“Yes.” The tears spilled down her bony cheeks. “But it was all for you, for us. Why should I have told you I speak English? You would talk of your problems to Charles, and I solved them without your ever asking me to—I was your djinn, your secret granter of wishes. You used to need me. How can you think you don’t need me any longer?”
“We all of us need one another,” he said softly, but she was a rudderless ship close to capsizing.
“Sahjara and I were fine, we were all fine, until she came!” Garima Kaur may as well have been brandishing the knife, for her words slashed through the air between us. “So you didn’t seek me out any longer, banished me to the servants’ quarters, and never thought to visit—none of it mattered whilst I still had our sweet girl to tutor. But you took even that pittance and gave it to her, and never noticed I was fading away right in front of you.”
Mr. Singh raised his hands, seeming as contrite as he was appalled. “We shall set all this right. Do you hear me, Garima? Please—I am to blame, you are correct, but as to Augustus Sack’s coming here—how could you even consider bringing such a plague upon us when he had thought Karman’s treasure lost in the Punjab?”
“Because the only time you ever loved me was when I was fighting beside you!” she cried.
A ghastly silence fell. I took in her terrible scar, her posture like prey caught in an iron trap. I did not blame Mr. Singh for being celibate, nor for being stupid, because I am apparently remarkably dim-witted myself where Clarke is concerned. Imagining the eternal desert Garima Kaur had walked through all her life, however—next to the man she loved but never near him—repelled me on her behalf. I had chosen to leave Charles Thornfield, and she had locked herself in a prison with a view of paradise through the window.
Mr. Singh, meanwhile, seemed to have forgot his own mastery of our language—any language—regarding Garima Kaur as if he had never truly set eyes on her previous.
“There were five of them, and they came on us, thirsting for blood and spoils, and you’d no heart to take their wretched lives, but I was there, and so we lived,” she said brokenly. “We survived, Sardar, and for two terrible, magnificent minutes, I wasn’t invisible. And after it was over, after they’d marked me and my chances at marriage to anyone else had vanished, I disappeared again the same way my hopes did. So courteous you were, so distant—I may as well have been your shaving mirror.”
Had she whipped the blade from her skirts and slit his belly, I do not think Mr. Singh’s expression would have differed.
Then I did something entirely brainless, and thus set a number of dreadful events in motion. What I ought to have done was to bolt whilst her attention was fixed on the object of her affections; I ought to have sprinted to the main house shrieking for Charles Thornfield, and many ghastly consequences would have been avoided.
Unfortunately, I scarcely ever scream when I am meant to.
“I think we must—”
The instant I opened my lips to offer an unsolicited opinion, Garima Kaur bellowed in rage and swung her knife at my throat.
There was not enough time.
Had there been enough time, I could have evaded her; had there been enough time, Mr. Singh could have drawn a weapon. Had there been enough time, Garima Kaur would not have been almost unhampered in her decision to send me to hell.
I say almost unhampered.
Sardar Singh emitted a wordless sound of protest and leapt, using what I only then realised was a final recourse when lacking other shields, and blocked her blade with his metal cuff. The knife slid with a horrid scraping noise down the sheath and then soundlessly sliced off his right hand.
Garima Kaur emitted a despairing groan, dropped her weapon, and ran.
Mr. Singh roared in pain and fell to his knees; I whipped off my cloak, bundled it, and I buried the gushing stump within. The hand with its severed tendons and its white gleam of bone lay to my left, pointing in the direction whence its butcher had fled.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I— You saved my life.”
Mr. Singh’s lips were pressed so hard within his mouth that nothing save beard remained; he had not lost enough blood yet to faint, but the shock did battle with his consciousness nevertheless.
“Please, you’ll be all right. You have to be. Please.”
I think my uselessness roused him, for he ordered, “Help me to stand.”
Between the two of us, we managed, though I nearly toppled under his weight; the instant he was upright, he was striding for the main house with his good arm about my shoulders, I pressing the ball of my cloak against his stump.
“Can you make it?”
“I don’t know, but I needn’t,” he gasped. “Not if you fetch Charles to wherever I collapse.”
The journey, I am sure, took less than three minutes; if ever three minutes were drenched with horror enough for three lifetimes, it was those. We burst through the front door like marauders, interrupting Charles Thornfield as he came from his study into the hall, dropping several pieces of mail on the table.
“What in the name of the devil—” he began, and then paled. “Is this our Jane returned? Oh my God—Sardar, what has—”