The Mountain of Light by Indu Sundaresan Page A

his empire and he meant for it to endure. Would it?
    And what of that child in the cradle? What would become of him? Would he be a pawn in someone’s game? Would this young wife of his, who had given him such immense joy at a time when he most needed it, would she survive also?
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    The lamp spluttered, and a thin spiral of smoke curled its way upward. Emily Eden laid down her pen on the blotting paper and scrubbed her forehead tiredly. The flame wavered once, and again, and extinguished itself with a sigh. The outlines of the tent disappeared, and then reemerged, lit faintly from the glow of torches in the camp outside. The roses in the silver vases on her desk seemed to come abloom in the dark, heavy-scented, padding the air with their aroma. Emily touched the supple petals, bent in to breathe the perfume, thought of the man who had sent them to her.
    â€œNot asleep?”
    She moved quickly, straightened from the flowers, yanked the top page from her desk and burrowed it under other papers. When he had reached her, he sat down heavily upon the carpets, near her chair.
    â€œNot on the floor, dear. Jimrud swept, but snakes . . .” and scorpions, insects and spiders, in fact, all of India on many, varied legs would ooze into a darkened tent, gnaw at the furniture, leave malodorous droppings.
    â€œI don’t care,” George said, his body slackening. A blurred tangerine glow trickled through the white canvas. Her desk lay flush along the wall, in front of a window. Their mother had given it to Emily for her tenth birthday, the first substantial gift she had received in her young life. At sixteen, she’d moved into an attic bedroom by herself and tucked it under the steep slope of the roof, knocking her head each time she rose. When they came to India, they had been told to take everything with them—servants, furniture, clothing, shoes, books, pens, paper, knitting, wool. Once they got here, she realized that things were not quite so dire, but she was still glad for the desk—its amber-hued oak, its scarred legs—because it tethered her to home, to England.
    Emily trawled her fingers through George’s thinning brush of hair. India had done this. When they left home, his hair had been a rich brown, now it was heavily woven through with strands of white. “I used to think that bringing my old room to India would make it England. So everyone told us, you remember, when we first embarked—take the comforts of home with you.”
    He glanced up. “Who are you writing to? Mary?”
    â€œEleanor,” she said, falteringly, glad that he couldn’t see the flush that crept up her neck. “Although by the time this letter gets to her, it will be May or June, and her garden will be in full bloom.”
    George wrapped his arms around her leg, and she felt the warmth of his face seeping in through the thin cotton of her nightgown. She dabbed at her nape and her hand came away damp with sweat. In Greenwich, at Park Lodge, where George had been Commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, the garden would have gone into its quiet hibernation, now, in December. Frost would carve patterns on the thick glass of the casement windows; the branches of the birches would be rimmed with ice, trunks stripped of bark, lying about in paper curls of white; the grass would crackle with frozen dew. There had been other houses, other gardens, but the memory of the Park Lodge garden—where Emily had planted the rosebushes, the elms, the rhododendrons—was the one that came swooping clear to her when life in India troubled.
    When their mother had died, Emily and Fanny, the only unmarried girls in the brood of fourteen, had left Eden Farm and gone to George. If George had been married, Emily and Fanny would have had to live by themselves—two mistresses in George’s home were already one too many, but three  . . . unthinkable. Fanny was