Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

end of the Raj, but it might be newsworthy.

       And of course, I’d love to introduce you to Claire and our glorious boy. Do come!

      Your ever-loving brother,

       Shep

      Claire loved motherhood. She did. It had simply come too soon. Her only physical outlet was to walk the baby around Ross Island, which took all of an hour, and some days she would pause when Ty was asleep in his pram, and gaze out across the water to the forest in the north and wonder what her other self would be discovering at this exact moment in Behalla. What Kuli could be teaching her, or how that other baby, Artam, was growing. Not that she would trade Ty for any of them, but the Biya beckoned her in a way that motherhood couldn’t. While her son represented the future, the Biya represented a world that might soon become extinct. Time was crucial in both cases, but she felt it especially keenly when it came to documenting the Biya, and she’d only just begun to trust the promise of that work when pregnancy intervened. She longed to get back to it.

      While Ty was nursing, of course, field work would be impossible, but once he was weaned, it would still be a challenge. As a new father, Shep had become unnervingly protective. Lately, in honor of his paternal role, he’d even cut back on his own expeditions.

      Also, there was a new insistence to his affections that could verge on cloying, and the harder he reached for her, the more Claire tended to pull away. It horrified her to admit this, even to herself, but a part of her was responding to both Shep and Ty the way she once had to Robin—as if they somehow threatened something deep inside her that she couldn’t even name.

      Duty played a role in all this. She should have known it would. There had been a day back in New York. A thundershower. Romantic, she’d thought at the time. To Shep, however, the downpour represented an obligation.

      As they’d settled into a coffee shop to wait out the rain, he kept apologizing for his failure to bring an umbrella. “I could kick myself,” he persisted, even after they ordered their lunch.

      “Sounds like you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.” The words had bubbled up, amused, scolding—and unrecognizably libertine.

      Shep wouldn’t play. “Conditioned response is more like it.” He fingered the starched white cuff of his shirt, which gaped around his thin wrists. His hands tapered to squared pink nails, their restlessness at odds with their grooming.

      The rain had formed silver thistles on the window glass. “My father’s a British Royal Medical Officer,” Shep said. “In our family, a mistake like that would result in the silent treatment for days.”

      The silent treatment. In our family. His confessional tone had thrown down a marker. Whether he wished to or not, he held himself accountable. At the time, Shep didn’t know about Robin’s death, and his response when she did tell him later was the soul of compassion. Still, Claire shuddered to think how the British Royal Medical Officer would react if he learned what she’d done to her brother. Tread with care, Shep was telling her. Duty, to a fault.

      And what could be a greater duty than motherhood?

      Evenings at the club, she watched her husband across the terrace, sucking on his pipe. A new habit he’d picked up from the officers, she suspected, to make himself appear more mature. More fatherly.

      Their son was their joy, their connection. She adored them both. But she couldn’t help herself. When Tom Lutty, the wireless officer from North Point Station, happened to mention that some new field transceivers had come in for use by the bush police, she wanted to know more.

      According to Lieutenant Lutty, the devices were small as rucksacks and had a signal range of about eight kilometers. This was approximately the distance from Behalla to the coast.

      “How do they work?” she asked, bracing herself for Lutty’s effusive reply. The young redhead’s father was a Royal Scots Fusilier, his mother Bengali royalty—reputedly a scandalous liaison, though there was nothing remotely scandalous about Tom Lutty himself. He loved his “tinker-toys,” as he called the station equipment, and could go on about their technical intricacies, ad nauseum.

      Before he got too deeply into the nuts and bolts, Claire figured out what she was really asking. “I mean, how do you talk through them? They’re not telephones, are they?”

      The wireless officer bit back a laugh. “You never heard of Morse?”

      She laid out her plan to Shep that night as they walked back to the house. If Lutty trained them, they could have a lifeline when they went into the forest. All they’d have to do was ask Lieutenant Reynold to run his launch past a point within range of transmission, and whichever of them was out in the field could deliver a daily AOK.

      She didn’t mention that it had been an afterthought to include Shep in the training, a subtle way of making her point, since he’d never seen any need to touch base when he went off without her.

      “You’re that eager to get back at it?” The flickering gaslight warped his smile. “We could go out together, like before.”

      But the quaver in his voice betrayed him. She said, with some calculation, “You’d leave Ty alone with the servants? Without either of us nearby?”

      His distrust of servant loyalty aside, Shep had been just five when his parents sent him and his sister off to boarding school. If not for Vivian, he’d told Claire, he never would have survived it. And one was a far cry from five.

      There was a long pause. “I just hate to let you go,” he said finally.

      She took his arm and pulled him close.

      Fortunately, Tom made Morse code fun. He loved puzzles and games, and he seemed to take special pride in his speed of translation. The wireless was a battery-powered kit with an antenna that extended several feet overhead. On clear days they practiced setting it up on the lawn behind the station, with Claire transmitting essential messages such as AOK and SOS. Lutty would give them a thumbs up or down from the window when he received the correct, or botched, message.

      Claire and Shep both needed the chattering keys slowed to the pace of a metronome before they could grasp even the most basic incoming phrases. “It’s like music,” Claire said.

      “Right,” Lutty agreed. “Notes an’ rests. Rests an’ rests. Notes an’ notes.”

      “Patterns.” She studied the page of dots and dashes.

      “Just listen.” Lutty closed his eyes and began to nod as his finger tapped the key.

      Shep said, “Sounds like cardiac arrhythmia to me.”

      But Morse was the least of it. Frequency, range, call sign, directional, crystal, coil, triode . . . Claire thought, even machinery has its own language.

      At the end of their eighth lesson, after ten straight thumbs up, Tom placed a box phonograph on the window ledge above them and set it spinning with “Goody, Goody.”

      “Guess he’s signing off on you,” Shep said as Benny Goodman’s clarinet trilled down at them. “Can you jitterbug?”

      “Not well.”

      He called up to Lutty. “Get on down here, Tom, and show my bride what you’ve got.”

      An hour later she collapsed, laughing beside Shep on the grass, the exuberant lieutenant still spinning and shimmying solo before a crowd of cheering officers and bemused Indian MPs.

1938

      Claire tried to compromise between Ty’s needs and her own by ending their morning walks at the little stone library behind the club. The room was usually cool and empty, and apart from the bookshelves, a mahogany table and four heavy wooden chairs were the only furnishings. Each time she lifted him out of the pram—an