CHAPTER TWO: MARY'S POV
Many of the girls I met in boarding school who had been brought up on foreign soil seemed almost ashamed and regretful of the fact. I, on the other hand, have always been thankful for my early years in India. I was the kind of girl, and am now the kind of woman, who enjoys knowing all she can.
Perhaps that was one of the things that drew me to John; not only was he travelled, but thanks to his relationship with the great detective Sherlock Holmes, he was far better at deducing things than he gave himself credit for.
Because I grew up in India, many of my earlier stories are set there, as was the one John wished to hear from me now. So many proper British ladies would swoon to hear my first childish spark of romance was for a nut-brown Indian boy, but I doubted my John would be so shocked. Perhaps a little jealous, but not shocked.
"Well..." I began, my hands folding in my lap so that I would not fidget with them. This was a bit harder than I thought it would be; hours ago I had pledged my eternal love to the man now watching me intently and now I was to relate love that occurred far before him. "I suppose it all starts in India. My father was stationed there to oversee the colonies, and you know my mother died shortly after my birth. My Ayah was my main keeper, but she had the belief that the world was made far before books and you could learn much more from the former than the latter."
How many letters had my late mother's family sent demanding that I be provided with a good, firm, British nanny? I suppose as many as ended up in my father's rubbish bin. I had a British tutor to make me learn my lessons from books, but my Ayah was the one who opened the curtains once the lessons were done and taught me what was useful. Arithmetic was all well and good, but it would not teach you which thorns could poison you.
"As such, I spent a great deal of time outside. My relatives back home would purse their lips at how dark I'd become because of it once I returned home, but when I was eleven that time was a hundred years away. And my tanning did fade away eventually."
Not before all the girls at my boarding school had teased me for it, of course. There was another girl fresh from India in my year and I had hoped to forge a friendship with her, but she was a bone-white and almost sickly creature who had seen no more of the beautiful country than she could from her bedroom window. So until the girls had found a new pastime, I had buried myself in my books. They were more interesting than most of the silly creatures in that school.
"My father's closest servant was a man named Aseem. He was the only man he trusted fully to translate Indian for him until he caught onto it himself and who lived with us. Aseem's eldest son Isha lived with us, too, and was my age. He tended to the hens mostly, but he was such a clever boy that whenever something was broken, they would ask him to poke at it before paying someone to. He could usually fix it, too."
I could see the boy now; a bit smaller for his age, perhaps even a hair's width shorter than myself at the time. Shining dark eyes that took in everything around him and black hair that was never entirely neat no matter how much he combed. Brown skin, sun-darkened and usually scratched from his adventures through the thick foliage, seeking nothing but enjoyment. One of the most honest smiles I have ever known.
"My father had just bought me a book on the flowers of India and Isha and I were looking over it together. He could speak English as well as his native tongue, but he could read neither out of pure stubbornness. He had a younger brother in school; he claimed one educated boy in the family was enough. Well, he took one look at those black and white drawings and he claimed it was an outright blasphemous thing to trap flowers on a page in such a lifeless way."
There had been that silly passion in his voice when he declared this; someone who did not know him would think him serious, but it had sent me into giggles.
"I told him that these drawings were not as good as the real thing, but that they were the closest thing most people could get to seeing them. He said that he could lead me to any flower in the book, and so I thumbed to the page with the Himalayan tulips – "
John interrupted me for the first time. "Himalayan tulips? I've never heard of such a thing! And they're native to India?"
I smiled, feeling very much like a teacher with a delightfully eager student. "Most people believe tulips come from Holland, but they actually began in the Middle East and central Asia. Himalayan tulips were a wild strain, and they don't look very much like tulips at all. Not the ones we know. They are more like tiny daffodils with rounded leaves, a flower within a flower. They are hard to describe."
The drawing had made them look beautiful, and it was odd to think that something that looked so delicate could grow in the untamed jungles without the intervention of human hands. To see one growing in the wild... I had thought it almost impossible, and I so loved to prove Isha wrong. I rarely did, however, and that time was no exception.
"In any case, I challenged him to find me one by tomorrow. I expected him to pick it and bring it back to me. Imagine my surprise when he waited outside my door until my lessons were finished and told me to follow him into the jungle."
John was smiling; apparently he could imagine it. "Well, if he had picked it, it wouldn't have been in the wild anymore."
I sighed, though I too was grinning. "That was just what he said. I had been in the shallower parts, but my father had warned me against going too deep. Thinking back, I did not even think of all that might have happened."
No... At the time, I had been with Isha and that was enough to guarantee my safety. The boy knew the flora and fauna of the area better than an Oxford mathematics professor knew his multiplication tables.
"I take it from the fact you still have all your fingers that nothing terrible did happen," my husband (oh, it was so odd but so pleasant to refer to him as such) commented with one of his small smiles that meant more to me than his grins.
"No, and as promised, he led me to the flower. Oh, John, he was right to be affronted. The drawing in the book did it no justice at all. But when I touched the leaves, they were as tough as leather of the same thickness. Isha told me that was the way the best flowers were; they looked delicate enough to break, but yet they were as strong as they had to be in the jungle." I felt a blush rising to my face at the memory of the two of us, eleven and
thinking nothing of twelve, crouching in the dirt around the cluster of yellow flowers. "He told me that was the way I was."
It had been childhood memories up until this point, but now I was revealing the very first traces of adulthood in my life; the green pushing up through the brown soil. Whether or not I had bloomed into a rare flower or not I could not say, but although I had not become a woman for several more years yet, womanhood glimmered faintly in the child I once was.
"Well, I did not know what to say." I had no more confidence at that moment than I had all those years ago. To be telling the man I loved now about the boy who had caught my first dim sparks of the emotion was more than a bit embarrassing. "I couldn't think of a thing to say for all the poems my tutor had made me memorize. So . . . so I didn't say a thing. I just..." Lost entirely, I gave a meek shrug.
"You kissed him." There was one of those small smiles again, playing on his solid features. He seemed a bit bashful, hearing about this young man, but he was more composed than I. John had such a strong constitution in the oddest of situations, another trait, no doubt, acquired at Sherlock Holmes's side. The detective himself did not seem to hold a great deal of affection for me, but I owed him much.
"Yes. I suppose I did." Certainly not the most intelligent thing to say, not when I had so many words that could describe the delicate scent of the wild tulips and the sweetness of the surrounding foliage, the heavy sun touching us only briefly through the thick green leaves, the sounds of the foreign forest that were as evocative as any poetry yet as volatile as a stream, the furious but delightful pounding of my heart as my lips touched his, and the blush that was hotter than any sunburn ever was that remained on our cheeks after we had parted.
"What happened then?"
I refrained from physically shaking my head to dislodge myself from the engulfing memory. "We never really talked of it again, to be honest. We remained good friends until I left for boarding school in England when I was thirteen and he was hired the next year as a guide to a group of botanists." I wondered how many other people had been led by him to those odd flowers within flowers. I wondered how many had been beautiful women that he had kissed. "Letters were useless since he could not read or write. And so we drifted apart, each to very different lives."
I held no regrets, of course. Marriage between a Caucasian and an Indian . . . What would my British relatives have said about that? No, there was no question of things going differently, not when I sat in an armchair across from a man who loved me so dearly.
At the same time, however, no matter how beautiful my English home with my handsome doctor would be, in my heart there would always be a patch of Himalayan tulips blooming under the persuasion of the Indian sun.
