* * *
Anusha walked into her father’s study as soon as she heard him moving around in there. A sleepless night fighting with her conscience had left her in no state for an Anglo-Indian breakfast.
‘Anusha.’ He got to his feet and came round the desk to urge her into a chair. ‘You look—’
‘As though I have not slept. Yes, Father, I know. It was all very...sudden.’
He almost went back to the big chair behind the desk, then came back and sat down opposite her. ‘It is the best thing for you. Have you changed your mind? Don’t you want to marry Nicholas?’
‘I do not want to be a trouble to him.’
He watched her from under dark bushy brows for a minute. ‘You like him, do you not?’
She nodded. Of course I like him! Can you not see that I love him?
‘Do you desire him?’
‘Father!’
‘Well, do you?’ He had coloured up and he was frowning, but he persisted. ‘You haven’t got a mother to ask you about these things. Don’t pretend to me you don’t know what I am talking about, not with your upbringing.’
Anusha pressed her lips together and stared up at the painting over the mantelpiece of the Garden Reach of the Hooghly River with the fort in the background. If she said anything it would all come tumbling out, how she desired him, loved him, wanted him and how selfish it was of her to tie him down in marriage. And Father would tell Nick and then he would be uncomfortable and pity her.
‘I married too young,’ her father remarked in a conversational tone. ‘I married a very suitable bride, an intelligent, handsome woman I hardly knew.’
‘I don’t want to hear about—’ I do not want to hear you justifying yourself to me.
‘But I am going to tell you,’ he said gently. ‘And you will listen to the story of my stupidity and where it took me. I married Mary and she fell pregnant almost immediately. She lost the child after three months. We tried again. She lost another. And another. The doctors said she should not attempt to carry a child for at least a year to allow her body to recover. You understand what they were asking me?’ She felt the blood hot in her cheeks, but nodded, her eyes still fixed on the painting.
‘I was young and arrogant and I did not see why we should wait. It reflected on my virility that my wife was not with child, I thought, and besides, I was not cut out for self-denial. Within four months she was pregnant again and this time she brought it to term. It almost killed her because her body just could not cope. The child died and the doctors told us she could never conceive again.’
Anusha heard the pain in his voice and the self-recrimination. It serves him right, she thought, trying to harden her heart. Then, Oh, poor woman. Poor things—how old had they been?
‘I had an opportunity to come out to India with the Company, to make my fortune. I assumed Mary would come, too—I did not ask, just told her. And she refused. I had almost killed her, I had ensured she could never have a child and for the first time I saw what I had done to her, not just to myself.’
‘Why did you not divorce her? Or she you?’
‘In English law there were no grounds for divorce in our circumstances. A wife being barren and a husband being a selfish fool are not enough. So we separated. I made sure she wanted for nothing financially and she made her own life in England. But her sense of duty was strong. She wrote to me every month and I began to write back. Gradually it seemed we could be friends, even at that distance. Or perhaps because of it.’
‘But you were living with my mother.’
‘I will not pretend I lived like a monk, Anusha. But some years after I came to India I met your mother at your grandfather’s court and we fell in love.’
‘She deliberately sought you out, she told me.’ Long hot afternoons, with her mother’s voice, soft and reminiscent, telling the story of that long-ago love affair. ‘It was very shocking.’
‘Indeed. I was thirty-five, she was twenty. By some miracle the raja approved the relationship, because he could refuse her nothing and because he could see the Company would be a great power in the land. We were in love and we were so very happy when you were born.’
‘And then you sent us away, you did not want us any more.’ She tried to keep the hurt from her voice, but she knew that it showed.
‘Mary thought I was ill and she had come to believe it was her duty to be with me. The letter telling me she was on her way reached me before there was anything I could do to stop her. She was my legal wife—I could reject her, risk her life again by sending her back for another three months of danger and misery at sea, or I could do what honour told me I must, and welcome her.