Chapter 1

Darjeeling, British India

1856

The road ended, in the manner of roads in that country, without announcing it.

For three days Thomas Wainwright had been carried upward in a palanquin whose bearers changed at every village and whose rhythm, a short grunting chant repeated for hours, had settled into his bones like a fever. They had left the plains behind at Siliguri, where the heat lay on the land like a hand, and had climbed through forest so dense that the light came down green and broken. Then the forest had given way to cloud. Now the path was a ribbon of wet stone clinging to the flank of a mountain, and the bearers walked it with the unhurried certainty of men who had never in their lives been anywhere else.

He drew back the curtain and looked out.

The mist moved across the slopes in slow sheets, parting to show a terraced hillside, then closing again. Where it lifted he could see the shapes of tea bushes in orderly rows, dark green and clipped low, following the contours of the land like the lines of a drawing. Beyond them the ground fell away into a valley so deep that its floor was lost in vapor, and beyond that, if he looked hard, there was a paleness higher than the clouds that he understood, after a moment, to be snow.

Thomas was thirty-six years old and had spent fourteen of those years in rooms. He knew the particular quiet of a counting-house at dusk, the scratch of a dozen pens, the smell of ink and coal smoke and damp wool. He knew how a column of figures ought to look and how it looked when someone had lied to it. He did not know what to do with a mountain, and the discovery was an uncomfortable one.

He did what he always did when confronted with something he could not immediately comprehend. He began to take inventory.

The road, first. It was too narrow for a cart and too steep for a mule train carrying anything of weight, which meant that every chest of tea leaving this place must go down on a man’s back or not at all. He counted the porters he passed, small, wiry men bent beneath loads strapped across their foreheads, and tried to estimate what a chest of tea would cost to move as far as the plains. He reached a figure and disliked it. A second figure, for the monsoon months when the path turned to mud and landslips closed it for days together, was worse.

Then the gardens. He noted the age of the bushes, which he could guess from their height, and the number of pickers visible at their work, women mostly, with baskets on their backs and their heads bound in cloth. He noted that several of the terraces had been cut recently, the raw earth still pale at their edges. Someone was expanding. Someone, therefore, believed that the price would hold.

It was a useful habit, and it also kept the other thing at bay. For beneath the arithmetic ran a quiet current of unease that he could not account for. The place was beautiful, and he had not expected that. He had been prepared for hardship, for fever, for insolent servants and indifferent officials. He had not been prepared to feel, as the palanquin rocked him through the drifting white, that he had stepped off the edge of something he understood.

“Darjeeling, sahib,” said the head bearer, some time later. He said it without turning, as one might announce a fact about the weather.

The town, if it deserved the word, was scattered along a ridge like something dropped there. There were a few stone buildings in the English style, a church whose spire was still new enough to look out of place, and a bazaar of timber and thatch where hill-people in thick wool and heavy silver jewelry bargained in a tongue Thomas could not name. Smoke rose from a hundred cookfires and flattened itself in the damp air. Somewhere a bell was ringing, and a dog was answering it.

The Company bungalow stood a little apart from the rest, on a shelf of land above the road. It was a long, low house with a deep veranda, a roof of corrugated iron already streaked with rust, and a garden that someone had tended with fierce and evident care. Roses grew along the veranda rail. There were roses, Thomas noted, in the Himalayas, where he had expected nothing but stone and cloud.

A man was waiting at the foot of the steps.

He was perhaps forty, slight and straight-backed, in a white cotton coat buttoned to the throat and a modest turban the color of dust. His hands were folded before him. He did not hurry forward as the bearers set the palanquin down, and he did not hang back either. He waited until Thomas had climbed out and stood stiffly in the road, working the ache from his knees, and then he inclined his head with exactly the degree of courtesy due to a man whose rank he had not yet determined.

“Mr. Wainwright,” he said. His English was careful and unhurried, each word set down like a cup on a saucer. “You are most welcome. I am Nandalal Mukherjee. I have the keeping of the house. Your rooms are ready, and the water for your bath is hot. I took the liberty of having it heated an hour ago, when the bearers were sighted on the lower road.”