She feels that she could live here for a lifetime and never get used to the heat.
It never ceases, not during the winter months nor during the rainy season when the heavens open up and she dares not venture out of doors for fear that she might drown right where she stands, it's as if the sea itself has upended and trees and villages are swept away whole in the wake. They call it the monsoon, and the first year she had assumed it must have been the kind of storm that occurs only once in a century. But it is a yearly right of passage in this land that turns deserts to greenery and brings some measure of relief from the scorching temperatures.
Some. Not all.
India is an ancient country, of strange gods and aromatic spices, deadly serpents and bright textiles, fabulous wealth and crushing poverty.
And heat.
Ceaseless, unrelenting heat.
It turns the pages of her books limp, the paper melting back to pulp. It trickles between her breasts and soaks the handkerchief she keeps tucked there just for that purpose. It caresses her like a lover in the night, when she lies in her empty bed and feels the weight of the sultry air on her skin, heavy and damp, hot, so hot. She dreams of the bracing winds of the English seaside and the almost forgotten scent of heather and yew off the Yorkshire moors, but wakes to the tropical breeze wafting from the jewel-bright Bay of Bengal and the smell of the night blooming jasmine and rubber trees out her window.
She is not here by choice, but then very few Englishwomen are. They have followed their men on this new crusade to another southern land, to claim the wealth of the rajahs and expand the empire, planting the Union Jack in the dark fertile soil of the vast subcontinent.
Her husband is a high-ranking official who is absent most of the year, travelling inland to oversee and collect revenue from the various outposts under his jurisdiction. She had met Neal at seventeen and had loved him once, or thought she did. Their youthful passion had produced a son, Henry, born seven months after their wedding, but had long since faded into a shadow of what it had once been, if it had ever existed at all. Neal had told her once on a night when he'd come home with his tongue loose with drink and his shirt scented with a perfume she didn't own that he'd married her only because his father had ordered it. Her mother was the daughter of an earl and her father a baronet, and Neal's family had newly-acquired wealth but poor and humble lineage.
The following morning he is sober and polite over the tea and toast at the breakfast table, and they don't speak of the previous night.
But there is a chill in their marriage from that day on, a chill that does not thaw, it only grows colder and opens up a chasm that can not be bridged, not in London nor in Bombay. The Indian sun is hot, but the wall of ice that lies between them now does not melt. It settles deep within her heart and makes her brittle and cold to the father of her child.
Still, her son is her pride and joy and she lavishes him with her love. If Neal gave her nothing else, he had given her Henry. Their son had been a pale and sickly thing in England, beset by every cough and cold and confined to the nursery more often than not. She reads to him from his beloved fairy tales while he rattles and wheezes in his bed and her heart seizes in fear at the sound. But he blooms like a hothouse flower under the bright yellow sun, his lungs clearing at last and his constitution turned robust and rosy with glowing health. Henry loves India, and India is good to him in return.
She tells herself she can be content with that.
And she is, until the day he arrives.
Lieutenant Killian Jones is newly arrived from a previous posting in Rhodesia, followed by whispers of a scandalous love affair with a superior officer's wife. Black hair and blue eyes, with a smile that doesn't quite reach them, she watches him from behind her fan, ever fluttering in a vain attempt to keep the heat at bay. The local garrison is full of men like him, the young unmarried officers who make advances to the neglected and bored wives in between the games of croquet and afternoon tea and attempt to fondle her under the table when seated next to her at yet another dinner party, whispering in her ear to leave her gate unlocked and her bedroom window open.
She never does.
She never wants to.
Until him.
Her husband is gone again, leaving her and their son behind but bringing along the mistress she pretends she doesn't know about, a local girl younger than even she had been when he'd promised her forever. And she wears a pink and white lily in her upswept hair and dances with Killian Jones at a ball, he calls her Mrs. Cassidy in a measured tone but whispers Emma in her ear and she can feel the heat beading between her breasts and and a kindling fire between her legs under the ruffles and flounces of her silk dress and underthings. He steals the flower from her hair and draws it under his nose, inhaling deep with a wicked smile that finally reaches his eyes and an unspoken question she answers with a nod.
She leaves the gate unlocked.
Her bedroom window is open, and the scent of the night blooming jasmine follows him when he climbs through and finds her in the dark. They lay atop the coverlet and peel away the limp layers of clothes, ridiculous to be wearing in the climate so far removed from English fog but required by their stations all the same. When at last they're both bare he buries his face between her breasts and licks the dampness he finds there, and the blazing heat of their frantic lovemaking slicks his skin under her hands and she is finally warmed through for the first time since setting foot in this land, for the first time in years. He swallows her cry with a kiss and groans into her neck, his fingers leaving dark bruises on her hips and thighs that she looks at in the mirror the following morning with pleased eyes before covering them up with her dressing gown and admitting her Indian maid, who enters with downcast eyes and a murmured "Memsahib".
They are proper in public and passionate in private, stealing every moment alone that they can. They play cards at picnics and sneak away when no one is watching, finding someplace, anyplace where he can sink to his knees and shove up her skirts, pleasuring her with his clever mouth in quick, firm strokes. She fondles him under the table at dinner parties and he pulls her into empty drawing rooms, locking the door and bending her over the backs of chaise lounges, taking her hard and fast with his hand clapped over her mouth to keep her silent. It's as heady as the sticky-sweet fumes of the opium that drew their countrymen to this land and just as dangerous. He's already almost lost his commission over one woman, and her husband could keep their son here and send her back home in disgrace. But neither of them can stop.
Neither of them wants to stop.
Killian makes promises in the night, cradling her against his chest and speaking hesitantly of a life together. His elder brother owns a sugar plantation in Jamaica, another strange, far away land of heat and sun. She could obtain a divorce from Neal and go with him, and send for Henry when he came of age.
She almost wants to, but she can't.
She won't leave her son.
He smiles and says he understands.
The smile doesn't reach his eyes.
She knows that she loves him.
She doesn't say it.
Neal returns, and Killian leaves. There's fighting in the north, tribal unrest that seems to have gone on for time immemorial. It's a familiar story, their own homeland has that same divide between north and south. His regiment has been called to arms, and the night before her husband's arrival he climbs through her open window, her Romeo who brings with him the sent of the night blooming jasmine and kisses her with the taste of spice in his mouth. It's slow and then it's fast, and slow again. She wants him to brand her, to bruise her and bite her, but he refuses, he won't let Neal see the proof of her unfaithfulness. But he doesn't protest when she rakes her nails down his back and sucks a red mark into his hip.
"I'm yours, love. I'll wear you proudly into battle and return so you may claim me again."
He leaves just before the dawn, taking one of her monogrammed handkerchiefs with him. It spent the day nestled between her breasts to catch the drops that trickle down from under her lace collars, and he tucks it into his shirt next to his heart before he slips from the window and takes the warmth with him, leaving her cold and alone once more.
Her husband shows up in time for tea, and they engage in pleasantries as if he hadn't spent the last few months traipsing around with his dusky-skinned young lover who rumour states had borne his child, and she hadn't welcomed another man into her bed and to her heart. He has brought her a gift of a necklace, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, thick Indian gold with a large star sapphire the same colour as Killian's eyes.
She retires to her room with a headache and doesn't come out again until morning.
Two days later the rains come, the monsoon that sweeps and scrubs the land clean and washes away the refuse of the last year. She has to close and latch her window against the deluge, and she can't smell the jasmine through the glass.
The heat rises from the sodden ground and fills the air, but she is cold without him.
There is no word from the north.
Neal departs again with a close-lipped kiss and without a backwards glance. The garrison is shuttered and empty, and the ladies left behind play croquet and drink tea as their children run and play, pretending to be natives with napkin turbans and tablecloth veils. Henry is growing too old for such games, but he can still be persuaded to join in at times. She watches him from behind her fan, her handsome, brave son.
Brave enough to step in between a younger playmate and a cobra hiding in the tall grasses that grew after the rains.
It takes him three days to die.
She swears her heart stops beating when his does, swears it freezes and shatters right in her chest.
She's cold.
She's so cold.
She's heard of the local custom of the funeral pyre and the grieving women who throw themselves on it. If they had burned her son then she would have joined him in the flames.
Neal comes back as soon as the news reaches him but it's too late, their son is dead and buried, they couldn't wait, not in the high heat of the Indian summer. He tries to comfort her, tries to take her in his arms but she slaps his face and screams at him that it's all his fault for bringing them to this cursed country and he finally backs away and leaves her alone with her grief. If her husband goes to finds solace in the arms of another she doesn't know and she doesn't care. The chasm between them is an ocean now, and she thinks she's about to drown.
Nearly a year passes but she's frozen in time, she's always cold despite the unrelenting heat and she thinks she'll never be warm again.
And then he comes back.
Lieutenant Killian Jones has returned from the north, black hair and blue eyes, and missing his left hand.
Lost in battle with a young tribal chieftain and a vicious army of child soldiers.
India has claimed a piece of him too.
He can't climb through her open window anymore, and she meets him at the unlocked gate.
He smiles at her, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
She still loves him.
Her handkerchief is still tucked next to his heart.
The jasmine grows over Henry's grave and she plucks a sprig and presses it in between the pages of a book. Killian holds her when she cries and wipes away the tears with the pad of his single thumb. He's been discharged from his commission with a small sum from the Crown as compensation for his injury, as if money could pay for what either of them has lost.
She sells the gold necklace with the star sapphire and sends a letter to Neal that will reach him long after they're gone. The servants are dismissed, and passage booked for the west.
Jamaica.
She would have lived a lifetime in India for her son.
Killian promises that the Caribbean Sea is bluer even than the Bay of Bengal.
He promises she'll be warm again.
She hopes that the smile will one day reach his eyes.