Ada spent the next few hours stalking along the river, pulling reeds from their sheaths and then slaying the tall grasses that lined the bank. She observed the horrible house from a distance, hating it with all of her might. She shed hot, angry tears when she thought of Shashi.
Only when the sun began to set, and Ada realised that she was alone in the middle of a darkening copse of trees, did she start to head back across the meadow, skirting the stone wall that surrounded the house, to arrive at the front gate. She sat cross-legged on the ground where she could keep an eye on the lane that led from the village. That way she would be able to see the carriage as soon as it turned towards Birchwood Manor. She watched the light turn from yellow to less yellow and her heart ached when she pictured the jagged scars of palm trees on the purple and orange horizon at home, the sharp smells and the bustle, the hymns of the praying Parsees.
It was almost dark when she sensed someone behind her. ‘Come now, Miss Lovegrove.’ Miss Thornfield stepped from the shadows. ‘Dinner is being served. It would not do to go hungry on your first night.’
‘I will dine with my mother and father when they return,’ said Ada. ‘They will be back for me.’
‘No. They will not. Not tonight. As I tried to explain, they have left you here to go to school.’
‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘Be that as it may.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Miss Lovegrove—’
‘I want to go home!’
‘You are home, and the sooner you start to accept that fact, the better.’ Miss Thornfield stiffened then, and seemed to grow in length, drawing herself up like a ladder, all the way to her hunched shoulders, so that Ada was put in mind of an alligator stretching its scales. ‘Now then, shall we try again? Dinner,’ she enunciated, ‘is being served, and no matter what you might have become accustomed to on the subcontinent, Miss Lovegrove, I assure you that here we do not serve dinner twice.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
And so here she was, sixty-three days later, crouched in the dark in a secret damp-smelling space in the lining between walls in the first-floor hallway of Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies. Her parents, as she understood it, were now back in Bombay, although she had not heard the news directly because, as Miss Thornfield had explained, they wished to give Ada time to ‘settle in’ before sending any post. ‘Very considerate of them,’ was Miss Thornfield’s determination. ‘They wished to give you no cause for upset.’
Ada pressed her ear to the wooden panel and closed her eyes. It was already dark, but the act of shutting them helped to focus her other senses. Sometimes she thought that she could actually hear the whorls within the wood. ‘Whorls’ sounded very similar to ‘worlds’ and it was a pleasant distraction to imagine them as such. She could almost believe that the worlds within the wood were speaking to her in a lovely voice. It made her feel better, that voice.
Now, from the hallway outside, came two real voices, muffled, and Ada’s eyes snapped open.
‘But I saw her come this way.’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘I did.’
‘Well? Where is she then? Disappeared into thin air?’
There was a pause and then a petulant reply. ‘I saw her come this way. I know I did. She must be here somewhere; we just have to wait.’
Tucked inside her hiding place, Ada exhaled silently. Her foot had gone to sleep; she’d been cramped up in the same position for at least twenty-five minutes now, but if there was one thing she was good at – as opposed to sewing, piano and painting, and almost everything else they tried to teach at this bevkuph school – it was being stubborn. Shashi was always calling her ‘little khacara’ – little mule. Those girls could wait all they liked in the corridor; Ada would simply wait longer.
Charlotte Rogers and May Hawkins were the names of her tormentors. They were older than she was, twelve years old, and one of them, Charlotte, particularly tall for her age. She was the daughter of a parliamentarian, May of a prominent industrialist. Ada had not had much opportunity to mix with other children, but she was a fast learner and an excellent observer, and it hadn’t taken long for her to ascertain that at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies there was a small group of big girls who ran things and that they expected willing obedience from the littler ones.
But Ada was not used to being told what to do by other children, and her steel sense of justice rendered her incapable of iniquitous compliance. So when Charlotte Rogers demanded the new ribbons that Mamma had bought for her in London, Ada told her no. She liked the ribbons, thank you very much, and would prefer to keep them for herself. When the two of them cornered her in the stairwell and told her not to make a single noise while May Hawkins saw how far backwards her finger would bend, Ada brought her boot down hard on May’s toes and shouted, ‘Let go of my finger at once!’ When they reported (falsely) to Matron that it was Ada who had sneaked into the larder and opened the new jars of jam, Ada spoke up quickly to report that, no, she was not the culprit, adding that in fact it had been Charlotte Rogers who stole down the hallway after dark; she had seen it with her own two eyes.
None of this had endeared her to Charlotte Rogers and May Hawkins, it was true, but their enmity went back further than that, to the beginning. For when Ada had fled from the library, hoping to catch her parents, it had been Charlotte Rogers with whom she had collided in the corridor. Charlotte had been caught by surprise, issuing a banshee-like scream that drew laughter and pointed fingers from the other girls, even the younger ones. The fact that Ada had then hissed into her face had not helped matters.
‘There she is, the little Indian wild cat,’ Charlotte had said, the very next time that she’d seen Ada.
They had crossed paths in the front garden, Ada sitting alone beneath the young Japanese maple by the wall, Charlotte in the midst of a giggling flock of ringlet-ribboned girls.
A radiant, hungry smile had spread across Charlotte’s pretty face as she drew the attention of the group to Ada. ‘This is the one I was telling you about, ladies. Her parents brought her all the way from India in the hopes that she could somehow be civilised.’ One of them sniggered at that and Charlotte, emboldened, widened her cool blue eyes: ‘I want you to know that we are all here to help you, Ada, so if there’s anything you need, anything at all, you must simply ask. While I think of it, there’s a water closet inside, but you should feel free to dig yourself a hole out here if that makes you more comfortable.’
The girls had all laughed and Ada’s eyes had stung with hurt and anger. An image had come to mind, unbidden, of Shashi’s sunshine face as they lay side by side on the platform on the roof in Bombay, her broad, bright smile as she told stories of her childhood in the Punjab and teased Ada gently for her life of privilege in the mansion. In some inexplicable way, when Charlotte spoke derisively of India, it was as if she had poked fun directly at Shashi; as if she had made Ada complicit.