Chapter 40 #2
He might have protested, but she was already gone. When he next opened his eyes, it was the older nun looking down on him once more.
“Where… where am I?”
“You are in a mission house in Calcutta,” she replied.
“A mission house?” The words came slowly, as though dragged from him.
“Yes, the only one that remains.”
He frowned faintly. “Remains?”
“From before His Holiness abolished us twenty years ago. The rest are now gone.”
That puzzled him, though his mind struggled to hold the thought.
“You are… Catholic?” he asked, after a moment.
She inclined her head. “I am. Sister Mary Francis, of the Society of Jesus.”
Frederick closed his eyes briefly, considering. “I had thought… between Rome and the Company… all such places—”
“Had been suppressed,” she finished for him.
“Yes.”
A shadow passed over her expression. “For many, they have been. We remain only by God’s grace… and perhaps by not drawing too much attention to ourselves.”
He gave the faintest huff of breath that might have been a laugh, had he possessed the strength.
“Fortunate,” he murmured.
“For now,” she said simply. Then, after a moment, “We have hope that our situation may improve.”
“Oh?” he asked. “How so?”
“There is a missionary expected,” she said. “Mr. Carey. He and his wife were delayed in their arrival, but we have been given reason to believe he will assist us.”
“Carey?” Frederick repeated. “I do not know the name.”
“Mr. William Carey,” she clarified. “He is connected to the Particular Baptist Society.”
Frederick raised a brow. “The… what?”
A faint smile touched her lips—small, but unmistakable.
“The Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen,” she said. “Though in India, no one has the time to say the whole of it—we are too busy.”
He gave a weak chuckle, which earned him a small smile.
The days passed in fragments.
He woke.
He slept.
Sometimes he was aware of voices, of movement, of the low murmur of prayers.
More often, it was her.
The girl.
She came when he was at his weakest—when the fever surged and his thoughts slipped away from him. She spoke little, if at all, but her presence was constant. The cloth, the broth, the steady care that asked nothing and expected nothing.
Once—only once—he thought he heard her humming, soft and low, as she worked.
Another time, he woke to find her dozing in the chair beside him, her head bowed, one hand still loosely wrapped around the edge of his blanket as though she had not meant to sleep at all.
But whenever he was fully awake—
She was gone.
And the nun took her place.
“Who is she?” he asked at last, one afternoon when the worst of the fever had passed and his thoughts came more clearly. “The young woman who has been attending me.”
Sister Mary Francis followed his gaze across the room, her expression changing. The girl was there, tending to a child—lifting it gently, murmuring something too soft to hear.
Her lips pressed together, just slightly. “You refer to Anya,” she said.
He inclined his head.
“She is… one of many,” the nun said, her tone measured. “The daughter of a man in service to the East India Company. A tradesman of some means.”
Frederick frowned. “Then why—?”
“She was not born to a marriage recognized by English law,” the nun said, her lips pressing together. “Her father took a wife according to local custom. When he returned to England, he did not consider himself bound by it.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“It is not uncommon,” she continued, more quietly. “There are many such children. Too many. Some cannot pass. Others…” Her gaze flicked, briefly, toward the young woman across the room. “Others might, if they were placed in the proper setting.”
Frederick followed her look.
Anya moved among a cluster of small cots, tending to a crying child with a patience that seemed inexhaustible. She lifted the infant, murmuring softly, her hands gentle, sure.
“She has remained with us,” the nun said. “Helping where she can.”
Frederick watched her in silence.
Over the following weeks, as his strength slowly returned, he saw more.
Saw how she worked without complaint, how she moved from one task to another without hesitation. The way she soothed the children, the quiet steadiness of her manner, the absence of bitterness in her expression.
She had every reason for resentment.
And yet—
There was none.
Only kindness.
And something else.
Something that, despite everything, remained unbroken.
As his strength slowly returned, he found his gaze drawn to her again and again, and soon the passing interest he had initially felt began to develop into something more.
When the time had at last come for him to resume his life, he did so with reluctance he did not entirely understand.
Life resumed.
Or something like it.
He returned to trade, though it was not the same as before. Nearly all that he had possessed had been sent away with that final letter—the letter he had believed would be his last. He began again with little more than his name and his knowledge.
Fortunately, those proved to be sufficient.
His former partner received him with astonishment, and no small degree of satisfaction.
“You always did have a talent for surviving what ought to kill you,” the man remarked, clapping him on the shoulder. “And I have sorely missed your judgment in my accounts.”
Frederick allowed himself a faint smile.
Within days, a modest sum was placed at his disposal. Within weeks, it had been repaid—doubled—through a venture that bore all the marks of Frederick’s careful calculation.
He had always possessed a head for numbers.
For opportunity.
For risk that was not truly risk at all.
And now?
Now he applied it with a purpose he had never before known.
The money he earned no longer seemed his own.
Each pound, each farthing, took on a different weight—measured not in profit, but in what it might accomplish.
A blanket.
Medicine.
Food.
Time.
Life.
The mission house had not asked anything of him.
But that did not lessen the debt.
If anything, it deepened it.
And so he gave.
Quietly.
Consistently.
Initially, he had intended to send most of what he earned back to England for Elizabeth. But those future remittances, those careful provisions—those he now diverted elsewhere. Not out of neglect, but out of a hard, settled certainty.
His brother would care for her. Of that, he had never truly doubted.
But here, in India?
Here were so many who had no such assurances of protection, of safety, of life.
And the memory of that dim, fevered room—the cool cloth upon his brow, the steady hand that had refused to abandon him when he could offer nothing in return—remained too vivid to ignore.
He threw himself into his work.
Not merely with diligence, but with something bordering on fervor.
There were times—quiet moments, usually in the evening—when his thoughts turned toward England.
Toward what had been left behind.
Toward Cathy.
Toward the child he had never held beyond those first desperate hours.
The ache of it had not lessened. It had simply… settled. Become something he carried, rather than something that consumed him.
You could go home. The thought came, now and again.
He might reclaim what had been lost.
But each time, the same conclusions followed: the world believed him dead, and Cathy had married someone else.
His reappearance would not restore what had been taken. It would only disturb what fragile order had been built in his absence. It might cast doubt where none need exist. It might bring harm where he most wished to protect.
And as for Elizabeth, it was better, perhaps, that she remain the daughter of the man who was raising her rather than the complication of a truth that could offer her nothing but illegitimacy and rejection.
No.
It was better this way.
Better that he remain, in England’s eyes, a ghost.
Better that whatever purpose had been preserved for him—whether by chance or by Providence—be fulfilled here.
And so, Frederick Bennet, who had once expected to die in a narrow cot in a mission house in Calcutta—
Lived.
And worked.
And gave.
As though the life returned to him had been granted for no other reason than that he might spend it.