“Did I ever tell you the story of that tiger?” he asks.
“Yes, Father. You did.”
“No, I didn’t tell you everything,” he says. “I did not tell you about the day I shot the tiger.”
I remember the moment in his room after the morphine. I thought it nothing more than ramblings at the time. This isn’t the story I know, and I am afraid of this new story. He doesn’t wait for my answer. He means to tell it. He has heard me; now I shall hear him.
“The tiger had gone. He did not come around again. But I was a man possessed. The tiger had come too close, you see. I no longer felt safe. I hired the best tracker in Bombay. We hunted for days, tracking the tiger to the mountains there. We found him taking water from a small watering hole. He looked up but he did not charge. He took no notice of us at all but continued to drink. ‘Sahib, let us go,’ the boy said. ‘This tiger means you no harm.’ He was right, of course. But we had come all that way. The gun was in my hand. The tiger was before us. I took aim and shot it dead on the spot. I sold the tiger’s skin for a fortune to a man in Bombay, and he called me brave for it. But it was not courage that brought me to that; it was fear.”
He drums his fingers on the mantel before the grim-faced portrait. “I could not live with the threat of it. I could not live with the knowledge that the tiger was out there, roaming free. But you,” he says, smiling with a mix of sadness and pride, “you faced the tiger and survived.”
He coughs several times, his chest heaving with the effort. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his mouth quickly, then hides the linen safely in his pocket again so that I cannot see the stain that is surely there. “The time has come for me to face my tiger, to look him in the eye and see which of us survives. I shall return to India. Your future is yours to shape. I shall prepare your grandmother for the scandal of it.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
“Yes, well,” he says. “And now, if you don’t mind, I should like to dance with my daughter on the occasion of her debut.”
He offers his arm and I take it. “I should like that very much.”
We fall into the great continuing circle of dancers. Some leave the floor, tired but giddy; others have only just arrived. They are eager to wear their new status as ladies, to be paraded about and lauded until they see themselves with new eyes. The fathers beam at their daughters, thinking them perfect flowers in need of their protection, while the mothers watch from the margins, certain this moment is their doing. We create the illusions we need to go on. And one day, when they no longer dazzle or comfort, we tear them down, brick by glittering brick, until we are left with nothing but the bright light of honesty. The light is liberating. Necessary. Terrifying. We stand naked and emptied before it. And when it is too much for our eyes to take, we build a new illusion to shield us from its relentless truth.
But the girls! Their eyes glow with the fever dream of all they might become. They tell themselves this is the beginning of everything. And who am I to say it isn’t?
“Gemma! Gemma!” Felicity is pushing through the crowd, her chagrined chaperone struggling to keep up as the dowagers look on, disapprovingly. It is only an hour into her debut and already she has them spinning like tops. And for the first time in days, I smile.
“Gemma,” Felicity says, catching up to me. Her words tumble over each other in a torrent of excitement: “You look beautiful! How do you like my dress? Elizabeth tottered a bit—did you see it? The Queen was magnificent, wasn’t she? I was terrified. Were you?”
“Utterly,” I say. “I thought I might faint after all.”
“Did you receive Ann’s cable?” Felicity asks.
I received a lovely telegram from Ann this very morning, wishing me well. It read:
REHEARSALS ARE SPLENDID STOP THE GAIETY IS THRILLING STOP BEST OF LUCK WITH YOUR CURTSY STOP YOURS ANN BRADSHAW
“Yes,” I say. “She must have spent her future wages on it.”
“When the season ends, I am to accompany my mother and Polly to Paris, then stay on.”
“What of Horace Markham?” I ask warily.
“Well,” she begins, “I went to him. By myself. And told him I didn’t love him and didn’t wish to marry him and that I would make a perfect fishmonger of a wife. And do you know what he said?”
I shake my head.
Her eyes widen. “He said he didn’t want to marry me, either. Can you imagine? I was rather wounded.”
I laugh a bit, the first laugh I’ve had. Feels odd and near a cry.