Love on the Wind

Chapter One ~ 1883-2

The way he spoke sounded serious and she enquired a little apprehensively,

“What – is that?”

“That you will never, in any circumstances, attempt to do anything so foolish and wicked as you intended to do tonight.”

“Why should it be – wicked? I did not ask to – come into this world – and it is nobody’s business if I – choose to go – out of it.”

“I don’t think that your father, if he was alive, would take that view.”

“Papa is dead – but perhaps Mama who died with him – would understand.”

“I think neither of them would expect that you, having been born in India and bearing the name of one of her most admired Goddesses, would try to escape from your Karma.”

Sita sat up and looked at him now in a very different way.

“Why should you think that going through the miseries I suffer with Uncle Harvey is my Karma? If Papa and Mama had not been drowned when they were sailing, I should be with them now and – if I die – I shall be with them again.”

“You cannot be certain of that,” the man opposite her said quietly. “What you can be certain of is that if you deliberately throw away your body, which is very valuable, you will have to be born again and perhaps go through all the misery you are suffering now or even worse.”

“What do you mean? Are you talking about reincarnation?”

“The Wheel of Rebirth,” the man replied. “You will find that it is something everyone understands in India and is so palpably true that you will wonder how you ever doubted that it could happen to you.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“We will have a little wager that one day you will tell me that I was right.”

“I have nothing to bet with,” Sita frowned. “Uncle Harvey gives me – no money.”

She thought as she spoke of how she had pleaded with him almost on her knees to give her a little of her own money to buy gowns to travel to India with.

“It will be hot, Uncle Harvey,” she had said to him, “and I have nothing to wear. I can hardly walk about in the heat in the clothes I am wearing now!”

“The miserable amount of money your improvident father left you when he died must be a safeguard against your future,” her uncle replied. “I am not going to live forever and I do not intend to leave you any of my hard-earned money.”

He waited for her to make some remark and, as she was silent, he went on,

“You will have to fend for yourself unless somebody marries you, which is most unlikely. At least what I have put in the Bank for you will save you from starvation.”

Sita had heard all this before and it always hurt her that her uncle invariably spoke of her father contemptuously, as if he should have made a lot of money during his lifetime.

Her father had left his Regiment soon after he married because he could not afford it and came back to England to try to farm a very small estate that belonged to her mother.

That he had failed had not really been his fault.

He had not enough capital to start with, he lacked experience and the soil, which had been neglected for many years, was not at all productive.

Nevertheless they had been happy in the small Manor House in a little village where her father was treated respectfully as the Squire.

Because Raymond Arran was very much in love with his wife, he only occasionally regretted the Regiment and the friends he had had to leave behind in India.

Somehow with very little money he had managed to enjoy life, riding in the local point-to-points and training horses that he bought cheaply and broke in so that he and his wife could hunt in the winter.

Occasionally they went to London to enjoy themselves wildly and extravagantly for two weeks before they returned to try to make up what they had spent as if they had not a financial care in the world.

The Manor House had been filled with laughter and love and, only when Sita found herself incarcerated as if in a tomb in the gaunt ugly Georgian building where her uncle lived in the outskirts of London, did she know how much she had lost.

Sita somehow thought that her uncle, because he had been a Judge in India, treated everybody he met as if they were criminals.

That certainly was his attitude towards her.

More than this he was clearly a misogynist and had no wish to have any woman in his house and in his care.

It was only when he discovered that Sita was intelligent enough to be useful that he condescended to speak to her at mealtimes.

Then he demanded that she should work for him, but every mistake she made infuriated him and, from first berating her angrily, he started to shake her and then hit her.

Never in her whole life had her father or mother raised a hand against her and Sita could hardly believe that it was happening to her.

When at first she defied her uncle, he hit her harder and then when she cried it irritated him because he thought that she was wasting time when she should be working.

Being in fact perceptive she began to realise that his anger was directed not only against her but against the frustration of becoming too old for the life he had once enjoyed and the importance of his position in India.

Having lived in India for over twenty years he had few friends in England and those he had now found him a bore.

It was therefore understandable that Sir Harvey Arran, lonely and unwanted, hated his very existence and took it out on the newest victim.

This was Sita and she wilted before his rage like a flower without sunshine.

When the letter came asking Sir Harvey to come out to Hyderabad, where he had lived before he retired, to advise the Nizam in a very complicated legal deal he was elated.

“I knew they could not do without me,” he bragged. “I knew they would miss me when I had gone! There is nobody in the whole Province with my brains or my knowledge of legal affairs.”

For two days he seemed younger and almost human as he decided what books he would have to take with him and his manservants began to get out his tropical clothing, which had been put away since he came back to England.

It was then that Sita had asked nervously,

“Am I to – stay here, Uncle Harvey – while you are – away?”

Her uncle stared at her as if it was the first time that the question of what she should do had occurred to him.

Then he said sharply,

“Of course, where else would you go?”

Then it suddenly struck him that, because she had been working on his book and doing his letters for nearly a year, she was more useful to him than if he had to begin again with a stranger and so he said,

“No, you will come with me. At least you can continue to do something to earn the amount of money I have to expend on you, week by week, month by month and year by year.”

Because she had hoped that for a little while at any rate she would be free of his continual fault-finding and even physical violence every time she made a mistake, Sita felt her spirits drop despairingly.

She had sometimes thought that she would like to see India because her father had spoken about it in such glowing terms and he had first met her mother when she was visiting a relative who was Governor of the North-West Province.

But Sita knew now that to go anywhere with her uncle would be like setting off for Hell and, because for one optimistic moment, she had thought that she would be alone, the disappointment was like a physical pain.

It was a pain that seemed to intensify every day as her uncle raged at her whenever she asked questions and, because he was on edge concerning what lay ahead, he hit her even harder than usual when she made a mistake in writing his letters or copying out a manuscript.

They had sailed through a rough sea in the Bay of Biscay and, although Sita had not actually been sick, she felt unwell and had an incessant headache from being rocked about.

Moreover she found when they went aboard that her uncle had engaged for her one of the cheapest cabins available in First Class.

Little more than a cupboard and intended for a servant travelling with a First Class passenger, it was an inside cabin with no porthole.

Every time she entered it, Sita felt as if she went into her grave.

It was badly lit, but, as she had no wish to sit in her uncle’s cabin, she was forced to write in a light that was so dim it made her eyes ache and, even though she sat up late every night, he was not satisfied when morning came that she had done enough.

Because she felt so unwell she could not eat and, when they left the Mediterranean and entered the Suez Canal, she felt so ill that she was unable to do anything but lie on her bunk.

“Do you know what you are costing me on this voyage?” her uncle had shouted at her. “Stop being lazy and get on with your work! I want that manuscript finished by the time we reach India and if it is not you will be sorry!”

“I cannot – do any more,” Uncle Harvey,” Sita answered.

He had slapped her hard across the face almost knocking her down before he shouted,

“You will work or I will beat you into it. God knows I had only one reason for bringing you with me and for all the use you are I might as well chuck you overboard!”

It was these words that had given Sita the idea that she could save him the trouble.

She thought about it all night and the next day when her uncle had seemed angrier and more violent than usual she had known that she could bear it no longer.

She had seen from the top deck the people sleeping outside in the stern of the ship wrapped either in a blanket or in a shapeless Muslim robe and had known that it would be a perfect disguise for her to reach a place where she could slip into the sea without being seen.

It was unlikely that anyone in the middle of the night would be looking back the way they had come, while those on the bridge would be looking forward over the bow.

She made her plans very carefully and, ignoring the manuscript that was waiting to be copied out in her airless cabin, she watched the hands of the clock until she was sure that the ship would be silent and everybody asleep.

It was then that she had taken the cotton cover off her bed, which was an indeterminate faded blue, and wrapped herself in it.

In her heelless slippers she moved silently from the top deck down to the second and from there down to the third without encountering anybody and found her way to the stern.

Now she wondered why in a ship full of sleeping people there was one man who had to be awake.

Because she found herself thinking of him rather than herself, she asked after a moment,

“How can you – speak as you do? You may think it – impertinent of me, but I do not – believe you are – Indian.”

He smiled and it made his eyes twinkle.

“If I have been inquisitive about you, Sita, I have no wish for you to be inquisitive about me.”

“Why not?”

“I have my reasons. I am still waiting for your secret promise in response to mine, not to speak of me or to know me.”

“And if I refuse to give it to you?” she asked with a sudden flash of spirit that she had not shown before.

“In that case,” he said slowly, “I will think it my duty to tell your uncle how he might have lost his niece.”