Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

‘Are you sure, Mrs Burnham?’ said Zachary. ‘There’ll be no turning back, you know.’

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

‘Very well then.’

A peal of thunder sounded nearby and Zachary waited for the sound to rumble through the room.

‘Mrs Burnham — I hope you will not regret hearing this, but here it is. One night, soon after she ran away from your house, Paulette arranged to meet with me. She told me that she did not want ever to return to Bethel and begged me to get her a passage to Mauritius, on the Ibis . I asked why she was so desperate to go, and she told me she wanted to escape from Calcutta, at all costs, because she was afraid of …’

‘Mr Burnham?’

‘Yes. So I asked her if anything had happened between herself and your husband and she answered by telling me a strange story.’

‘Please go on. I am listening.’

‘She said that while she was here Mr Burnham would often call her into his study, to give her scriptural lessons in private.’

‘Go on, Mr Reid.’

‘She said that as the lessons progressed Mr Burnham had asked her to do … certain things.’ ‘What things?’

‘Well, I may as well say it: what he wanted was a larruping — I guess he likes the feel of a girl’s hand on his rump. Don’t understand it myself, but there’re all sorts in this world.’

‘Did she do it?’

Zachary nodded. ‘She agreed because he had been kind to her and she did not wish to appear ungrateful. But one day she realized that what she was doing was very dangerous so she decided to run away.’

‘Please be honest with me, Mr Reid — did she run away because she had been seduced? Violated?’

‘It seems almost certain to me now that she was,’ said Zachary, ‘but she did not say so at the time. She said rather, that she had decided to escape before it came to that. I believed her story then, but now that I’ve heard your tale it seems clear to me that Paulette was hiding something — lying, not to put too fine a point on it.’

Mrs Burnham began to sob quietly into her hands, covering her face.

‘But Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary quickly. ‘No matter what happened between your husband and Paulette, this I can tell you: Paulette was not actually with child — what she expressed to you was only, perhaps, the worst of her fears.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because we met again, months later, on the Ibis , and had she been with child, it would certainly have shown by that time. But there was no sign of anything like that. I hope you will find some consolation in that.’

‘Consolation?’ said Mrs Burnham, sobbing into her cupped hands. ‘Oh Mr Reid, how can you speak to me of consolation … when you have just confirmed my worst fears and suspicions?’

The heaving of her shoulders had loosened the stays of her robe and a lapel had dropped, to provide a glimpse of the nightdress she was wearing underneath: Zachary saw that the thin, cotton cloth was straining against the swell of her bosom. Drawing his eyes guiltily away, he said: ‘So you had some suspicion, then?’

She nodded. ‘In the past, yes — I had often wondered whether there might be something untoward between my husband and the young girls we sometimes sheltered in our house. But I would never have thought it possible with Paulette, who seemed to me the purest spirit I had ever come across. That was why I lavished my affection on her. And now I don’t know which betrayal is worse, hers or my husband’s.’

Burying her head in her hands she began to weep. Slowly her statuesque figure seemed to crumple and her head fell almost to her knees.

Zachary rose from his chair and went to kneel beside her. ‘Mrs Burnham,’ he said quietly. ‘You are not the only one who has been betrayed, you know. I too have been lied to and betrayed by Paulette. And I thought she was the love of my life.’

He couldn’t tell whether she had heard him, so he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Mrs Burnham?’

At his touch she raised her face and narrowed her eyes. ‘Why Mr Reid …’ she whispered, her eyes straying to his head. ‘Oh, look at you — your hair is still wet … from the rain, I suppose.’

She stretched out a hand and touched his dark hair, gingerly, with a knuckle. Then her fingers opened, entwining themselves in his curls, and suddenly she pulled his face towards her lips.

He responded with such eagerness that her armchair began to tilt slowly backwards and then fell over sideways, spilling them both on the floor and knocking the turban off her head. With his lips still locked on hers, Zachary began to tug at the lapels of her robe. In the process of sloughing it off they rolled over once, and then again. Then his fingers went to the neck of her nightdress and he pulled at the cloth. When he was unable to make any headway there, he lost patience and tore through the soft cotton to reveal her breasts.

Then it was her turn to claw at his shirt which came apart suddenly, with a tearing sound. He was trying at the same time to kick off his drawers and breeches and in the midst of their struggles they tumbled over each other again, bumping into something which fell over with a great crash of splintering wood and shattered glass.

Zachary looked up, startled, but she pulled his face down again. ‘It’s just the brandy, and the table,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘It doesn’t matter. No one will hear it over the storm.’

Her torn nightdress had wound itself around their shoulders now, and his half-discarded drawers and breeches were wrapped around their ankles. When they tried to move they began to roll in the other direction and crashed into something else.

Zachary’s lips were on her breasts and he didn’t bother to look up. But he caught the sound of her voice, whispering: ‘It’s just my tamancha.’

Throwing her arms around him, she wrapped her legs around his hips, clinging to his body as though she were holding on to a branch in a storm. Then a moan broke from her parted lips and grew slowly into a prolonged, rising cry that ended with a steep arching of her body. Suddenly she went limp in Zachary’s arms and he too stopped moving — now it was as if a fuse had been lit in the depths of his body, and a spark were going around and around, in a descending spiral, travelling down a wire to the bottom of a very deep mineshaft. When the wire ran out there occurred a detonation that shook him to the core, creating a blast that rattled his bones and wrenched his muscles. When the explosion reached his head everything turned yellow, as if in the light of a flame, and then slowly, the glow faded away, to be replaced by darkness.

Afterwards, the sensation of returning to awareness was like none that Zachary had ever experienced before. It wasn’t like rising upwards, from darkness towards light; rather it was like falling from a cloud. He had no conception of how much time had passed but he knew that he was still on the floor, his limbs entwined with Mrs Burnham’s.

When he stirred and tried to disentangle himself, she whispered into his ear: ‘No not yet: wait a little. Tomorrow we will wake to an eternity of guilt and remorse. Since we have only this one night together, we may as well deserve our punishment.’

Zachary pulled his head back in surprise. ‘What do you mean, Mrs Burnham? Are you sayin there won’t be another time?’

She brushed her lips tenderly against his face. ‘Yes, m’dear — I’m sorry but it must be so. This is the last and only time. Don’t you see? It is too dangerous — if even a whiff were to reach Mr Burnham, he would murder us both. It is too great a risk.’

‘But why should any whiff reach him? We can be careful, can’t we? There will be other nights when the house is empty, surely?’