Not Quite a Husband Read Online Free Page A

churns of white foam where it came to sudden drops and angles, and passed village after village—Grom, Maldesh, Batet, Kalashgram, Parakal.
    Birds sang in rhododendron bushes that would have been wild with flamingo pink blooms in spring. Water wheels creaked productively. Kalasha women in their elaborate shell headdresses and deep-piled bead necklaces prepared dinner around fire pits on the verandas of their tiny houses.
    The valley was not precisely a lost Eden—Kalasha children fetched high prices on the Chitrali slave market for their beauty and docility, Kalasha herdswere subject to raids and poaching from their more aggressive neighbors—but for this day it was peaceful, shining, and idyllic.
    Then the walls of the valley closed in. Fields, houses, and goat stables became scarcer, and then disappeared altogether. They exited Rumbur Valley where the Bumboret River and the Rumbur River joined, and entered a narrow gorge where no trees or grass grew. The river rushed impatiently far below; red and gray cliff walls blocked out the sun. Their path hung from the cliffs, twisting and turning with the whimsy of nature.
    At dusk the defile gave onto the wide alluvial plains of the Chitral Valley. The town of Ayun, draped in paddy fields, lay before them, its architecture strikingly different from the openness Bryony had become used to among the Kalasha. Here the houses all had high mud walls to protect their female inhabitants from the eyes of strangers. Only boys and men walked abroad.
    “I left the other coolies waiting for us on the outskirts,” said Leo. “We have no need to go into town.”
    She was relieved and irked at the same time. “You’ve planned this well, haven’t you?”
    “It never hurts to be prepared,” he answered smoothly.
    He’d sent ahead their guide, a leathery mannamed Imran, to inform the coolies of their arrival. By the time they rode into camp, an ayah had a hot towel on hand for Bryony to wipe away the dust of travel from her face. As she took her tea, buckets of steaming water were poured into the tub already set up in the bathing tent. And when she’d washed and dressed, she was given a plate of hot
pakoras
, vegetables dipped in gram flour batter and deep fried, to snack on while Leo bathed and the cooks prepared dinner.
    They sat down to dinner at almost the exact time she would have sat down to dine with the Braeburns. Mrs. Braeburn enjoyed this time of the day, the wisps of wood smoke rising in the cooling air, the streaks of twilight in the sky, the first pinpricks of fireflies.
    Dinner was mulligatawny soup, chicken cutlet, and curried lamb over rice. Bryony ate with her eyes on her food, cutting a trench around herself with her demeanor. But he did not take the hint.
    “What were you thinking?” he asked, in the same dulcet tone he’d used to compare her to a summer’s day.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
. “Leaving Leh without a word to your family? And why were you in Leh to begin with—is nobody in need of doctors anymore in all of Delhi?”
    She considered simply ignoring him. “Delhi was too hot,” she said finally.
    The heat had indeed been traumatic. Mere heat, however, she could have endured. But with Leo’s brother in town, everyone seemed to know not only who she was but that her marriage had ended badly. She had not traveled thousands of miles to have a duplicate of London society thrust upon her.
    “When the Moravian missionaries in Leh called for a temporary replacement for their resident doctor on home leave, I thought the climate would suit me better.”
    And the solitude.
    Leh was the capital of Ladakh, a high, arid plateau to the east of Kashmir, otherwise known as Little Tibet. Bryony had thought Leh would be a sleepy hamlet long past its days of glory. Instead, Leh was still a bustling city, playing host to caravans from as far as Chinese Turkestan. Within sight of the abandoned palace from whose rafters still fluttered long strings of prayer