“Are you ill, Button?” her father asked, knocking on the door.
It took Linley a few tries to find her voice, and when she did, it came out no more than a whisper. “I…I had a shock…but I’m fine now.”
“Then come out of there,” he said. “This is no time to lose one’s composure over a few pachyderms. Our entire expedition could be in jeopardy if we cannot get to Guahati before the rains set in!”
Linley opened the lavatory door, glaring at her father through bleary eyes. For once—just once—she wished she could tell him that everything was not all about his damned expedition.
***
The train backed down the tracks until it reached a small station on the outskirts of a tea plantation. Fields of little green leaves stretched for miles on both sides of the red dirt road. Far beyond them, the whitewashed walls of the plantation house gleamed in the afternoon sun.
The station itself was no more than a lean-to with a few worn wooden benches set beneath it. The man who sold the tickets also acted as porter, and he helped Linley off of the passenger car.
“There is a village a few miles walk from here,” he told them. “Or you can wait for the wagon, but it only comes when the trains are due…and another is not due for many hours.”
Thank God they planned to wait until they arrived in Guahati to purchase supplies, or else the team would have quite a time dragging a month’s worth of provisions down this dusty dirt path. Linley and the others set off down the road in the sweltering heat, promising to send the wagon back for the rest of the passengers.
As they walked, Linley studied the tea fields and the spotting of trees between the rows. Her father explained that the trees were planted to shield the tea bushes from the relentless Indian sun. She watched the workers in the fields wade through the sea of green, their heads sheltered beneath wide straw hats and swaths of tightly wrapped cloth.
Linley adjusted her own straw hat. The old thing showed every bit of every mile it ever traveled. Her nice clothes had been shipped to their villa in Malta soon after they left London. She wondered if there would be a letter from Patrick also waiting for her whenever she finally went home. Linley thought of him often. More often than she liked to admit to herself.
She wondered what he was doing at that exact moment, whether his sister had her baby yet, and if he really meant what he said about not marrying Gaynor Robeson. Linley knew she would be hurt if she found out he ever married, but she would be crushed if it were Gaynor. Even if she lived to be one hundred years old and had long forgotten what either of their faces looked like, her heart would shatter into a thousand tiny pieces at the news.
Linley wished she had a photograph of him. Perhaps he would send one to her someday. She decided she would have Archie take one of her during their trip, and when she went home, she would send it in her first letter to Patrick. Hopefully, he would get the hint and send one of his own.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would never write to her. With all those beautiful, rich London girls turning themselves inside out for him, why would he bother with a spotty-faced, tangle-haired girl seven thousand miles away? She kicked a rock with the toe of her boot. Linley hated feeling sorry for herself, and that was exactly what she was doing. If Patrick forgot about her, it was her own fault. Not a day went by that she didn’t wish she’d stayed in London. All the ‘maybes’ and ‘what ifs’ haunted her, and they probably would until the day she died.
***
Linley and the team sat on the side of the road, sipping from their canteens in the shade of a banyan tree. The sun was at its highest then, and they rested in the cool dirt beneath the tree branches. Besides the voices of the tea-pickers singing, there wasn’t a sound in the air. So when they heard the rumble of an automobile engine, everyone turned to see who it could be.
Speeding down the path came a man and two women in a Renault torpedo. When it reached them, the motorcar skidded to a stop amid a cloud of bright orange dust.
“Hullo, there!” the man called out.
Linley’s father waved in return. “Good afternoon!”
“We don’t see many visitors…have you come by rail?”
He answered that they had indeed, explaining the accident and how they came to the spot on the road where they now sat.
The three people in the car glanced at each other, shocked. “Then we will send someone for the wagon, and you will come with us! You must be famished!”