“What did you see? Tell me!”
I kick and hit, twisting in his grip. Is there anyone around who can help me? What is happening? Mother! My mind fights for control, logic, reason, and finds it. My mother is having tea at Mrs. Talbot’s house. I’ll go there and prove it. She will be angry and send me home with Sarita and there’ll be no champagne later and no London but it won’t matter. She’ll be alive and well and cross and I’ll be ecstatic to be punished by her.
He’s still yelling at me. “Did you see my brother?”
“Let me go!” I kick at him with my legs, which have found their strength again. I’ve gotten him in the tenderest of places. He crumples to the ground and I take off blindly down the street and around the next corner, fear pushing me forward. A small crowd is gathering in front of a shop. A shop where dried herbs hang from the roof.
No. This is all some hideous dream. I will wake up in my own bed and hear Father’s loud, gravelly voice telling one of his long-winded jokes, Mother’s soft laughter filling in after.
My legs cramp and tighten, go wobbly as I reach the crowd and make my way through it. The organ-grinder’s tiny monkey scampers to the ground and tilts his head left and right, eyeing the body there with curiosity. The few people in front of me clear away. My mind takes it in by degrees. A shoe upturned, the heel broken. A hand splayed, fingers going stiff. Contents of a handbag strewn in the dirt. Bare neck peeking out from the bodice of a blue gown. Those famous green eyes open and unseeing. Mother’s mouth parted slightly, as if she had been trying to speak when she died.
Gemma.
A deep red pool of blood widens and flows beneath her lifeless body. It seeps into the dusty cracks in the earth, reminding me of the pictures I’ve seen of Kali, the dark goddess, who spills blood and crushes bone. Kali the destroyer. My patron saint. I close my eyes, willing it all to go away.
This is not happening. This is not happening. This is not happening.
But when I open my eyes, she’s still there, staring back at me, accusing. I don’t care if you come home at all. It was the last thing I’d said to her. Before I ran away. Before she came after me. Before I saw her die in a vision. A heavy numbness weighs down my arms and legs. I crumple to the ground, where my mother’s blood touches the hem of my best dress, forever staining it. And then the scream I’ve been holding back comes pouring out of me hard and fast as a night train just as the sky opens wide and a fierce rain pours down, drowning out every sound.
CHAPTER THREE
“VICTORIA! THIS IS VICTORIA STATION!”
A burly, blue-uniformed conductor moves through on his way to the back of our train, announcing that I’ve arrived in London at last. We’re slowing to a stop. Great billowing clouds of steam sail past the window, making everything outside seem like a dream.
In the seat across from me, my brother, Tom, is waking, straightening his black waistcoat, checking for anything that isn’t perfect. In the four years we’ve been apart, he has grown very tall and a little broader in the chest, but he’s still thin with a flop of fair hair that droops fashionably into his blue eyes and makes him seem younger than twenty. “Try not to look so dour, Gemma. It’s not as if you’re being sent to the stocks. Spence is a very good school with a reputation for turning out charming young ladies.”
A very good school. Charming young ladies. It is, word for word, what my grandmother said after we’d spent two weeks at Pleasant House, her home in the English countryside. She’d taken a long, appraising look at me, with my freckled skin and unruly mane of red hair, my sullen face, and decided that a proper finishing school was what was needed if I was ever to make a decent marriage. “It’s a wonder you weren’t sent home years ago,” she clucked. “Everyone knows the climate in India isn’t good for the blood. I’m sure this is what your mother would want.”
I’d had to bite my tongue to keep from asking how she could possibly know what my mother would want. My mother had wanted me to stay in India. I had wanted to come to London, and now that I’m here, I couldn’t be more miserable.
For three hours, as the train made its way past green, hilly pastures, and the rain slapped wearily at the train’s windows, Tom had slept. But I could see only behind me, whence I’d come. The hot plains of India. The police asking questions: Had I seen anyone? Did my mother have enemies? What was I doing alone on the streets? And what about the man who’d spoken to her in the marketplace—a merchant named Amar? Did I know him? Were he and my mother (and here they looked embarrassed and shuffled their feet while finding a word that wouldn’t seem too indelicate) “acquainted”?
How could I tell them what I’d seen? I didn’t know whether to believe it myself.
Outside the train’s windows, England is still in bloom. But the jostling of the passenger car reminds me of the ship that carried us from India over rough seas. The coastline of England taking shape before me like a warning. My mother buried deep in the cold, unforgiving ground of England. My father staring glassy-eyed at the headstone—Virginia Doyle, beloved wife and mother—peering through it as if he could change what had happened through will alone. And when he couldn’t, he retired to his study and the laudanum bottle that had become his constant companion. Sometimes I’d find him, asleep in his chair, the dogs at his feet, the brown bottle close at hand, his breath strong and medicinally sweet. Once a large man, he’d grown thinner, whittled down by grief and opium. And I could only stand by, helpless and mute, the cause of it all. The keeper of a secret so terrible it made me afraid to speak, scared that it would pour out of me like kerosene, burning everyone.
“You’re brooding again,” Tom says, casting a suspicious look my way.
“Sorry.” Yes, I’m sorry, so sorry for everything.
Tom exhales long and hard, his voice traveling swiftly under the exhalation. “Don’t be sorry. Just stop.”
“Yes, sorry,” I say again without thinking. I touch the outline of my mother’s amulet. It hangs around my neck now, a remembrance of my mother and my guilt, hidden beneath the stiff black crepe mourning dress I will wear for six months.
Through the thinning haze outside our window, I can see porters hustling alongside the train, keeping pace, ready to place wooden steps beside the open doors for our descent to the platform. At last our train comes to a stop in a hiss and sigh of steam.
Tom stands and stretches. “Come on, then. Let’s go, before all the porters are taken.”
Victoria Station takes my breath away with its busyness. Hordes of people mill about the platform. Down at the far end of the train, the third-class passengers climb off in a thick tumble of arms and legs. Porters hurry to carry luggage and parcels for the first-class passengers. Newsboys hold the day’s papers in the air as far as their arms will stretch, screeching the most enticing headlines. Flower girls wander about, wearing smiles as hard and worn as the wooden trays that hang from their delicate necks. I’m nearly upended by a man buzzing past, his umbrella parked beneath his arm.
“Pardon me,” I mutter, deeply annoyed. He takes no note of me. When I glance to the far end of the platform, I catch sight of something odd. A black traveling cloak that sets my heart beating faster. My mouth goes dry. It’s impossible that he could be here. And yet, I’m sure it’s him disappearing behind a kiosk. I try to get closer, but it’s terribly crowded.
“What are you doing?” Tom asks as I strain against the tide of the crowd.