‘Hello there, are you our Indian princess?’
I’d been so engrossed in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard anyone approach me. I looked up into a pair of the bluest English eyes I’d ever seen. They were contained within a face that still had the undistinguished features of adolescence before the final contours of adulthood appeared. The boy’s hair, to my Indian eyes, was the colour of straw and just as coarse. He had the usual pale pink-and-white complexion of the English that so many Indians longed for.
To me, that sunrise, he looked like the Adonis in the Greek myths I had read during history lessons.
‘I—’
As I began to answer him, the faint sound of singing started in my ears and I found it difficult to concentrate. A now-familiar shiver ran up my backbone. Someone, or something, was telling me that this stranger would play a part in my future.
‘Do you understand English?’ he prompted me.
‘Yes.’ I tried to shut out the sound in my ears by telling them that I understood what they were trying to say to me. That the message had come through loud and clear. ‘I speak good English,’ I replied.
‘And your name is Indira?’
‘No, I’m her companion. My name is Anahita Chavan – Anni for short.’
‘Hello, Miss Chavan, or Anni for short,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘I’m Donald Astbury. How do you do?’
As with all the English, his manners were impeccable.
‘Very well, thank you,’ I replied demurely.
He sat down companionably next to me on the bench. ‘So may I ask what you’re doing out in the garden at such an early hour?’
‘The sunrise through my window wakes me. And you?’
‘Oh, I arrived home from school late last evening. The bell there rings at six-thirty, so I woke up here on the dot. It’s such a glorious morning that I decided to get up and go and check on my mare in the stables.’
‘I love horses,’ I said wistfully.
‘You ride?’
‘Yes, I learned before I was able to walk on my own two feet.’
‘I didn’t realise they taught riding from the cradle in India the way they do here.’
‘Of course! How else would we have got about for thousands of years?’
‘Good point, good point,’ Donald said with a smile. ‘Then how about I show you our stables?’
‘I’d love to see them,’ I agreed eagerly.
‘Come on, then.’ He helped me up from the bench and we started to walk across the gardens. ‘So, how are you finding England?’
‘There are some things I like, and others that I do not.’
He looked at me suddenly. ‘You’re awfully sensible and your English is excellent. May I ask how old you are?’
‘I’ll be fifteen in a few months’ time,’ I answered, exaggerating a little.
‘Goodness. Most of the English girls I meet of your age are still silly little children.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Not at all,’ he replied as we approached the stables. ‘Now, look here, this is my mare, Glory. My mother had her named Gloria after some maiden aunt, but I really didn’t think the name suited her, so I changed it. What do you think of her?’
I looked at the horse and saw that Glory was indeed glorious, and a thoroughbred. By my reckoning, she stood sixteen hands high. I offered her my palm, and put it under her chin as I stroked her long, sleek face.
‘Gosh, I’m impressed,’ Donald commented. ‘Normally she’s whiney and complains when a stranger strokes her. You obviously have the touch, Anni.’
‘I seem to understand them, somehow.’
‘Well, how about a ride? I’d love to see if Glory would stand you on her back. Normally, she bolts and throws unknown riders off. Let’s see if she’ll allow you to mount her.’
‘I’d love to try,’ I said eagerly.
‘Lead her out and I’ll saddle her up,’ my new friend instructed. ‘I’m sure she’ll let us know if she’s in a mood to oblige us.’
I did as he requested, then, once Glory was still, I jumped onto her back, hitching up my long skirt as far as modesty would allow me to sit astride her.
Donald smiled. ‘It seems she’s perfectly happy to have you up there. I’ll get the stallion.’
Five minutes later, we were trotting companionably together across the park. He brought his horse up short and looked at me. ‘Are you up for some rougher terrain? Dartmoor is literally a few minutes that way,’ he said, gesturing to his left. ‘It’s the most wonderful hack and I think you’re good enough to cope.’
‘Of course.’ I agreed, not knowing what this ‘Dartmoor’ place might be, but feeling happier and freer than I had for months. ‘I’ll follow you.’
‘Righty-oh,’ Donald agreed, and immediately cantered off, with Glory and me doing our best to keep up with him.
As we left the park and flew out onto the moor, a warm breeze pulled through my hair and I felt the heaviness that had recently assailed me begin to lighten. At first, I concentrated on steering our way through the rocky, uneven terrain. But Glory seemed to know exactly where she was going and, realising that she was in charge, I relaxed, sat back and enjoyed the ride.
Forty minutes later, we arrived back at the stables, both horses and riders panting with exertion.
‘My goodness,’ said Donald, as he climbed off his horse and handed him to the yawning stable lad for attention, ‘you’re by far the best girl in the saddle I’ve ever seen.’
I realised he was looking at me with genuine admiration.
‘Thank you. I’m sure you’ll find that Princess Indira is equally competent,’ I added loyally.
‘Then I’ll look forward to putting her to the test too, but I doubt she could possibly be better than you.’ He offered me his hand to help me dismount. ‘Well, Anni, I hope you’ll join me on further rides,’ he said, as we walked back together towards the Hall. ‘Tomorrow morning, perhaps? Six-thirty sharp?’
‘I’d love to, yes.’
I floated upstairs to wash before breakfast, feeling happier than I had for months.
Despite my misgivings about being unable to return to India, that first summer at Astbury was one I will never forget. Even though Britain had officially declared war on Germany on 4 August, we remained relatively untouched by it. As food shortages began, we hardly noticed, as the estate, with its thousands of acres of fertile farmland, was self-sufficient.
Although Donald himself was too young to join up, one particular event that brought home to me the suffering and change others were facing was when Selina, Lady Astbury’s daughter, came back home to live with us. Her husband, a captain in the British Army, had been posted to France. They had only been married for just over a year and Selina was eight months pregnant with their first child.
Sometimes in the afternoons I would find her sitting in the Orangery, which housed the many exotic plants that generations of Astburys had brought home from their travels to foreign climes. I recognised some of them from my mother’s leather-bound notebook of remedies, and began to take cuttings from them, then grind them with my shil noda, laying them out on the tiny eave-top edge outside my attic window to dry in the sun. On my forays around the garden and sometimes out onto Dartmoor, I’d found further unusual herbs and plants, and having asked for spare jam jars from the kitchen, my collection was growing.
‘What do you do with all these cuttings you take, Anni?’ asked Selina one humid afternoon in the Orangery as she fanned herself in her chair and watched me with apparent interest.
I was unsure how to answer, but I decided to tell her the truth. ‘I make healing medicines from them,’ I said.
‘Really? Did you learn how to do this in India?’
‘Yes. My mother taught me.’ I didn’t want to enlarge on the subject, worrying she might think me some kind of witch doctor.
‘My goodness, how clever you are,’ she replied with genuine admiration. ‘I know my father was a great believer in the local re
medies when he was posted in India. Well, if you have any special potion to hurry this baby into the world, I, for one, would be grateful.’
I studied the shape of her belly, saw that the child she was carrying had dropped lower in the past few days, which meant the head was already down.
‘I don’t think it will be long now.’
‘Really? You can tell?’
‘Yes.’ I smiled. ‘I believe so.’
Sadly, despite her heartfelt protestations the day we had first arrived, I saw Indira less frequently than ever. Lady Astbury had consented to her plea that friends should be invited down from London to keep her company. I had a feeling Lady Astbury had an ulterior motive in this; after all, it would soon be time for Donald to choose a bride from the ranks of well-bred young British women. The introductions Indira provided on his very doorstep were likely to be valuable.
‘Never have so many delightful young girls’ – Lady Astbury pronounced it ‘gels’ – ‘flooded through our doors before,’ she announced to me one day as I encountered her on the grand staircase. ‘Anahita, dear, would you run upstairs and just check that the maids have remembered to put flowers in Lady Celestria’s bedroom?’
‘Of course,’ I said, and scurried off to see if they had.
I didn’t like Lady Astbury, and I knew she didn’t like me. She had lived in India when her husband was the Resident of Cooch Behar, and I gathered from the things she said that she had loathed every second of it; she treated me as little more than a serving maid. Her superior attitude to my countrymen and women – ‘dirty little heathens’, I’d heard her call us once – exacerbated her disdain for me. I knew she was a strict Catholic and went to Mass in the Hall’s chapel every day.
For me, her rigid formality and intrinsic arrogance summed up the very worst of the British. Indira, of course, was royalty, and had been brought up in a Western style. Lady Astbury was able to treat her as an equal . . . just.
Despite the fact that I too was related to Indian royalty, more and more I found I was running errands for Lady Astbury. She would often ask me absent-mindedly to ‘run along’ and find her embroidery for her, or collect a book from the library.
This situation was intensified because of the staff crisis in the house. With so many of the men from the servants’ hall leaving to fight in France, the maids had double their usual workload. Not wanting to appear rude and ungrateful, I always acquiesced to Lady Astbury’s requests. It wasn’t a hardship helping the maids, who were a sweet, friendly bunch and glad to have another pair of hands to change a bed or dust a room.
In the first few days at Astbury, I’d gone down to dinner in the formal dining room with Indira but found myself ignored, which made me uncomfortable. Then, on the fourth night, a tray had been brought up to my room in the attic, and I’d taken the hint. I was not unhappy about it, as my wardrobe did not contain the plethora of formal English clothes needed for such nightly occasions, and I didn’t like to mention my lack of them to Indira.
Tilly, one of the maids, on her nightly journey up the endless staircases to bring me my tray in the attic, commented that I must be lonely eating my supper all alone. She suggested I might prefer to eat with the rest of the staff in the kitchen. As I knew this would also save her legs from the climb upstairs, I agreed. From then on, I ate downstairs with the servants every night, answering their constant questions as all of them were fascinated by my life at the palace in India.
On one occasion, the cook, Mrs Thomas, complained of the arthritis in her hands. I asked her whether she would like something to help with the pain and inflammation.
‘I doubt it’ll help,’ she commented, ‘but it’ll do no harm either, I’m sure.’
Using my shil noda, I ground down a calamus root I’d found growing in the Orangery and then added water to create a paste. That night, I showed Mrs Thomas how to apply the paste to her hands.
‘You must do this twice every day for a week, and I think it will help.’
Sure enough, a week later, Mrs Thomas was telling everyone what a ‘miracle worker’ I was. This quickly engendered a stream of kitchen ‘customers’, who would ask me to mix them a remedy to help with all manner of aches and pains. I was happy to help, and it gave me a chance to put what I’d learned from Zeena and my mother into practice. I also enjoyed the other servants’ genuine warmth and acceptance – it had been a long time since I’d felt that.
But the main reason I was so happy that summer, so happy that even Indira’s cold shoulder and Lady Astbury’s treatment of me could not lower my mood, was my morning hacks with Donald Astbury.
The day after our first ride, I’d sprung out of bed the next morning, wondering if he would be at the stables as agreed.
‘Anni!’ he’d said, smiling. ‘Up for another ride?’
‘Yes.’ I’d nodded eagerly, and we had saddled up, then flown off across Dartmoor in the soft sun of the early morning. From then on, we met almost every morning. During those rides, we began to form a friendship.
In complete contrast to his mother, Donald was warm and open, and I felt I could talk freely with him about my life. He was genuinely fascinated to hear about India, its customs and culture.
‘My father always loved India and its people,’ he explained. ‘Unfortunately, my mother didn’t, and that’s the reason they returned to England when Selina and I were very young. Sadly, my father died five years later. Mother always blamed India for killing him, and admittedly, he did suffer from recurrences of the malaria he caught there, but in the end, he died of pneumonia. He said it was the English weather that didn’t suit him. He was a very good chap. Always trying to help somebody or other.’
‘Are you like him?’ I asked, as we lay on the rough Dartmoor grass, allowing our panting horses to take a drink from the brook.
‘My mother always says so. I don’t think she approved of what she termed his bleeding heart – Father was always on a mission to help the less fortunate, often to the detriment of our own bank account. He also held no account of creed or colour, whereas my mother is a little more . . . traditional in her thinking.’
During those rides on the moors, he talked to me of his fears for his own future because of the war, and how he worried about his ability to take over the management of the Astbury Estate in a few years’ time. It would pass to him when he came of age, at twenty-one.
‘There’s hardly enough money to pay the costs on the estate as it is,’ he sighed, ‘let alone restore the Hall – some of which hasn’t been touched for a hundred years. Mother inherited it, you see. Father wasn’t really a businessman, nor was it ever imagined that he should die whilst I was so young. So I rather think that Mother’s buried her head in the sand. Or, should I say more accurately, the chapel. I don’t want to be the one to tell her how difficult things are, but it’s doubtful that even her God can help us.’
I looked at him and felt humbled that, though he was only sixteen, the weight of the world seemed to be on his shoulders.
‘So many lives depend on me to earn their family crust.’ Then he rolled over and grinned at me. ‘Well, looks like there’ll be nothing for it but to marry a rich heiress! Come on, it’s time to ride back.’
After Donald had disappeared into the house to change for breakfast, I’d rarely see him until the following morning. His daytime activities were taken up with amusing Indira and her friends with luncheons, tennis parties and riding far more sedately than we did together through the park. I doubted he ever spoke of our morning rides – I certainly didn’t. It was another secret I kept to myself during those long, balmy English summer nights.
14
At the end of August, a couple of days before Indira and I were to return to school, Selina went into labour. The maids were up and down the stairs with towels and hot water. The atmosphere in the kitchen was tense with the normal mixture of anticipation at the arrival of a new baby and trepidation that all might not go well for her.
‘Doctor Trefusis is returning
from the hospital in Exeter. Only Lady Selina would have picked a Sunday evening to go into labour. Let’s hope he arrives here soon,’ Mrs Thomas said, rolling her eyes.
An hour later, Tilly, Selina’s maid, came downstairs looking pale. ‘She’s in a terrible state up there, rolling around the bed in agony and screaming her head off. I don’t know what to do to calm her down. What can I give her, Mrs Thomas? I’m worried the baby’s stuck or something.’
‘Have you called for Her Ladyship?’ Mrs Thomas asked.
‘Yes, but you know you won’t get Lady Astbury anywhere near the birthing room. I reckon she paid someone else to give birth to hers for her!’
‘Lady Selina must be tired,’ I commented from my usual chair in the corner of the kitchen.
‘She’s exhausted, Miss Anni, she’s been going at it for the past six hours,’ Tilly explained.
‘Then you should take her some sugar water to help keep her glucose levels up,’ I advised quietly. ‘And have her move around as much as possible.’
All eyes in the kitchen turned to me. ‘Have you ever seen a baby being born, Miss Anni?’ asked Mrs Thomas.
‘Oh, yes. I watched my mother many times when she went out to help the local women during their labours.’
‘Well, any port in a storm,’ said Mrs Thomas. ‘Miss Anni, would you go upstairs with Tilly, who’ll ask Lady Selina if she’ll see you?’
‘If you’re sure,’ I replied, rising nervously from my chair.
‘She can only say no, can’t she? Sounds to me like she needs all the help she can get. Off you go, dear.’
I followed Tilly up the stairs, and as I waited outside Selina’s door, I could hear the moans from within.
Tilly poked her head around the door and beckoned to me. ‘She didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, so come in anyway.’
I walked into the bedroom and saw Selina lying flat on her back, her face white, sweat matting her hair.
‘Lady Selina, it’s Anahita. I’ve helped bring babies into the world before. Would you mind if I tried to help you?’
The Midnight Rose Page 17