Page 2 of The Girl from the Tea Garden (The India Tea #3)

But the trouble didn’t stop. Nina was vindictive. Adela had misjudged quite how humiliated Nina had been, both by the drenching and by being publicly hauled in front of Miss Black. Nina called Adela a little sneak and organised the other girls into not speaking to her.

‘We’ve sent you to Coventry,’ Margie told her, ‘for being horrid to Nina.’

‘But she started it,’ Adela protested.

‘Can’t hear you!’ Margie called as she hurried away and left Adela mending sheets in the common room.

Only Flowers Dunlop smiled warily at her when she entered the classroom or dormitory, andonce she realised that Adela didn’t hold a grudge against her for what had happened, she was happy to chat about life as a member of a railway family.

Her father was station master at the busy depot at Sreemangal in the tea district of Sylhet.

He was a second-generation Scot in India.

Her mother came from the nearby hill station of Jaflong.

Adela had seen them dropping off an excited Flowers at the start of term: a jovial red-faced man and a pretty woman in a lime-green sari who had stood out like a sore thumb because no one else’s mother was dressed in native costume.

‘I’ve been fishing at Jaflong with my father,’ Adela enthused. ‘It’s beautiful there, and the fishing boats are like gondolas– just like in Venice.’

‘Have you been to Venice?’ Flowers asked, wide-eyed.

‘No, but I’ve seen pictures. And one day I’m going to go there– I’m going to travel all over the world and become a famous actress.’

‘How will you do that? Are your family very rich?’

‘No,’ Adela admitted. She waved away such an obstacle. ‘I’ll marry a prince or a viceroy and he will take me around the world. We’ll spend the summers in Europe,or maybe America– yes, we’ll have a house in Hollywood so I can star in the latest films.’

Flowers chewed on the end of her pigtail. ‘I want to be a nurse and make people better.’

Adela looked at her in pity. ‘I can’t think of anything worse– all that blood and having to empty bedpans and wash men’s bottoms.’

Flowers gasped. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that.’

‘You’ll have to. Auntie Tilly’s brother is a doctor and he says that’s what nurses have to do. He calls them angels, but I think it sounds like a job from hell.’

‘Adela!’

‘Well, I’m just telling the truth. I think you should become a lady doctor instead, then you can be in charge of all the nurses and wear nicer clothes and still make people better.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Flowers’ slim face looked pensive. ‘I don’t think girls like me become lady doctors.’

‘Why ever not? You’re obviously brainy.You’ve only been here a month and you’re top of the class in almost everything– no wonder bossyboots Nina doesn’t like you. She was first in everything last term– except for the singing prize, which I won.’

Adela abandoned her sewing and paced to the window.

Outside, the leaves of a large chinar glowed brilliant scarlet in the mellow autumn sun.

How she longed to be home in the hills at Belgooree, out riding through the tea garden on her piebald pony, Patch, shooting duck by the river with her father or, after an explore through the sal forest, pestering their khansama, Mohammed Din, for scraps of chicken for Scout, her hill dog.

Anything but be stuck in school doing endless sewing, with everyoneexcept new-girl Flowers giving her the cold shoulder.

How she loathed StNinian’s! She hated lessons and having to sit still and learn algebra and the names of long-dead kings and queens.

School was only bearable when she was out of doors running and playing games on the half-bald playing field or larking around in the spinney with Margie and the others.

She used to make Margie laugh with impersonations of the teachers. But Margie wasn’t speaking to her.

Adela had to admit the bleak truth that things had been changing with Margie long before the fight with Nina.

All term their friendship had been lukewarm.

Margie hadn’t come to stay at Belgooree over the summer like she had in previous holidays; she had gone to Simla in the Himalayan foothills with Nina and her mother.

‘We went to a garden party at Viceregal Lodge,’ Margie had boasted, ‘and Nina got a part in a play at the Gaiety.’

Adela had been consumed with envy to think that Nina had performed on a real stage with a paying audience and– if she was to be believed– in front of the Viceroy himself!

Nina couldn’t act for toffee. It should have been her, Adela Robson, with a good singing voice and dancing legs, who entertained India’s most important people, the ‘heaven-born’– those elite British government officials who spent the hot weather in Simla.

But that was never going to happen, not while she was stuck in a boarding school in Shillong.

Here, the only chance to act was in the inter-house plays in front of the headmistress and occasionally Miss Black’s missionary brother, DrNorman Black, who had helped found the school and came to judge the competition – if he wasn’t away spreading the gospel to heathens.

Adela gave an impatient sigh. If only she hadn’t interfered between Nina and Flowers. Since then school life had become completely unbearable.

‘All your troubles are my fault. I’m sorry,’ Flowers said.

Adela swung round. The girl was studying her with sorrowful brown eyes.

‘Don’t be,’ Adela said.

‘I should just have drunk that ghastly stuff and got it over with.’

‘No, you shouldn’t have. It’s not a tradition– just something Nina made up. We usually just make apple-pie beds and lock the new girls in the laundry room and pretend it’s haunted.’

‘It doesn’t matter– any tradition will do,’ Flowers said, shaking her head. ‘I just want to fit in here.’

‘There isn’t a part for you,’ Nina said callously. ‘It’s all about Queen Elizabeth the first and Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m Queen Bess and Margie’s going to be Queen Mary. We’ve already decided.’

Adela looked up at them, stunned. They were standing over her desk, where she was struggling with equations, her jotter a patchwork of holes where she’d rubbed out her miscalculations. Everyone else had finished their prep and gone to the common room. Margie glanced away; even she looked sheepish.

‘That’s not fair!’ Adela protested. ‘You can’t just choose the best parts– it has to go to a vote.’

‘We’ve voted. After the hockey match. You weren’t there.’

‘I didn’t know—’

‘Well, now you do.’

Adela was suddenly filled with rage at the injustice. She leapt up and grabbed Nina as she tried to walk away.

‘Why are you being so mean?’ she cried.

Nina went rigid, as if her touch was contagious. ‘Get off me, or I’ll scream for help.’

Adela let go. ‘Just tell me! Why can’t we all be friends?’

Nina’s face puckered into a look of disgust. ‘You’re not like us; you never will be. You pretend to be British but you’re not.’

‘Of course I’m British. Just because I was born in India doesn’t make me Indian.’

Nina gave a malicious little smile. ‘You don’t know, do you, Tea Leaf? I can’t believe no one’s told you.’

‘Told me what?’ Adela’s stomach knotted. The glint in Nina’s pale blue eyes was frightening.

‘You’re two annas short of a rupee– ask your mother.’ She leant forward and hissed, ‘And your father is a blackguard who jilted my mother at the altar, so I’ll never ever be friends with you!’

With a toss of blonde ponytail, Nina turned her back on Adela. ‘Come on, Margie, we’ve got a rehearsal.’

Adela, shaking with shock, watched them march from the room.

That night Adela lay awake, tormented by Nina’s hurtful words.

What did she mean by them? Two annas short of a rupee was an insult thrown at Eurasians– or Anglo-Indians, as mixed-race families, such as Flowers’, now called themselves– but she, Adela, had no Indian blood.

The Robsons were British through and through, and her mother was the daughter of Jock Belhaven, English soldier turned tea planter.

What incensed her even more, though, was the slur on her father’s character; he would never jilt anyone at the altar and he had only ever loved her mother.

Auntie Tilly in Assam said it was well known among the tea planters how Wesley Robson adored his Clarissa and had even given up his career at the prestigious Oxford Tea Estates to run the remote tea garden in the Khassia Hills just to please the beautiful Clarrie Belhaven.

The next day, tired out and short-tempered from lack of sleep, Adela confronted Margie in the washroom.

‘You don’t believe all this nonsense about my parents, do you? You’ve met them, Margie. You’ve always said how much you like them.’

Her former friend looked uneasy. ‘I shouldn’t be speaking to you.’

‘Margie! Just tell me you don’t believe Nina.’

Margie gave her a cool look. ‘I do believe Nina.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause I’ve heard MrsDavidge say as much. She tells Nina everything.’

‘What did she say?’ Adela blocked her way. ‘Tell me. I have a right to know.’

‘Very well,’ Margie said. ‘Don’t say you didn’t ask for it. MrsDavidge said she was engaged to your father, but he left her in the lurch and went off with a box-wallah’s half-caste daughter who’d been married before.’

‘Box-wallah’s half-caste ...?’ Adela felt winded.

‘MrsDavidge said it turned out to be a lucky let-off ’cause she ended up with an officer in a prestigious Gurkha regiment and not stuck out in the sticks with a penniless tea planter.’

Margie pushed past and left Adela gaping after her.

Adela hardly ever cried, but that day she ran off to the spinney and howled behind the thick trunk of a pine tree.

Crouching down, she eventually forced herself to be calm.

She refused to believe Margie’s poisonous words.

Surely a grown woman like MrsDavidge wouldn’t say such malicious things, let alone admit them to her daughter’s friend.

She had glimpsed Nina’s mother at speech day: a thin woman dressed in a fashionably belted frock and a large straw hat with matching ribbon over a neat blonde perm.

She had hung on to the arm of a much older man wearing a military-style topee and an array of medals, presumably Nina’s father.

Henrietta she was called; Adela had heard her being introduced.

She had looked so sophisticated that Adela had felt a guilty stab of relief that her own mother had not felt well enough to travel the bumpy two hours by car from Belgooree.

She would have worn one of her ancient tea dresses and an old-fashioned hat, the kind that no one had worn since before the Great War.

But Auntie Tilly had travelled all the way from the Oxford Tea Estates with gruff Uncle James, and her adored father had come from Belgooree looking handsome in a white linen suit and brown fedora hat. Adela had felt so proud marching up on stage to receive a small silver cup for singing.

Had her father and Nina’s mother spoken to each other that day?

Auntie Tilly had demanded to be shown around her schoolhouse, so Adela hadn’t been with her father all of the time.

It made her feel strange inside to think her father might have had feelings for another woman.

She knew that her mother had been married before; she had run a tea room in Newcastle and named it Herbert’s after her first husband.

Adela’s parents had made no secret of that.

But these other hurtful accusations were a different matter.

Suddenly she had an overwhelming urge to run away, to escape the cattiness of Nina and her followers and the strictures of boarding school. She longed for home, for her mother’s fussing attention and her father’s companionship.

‘What are you doing out here?’

Adela looked up to see Flowers peering anxiously at her. Adela rubbed her eyes.

‘I hate it here,’ she admitted. ‘The only thing I was looking forward to was being in the inter-house play competition, and now I’m not even in that. Nina has said horrible things about my parents, and now Margie and all the other girls hate me.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ said Flowers, squatting down beside her. ‘I think you’re the nicest girl in the class– in the whole house. I’ll never forget the way you stuck up for me.’

Adela’s eyes watered again. ‘Thank you.’ She slipped an arm around the girl’s bony shoulders.

Flowers said, ‘I thought StNinian’s would be like the Chalet School in those novels Daddy used to bring me back from the library– all girls together and having adventures. But it’s nothing like that, is it?’

‘I don’t know– I’ve never read them– but it doesn’t sound like StNinian’s. It was all right when Margie was my best friend, I suppose, but I’ve always preferred playing with boys. My cousin Jamie was the best fun– till he got sent back home to school.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes. Durham, in the north of England. Not that I’ve ever been there.’

Flowers looked at her with dark, solemn eyes. ‘I’ll be your best friend if you like. I’m not pretty like Margie and I’m not a boy—’

Adela snorted with sudden laughter. ‘No, I can see you’re not a boy.’

Flowers giggled and sucked her hair. Adela considered the idea.

Flowers was not as timid as she looked; she had fought back when the girls had tried to force her to drink Nina’s potion.

And she had come out here to find her even though she must know that speaking to her, Adela, would make her more unpopular with Nina and the others.

Flowers had a quiet strength and an innate kindness.

Adela was growing fond of the railway girl.

‘Can you sing and dance?’ Adela asked.

Flowers smiled. ‘Mummy says I’m her little nightingale, and I went to ballet classes in Sreemangal.’

‘Good.’ Adela stood up. ‘We’re going to enter our own act in the inter-house competitions. There’s nothing to say we can’t.’

Flowers gaped at her. ‘But what will the others say?’

‘Who cares?’ Adela said with a grin, pulling the skinny girl to her feet. ‘All that matters is that we get on that stage and show them they haven’t beaten us.’