He does not love you. He will not love you. There is nothing about you for him to love.
She shook her head. If she didn’t think about it—if she worked until she was exhausted every day—she could pretend that her marriage wasn’t a complete disaster.
But it was. A complete disaster.
One small lie—This marriage has never been consummated—would free them both.
Then she could walk away from him, from the wreckage of the greatest and only gamble of her life. Then she could forget that she’d been mired in an unrequited love as unwholesome as any malarial swamp on the Subcontinent. Then she could breathe again.
No, she couldn’t. If she asked for and received an annulment, he would marry someone else, and she would be his wife and the mother of his children, not Bryony, forgotten and unlamented.
She did not want him to forget her. She would endure anything to hold on to him.
She could not stand this desperate, sniveling creature she’d become.
She loved him.
She hated both him and herself.
She hugged her shoulders tight, rocked back and forth, and stared into shadows that would not dispel.
She was still sitting up in bed, her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking and staring, when her maid came in the morning. Molly went about the room, opening curtains and shutters, letting in the day.
She poured Bryony’s tea, approached the bed, and dropped the tray. Something shattered loudly.
“Oh, missus. Your hair. Your hair!”
Bryony looked up dumbly. Molly rushed about the room and returned with a hand mirror. “Look, missus. Look.”
Bryony thought she looked almost tolerable for someone who hadn’t slept in two days. Then she saw the streak in her hair, two inches wide and white as washing soda.
The mirror fell from her hands.
“I’ll get some nitrate of silver and make a dye,” Molly said. “No one will even notice.”
“No, no nitrate of silver,” Bryony said mechanically. “It’s harmful.”
“Some sulphate of iron then. Or I could mix henna with some ammonia, but I don’t know if that will be—”
“Yes, you may go prepare it,” said Bryony.
When Molly was gone she picked up the mirror again. She looked strange and strangely vulnerable—the desolation she’d kept carefully hidden made manifest by the translucent fragility of her white hair. And she had no one to blame. She’d done this to herself, with her relentless need, her delusions, her willingness to gamble it all for a mythical fulfillment conjured by her fevered mind.
She set aside the mirror, wrapped her arms about her knees, and resumed her rocking—she had a few minutes before Molly rushed back with the hair dye, before she must arrange a meeting with him to calmly and rationally discuss the dissolution of their marriage.
Leo, she permitted herself this one last indulgence, a heartbroken widow at her husband’s grave, sobbing his name in vain. Leo. Leo. Leo.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Leo. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Kalash Valleys
Near Chitral, Northwest Frontier, India
1897
The white streak was a slash of barrenness against the rich deep black of her hair. It started at the edge of her forehead, just to the right of center, swept straight down the back of her head, and twisted through her chignon in a striking—and eerie—arabesque. It invoked an odd reaction in him. Not pity; he would no more pity her than he would pity the lone Himalayan wolf. And not affection; she’d put an end to that with her frigidity, in heart and body. An echo of some sort then, memories of old hopes from more innocent days.
She’d finished washing her hands minutes ago, but she hadn’t moved from the edge of the stream. Instead she’d picked up a twig to trace random patterns in the swift-flowing, aquamarine water.
Beyond the stream fields of wheat glinted a thick, bright green in the narrow alluvial plain. Small, rectangular houses of wood and stacked stone piled one on top of another, like a collection of weathered playing blocks. Behind the village, the ground rose quickly, a brief stratum of walnut and fruit trees before the slope butted up against austere crags that supported only dots of shrubs and an intrepid deodar or two.
“Bryony,” he said at last.
She went still.
So she hadn’t known that he was there. With her it was sometimes hard to tell. She was capable of a surpassing obliviousness. But he did not put it past her to deliberately ignore him in public. It had happened before.
She picked up the rubber gloves she’d worn during the caesarean section and began to wash the blood from them. “Mr. Marsden, how unexpected. What brings you to this part of the world?”
“Your father is ill. Your sister sent several cables to Leh, and when she received no response from you, she asked me to find you.”
She was still again. “What’s the matter with my father?”
“I don’t know the specifics. Lady Callista only said that doctors are not hopeful and that he wishes to see you.”