Hold Me Close Page 9

  “Oh!” said Margaret. “Then no wonder you’ve made a match with my sister, Mr. Maji. She has always been a devoted student of literature and languages. As Christopher was.”

  “Your sister is a superb scholar,” said Mr. Maji, beaming at his wife. “In fact, we met while working in my aunt’s literary archives.”

  “His aunt has the second finest library in all of West Bengal,” said Eleanor. “And that is saying a great deal, if you know the literary treasures of that area. She’s a far more free-thinking lady than Mr. Maji’s mother and grandmother turned out to be, and the moment she learned I was a student of Indian languages, she graciously gave me permission to work on some translations there.”

  “Oh, goodness!” said Julia suddenly, remembering what a gracious lady should be doing, at least in England. “How rude of me to leave everyone standing here so long. Have you had a chance to eat breakfast, Mr. Maji?” She glanced at the sideboard, wondering if the English fare would be at all to his liking, and gestured with her left hand towards the kitchens. “If there’s something else you would like, I can send to Cook for—”

  Before she could finish the phrase, both Aunt Eleanor and Mr. Maji made loud gasps of astonishment.

  Aunt Eleanor was pointing at Julia’s wrist, her eyes wide. “That bracelet!” she cried, “That’s my bracelet! How on earth did it get here?”

  Julia glanced down at the gold circlet on her wrist. In all the excitement about Eleanor’s marriage, she’d forgotten it was there at all.

  “Oh!” she said, feeling a prickling unease down the back of her neck. “But—but weren’t you were the one who put it in my chambers last night?”

  “No!” said Eleanor, her gaze quite fixed on the bracelet, her head shaking slowly side to side. “No, I most certainly was not. In fact, I couldn’t have. I lost it before we left for our journey here. More than three months ago, during our honeymoon in Mumbai. I looked everywhere for it before we returned to Calcutta, and I was sure I’d never see it again!”

  Mr. Maji looked just as dumbfounded, but he gave a little shrug. “Perhaps when you first lost it, it became entangled with some garment or other. One of your maids might have packed the garment away with our things in Mumbai without even realizing the bracelet was there. It could easily have slipped into one of those little silk pockets inside your valise, and remained hidden until we arrived here.”

  Eleanor gave him a dubious look. “Perhaps so. But even if all that were true, how did it get out of the valise? Did it jump out, and roll its way into Julia’s bedchamber?”

  Her husband shrugged again. “Perhaps it tumbled out when one of the Grantleigh maids unpacked for us last night. Its clasp may have caught in her skirts, after which she walked with it into Lady Grantleigh’s rooms without being aware of its presence, and it came loose again there.”

  “That’s a great deal of subterfuge for a bracelet,” said Eleanor, wrinkling her brow.

  Mr. Maji smiled, and his eyes twinkled. “But we both know it is a rather remarkable bracelet.”

  Unexpectedly, a slight blush stained Aunt Eleanor’s cheeks. “Indeed, it is.”

  Julia shook her head at the two of them. “But it couldn’t have tangled in anyone’s skirts,” she blurted out. “It was in a box when I found it.”

  Eleanor and Mr. Maji exchanged newly astonished glances. “A box?” they said at the same time.

  “Yes,” she said. “A little carved sandalwood box—”

  Eleanor’s mouth gaped. “With a dancing woman on the lid?”

  “Yes!”

  “Ha!” said Eleanor, giving her husband a pointed look. “Explain that, meri jaan. How on earth did it get back inside its box? I most certainly didn’t put it there. I did keep the box with the rest of my jewelry, but you know I never took the bracelet off. Not intentionally, anyway.” And suddenly she blushed again, quite deeply this time.

  The color in Mr. Maji’s cheeks deepened as well, and he cast his gaze downward, a little smile playing on his lips. “I know quite well that you did not,” he said.

  Holsworth stepped forward now, looking suddenly rather thunderous. “Will someone please explain what is going on here?”

  “I cannot,” said Mr. Maji. “At least I cannot explain how the bracelet came to be in Lady Grantleigh’s chamber. That is most mysterious.”

  Oh, great heavens. Julia wanted no more talk of mysteries, or the older couple’s reasons for blushing. The bracelet had unsettled her own world quite enough already, and she couldn’t bear to feel her grip on reason wobble again, as it had last night.

  “Well, never mind how it got into my room,” she said, hastening to try the clasp again. “If the bracelet’s yours, Aunt Eleanor, I shall happily return it.” She fumbled again for the tiny gold pin, but pressing it did no more good now than it had the last dozen times she’d tried. “It’s just—I’m afraid the catch seems not to be working just now.”

  Mr. Maji’s eyebrows climbed. “No?”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” said Julia. “It worked easily enough the first time I tried it, but now it just won’t budge.”

  Eleanor cast another sideways glance at her husband, her own eyes gleaming now. “Yes, well…it’s been known to be a bit tricky.”

  “Indeed,” he answered, seeming to suppress an amused grin. “The bracelet is very old, I believe. And perhaps not entirely in tune with the spirit of modern conveniences.”

  Reflexively, Julia glanced over at Holsworth, but he seemed as puzzled by the conversation as anyone, and was scowling at the bracelet as though it were a new recruit who wouldn’t stop marching out of step.

  “Ah, well,” said Mr. Maji. “In some matters, logic cannot be our guide.” He glanced over at Holsworth now himself, a look of speculation on his face. “But perhaps we should do as Lady Grantleigh suggested, and go somewhere we can sit down. And perhaps more comfortably than we can in this room. I broke my fast early this morning, and need no more. But there is a story behind that bracelet that I think it really would be best for you to hear.”

  7

  Margaret, at least, seemed eager to hear Mr. Maji’s story, for she shooed everyone quickly over into the parlor, and ushered each one to comfortable chairs. Unfortunately, she was quite insistent about seating Major Holsworth on the divan next to where Julia had seated herself.

  It was hard enough keeping a grip on her composure here in front of Christopher’s family when they were simply in the same room. Sharing the same piece of furniture was a challenge she didn’t know if she was up for until she made some more sense of her feelings.

  She edged carefully towards the far side of the cushion, up against the padded chintz arm. But Holsworth was so large, it was difficult to put much space between them. Though she turned all her attention toward Mr. Maji, who had made himself at home in an armchair beside the fireplace, she could feel Holsworth there, warming the air beside her.

  Mr. Maji, meanwhile, crossed one leg comfortably over the other knee, and leaned back, looking out over his audience in the manner of an experienced storyteller who knew he had an enthralling tale to tell.

  “You should know, Lady Grantleigh,” Mr. Maji began, “that according to stories passed down in my family, the bracelet currently adorning your arm fits the description of one said to belong to a very distant relative of mine—an aunt, you might say, but many generations back.”

  “Many generations?” Forgetting Holsworth for the moment, Julia raised her arm to catch the morning sunlight. Could the bracelet really be so old? The gold still looked so bright and flawless, with no signs of the dents or scratches long use would almost surely bring.

  “We have no concrete records to prove this aunt even existed,” said Mr. Maji, “but the stories say her name was Bharati. They say she was a scholar, like so many in our line, and made great study of the Gaha Sattasai of the Satavahana King Hala.”

  “The what?” asked Aunt Margaret.

  “A great collection of Prakrit poe
ms,” said Mr. Maji. And then he leaned forward with a conspiratorial smile. “Love poems.”

  “And such poems!” declared Aunt Eleanor, who had claimed the armchair across from her husband, on Holsworth’s side of the divan. “Each verse very short, but so full of passion—about illicit love, heartbreak, star-crossed lovers finding the briefest bliss in secret trysting places. Extraordinarily lovely, and so often sad.”

  Illicit love. Trysting places. Good Lord. Julia was not going to look in Holsworth’s direction. She was not. Yet somehow she felt the heat and solidity of him even more than she had a few moments before.

  She turned her gaze deliberately to the portrait above the hearth, the fifth Earl Grantleigh on horseback, cantering along with his foxhounds bounding beside him. His expression as he looked down over the parlor had always seemed benevolent, but this morning his painted face seemed to glare at Julia in disapproval. She lowered her eyes hastily to the carpet.

  “Bharati, it is said,” Mr. Maji continued, “lived out one such story of heartbreak in her own life. She fell in love with a young man whom her father would not permit her to marry—no one remembers the reason why not. But she defied her family to be with him.”

  Aunt Eleanor broke in again, her expression aglow with deep feeling. “Bharati and her lover found happiness, extraordinary happiness,” she said. “But only for a very short time. Bharati’s family considered her dalliance with this man to be an intolerable dishonor. So, one morning, her brothers used some subterfuge to lure her beloved out into the forest, and then shot him full of arrows.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Margaret, who had been listening wide-eyed and enraptured. “They killed him, only because he loved the girl! It’s like the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet!”

  Mr. Maji nodded. “It was a great tragedy for Bharati. She never recovered from the loss. But if our family stories are true, she turned her heartbreak into a wonderful book of poetry, in the style of traditional Prakrit verse. Short, vivid pieces that told of the happiest moments, as well as the saddest. A portrait of a soul achingly in love, and in unspeakable pain.”

  Heaviness filled Julia’s chest. A soul in love, and unspeakable pain? A young woman whose beloved was cruelly torn from her? Oh, Christopher. Despite all Julia’s efforts to contain her emotions this morning, tears were rising to her eyes again.

  Margaret heaved a melancholy sigh. “But how do you know this Bharati wrote such poems,” she asked, “if you’re not even sure she existed?”

  “Ah!” said Mr. Maji. “We still have the verses themselves. Each generation of the family has had at least one sympathetic soul who preserved them, and passed them down. They were never published, of course—even today, it would be considered shameful to have a female poet in the family who shared her work with the public. But Lady Eleanor and I have been working on a translation into English, which perhaps we may one day publish here in Britain, where it would be unlikely to cause embarrassment to my family back home.”

  “Goodness!” said Margaret. “I should love to hear one of the poems!”

  “I can recite them,” declared Eleanor. “One tends to remember them well after working out the translation. As I said, each one is very short—a cluster of heartfelt images, no more. This is one of the happier ones.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Margaret. “A happy one, please!”

  To Julia’s surprise, Eleanor rose solemnly to her feet, and drew herself up as tall as such a stout little woman could manage. She took a deep breath, and then intoned:

  Again, I met him in the woods,

  Free there among the grazing deer.

  He held me close in the shadows of the leaves,

  Where I could scarcely see his face,

  Where my fingers traced his handsome, dark body.

  And that, apparently, was the whole of it. Eleanor sat down again, folding her hands neatly in her lap, and the room was very quiet. A short cluster of images, she had said, and so it seemed to be.

  Aunt Margaret had one hand pressed to her heart, and her mouth had fallen open. “Oh, dear!” she said, her cheeks glowing pink. “That is quite…vivid at the end there, is it not? At first, it sounded rather like Wordsworth, but then—”

  Eleanor chuckled, relinquishing the dignified tone of her recitation. “Prakrit poets are quite frank about the pleasures of the body. But they can speak to the soul as well.” Suddenly, she leaned across the space between her armchair and the divan and placed a hand on Major Holsworth’s broad knee, patting it affectionately. “Marcus, dear,” she said, “you remember that verse you were so fond of, the one you were so clever at helping me with as we were sailing here? About the darkness of night?”

  Holsworth? Holsworth had helped Aunt Eleanor with a translation of an Indian love poem? Though given what he’d done with her in the hothouse room, perhaps it shouldn’t be quite such a surprise. In any case, Julia hoped she wasn’t gaping at him too openly.

  Thankfully, the major seemed to be paying her no attention. He was, in fact, staring abstractedly into the cold fireplace, his thoughts entirely opaque, though he nodded in answer to Eleanor’s questions.

  To Julia’s utter astonishment, he, too, began to recite, leaning forward with his forearms balanced on his knees, the words rolling out in his deep, vibrating voice:

  When Night draws its black shadows across the sky,

  Then comes the brightest light.

  For then you draw back the curtains of my bed,

  And the heat of your sun

  Makes fire blaze within my breast.

  And now it was Julia’s turn to blush. Good heavens—beds and heat and breasts? Ought they to be reciting such shocking verses in an English parlor, so early in the morning?

  Heat crept through her, nonetheless, as she imagined the young poetess reclining on a heap of silken pillows, and a male hand pulling back the curtain that concealed her. She could see the man’s dark shape in the shadows, lowering his body over his lover’s.

  And then she blinked, quite startled. The male face she saw her in mind as she imagined the scene—it was not Christopher’s face.

  It was Holsworth’s.

  Without her brain even giving a command to move, she jumped to her feet, her right hand clutching once again at the gold band that encircled her left wrist.

  “Julia?” said Aunt Eleanor. “Are you quite all right?”

  “Of course,” she answered, perhaps a bit too quickly. “The verses are…remarkable, without a doubt. But, if I may ask, what does all this have to do with the bracelet?”

  “Ah!” said Eleanor, smiling a mysterious smile. “Well, we have no direct proof of this, either, but the family stories go on to say that Bharati, in her endless grief, turned her attentions not only to the art of verse-making, but also to the art of enchantment.”

  “Enchantment?”

  “The magic arts,” confirmed Mr. Maji, giving Julia an assessing look from behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “They say she sought ways to help other young lovers avoid her sad fate. She wanted to help them find their hearts’ desires, even when family or society would not approve.”

  “And, by one account at least, she was successful,” said Eleanor. “That story claims she had a bracelet crafted all of gold, and imbued it with a charm that would draw true lovers together, and help them find happiness, despite all obstacles that might stand in their way.”

  Julia stared down at her wrist in shock. “And you think such a bracelet actually exists? You believe it is this bracelet?”

  “It is a fanciful idea, to be sure,” said Mr. Maji. “The legend of the bracelet may be nothing more than a sentimental embellishment of Bharati’s tale, by some later relative who wished to lighten the tragedy with the promise of new romance.”

  Julia’s heart seemed to flip in her chest. “Surely, it is nothing more than that!”

  The legend just couldn’t be true. Magic of that sort didn’t exist, not in the real world. And she and Holsworth were not true lovers. Aside from last n
ight’s burst of passionate madness, it made no sense for them to be lovers of any kind, at all.

  Suddenly, though, the bracelet seemed almost to tingle against her skin, and her heart was hammering. She felt a desperate urge to twist violently at the metal, to bite through it if she had to, to get it off her wrist. She restrained herself, of course.

  Eleanor was watching her very carefully now, with an impish gleam in her eye. “Perhaps I should tell you exactly how the bracelet came into my hands,” she said. “It was about six months ago, when I was in Mr. Maji’s aunt’s library, looking through a drawer of old palm-leaf manuscripts. I lifted a lovely, illuminated section of the Bhagavata Purana which I’d quite been longing to read, and to my surprise, underneath it was that little sandalwood box. Mind you, many others had looked through that drawer over the years, and no one had reported finding a box before. Of course, I was even more startled to open the box and find such a valuable, exquisite bracelet inside!”

  “It was indeed startling,” said Mr. Maji. “I happened to be in the library as well, transcribing a work of Balinese philosophy, when Lady Eleanor called me over. We ended up spending days together, studying that inscription, comparing it to Bharati’s own writings, and trying to piece together how the bracelet might have stayed concealed so long. I’m still not sure how something becomes eternally yours when you give it away, but I soon realized that working with Lady Eleanor on the project was without question the loveliest and most joyful time of my life.”

  The couple exchanged a beaming look, and reached out for one another’s hands across the space between the armchairs.

  Eleanor squeezed her husband’s fingers fondly. “And if finding the bracelet made two gray-haired, stubborn, reclusive old bachelor scholars tumble madly into love,” she said, “it must have enchantment of some kind.”

  His left hand still clasped in his wife’s, Mr. Maji stretched his other arm towards Julia and touched his fingertips lightly to the bracelet. “And now, Lady Grantleigh, it seems Bharati’s bracelet has chosen you.”