Behold My Wife

A frost-bitten fable unspools beneath the cedar spires of British Columbia: an Oxford-educated aristocrat, smarting from a snub by London’s drawing-room elite, purchases a bride from a Sikh trading post—her eyes still carrying monsoon memories—then ships her across the Atlantic like an ornate, spiteful parcel. In the fog-softened manor of his ancestral enemy, this copper-skinned stranger, whose sari whispers of turmeric and cedar-smoke, becomes both weapon and wound. The groom’s estranged brother, a sinewy scholar of Blake and botany, teaches her to read the English rain as if it were Sanskrit verse; together they unpick the corset of Empire, thread by thread. When the vindictive husband finally returns, expecting to flaunt a tarnished trophy, he discovers that the woman he tried to weaponize has quietly become the blade—her newfound eloquence, her sly mastery of land-law, and the unborn child she carries (whose paternity hums with delicious ambiguity) have rewritten the script of power.