Page 38 of A Thousand Painted Hours

I glared at him, my eyes filled with tears. I could not speak.

“Do you understand?” he repeated, steely, his eyes boring through my body.

“Yes,” I whispered, tears spilling down my face. “May I be excused?”

“Elsie,” my mother said.

But I fled.

An hour later, Mother came to my room. I was flung over the bed, exhausted from weeping, and she sank down beside me. “I know it seems terrible now,” she said in her soothing voice, “but you will come to see how well it works out in time. You’ll love England.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to.”

“I know.” She stroked my hair. “I was once fifteen, you know.” I heard her smile. “Things feel enormous, but that doesn’t mean that theyareenormous.”

“That helps ever so,” I said sarcastically. “Why don’t you just tell me I’m being a foolish child? That will ease my sorrow.”

“I knew you would be desperately upset, Elsie, but in truth, there is no place for you here. Your friends are royals and soon will take their own path, leaving you behind. What then? Will you marry some boorish INC officer? Some middling bureaucrat who wants you only because you’re pretty and will make him shine?”

“No! That sounds terrible.”

“What then? Here, in India? What?”

I plucked at a loose thread on my coverlet, taking a savage pleasure in the way it ruched the fabric. “I don’t know. Surely there is a way to study art? To make a life here without marrying some awful person?”

“Perhaps.” She took a breath. “I have allowed you a great deal of freedom, my dear. I was loath to constrain your mightiness.” She paused. “But I fear that was not in your best interest. For all that I wish it to be true, this world is not an easy place for women.” A glimmer of tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, and it pierced me as nothing else could have. “As a girl, you have some freedom, but as a woman, you must be strategic.”

I sat up. “That is not fair.”

“No,” she agreed. “It is not fair.”

Fresh tears welled in my eyes. “So how will it be any better in England? I only trade a boring officer for boring country Englishman. How is that better? At least here, I’d be in the landscape that I love.”

She looked away, as if considering her words, then back to my face. “If you stay here, your soul will be shredded by all that you want to be, and all that you are not.” She took my hand. “In England, you will have some modest standing, and therefore some measure of power. In England, I will have more ability to sway your father to what you wish, not what he wishes.”

I held her gaze, and felt a fool that I thought she had not noticed my liaison with Tanveer. I blushed, thinking that she imagined I wanted to be his wife, when I clearly knew I would not. But in some small partof me, had I not been thinking there was a way around the roadblock, the dire future he predicted, that she now also predicted? “I don’t want to be anyone’s wife,” I said, fiercely, leaving the truth unsaid:if I cannot be Tanveer’s wife.“I want to paint.”

“I know.” She smiled. “In England, perhaps you might study art. And in a few years’ time, perhaps you’ll be less opposed to marriage.”

I scowled. “I doubt it.”

“Hmm. Well, I daresay that between now and that possible day, you’ll learn much more about the ways of the world than you know now and perhaps will change your mind.”

Seeing that I would not escape my fate of leaving India, I closed my eyes, letting grief fill my being. “I can’t bear it,” I said.

Mother allowed me to collapse against her. “You can,” she said. “And you shall.”

—19—

Tanveer appeared at the door to the former playroom, now my studio, the next morning. He halted in the doorway, the sun behind him casting his figure into silhouette—and I could not even stand for the fresh grief that washed over me.

“Is it true?” he said. “You are going to England?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “In two months’ time.”

He sat beside me on the wide windowsill. “This is terrible news.”

I nodded, airless. It seemed impossible. “What will we do?”