Page 97 of A Modest Independence

“I was not, Miss Holloway. But I’ve read all about it in the papers. The city was devastated. One wouldn’t know to look at it.”

“No indeed, madam,” Mr. Walters said. He was a quiet gentleman. A missionary, Tom suspected. He’d seen him reading the Bible on occasion. “The burned houses have been rebuilt and new roads have been laid. The resiliency of the native residents is really quite something to behold.”

“Everyone has been very friendly toward us,” Jenny said. “Ever since we arrived in Calcutta.”

Mr. Walters smiled. “That is because you’re very friendly toward them, Miss Holloway. Anyone who treats the Indians with kindness and respect will find them a welcoming people. That has been my own experience.”

Mrs. Goodwin’s son narrowed his eyes. “How then does one account for the atrocities committed by them during the mutiny?”

“In the same manner one accounts for the atrocities committed by us.” Mr. Walters resumed eating his rice. “We have not come out of the mutiny with clean hands, sir. In many cases, it would be as fitting for us to ask forgiveness as to extend it.”

“Do you mean to compare the slaughter and cruelty that they—”

“I say, sir,” an older gentleman at the end of the table interjected in a booming voice. “My lady wife is present. I’ll thank you to turn the subject to one fit for females.”

Tom exchanged a glance with Jenny. She smiled at him. One of her private smiles, a faint upward tilt of her lips and a glint in her sea-colored eyes. A smile reserved only for him. It never failed to make his heart beat faster, even now, surrounded by strangers in the sweltering heat.

“A subject fit for females,” she murmured to him as they left the dining room. “How dreadfully dull.”

His mouth quirked. “Don’t you enjoy discussing the weather?”

“Hardly. How many ways can one express an opinion on the heat?”

Tom walked Jenny to the door of her room. “You have time for a nap before dinner.”

“I don’t think I’ll sleep.” She brushed her skirts. “What I need is a bath. I’ve never encountered so much dirt and grime in my life.”

“Order one, by all means. We’ve plenty of time.”

After settling into his room next door to Jenny’s, Tom took his own advice. Four servants clad in loincloths carried up the large copper tub and filled it with cans of hot water. When they’d gone, Tom stripped out of his dusty clothes and gratefully climbed in.

As a boy, baths had been few and far between, and hot baths even fewer and farther. He’d never forgotten the deprivations of his youth. All these years later, a hot bath was still a luxury to him.

His head came to rest on the rolled back of the tub, his eyes falling shut as the warmth and heat worked on his tired muscles. He imagined Jenny enjoying the same pleasure, her slim, shapely limbs relaxed and pliant beneath the steaming water, suds of Marseilles soap clinging to her skin.

Would she wash her hair? Or would she leave it pinned up in its carefully plaited sections?

He tried not to think of it. It wasn’t right or proper—certainly not while he was in the bath.

But it was impossible not to think of it. Not to think of her.

Sometime later, as the sun was lowering over the horizon, Tom emerged from his room freshly washed, shaven, and in a slightly better frame of mind. He made his way downstairs to the lobby. He’d seen Ahmad from his window, standing on the street, smoking a cheroot as he talked with an Indian gentleman in a turban.

Outside the hotel there was no sign of Ahmad. Instead, Tom saw Jenny.

And an elephant.

It was an enormous creature, gray and whiskery, with a thin tasseled tail and fringed ears that twitched as Jenny stroked its shoulder. Beside the elephant stood its keeper, a rather grand-looking Sikh fellow garbed in dramatic white and scarlet.

“She belongs to the rajah.” Mr. Walters was seated beneath the veranda at the front of the hotel, a small sketchbook open on his lap. The pencil in his hand moved in short strokes over the page. “He often lends her to honored guests for transport from the railway station.”

Tom stopped beside him, trying to keep his mouth from falling open.

“Have you never seen an elephant, Mr. Finchley?”

“Once or twice in a menagerie, but never like this.”

Jenny laughed as the elephant touched her with its trunk. Her face glowed with pleasure, her plaited auburn hair radiant in the sun.