fly at me with all the abuse you like and you’ll make me a happy man.”
My lungs produced a frightful sound, and he crossed one arm over my torso diagonally, as if protecting me from falling.
“Will you pardon me for murdering someone in your drawing room?” I breathed.
“Oh, Jane.” His voice was wracked, vibrating through me, but I shook for more reasons than I liked to think about.
He handled my hair with bare hands, though he never brushed my skin, and I registered sharp hurts, and glass draughts smelling of herbs and strong spirits against my lips and my head. He dried the tear in my scalp, and washed the blood from my locks in a porcelain bowl, and as dawn approached he lifted a tendril of my hair up to his lips even as I fell asleep in his arms, kissing it as though his heart were breaking.
Volume Three
TWENTY-THREE
Mr. Rochester did, on a future occasion, explain it.
I did not awaken for many hours, though neither did I sleep; my consciousness thinned into a filmy half-awareness, and when I did feel the slow burn of sunlight drifting across my face, I heard a chair creak.
“Jane?”
“Is there water?”
“Of course.”
Mr. Thornfield seemed never to have quit the room. Thirst quenched after the glass had been held to my lips, I discovered I was not as hurt as I had supposed. Yes, I had killed a man in front of two respected friends; yes, I had then acted like an abominable weakling; but, no, my cranium had not cracked, only torn, and I found myself staring glassy-eyed at a haggard Mr. Thornfield.
It would do him discredit to pretend he was unmoved, but I hesitate to set down how distressed he was in fact, his countenance as pale as if he were the one who had been strangled.
“I thought when I saw you with that pepperbox* against your throat . . .” He made an abortive movement. “Jane, I hardly know how to speak to you.”
“As the governess would suit.” I sighed, shifting my knees.
“No, it bloody well would not. As the woman I acted a cad towards in the morgue downstairs, or the woman who saved my skin last night?”
“Please don’t, sir. You never acted a cad, and I never saved you.”
“You saved me sure as God saved Isaac.”
My mind could not seem to light upon important subjects, only trivial ones. “How do you know that story?”
“Sardar could write a book entitled A Thousand and One Useless Meditations. He knows all when it comes to retribution and forgiveness.”
“Not all, or he’d have taught us both to stop hating ourselves. Who was it I killed?”
“Jane, I am hesitant to—”
“Don’t I deserve to know? Sahjara and I both were at risk, and had you not arrived when you did . . .”
His flinch told me he knew I was right, but he took his time: pouring a pair of neat Scotches, passing me one.
“I am all attention, sir.”
Mr. Thornfield’s chest gave a small heave, and then he abruptly drew his hand over his mouth and sat down close beside me on the divan.
“Where should I begin?”
“Try the beginning.”
“What was the beginning? The wars were years in coming,” he said softly. “Believe me or don’t, or ask Sardar, but it didn’t even occur to the British to conquer the Punjab until the Sikh ruling class started dangling it in their faces as if they were cunchunees.* It was too well fortified, y’see. The Khalsa army was the best in the world, and they wanted to march—on Delhi, on London. Geography was never their top marks, bless ’em, but so long as they stayed in the Punjab, they were unbeatable.”
“Yet they were still beaten.” I sipped the amber liquid. “Mr. Singh called the Company rapists, and the Sikh royalty their pimps.”
Mr. Thornfield nodded as his knuckles met his lips. “I can still see the Khalsa parading on the doab* when I was thirteen: a hundred thousand strong marching in such perfect order a Geneva watch would have dashed itself to pieces forthwith. Sapphire turbans, red feathers thrusting from round steel helms, emerald jackets and scarlet jackets and indigo jackets, every jab of the light infantry’s bayonets into the sandbags precise enough to kill a gnat. If you’ve never seen dozens of war elephants draped in crimson, there ain’t a way to describe what happens to your stomach. As for the horses—if you watched their white chargers at parade exercise, you could almost grasp why ‘He made intuition