“He doesn’t sit with the servants at meals,” I insisted. “He doesn’t count the silver or manage your wine collection or berate the rest of the staff. I should venture to say that his only jobs are answering the door and locking the windows of a night, and those because he likes the control.”
Mr. Thornfield frowned. “Are you an inspector, Miss Stone? I shall have to look out over pinching extra kippers at breakfast and telling Sahjara lies about not being able to afford two mares for her instead of one.”
“That was a very neat way of not answering my question.”
“Oh, what’s the use—you’ve found us out.” Mr. Thornfield smiled, and this was an effortless one. “You know that Sardar and I were practically brothers growing up. The rest of the household, other than Sahjara of course, were his own servants in Lahore—we brought them with us, as he’d no wish to sack ’em all and they’d no wish to see the back of him. The man inspires affections left, right, and sideways—it’s a foul thing to watch.”
“So Mr. Singh is not a butler?” I pressed.
“Of course he is, supposing you want to keep meddling English busybodies out of our hair. But, no, you’re quite right—when Sardar vanishes, he is either studying the Guru, taking long constitutionals, or fiddling with Jas Kaur over replicating Punjabi dishes in the kitchen.”
I chuckled over my glass. “So though this is your estate, an argument can be made he is the master, since the servants are his domestics and not yours.”
“We couldn’t very well have made off with my parents’ household, could we, would’ve strained relations something frightful. You’re near to correct, but one of them—Mrs. Garima Kaur—was Sardar’s confidential secretary back in Lahore.”
This surprised me. “I thought she knew very little English?”
“Spoken like a true colonialist—didn’t matter a fig back then, there were only a pocketful of us. She probably figured it beneath her, never did warm to whites much, come to think of it. She speaks Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, and Pashto something spectacular, and that’s all Sardar required.”
“And now she’s a housekeeper.”
“Well, what with Sardar a butler and all, she can’t be too miffed.”
Smiling, I leant my head against the cushion of my chair. “Tell me more.”
“More of what, you impudent elf?”
“Anything. Everything. Your parents survived the wars, I take it, since they still needed a staff? And why did you leave them in the first place—why study medicine?”
“Miss Stone,” he drawled, “if I did not know better, I would think I intrigued you.”
“You do intrigue me.”
I said this without a trace of guile. A British chap might have been chagrined over such an open display, but Mr. Thornfield only settled farther back into his armchair.
“Do you know, Miss Stone, that you are exceptional?”
“I have been told so, but never in complimentary light.”
Mr. Thornfield’s jaw twitched. “That was undeserved on your part, and therefore I will answer you. My parents are still in Lahore, and survived both wars without so much as a scratch. I should be proud of them if it were the done thing to be proud of privateers bleeding Company executives dry; I ought to be delighted, in fact, as it all comes to me in the end and now they have ten times the population of expatriates to drain to the dregs. Pardon, you might mistake me; I cherish my parents, but they are not suitable subjects for small talk.”
“Neither are we.”
This time he laughed freely. “Quite right, Miss Stone—if misfits cannot converse amongst themselves, then who can? Very well, my parents are brazen criminals and I elected to study medicine because I have always been fascinated by the impermanence of the human body. Does that answer your question?”
I shook my head, waiting for him to continue.
“Becoming a charlatan and a cheat never appealed to me,” Mr. Thornfield admitted. “My parents are crafty rather than malicious, but damned if I share their tastes—medicine meant studying mortality, in a sense. The Sikh holy book contains plentiful passages about flesh, and since my parents were about as interested in religion as they were in sobriety, I learnt from Sardar and his family. ‘We are vessels of flesh. . . . The soul taketh its abode in flesh. . . . Women, men, kings, and emperors spring from flesh.’ Sikhs are very—how shall I put it delicately?—straightforward about flesh. It was a comfort to me that they thought souls separate from lungs and livers, this sack of bones and blood we daily maintain, and I thought there was romance in medicine’s efforts to stave off the inevitable. This was when I was young and thick as a marble bust, you understand,” he added with a dour expression.
“I adore the macabre,” I confessed. “I used to supplement my governess’s income by selling last confessions in tea shops and the like.”
“Good Lord! Miss Stone, I find it difficult to picture you peddling gallows doggerel.”
“No more should you, sir, for it was prose, and I always chose the most poignant subjects, as if by placing hard words upon a page, like so many stones, my own heart would not be so heavy.”