Under the Jeweled Sky (29 page)

“Do you ever wonder what's going to happen to your baby?”

“It's easier to find homes for the boys. Everybody wants boys. It's the girls that get left behind. The orphanages are full of them.”

“That's so unfair.”

“It's the way it is. It's bad enough if you have a girl when you're married, then you're stuck with it, but nobody's going to want to take one on unless they have to.”

“Why not?”

“Something to do with dowries.”

“I thought they'd done away with all that.”

“Who? The government? And since when did anybody here take any notice of anything the government says?”

“I suppose so.”

“I'm not going back to my parents after this,” said Rumpel. “And there's nothing they can do to make me.”

“You can't do that,” Lotus said.

“Yes, I can. I'm old enough to look after myself.”

“But where will you go?”

“My sister is coming to get me.” The other girls looked at each other. “She's five years older than me. She ran away from home when she was seventeen. My parents never heard from her again.” Rumpel gave a satisfied smile. “I know where she is. She's working as an import clerk in a big shipping firm in Cochin. We're going to get on a boat and go away together.” The girls became quiet. Everybody knew that her father did it.

Sophie closed her eyes and began to dream, blackness closing in around her. Quiet, so quiet. Quiet as a mouse hidden deep in the cupboard under the stairs in the house in Islington, cozy within the coats that hung there, wrapped in the heavy oilskin of her father's waxed cape, the one he wore whenever he was called out in the middle of a harsh night, rushing out into the downpour. She could smell him, sleep drifting in. Then, hours later, the door slowly opening, a shaft of light sliding in to find her.

She blinked against the brightness to see her father kneeling down and reaching out to her. He didn't say anything, just offered small soothing sounds as he coaxed her out. Then being lifted and held strongly against a shoulder as he carried her into the kitchen, sitting her on the edge of the table as he took a washcloth and rinsed it in a basin of warm water. He began to clean her up, her face first, gently wiping away the dried blood, the cloth gradually becoming red in his hands. With his back turned to her as he rinsed it out, the water pink, she stole a glance at her reflection in the mirror of the old dresser that stood by the wall. But the face that looked back at her couldn't be hers, just a strangely disfigured child, its hair darkened and matted with blood.

People like to think that children forget, that they make unreliable witnesses in matters of history. But they don't forget. They remember everything. Instinctively Sophie's hands went to her belly, resting protectively over the soft mound.

Leaving the palace had been one of the easiest decisions of Dr. Schofield's life. The newspapers were full of it, the rioting and mindless violence, the attacks and reprisals, the rapes and slaughter. He didn't even think about it once he knew Veronica was gone. She wouldn't be back, and he was glad of it. In that moment, everything had changed, and the last thing he had needed was to stay at the palace, pandering to a spoiled maharani who knew nothing of real suffering. That was not why he had become a doctor. He had failed his own principles by taking the easy option, as though he had earned the right to a leisurely life simply by doing his duty for a few years. He had forgotten who he was and why he had been put here. He wouldn't stay. It would be unconscionable. They needed every doctor they could get.

Dr. Pretti was attached to the women's clinic, serving under India's commission for recovered persons. Her role was to attend to the missing girls who had been rescued and brought back to the camp, many of whom had been savagely attacked. It was difficult work, to bear witness every day to the brutalities they had suffered, knowing that she was gradually becoming desensitized to the distressing nature of the sights that had initially caused her heart to freeze. Why must men do these things? What hope was there of nurturing a civilized nation when a woman's life and honor counted for so little? She sat with Dr. Schofield in the mess tent set up beside the clinic enclosure. It was the only place they could get away for a while, the doctors and nurses, the orderlies and volunteers, to take a desperately needed cup of tea and a biscuit, hidden from view so that they might be able to eat and drink or rest awhile without feeling wretchedly guilty.

“There was a girl in the next village who ran away,” Dr. Pretti said. “She was a very good girl, but she was in love with a Moslem. They had been in love since childhood. Of course, the families would never have agreed to it, so she ran away from the convoy to join him, claiming to be his wife. Later she was captured and taken to the border camp to join her family, but she ran away again. It is very difficult to deal with girls like that. Eventually I told her that we would not hold her name on our records. I told her, ‘Just go and don't tell anyone about it.' What else was to be done? Otherwise she would have been kept here against her will. Some parents will not come to collect these girls; they simply deny having a daughter of that name. We end up sending most of them to the girls' home in Ludhiana. It's an awful place. Many of the girls there are exploited. Their parents should be ashamed of themselves, leaving their daughters like that to be molested by
goondas
.” She noticed Dr. Schofield's lost expression. “Professional looters.
Badmash
, bad people.”

“What is being done about reuniting lost children with their families?”

“It's hopeless,” she said. “You ask them what their name is and they say Qasib or Sanjay. So you try asking what is their mother's name, and they will say Amma, Amma, because of course they don't know what their parents' names are. There are so many children, crying Amma or Abba, with no names for us to go on and no one coming to claim them. Who is to know who they are or where they have come from? And how can we possibly trace their parents? They could be anywhere. Or dead. Most will be adopted, we hope, or otherwise sent to an orphanage, or left to fend for themselves.” Dr. Schofield drank from his tin mug and felt useless. “There is a lot of bad feeling. The Sikhs and Hindus left a great deal of property over the border which has now been taken over. They feel cheated. When they do finally get out of the camp to be resettled, they will only be given a modest piece of land, or allocated a small house, and perhaps given a government loan to help them get back on their feet. Some have arrived here with absolutely nothing, their valuables looted along the way, their possessions dragged from their hands.” She tutted her defeat. “There is nothing we can do to help them except to give them shelter, food, and blankets while they wait. I think it will take years to clear the camps. Progress is so slow and most of the helpers are volunteers. They have set up community kitchens along the main routes to feed the refugees, and people have been very generous, donating food and clothes and bedding. Whatever they can give, they give, but sometimes I think that it is an impossible task.”

Dr. Schofield could not disagree, and nodded his head sagely. “I should have come sooner,” he said.

“Housing is gradually being allocated in Amritsar and the surrounding villages from the properties left behind,” said Dr. Pretti. “But the
badmash
are at work, of course. Some greedy people already living on this side are claiming empty houses and moving family members into them. Refugees lucky enough to have been met at the border by their relatives have been taken in and will probably be allocated housing much more quickly than the ones left here.”

“What will become of them all?”

“There are endless lists being compiled, and as we process the people, they will be allotted properties or given land settlements. No doubt money will change hands. It always does. Some have their jewelry still.” She looked at him. “Anyone who managed to arrive with money or valuables will have a better chance of securing a decent property deal. Houses, land, business premises, and shops. The lists go on and on. Have you finished your tea?”

“Yes.” Dr. Schofield drained his mug quickly and set it down.

“Ready to go back in?”

“Ready when you are,” he said and stood up.

As he walked back into the medical tent, he made sure not to look around, focusing instead on the next person in the queue, thinking only of what he could do for that patient in the here and now. To lift his head and look up would only fill him with a sense of defeat before he had even started. It was a miracle that anyone ever got seen.

The field hospitals he had worked in during the war had been a different matter. They were much better organized, everyone knowing what to expect and what was expected of them. The whole thing had operated like a well-oiled machine, whether stuck in the middle of nowhere or caught in the midst of heavy shelling, the lights flickering on and off or knocked out completely. The adrenalin had kept them going, pumping through their veins. Work fast, work well, remember that this man has a family somewhere. He'd had letters from some of his patients after the war, soldiers and airmen who had taken the trouble to track him down and send word of their fates, sometimes with a photograph enclosed, a picture of them standing with a smiling bride or a newborn baby.

He had treasured those letters. They had reminded him of what it felt like to be needed, maybe even cared about a little by somebody far away. They always said that they hoped he was doing well and enjoying life on Civvy Street. He would smile to himself, taking pleasure at the sight of their happiness, the joy of life having been restored to them when death had been so close by. He remembered the field hospitals, where they had found moments here and there to open a bottle of whisky and sing drunken songs, arms slung around each other's shoulders while the sapper with the big smile coaxed a few tunes from the broken-down piano they'd dragged in from the abandoned school on the hill. He had felt differently then. He had felt like a man.

His first glimpse of the refugee camp had knocked the wind from him. He had been told what to expect, certainly, but he would never have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes. A full seven months had passed since the night of Partition, yet still they came in droves, people in their thousands, exhausted, half dead on their feet. He had thought that he had fortified himself, mentally at least, having read the newspaper reports and seen the newsreels, but nothing could have prepared him for this. Why had nobody planned for it? What kind of leaders would have plunged so many into utter destitution? It was incomprehensible to him, that anyone could have thought that this was a workable idea. The dead were uncountable, to say nothing of the sick and injured. Had the new dominions descended into out-and-out civil war, he doubted the results could have been any worse.

He had already seen Amritsar. It looked like a bombarded city, battered by riots and arson. Bodies lay strewn in the streets, stiff and bloodied, grotesquely posed in states of rigor mortis, blood everywhere, houses burning, women and children crying. The larger camps, some sprawling for miles, seemed futile, the logistical problems colossal. The inmates of the ones he had passed through on the way narrated innumerable tales of woe, all of them subdued by the same sense of grimness and despair.

Thousands had been murdered, injured, or maimed for life. Masses of non-Moslems streamed out of the towns and villages in one-time India that had now become hostile country. The stamp of terror on their faces was always the same as they clamored to cross the border from Pakistan to the safety of India. Frenzied acts of destruction were commonplace, and those who escaped the mob fury arrived in the refugee camps filled with tales of looting, murder, and rape. Villages had been surrounded by enraged hordes who killed all the men, burned their homes, and took away the women and livestock. Every day, another line of desperate people would come to the military office in the Indian cantonment, imploring the major general to locate their kidnapped womenfolk.

The few British officers who remained under his command were sent to carry out the duty, as no non-Moslem Indian would be permitted to cross the border, uniformed or not, just as those of the Baluch regiment were not allowed to come back to India. The detail would travel far into Pakistan, some as far as Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, and Peshawar, searching out girls and bringing them back hundreds of miles to their families. The British would liberate all they could find, whether they were named on their list or not, sometimes having to tear them away from their captors. The British officers found their violent reluctance perplexing, until such time as the girls were brought back to the Indian camps. Those parents who had listed their daughters as missing would be overcome with joy and near hysterical at the reunion, whereas those girls who had not been sent for by name would be faced with families who refused to take them back, their purity lost, their presence bringing untold shame upon them. The major general, a proud, thickset Sikh, accused those parents of cowardice for throwing their daughters to the
goondas
while escaping themselves. Many of his
jawans
came forward and offered themselves honorably, volunteering to marry those girls who had been denied by their families.

Dr. Schofield sat quietly with a cigarette, looking up at the stars, thinking about his daughter. He pulled the blanket closer around his shoulders. The nights were still cold here, winter not quite over, clinging on for these last remnants of March. It would be warmer where Sophie was, way over in the east and further south; summer would have broken already. She would be heavy with child by now, in her seventh month, and he tried not to think of it. Oh, how he missed her. Away from his day's toil, he found himself worrying about her again, as he did whenever his mind was idle. He worried for her constantly, for the act of childbirth and what it had done to his wife, for the aftermath, and perhaps most of all, he worried about how it would be when he saw her again. It would not be long now.

It was good that he was here, working himself hard so that he might be spared the agony of an unoccupied mind. He would stay a little longer, a few weeks perhaps, before packing up and hauling out. The distance down to Ooty was practically the whole length of the country, and he must see to it that everything was ready before fetching her back to him. There would also be the business of telling her about her mother, although he worried about this less, having reasoned that she, like him, would probably feel nothing more than a sense of relief after the initial shock of it. Dr. Schofield had had a great deal of time to think over the past few months, to reflect upon all that had come to pass, to consider his future, and his daughter's. It was just as well that he and Sophie were not permitted to correspond. Miss Pinto had been quite clear about that. It was better that the girls at St. Bride's remained closed off from the rest of the world. News from the outside invariably caused upset and tears, and the girls were not permitted to send letters. They only ever led to trouble. Dr. Schofield would just have to wait, and hope, and do his best to help her to get over this terrible thing. He would devote himself to her once they were reunited, and to hell with everyone and everything else. They would go south, as far away from this trouble as they could go, to the peace and tranquility of the Nilgiri Hills.

Fiona Ripperton had written a week ago to say that there was a lovely house available with wonderful views at a reasonable rent, and that if he was happy for her to do so, she would go ahead and make the necessary arrangements to secure it for him. She and Rip had summered in Ooty many times, and they remained on amiable terms with their seasonal neighbors, exchanging cards at Christmas time, promising to meet up at the Ooty Club next time they were there. Dr. Schofield had written back to thank her and had gratefully taken up her offer to travel down herself after Easter, to see that everything was in order and make sure they were not being hoodwinked into leasing a hound.

She had said (and Dr. Schofield suspected that it was not true) that she was planning on going anyway and that she would be quite delighted to have an excuse to get out of the mausoleum and start the season early. What a pillar of support that woman had been, never once asking a probing question nor venturing an opinion about the sudden dissection and scattering of his family. Dr. Schofield had even considered telling her the truth of it, if only to share the awful burden, before dismissing the thought. It was not his tale to tell.

He thought about Sophie all the time. He couldn't help himself, the same tangle of wishes and regrets running over and over in his mind, the things he should have done and said, the blind eye he had turned too often, wittingly or unwittingly. No family was perfect. That was what he had told himself. No marriage was what a man thought it would be, his hopes and dreams nothing more than a naïve fantasy of youth and inexperience. Until death do us part, they had promised, yet the death had come so soon, the death of all hopes and dreams. He should have left her years ago, the wife he had chosen so hastily.

The bracing December wedding had heralded the first of many disappointments. They moved into the house in Islington, where his parents lived a quiet life in too many rooms since his mother began to crumble beneath the disease that had crept in without warning and refused to leave.

A sweet-natured woman with an infectious laugh, Isadora Schofield would not be too long in this world, and his father had worn the burden of it heavily, sitting up for hours long into the night, staring into the fire, a glass of whisky in his hand as though waiting for her executioner. Not once had George heard an unkind word pass between his parents. To his mother, his father was the moon and stars. To his father, she was the source of all the good in his world. It was not right that she had been made to suffer this affliction, that pain should be her constant, unrelenting companion. No merciful God would visit this upon a woman so kind and selfless. That was what his father had said, renouncing the Church, renouncing any God who would treat his dear wife in this way. “You can keep your God,” he said to those friends and neighbors who asked why he no longer went to church, looking upon them as though they were fools. “And if you want to go and worship an invisible being who dare not show himself for the misery he has caused, then go ahead. Don't you see? There
is
no God.”

It was only a matter of time before Veronica's presence became intolerable to George's father. Almost from the moment they moved in, the friction had been palpable. There were even times when George wondered if she didn't do it deliberately, her incessant references to the Bible, her insistence upon praying over her food with head bowed while they waited on her, his father's fists clenched in anger. George had tried to speak to her about it, had tried to explain that his father was not himself since his mother's decline, but Veronica would not hear of it and said that he was a godless man and that that was why he was being punished through the suffering of his wife. George remembered it so clearly, the way they had been standing there in the bedroom as her words hit him like cold water, the expression on her face almost triumphant, and he had known, at that very moment, that he had made a terrible mistake.

Isadora Schofield died peacefully in her bed that summer, on a Sunday morning while the church bells were ringing. Veronica said that it was God's way of calling her to him. There was no funeral service to speak of, just a brief civil affair without ceremony before the cremation. George's father took her ashes to France, to the small town on the Riviera they had honeymooned at and dreamed of moving to one day, and scattered her remains in the rose garden of the hotel at sunset before ordering six bottles of their most expensive champagne and inviting every guest to drink a toast to his wife, the most beautiful woman in the world. His body was found the next day, washed up on the beach at Juan-les-Pins.

How rare their love had been, George thought, and how foolish of him to have thought that he might be lucky enough to find the same.

He took a last drag of his cigarette, flicking the butt to the ground. He hadn't smoked in years. Veronica had hated the smell of cigarettes, so that was another thing that he had given up, along with his penchant for taking a couple of pints at the local pub on occasion. Just one or two, never more, in the company of a few honest-to-goodness hard-working men. The conversation would always turn to the war. It was unavoidable really. There was nobody to listen at home, nobody who would appreciate what it had meant, so they kept those stories for themselves, man to man, and everyone understood. They were bereft, some of them, returning home to find the world a changed place and unsure of where they fitted in. Their lives were their own again, but many of them didn't know what to do with it. There was nobody to tell them where to sleep and what to eat and when to stand at ease. They missed the bark of orders, the shared hardship, the camaraderie.

All George Schofield had ever really wanted was a wife to love, who would love him too. With that, everything else would have fallen into place. Veronica had never loved him. He knew that now, yet it had never crossed his mind to put an end to it. They had promised themselves, for better or for worse, a vow from which there could be no return for an honorable, if misguided, man. He should have taken his daughter and walked away, no matter how impossible it might have been, but what would have become of Sophie then? And even if he had attempted such a thing, what trouble would it have unleashed? These were the things he thought of now, out in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the camp, the bitter smell of fires lacing through the still night air. He lit another cigarette and shook out the match, drawing the smoke deeply into his lungs, picking a thread of tobacco from his lower lip. His fingers wandered to the mustache he now wore, touching it absentmindedly, comforted by the way it felt, the sensation of the short bristles suddenly giving way to the softness of clean-shaven skin. He must be getting old, he thought, the whiskers having come through peppered heavily with gray. He hoped Sophie would like it. If she didn't, he would take it off, but in the intervening weeks, he would keep it and enjoy it, simply because he was free to do so, at last.

Dr. Schofield finished his cigarette. He stood from the camp chair and stretched, long and slow. Perhaps he should turn in for the night. He would write to Fiona in the morning. He was too tired to think about it now. With any luck, his sleep would be dreamless.