CHAPTER 1THE DAY JIM LEFT
25TH OF MARCH 1893
That evening I knew something was amiss but didn’t want to admit it. To address it would make it real. We’d only just made a home here in Boston, got acquainted with the Chinese couple next door and the Welks, the Irish family below, and my husband, Jim, was learning his trade at the Dupree Detective Agency. Yet something was wrong.
A key rattled in the door, so I wiped off my hands with a flutter of excitement.
“Ah, sweetheart,” Jim said, setting down a package. He took off his boots and black wool coat by the door. Seeing the seams stretch at his shoulders, the fabric thin at the elbows, I sighed. He needed a new overcoat, but always found a reason to postpone it. Instead, he’d bought a used coat because we were saving to buy a house. When I protested this parsimony, he’d just smiled.
Jim’s full name is Captain James Agnihotri, but he rarely used it now. We went by O’Trey, the tail end of his name. He washed up, kissed my cheek, and sat down while I set the table. We’d been married six months, but it was still new to me. I watched him unobtrusively, his calm manner that gave an impression of contained strength. Well proportioned, one did not notice his height except by comparison. Standing beside him, even with my curly hair piled up in a Newport knot, I felt as small as a child.
I sniffed—a whiff of burning crust hovered in the air.
“Oh no!” I hurried to the stove, grabbed a towel and hauled out my tray of hot cross buns. Their healthy golden glow reassured me, but the undersides! Were they charred?
“Damn this old stove!” I wailed. Learning to cook wasn’t easy—I’d put down my book only to find my sausages singed, or my soup bubbled down to a few sticky inches. Cleaning floors tired me. When I pressed clothes with the heavy box iron, its glowing embers left sooty streaks on Jim’s nice clean shirts. Fortunately, Mrs. Welks downstairs took in washing.
“Ah!” Jim plucked a bun off the tray, tossing it from hand to hand to cool it. Biting into it, he closed his eyes, his body still. “Mmm.”
A glow filled me then, watching him chew slowly to savor my bread. When I’d made the buns for Christmas, Jim’s face shone with such enjoyment, so I baked them often, pressing a currant into each like a button on an overstuffed pillow.
An orphan, raised in a Christian mission in Poona, Jim wasn’t sure exactly what year he was born but thought it might have been 1862. At fifteen “or thereabouts,” he’d run away to join the British army. My poor boy had seen few luxuries in his hard life.
He loved the smell of bread. In Bombay he’d lived in a dusty warehouse behind a bakery, a far cry from Framji Mansion, where I grew up among servants and bearers, with rows of banana, citrus and papaya trees on Papa’s shady estate. That gap between us shrank last September, as our liner crawled through the Suez Canal, on to Liverpool, then plowed across the Atlantic.
Finishing the bun in two bites, Jim turned to me. His grey eyes light against the dark lashes he inherited from his Indian mother, lashes so long a girl might envy them, he said, “Someday, let’s have a bakery, you and I, yes?”
I smiled as our little clock dinged the half hour. Perhaps nothing was wrong, after all. And yet I knew, deep within me, today felt different. The texture of his words was careful, like someone saying goodbye.
Pushing away the odd thought, I laid out cheesed potatoes and boiled eggs on a dish, cutting slices from a loaf for our simple supper. Jim was quiet at dinner. Although he complimented the meal and flashed a smile at me, a shadow of presentiment dogged those moments. I wanted no storm to threaten my cozy apartment with Mama’s soft yellow curtains at the windows, and my father’s gift, a burgundy Persian rug on the floor. After all the to-do with my parents and our Parsee brethren in Bombay, we were married; surely we deserved some peace and quiet?
We washed and dried the dishes as usual, but Jim seemed distracted, barely aware of passing me the plates. His silence reminded me of an evening high in the North India hills of Simla, when he’d been lost in thought, then watched me closely. That night he left on a secret mission into enemy terrain and was gone for weeks.
Jim was fond of fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes. He’d been teaching me to observe, to make deductions, thinking backward, as he said, to where something was, or should be, or shouldn’t be. Why this was considered “backward” I had no idea. Over dinner he’d usually tell me about his day—visiting people to investigate someone or following to see where they went. He’d ask questions to see what I’d noticed on my trip to market.
Now he had his head back against the settee, eyes closed, but I wasn’t deceived. His arms clenched beside him as if awaiting a blow. Was he remembering the awful things he’d seen in the army? Or something else?
“Captain Jim?” That was what we called him when my brother Adi hired him last year.
He smiled, opening his eyes. “Ah,” he said, “you know.”
Heartened by his calm, I tucked my skirt under me and sat. “Something’s happened.”
Instead of replying, he picked up the long narrow parcel by the door and handed it to me. “A present, my sweet.”
“But my birthday’s two weeks away,” I protested, grinning, nonetheless.
He nodded at the package, so I unwound the string and peeled back newspaper to reveal a pretty blue parasol edged with ruffles. With a staff of metal, it lay heavy upon my lap.
When I reached for the handle, Jim’s hand clamped my arm.
“Careful,” he said, pointing it away from me and squeezing the handle. To my surprise, the tip retracted, revealing a sharp, shiny blade.
“Goodness!” I was no fragile miss, fainting in a fit of vapors. One awful night last year I’d killed a man. I had to—if I hadn’t fired that shot, I’d have lost my dear Jim. The incident left him with a scar on his neck, one more gash to mark the progress of Captain Jim’s life, for he was a soldier and a good one. Yet when I fired, I could not have imagined how it would change us. It had already changed Jim’s notion of me.
He released the handle and passed it to me, saying, “It is a weapon, my dear. Do not forget that.”
