It was hard to stay cross with a warm, fresh, salty chakkali in hand, with the songs of the Parsees drifting up from the water, with candles and hibiscus flowers floating on the sea and dotted around the market stalls, in a world that had turned orange and mauve with the dusk. In fact, Ada felt so happy that she couldn’t quite remember now what she’d been so annoyed about. Her parents wanted to take her on a little trip to visit an island. That was all.
Mamma required the fruit back quickly, so they didn’t have as long as usual for Shashi to spend picking over each stall to find the best papaya and muskmelons, and Ada was still licking the last of her chakkali as they started the walk home. She said, ‘Will you tell me about Princess Aubergine?’
‘Again?’
‘It is my favourite.’ Truthfully, Ada liked all of Shashi’s stories. Indeed, she would have relished story time even if Shashi chose only to read from one of Ada’s father’s diplomatic papers; what she really loved was lying with Shashi, whose name meant ‘moon’, as the last of the day’s light dissolved into the stars of the night-time sky, listening to the enchanting sound of her aaya’s voice, the soft breathy clicking of the Punjabi words with which she wove her tales. ‘Please, Shashi.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Please!’
‘Very well. If you help me carry the fruit to the top of the hill I will tell you tonight of Princess Aubergine and her clever trick upon the wicked queen.’
‘Now, while we walk instead?’
‘Bāndara!’ said Shashi, pretending to swat Ada’s ear. ‘Little monkey! What do you take me for to ask such a thing?’
Ada grinned. It had been worth a try, even though she’d known that Shashi would say no. Ada knew the rules. The best storytellers only ever spoke by dark. Many times, as they lay together at night when it was too hot to sleep, side by side on the platform at the top of the house, with the window wide open, Shashi had told Ada about her girlhood in the Punjab. ‘When I was your age,’ she would say, ‘there were no stories between sunrise and sunset, for there was work to be done. Not for me a life of pleasure like yours! I was busy making fuel cakes all day so that there was something to burn at night, while my mother sat at her spinning wheel and my father and brothers drove the bullocks in the fields. In the village, there was always work to be done.’
Ada had received this little lecture many times before and although she knew it was only intended to highlight the idleness and indulgence of her own life, she did not mind: there was a magic to the way Shashi spoke about her home that made such tales every bit as wondrous as her ‘Long ago …’ stories. ‘All right, then,’ she said, taking the smaller basket and hooking it over her arm. ‘Tonight. But if I beat you home, you will tell me the tale of Princess Aubergine twice!’
‘Monkey!’
Ada started running, and Shashi gave a whoop behind her. They ran together, each laughing as much as the other; and when Ada glanced sideways at her aaya’s face, taking in her kind eyes and wide smile, she knew that she had never loved anyone quite so much. If Ada were asked, ‘In what does your life lie?’ – as the wicked queen asked of Princess Aubergine in order to discern her weakness – she would have had to confess that it lay in Shashi.
And so, on that hot afternoon in Bombay, Ada Lovegrove’s ill temper disappeared with the day’s sun. And when she and Shashi reached the house, its terrace now swept clean, candles flickering in glass jars along the verandah, the scent of freshly cut grass on the warm evening breeze and the sound of piano music drifting out through the open windows, Ada experienced a swelling sense of ecstatic completeness so overwhelming that she dropped her basket of fruit and ran inside to tell Mamma that yes, she consented, she would accompany them on the trip to England.
But Ada’s parents had not been truthful.
After a tortuous journey through the Suez Canal, during which Ada had spent the entire time heaving overboard or lying abed with a damp cloth on her forehead, they’d had a week in London, and a second week touring Gloucestershire – Mamma remarking to the point of delirium on the glory of spring and how little of the ‘seasons’ they saw in India – before arriving one day at a twin-gabled house on the bend of an upper reach of the Thames.
The clouds had begun to darken as their carriage wound south through the village of Burford, and when it took a turn in the road before Lechlade, the first rain began to fall. Ada had been resting her face on the edge of the carriage window, watching the wet fields sweep by and wondering what it was that made the colours of this country appear as if they had been washed in milk. Her parents, meanwhile, had been unusually quiet since they’d bidden farewell to Lady Turner, their host, but this was something Ada noticed only on reflection.
They passed a triangle-shaped green in the middle of a very small village, and a public house called The Swan, and when they reached a stone church and cemetery the carriage turned into a winding lane with edges that fell away into the verge, making the journey exceedingly bumpy.
Finally, when they had gone as far along the lane as they could go, their carriage cut between a pair of iron gates which were open within a tall stone wall. A barn-like structure stood to one side, overlooking a stretch of very green grass that ran as far as a line of willows beyond.
The horses came to a full stop and the driver leapt down from on high to open Mamma’s door. He held aloft a large black umbrella and helped her from the carriage.
‘Birchwood Manor, ma’am,’ he said in a dour voice.
Ada’s parents had spent a great deal of time telling her about the people and places that they were going to see when they were in England, but she could not think that they’d mentioned friends who lived in a house called Birchwood Manor.
They followed a flagstone path with roses planted on either side and when they reached the front door were met by a woman with shoulders that hunched forward, as if she had spent her whole life hurrying to get where she was going. Her name, she announced, was Miss Thornfield.
Ada noted with mild curiosity how different she was from the other ladies that they had visited during the week, with her scrubbed face and severe hairstyle, before realising that this woman, although not wearing a uniform, must be the housekeeper.
Ada’s parents were being scrupulously polite – Mamma was always reminding Ada that a true lady treated servants with respect – and Ada followed suit. She smiled daintily and stifled a yawn behind her closed lips. With any luck, they would be taken to meet the lady of the house, be offered tea and a slice of cake (something, she had to admit, the English did very well indeed), and be on their way within the hour.
Miss Thornfield led them into a dim passage, through two halls and past a stairwell, to arrive at a room that she called ‘the library’. A sofa and pair of worn armchairs stood at the centre of the room, and shelves laden with books and other objets d’art lined the walls. Through the window at the back of the room was a garden with a chestnut tree at its centre; beyond it, a meadow with a stone barn. The rain had stopped already and weak light was breaking through soft clouds: even rain wasn’t really rain in England.
It was at this point that proceedings took a further turn for the unexpected: Ada was instructed to wait while her parents were served tea elsewhere.