Read Online Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald - Free Book Online Page A

parents had ever been able to withstand her rages, and even I, though generally impervious to her avowals of everlasting hatred, sometimes found it simpler to walk away and let her pursue her temper to exhaustion. Now Charles was reaping the fruits of our combined weakness and good nature. Poor Charles! Convention inhibited me from disillusioning him as to the true character of his bride, but I had a premonition that he was not going to enjoy the discoveries of the next few months.
    And then he put out his hand in the darkness and covered mine as it lay quietly on my knee. ‘Dear Laura,’ he said gently. ‘A rock of strength, good sense and serenity in the turmoils of our silly troubles. Where would we be without you?’ Then he left me.
    I remained alone on the verandah for a long time afterwards, remembering all the many occasions on which my ‘good sense’ had been my downfall.

CHAPTER 5
    Charles must have decided that night that the only way to distract Emily from her present discontents was to give her something else to think about. Accordingly, on the following day a servant was dispatched to the city to hire a landau as much like the Chalmerses’ as possible. He himself, with the aid of Mr Chalmers and a native groom, chose the horses, and that evening we took a drive along Garden Reach. The following day, despite Mrs Chalmers’s opinion that they had not allowed themselves sufficient time to recover from the voyage, he took Emily calling.
    Emily had been in a twitter about what she should wear since waking, and had changed her gown three times before satisfying herself, but even so it was very early when they set off, Emily in dove-grey silk and a large straw hat, and Charles very neat in his new tropical kit of cream alpaca.
    I was delighted to know that I was not to accompany them—though I had an idea my absence was a concession made by Charles to Emily’s bad humour—and settled down comfortably to my needlework with Mrs Chalmers on the dark cool verandah until the gathering heat should drive us indoors. Looking through an arch from the gloom of the verandah to the garden bright with zinnias, cockscomb and cannas against the pearl-pure morning sky, I got the impression of looking at a picture in a heavy frame. Several gardeners, wearing only loincloths, squatted on their haunches and scratched apathetically at the flowerbeds. Various tradesmen, carrying on their heads flat, round baskets of fruit and vegetables, came and went to the kitchen quarters. And a Chinese merchant entertained us with a display of silks and laces, embroidered linen and jade figurines, all produced from a finely woven basket-pack and then replaced with beautiful precision and great good humour, although we had made no purchase. The garden was patronized by all manner of birds, some dull, some most beautifully coloured. All were noisy; one or two had a recognizable song but in the main they chattered, clucked and squawked, and as the heat increased they fell still, all but one group of drab, untidy little things (known, Mrs Chalmers told me, as Sath Bhai or Seven Sisters) who continued to quarrel and scream at each other in an hysterical fashion all the hours of the day.
    By ten o’clock the sky was leaden and lowering and we had just determined to retire to the comfort of the punkah -cooled drawing-room when, heralded by a tremendous peal of thunder, the rain came. It was the first true monsoon downpour I had experienced, and after the first few moments, when I was almost alarmed, I found myself enjoying it. Never had I imagined anything like the vehemence of that sheeting, pouring, clamorous rain! The storms at sea had been violent, often frightening, but now the heavens literally split and a solid wall of water descended, driving us, in a matter of seconds, into the house. I stood at a door and watched, while Mrs Chalmers, shouting to make herself heard above the din, begged me not to be alarmed: it was ‘only the monsoons’.