Not Quite a Husband (16 page)

She stopped. She needed to scrape the bottom of the barrel for what remained of her courage. Logically she knew that the path continued beyond the jutting rock blocking her way and that Leo and the guides had already safely rounded it. But she could not see that continuation. And she was not such an experienced mountaineer as to not quake at the tilt of the trail—it would be all too easy to slip off the incline into the sharp-teethed maw of the ravine.

Leo reappeared, coming back toward her. “Are you all right?”

Like her, he had opted to cover this stretch of the road on foot. But whereas she felt herself to be tiptoeing on a tightrope, he walked as easily as if he were on a parade ground.

She nodded by habit before slowly shaking her head.

Without another word he extended his hand. She hesitated only a second before gripping it. Instantly her fear halved.

He took her safely past the tilted ledge skirting the outcrop that cut through the cliff face. She did not let go of his hand on the other side, because it was still the same spine-tingling path. Hands held,
he guided her until the path became an ordinary goat trail again, one that did not punish a single misstep with an irreversible plummet.

She could have kissed the ground for simply being there. Releasing his hand, she stripped off her gloves and flexed fingers that were almost numb from tension. She looked up to see his gaze on her hands.

Their eyes met.

“I hear the road is much improved in recent years,” he said.

“I can tell,” she answered.

He laughed softly.

“Thank you,” she added.

He smiled briefly, a sweet smile that drove a bead of pain deep into her heart. “It’s no hardship to hold your hand.”

Upper Dir was an austere place. Small settlements clung to the skirts of mountains. Broken boulders littered the land, torn loose by earthquakes that occasionally convulsed the Hindu Kush, then deposited willy-nilly by the swift torrents of rainy seasons. And yet occasionally, between forbidding crags, they spied small hidden plateaus, almost alpine in their lushness,
and once even a whole slope covered in asters, brilliantly purple.

“Things are running much more smoothly now that you are back on your feet,” she said, taking a sip of her afternoon tea, her eyes on the carpet of asters, her mind still on the other side of the Hindu Raj, on the events of the night and the revelations of the morning.

“Did anyone give you trouble when I was sick?”

She shook her head. Imran and Hamid had kept a leash on the coolies. But the coolies had pushed back at the guides, and complained, and dawdled. Only then had she appreciated Leo’s talent for putting a ragtag collection of coolies happily to work and orchestrating their tasks so that everything was done the right way at the right time.

She glanced at him. He was looking better, but still tired. Despite their late start, they’d done two marches already, and he planned to get one more in before dark. She wanted to cradle his head in her lap and watch him fall asleep.

“How do you manage the coolies?”

It was strange to be talking like this, of ordinary things, when the sky had fallen. But then she was strangely hungry for his company, as if she missed him, even though he was never more than fifty feet away.

He shrugged. “Experience, I suppose. Do you remember my great-uncle Silverton?”

She thought for a moment. “The old soldier at our wedding who had a chest full of medals?”

“He was a colonel of the Royal Bengal Fusiliers. When we clamored for war stories, he’d tell us that an army marched on its stomach—wars were won and lost less on tactics and strategies than on the soundness of the supply chain. So when I went on safaris with my godfather, I always took it upon myself to oversee logistics,” he said, smiling a little. “It was quite heady for the youngest of five sons to finally feel in charge of something.”

She was struck dumb with a harebrained realization—harebrained because she should have seen it long ago: He had been the one in charge of their household.

She’d known very little of the complex inner workings of a household. During their brief marriage, however, the house had run like a charm. Her clothes and shoes were kept in perfect shape. The carriage pulled up outside the front door every day just as she got ready to go to the hospital. Dinner appeared every night—always with something she liked—without her having ever consulted with the cook, without her even knowing what the cook looked like.

Even after she’d barred him from her bed.

After he left, however, dinners became too rich, the coachman sometimes drove half drunk, the housekeeper complained constantly about the maids and their followers, and piles of correspondence were left for Bryony to deal with. At that time she’d been in a daze and had taken the various ways her household had fallen apart as merely additional symptoms of her own broken life.

When the truth was he’d taken very good care of her during their marriage and she’d never known it or appreciated it.

Her compact, delicious weight atop him. His name on her lips. Her hips, soft and pliant under his bruising grip. His body, straining off the camp bed, emptying into her in desperate pleasure
.

Amazing what a man thought of, looking at a fully clothed woman who did nothing more provocative than sipping her tea while gazing thoughtfully into the distance.

For the thousandth time he wished he’d just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime
as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity.

There were so many stories he could tell her, so many ways to draw her out of her shell. He would have waited with bated breath for her first smile, for the sound of her first laughter. He would be endlessly curious about her, eager to undress her metaphorically as well as physically.

The first holding of hands. The first kiss. The first time he saw her unclothed. The first time they became one.

The first time they finished each other’s sentences.

But no, they’d met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye.

“Who are those?” she asked.

He looked in the direction she indicated: a band of turbaned, musketed men in the distance, coming toward them.

“The Khan of Dir’s levies,” he said. “They keep peace along the road.”

The Khan of Dir was under obligation to the government of India to maintain the road to Chitral, though the regular posting of levies along the road probably also served as a reminder of force, for the khan’s chumminess with the British did not endear
him to his subjects. In fact, they seemed to despise him altogether for being a puppet of the distant government whose unwanted influence stabbed through the heart of their mountain fastness.

Leo signaled for tea to be offered to the levies. “Ask them about the situation in Swat,” he instructed Imran.

When the levies had taken to the road again, Imran came to offer a summary of the news. The miracle man’s fame had grown substantially in Dir in the week since Leo had first heard of him. People talked about the imam at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and debated his chances of success at tea.

Leo wasn’t convinced that the imam was anything but a charlatan. But most charlatans, or most small-time martyrdom-seekers for that matter, didn’t have people avidly talking of their deeds one hundred and fifty miles away in this kind of terrain.

“Should we worry?” Bryony asked him.

“For now, no. We will keep a close eye on the situation. If and when we receive any solid evidence of danger, any solid evidence at all, we will stop and wait out the trouble.”

She nodded, and reached for a piece of the tea cake.

He watched her.

Her blue-black hair, spread like the cape of Erebus. Her
skin, as bare as a beggar’s coffer, as fresh and soft as that carpet of asters upon which he would love to place her, her mouth warm, her body sweet and yielding. No past. No future. Only that eternal, glorious moment, unstained by shame or regret
.

She intercepted his gaze. Color rose in her cheeks. And he was a smoldering heap of ruins.

“Eat.” She pushed a piece of tea cake into his hand. “You need to eat more.”

W
ill you be in India for much longer?” she asked, as she took out his queen rook.

He returned the favor by eliminating her king bishop. “Probably not. I’m going back to Cambridge.”

They were at the confluence of the Dir River and the Panjkora River. It had been a long day. But when she’d lingered at the table after dinner, he’d asked her if she wanted a game of chess and she, pleasantly surprised—once defeated, no man had ever come back for another game with her—had readily agreed.

She looked up at him. He was in his shirtsleeves, sprawled on the folding chair, if it was possible for a man to sprawl while maintaining a perfectly straight back. The two of them were enclosed in the intimacy of a lantern’s sphere of light, beyond the faded gold edge of which was a darkness as thick as
walls. Beyond that, in the night, there was only the sound of the rivers—the dishes had been washed, the mules fed, the coolies put to bed.

“I hear you already have a house in Cambridge.”

“My godfather gave it to me years ago, before we were married. I’ve never lived in it. Will and Lizzy used it while Lizzy studied at Girton. Now that they’ve moved back to London, the house is empty again.”

“What is it like?”

“The house? Smaller than our house in London, but prettier. It has a back lawn that abuts the bank of the Cam and a good number of cherry trees. In spring, when the trees are in bloom, it’s a lovely sight.”

“You sound glad of it.”

“It will be good to be in Cambridge again—I’ve been away far too long. But I’m not exactly looking forward to equiping another house.”

That was something else she had not appreciated, the enormous task of fully outfitting a house. He’d taken care of all of it.

“No more globe-trotting for you?”

“The wanderings of youth must end at some point.” He placed a fingertip on top of his queen bishop, considering, but moved his queen knight instead. “When I’m a wizened old professor at
Cambridge, and can barely climb up to the podium to lecture, I will think back to the frontiers of India—and life’s strange paths that had led me here—and remember that this was where the wanderings
of my
youth ended.”

His eyes were on the game. She allowed herself to stare at him: the way the lamplight danced upon his hair, hair the color of coffee, a deep, dark shade that was black except in the strongest sunlight; the firm ridge of his nose; the fine shape of his mouth.

“Have you always wanted to be a Cambridge professor?” She urged a pawn forward. So many questions, she thought. So many things she did not know about him.

“Not just any professor: the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.” He placed his chin in his palm. “I thought you’d be impressed by it.”