A HANDFUL OF STARS An enthralling story of poverty, passion and survival: one of the Tyneside Sagas
Page 45
‘Have you seen Mr Robson?’ Clarrie asked in dismay.
‘Camping over by Um Shirpi,’ Jock snorted.
‘Maybe it’s just a fishing expedition,’ she suggested, trying to soothe him. ‘If he was recruiting for the tea gardens, he’d be round the villages dishing out money and opium as if he owned the place.’
‘He’s trying to ruin me.’ Jock would not be mollified. ‘Old man Robson was the same — put me grandfather out of business. Never forgive ’im. Now they’re in India — my India. They’re out to get me—’
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ Clarrie said, guiding him quickly into the chair. ‘Nobody’s going to put us out of business. Tea prices are bound to go up again soon.’
He sat watching her, hunched and gaunt-faced, while she blew gently on the dying embers of the fire and added sticks. As it came alive again with a crackle, the room filled with the sweet scent of sandalwood. She gave her father a cautious glance. His chin was slumped on his chest, his hooded eyes drowsy. His face was emaciated, the skin as creased as old leather and his head almost bald. But for his European clothes, he looked more like a Hindu ascetic than a soldier turned tea-planter.
She sat back on her haunches, feeding the fire. In her mind’s eye she could hear her mother’s silvery voice gently chiding her: ‘Don’t squat like a common villager — sit like a lady, Clarissa!’ It was sometimes hard to conjure up her mother’s face these days; her cautious smile and watchful brown eyes, her dark hair pulled into tight coils at the nape of her neck. There was a photograph on her father’s desk of them all taking afternoon tea on the veranda; baby Olive on her father’s knee and an impatient five-year-old Clarissa pulling away from her mother’s hand, her face blurred, bored with keeping still for the photographer. Yet her mother had remained composed, a slender, beautiful pre-Raphaelite figure with a wistful half-smile.
Ama, their old nurse, told her that she grew more like her mother the older she got. She had inherited Jane Cooper’s dark complexion and large brown eyes, while Olive had the pale red hair and fairer skin of the Belhavens. The two sisters looked nothing like each other, and only Clarrie’s appearance betrayed the Indian ancestry of their mixed-race mother. Sheltered from society as they were, growing up at Belgooree, she nevertheless knew that they were marked out in British circles as mildly shocking. Many men took Indian mistresses, but her father had broken ranks by marrying and settling down with one. Jane Cooper, daughter of a British clerk and an Assamese silk worker, had been abandoned at the Catholic orphanage and trained as a teacher at the mission school in Shillong.
As if that were not offence enough, Jock caused further embarrassment by expecting his daughters to be welcomed into Anglo-Indian society as if they were pure English roses. And to cap it all, this jumped-up soldier from the wilds of Northumberland thought he knew how to grow tea.
Oh, Clarrie had heard the hurtful comments at church and clubhouse, and felt the disapproval of the women from the cantonment in Shillong who stopped their conversations when she entered the shops of the bazaar. Olive hated these shopping trips, but Clarrie refused to let small-minded people upset her. She had more right to live here than any of them and she loved her home among the Assam hills with a passion.
Yet she shared her father’s worry over the estate. The terrible earthquake of seven years ago had ripped up acres of hillside and they had had to replant at great expense. The tea trees were only now reaching maturity, while the market for their delicate leaves appeared to have vanished like morning mist. The insatiable British palate now demanded the strong, robust teas of the hot, humid valleys of Upper Assam. She wished there was someone she could turn to for advice, for her father seemed intent on self-destruction.
Clarrie glanced at him. He had dozed off. She got up and fetched a blanket from the camp bed in the corner. Her father had slept in here for the past seven years, unable to enter the bedroom in which his beloved Jane had died. Clarrie tucked it around him. He stirred, his eyes flickering open. His look fixed on her and his jaw slackened.
‘Jane?’ he said groggily. ‘Where’ve you been, lass?’
Clarrie’s breath froze in her throat. He often mistook her for her mother in his drunkenness, but it shook her every time.
‘Go to sleep,’ she said softly.
‘The bairns.’ He frowned. ‘Are they in bed? Must say goodnight.’
As he struggled to sit up, she pushed him gently back. ‘They’re fine,’ she crooned. ‘They’re asleep — don’t wake them.’
He slumped under the blanket. ‘Good,’ he sighed.
She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Her eyes smarted with tears. She might be only eighteen, but she felt weighed down with a world of responsibilities. How long could they go on like this? Not only was the tea garden failing, but the house needed repairs and Olive’s music teacher had just put up her fees. Clarrie swallowed down her panic. She would talk to her father when he was sober. Sooner or later he would have to face up to their problems.
Returning to the sitting room she found Olive crouched in a chair hugging her knees, rocking back and forth. Kamal stood by the carved table in the window guarding the silver teapot.
‘He’s sleeping,’ she told them. Olive. stopped her rocking. Kamal nodded in approval and poured Clarrie a cup of tea while she went to sit beside her sister. She put a hand to Olive’s hair and stroked it away from her face. The girl flinched and pulled away, her body taut as piano wire. Clarrie could hear the tell-tale wheezing that preceded an attack of asthma.
‘It’s all right,’ Clarrie said reassuringly. ‘You can carry on playing now if you like.’
‘No I can’t,’ Olive panted. ‘I’m too upset. Why does he shout like that? And break things. He’s always breaking things.’
‘He doesn’t mean to.’
‘Why can’t you stop him? Why can’t you stop him drinking?’
Clarrie appealed silently to Kamal as he set her cup on the small inlaid table beside her.
‘I will clear it all up, Miss Olive. In the morning all will be better,’ he said.
‘It’ll never be better again! I want my mother!’ Olive wailed. She broke off in a fit of coughing, that strange panting cough that bedevilled her during the cold season as if she were trying to expel bad air. Clarrie held her, rubbing her back.
‘Where’s your ointment? Is it in the bedroom? I’ll fetch it. Kamal will boil up some water for a head-steam, won’t you, Kamal?’
They rushed around attending to Olive’s needs, until the girl had calmed down and her coughing had abated. Kamal brewed fresh tea infused with warming spices: cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and ginger. Clarrie breathed in the aroma as she sipped at the golden liquid, her frayed nerves calming with each mouthful. The colour, she noticed thankfully, was returning to Olive’s wan face too.
‘Where’s Ama?’ Clarrie asked, realising she had not seen the woman since lunchtime. She had been too busy in the tea garden supervising the weeding to notice.
Kamal gave a disapproving waggle of his head. ‘Swanning off down to village doing as she pleases.’
‘One of her sons is ill,’ Olive said.
‘Why didn’t she say anything to me?’ Clarrie wondered. ‘I hope it’s nothing serious.’
‘Never serious,’ Kamal declared, ‘always toothache or wind. But Ama flies off like mother hen.’ He made a squawking noise.
Clarrie snorted with laughter and Olive smiled. ‘Don’t mock,’ Clarrie said. ‘She fusses over you as much as any of us.’
Kamal grinned and shrugged as if the ways of Ama and her kind were beyond his comprehension.
Soon after, they all retired to bed. Olive snuggled up close to Clarrie between chilly damp sheets. On nights when their father was fuelled with alcohol, the thirteen year old always begged to share Clarrie s bed. It was not as if Jock ever barged in and woke them, but any night noise — a hooting owl, the scream of a jackal or the screech of a monkey — set Olive trembling with unfathomable fear.
>
Clarrie lay awake long after Olive’s noisy breathing had settled into a sleeping rhythm. She slept fitfully and awoke before dawn. There was no point lying there stewing over problems; she would go for an early morning ride. Creeping out of bed, Clarrie dressed swiftly and left the house, making for the stables where her white pony, Prince, snorted softly in greeting.
Her heart lifted as she nuzzled him and breathed in his warm smell. They had bought him from Bhutanese traders on a rare holiday in the foothills of the Himalayas, after her mother died. Her father had found Belgooree intolerable for a while and they had trekked for several months, Olive being transported in a basket slung between poles, her anxious face peering out from under a large raffia hat. Clarrie had fallen at once for the sturdy, nimble pony and her father had approved.
‘Superior sort, Bhutan ponies. Of course you can have him.’
Clarrie had ridden him almost every day since. She was a familiar sight around the estate and the surrounding forest tracks. Hunters and villagers called to her in greeting and she often stopped to exchange news about the weather, information on animal tracks or predictions about the monsoon.
She saddled Prince, talking to him softly, and led him out into the sharp air of pre-dawn and down the path that snaked away from the house through their overgrown garden. Once through the tangle of betel palms, bamboos, rattan and honeysuckle, she mounted, flung a thick, coarse blanket around her shoulders and set off down the track.
In the half-dark she could see the spiky rows of tea bushes cascading away down the steep slope. Columns of ghostly smoke rose from the first early fires of the villages hidden in the jungle below. Around her, the conical-shaped, densely wooded hills stood darkly against the lightening horizon. She continued through the forest of pines, sal and oaks, the night noises giving way to the scream of waking birds.
For almost an hour Clarrie rode until she reached the summit of her favourite hill, emerging out of the trees into a clearing just as dawn was breaking. Around her lay the toppled stones of an old temple, long reclaimed by jungle creepers. Beside it, under a sheltering tamarind tree, was the hut of a holy man built out of palm leaves and moss. The roof was overrun with jasmine and mimosa and he tended a beautiful garden of roses. A crystal-clear spring bubbled out of nearby rocks, filled a pool and then disappeared underground again. It was a magical place of pungent flowers with a heart-stopping view that stretched for miles. There was no smoke issuing from the swami’s hut so Clarrie assumed he was travelling.
She dismounted and led Prince to drink at the pool. Sitting on a tumbledown pillar carved with tigers she gazed at the spreading dawn. Far to the east, the high dark green hills of Upper Assam came rippling out of the dark. The mighty Brahmaputra River that cut its way through the fertile valley was hidden in rolls of fog. Beyond it, looking north, Clarrie watched the light catch the distant peaks of the Himalayas. They thrust out of the mist, jagged and ethereal, their snow-capped slopes blushing crimson as the dawn awoke them.
Clarrie, wrapped in her blanket, sat motionless as if caught in a spell. Prince wandered off to graze as the sunlight gathered in strength and the remote mountains turned golden as temple roofs. At last, she sighed and stood up. This place always stilled her fractious thoughts. She left a pouch of tea and sugar at the swami’s door and remounted Prince. A soft noise made her turn. At the pool a graceful fallow deer stooped to drink. Clarrie was entranced that the animal had crept so close to them without showing fear.
A moment later, a deafening shot exploded from the surrounding trees. The deer’s head went up as if yanked on a harness. A second shot passed so close, Prince reared up in terror. Clarrie clutched frantically at the reins to calm him. A third shot hit the deer square on and its legs folded like collapsing cards.
Horrified at the brutality of the moment, Clarrie slackened her hold. Prince danced in crazy, petrified circles, slipping on wet leaves. The next instant she was tossed from the saddle, thumping on to damp ground. Her head hit a stone and her vision turned red. She was aware of men’s voices shouting and footsteps running towards her.
‘You madman!’ a deep voice thundered.
‘Just a ruddy native,’ another blustered. ‘I fired a warning shot.’
‘It’s a woman, for God’s sake!’
Clarrie wanted to carry on listening but their voices were fading. Who were they talking about? Before she could decide, she passed out.
Janet welcomes comments and feedback on her stories. If you would like to do so, you can contact her through her website: www.janetmacleodtrotter.com
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1
1928
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Summer, 1931
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 1O
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
1932
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 2O
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 3O
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
1937
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 4O
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
THE TEA PLANTER’S DAUGHTER
Read a bonus chapter from THE TEA PLANTER’S DAUGHTER