A Beggar at the Gate (2 page)

June 20, 1840

T
hree months later, still in Calcutta, Mariana sat beside her aunt six pews behind the Governor-General and his two spinster sisters, watching a short, red-faced man make his perspiring way toward the pulpit steps of St. John's Cathedral.

Around her, the congregation twitched and whispered. A woman nudged her husband. Another woman, in black, who had appeared to be sleeping, sat up and began to fan herself vigorously. Two rows away, a newly arrived girl and her sharp-faced companion turned in their seats to look back at Mariana, smug satisfaction on their faces. Like her, they knew what was coming. Unlike her, they were enjoying themselves.

Beneath her wilting gown, Mariana's stays felt as if they had been ironed onto her torso. Her hair, difficult at the best of times, had escaped her straw bonnet, and now hung in loose brown curls on her neck, causing her skin to prickle in the June heat.

The dean stopped climbing and mopped his face. He leaned over the carved wooden rail of the pulpit, his eyes drifting toward Mariana, who yawned deliberately behind a gloved hand, her body tensing against the hard wooden pew.

“I find it delightful to see how much our numbers have grown in the past year,” he began in his high voice. “It gives me
such
pleasure to see how many eligible young ladies from Home have found suitable matches here in India. As I look out over this congregation,” he added, fastening his eyes upon a square-shouldered officer, his moonfaced wife, and their overdressed, squirming baby, “I am filled with joy at the sight of so many happy little families, and I look forward to many,
many
more.”

“I know someone who will
never
be married in this cathedral,” someone behind Mariana said clearly, as the dean looked pointedly in her direction.

It would do no good to let the woman know she had heard. Instead, Mariana picked up her aunt's hymnal and began to leaf through its pages.

It came as no surprise that the dean had aimed his remarks at her, for he had done the same in every one of his sermons for the past six months.

The gossip about Mariana's experiences in the northwest had begun to surface in the verandahs and drawing rooms of the British capital six months earlier, immediately after she had returned, along with the rest of the Governor-General's vast camp, from his lengthy visit to the Maharajah of the Punjab. After Lord Auckland's state tents had been struck for the last time and the officers who had accompanied him had returned to their families and living quarters, the story of Mariana's shocking behavior at Lahore had spread rapidly from bungalow to bungalow, defying Lord Auckland's order of strict secrecy and swiftly eclipsing all previous scandals. For, the gossip ran, while in the Punjab, Mariana Givens had done the worst thing an Englishwoman in India could do: she had entangled herself in a disgraceful, ruinous liaison with a native man.

Confirmed by the energetic, brown-skinned presence of her two-year-old stepson Saboor and embellished with ever more damning detail, the scandal had clung to her like sticky, invisible clothing, uniting all of Calcutta society against her, and turning her overnight into an outcast among her own people.

Worse still, Mariana's ruin had fallen upon her aunt and uncle, neither of whom had been present in Lahore during that tumultuous time.

From the moment of her return, Aunt Claire and Uncle Adrian, the only family Mariana had in India, had been excluded from the cheerful dinners and the spirited balls and fetes that had made Calcutta the gayest city in India, especially the celebrations that had attended the Governor-General's triumphant return from his visit to the north. A few loyal friends still paid surreptitious visits to the Lambs’ comfortable bungalow, but the rest of society had drifted away, fearful of being caught by association in the sticky web of Mariana's disgrace.

“But these people know nothing of what really happened,” Mariana had insisted to her tearful aunt when they had been cut dead for the third time while buying muslin in the bazaar. “Why should we care what
they
think, Aunt Claire?”

But Aunt Claire cared very much what people thought. Moments after Mariana had carried little Saboor through the front door of number 65 Chowringhee Road and begun a halting, uncomfortable recital of her experiences in the Punjab, Aunt Claire had swooned, semi-conscious, onto a sofa, eyes shut and mouth open.

Choking tragically from a whiff of smelling salts, she had waved Mariana away and refused to listen to a word of explanation. “What have I done to be punished so?” she had sobbed later to Uncle Adrian from her pillows, while Mariana eavesdropped in the hallway outside. “Why has she done this unmentionable thing? And why has she brought a native child into my house? Make her take it to the servants’ quarters, Adrian. Oh,
what
will become of us?”

“You should never have brought that baby into the drawing room,” her uncle had told her tightly a while later, as he stood, his back to her, staring out of his study window. “Is it not enough that you have ruined yourself? Must you also parade a native child in front of your aunt?

“Since you insist he has lost his mother, and is of high station among his people,” he added grimly, “the child may remain with you. But you are
not
to let him into the front of the house, and you are
forbidden
to mention Lahore or the Punjab again in your aunt's presence.”

Shocked at this angry reception by her normally mild uncle, Mariana had been unable to reply.

He turned from the window and glared at her. “You knew perfectly well,” he added, “why we accepted Lord Auckland's invitation for you to join his train. You were
well
aware that it had nothing to do with translating local languages for his sisters. Given such a signal opportunity, why did you not marry one of his officers while you were in the Punjab?”

“But I
tried
to marry one of them,” she put in, “and then it all fell to pieces because he was supposed to have—”

“Instead of doing your duty and marrying an Englishman,” her uncle barked, his bald head flushing with emotion, “you kidnapped the Maharajah's baby hostage, and then, with a recklessness I cannot even begin to conceive, you married its father. How could you have done it? How?”

“It was a mistake,” she replied stiffly. “I did not mean to marry him.”

“You might have thought of the consequences to us,” he went on, his voice rising. “Before you abandoned your own race and entangled yourself with a native family, you might have considered my dear brother-in-law, who so generously sent you out here with
very
different expectations.”

He sighed. “We must, of course, extract you from this most unfortunate marriage and return the child, but when and how that is to take place, I have no idea. It will do you no good, of course,” he added, waving an impatient hand at Mariana's tears, “but in the meantime you must
bend over backward,
and behave like everyone else. Do
nothing
to attract comment.
Do you hear me?”

He had been right but it had been far too late for Mariana to bend anywhere. Snubbed and ignored for the next six months, barred from society's pleasures, she had lived quietly with Saboor and her aunt and uncle at Chowringhee Road, reading Persian poetry with her elderly native language teacher and escaping occasionally to the native part of Calcutta, telling herself it was not an unpleasant way to live, for unlike her Aunt Claire, Mariana had never been interested in parties.

The only things she hated about Calcutta were the knowledge that she would one day lose Saboor, and going to church.

“Put on a pretty morning gown and get into the carriage,” Aunt Claire had snapped that morning, after bursting into Mariana's room and finding her still in her dressing gown. “There is no need for you to feed it,” she had added, averting her eyes from the round-eyed child who sat beside Mariana, eating his breakfast. “It can have its breakfast with the servants.”

“I loathe church,” Mariana argued, as she deliberately handed Saboor a piece of buttered toast. “I hate everyone who goes there, and they hate me. St. John's Cathedral must be the most
unchristian
place in all of India.”

“It is
not,”
her aunt had replied sharply, “and you
shall
go there. If you would only make the slightest show of contrition,” she added wistfully, “I am sure you would be forgiven.”

The dean now raised his voice, interrupting Mariana's thoughts. “And there is still better news,” he announced grandly. “Churches are being constructed all over India. The latest, at Allahabad, is nearly complete.

“What wonders these churches will do!” he added, spreading his arms wide. “We are all breathless with expectation, for it is now certain that the conversion of the natives is
very
near at hand.

“We must keep in mind, however,” he intoned as he leaned over the pulpit rail, “that until they have seen the Christian light, the natives must be avoided. There is terrible degradation in the native's present character, and vice in his every word and deed. And we must remember,” he added, dropping his voice and favoring Mariana with a sidelong glance, “that for those who associate intimately with them, there awaits their same vice, their same degradation, their same
perdition.”

Degradation. Perdition.
The hymnal Mariana was holding came alive in her hands. As if by itself, it slammed shut, making a noise like a thunderclap that rang satisfactorily throughout the cathedral's stone interior.

The dean jerked upright. A stringy woman turned in her pew and glared at Mariana.

Aunt Claire's finger jabbed into Mariana's side. “What are you
doing?”
she whispered, scowling. “Put down that hymnbook and attend to the sermon.”

People stared. The sharp-faced girl nudged her friend.

Now recovered, the dean began to quote the Acts of the Apostles, his florid voice rising and falling. Below his pulpit, Mariana sat erect, giving no outward sign of discomfort as her mind wandered to the message she had received the previous March from the mysterious pointing man.

He had spoken with urgent authority, but Mariana could not fathom what he had meant. What destiny could possibly await her in the direction he had pointed?

She blinked. Could the man's message have had anything to do with the poem her old teacher had given her to translate on the day before he began the long journey home to his native Punjab?

My moon of Canaan, the throne of Egypt is thine,
the poem had read.
The hour is near. The time has come to bid farewell to the prison.

As she translated those Persian words, her
munshi's
feverish old face had brightened with some emotion she could not read, but the old teacher had not told her why he had chosen that particular poem for their last day.

There was no question that he knew more than he revealed, for he had long belonged to the Karakoyia brotherhood, and he knew the mysterious Shaikh Waliullah well.

What was the meaning of that verse? Did the prison represent Calcutta for her? If so, where was her promised throne of Egypt? She found her handkerchief and blew into it, trying to imagine herself as beautiful as Joseph, with his coat of many colors.

The dean had stopped speaking at last. As he descended from the pulpit, the wooden stairs set up a great creaking and groaning, accurately voicing Mariana's sentiments. She longed to jump to her feet, pink-faced and shouting, and teach the old hypocrite a lesson in Christian charity.

Half an hour later, as she followed her aunt toward the cathedral's main entrance, she heard a male voice behind her in the crowd. “She wouldn't be bad-looking, you know,” the smug voice said, “if she ever smiled.”

When they reached the driveway, Aunt Claire hoisted herself, panting a little, into her new carriage and fought her parasol open against the Calcutta sun. “What is the matter with you, Mariana?” she demanded, one hand clutching the side of the carriage for balance. “Why did you bang your hymnal shut in the middle of the sermon? You will never redeem yourself with Calcutta society if you behave like a lunatic.”

Mariana snapped open her own parasol. “I could not bear to hear one more syllable about my supposed sins, Aunt Claire.”

“And why should he have mentioned
your
sins, Mariana?” Aunt Claire sniffed, settling into her seat. “I am quite certain he did not. In any event, no one can make out what is said in that great, echoing cathedral. I, for one, caught no more than one word in three of that sermon.”

An English family drove past them, wedged into another carriage, the husband stuffed into his frock coat, the children looking wan and ill in the heat. As they passed Mariana and her aunt, all turned their heads away. Mariana winced at the miserable little sound that came from her aunt's corner of the carriage. Aunt Claire might pretend she had not heard the sermon, but there had been no avoiding the Broderick family's collective snub.