The Worm in Every Heart by Gemma Files Read Free Book Online

but one woman in a red-and-gold sari, who hoisted the child on her hip a little higher and told it, beneath her breath:
    â€œBe calm now, my darling, that thou dost not draw his gaze—only turn away in quiet, and think no more on what he is. Rhakshasa araha hai.”
    Grammar paused a moment, staring at her. His blue eyes dimmed to slits, so narrow they could only take proper stock of her flash by flash, a visual piece-meal: Red cloth draped loose over lithe brown skin, red dab of fixed bindi between her level black brows. Round curve of thigh flexing beneath red folds, enticingly graspable; flatter curve of belly stretched taut under the child’s whimpering grip, inviting perforation. The whole of her lapped in red-tinged afternoon shadow and a sudden red wind that blew his own scarlet uniform jacket briefly open and shut, then open and shut again, rhythmless as a diseased heart’s liquescent flap.
    Through a rising hiss of arousal, he noticed—without even much anticipation—that his hand had already fallen, reflexively, to the hilt of his sword.
    And Romesh Singh stirred uncomfortably in his saddle, sweat starting up on every limb, as he caught an improbable whiff of old blood—the death-inflected musk of British madness—from Grammar’s clean blonde halo of hair.
    â€œSahib,” he began, delicately.
    Beside him, Ottilie Mill gave an equally well-modulated cough of pain. Suggesting, without rancor:
    â€œYou will bruise my hand if you continue to hold it so tightly, Lieutenant.”
    Grammar—abruptly remembering he and Romesh Singh were not, after all, free to act as though they were alone at this particular moment—nodded, politely, and let her go.
    â€œMy most sincere apologies,” he told her, in English. And meant it.
    (For she—and her sister as well, wide-eyed and silent behind the unfurled screen of her fan—were both so very little to him indeed that they deserved such meaningless courtesies.)
    Then, switching back to Romesh Singh (and Urdu): “This . . . ”
    . . . indicating the woman, who stood stock-still before him, her eyes downcast . . .
    â€œ . . . has named me unfamiliarly, perhaps insultingly, as ‘Rhakshasa’. Hast thou some idea of what she means by it?”
    â€œNo, sahib,” replied Romesh Singh, his own eyes busy on the river’s muddy bank—now thoroughly vacated, but for his countrywoman and her child.
    â€œI do not think thou art being entirely truthful,” Grammar said, sweetly. “But no matter, for I do not care enough to inquire further.”
    To the woman: “As for thee, let us not meet again; for I tell thee truly, if ever I behold thy face within these city walls, I will certainly rip thy child’s head from its throat and wash my face in its blood.”
    He urged his horse on, gesturing to the Misses, who followed, gratefully—along with Romesh Singh, keeping his usual careful distance. The woman watched them go, hugging her child to her, and heard the distant cries of a pack of children playing age-old games with forced confinement and flame: A scorpion in the dust, under the pitiless sun; a sloppy circle smeared first with saffron, then further limned in lamp-oil; a spark, falling. Simple pleasures.
    Up and down the river, meanwhile, servants waited on the green lawns of British estates, their only duty to push any bloated corpses which might come floating by a little further on, so as not to spoil the view.
    Later that night, after the accident, I was to complete my role in the day’s events by appearing to the surviving Miss Mill—Sufferance, cheated of her chance at precedence yet again—in the guise of her dead sister, naked and desirable. Her resultant suicide by hanging, from a peepul tree by the very stretch of riverside where she and Ottilie had listened (all uncomprehending, neither being particularly fluent in Hindi) as Desbarrats