Work Text:
She had expected the heat of India, the baked taste of the air and the way it made even the thinnest muslin stick uncomfortably to the skin.
She had expected to burn under an unforgiving sun, to be faced with hard work and danger of illness and recalcitrant natives.
So St John had spoken of it, between more lessons in Hindostanee and the laying out of maps, with a tremor of missionary passion behind the measured words, even smiling with something like relish when he had spoken of the malaria and of the illiteracy and ignorance of the villages. And she had felt a corresponding surge of nervous energy at the thought of it, the work. But he had not told her to expect the rain.
"Oh yes, Mrs Rivers," Mr Combe shouted over yet another crash of thunder, the constant drum of the rain itself hardly a gentler sound. He was an East India clerk whom they had met on the ship, and who was travelling with them as far as Benares. "I'm afraid it can go on like for months."
The thunder cracked again, a great shout, white lightning forking across a tremendous purple sky. St John's hair was curling to his forehead, his neckerchief soaked and his boots splashed red to the knee. Little rivulets ran in her own hair, turning it bedraggled under her bonnet and chasing cold down the back of her neck; it was uncomfortable in the extreme, but the way the storm drove the rain at them, in furious warm gusts that bent the strange trees quite in half, was exhilarating too. There were curious scarlet flowers in the trees, some of which fallen underfoot and lay vivid as red silk in the black mud.
She glanced at St John but he was striding rapidly ahead, eyes on the dark horizon, and she knew he would not care to have his mind drawn away from whatever plans he was sketching for the sake of such details.
The opportunity to test her Hindostanee came at the next village, where they had to stop since the rain had made imperative to find shelter. It was a tiny scattering of primitive huts, too small to make it likely that they would find any representative of the Company or other Englishman there and she armed herself with what memories of grammar she could recall.
Unfortunately, she could not call to mind the Hindostanee for shelter. However, it did not matter in the end; the few people they saw in the village, quaintly turbaned men and a few children, would not stop to speak to them or be spoken to. She caught only one glimpse of a woman, old and stooped, dressed all in white cloth in the Indian fashion for a widow, with her hair white and her lined skin dark as teak.
Her eyes met Jane's, arrestingly bright and enquiring, for one moment in the street; there was something sardonic in her expression, oddly familiar, and Jane forgot her Hindostanee in recognition. Then St John stepped forward with his question about shelter and the woman's eyes flickered, shuttered, and she turned away without another word or glance.
At last, they found some protection for themselves under what Jane first took to be a cluster of trees and then realised was a single monstrous tree with several trunks, all so clustered about with hanging roots that she could not distinguish the branch from the root. There was a single black stone by the tree, shining with rain and surrounded by the same scarlet flowers, seven or eight of them, carefully placed.
"An idol," St John said, knocking lightly at the stone with his boot. "You can find a thousand of them, one in every such hamlet in the land. To root out every one would be more than a life's work."
More than a life's work. He said it with his usual stern joy and Jane sought to summon up the answering thrill but found herself oddly distracted. She had pictured the idols as brass and gold, Moloch figures, and the single unfeatured stone, the small sacrifice of flowers, was oddly incongruous.
More rain fell. She picked up one of the scarlet flowers; it was as silkily textured as it looked, with long curling petals. There was a smell rising from the earth, rich and fresh, and she thought suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, with a vivid pain, of Mr Rochester. It felt as though she saw him, almost, whole before her, with his square forehead and the shifting black of his eyes and the half-grimacing turn of his smile; it was as if his blunt hand was on her damp cheek, as it had been that night in the garden; as if she almost heard his voice, murmuring in a strange hopeless accent, very soft, Jane, Jane.
"I think it has stopped for the day," Mr Combe said cautiously, and she started, glancing up. There was steady drip from the tangled roots of the tree above them, but the noise of the storm itself has ceased entirely. St John stood.
"We have another's travel before us," he said, his profile half-turned away from Jane, gazing to the east. In the quietened air, with his air of strength and purpose, he looked very handsome, even bedraggled as he was with mud and rain. "Another day, and the school should have been prepared for us - we may begin at once." He turned and smiled at Jane as he said it, unearthly bright, and offered her his hand. "Mrs Rivers."
"It'll start up again soon enough," Mr Combe warned gloomily, hauling himself reluctantly up as Jane slid her hand into St John's cool grasp and brought herself to her feet. "Goes on for months."
"It will not take us months," St John replied with a secret hint of a smile, putting his arm with some deliberation about Jane's waist. "And we shall weather it well enough when we have reached our destination. Shall we not, Jane?"
She looked at the lowering horizon, where the hope of storm was gathering its forces again. St John's arm was as cool and firm as a stone wall by her side, enclosing. She dropped the flower. "God willing."