The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [162]
Yet because her head was no longer bent, her sari had slipped back a little, and the signs of her mixed blood were clearly to be seen. They were there in the colour of her skin and the structure of her bones; in the long, gracious lines of her body, the breadth of shoulder and hip, and the small, square-jawed face with its high cheek bones and broad brow; in the set of the wide-spaced eyes that were the colours of bog-water, the tilted tip of that short nose, and the lovely, generous mouth that was too large to suit the accepted standards of beauty that were so admirably personified by her half-sister.
By contrast, Shushila-Bai was as small and exquisite as a Tanagra figurine or the miniature of some legendary Indian beauty: golden-skinned and black-eyed, her face a flawless oval and her mouth a rose-petal. Her small-boned perfection made her seem as though she were fashioned from a different clay from the half-sister who sat beside and a little behind her – and who was not quite as tall as Ash's first impression of her, for standing, he had topped her by half a head. But then he was a tall man, and her co-bride, Shushila, stood barely four foot ten in her heelless silken slippers.
The elder girl lacked the delicacy of the East, but that did not prove that she was the Feringhi-Rani's daughter…
His gaze fell on a bare arm that was the colour of warm ivory, and there, just above the golden bangles, was a crescent-shaped scar: the mark left by the teeth of a monkey, many years ago… Yes, it is Juli all right, thought Ash. Juli grown up – and grown beautiful.
Long ago, during his first year at a public school, Ash had come across a line in one of Marlowe's plays that had caught his imagination and stuck fast in his memory ever since: Faust's words on seeing Helen of Troy: ‘Oh thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!’ It had seemed to him then, and still did, the perfect description of beauty, and later he had applied it to Lily Briggs, who had giggled and told him that ‘he wasn't 'alf a one’, and later still to Belinda – who had reacted in a similar manner, though she had phrased her comment a little differently. Yet neither of them bore the least resemblance to the Maharajah of Karidkote's half-sister, Anjuli-Bai, for whom, thought Ash, astounded, those lines might have been expressly written.
Looking at Juli, it was as though he were seeing beauty for the first time in his life, and as though he had never realized before what it was. Lily had been blowsily attractive and Belinda had certainly been pretty – a great deal prettier than any of his previous loves. But then his ideal of feminine good looks – had been shaped by his childhood in India, and unconsciously influenced by fashion – Victoria's England, as may be seen from countless paintings, picture-postcards and illustrated books of the period, still admired large eyes and a small rose-bud of a mouth in a smoothly oval face, to say nothing of sloping shoulders and a nineteen-inch waist. The era of Du Maurier's stately goddesses, who were to usher in an entirely new fashion in beauty, had not yet dawned; and it had never occurred to Ash that any form and face so diametrically opposed to the Victorian – and Indian – ideal could not only be immeasurably more arresting, but make the prettiness he had hitherto admired seem slightly insipid. But though his personal preference was still for dainty and delicately built women such as Shushila, Anjuli's looks, which threw back to her Russian great-grandmother, were a revelation to him, and he could not take his eyes off her.
Becoming aware of his regard and embarrassed by it, she half turned from him and drew the peak of her sari forward again so that her face was once more in shadow; and Ash suddenly realized that he had been staring – and also that Jhoti had just asked him a question and that he had no idea what