The Secret Mandarin. Sara Sheridan

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СКАЧАТЬ brought the jug from the pantry and poured. I cut two slices of bread and spread them thickly with butter and jam. We swapped, pushing our wares over the tabletop. I glanced at the door.

      ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We should sit down.’

      There was a breeze in the garden. Very slight but delicious. The fresh air blew in as we sat companionably on the step listening to the church bell sounding three. As the night wears on, the chiming sound echoes so. It is different once it’s dark and the streets are quiet. I thought this could not be anywhere but England. The touch of cool night air on my skin and the bells in the distance. There were those, I knew, who had been out half the night at cards or dancing or worse, who were only now in some dark carriage on their way home. Robert shifted uncomfortably. He had a fleck of jam on his forearm and when I pointed it out he brought his arm to his mouth and sucked the sweetness away. This left, I noticed, a pale pink mark on his skin.

      ‘I am going, Mary,’ he said. ‘I am commissioned.’

      Robert did not look at me though an eager, almost shy, smile played around his lips. He had been given his chance. I assumed that he meant that the Society was sending him abroad to collect botanical specimens. It had been his ambition for some time.

      ‘Where will you go?’ I asked.

      ‘China. Camellia sinensis. Tea plants.’

      ‘You would think they had tea plants aplenty at Kew.’

      ‘Those are Indian tea plants, not Chinese ones. Besides, I am not going for the Society,’ Robert whispered. ‘They do not pay anything more for travelling and whatever I bring back is not mine. I will go for the Honourable East India Company, Mary. Whatever new plants I collect outside the terms of the commission will belong to me. I will sell them to a private nursery for profit.’

      ‘How long will you be gone?’

      Robert stared towards the garden wall. ‘More than one year certainly. Perhaps two or three. If I can find something it will make us, Mary. And of all the specimens to come from the Orient I cannot believe I will not make a discovery there.’

      He had not touched the food. It lay in his hand. When Robert had secured his position at the Society it seemed the pinnacle of his career. This was a leap beyond. For all his efforts to fit in, all his fears about my behaviour, Robert was audacious on his own part. He worked every daylight hour. I could not find it in my heart to begrudge him this success, however difficult a time I was having.

      ‘Well done,’ I said, holding up my milk in a toast. ‘I hope you discover something England cannot live without!’

      We tapped the cups together, though as he drank I could see a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. Robert had fought hard to scramble up the rough battlements of advancement. He had become everything his betters wanted—a hard worker, a respectable family man and a prudent and underpaid employee. Now he had thrown over the Royal Society and struck out for himself. A mission to a barbarian land would be both dangerous and difficult. It was daring. No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

      ‘If anything happens to me,’ he said in a low voice, ‘I worry that they will fall. They will go hungry. I could stay at the Society, of course, but then we will never have the money to move up. I want the children to marry well.’

      A few months ago I would have considered these words only proof of Robert’s desperate desire for his own advancement, but now, having Henry, I recognised the father in him. Besides, he showed more spirit that evening than I had seen in him in ten years.

      ‘No one could know more than you do. You have an eye for it—a feel for the plants that has brought you this far and will take you further. Strike out for yourself, I say, Robert. Jane will not be for starving if I know my sister. You are doing the right thing,’ I promised him.

      He took a hearty bite of his bread and jam.

      ‘They do have a fund at the East India Company,’ he murmured. ‘For widows.’

      We said no more.

      The following afternoon I took the atlas from the morning room and sat by the fire. The tea countries are hilly and lie away from the coast. Robert was set to travel far further than I. With my finger I traced the outline of Madagascar, the largest island in the Indian Ocean. Réunion lies to its east. My fingers followed the fine line of the coast. The map seemed too small to contain the vast, empty sea, the expanse of beach, the two miles to St Denis that I had been led on horseback, half dead. What lay for me in the maze of streets behind the tiny black dot that marked Calcutta and where was my sense of adventure that I so strongly resisted its allure? Unlike Robert I would not travel in unwelcoming territory. Bohea and Hwuy-chow were closed to white men. In India I would be welcomed with open arms.

      I stretched my hand across the open page, my thumb on London, my fingers lighting on Calcutta and Hong Kong, Robert’s landing point in China. We would be very distant. Weeks of sea between us. William did not love me any longer. He had dispatched me as easily as a lame horse or a hunting dog. Bought and paid for.

      That week, Jane ordered two trunks from Heal’s. We packed them together.

      ‘I did not expect to love Henry so much,’ I admitted.

      ‘You cannot have everything you want, Mary,’ she chided me.

      The truth was I had nothing I wanted. Neither William nor Henry nor my life on the stage—only a sense of doing what was expected. I had fought against that all my life.

      ‘Mother should have come with you to London,’ Jane said wistfully, as if that might have kept me in check.

      I giggled. Our mother loved a rogue. She probably would have encouraged me with William, if I had the measure of her.

      ‘It is not funny,’ Jane retorted. ‘You treat everything as if it doesn’t matter. It matters when you hurt people, Mary.’

      But as far as I could make out I had hurt no one but myself and I let the matter drop, instead lingering by the open window. I love the smell of the horses wafting up as they pass. You can only just catch it. The sound of hooves and the whiff of hide that reminds me always of the stables near our old house, where we grew up, Jane and I. She and the children were my only family now and there was a bond between us that I simply could not bear to break.

      ‘Do you remember Townsend Farm?’ I asked. ‘Father took me there once. He let me ride a pony. A white one.’

      Jane stiffened. She banged the lid of the trunk down. She thought we were better off without him. Mother had agreed. ‘We might have no man about the house but we can do for ourselves,’ she used to say. I missed my father though, for I had been his favourite. I was not quite eight and Jane perhaps only ten when he died. Why he had cared for me more, I have no idea. Nor why he had taken almost a dislike to my sister—for he had been fierce with her, though I could not remember much of it. The bonds between a family are strange indeed. Jane had sheltered me when many would have slammed the door in my face and yet she would not talk about him. If I mentioned our father she simply clammed up, drawing her protective armour around her. Saying nothing. Our children make us so vulnerable. Our parents too, I suppose.

      ‘It’s all right for you,’ Jane snapped. ‘I have to pack, Mary. I have to organise everything. There is no time for your dilly-dallying. Come along.’

      I had lost everything aboard СКАЧАТЬ