The Weeping Ash by Joan Aiken Page B

that he would. It was hard to resist Prince Mihal’s pleadings. “My dear Padg-ett—it is so deucedly boring here. Just one more game! What difference can the time make to you ?”
    When Scylla woke next morning, to the usual sound of crows bickering on the town ramparts up above, there was dead silence from her brother’s part of the bungalow. She could tell, because even the punkah was silent.
    Throwing aside festoons of mosquito netting, she pulled on a voluminous cotton wrapper and walked out onto the veranda. There the punkah wallah, whose duty it was to keep moving the long pole with a deep frill of material fastened along its length, was lying fast asleep.
    Scylla gave him a prod.
    â€œWake up, Ram! What time did my brother come home last night?”
    â€œCal Sahib did not return until the third hour, mem,” he answered, hastily beginning to pull on the punkah rope, which was attached to his big toe and ran through a hole in the wall. “The sahib was very weary and gave orders not to be called till noon.”
    â€œOh, he did, did he? The wretch!”
    Scylla grimaced to herself as she returned to her own room and splashed her face and arms with water, which was already lukewarm, from the big earthenware jar. Then, sighing with her usual irritation, she struggled into the muslin chemise and petticoats which Miss Musson considered essential for a European young lady to wear among the heathen. If only I could wear a sari or perjamas, how cool and practical it would be, how much less notice it would excite, thought Scylla, as she had so many times before. But Miss Musson was positive that her ward’s adoption of native dress would be the first step in a downward progression that would inevitably terminate in slavery, degradation, and death. “It is all very well for me, my dear Priscilla, to wear Pahari trousers, because I am aged and hideous and nobody takes me for anything but what I am, an eccentric old lady from Boston who chooses to try and teach ways of cleanliness and godliness to the idolaters. But you are so pretty that it would give rise to immediate misapprehension. No, no, you are best as you are.”
    If only she knew how often I had worn a sari before I came here , thought Scylla crossly, pulling on a blue calico riding dress with a full skirt and gathered high to the neck. The material was already faded almost white along the tops of the gathers from the Indian sun, and showed stains under the armpits in spite of frequent ferocious scrubbings by the dhobi. At least, however, Miss Musson had relented about Scylla’s hair; it would have been senseless folly to attempt in Ziatur the fashionable high-piled style which was still worn by ladies in Calcutta long after it had vanished from Paris and London. Scylla’s hair had been shorn when she had fever at the age of twelve, and it had never grown very long since then; now her soft, silver-pale curls clustered in comfortable disorder above her brow and ears; half a dozen strokes with a brush, and her toilet was complete.
    â€œHow—with your coloring so different—you and that brother of yours can be twins —” Miss Musson often said at first.
    â€œWe are not identical twins, ma’am,” Carloman had pointed out. “The nonidentical ones are frequently quite different, I understand; and how lucky for me! Who would wish to look like Miss Monkey Face there?”
    â€œCarloman! You should not speak so of your sister!”
    But Scylla only laughed. She did not, in fact, resemble a monkey so much as a charming little pug dog; her nose was exceedingly short and straight, with a slight upward tilt to the nostrils; her soft pink mouth was triangular, with dimples at each corner; and a pair of huge guileless gray-blue eyes gazed trustfully out at the world from under level brows which were rather darker than her silvery curls.
    â€œIt’s those eyes of yours that really gull