The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [81]
He was home again. He was in his nineteenth year – and he was engaged to be married…
Until recently, Ash had had very little to do with girls of his own class, for after Lily Briggs the well-bred and well-behaved sisters and cousins of his schoolmates had seemed painfully prim and colourless, and he had gone out of his way to avoid them. Lily had had her successors, but they had made no lasting impression and already their names and faces were becoming dim, for his heart had never again been involved. As a cadet he had gained the quite unfounded reputation of being a misogynist by refusing invitations to tea-parties, picnics and dances, and announcing grandly that he ‘had no time for women But there had been plenty of time – hours and days and weeks of it – on the long sea voyage from London to Bombay. And Miss Belinda Harlowe was not only a young lady, but far and away the prettiest girl on board.
There was nothing prim or colourless about Belinda. She was as pink and white and gold as Ash's romanticized memory of Lily, as gay as Dolly Develaine of ‘The Seaside Follies’ and as seductively shaped as Ivy Markins, who had worked in a hat shop in Camberley and been so generous with her favours. She was also sweet and innocent and young (two years younger than Ash) and, in addition to a charming, wilful face that was set off to admiration by a wealth of pale gold ringlets, was the fortunate possessor of a small straight nose that wrinkled deliciously when she laughed, a pair of large cornflower-blue eyes that sparkled with interest and eagerness for life, and a kissable mouth made more inviting by the fact that a dimple hovered near each corner.
None of these assets would have aroused much emotion in Ash (beyond a natural feeling of admiration for a pretty girl), had he not discovered that Miss Harlowe, who like himself had been born in India, was delighted at the prospect of returning there. She had said as much one evening during dinner, when the Canterbury Castle had been at sea for close on ten days, and several of the older ladies, including Belinda's mother, had been lamenting the fact that they were journeying east once more. They had been cataloguing the many discomforts of life in India – the heat, the dust, the disease, the appalling state of the roads and the difficulties of travel – when Belinda had intervened with a laughing protest:
‘Oh no, Mama! How can you say such things? Why, it's a delightful country. I can remember it clearly – that lovely cool bungalow with the purple creeper climbing over the porch, and all the gorgeous flowers in the garden; the ones like spotted lilies and those tall scarlet ones that were always covered with butterflies. And riding my pony on the Mall and seeing lines of camels, and being carried in a dandy when we went up to the hills for the summer – those great tall pine trees and the yellow wild roses that smelled so sweet… and the snows: miles and miles of snow mountains. You've no idea how ugly Nelbury and Aunt Lizzie's house seemed after that; and her servants were always scolding me, instead of spoiling me like Ayah and Abdul and my syce. I can't wait to get back.’
This artless speech had displeased a Mrs Chiverton, who evidently deciding that young Miss Harlowe was a forward chit who had no business to intervene in a conversation between her elders, remarked dampingly that no one who had endured the horrors of the Mutiny would ever be able to trust an Indian again, and that she envied dear Belinda's happy ignorance of the dangers that must face any sensitive Englishwoman