Jane Coverdale - The Jasmine Wife

When it came her turn to speak she hesitated, caught between a desire to make a run for the open door of the church and a yearning to cling to the man who offered her a lifeline to a new world.

She glanced around in a frantic effort to find an answer, but saw instead the face of her aunt, alarmingly pale, though smiling bravely, and her uncle, nodding furiously at her with a tight grimace on his lips, clearly willing her to get it over with.

She must have responded, as the final words, “I now pronounce you man and wife”, were uttered at last, but Sara, at the threshold of what she felt every young woman must desire, instead of feeling the expected rush of joy, felt an overwhelming sense of doom.

Then, as she turned to walk down the aisle towards her new life, her aunt seemed to haul herself to her feet as she reached out to the new bride for a congratulatory kiss, swayed a little, then, grasping the folds of Sara’s gown in her fingers, fell in a crumpled unconscious heap at the feet of the bride and groom, clutching a torn piece of silk from the wedding veil.

The illness was serious, and inevitably fatal. When her aunt begged her to stay to help nurse her it seemed unfeeling to do otherwise and, even though she expected Charles to protest, he was remarkably accepting about the prospect of travelling to India without his bride.

“In some ways it’s a good thing,” he said as he tried to reassure her.

“My house is a mere bachelor’s hut and this small delay will give me a chance to find you something more suitable, and you can brush up on your Hindi. Tamil will be beyond you, I feel. But Hindi will come in very useful in dealing with the servants. Also—” he gave her a furtive glance “—my position demands my wife be well dressed. Lady Palmer entertains on a regular basis and you’ll be expected, as my wife, to make a bit of a splash.”

“Oh …” Sara blushed as she looked down at what was meant to be her going away outfit, an ill-fitting mustard-coloured dress which did nothing for her complexion, adorned with oversized leg-of-mutton sleeves too tight under the armpits.

All her clothes had been made by her aunt’s dressmaker, a lady who specialised in a style that had died out in Paris at least twenty years before, despite still flourishing amongst the vicars’ wives and spinsters of Hampstead, and any suggestion that poor Miss Blunt might be exchanged for someone more modern was quickly suppressed.

Though her fears about the suitability of her clothes seemed trivial compared with the cruel reality that Charles would be leaving her any moment, her husband but not a husband, not till they spent a night together under the same roof.

In an agony of misery she threw her arms around his neck, unwilling to let him go. There was no question of his staying; he’d extended his leave already and was anxious to return to his duties.

He reached up to remove her arms from his neck, gave her a final brief kiss, then hurried away without looking back, while she flung herself down on the settee and cried as though her heart would break. To be so close to freedom, then to have it taken away, was almost more than she could bear.

Later, when her tears were exhausted and she felt nothing but an empty despair, she’d climbed wearily to her feet and made her way upstairs to the sick room.

The shoreline moved closer still, and the mirage formed into a blinding reality. They would be there soon. Sara pulled a mirror out of her bag and examined the clear light topaz eyes squinting back at her. They appeared unimpressive in that harsh white glare, but she knew they would be lovely again once she was in a softer light. Her eyes were the only feature on her face she wouldn’t change, and the rest of it she found more acceptable now, with the miraculous clearing of her skin and an equally miraculous dramatic weight loss.

The first small signs of improvement had come soon after the marriage ceremony. She had lost at least fifteen pounds in only two months, forcing her to buy a completely new wardrobe, and her doctor pronounced her excess weight and her skin condition as being based in nervous tension, hinting it was not unusual for single women to improve in looks with the marriage state.

She didn’t tell him that, even though she was a wife, she was still technically a virgin, and perhaps the real reason for the improvement was she was no longer made to feel ashamed whenever the subject of marriage was mentioned.

After being at sea for eight weeks, including a further month spent in the Canary Isles due to having to mend a split mast, where she’d gorged herself on fresh fruit and vegetables, the almost constant faint rash around her nose had miraculously disappeared. Then the fine red bumps on her cheeks and forehead had faded completely, revealing a surface with the fresh even tone of rich cream.

Her true beauty however, lay in her bone structure, a beauty that would last long beyond the freshness of youth. Without the excess weight, her face became more refined, making her eyes appear much larger. Her posture had always been good, and her straight back and long neck gave her elegance, far from the clumsy girl of her youth.

Though it was the new shape of her once heavy eyebrows that gave her the most pleasure. Never could she have imagined such a small change could have produced so dramatic an improvement to her face. The mysterious ritual of threading, performed by an Arab woman in a tent in a Canary Isles market, had turned her shaggy brows into a blackbird’s wings, giving her face a striking new beauty. Now she secretly plucked them to keep their shape, knowing her aunt would be horrified had she known, believing a lady must learn to live with her imperfections, and any thought of artifice was vulgar in the extreme.

Sara had no such feelings as she smiled at her reflection and smoothed her skin with a cautious finger. She hoped fervently the hated rash had been banished forever, though; it seemed the further she travelled from England, the healthier and lovelier she became.

Her much improved looks were a novelty still, and sometimes she found herself studying her face in the mirror for longer than necessary.

Though, as time wore on, she trained herself not to think too much about her new-found charms, but secretly enjoyed the long slow looks men gave her as she passed them on her walks around the deck of the ship.

She snapped the mirror shut and slipped it back into her bag. While she’d been dreaming, the shoreline had drifted closer still. The clear blue waters had changed to a dirty yellow, and the once vague outline of the distant bank had turned into buildings set amongst tall waving palms and enormous trees spreading their branches along the baking paths like engorged pythons.

Some of the structures were prosperous and ornate, more bizarre, romanticised reflections of their respectable English cousins, while others, mere piles of other people’s cast-off rubbish and the fallen branches of coconut palms, were turned into little caves to huddle under for a moment’s respite from the merciless sun and the endless mass of humanity.

Towering over even the grand buildings of the British were the temples, shimmering through the damp heat, many storeys high, barbaric and mysterious, intricately carved with unlikely gods and decorated with gaudy impossible colours and gold leaf. There were dozens of them, punctuating the tropical landscape every few hundred yards and soaring towards the heavens like the wild and fantastic imaginings of a dream, monumental and overwhelming.

Remembered snatches of whispered stories of ancient and primitive rituals carried out in the dark recesses of the temples crept back into her mind, making her shiver: stories too horrible to be spoken of out loud, used as a weapon by the servants when she was naughty, to frighten her into good behaviour.