The Linnet Bird: A Novel (69 page)

I picked up the baby’s loosely curled fingers and kissed them. “David. His name will be David.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

S
OMERS STOOD IN THE DOORWAY WITH HIS HANDS IN HIS
pockets. “It went all right, then?”

I nodded. “Come and see him,” I said. At this moment I felt such happiness that it extended even to Somers; I patted the bed beside me.

He came to the bed but didn’t sit down.

“Would you like to hold him?”

He shook his head. “He looks fine, I suppose.”

“He is fine. Small, because he came early, but healthy.”

“Well,” he said. “It will be Somers, I suppose.”

“Pardon me?”

“His name will be Somers.” His voice was curiously flat.

“I thought we’d call him David.”

“David? Why David?”

“I don’t know, really; I’ve always admired it as a name. It means
beloved.
” I stared at the baby as I spoke, hoping not to appear too determined. If Somers knew how important it was to me that this child be called David—my only connection with Daoud—he would fight me on it. And win.

“I suppose so. David Somers Ingram, then,” he conceded.

“Fine.”

The baby made a face, yawned, and opened his eyes, squinting.

“He’s got my hair, Somers, but his eyes . . . at the moment they’re dark blue, like so many newborns. But they’re murky.” I raised my own eyes and stared at Somers. “I have a feeling they’ll end up quite dark, like his father’s.”

Somers stood. “I suppose they might. Well.” He kept looking at the baby, the same noncommittal expression on his face. I waited, my heart pounding, to see what he would say. “I may as well go on to the Club for dinner, if you’re fine here.”

I smiled, nodding. He was thinking about his dinner, not whether the child in my arms looked unlike any other English child.

L
ATER THAT EVENING,
after I’d fed David, Malti let Neel in from the back garden. He ran to the bed, jumping on the end. He stopped, raising his nose in the air.

“Hello, Neel,” I said. “Come and meet David.” I folded the light flannel back from the baby, who had fallen asleep as he’d nursed. Tail curiously stiff, Neel crept up beside me. His kind ocher eyes looked at me, then he sniffed at the blanket. Immediately, a low growl started in his throat, and his black lips twitched.

I grabbed David, pressing him against me. He cried out, woken at the sudden movement, and Neel barked in short, angry bursts.

Somers came to the door. “What the devil is all this caterwauling?” he shouted over the noise of the baby and of Neel. “Neel, stop it.”

But the animal kept barking, his legs spread and rigid as he backed away from me.

The words of the soldier in Simla came back to me with a heavy thud.
Those dogs can detect nomad blood. They’ll tear a gypsy to pieces, given the chance.
“Take him out, Somers. Take him away.” My voice was high with terror.

“For God’s sake, Neel,” Somers roared, grabbing Neel by the scruff of his neck. “Settle down.” He carried him away, returning in a few minutes.

“You’re looking awfully green,” he said. “Nothing to get that upset about. I suppose Neel doesn’t like playing second fiddle.”

“Where is he?”

“I tied him up out back and gave him a mutton bone. Give him a few days; he’ll be fine.”

“No. Tomorrow I want you to give him to the Lelands. Ivy’s been wanting a dog for her Alexander. They’re leaving for a new posting in Barrackpur next week.”

Somers blinked. “I thought you had an affection for him.”

“I do. But I don’t want him to be near the baby. Of that I’m certain. I don’t trust him.”

“You can do what you like with him,” Somers said, shrugging. “I’m off to bed.”

An hour later I left David with Malti and slowly walked out to see Neel. I stroked him and held him, kissing his bony head. “You won’t be happy here anymore,” I whispered to him, crying into his fur, and he wagged his tail and licked my face.

I stifled my sobs, sitting on the cool stones with him in my lap. I loved him and he me, and now I must lose him.

February 1, 1834

My love to you both,
Linny

The year had passed in a tolerable way. I was caught up in the physical and emotional demands of David, not letting Malti help me except in the most minor ways. I couldn’t get enough of my pretty baby, and had him sleep in my bed with me. I never let him out of my sight for that first whole year. He helped me forget my life with Somers, the suffocating presence of the English enclave, and enabled me to remember my time with Daoud.

But as he passed his first, and then his second birthday, and was by then running about, less needy of my endless presence, I found loneliness yawned. There were longer and deeper times of restlessness, of despair, when David’s smile made me hunger so much for Daoud, for the time I had spent with him, for the feel of his arms around me, that I developed an odd, inexplicable pain under my ribs that never left.

I was an outsider in my own home and an outsider in English India. I spent my time now, like the other women, shopping at the English shops, and taking quiet walks around the Maidan, pushing David in a pram with Malti in tow.

That and palanquin rides to the homes of the other Company employee wives. They seemed to have forgotten about my “ordeal,” and there were always new wives from each year’s Fishing Fleet, wives who knew little about me except for my senior position, and that I was not overly sociable. But still, I found their judgmental outlook stifling. They were determined to reinforce the English traditions and rules much more strongly in India than they would have at home. Their narrow-mindedness, their unforgiving attitude, frightened me when I thought about my dark-eyed son. I dared not imagine the ramifications should anyone ever find out. I grew careful with them as I had become with Somers, cautious not to draw attention to myself, not to upset the fragile confines of their narrow world.

Somers no longer found reason to beat me, although he still struck me occasionally, for the sheer pleasure of it. I realized, after thinking about it, that he was no longer interested in intense beatings because of the difference in me. The excitement had gone out of the game; he considered me broken. I remembered how Daoud, with a gentle hand, broke his horses’ wildness. And I knew that people can also be broken, although Somers’s tactics were on the opposite end of the spectrum from Daoud’s. I had grown submissive through fear for the well-being of my son.

And so I lived quietly, in near isolation, finding joy in David, but gradually realizing that I couldn’t go on indefinitely, living on the razor edge of my nerves.

W
HEN
D
AVID WAS CLOSE
to three I heard, quite by chance, about a handful of women who got together regularly in a house on the other end of Garden Reach. They put together small booklets for the newly arrived English women in India. The booklets ranged in topic from basic Hindi to use with servants to recipes that incorporated Indian with English foods to dealing with minor ailments caused by the climate. I was welcomed into the group, possibly because I came with such enthusiasm, for here was something I was excited about and interested in—creating books. I began working on a booklet that dealt with the information I’d been collecting for the past few years—the healing properties of many of the indigenous plants. The pages were created on an ancient printing press, sent up from Madras when a new printing company opened there. A gentleman named Mr. Elliot—the husband of the woman who held the gathering in her home—ran the press for us. The last time I’d been at the Elliots’ I had showed several of the ladies what I remembered from the bookbindery in Liverpool so many years ago, and we’d worked on simple covers of floral cotton and drawings on white vellum. I had been experimenting on a piece of red silk, embroidering it with gold and colored threads to create a pleasing cover.

Those afternoons were very precious to me. It was the first time in a long while that I looked forward to something and felt useful.

I found myself humming one evening as I sat brushing my hair at my dressing table, thinking about the meeting the next afternoon. It was the beginning of the cool season, and as always at this time, spirits rose. I breathed in the fresh air from the open window, looking at myself in the mirror. I pinched my cheeks to put more color into them and thought about the richness of the red silk cover.

But then Somers came to my room. He stood in the doorway, and I saw his reflection in the mirror. I turned on my chair to face him.

“I’ve heard of your involvement with these people, Linny. The book people.”

I put down my brush, standing. I smiled. “Yes. I think the booklets are quite useful, especially to new wives. I wish I’d had something similar when I—”

“You’re not going back.”

I took a step toward him, my smile gone. “But . . . but why ever not? It’s a function for the ladies. You said I could—”

He interrupted again. “It’s a function that includes Indian women, Linny.”

“Yes, some of them are Eurasian, but—”

“They’re all half-castes. As is that Elliot, who works as a clerk in the public office.”

“Mr. Elliot is highly educated, very quiet and gentlemanly. His wife is lovely. What does it matter that—”