Episode 8: The Wilbur Browns Have Something to Say but Phillip's Story Comes First

Chapter 14

She studied Phillip’s profile, so close she could make out each soft eyelash. The dying breeze blew strands of hair against his temple and cheek. Agnes watched them dance there as she fought an inexplicable urge to reach out and tuck them behind his ear.

            Low voices approaching from beyond the hedge broke the spell. Phillip looked at Agnes as she put a finger to her lips. The voices came nearer while the two sat as still as the statues watching over them. Wilbur’s low tones floated on the cooling air.

            “. . . not at all the time to talk about a thing like this.”

            Eleanor answered, her voice tense with urgency. “You promised me that you would tell her on this visit. You know I wanted you to make a clean breast of it weeks ago, but you said”—her voice going pompous—“‘This is not something you put in a letter.’ Well, which is it? We’re here and you can tell her face to face.”

            “My love,” Wilbur replied, just inches behind the dense hedge, “she’s my cousin. I should know how to handle this, don’t you think? And wouldn’t I be a cad to spoil her anniversary party with such a discussion?”

            “If you don’t, Grandma will. Do you think for a moment that she is going to leave here without letting Agnes know? If she sees you keeping silent?”

            “You need to trust me with this, Eleanor,” Wilbur put down firmly. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t play the righteous wife.” The voices thinned as the couple moved off, leaving behind them a domestic sort of anger that hangs in the air like smoke.

            Phillip looked at Agnes with concern. “What do you make of that?” he whispered.

            Agnes clamped her skirt in her hands. “I’ve no idea. But it sounds like I should have a conversation with Grandma Brown first thing tomorrow.” Agnes remembered Mrs. Bairnaught’s advice to her the night before. “It appears I have some things to look into,” she said distractedly. Collecting herself, she smiled at Phillip. “But now I want to hear the rest of your story.”

            Phillip sat back. “Where was I?”

            “Beheadings, and not a place for those with a heart.”

            “Well, let’s see. You remember what Gregory told me? About being careful what you prayed for? Well, I learned not to wish for rain or against it.” Phillip told how the monsoons were a force to reckon with, indeed, but their absence was worse. In 1875 the rains failed across southern India. The population scratched out an existence, waiting for the next season. But the next year they did not come either. By then, the price of the little food that remained was horrifyingly high, out of most people’s reach. Britain was slow to respond, with the viceroy in charge declaring that a free market would be the best way to ensure an adequate supply of food. By the time they set up refugee camps they were too few and too late. The mission closed, and Phillip went to lend a hand in a camp 50 miles to the east.

            “On the road I came across flocks of children wandering alone. Walking skeletons. I couldn’t understand how these little ones kept going. And they did not just walk along themselves—I saw so many carrying children smaller than themselves, wasted down to their bones, too exhausted even to speak. Scores of them arrived weekly at the camp. Often those who clung to one another were not even related but had come from the same village where their parents had died of famine or cholera or had simply abandoned them in search of food.”

            “We brought some back to life. Others got only as far as our gate. They would deliver their little burdens into our arms, then lie down . . .” Phillip’s voice failed and he looked at the ground. Agnes took his hand and pressed it into hers.

            “I cannot tell you all that I saw. I must not. No one I suppose will ever read a full account. It’s as one missionary told me, that a man’s pen sticks at writing down scenes that have made his blood run cold.”

            Agnes waited, watching a band of noisy blackbirds find their places in the treetops. Finally she asked softly, “How long did this go on?”

            In earnest, eighteen months. It seemed an eternity. The rains finally found Madras again in 78, in June. He returned to the little mission, but nothing was left of it. Gregory had been killed on a solitary outing by a murderous band of thugs, hoping no doubt that his bloody death would placate Indra. That mercurial goddess would then release the monsoons and end the famine, or so a talkative passerby had told him.

            “So I walked into town and stood in what was left of it. Half of the inhabitants were dead or gone. What to do. I decided to pay a visit to the family I remembered as the wealthiest in the area and see if they would help me rebuild the mission. I had no idea why they would—I just thought I’d give the hand of God an opportunity. I hadn’t the least idea what else to do. The father, Dhanesh, being a good man of business, spoke very fine English. He was genial and sat me down. I remember he said with a grin” (here Phillip adopted an authentic south Indian singsong) “‘Why do you waste your time here in Madras? You are a young man, strong, intelligent, but you are getting older every day and you are alone. It is not good for you. A lizard who comes to live with the turtles will never teach them to be lizards. And the turtles just wait for him to leave one day. You are understanding me?” Phillip smiled. “I was understanding.”

            “So you left?”

            “No. You might say I should have.” Phillip glanced at Agnes, then away. “He had a daughter.”

Chapter 15

Rupa was fourteen and well into marrying age. Her father suspected every man in the province of wanting to wed her for her beauty and the family’s money, and indeed, she had many suitors. Her mother envied the daughter whose radiance grew as her own faded. She had noticed how lately, when they walked together through town, her daughter stole the attention of men who only a handful of years ago looked approvingly at her, the lovely Neela. So Neela soothed her injured vanity by scolding the girl for failings large, small, and imagined. Three brothers, all older, delighted in teasing Rupa and setting up elaborate schemes to frighten her. The father joined in the hilarity, and even though the mother condemned this campaign of shock as going too far, her sons had long ago developed an immunity to her high-pitched harangues.

            Being a hospitable Hindu, Rupa’s father invited Phillip to stay in his home while deciding what to do next—that is, when to leave the country and by what means. They gave him new clothes (his own were in rags), fed him, and instructed him in the glories of their many gods. Reclining on silk cushions, Dhanesh talked to Phillip long into the night about the proud history of India, about what Marco Polo really found on his voyage through that country, about invaders and emperors and the craftiest warrior of all ages, the Lion of Punjab.

            Rupa kept her distance from Phillip but he had caught her watching him from corners or behind curtains. He assumed that he might be the only man who did not stare at her or order her about or sadistically frighten her.

            “One day,” recalled Phillip, “I took a basket of melons from her and carried it the rest of the way to the kitchen. I could see that this confused her, especially when she saw that I wanted nothing from her. The next day, in my broken Hindi, I told her the story of Mary Magdalene, and how Jesus was probably the first man who had loved her without wanting something in return. I tried to explain how Jesus was like that, a servant, and yet God. Of course, this was very difficult for her to imagine. She asked me to tell the story many times over, and sometimes I would substitute other parables—the Good Samaritan, the rich young ruler, the good and poor soil. Her mother watched us with suspicion. Her father laughed.”

            “He did not see you as a threat, I imagine?”

            “Not at all. I believe he saw me as a mangy cub he had taken in until I could be released back into my own habitat.”

            “Did she fall in love with you?” The question startled Agnes even as she said it.

            “She would have fallen in love with any man who was kind to her.”

            “What happened?”

            One night Rupa crept to Phillip’s bed and begged him to take her back home with him. She would marry him, or be his servant, anything he wanted. He could never forget how her wet eyes shone wildly as she knelt beside him in the moonlit room. She could not stay there, she said. Her father was in final negotiations to marry her to the son of a minor prince, a young man only ten years older than her but already famous for his wickedness.

            “What could I do? I could not leave her there. I had met her betrothed earlier at a festival in Hyderabad—I was walking through the market when his man pulled me over and asked me to translate an inscription inside a ring. Manindra, the fiancé, stood there, handsomely dressed, with a great sword hanging at his side. He held the ring out to me without a word, and his eyes were like a dead man’s—there was no light in them. They did not seem human, really. I’ve never seen eyes like them.”

            “What was the inscription?” Agnes asked. She had always needed every detail colored in when hearing a story.

            “It was Latin: Misere mei, Deus.”

            “Have mercy on me, Lord.”

            “Yes. I could not help imagining that the ring came off the finger of a Catholic priest, and probably not with his consent. I gave Manindra the translation and he slid the heavy ring onto his middle finger. Then he paid the seller and smiled at me in the strangest way. Even in that miserable heat, a chill ran through me.”

            Phillip described the plan he devised with Rupa. In two days they would steal away during the night to a town ten miles south, where they could catch a train to the coast. They would travel posing as man and wife. In Bombay he would find a friend of his father, who could be counted on to lend him enough money to transport them to France.  Once there, he would leave Rupa in the care of nuns in Rheims, a refuge he had heard other missionaries tell about.

            They waited through the next two agonizing days, afraid that someone, somehow, might read their minds and snatch Rupa away to the prince’s household for safekeeping. Instead, the family continued in its routine, the mother scolding everyone and fussing over wedding preparations while the brothers left a dead lizard in Rupa’s shoe, and this was all very reassuring.

            Just after midnight, with only a sliver of moon to guide them, Phillip and Rupa slipped out of the house. If they were caught, it meant certain death for Rupa and something worse for Phillip. They hugged the shadows along the road going south, hiding from the late-night carts that rattled along that lonely stretch, reaching the train station just before dawn. Rupa kept her veil spread over her face and walked with the dignity of a married woman, adorned with jewelry befitting a young bride. She had taken the finery from her hope chest kept in her mother’s room the evening before, along with enough money for food, the train trip, and any bribes that might ease the journey.

            Phillip purchased two tickets to Bombay. They wandered through the marketplace for an hour, concealing themselves amid the crowd in case any one had come looking for them already. At the last possible moment, they returned to the station and jumped on the westbound train, settling themselves away from the windows. A conductor eyed them suspiciously above his massive moustache as he took their tickets, staring intently at Phillip before moving on. As he walked back through the car, he stopped again beside them.

            “You are missionary?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

            Phillip’s jaw tightened but he replied as evenly as he could, “That’s right.”

            “You have been in Anayesh, in Madras?”

            “Some time ago, yes.” It might end here, Phillip thought. This man could call the guards and pull them off the train. “God, help us!” he silently implored.

            The conductor’s sun-darkened face relaxed. The small man grabbed Phillip’s hand and squeezed it. “You are good man!”

            Phillip slowly let out his breath while trying to retrieve the man’s face from memory. The conductor explained that Phillip had taken his child from him when they arrived at the relief camp a year ago, his wife already dead along the way. He reminded Phillip of how he had fed the man’s little girl for several days as the father, too weak and sick to care for her, lay on a mat and watched. His daughter was now healthy, he said, and living with his mother while he looked for a new wife.

            “I remember you tell me, in heaven, no caste. For Jesus, we all are same. I like your Jesus,” he whispered, dropping his head close to Phillip’s ear. Then he was gone.

            Agnes saw Phillip’s face brighten as he recalled the scene. He turned ruefully to her. “My only convert!”

            The rest of the journey went incredibly well. They found the Duke’s friend in Bombay, still at his old address. After listening closely to Phillip’s story, he rose stiffly and took from a little locked drawer in his desk the money needed to reach France and pressed it upon the young man. Seeing this, Rupa reached into her bag and drew out two gold bracelets as partial payment. The good man held up his hands, but she insisted, and he knew better than to refuse. They all shook hands warmly, and their benefactor sent the couple off with his best wishes and greetings for the Duke. The boat sailed, the wind blew fair, and by the time Phillip and Rupa reached the Suez they had stopped looking over their shoulder. In France they found the convent right where the missionaries had described it, spreading quietly beside a humble stone church. After a long embrace, Phillip left Rupa at its gates, in the care of the nuns. Then, unwilling to present himself to his father in the state of turmoil and exhaustion that the adventure had left him in, Phillip made his way to the home of his godparents (artistic ex-patriots from New York) just south of Paris, there to recover and re-acclimate himself to the civilized life of sitting at a well-set table, wearing clean clothes that fit, and communicating in his native language. 

            “This is a wonderful story,” Agnes breathed when he had finished. “Why should your father tell any other?”

            “Have you heard the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished?” asked Phillip. “At least in this life.”

            “I have both heard it and experienced it,” she assured him.

            “There is another version of my story afoot. And for some reason it seems more credible to people than the actual one. Maybe because so many people enjoy thinking the worst. At any rate, Rupa’s father complained to the British governor, and word got around that I had a romantic entanglement with a young girl and had dishonored her in the worst possible way, then spirited her out of the country.”

            “Were you called to account for it somehow?”

            “Oh, yes, the Raj tracked me down and asked for a full explanation, which I provided except for any disclosure about where I left Rupa. As it was my word against her father’s, nothing could be proven, so they have left me alone. Nevertheless, the ugly version of this tale has somehow found its way into certain pockets of society, so I am for some a man with a soiled past.” He glanced sideways at Agnes and pushed at a buried rock with the toe of his boot.

            “So,” observed Agnes, “your good works have earned you a penalty you did not suspect at the time.”

            “Correct.”

            “The consequences truly never occurred to you?”

            “I knew her family would be furious, but I counted on distance to protect me from them. That the story would follow me home and besmirch my name here was a surprise. I am, you will see, that most exasperating of human creatures, the slow learner.”

            Agnes felt her heart throb with affection for this man, but she kept her mind steady.

            “And what reason do I have,” asked Agnes coyly, “for believing one tale rather than another?”

            “None at all,” he answered, rising. “You may believe whichever one appeals to you.” He held his arm out to her. She looked up into his face but had trouble making out his expression in the dusk.

            Suddenly a realization struck her. “Oh, my!” she cried, jumping to her feat. “The dinner! I still need to dress. Look how you have distracted me, Lord Phillip.”

            “Then let’s away, madam—let’s run!” Agnes took his arm with one hand and her skirts with the other and ran as lightly as she could ever remember through the gloom of the garden and toward the great house where golden light now shone from every window.

To be continued . . .