I patted her awkwardly at first, then drew my fingers over glossy braids smelling of the almond oil she used to smooth out the tangles. Sahjara was demonstrative with everyone, adorably so, and it did not mean anything, I told myself; she probably expected a tyrant, but I recalled tyranny and preferred rebellion. Anyhow, I had neatly solved the problem of attention to her lessons by making each and every subject horse themed. She painted horses in watercolours, explored their anatomy, learnt geography specific to legendary cavalry marches, and translated French passages about horses, as she was doing now.
“We will be great friends, won’t we?” she mused as I shifted to correct her work.
“I hope so. Did you expect a shrivelled old crone with a cane and a pocket Bible?”
Sahjara shrugged against my calf. “Not precisely. I feared someone who would think me unnatural, though.”
This gave me pause, even as I marked an improper conjugation of avoir: she was almost exactly the age I had been when I left Highgate House, and Sahjara in five short days had already revealed her character; she was headstrong, impulsive, recklessly affectionate, and had gifted me with thirteen possessions of Mr. Thornfield’s to date. What did a murderess four times over care if Sahjara was browner skinned than I, forward in her speech, and was familiar with the housemaids? If surnames were to be taken as given, they could be her aunties for all I knew.
“Would you have seemed unnatural at home—or do you remember?”
“That’s a hard question,” Sahjara said slowly. “The Punjab comes out all jumbled when I try to remember. I see pictures without any story to them.”
“Do any of the pictures stand out?”
“The flap of the tent was ripped by a sword, and I was afraid of who would come through the gap, but it was Charles, and he carried me away and fed me. I was very hungry, I recall. And soon after, I was sent to England for safety’s sake. I was five.”
Well, there is a remarkable fragment indeed.
I pressed, “Did England improve matters?”
“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, before England, men had always been asking me questions. How was I faring, but also Where is it? and I hadn’t the faintest, you see, and so kept quiet. Keeping quiet made them very cross.”
“I can imagine.”
Where is it? is a very specific question. Had Sahjara been caught in the middle of the First Anglo-Sikh War and interrogated at so young an age as five? A startling surge of protectiveness coursed through me. I liked Sahjara and wanted her to erase the other little girl, the one who had wandered these halls suffocating on her aunt’s hatred.
“Look, I’ve scored eighty percent!”
“You have indeed. What were the men looking for?”
“A trunk,” said she, taking her translation and glaring at the errors. “It had my dolls in it. Though they couldn’t have wanted my dolls, so perhaps they thought something else was inside—there was a terrible row when it went missing, I know. I just wanted my dolls back, as I was only a chico.”
“Perfectly natural.”
“I was very upset over losing them.”
A trunk.
I swear upon my copy of Jane Eyre that my interest in Sahjara’s tale was based in both fascination and goodwill; I wanted to know more about her, and I badly wanted to know more about Mr. Charles Thornfield, who had callously flouted my poor pupil’s request and stayed away longer than a few days.
“What else do you remember?”
Her eyes grew unfocused, as if peering through fogged glass. “Our house in Lahore, its balcony. It smelled like livestock and incense in the streets, which were very busy with all the Afghani horse traders, and the merchants bargaining over oranges and goats, and the fortune-tellers at tables divining from maps of the stars. I remember huge walls with heavy guns, white mosques like turnips.” She charmingly screwed her face into a pucker. “It’s still an awful muddle. I don’t even know what the wars were for.”
Mindful of my role, I cudgelled my brains and drew embarrassing blanks. The Sikhs’ Khalsa army was by all accounts a ferocious one—sharp as a pistol crack, and just as keen to hack our East India Company to bits after the first war ended as they had been at the starting gate. Predictably, they had emerged thirsty for blood two years later, and countless British and Punjabi soldiers had blown one another’s pates off before the Sikh Empire went the way of the Roman one. I knew this meant outrageous riches for Her Majesty; when I opened my mouth to unmuddle the situation for my pupil, however, I found I knew nothing whatsoever else.
“Did Mr. Thornfield never recover your trunk?”
“No, though he tried.” Sahjara stretched upon the rug like a lean little cat. “It must be lost forever now.”
Voice quite composed, I said, “Sahjara, I know we’re strangers, and you needn’t speak of your parents, nor the past—but you may if you wish, all right?”
She stood, outlined now against the dimming December sunset, for we had not turned up the lamps. “Oh, were you curious over my parents? Charles says my father was a Company man and my mother a Sikh princess. It’s horrid but I can’t recall them. There was the sword through the tent flap, and the trunk went missing, and I had horses to tend to, I think—but I don’t recall much from the Punjab other than Charles.”
Sahjara fetched her warmest cloak from where she had thrown it two hours previous, her governess too slovenly a creature to have noticed.
“Give Dalbir my best,” I instructed.
“If Charles returns, send someone to fetch me?”