Dark Road to Darjeeling. Deanna Raybourn

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ my voice harsh. “No, I do not. And I cannot. It seems the cruelest trick to offer me marriage under pretenses you knew were false.” I regretted the words as soon as I had uttered them, but of course I could not call them back. They had flown at him, and I had only to look at his face to see they had flown true and pierced him.

      “Do you regret marrying me?” His voice was deadly calm. If he had raged at me, I would have been at my ease. But this cool detachment was a mood I had seen once or twice before and I knew to be wary of it. He could not be touched when he was in the grip of one. He was polished and hard as an ebony chess king, implacable and immovable.

      “Of course not,” I said, deliberately gentling my tone. “You know the depth of my feeling for you. But I also esteem what I become when I am with you, when we are working, hand in hand. And you seem determined never again to let that happen.”

      “And you are determined to press the matter until I do,” he countered. It was astonishing to me that he could stand before me wearing nothing but a bath towel and yet preserve as much dignity as if he’d been draped in a judge’s robes. But then Brisbane wore anything well, I reflected.

      I gave him a rueful smile. “You know me well enough to know that.”

      “Then we are at an impasse,” he observed.

      “And you will not leave Calcutta?” I asked one last time.

      “Not now,” he said gravely. “I have business here.”

      I gaped at him. “Business? What manner of business? I know nothing of this.”

      “As it happens, the viceroy has invited me to join a hunting party he is putting together. He is heading out after tigers. There is a man-eater preying upon a village near Simla. It promises to be excellent sport.”

      My mouth gaped farther still, and I shut it with a decisive snap. “You do not hunt,” I said after I had recovered myself.

      He lifted one heavy shoulder in a careless shrug. “People do change.”

      “Not you!” I cried. “It is one of the things I depend upon.”

      His expression did not alter, but I smelled something of savagery in him just then. “You will have your secrets, Julia. You must leave me mine. I will see you soon enough, I promise you that. And so we will leave it.”

      Even then I could have mended it. I could have conceded his concerns for my safety and his outrage at my sister’s manipulations, his sudden need for convention and normalcy. I could have trimmed myself to fit the mould of a proper wife. It would have taken but a phrase, gently spoken, and a smile, sweetly offered. But I had been such a wife once before, and I had vowed never again.

      So I did not offer him either the gentle phrase or the sweet smile. I merely turned on my heel and left him then, closing the door firmly behind me.

      And so I set my gaze toward Darjeeling and left with my sister and brother, my maid, Morag, and a party of porters that would have put Stanley’s expedition to shame.

      “Is it absolutely necessary to travel with so many men?” I demanded of Portia. “It looks as if we mean to claim Darjeeling in the name of the March family and establish a colony of our own. For heaven’s sake, Portia, the porters are laughing at us.”

      Portia shrugged. “They’re being paid well enough to carry Buckingham Palace on their backs if we ordered it.” I continued to needle her about the size of our party, but she did not rise to the bait. She knew Brisbane and I had quarrelled over the investigation and that her methods had been at the centre of our disagreement. Nothing more need be said upon the matter, at least not yet. Once my anger had burnt itself to cinders, no doubt I would have need of her sisterly bosom for a good weep, but for the present, I was content to embark upon the adventure we had set ourselves. I could not worry over Brisbane, I told myself sternly. He had sent his trunks with us as he required only a small bag on his trip, and I held on to the sight of those trunks as proof I would see him again soon. Besides, I reflected, there was quite enough to do just to navigate into the foothills of the Himalayas with an increasingly bitter Plum on our hands. As it happened, he had taken Portia’s manipulations no better than Brisbane had, and it had only been her pointed threats to dispatch a telegram to Father that had persuaded him to continue on with us.

      Our unwieldy party left Calcutta behind and began to wind its way slowly up the road to Darjeeling. We might have boarded the train, but Portia had taken one look at the tiny railway and stated flatly that she would not put a foot onto such a toy. Plum grumbled exceedingly at the extra time and trouble it required to travel by road, but in the end I was glad of it, for the air grew thinner and colder outside of Darjeeling, and the scenery changed as we wound our way ever upward. The first high peaks of the Himalayas hove into view, and I nearly fell from my horse when I saw at last the great snow-capped peaks of Kanchenjunga. It was the most beautiful, most majestic sight I had ever seen, and everything I had ever known before paled in comparison to that one extraordinary horizon.

      We lingered a number of days in Darjeeling town organising the rest of our journey before pressing on, passing through villages and skirting tea plantations and falling into rivers. The children were plump and friendly, and I noticed their parents were very unlike the Indians of Calcutta, for here the native folk were much shorter and with a coppery cast of complexion and broad, flat cheekbones. Portia, who had armed herself with every bit of information she could find upon the area, informed me that the people of Sikkim blended Bengali Indian with Tibetan and Nepalese, and that the language was a peculiar patois of Hindustani liberally laced with the mountain tongues. The result was a nearly indecipherable but pleasant-sounding language that rose and fell with a musical lilt.

      “Yes, but are we actually in Sikkim?” I asked.

      Portia wrinkled up her nose and pored over the map. “I think we may actually have crossed into Nepal.”

      “Nepal? Are you delirious?” Plum demanded. “We are still in Darjeeling district.”

      I peered over Portia’s shoulder. “I think we might have crossed into Sikkim, just there,” I pointed.

      “You have the map upside down. That is Madagascar,” Plum said nastily.

      “We could ask a porter,” I ventured.

      “We cannot ask a porter,” Portia hissed, “any more than we can ask the Cavendishes. It would be rude and impossibly stupid of us not to know where we are. Besides, so long as the porters know, that is all that needs be said upon the matter.”

      The one point we did agree upon was the beauty of our surroundings, wherever they might be. The landscape seemed to have taken what was best from many places and combined it to great effect, for I saw familiar trees and plants—ferns and roses and elms—and mingling with them the exotic blooms of orchids and towering, fragrant deodars. Here and there a cluster of native bungalows gave way to neat English cottages, sitting like curiosities among the orderly undulations of the tea fields. And over it all hovered the scent of the tea plants, rising above the serried rows to perfume the air. It was captivating, and more than once Plum very nearly walked off the side of a mountain because he was busily sketching scenes in his notebook.

      At last, a few days’ ride out of Darjeeling town—possibly in Sikkim, although possibly not—we crested a small mountain and looked down into as pretty and tidy a valley as I had ever seen. A small river debouched into a lake thick with lilies and water hyacinths at the mouth of the valley, and the only means of entrance was by way of a narrow stone bridge that seemed СКАЧАТЬ