His mention of the hospital brought an image of Emily linked up to the life-support machines. “I hope he’s not too ill.”
“Dasmaya, whom I spoke to, said he’d be back on his feet eventually, but it could take a while.”
That upset all their plans. Apart from the fact that, at his age, there was a possibility he might never return.
Jonathan must have seen her disappointment because he said, “People here believe that the gods are in control of everything. We’ll have to trust them. The old man is almost a saint to them. If he doesn’t have a good line to the gods, who does?”
“And what if he dies?”
“Then we’ll find someone else who can help us. But we should think positively; that’s the best way we can help Vijita.”
Diana’s self-consciousness among the wedding guests soon disappeared as the celebrations got into full swing. Almost like a member of the family, she soon found herself near the happy couple, who sat proudly on a wicker sofa that was richly adorned with flowers. A pair of Buddhist monks entered, and a murmur rippled through the crowd. The men, whose orange habits shone against their dark skins, fanned themselves with palm leaves as they approached the bridal couple to bless them. By way of thanks, the couple washed the monks’ feet and invited them to eat with them.
During the meal, Diana couldn’t take her eyes off them. She had seen Buddhist monks in the movies, but had never been in the same room as one before.
When the monks had finished, they began their ritual singing while the guests listened, enraptured, many of them in the lotus position, which Diana had never managed.
The monks eventually rose and one of them said something that caused the others to kneel before them in turn to have a white band tied round their wrists.
Diana hesitated. Did she have the right to seek a blessing? After all, she wasn’t a Buddhist . . .
“Feel free to join in,” Jonathan whispered. “You’ll be showing respect, and it can’t hurt to get a blessing from them.”
Encouraged, Diana also knelt and looked at the monk, his face lined by hundreds of wrinkles. With a smile, he moved his hands in the prayer position over her brow, then tied a white band around her wrist.
“That’s to bring good luck,” Jonathan whispered after he, too, had received his band. “I think you’ll need it in your search.”
Diana nodded, then gazed at the band, thinking about the unknown Nadi reader and how much hung on his recovery.
5
Vannattuppūcci, 1887
Henry Tremayne felt strange as he entered his brother’s study. Part of Richard’s soul still seemed to linger there—this room looked as though he had only left it for a brief tour of the plantation. A bitter smile crossed Henry’s lips. All those years he had spent hating his brother for throwing his family responsibilities to the wind. But now, recognising his traits clearly in the arrangement of the room, the books, and the writing implements on the mahogany desk, he felt an almost affectionate pull towards Richard.
He was only too familiar with the cause of his animosity towards his brother.
Henry had dreamed of becoming a scientist—a chemist or a physicist—but since there was no one who could take care of his parents’ estate, and his father had died shortly before he had finished his schooling at Eton, the responsibility for Tremayne House had fallen to him. While his brother enjoyed his freedom abroad and lived his adventure, such a path would forever be closed to Henry because he was dragged down by the chains that should have bound Richard.
A knock at the door tore Henry from his reflections. He glanced at the clock. It was time for his appointment.
“Enter!” he called out as he took a seat behind the desk.
As he entered, Mr. Vikrama straightened visibly then inclined his head in greeting. “Good morning, sir. I hope you had a pleasant night’s sleep.”
“I can only repeat what I told my butler this morning: I slept like a rock and couldn’t have felt better in my own mother’s lap.” As Henry offered his hand for the young man to shake, he saw a smile on Vikrama’s lips. Henry noticed his gaze was directed towards the window, but as he turned to look, he saw nothing.
“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” Vikrama said, his expression turning serious again. “Some Europeans have problems adjusting to this country’s climate.”
“We had some time in Colombo to acclimatise ourselves. During the first night here I was so tired that I could have slept next to a ship’s turbine. Do take a seat.”
Henry indicated the chair in front of the desk. His visitor sat with a suppleness that he himself had lost over the years.
“So, you’re a kind of foreman over the plantation?”
“You could call it that. Your brother was kind enough to appoint me to the position.”
Henry regarded him for a moment. It was hard to believe that this cultured, obviously clever man was the son of a labourer and a Tamil!
“How long have you been in my brother’s service?”
“Since I was fourteen,” Vikrama replied. “But I’ve lived on the plantation since I was a child. My mother worked as a tea picker here, and Mr. Tremayne sent me and the other children to school so that we could learn to read and write. He believed that educated employees would be of more use than an illiterate workforce—especially in such a sensitive business as the tea trade. I think it was Mr. Taylor—from whom he acquired the first tea plants—who gave him the idea.”
Henry recalled that Richard had referred to James Taylor in one of his first letters, back when he had been trying to get his brother to understand his decision and at least hold on to his affection.
Henry had pretended not to be interested, but the letter, which he had only read once, had remained so well ingrained in his mind that he could still recall how James Taylor had travelled from Calcutta to Ceylon with a trunk of seedlings in order to compete with the coffee plantations that had been the staple trade on the island at the time. Fate had been kind to him, coffee producers became tea producers, and now tea cultivation was becoming increasingly widespread.
Pushing the memory to one side, Henry cleared his throat. “And where did my brother employ these educated young people?”
“Mainly in administration. Unless a pupil turned out to be stupid.” A distant memory brought a smile to Vikrama’s face. “My mother always urged me to be the best. It was the only way to achieve anything. Of course, everyone else thought she was crazy, but Mr. Tremayne recognised and encouraged my abilities. It was only through him that I became the man I am now, and that’s why I regret his dreadful fate so much.”
“As do we all.” Henry folded his hands on the desk in front of him as though about to pray. He found this unknown side to his brother as bewildering as the young man in front of him, whose abilities clearly exceeded a normal school education. “But I can assure you that my brother’s spirit will live on here. The school you refer to—is it still going?”
Vikrama nodded. “Yes, sir, one of my former classmates runs it and teaches the Tamil boys all they need to know.”
“What about the Sinhalese?”
A hint of contempt showed in Vikrama’s eyes. “They prefer to keep among their own kind. Hardly any of the Sinhalese families are prepared to send their children to school.”
“Well, in this world there must always be someone to do the more mundane work, after all.” Henry rose. “I’m looking forward to your guided tour very much, and I hope you won’t hold back on your knowledge about tea.”
“I’ll do my best.”
He stood up to join Henry, and the two men left the study.
Catching her breath, Grace pressed herself against the wall of the house. Her heart was beating wildly as though she had been caught doing something forbidden.
“You must be mad!” she hissed to her sister. “I bet that Vikrama saw us.”
“If so I’m sure he would have told Papa, and he would have come to the window,” Victoria replied. “You should be a bit bolder. After all, it
was your idea to creep after them.”
Grace was about to reply, but the crunching of feet on gravel made the words stick in her throat. “They’re coming!”
The two girls quickly slipped behind a white-flowered rhododendron bush from where they could peer through the twigs and watch their father and the foreman. Without a sideways glance, the men headed for the outbuilding that housed the plantation’s administrative office. That didn’t promise to be too exciting, so Grace decided they should wait where they were for a while until they had calmed down.
“Maybe we should go on ahead to the tea-processing sheds,” Victoria suggested impatiently. “That’s probably where they’ll go next.”
“Don’t you think people will wonder why we’ve appeared there with no good reason?”
“They’ll also ask questions if we creep around behind Papa. So let’s go before the gardener discovers us here.”
The dark-skinned gardener was already at work, clipping a hedge not far from their hiding place. The regular snipping of the shears could be heard clearly when the calls of the parrots in the trees dropped enough for it to be audible.
“Very well, then. Come on.”
Grace stood up straight, brushed away a leaf that had attached itself to her sleeve, and smoothed her skirt. Holding her sister’s hand, she set out along the path as though they were merely taking a walk. A few men passed them, their heads lowered, and a woman with an empty tea basket gave them a friendly smile.
As they approached the tea-processing sheds, they were met by an overpowering scent. The aroma that came from the tea caddies in the kitchen was a pale ghost of the real smell of tea. Tea leaves in various stages of wilting were spread out on grilles and hurdles. Some of the leaves were still fresh, giving off a green scent, while other grilles were covered with light-brown, dark-brown, and even rust-red tea leaves. Some women were sitting at tables near the sheds, rolling up the tea leaves that were at an advanced stage of wilting.
Grace and Victoria had no chance to observe anything more.
“They’re coming!” whispered Victoria, whose eagle eyes had been watching the administration building. The two girls vanished behind the tea sheds, where a number of baskets were piled up.
If the women, who were concentrating on their work, had noticed them they didn’t show it, nor did they interrupt their work for their new master and his foreman.
“These are the tea sheds, where the tea is still processed by hand, as is the custom in China,” Vikrama explained as they looked at the building roofed with banana and palm leaves. “Once the tea has reached the right stage of wilting, it’s taken to the drying ovens. Our tea master, Mr. A. Soresh, is an expert at recognising the correct degree of wilting. To date, every harvest that has left our plantation has been excellent.”
Henry made no reply, but merely looked around as if some storm had carried him off to a fairy-tale land.
“He seems impressed,” Grace whispered as they peered around the corner of the building. “It’s not often you see Father rendered speechless.”
“This Mr. Vikrama is an impressive man,” Victoria replied with a wink. “It’s just a pity I’m too young for him.”
“You’d wish to marry a native? Mama would have a heart attack!”
“You’re forgetting that Mr. Vikrama is half English. I’ve read that half-castes are held in very high regard here. They even have their own caste.”
“Caste?”
But before Victoria could reply, their father and Vikrama set off again. Once they had turned their backs, Grace and Victoria slipped around the tea shed and reached a farther building, ducking beneath a window from which a draught of hot air escaped.
“Your brother had recently begun to introduce mechanical tea processing,” Vikrama continued. “Of course, the quality is slightly inferior to that of manual production, but on the other hand we can produce larger quantities at a cheaper price, which is particularly welcomed by customers with tighter budgets.”
On they went to the next building, in which a machine could be heard working. The girls didn’t dare spy through any of the windows, as their father and Vikrama disappeared into the building for a while. Vikrama’s explanations of how the machinery functioned were muffled by the thick mud-brick walls, and the sisters could only catch meaningless snatches of the conversation.
Once they had inspected all the buildings, Henry and Vikrama turned to the bushes, into which led a path reinforced with wooden planks.
After following the two men some way through the greenery, Grace and Victoria saw a kind of village before them—wooden huts with palm-leaf roofs. Some small children were playing with a puppy between the buildings.
“This is where our workers live.”
Victoria craned her neck inquisitively. Grace dragged her back down. “They’ll see us.”
“Don’t worry, Vikrama’s talking to an old man. Have you noticed how the men wear skirts here?”
“They’re called sarongs,” Grace told her.
“How do you know that?” Victoria asked, surprised that her elder sister, who until recently had only been interested in balls and afternoon tea, was now a step ahead of her.
“I heard some people in the hotel talking about it. The women’s dresses are called saris.”
Victoria’s eyes sparkled with a desire to shock her sister. “Perhaps we should wear saris, too. As you can see from their naked bellies, they don’t wear corsets.”
“Vic—!” Grace pressed her hand to her mouth as she watched a smile of satisfaction cross her sister’s face. She had won. “You don’t mean that seriously, do you? Those dresses are quite unseemly; Mama would—”
“Have a migraine. I know. But don’t you think corsets are even more suffocating in this heat?”
Grace didn’t reply. She, too, had ventured to lift her head a little above the tall grass. At that moment Vikrama laughed out loud. He threw his head back and laughed so uninhibitedly that even her upright father with all his suppressed emotion couldn’t help but be affected. Grace had to smile, too. She would have loved so much to know what had caused his merriment.
But the moment passed and after the men had taken leave of the villagers, they returned by the same path on which they had come.
“Let’s get out of here,” Grace muttered to her sister. Ducking down, they ran back into the undergrowth. They didn’t realise that their father could have seen them until they were sheltering beneath a bush.
Stars swirled behind Grace’s eyelids as she tried to suppress her panting. She was no longer accustomed to running. By the time she opened her eyes, Victoria was peering through the branches. “They’re going up towards the plantation!”
Grace wondered whether it was time to call a halt to their adventure. Apart from a few moments by the sheds, they had been unable to overhear anything, and she had begun to doubt whether they would actually find out anything about the foreman. But Victoria was aflame with excitement and so, not wanting to lose face, she rose.
“Come on, then, let’s go after them!”
The walk was longer than they had anticipated and led up man-made steps reinforced with wooden planks. As her father and Vikrama climbed the steps a substantial distance ahead of them, they were having a lively conversation, and Grace was annoyed that the gentle breeze was not strong enough to carry their words back to her. The only sound was the rustling of the leaves in the trees around them; even the cries of the parrots had faded into the distance.
How far is it up to the plantation? Grace wondered as she looked up at the summit of Adam’s Peak rising into the sky like a sugarloaf. A screech above their heads made her jump. The bird that circled above them looked like a bird of prey, but Grace wasn’t sure.
She stopped in shock as she saw a group of tea pickers coming towards them. But Victoria drew her on.
“Just act normally, as if we should be here,” she advised.
But Grace worried that the women would look at them in surprise afte
r leaving the two men behind and coming across the girls. It almost made her miss the magnificent colours of the women’s clothing. Their saris were of simple fabrics, but made up for it with their bright pinks, fiery oranges, and sunny yellows. In contrast, Grace and Victoria in their beige dresses looked like hens next to a parrot.
As they passed them, the women’s quiet conversation faded into silence. Concentrating on where they placed their feet, they carried their baskets past the girls. Once they were some way past, their exotic sing-song voices resumed, reminding Grace of the meeting with the remarkable old man.
A strange shudder ran down her spine.
“Always listen to your heart, and follow what it tells you. If you don’t, you will bring bad luck on yourself and those you love.”
These words, to which she had not attached much importance a few days ago, suddenly paralysed her.
“What’s the matter with you?” Victoria tugged at her sleeve.
“Nothing,” Grace replied, perplexed. “It’s nothing. Let’s go after them.”
Victoria looked at her uncertainly, but Grace walked on, leaving her no choice but to follow.
The tea pickers among the green tea plants looked like the first rosebuds in spring. Henry Tremayne was overcome by the magnificent greenery that was now his.
“This is the biggest of the three tea fields,” Vikrama said with a sweep of his arm. “This is where we grow the tea that’s rolled by hand in the sheds. The two other fields and the new one that’s being cleared at the moment are intended for mechanical production. The tea in those grows more densely, but due to the higher altitude, the quality of the leaves isn’t as good.”
Henry looked at the young man, whose eyes lit up whenever he spoke about the tea as though he were talking about his own estate.
“You seem to feel a lot for the plantation.”
“It’s been my home for as long as I can remember. I can’t imagine any more beautiful place in the world. Besides, the plantation provides work and food for my people. It’s impossible to dislike such a place.”
Henry was moved into silence. This lad’s really good. I’d almost think dangerously good, if the light in his eyes didn’t show complete devotion.
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