By Eastern windows by Gretta Curran Browne Page A

found himself   joined by thirty-eight others.
    ‘Now you understand why it was necessary to employ so many servants,’ Jane whispered, looking fretfully down the veranda-table that had been designed to seat no more than twenty.
    A few nights later, in the privacy of their bedroom, when the assembled supper guests that evening had numbered a mere sixteen, Lachlan looked at his wife and enquired tiredly:   ‘Is this entertaining ever going to end?
    It ended for a while when they took a trip down the coast to Goa, a delayed honeymoon of ten idyllic sun-baked days spent walking or lazing on Goa's deserted and lonely white beaches and swimming in the sparkling blue waters of the Indian Ocean.
    Swimwear was a thing unheard of for English ladies, so Jane swam as she had so often done since childhood in the Jarvis's secluded cove in Antigua, naked, with her chestnut hair floating loose to her waist. To Lachlan she was a glorious mate. He dived beneath her, swimming under her body then surfacing suddenly before her, kissing her wet lips in an ecstasy of passion. ‘I love everything about you,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me?’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ she laughed, because he had said those same words to her all those months ago on the night James had seen them kissing in the garden at Government House. ‘But my brother-in-law will never allow it,’ she repeated, ‘because he thinks you’re a rogue!’
    And then she fled from him, back under the water, her figure moving as smoothly as if she had been born under there, while his eyes gazed into the blue depths following her rapid flight.
    Finally, with sighs of regret, they left the peace and freedom of Goa and returned to the bustle and noise of Bombay, just in time for the start of the Christmas social season.
     
    *
     
    The early months of their marriage passed like a romantic dream. But all dreamers eventually wake up.
    Married only ten months, on a morning after another lavish evening of entertaining a score of guests, Lachlan faced the fact that he was nearing bankruptcy.
    He had seen it coming, but had not known what to do about it. He sat at his desk and looked in despair at the list of expenses that far exceeded his income, all due to the large and costly circle of society in which they now moved in Bombay, where every family of any consequence must live in the same style and opulence as their neighbours did.
    ‘A poor way to live,’ he muttered.
    The weekly liquor bill alone was astronomical in his eyes, although no more than normal in the world of British Bombay. In the past seven days alone his guests had easily seen off twelve dozen crates of Madeira, eight dozen crates of claret, six dozen brandy, ten dozen of gin, and fifty-three bottles of port. Not to mention the tons of food required each week.
    Something about it all shamed him. This gluttony, this waste, this over-indulgence in every luxury while most of India was starving, and most of the people on Mull were scraping together every penny just to survive. He had made a mistake, a big mistake, trying to live the life of a rich British officer and compete with the nabobs of the East India Company.
    The cost of love? The cost of making Jane as happy as he possibly could? He added it up ... and saw that he was over nine hundred pounds in debt. Just the word ‘ debt ’ sent a chill through his heart. And that debt did not take into account the money he had already drawn to pay the lease on his mother's farm in Scotland which had been due for renewal, as well as the quarterly rent. But then he had always paid the rent on his mother's farm, from the age of fifteen, from the first month he had landed in America, and ever since.
    He sat for hours at his desk trying to find a solution. Naively, he had hoped that as the years passed, no more than another five, he would have saved enough money to enable himself and Jane to return to Britain and establish a home in Scotland. It was a lovely vision of a future life that