by Eloisa James
“I don’t think I’ll ever let you out of my sight again. We’re going to live in bed.”
“Quill!”
“Why not?” He wrestled her flat on her back and lavished kisses on her nose and eyelids as she twisted under him, trying to get free. Dimly, he could hear her protesting, but he was too joyfully intoxicated to listen.
It took a howl to get through to him. “Quill, you must let me go! I’m having a very peculiar reaction to Sudhakar’s medicine—I feel as if I swallowed a large lake, and I must get to the water closet!”
Quill started hopelessly chuckling into his wife’s neck.
It was only when her struggling limbs endangered his future children’s lives that he rolled to the side and let her go.
But it didn’t change his plans for the day—nay, for the week. He was a well man with a beautiful wife and a passel of children to create. Pleasant work, indeed.
And they had the whole of life ahead of them in which to do it.
KAMATH THE FRUIT SELLER noticed with some amusement the two lovers lying on the banks of the Ganges River. Likely they thought they couldn’t be seen. He paused in his hard climb up the mountain. The woman had the pearly white skin of an Englishwoman. He’d heard that hail fell as large as mango fruit over in England. Struck people on the head, which explained why Englishmen were so foolish. His eyes widened. The hail didn’t seem to injure their other faculties.
With a sigh of appreciation and remembrance, the old man continued up the tiny, winding path leading to his house. Good thing the crazed old Englishman Jerningham died a few months ago, he thought. He was miffy about things like that. Tried to exile Kamath’s own daughter, Sarita, from the village. Kamath snorted to himself. Of course, Sarita and her husband had returned just a few weeks later, calling themselves a different name. He was as blind as a toad, old Jerningham. Couldn’t see farther than the tip of his nose.
DOWN ON THE BANKS of the Ganges River, the Englishman, whose skin was not nearly as pearly white as that of his wife, had rolled over on his back and was looking up at the clouds far above them.
“What do you see?” his wife asked, tucking her head into his shoulder.
“Mmmm,” Quill said, running his hand down Gabby’s back. He found to his annoyance that she had pulled a length of silk over herself. “I’m looking for my dream wife,” he said. “She’s up there somewhere, waiting for me, with her rosy halo. She would lie here naked in the sunshine without a thought for propriety.”
“Lucky her,” Gabby said. “Let me know when you find her. I want to warn her about the sunburns in her future.”
“There’s nothing in her future but me,” Quill said lazily. He rolled over, half on top of his wife, and murmured, “An hundred years should go to praise thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, but thirty thousand to the rest. That’s a rather lazy poem by Andrew Marvell. With world enough and time, I intend to keep my Dream Gabby busy—just the two of us, through all eternity.”
“Well,” said his wife, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, “then eternity is where the oh-so-lauded Dream Gabby and I part company.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your future on earth,” she said.
“What about it?”
“It won’t be so solitary by this time next year,” she whispered. “Not just you and me anymore.”
There was a moment’s silence. A frog plopped into the deep green depths of the Ganges. Reeds hushed themselves in a faint wind.
Quill cleared his throat. “Are you saying…?”
“Mmmm,” said his wife, her eyes smiling at him.
“Are you certain?”
“Absolutely.”
The Englishman rolled away and stood up, showing his naked self to the whole world, had the world shown any interest. “We’re going home,” he said briskly, reaching for his trousers and pulling them on.
His wife propped herself on her elbows and laughed. “Home to Jaipur or home to England?”
“Home to England.”
“I thought you needed a few more months to consolidate your trade routes to England. And Jawsant has truly appreciated your help with the royal treasury.”
Quill knelt on the grass next to his mischievous wife. “Home to England, Baggage.” He touched her nose with one finger.
Gabby sighed. “I suppose this is your way of telling me that you are outrageously happy?”
Quill nodded. “Of course.”
“Living with you is an act of interpretation, do you know that?”
“Living with you is…bliss. Did you know that?”
Gabby’s eyes filled with tears. A drift of white jasmine that bent over the Ganges succumbed to the breeze and scattered flowers. And Quill’s mouth came to hers as sweetly as the jasmine floated on the water.
A Note about Migraines,
Ecuadorian Frogs, and Indian Princes
My Indian prince, Kasi Rao, was indeed the only legitimate heir to the Holkar region of central India, a region that Richard Colley Wellesley, when he was governor-general of India, dearly wished to acquire. Wellesley was determined to dispose of Jawsant Holkar and replace him with his addled but legitimate half-brother, Kasi Rao. Given these basic facts, I have juggled events to suit my plot. It was not Kasi Rao’s father who imbibed too much cherry brandy and ended up under restraints, being fed on milk. It was instead his brother Jawsant, and at least one historian has suggested that Jawsant’s addiction resulted from his terrifying remorse after ordering the execution of Kasi Rao. I took an author’s privilege by granting my Kasi Rao an altogether longer and happier life with Mrs. Malabright.
The battle against migraines, megrims, or, as first mentioned in medieval English, the mygrame and other euyll passions of the head, has been documented for at least two thousand years. The cures that Quill had undergone prior to this novel (his encounters with camphor, sneezing powders, leeches, Indian hemp, and opium) were doled out to unhappy migraine patients in the 1800s. For anyone interested in the viability of Quill’s personal—and, I am certain, unusual—source of migraines, there are documented cases in which migraines follow sexual intercourse. I am indebted in these details to a wonderful book written by Dr. Oliver W. Sacks entitled Migraine: The Evolution of a Common Disorder. I hasten to add that Sudhakar’s dose of tree-frog poison is purely fictional. In 1998, The New Yorker reported that the future of pain management may lie in poison secreted by an Ecuadorian frog, the Epibpedobates tricolor, whose venom is proving to be seventy times more potent than morphine. It is my earnest hope that all migraine sufferers will receive a miraculous cure akin to Quill’s, whether due to an Ecuadorian frog or to less-exotic drug treatment.
About the Author
ELOISA JAMES is also the author of the acclaimed novels Potent Pleasures and Midnight Pleasures. She is a professor of English literature who lives with her family in New Jersey. Visit Eloisa James at www.eloisajames.com or visit our website at www.bantamdell.com.
Published by
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Eloisa James
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eISBN: 978-0-307-56949-3
May 2002
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