The Planter’s Bride
By
Janet MacLeod Trotter
A Story of Intrigue and Passion: Sequel to The Tea Planter’s Daughter
(Second in The India Tea Series)
Copyright © Janet MacLeod Trotter, 2014
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Published by MacLeod Trotter Books
eBook edition: 2014
ISBN 978-1-908359-36-0
www.janetmacleodtrotter.com
(The photograph used on the cover is of Janet’s maternal grandmother)
eBook conversion by www.ebookpartnership.com
About the Author
Janet MacLeod Trotter was brought up in the North East of England with her four brothers, by Scottish parents. She is a bestselling author of 17 novels, including the hugely popular Jarrow Trilogy, and a childhood memoir, BEATLES & CHIEFS, which was featured on BBC Radio Four. Her novel, THE HUNGRY HILLS, gained her a place on the shortlist of The Sunday Times’ Young Writers’ Award, and the TEA PLANTER’S DAUGHTER was longlisted for the RNA Romantic Novel Award and was an Amazon Kindle top ten bestseller. A graduate of Edinburgh University, she has been editor of the Clan MacLeod Magazine, a columnist on the Newcastle Journal and has had numerous short stories published in women’s magazines. Find out more about Janet and her other popular novels at: www.janetmacleodtrotter.com
By Janet MacLeod Trotter
Historical:
The Jarrow Trilogy
The Jarrow Lass
Child of Jarrow
Return to Jarrow
The Durham Trilogy
The Hungry Hills
The Darkening Skies
Never Stand Alone
The Edwardian Sagas
The Tea Planter’s Daughter (India Tea Series: Book 1)
No Greater Love (The Suffragette)
A Crimson Dawn
The Tyneside Sagas
A Handful of Stars
Chasing the Dream
For Love and Glory
Scottish Historical Romance
The Beltane Fires
Mystery:
The Vanishing of Ruth
The Haunting of Kulah
Teenage:
Love Games
Non Fiction:
Beatles & Chiefs
***
This novel is dedicated to the fond memory of my grandparents, Bob Gorrie (known as jungli Gorrie) and Sydney Easterbrook, who went to live and work in India in the 1920s – and to my beloved mother, Sheila, who lived there until she was eight years old.
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to my maternal grandparents for keeping diaries and writing interesting letters home to Scotland from India. These recently rediscovered diaries have inspired much of the background to this novel.
Thanks once again to my eagle-eyed and perceptive editor, Janey Floyd, for her practical help and wise comments. Thanks also to husband Graeme for keeping body and soul together with great meals and many cups of tea and coffee (and for spotting the odd typo)! And to Amy and Charlie for their constant cheerful encouragement.
Prologue
India, 1907
Sophie stood on tiptoes, peering through the tangle of creepers that blocked her view from the veranda to the path below. She was impatient for her birthday party to begin, for friends from the neighbouring tea gardens to come and share the cake and apple pie that cook had made; to play Blind Man’s Buff and Hide and Seek. This strange creaky house with its shaded veranda and overgrown garden was perfect for hiding. They were playing drums for her down in the village; they had started before dawn and had been playing for hours. She pestered her mother.
‘When will they come, Mama? When will they come!’
‘Wheesht lassie,’ her mother sighed. ‘It’s too far for children to come just for tea.’
‘No it’s not!’ Sophie shook her head of honey-coloured curls. ‘We go for hours and hours to see people.’
‘This year is different. How many times do I have to tell you?’
Sophie looked at her mother in disappointment; she hadn’t even made the effort to change into an afternoon dress, as if she knew no one was coming. Sophie had put on her best blue dress the moment she had woken, without any help from her nanny, Ayah Mimi, though she had allowed Ayah to brush out her hair and button her shoes with the special metal hook.
‘We can ask some village children then,’ Sophie brightened. She had seen them splashing in the river pool when Papa had given her a riding lesson down the drive and along the track that led deep into the forest. Some of them had laughed and waved to see her perched high in the saddle, her legs straddled like a boy’s with her father leading the reins.
Her mother ignored this. ‘Ayah will set out your toy tea set and you can have a party with your dolls.’
‘No!’ Sophie stamped her foot in frustration. Today, she was six year’s old and wanted a proper tea party at the grown-ups’ table. She didn’t like the wax-faced dolls her parents had given her two years running, ignoring her pleas for a toy train; the only doll she had ever loved was a soft one in a velvet jacket and a long dark plait like Ayah Mimi’s, but it had gone mouldy and disintegrated in last summer’s rains. ‘I want a proper party!’
‘Don’t shout,’ her mother snapped, ‘you’ll disturb Papa.’ She gave an anxious glance into the dark interior of the house. All was quiet but for the new kitten mewling.
‘Will Papa get up today?’ Sophie asked. ‘If I can’t have a party, will he take me fishing?’
‘Not today. No one’s going anywhere today.’
‘Why not?’
Her mother twisted and twisted a ring around her finger.
‘Next year, God willing, I promise you will have a party.’
‘I don’t like it here – I want to go home.’ Sophie ran to the veranda steps and plonked herself down to wait; she refused to believe that no one would come.
‘Keep out of the sun,’ her mother fretted, ‘and don’t go further than the bottom of the steps.’
‘Why?’
‘Cos I say so.’
Ayah Mimi’s soft tread came out of the shadows. The slim woman with a mole on her chin popped Sophie’s topee on her head and coaxed her out of the fierce light.
‘Lime juice and story time,’ smiled Ayah, ‘then lots of cake.’
When Sophie looked round her mother had already gone.
***
They were arguing – men’s voices – her father’s was hoarse and querulous, the other man’s deep and booming. The wide veranda was in darkness. Someone had covered her with a cotton sheet – it smelled of cloves like Ayah Mimi – as she had lain napping in the low hammock.
The sky was red and angry; the drumming from the village louder, sending birds screaming into the trees. Sophie sat up in alarm. Her mother was screaming too.
‘Just go! You’re making things worse!’
And why was that kitten wailing? The dusk made everything sound bigger than it should be.
; Sophie scrambled out of the hammock, stumbling into heavy furniture and knocking over a pot plant. She peered down the steps; a large black horse was tethered to a post. She could just make out its tail flicking in the dying light, but no one was tending it. No cooking fires burned in the compound beyond the jungle of garden.
Was it still her birthday? She looked down at the limp dress stuck to her prickly skin. It must be.
‘Ayah?’ Sophie called out. ‘Ayah Mimi!’
She wanted her nanny to come and be with her while the grown-ups shouted and the fireworks went off in the village and the drumming went on pounding like it was inside her head.
Suddenly the shouting was spilling through the door. Sophie pressed back into the shadows.
‘Jessie, you’re not safe here. There have been threats. You must come–’
‘I’m going nowhere. Stop interfering! You being here is what makes it not safe.’
The man with the booming voice strode from the house and down the steps. Sophie heard the big horse snort as he mounted and kicked it forward with a final shout, ‘On your own heads be it!’
Her father’s ranting continued after the rider had gone – his ‘fever shouting’ as her mother called it – and it rang around the old house.
As she crouched in the dark too anxious to move, Sophie heard hushed women’s voices – urgent, tearful – and hurried footsteps making the uneven floorboards squeak.
A flash of pink sari dashed down the steps. Sophie jumped up.
‘Ayah Mimi! Wait!’
The woman turned, startled. She was clasping something; the kitten’s basket.
The next moment her mother was grasping her arm. ‘Quiet, let her go.’
‘Where’s she going?’
Her mother’s face looked pained, like she had toothache.
‘On an errand.’
Sophie was frightened. Ayah Mimi shouldn’t be going anywhere without her. And who was the shouty man who had upset Papa? And why did her mother look like she was crying? It was the worst birthday ever and she hated the noise and the bangs that seemed to be getting closer coming from the village, and the flaming torches licking the night sky. All this she wanted to say to her mother. Instead she burst into tears and wailed, ‘And I never got to play Hide and Seek!’
‘Hush, lassie,’ her mother said, briefly putting an arm about her. She pulled a cotton handkerchief from her sleeve. ‘Blow your nose.’
All at once, there was an explosion of noise at the compound gate. Sophie’s father started bellowing again. Her mother gasped. She turned and pushed Sophie across the veranda.
‘Go and hide now.’
‘Are we playing Hide and Seek?’ Sophie felt fear and excitement.
‘Yes, now quickly. Be still as a mouse and don’t make a sound.’
At once, Sophie felt better. ‘Don’t look,’ she grinned and scampered off.
She hid in the linen chest, burrowing deep into the spicy-smelling sheets. Listening out for her mother’s footsteps, all she heard was the muffled drumming and the crackle of fireworks. Her mother didn’t come; Ayah didn’t come. Only the rain came. Sophie heard it battering off the roof, louder than any village drums. The air cooled. Then she slept.
***
Finally they found the child curled up in a laundry chest, squinting at the sudden light. She was shocked and mute as they lifted her out, hair damp and matted against her flushed cheeks. But it was the eyes – dark pools full of terror – that shook them the most. It was a look that haunted and left them worrying just how much the girl had seen.
Chapter 1
Edinburgh, June 1922
Sophie Logan leapt up the spiral steps two at a time, the clatter of her shoes on the worn stone echoing up the gloomy tenement stairwell. She burst through the door of the second-floor flat, unpinning her hat, kicking off her shoes and calling, ‘Auntie Amy! I’m back.’
The sound of hammering stopped. ‘In here, dearie.’
Sophie peered into the chaotic room her aunt used as a workshop for furniture making, breathing in the smell of newly cut wood and varnish. Amy Anderson looked up, grinning under a mop of fading frizzy fair hair, her trim body enveloped in dusty overalls. The walnut bookcase was nearly finished.
‘Good day, dearie?’
‘Bedlam Auntie. I had to run the office while Miss Gorrie went over to Duddingston to interview a new cook for the home. The telephone didn’t stop ringing. What did people do before they were invented?’
‘Wrote letters and had a bit of patience,’ Amy snorted.
Sophie laughed. Stepping over planks, she ran her hand over the hand-carved decoration of flowers and leaves.
‘It’s beautiful – so lifelike.’ She put her nose to the wood and breathed in the nutty, spicy smell. Her insides fluttered at the spark of memory; the smell of trees, of India.
‘Don’t eat it,’ her aunt teased, ‘or you’ll spoil your supper.’
The memory evaporated. ‘Shall I put the kettle on, Auntie?’
‘A pot of tea would be grand. Oh, and talking of letters; there’s one come for you from Newcastle.’
‘Tilly?’ Sophie gasped in excitement. Her aunt nodded. ‘It’s about time. What are the arrangements for her twenty-first birthday?’
‘Believe it or not,’ said Amy, ‘I haven’t steamed it open.’
‘We’ll read it over a cup of tea,’ Sophie smiled. ‘The suspense must have been killing you.’
‘Cheeky wee madam,’ her aunt said with a mock wagging finger.
While the kettle boiled on the gas range in the tiny kitchen, Sophie dashed into the sitting-room, slit open her Cousin Tilly’s letter with an ivory-handled letter opener and stood in the light of the window to read it. There were reams of pale blue notepaper covered in Tilly’s neat slanting writing telling her in great detail of the goings-on in the Watson household and life in the bustling industrial city a hundred miles south of Edinburgh.
The cheery Watsons had been a lifeline for her when she’d been shipped back from India, orphaned and dislocated, and given into the care of her mother’s older sister Amy. Sophie remembered so little of her first six years: snapshots of colour – white light filtering through lime green leaves, the salmon pink of her Ayah’s sari – and a birthday without a party. She had long forgotten the faces of early childhood.
Her spinster aunt had tried her best to provide a home and soon involved her clinging niece in her every activity – suffrage meetings, Kirk on Sundays, trips to the timber yards – but it was the holiday visits to her aunt’s cousins in Newcastle that brought the laughter and words back to Sophie’s plump lips.
‘Cousin Johnny’s been posted to somewhere called Pindi,’ Sophie called out to her aunt. ‘Have you heard of it?’
‘Rawalpindi,’ Amy answered, appearing in the doorway. ‘It’s an army station in the north Punjab. Your parents married and honeymooned near there in a hill station called Murree.’
‘Did they?’ Sophie glanced at the silver-framed photograph on the mantelpiece of a handsome couple in elaborate wedding clothes. It always struck her how sombre they looked but Amy had assured her that her parents were merely keeping still for the camera.
‘Jessie loved it there,’ Amy smiled. ‘Didn’t mind that it was winter and snowing; it had a healthy Scottish bluster.’
‘Wasn’t that a long way from Assam?’
Amy shrugged. ‘Aye, but we had a church connection there – a mission with a boarding house – I suppose they got a good rate at that time of year. And your mother always loved the hills.’
Sophie waited for more; her aunt rarely talked about her mother in case it upset her but Sophie craved these nuggets of information. Amy nodded towards the kitchen.
‘Don’t boil that kettle dry.’
Later, with cups of tea poured and shortbread eaten, Sophie read out the long letter. There was talk of Tilly’s mother going to stay with her eldest married daughter in Dunbar for the summer where the sea air would do her chest
good.
‘I’ll probably have to go with her,’ Sophie read aloud, ‘unless you can think up an excuse for me. What are the chances of Auntie Amy taking us to Switzerland on the train again? It was the best holiday I’ve ever had in my life. Beg her for me, will you?’
Amy Anderson laughed. ‘Tilly spent the whole time complaining about walking up mountains. But it was a grand trip, wasn’t it? It was thanks to the bequest from the Oxford Tea Company that we could afford to go.’
‘Yes, the company have been good to me, haven’t they?’
‘Well, your father was a respected employee – the company was only doing what was right by putting a bit in trust for you – seeing you through your education. And from what I hear, they’ve made huge profits during the War.’
‘Still, it was kind of them,’ said Sophie, returning to the letter.
‘Johnny’s dear friend Clarrie Robson is back on leave from Assam with her small daughter Adela. She’s just as much fun as ever and the girl is a pretty dark-eyed thing, already talking ten to the dozen. Clarrie’s handsome husband isn’t with her (more’s the pity!) but Wesley will be here in the autumn to take them back, when things aren’t so hectic in the tea gardens.’
‘Is that the woman who ran the tea room in West Newcastle?’ Amy interrupted. ‘What was it called?’
‘Herbert’s.’ Sophie nodded. ‘Named after her first husband. Her stepson Will was a good friend of Johnny’s, remember? Me and Tilly had such a massive crush on Will. I think it was the floppy hair – and he was always teasing us younger girls but in a nice way.’
‘Oh aye, the poor laddie who died after the war ended.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie sighed. ‘Tilly said Clarrie was heartbroken – and Johnny too.’
‘Well it’s grand that she found happiness again with one of the Robsons,’ said Amy.
‘Listen to this,’ Sophie read on. ‘Wesley’s cousin, James Robson, is also on leave in Newcastle, though he and Clarrie don’t really get on. It’s the first time he’s been back to England since before the Kaiser’s War.’
THE PLANTER'S BRIDE: A story of intrigue and passion: sequel to THE TEA PLANTER'S DAUGHTER (India Tea Series Book 2) Page 1