The Secret Mandarin. Sara Sheridan

       Chapter Two

      The road was muddy and it slowed us down. The hired carriage, uncomfortable to drive in at the best of times, bumped along the uneven surface. If I lost hold of it, the rug simply jolted off my knees.

      When I had first arrived in London I walked there. It was more than a hundred miles and took me a week. I left home with my mother’s blessing. I was fifteen by then and fired with visions of myself on stage, my name on billboards, fêted. I arrived with a shilling in pennies, a change of clothing and a fanatical light burning in my eyes that made me shine in any part I was offered. I bribed the scene-changers, forced my way into auditions and, once I had hijacked the part, stole the attention of the audience by fair means or foul—anything to act, to lose myself for a few brief hours on stage and bask in the limelight and the applause. My tactics worked. In my ten years in London I had managed everything I had hoped for—even two love affairs that had not inspired a single sentence in the scandal sheets and which, for a long time, saw me better provided for than most young actresses. Then I had met William. I hated being swept under the carpet like this. It was simply not in my nature.

      Robert, by contrast, was in good humour. He clutched his pencil eagerly and wrote notes in a moleskine—comments on the weather or trees he had spotted by the road or over the tops of the brick-walled gardens as we rode out of Fulham, past Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park.

      As we left the reaches of the city we followed a route now familiar to me, scattered with villages along the way—Claygate, Chessington and Esher. The clean air cut unexpectedly through the dampness, my head cleared and I felt calmer. I realised that I had been closeted too long in my sister’s blue back bedroom at Gilston Road.

      ‘I will simply have to make the best of this,’ I thought. ‘Perhaps I am an exotic flower and Calcutta will have me blooming. Maybe my instincts are wrong.’

      Outside the window the puddles splashed as we drove through.

      Robert sat back smugly. ‘Headed for warmer climes, eh, Mary? We English travel well,’ he remarked.

      ‘You are not English,’ I laughed.

      Robert pulled at his greatcoat. I had irked him. So far from home I could see he would enjoy not being placed. He could be born a gentleman, an Englishman, whatever he chose.

      ‘I’m sorry. I did not intend to hurt you,’ I apologised.

      ‘It is the least of what you’ve done, Mary,’ he retorted tartly.

      I straightened the rug over my knees and lowered my eyes. I did not wish to quarrel. We had hours until we reached the port. He drew a small volume from his pocket and settled down to read. Glancing over, I could see maps of India, drawings of tea leaves and tables of humidity readings. I contented myself with the thought that Robert was insufferably dull.

      The rain made the countryside doubly green and lush. The dripping sycamores were beautiful. I watched the passing of each field. The tropics would be very different and these, I realised, were my last glances of England. The last time I had passed in this direction, many months before, I had been so distressed after Henry’s birth and William’s abandonment that I did not look out of the window once. My recollection was that I had been distracted by my own body—it was so soon after the birth that I ached all over. Coming home again I had willed myself every mile to London and was so intent on reaching the city that I scarcely noticed the scenery on the way. Now, entirely recovered and not at all intent on my destination, my curiosity was piqued by the view from the carriage window.

      ‘Robert,’ I enquired, ‘are there sycamore trees in India? Are there horse chestnuts?’

      Robert looked up. His blue eyes were bright. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in Calcutta,’ he tapped his pencil against the cover of his notebook. ‘The seed does not travel easily. I know of a nursery on this road. We could obtain cuttings. The Society would be fascinated, Mary, if you could make the trees take on Indian soil.’

      ‘No, no,’ I insisted. His eagerness was simply too bookish. What did I care for the Royal Society and their no doubt copious information about what trees will grow where? ‘It was not for that. I only wondered,’ I said, cursing inwardly that I had started him off.

      He laid down his notebook and continued.

      ‘They have been cultivating tea plants in India for sixty years, you know. The bushes have died even on the high ground. It is in the tending of them. That is the thing. If I can crack that conundrum I will be there.’

      I could think of nothing more tiresome.

      ‘Does nothing else in China interest you?’ I asked in an attempt to stave off the information that was coming, no doubt, about soil alkalinity and water levels. ‘Strange dress or customs? The food?’

      Robert looked thoughtful. ‘I heard they train cormorants to fish. The Chinese keep them on leashes. Perhaps I will collect bird skins. I can dry them with my herbarium specimens.’

      A sigh escaped me.

      ‘And what of you in India? What interests you?’ he snapped.

      It saddened me. ‘It is not by choice I am sent away,’ I said. ‘I have no interest there. I am cast out, Robert. You know that.’

      He simply ignored me. He picked up his book and continued to read.

      In the middle of the day we stopped in the muddy courtyard of an inn. Robert and I sat silently over a side of ham. I had not thought that we would stop. It was only for the horses. The road was hard on them.

      Robert said, ‘We will go faster in the long run if we see to them now.’

      I wished we had travelled by train or taken the public coach. When the innkeeper stared at me, half in recognition, Robert became flustered. Perhaps the man had seen me on stage. We were not so far from town that it was inconceivable. Robert hurried our host away from the small side room and closed the door.

      ‘’twas not the end of the world if the man had been to Drury Lane,’ I said.

      Robert checked the tiny window to see if the carriage might be ready.

      ‘You do not fully understand what you have done, Mary. You have some regret but you do not understand. It is as well you are away.’

      My jaw tightened but I could not stop the tears.

      ‘You have never been in love,’ I spat. ‘There is no love in you.’

      Robert rounded on me. ‘It is not love to beget a bastard out of wedlock, Mary. That is not love.’

      It was a comment I could not allow to pass.

      ‘Henry will be fine. As you are fine,’ I said pointedly.

      Robert’s parents were not married when he was born. Only after. Jane had told me about it years before, when she had been considering Robert’s proposal of marriage, in fact. It was a secret he had not known I possessed and it infuriated him now.

      He pushed me against the mantle. His eyes were hard and I realised how strong he was. The material of his greatcoat cut against my neck and his voice was so furious that the words felt like barb-tipped arrows.

      ‘You will never say that again, Mary Penney.’

      Robert was often short-tempered but I had never seen him violent. I thought to strike him but I believe in that state he would have struck back. His cheeks were burning. Jane’s husband had not a Lord for a father. Not like Henry. Robert’s father was a gardener, a hedger on an estate in Berwickshire, or had been until he died. The man’s talent with plants was not a wonder. No, the wonder of Robert was how effectively he had expunged the two-room cottage where he was born and in its place put all the comforts of his house on Gilston Road. The carved wood of the mantle cut painfully into my skin.

      ‘Let go, you brute,’ I squirmed. ‘Are