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Chapter Ten
The Tucker House
August 29, 1889
12:32 AM
It had been an exhausting day followed by an equally exhausting evening, but it seemed
that none among them could find sleep.
In her room, Emma rose and wandered fretfully over to the bookcase, selecting at
random a handful of books grouped together, all written by a woman named Flora Annie Steel.
Settling into the armchair and switching on – with great caution – the lamp on the nearby table, she
began to skim each in turn and soon saw that the admirable Mrs. Steel employed, one might say,
certain similarities in her plots.
The heroine was always an Englishwoman. Young, fair, virginal. Her counterpart was
always an Indian man. Dark, brooding, throbbing in unspecified places with vaguely described
passions. Few paragraphs were spent in explaining what forces might have pulled these two unlikely
lovers together. What was it Mrs. Tucker had said earlier that day? Something along the lines of how
Emma must be careful because native men always craved white women. Apparently among the Raj
this assumption was too embedded to require analysis. As Emma flipped through the books she could
see that Mrs. Steel had envisioned a world in which Indian men were constantly seizing British girls -
kidnappings which always seemed to stop just short of rape, for any number of events, from sudden
thunderstorms to the arrival of cavalries, conveniently colluded to protect the virtue of Mrs. Steel’s
heroines.
Emma frowned and slid down in the chair, pulling the last book closer to her face. It
didn’t seem to her that a cloudburst, no matter how poetically described, would be enough to deter a
true rapist, but by the end of each book it was further revealed that the man once thought to be Indian
was truly English. He had been somehow abducted from away from his true family in infancy and
raised among the natives and then someone or something – perhaps that persistent rainstorm? – would
wash off the dust and reveal that his skin was white. Problem solved. The unsuitable man is proven
suitable after all. The potential rapist becomes the perfect husband and thus our story ends.
It was an absurdity, Emma thought, tossing the last book aside. An abomination.
Although, when one stopped to really think of it, reading these books was a bit like finding the boy
who stirred the ceiling fan. The eccentricities of the Raj all seemed horrid at first but were they really
any different than the sort of things which went on every day in London? In romances by British
authors, a young woman might be seduced by a stable hand only to learn that he was, in fact, truly the
lord of the manor. Forced to take on a disguise for some improbable reason or stolen from his crib
twenty years earlier by gypsies.
Emma looked up. The great fan, which she had learned was called a punkah, was still at
night, which was a relief. At least no small boy was forced to spend the night crouched in the
courtyard. Besides, the air was much cooler in the evening, just as everyone had promised it would
be, and almost absurdly fragrant. She rose from her chair and walked over to the door, pushed it
open, and walked outside, through the garden, feeling the breeze against her naked arms and ankles.
Other lamps were on in other rooms. Geraldine’s certainly, and then a row of lights from the
windows on the other side of the garden, representing, she supposed, the rooms of three of her