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.
Buthere,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.
