Mummy, thank you for everything you’ve given me.
See you very soon,
Your Aurora
xxx
Grania looked up slowly, her eyes clouded with tears. And saw a small, white seagull surveying her from the edge of the cliff, its head on one side.
“Grania?”
She turned slowly in the direction of the voice. Matt was standing some distance away.
“Are you OK, sweetheart?” he asked.
Grania couldn’t reply. She nodded silently.
“I was worried, the storm was blowing up and . . . can I come and hold you?”
She reached out toward her husband. He bent down and put his strong arms around her, holding her tightly. He glanced down at what she was holding. “Is that the letter she left you?”
“Yes.”
“What does it say?”
“Oh, many things.” Grania blew her nose on an old tissue from her pocket. “She was—is—extraordinary. So wise, so strong . . . how could she be those things so young?”
“Perhaps, as your mother says, she’s an old soul,” Matt murmured.
“Or an angel . . .” Grania leaned weakly against Matt’s shoulder. “She says she’s written something for me and left it in the study drawer.”
“Shall we go home and find it? Your hands are blue, sweetheart.”
“Yes.”
Matt helped her up from the rock and put an arm around her as they turned to head up the cliff.
“Aurora said something else in the letter too.”
“What was that?” Matt asked as they began walking.
“She said that I—”
A gust of wind blew suddenly, snatching the letter easily from Grania’s freezing hands and carrying it toward the cliff’s edge.
“Oh, baby,” said Matt helplessly, knowing there was no rescuing it. “I’m sorry.”
Grania turned and watched as the letter spun and danced and twirled in the wind, startling the seagull into taking flight with it, and following the letter up and out to sea.
Grania felt a sudden peace descend on her. “I understand now.”
“Understand what, sweetheart?”
“She’ll always be with me,” she murmured.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the page I most look forward to writing. It means the book is finished and on its way to publication, due in many different aspects to the unstinting support, advice and encouragement of all the people below.
Johanna Castillo, Judith Curr and the fantastic team at Atria, and the foreign rights girls at Penguin UK, who have brought my stories to a global audience.
Jonathan Lloyd, my fabulous agent and friend, whose patience (and huge expense account on my behalf) has finally paid off. Susan Moss and Jacquelyn Heslop, who were the only two I trusted to read the manuscript before I sent it off, and comforted me so positively until the professional verdict came in. Helene Rampton, Tracy Blackwell, Jennifer Dufton, Rosalind Hudson, Susan Grix, Kathleen Doonan, Sam Gurney, Sophie Hicks and Amy Finnegan . . . girls, what would I do without you?
Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, whose “Richard and Judy Book Club” gave me a wonderful platform from which to launch future novels.
The “family,” who put up with me and my mad writing habits every day without (much) complaint. My ever supportive mother, Janet; my sister, Georgia; and Olivia, whose editorial typing skills, fueled with a glass of “voddy,” are still beyond impeccable. And my fantastic kids, Harry, Isabella, Leonora and Kit (deserving of a special thank-you for allowing me to steal the opening line of this book from his first story), whose names are written in order of age, not importance. I love you all, and each of you has provided, in your different ways, so much love, laughter and life. I can only say I am honored I’ve had the privilege of bringing each of you into the world.
And my husband, Stephen; for a change, words cannot express. I can only say thank you. For it all. This is for you.
The Midnight Rose
From the #1 international bestselling author of The Orchid House—an epic saga of two remarkable women and two love stories spanning the years from 1920s India to modern-day England.
For American actress Rebecca Bradley, it is the role of a lifetime: she will star as a 1920s debutante in a film shot entirely on location at a magnificent English country house. The remote setting and high walls of Astbury Hall will provide a much needed refuge from the media glare that surrounds her every move. When Lord Anthony Astbury sees Rebecca in costume, he is stunned by her uncanny resemblance to his grandmother Violet, a famous 1920s society beauty. And when Rebecca discovers a manuscript written by a young Indian woman who visited Astbury Hall in the 1920s, she learns of a love affair so passionate and forbidden it nearly destroyed the Astbury family—a secret Lord Astbury himself does not know. As Rebecca is increasingly cut off from the modern world, Violet’s presence starts to make itself felt in unsettling ways.
In the gilded years before World War I, Anahita is a bright and curious Indian girl who never thought she would come to England. But as the companion to a royal princess, she is given rare access to a world of privilege and is sent to an English boarding school. When she meets young Lord Donald Astbury, they share a special bond that is only made stronger by their harrowing wartime experiences. Pressured by his family to marry Violet, an American heiress, Lord Astbury must say goodbye to a love that will haunt him for the rest of his life—and inspire a romance for the ages.
As Rebecca tries to understand her connection to a tragic love affair sixty years in the past, the story of Donald, Anahita and Violet unspools to its own shocking conclusion. For Rebecca to find a way back to the life she was meant to lead, she will have to put to rest the ghosts of Lord Anthony’s ancestors or risk repeating their downfall herself.
Click here to order Lucinda Riley’s
The Midnight Rose
Available March 2014 from Atria Books
Prologue
Darjeeling, India
February, 2000
Anahita
I am a hundred years old today. Not only have I managed to survive a century, but I’ve also seen in a new Millennium.
As the dawn breaks and the sun begins to rise over Mount Kanchenjungha beyond my window, I lie on my pillows and smile to myself at the utter ridiculousness of the thought. If I were a piece of furniture, a chair, I would be labelled an antique. I’d be polished, restored and put proudly on show as a thing of beauty. Sadly, that isn’t the case with my human frame, which has not mellowed like a fine piece of mahogany over its lifetime. Instead, my body has deteriorated into a sagging hessian sack of bones.
Any ‘beauty’ in me that might be deemed valuable lies hidden deep inside. It is the wisdom of one hundred years lived on this earth, and a heart that has beaten a steady accompaniment to every conceivable emotion and behaviour.
One hundred years ago, on this very day, my parents, in the manner of all Indians, consulted an astrologer to tell them about the future of their new-born baby girl. I still have the soothsayer’s predictions for my life amongst the few possessions of my mother that I’ve kept. I remember it saying that I was to be long-lived, but in 1900, I realise, my parents assumed this meant that with the Gods’ blessing, I would survive into my fifties.
I hear a gentle tap on my door. It is Keva, my faithful maid, armed with a tray of English Breakfast tea and a small jug of cold milk. Tea taken the English way is a habit I’ve never managed to break, even though I’ve lived in India - not to mention Darjeeling - for the past seventy-eight years.
I don’t answer Keva’s knock, preferring on this special morning to be alone with my thoughts a while longer. Keva will undoubtedly wish to talk through the events of the day, will be eager to get me up, washed and dressed before my family begin to arrive.
As the sun begins to burn off the clouds covering the snow-capped mountains, I search the blue sky for the answer I’ve pleaded with the heavens to give me every morning of t
he past seventy-eight years.
Today, please, I beg the Gods, for I have known in each hour that has ticked by since I last saw my child that he still breathes somewhere on this planet. At the moment of his death, I would have known, as I have for all those in my life whom I’ve loved when they have passed over.
Tears fill my eyes and I turn my head to the night-stand by my bed and study the one photograph I have of him-- a cherubic two year old sitting smiling on my knee. It was given to me by my friend, Selina, along with his death certificate a few weeks after I’d been informed of my son’s death.
A lifetime ago. The truth is my son is now an old man, too… He will celebrate his eighty-first birthday in October of this year. But even with my powers of imagination, it’s impossible for me to see him as such.
I turn my head determinedly away from my son’s image, knowing that today, I deserve to enjoy the celebration my family have planned for me. But somehow, on all these occasions, when I see my other child and her children, and her children’s children, the absence of her brother only feeds the pain in my heart, reminding me he has always been missing.
Of course, I speak of this to no-one; simply because they believe, and always have, that my son died seventy-eight years ago.
‘Maajee, see, you even have his death certificate! Leave him to his rest,’ my daughter, Muna, would sigh. ‘Enjoy the family you have living.’
After all these years, I understand why Muna becomes frustrated with me. And she is right. She wants to be enough, just her alone. But a lost child is something that can never be replaced in a mother’s heart.
For today, my daughter will have her way. I will sit in my chair and enjoy watching the dynasty I have spawned. I won’t bore them with my stories of India’s history. When they arrive in their fast Western jeeps, with their children playing on their battery-operated gadgets, I will not remind them how Indira and I climbed the steep hills around Darjeeling on horseback, that electricity and running water in any home were rare, or of my voracious reading of any tattered book I could get my hands on. The young are irritated by stories of the past, they wish only to live in the present, just as I did when I was young.
I can imagine that most of my family are not looking forward to flying halfway across India to visit their great-grandmother on her hundredth birthday, but perhaps I’m being hard on them. I’ve thought a great deal in the past few years about why the young seem to be uncomfortable when they’re with the old. When in fact, they could learn so many things they need to know from us. And I’ve decided that their discomfort stems from the fact that, in our fragile physical presence, they become aware of what the future holds for them. They can see, in their full glow of physical strength and beauty, only how they will be eventually diminished one day. They cannot see what they will gain.
How can they begin to see inside us? Understand how their souls will grow, their impetuousness be tamed and their selfish thoughts dimmed by the experiences of so many years?
But I accept this is nature, in all its glorious complexity. I have ceased to question it.
When Keva knocks at the door for a second time, I admit her. As she talks at me in fast Hindi, I sip my tea and run over the names of my four grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. At a hundred years old, one wants to at least prove that one’s mind is still in full working order. The four grandchildren my daughter gave me have each gone on to become successful and loving parents themselves. They flourished in the new world that independence from the British brought to India, and their children have taken the mantle even further. At least six of them, from what I recall, have started their own businesses, or are in a professional trade. I do wish, if I was being selfish, that one of my extended offspring had taken an interest in medicine, followed after me, but I realise I can’t have everything.
As Keva helps me into the bathroom to wash me, I consider that my family have had a mixture of luck, brains and family connections on their side. And that my beloved India has probably another century to go before the millions who still starve on her streets will gain some modicum of their basic human needs. I have done my best to help over the years. but I realise my efforts are a mere ripple in the ocean against a roaring tide of poverty and deprivation.
Sitting patiently whilst Keva dresses me in my new sari - a birthday present from Muna, my daughter - I decide I won’t think these maudlin thoughts today. I’ve done my best to improve those lives that have brushed against mine, and I must be content with that.
‘You look beautiful, Madam Chavan.’
As I look at my own reflection in the mirror, I know that she is lying, but I love her for it.
‘Your daughter arrives at eleven o’clock, and the rest of the family will be here an hour later. Where shall I put you until they come?’
I smile at her, feeling much like a mahogany chair. ‘You may put me in the window. I want to look at my mountains,’ I say. She helps me up, steers me gently to the armchair and sits me down.
‘Can I bring you anything else, Madam?’
‘No. You go now to the kitchen and make sure that cook of ours has the lunch menu under control.’
‘Yes, Madam.’ She puts my bell from the night-stand by me on the table and leaves my bedroom.
I turn my face into the sunlight, which is starting to stream through the big picture windows of my hill-top bungalow. As I bask in it like a cat, I remember the friends who have already passed over and won’t be joining me today for my celebration. Indira … my most beloved friend, died over fifteen years ago. I confess that it’s one of the few moments in my life I have broken down and wept uncontrollably. Even my devoted daughter could not match the love and friendship Indira showed me. Self-absorbed and flighty until the moment she died, Indira was there when I needed her most. And I miss her terribly to this very day.
I look across to the writing bureau which sits in the alcove opposite me, and ponder on what is hidden inside. It is a letter, and it runs for over three hundred pages. It is written to my beloved son and tells the story of my life from the beginning. For, as the years passed, I began to worry that I would forget the details, that they would become blurred and grainy in my mind, like the reel of a silent black and white film. If, as I have believed to this day, my son is alive and was ever returned to me, I want to be able to present him with the story of his mother and her enduring love for her lost child. And why she had to leave him behind …
I began to write it when I was in middle-age, believing then that I may be taken at any time. And there it has sat over the following forty-five years, untouched and unread, because he never came to find me, and I haven’t found him.
Not even my daughter knows the story of my life before she arrived on the planet, only the mother she has known since. Sometimes I feel guilty for never revealing the truth to her. But I believe it is enough that she has known my love when her brother was denied it.
I glance at the bureau, viewing in my mind’s eye the yellowing pile of paper inside it. And I ask the God’s to guide me. When I die, as I really must soon, I would be horrified for it to fall into the wrong hands. I ponder for a few seconds if I should light a fire and ask Keva to place the papers onto it. But no … I shake my head instinctively, I can never bring myself to do that, just in case I do find him. There is still hope, surely? After all, I’ve lived on to a hundred, I may live to a hundred and ten.
But who to entrust it to, in the meantime, just in case …?
I scan my family members, taking them in generations. At each name, I pause and listen for guidance. And it’s on the name of one of my great-grandsons that I pause.
Ari Malik, the eldest child of my eldest grandson, Vivek. I chuckle slightly as the shiver runs up my spine - the signal I’ve had from those above who understand so much more than I ever can. Ari …the only member of my extended family to be blessed with blue eyes. Other than my beloved lost child.
I concentrate hard to bring to mind his details; with eleven great-gra
ndchildren, I comfort myself, a human-being half my age would struggle to remember. And besides, they are spread out all over India these days, and I rarely see them.
Vivek, Ari’s father, has been the most financially successful of my grandchildren. He was always clever, if a little dull. He’s an engineer and has earned enough to provide his wife and three children with a very comfortable life. If my memory serves me, Ari was educated in England. He was always a bright little thing, though quite what he’s been doing since he left school escapes me. Today, I decide, I will find out. I will watch him. And I’m sure I’ll know whether my current instinct is correct.
With that settled, and feeling calmer now that a solution to my dilemma is possibly at hand, I close my eyes and allow myself to doze.
‘Where is he?!’ Samina Malik whispered to her husband. ‘He swore to me that he wouldn’t be late for this,’ she added, as she surveyed the other, fully present members of Naani-Anahita’s extended family. They were clustered around the old lady in the elegant drawing-room of her bungalow, plying her with presents and compliments.
‘Don’t panic, Samina,’ Vivek comforted his wife, ‘our son will be here.’
‘He said he’d meet us at the station so we could come up the hill together as a family at ten o’clock … I swear, Vivek, that boy has no respect for his family, I …’
‘Hush, pyaree, he’s a busy young man, and a good boy too.’
‘You think so?’ questioned Samina. ‘I’m not so sure. Every time I call his apartment, there’s a different female voice that answers. You know what Mumbai is like, full of Bollywood hussies and sharks,’ she hissed, not wishing any other member of the family to overhear their conversation.
‘Yes, and our son is a big boy now. He’s twenty-five years old and running his own business. I’m sure he can take care of himself,’ Vivek added.
‘The staff are waiting for him to arrive so they can bring in the champagne and make the toast. Keva is concerned your grandmother will become too tired if we leave it much longer. If Ari’s not here in the next ten minutes, I’ll tell them to continue without him.’
The Girl on the Cliff Page 44
