The Girl From the Tea Garden

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  Fluffy didn’t seem surprised. ‘I rather suspected he had left the area.’

  Adela felt her eyes sting again with unwanted tears. ‘Perhaps it was too unsafe for him to be seen in Simla,’ she said, searching for an excuse.

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Fluffy. ‘What do you want to do now, my dear?’

  Adela thought bleakly how her life in Simla had collapsed around her so swiftly: she was outcast from the theatre group, gossiped about along the Mall and deserted by Jay. She had given up her job and neglected her duties at the hospital in favour of a social life of dances, dinners and riding expeditions, revelling in the limelight and encouraging Prince Jay. And worst of all, Sam lived close by in the hills and yet forever beyond her reach.

  ‘I think I should go home to Belgooree,’ Adela said quietly. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I agree, and I think it will make your parents very happy.’

  Adela felt a stab of guilt at how little thought she had given her parents and brother these past months. She had been having too much fun and had hardly spared the time to reply to their long, affectionate letters. A scribbled note shoved into an envelope with Fluffy’s longer epistles was all she had given them.

  ‘You’ve been so good to me, Auntie. The person I’ll miss most in Simla is you.’

  Fluffy smiled. ‘I’ll miss you too, my dear. You’ve been such a good companion. Noor and I will find the house very empty without you.’

  ‘Quiet, you mean.’ Adela gave a sad smile.

  ‘You know you can come back any time you want.’ Fluffy gave one of her direct looks. ‘But I think you are ready to move on. Go and pursue your ambition to be an actress. Don’t let the petty-minded of Simla put you off.’

  Adela felt her heart squeeze. ‘Auntie.’ She swallowed, forcing herself to ask, ‘When did you find out about my . . . about Mother’s parentage? Was it just since Nina came? That’s not why you want me to go, is it?’

  Fluffy looked at her, shocked. ‘Goodness me, how could you think such a thing? I’ve always known about it – ever since I met your dear mama on the boat coming out in ’22 and you were a wee thing rushing about on deck like an eager kitten. Some of the women were unkind to her, but she put them in their place with her polite but firm manner. It didn’t bother her that they knew she was Anglo-Indian – at least she didn’t show it – and it shouldn’t bother you.’

  Adela gave a teary smile at Fluffy’s brusque, wise words; they eased a fraction of the emptiness she felt. She leant across the wicker sofa and hugged her stout benefactor, breathing in her smell of camphor and lavender. ‘Thank you, Auntie. Thank you for everything and more.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Adela had forgotten how beautiful Belgooree was. She saw it with fresh eyes as her father drove her back up from Shillong into the Khassia hills. The orchids bloomed and the air smelt of honey; the car stirred up showers of butterflies as they drove by. The jungle parted like stage curtains from time to time to reveal cultivated terraces of potatoes. Cattle meandered out of the trees to cross the road, tended by boys in mountain caps who sang as they prodded the beasts out of the way.

  When the engine strained at the steeper gradient and they bumped along the plantation tracks between the emerald tea bushes, Adela felt emotion catch her throat. She waved at the women returning to the weighing machine with baskets of leaves strapped to their heads.

  ‘Second flush from Eastern Section?’ she asked.

  Wesley grinned and nodded. ‘Glad to see you haven’t forgotten everything about tea.’

  ‘I haven’t been away that long.’ She smiled.

  ‘Well, it seems like an eternity to me and your mother.’ He ruffled her hair like he used to when she was little. She leant in and hugged him.

  ‘Give it a week and you’ll be wishing me back to Aunt Fluffy’s.’

  ‘Very likely,’ he said and winked, accelerating past the factory and in through the compound, tooting the horn repeatedly.

  The noise brought Clarrie and Harry clattering down the bungalow steps.

  Harry threw himself at his big sister as soon as she climbed from the car. ‘Delly’s home!’

  She picked him up and swung him round in her arms, dropping him back swiftly. ‘Goodness, you’re like a sack of potatoes! I can hardly pick you up.’

  He reached up to be swung around again, but Adela was rushing to her mother for a much-needed hug. They clung on together.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Mother,’ she mumbled into Clarrie’s hair, noticing threads of grey for the first time.

  ‘Me too, my darling.’ Clarrie squeezed her tight and kissed her head. They broke apart and Clarrie scrutinised her. ‘You’re looking a little thin and pasty. Mohammed Din will have to feed you up. None of these faddy diets from Simla in this household.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Adela said and smiled, ‘but I’m fine really.’ There was something about the way her mother eyed her that made her self-conscious. Was it possible for a mother to tell just by looking that her daughter had lost her innocence? Adela turned away. ‘Where’s Ayah Mimi?’

  ‘You can go and see her,’ said Clarrie. ‘She keeps to her hut most of the time these days – sleeping and praying.’

  ‘She’s well though?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Wesley. ‘Still refusing to come and live in the house. She eats less than a mynah bird, but she’ll outlive us all.’

  Adela’s first days back were spent early-morning riding and accompanying her father around the tea garden. The temperature was climbing and there had been a couple of half-hearted storms, but the main monsoon was yet to arrive. They listened on the temperamental radio to reports of its progress up the Subcontinent. The rains had started in Ceylon.

  Clarrie was once again busy in the factory, overseeing with an eagle eye the processes of withering, rolling, fermenting, drying and sorting, as well as taking part in the tea tasting. Their mohurer, Daleep, had a flair for tea and had been trained up as a taster; Clarrie enjoyed debating with him about the character of their teas and whether they were bright and brisk or a touch flat and dull.

  ‘Never try and argue with Clarissa Belhaven when it comes to the merits of Belgooree tea,’ Wesley had joked with the eager young Daleep when he had first been promoted. ‘Just listen and learn.’ Daleep was now as expert as Wesley and gaining on Clarrie.

  Adela greeted the women in the sorting room as they sat on the floor over sieves, sifting the processed tea leaves into grades, their shawls pulled over their noses to keep out the dust. She breathed in the heady aromatic smell of tea that permeated the sheds, a safe, secure smell that conjured up her early childhood.

  Each day she called on her old nurse, Ayah Mimi, bringing her bowls of dal and making her tea. No one knew her age, but Sophie had guessed she was in her seventies, though she looked older. The woman had had a hard life after being Sophie’s nanny, eking out a living and ending up as a holy woman sheltering in the forest hut at the hilltop temple clearing, where Sophie had found her again. She was the last of the household to have seen Sophie’s baby brother after the fateful day Sophie’s father had shot his wife and turned the gun on himself. Ayah Mimi had fled with the baby, but been forced to hand him over to a police officer, who had dumped the newborn in an orphanage. For years Ayah Mimi had searched for him in vain, as had Sophie after her return to India as an adult.

  Adela waited a week before she brought the subject up, knowing it was painful for the old nurse. But the nagging thought that Tommy might be the missing boy would not go away. She sat on a rush mat on the bare floor of the ayah’s hut and talked about Sophie coming for her birthday.

  ‘One of the reasons Auntie Sophie likes to come here is to see you, Ayah Mimi. She’s always asking after you in her letters to Mother.’

  Ayah smiled and nodded.

  ‘I wonder how much she remembers being here when she was little. Can’t be much, can it? And her feelings about the place must be mixed.’

  Again the old woman
nodded, the expression in her eyes reflective.

  ‘Ayah, you don’t have to talk about this if it upsets you, but do you mind if I ask you something about Sophie’s baby brother?’

  Ayah didn’t flinch but fixed Adela with a steady gaze. After a long moment she nodded her assent.

  ‘A male friend of mine in Simla came from an orphanage in Shillong – he was adopted by a British couple – and he’d be the right sort of age for Sophie’s brother. I know it’s a long shot, but can you remember the name of the orphanage where you . . . where the Logan baby was taken? Was it the Catholics or the Welsh Baptists?’

  Ayah began to twist her hands in her lap. Her eyes focused on something distant. Her voice when she spoke was thin and high-pitched, like wind through reeds.

  ‘I don’t know which orphanage.’

  ‘But I thought you went to work in one in the hope of finding him.’

  ‘I did,’ she whispered, ‘but only because I thought that’s where the police officer would have taken him.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Adela felt a stab of disappointment.

  ‘That night – before the terrible thing happened – I took baby sahib in a basket to the village like Logan Memsahib said,’ Ayah recalled painfully. ‘She thought the baby was in danger from Logan Sahib – he was shouting so much at the baby. Ama, a wise local woman, sheltered us. But afterwards Burke Sahib, the policeman, found me and took him away – said I was stealing a white baby and I was never to try and find him or Sophie again or I would go to prison—’

  A dry sob broke from her throat. Adela immediately threw her arms around the tiny woman.

  ‘Even though he made bad threats,’ croaked Ayah, ‘I did everything to try and find Sophie because I knew from Burke Sahib that she was still alive. Logan Memsahib had kept her daughter safe by getting her to play hide and seek. But it was many years before I knew this – not until Sophie came back to me . . .’

  ‘Oh, Ayah, I shouldn’t have made you remember!’ They rocked back and forth.

  ‘I never forget,’ said Ayah, ‘not one day of my life. The little sahib is always in my heart.’ She looked at Adela with a spark of hope in her rheumy eyes. ‘Perhaps this Simla sahib is him.’

  ‘That’s what I keep wondering,’ Adela said. ‘Do you think I should mention it to Auntie Sophie?’

  ‘What is his name? Is he a nice man?’

  ‘Tommy Villiers – and yes, he’s nice. He’s fun and a bit of a show-off, but that’s an act he puts on – underneath he’s kind and really quite caring.’

  ‘Tommy Villiers,’ Ayah repeated. ‘What does he look like?’

  Adela pulled from her pocket the recent programme from The Arabian Nights.

  ‘It’s not very clear and he’s dressed up in a turban, but that’s Tommy sitting in the front. Do you think he looks anything like either of Sophie’s parents?’

  ‘The eyes,’ said Ayah, ‘they are kind, like Logan Memsahib’s.’

  It didn’t seem much to go on. ‘Would it be cruel to get Auntie Sophie’s hopes up?’ Adela said, sounding worried.

  ‘It is much more cruel never to know. If there is a chance, then tell her,’ Ayah urged.

  ‘But how can we ever prove it?’

  Ayah sighed at the impossibility. ‘If the gods have been good, then he will still possess the elephant bracelet.’

  ‘What bracelet?’

  ‘Logan Sahib had two that she wore. One she gave to Sophie, and one to me to sell if needs be to feed the baby. I tucked it into his shawl when that man took him away.’

  ‘I’ve seen Sophie’s bracelet – it’s made of ivory elephants’ heads. I used to count them as a child. Twelve heads.’

  Ayah Mimi nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’ll write to Tommy and ask him.’

  The old woman smiled and cradled her face with slim bony fingers. For the first time in ages Adela heard her old nanny break into a song of joy.

  On the thirteenth of June, Adela’s aunties arrived for her birthday, Tilly with ten-year-old Mungo and Sophie with Rafi. Harry shrieked with excitement to see the older boy, who at once started showing him his homemade catapult. They ran off into the garden to try it out.

  ‘Uncle James sends apologies and happy returns,’ said Tilly, kissing Adela, ‘but it’s too frantically busy at the Oxford Estates for him to get away. Doing as much as he can before the monsoons make the roads impassable.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ Adela said. ‘I’m just sorry he’ll miss the picnic.’

  She hadn’t wanted a big fuss made of her turning eighteen; somehow she felt so much older. It embarrassed her to hear her parents make teasing comments about their little girl being so grown up now and ready for the world.

  They went down to the river and swam in her favourite rock pool, where the waterfall gushed out of the steep cliff and tiny fish flashed beneath water lilies. Harry and Mungo splashed so much that Adela gave up and lounged on the rocks in her bathing suit next to Tilly, who was eating a slice of the massive ginger cake with buttercream icing that Mohammed Din had made for the picnic, and sweating under a large topee.

  ‘Don’t you look gorgeous and trim?’ Tilly said between mouthfuls. ‘You are made for the silver screen with a body like that, Adela.’

  Adela self-consciously pulled her knees to her chin and swiftly changed the subject.

  Late in the afternoon they returned to the compound and played tennis on the uneven court of dry grass at the side of the house: she and Rafi against Sophie and Wesley, with the boys rushing about fetching balls from the bushes and under the house. Adela and Rafi won. Rafi was still athletic and fast, and she knew her father had paired her up with Sophie’s husband so that she would win on her birthday.

  ‘He didn’t always used to beat me, you know.’ Sophie smiled. ‘Rafi, do you remember the first time we ever played?’ Sophie reminisced. ‘With Boz and Auntie Amy in Edinburgh?’

  Rafi’s mouth twitched in amusement. ‘I will never forget it. You beat me three sets to one and totally ignored me. I was smitten from that very moment.’

  ‘No, you weren’t.’ She laughed. ‘You thought I was a snobby little memsahib and I wasn’t very nice to you.’

  ‘You’ve made up for it since,’ he said and grinned, catching her hand and pulling her to him for a quick kiss on the lips.

  Adela thought with a pang of Jay’s sensual kisses. He’d been wrong about Rafi and Sophie; anyone could see how in love they still were after years of marriage. They didn’t seem to need anyone else to make them happy, and it threw her once again into a dilemma about whether to mention Tommy Villiers.

  At dinner that night Wesley announced their present to her.

  ‘A shikar trip to Gulgat, just like I promised.’ He beamed. ‘The Raja will accompany us too. Isn’t that an honour?’

  Adela’s heart thudded at the mention of Gulgat. ‘Yes, it is. How wonderful!’ She glanced at Sophie who was watching her with an anxious frown. ‘Will . . . will anyone else be going with us?’

  ‘Rafi of course,’ said her father, ‘and probably Stourton, the British Resident. He never misses a chance to bag a tiger.’

  ‘Tiger?’ Adela said in excitement.

  ‘There’s a pair of tigers the Raja wants shooting,’ Rafi explained. ‘They’ve been carrying off cattle from a riverside village.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Sophie said. ‘A villager has gone missing, a grass cutter. They think the tigress might be lame and has attacked the man as easy prey.’

  ‘A man-eater?’ Clarrie gasped. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  Tilly exclaimed, ‘Don’t tell Mungo, or he’ll want to go. I can’t think of anything worse. Stuff of nightmares. James can’t understand it. He thinks hunting is the best thing about being in India.’

  ‘We won’t take any risks,’ Rafi assured Clarrie. ‘Adela will be kept out of harm’s way.’

  ‘But man-eaters are cunning,’ Clarrie fretted.

  ‘You must trust me to lo
ok after our daughter,’ said Wesley. ‘You would have jumped at such a chance at her age, Clarissa.’

  Clarrie smiled. ‘You’re right of course. I used to go with my father on shikar. I’ll stop fussing.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ Adela cried. ‘My first tiger shoot. We better get some rifle practice in before we go, Dad.’

  ‘We’ll go out at dawn,’ he promised with a wink.

  Two days later Tilly and Mungo departed. ‘Next time we meet will be in Gawhatty’ – she beamed and gave Adela a clammy hug – ‘on our way home! Isn’t that exciting?’

  Adela tried to sound enthusiastic, but she hadn’t really given the trip much thought. She had agreed to it to please her mother, yet somehow it didn’t seem real. England, Aunt Olive and the Brewis family were a place and people she had no memory of; if it wasn’t for Cousin Jane’s chatty letters, she wouldn’t know them at all. Her thoughts were consumed with the pending hunting trip and the possibility of seeing Jay again.

  Before the Khans left Belgooree, she was determined to get Sophie alone. Adela had handed over a letter from Fatima with news of Ghulam that the doctor had been too nervous to post, but she’d had no chance to confide in her favourite aunt about the events in Simla that summer. Adela took Sophie into the garden, sat her down and told her about Tommy. Sophie’s brown eyes widened in astonishment and then abruptly flooded with tears. She grabbed Adela in a fierce hug.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible? When can I meet him? Should I write to him first?’

  Adela was taken aback by Sophie’s ecstatic reaction, latching on to the idea of Tommy being her brother as if it was already proven. She had a surge of misgiving; she wasn’t sure that Tommy even wanted a sister. He had treated the whole idea as a bit of a joke. He was happy being a Villiers – to the world, that’s who he was – and he might resent being unmasked as someone else entirely.

  ‘Perhaps I should write to him first,’ Adela said hastily. ‘Explain that you would like to be put in touch – if he’s willing.’

  ‘Would you?’ Sophie smiled tearfully. ‘I’d be so very grateful. You might find this hard to understand, but I still feel there’s a little part of me missing, knowing that I have a brother, but not knowing who or where he is. Or even if he lived beyond babyhood. No grave, no explanation, nothing.’ Her eyes shone. ‘I make up stories about him – I know it’s silly – but my favourite one is that he was given to a kind maharajah with a large loving family, and he’s grown into a strong handsome man who helps run his father’s estates wisely when he’s not playing polo or writing sitar music.’