Not Quite a Husband (17 page)

Her heart skipped a beat. “So it was a fairly recent aspiration.”

“No, since always.”

She blinked. “But I thought you said …”

The flame of the lantern swayed. Light and shadow chased across his chiseled cheekbones. There was a stillness to him, a resignation almost. Her heart ached.

He smiled slightly. “I’ve wanted to be the Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics since I was eleven. And I thought at that time that you’d be impressed by it.”

She chortled, out of confusion. “When you were eleven, why would you care what
I
thought of what you were going to do when you grew up?”

“I cared. And when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and maybe even seventeen.” He advanced his queen knight some more.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just that I have loved you, even when I was nothing and no one to you, when you didn’t know my name and barely knew my face.”

She stared at him, not understanding his words at all. He’d loomed so large in her heart and her imagination for so long that it was difficult to grasp that he could ever have been nothing and no one to her.

A lanky boy sitting down on the stone bridge beside her. A tied handkerchief opening to reveal tiny, bright red cherries. The cherries were cool as the morning air and tartly sweet
.

“Any fish biting?”

“No.”

“Have you ever thought about what if your father doesn’t let you study medicine?”

“He will. Or he can go to the Devil.”

“You are a strange girl. More cherries?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She shook her head. Where had that come from? She recalled so little of her adolescence—long, blurred years of monotony, waiting impatiently for the day when she could leave Thornwood Manor and her family behind.

The day she at last departed for medical school, her carriage stopped halfway to the train station. A young boy came up to the window and gave her a handful of wild-flowers
.

“Good luck in Zurich.”

“Thank you, sir,” she’d said, perplexed, not quite sure who he was
.

When the carriage started again, she turned to Callista. “Was that the baby Marsden? What a strange child.”

What had she done with those flowers? She had no recollection at all.

Music. Bright lights. Lady Wyden’s country Yule ball. She was reluctantly home from Zurich and medical school and reluctantly in attendance. He was her partner in the quadrille that opened the ball, fifteen, and already as tall as she
.

“Octavius, is it?”

“Quentin.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. You look beautiful, by the way. I think you are the loveliest lady here tonight.”

He’d loved her, in those years when she’d thought of him as little more than an embryo.

“You were a child,” she said slowly, still in shock. “You were an infant.”

“Old enough to despair of ever being grown-up for you.”

“It doesn’t make what you did with Mrs. Hedley any less reprehensible.”

“No,” he agreed quietly. “It only makes everything more terrible.”

Silence, as the implication of everything she’d lost slowly began to sink in.

“If only you’d told me …” she murmured.

She would not have been so quick to abandon their marriage, as if it were a burning ship.

“I could say the same,” he replied. “If only
you’d
told
me.”

She had a sudden vision of herself as a wizened old physician, her hands too arthritic to wield a scalpel, her eyes too rheumy to diagnose anything except measles and chicken pox. The wizened old physician would very much like to drink tea next to her wizened old professor, chuckle over the passionate follies of their distant youth, and then go for a walk along the river Cam, holding his paper-dry, liver-spotted hand.

How ironic that when they’d been married, she’d
never thought of growing old with him. Yet now, years after the annulment, she should think of it with the yearning of an exile, for the homeland that had long ago evicted her.

Bryony had imagined the Panjkora Valley to be like the Chitral Valley, wide and flat and well populated. But the Panjkora Valley was, if not precisely a gorge, not much more than a watercourse. The population seemed mostly concentrated in tiny lateral valleys nourished by smaller rivers and streams that fed into the Panjkora.

Still there were villages along the way and in every village they passed, Leo sent the guides to ask about the situation in Swat. Rumors were as plentiful as microbes in a slum. The men the guides talked to all knew of the deeds of the Mad Fakir, as he was admiringly called in these parts.

The Mad Fakir could not be harmed by bullets; the Mad Fakir had legions of heavenly hosts at his disposal, to be called upon once he commenced his glorious and holy battle; the
Inglisi
, all the
Inglisi
, would be swept away before the new moon.

She didn’t know quite what to make of all the rumors. Was there some germ of truth to them or were they wholesale fiction? The population of Dir
seemed more entertained than fermented, despite all the excitement generated by the supposed miracles of the Mad Fakir and his grandiose promises to drive out the English.

In the end she mostly ignored the rumors. They were too outlandish and too comical, when she already had so much upheaval inside herself.

They were traveling faster now. In no time at all they would reach the Swat River. And then, Nowshera, where the train would carry her to Bombay, to the next P&O steamer out of India.

She did not want to say good-bye to him. She didn’t know what she wanted, for the road to go on and on, perhaps, for them to exist outside of their normal lives, in this bubble, removed from both the past and the future.

Not that they weren’t already existing outside of their normal lives. Germany, America, India. She had not set foot in England except en route to some place ever further away, to escape what could not be escaped.

She envied him his firm decision to return to Cambridge. She could not go back to the New Hospital for Women and simply resume her former life. She’d sought peace and serenity in her days abroad. She had not come away with either.

As the elevation of the land decreased, the weather
had become warmer, sometimes uncomfortably hot in the afternoon. Leo, correspondingly, had adjusted their pace to include more rest for both men and beasts.

Bryony, for one, was glad to spend a few minutes in the shade of an apple orchard, her much-swaddled person given a chance to cool. Corsets and petticoats were all very well for never-warm England, but here on the Subcontinent they made about as much sense as a five-legged chair.

She fanned herself a few times with her new hat. He’d produced it again in the morning to ask if she would like it, as the sun was certain to become harsher the further south they traveled. And she’d gratefully accepted.

“I thought you were impervious to weather,” he said. He was seated under the tree closest to her. Tiny apples hung from the branches overhead, such a pale green they were almost white.

“I thought so too. But as it turned out, I was impervious to weather as long as weather did not exceed seventy degrees. The heat does not bother you?”

“Not so much.” He turned his face toward the powder blue sky. “I suppose it’s because I’m enjoying my last hurrah in exotic, sunny places before spending the rest of my life in drear old England,
where it never stops raining and the mercury never goes above sixty-five.”

His traveling clothes were made of
puttoo
, a Kashmiri homespun wool that was perfect for the variable weather in the mountains, but the last thing from fashionable. His hair was imperfectly groomed. His boots had taken quite a punishment. His face showed the cumulative fatigue that came of months of incessant travel, followed by a severe illness, followed again by travel—there were shadows under his eyes, and the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners. And even though all about them it was green, voluptuous summer, there was a solemnness to him, a quiet that made her think of snow-blanketed winter.

He’d never been further from the gilded, angel-kissed youth. And never more beautiful.

Across the river, on the opposite edge of the valley, a man herded a flock of goats up a hidden footpath toward a deodar forest at the top of the slope—the hills and ridges here, though still rugged, were nowhere near as lofty or fearsome as those they’d passed earlier in their travels. She watched the goats’ bleating progress, until they disappeared around an outcrop.

“Are you returning to Cambridge straightaway?” she asked, without quite looking at him.

“No.”

“Oh,” she said, still not looking at him. “Why not?”

If he did, they would be travel companions for at least another three weeks. He could not manage it. To look upon her and know that he’d lost her through his own misdeed—love had become a thing of nails and spikes, every breath a re-impaling, every pulse a bright, sharp pain.

“I need to go to Delhi first, to wait for my luggage to arrive from Gilgit. I also want to see Charlie and the children again one more time before I leave India.”

For him and Bryony it was good-bye and farewell come Nowshera.

“Well, say hello to Charlie for me. He called on me twice when I was in Delhi but I was never home to him.”

Poor, conscientious Charlie.

“Is there any chance you will stay in London for good this time? Or will you be setting out for Shanghai after two weeks?”

She plucked at her skirt, a sturdy, dun-colored garment made especially for riding astride, with buttons and buckles for holding the extra lengths of
the skirt on either side up and out of the way when she was not in the saddle.

“Shanghai has a terrible climate. San Francisco is much better. Or New Zealand, perhaps—I hear it is beautiful.”

The pain was almost blinding. He had done this to her. Once she had been one of the finest doctors in all of London, now she was a nomad whose life had shrunk to one tent and two steamer trunks.

“It’s time to stop, Bryony. Don’t keep running away.”

“I don’t know that I can stop.”

“Give it a try. Stay in London for some time. It would make your father happy.”

She raised her face, her expression incredulous. “Where did you get that idea? My father is as indifferent to me as I am to him.”

“You are not indifferent to him. You are angry at him. And he is not indifferent to you: He has no idea what to do with you.”

“He didn’t need to do anything with me. He only had to be there. He could have written his books anywhere.”

“So he wasn’t there. So he was a grieving widower who ran away from the place where he’d once been happy. But don’t you see, once he came back, he gave you everything you ever asked of him.”

“What do you mean?” She looked at him blankly.

He was beginning to have the impression he was going after an iceberg with a match. “When it became known that he’d agreed to let you go to medical school, all the neighbors thought he was mad. You are the granddaughter of an earl. Granddaughters of earls do not dissect cadavers or touch strange men to whom they haven’t been properly introduced.”

She dismissed it outright. “He let me go because he knew that if he didn’t let me go then, I’d have gone once I came of age and took control of my inheritance.”

“You would not have come of age for another four years. Quite frequently people do not want the same thing at twenty-one that they wanted at seventeen. Most fathers would have gladly taken those odds and forbidden you to go. But he gave you permission.”

“You are wrong.” She was obdurate, her mind firmly closed. “My father does what is most convenient for him, always. He said yes to me because it was the most expedient answer under the circumstances. He could see that I meant it and he didn’t want to be pestered again.”

He felt strangely like crying. Between himself and Geoffrey Asquith, there existed an unspoken kinship.
They were both men who had failed her, who could not seem to recover from that failure no matter what.