East of the Sun by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online Page A

Bloomsbury, where The Voice, a feminist magazine begun by two suffragette sisters, Violet and Fiona Thyme, had its headquarters. Mrs. Driver had introduced her.
    If they liked the story, the sisters had promised to pay her ten pounds for one thousand words. “Forget elephant hunts and spicy smells, dear,” said Violet, who had once been to jail with Emily Pankhurst, and who smoked small cheroots. “Lift the lid on what really happens to all those women going to India, and what they think they’ll do when the whole thing collapses.”
    “First,” wrote Viva, “there are the memsahibs—the name in Hindi means ‘the master’s women,’ all of whom are traveling on this ship by first class.” (“Check there is a second class,” she wrote in the margin, for she hadn’t had much time yet to explore.)
    “I have seen them in the ship’s elegant dining room, and their plumage is quite varied—some favoring the more dowdy feathers of the shires: dun-colored tweeds, silk dresses in various shades of potato, sensible shoes, and thick stockings. Some look as if their hearts have already been half-broken by India. Others are extremely elegant, maybe they already know there will be little else to do when they get there but go to the club, the tennis court, or the shoot, where the same small crowd will watch each other with hawklike fascination and be quietly determined not to let themselves fall behind in the fashion stakes. Next, we have the skittishly nervous young girls who are collectively and unkindly called the Fishing Fleet. They are going to India to look for husbands, and they’ve been going there with their hooks baited ever since the early nineteeth century.”
    (“When exactly? You must talk to them” she scrawled in the margin.)
    “Most come after the London season is over and where, presumably, they have fallen at the first fence of that glorified marriage market. India, where men of their class outnumber women by three to one, will be their last chance to find a husband.”
    She put down her pen for a while and thought of Rose, who smelled of Devonshire violets, and who was, Tor was right, ravishingly pretty. She seemed to epitomize a peculiarly British kind of innocence: fine-skinned, appealingly shy, unsure of men.
    On their first night at sea, she’d gone down to the girls’ cabin to see if they were all right. The door was unlocked, and when she’d put her head round the door, she’d found Rose lying facedown on the bed quietly weeping. The girl had leaped up immediately and mumbled something about her brother, or maybe it was her father—that poor man had looked so devastated as she’d left—and apologized for being such a wet. And Viva had experienced what she imagined it felt like to have a maternal impulse; she had longed to put her arms around her, but knew it would embarrass them both.
    She’s petrified, she thought. And why not?
    “For some, this could turn out to be a voyage into nightmare: it was vessels like these that took those who were hacked to death in Cawnpore out to India. Others will discover what it is like to want to die of heat; or they may be shot at, or have their children die of tropical diseases or taken away from them at an early age and educated half a world away.”
    Viva put her pen down. This, of course, would be the natural moment to tell them about her own father’s death. Or not. Experience had taught her that telling meant enduring other people’s moistly sympathetic looks, their embarrassment, the long accounts of other people they knew who’d lost people abroad,or, worst of all, attempts to think of some uplifting moral that would make sense of it all. And besides, the car-crash story now tripped off her tongue so easily it felt almost real.
    “And next, there are women like myself: single women with no sahib and no wish for one, who love India and like to work. You see, nobody ever really writes about them—the governesses, the schoolteachers, the