Bid Time Return

by Lilian Harry

Genres: Sagas; Romance

Synopsis

Previously published in paperback under the name Donna Baker. Cumbria, 1901: aged twenty-one, Joanna has never seen England before. Now her father's death has sent her home from India, back to a country and family she has never known. As she prepares to meet relations of her father for the first time, she must also ready herself to claim her inheritance - and house and working mines in this new land. But Joanna has brought with her another inheritnace - a knowledge and affinity with the customs and traditions of India, the nation which raised her. And the dreams she has now are not just visions of her past...but they might just become guidance for her future. As she grows to understand the stories behind the tragic loves and marriages in her family's past she wonders if she will be the one to break the pattern. But answering this question will test her to the limit.

Release date: November 19, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 501

Sample

My first sight of the country of Furness filled me with dismay.

With the wind blowing in my hair – a wind that I was to learn seemed always to be blowing across this broad and rolling peninsula – I stood on Pennington Moor and gazed around at a
landscape that seemed to speak of nothing but devastation. I supposed it had once been green and hilly, with secret valleys and running streams, but now it lay torn and bleeding, with water running
crimson from the gashes in its flanks. It seemed a million miles, rather than a few thousand, from the clear white mountain peaks I knew so well; its murky skies a world away from the shimmering
distances to which my eyes were accustomed.

If this was the country where my father had been born, I was not surprised he had left it. And the thought of spending the rest of my own life here, among these small and ravaged fields, crowded
with clanking machinery apparently intent on devouring what natural scenery was left, lay cold and heavy on my heart.

Why had I come here? Why hadn’t I stayed in the country where I had been born and spent all my twenty-one years? Penniless though my father’s death had left me, was there nothing I
could have done? No work, no employment that could have given me even the most slender of livelihoods to enable me to remain where I felt myself to be at home?

I had asked myself that question many times, and each time had been faced with the same stark answer. There was nothing. In this year of 1901, there was no living to be made by a young woman of
my so-called ‘station’ among the British families in India. I had soon given up seeking work as a governess. Those who had young children employed an ayah to look after them;
older ones were sent back to Britain to school. And I knew that no other course such as cooking or needlework would be open to me, even if I could have brought myself to accept so tedious a
life.

‘You have a family at home, don’t you, Joanna?’ my father’s friend George Ledger had asked me. ‘Can you not go to them?’

‘I suppose I’ll have to.’ I looked despondently out through the windows of his airy bungalow. It was April and the chota bursat, the ‘little monsoon’, had
begun. Torrential rain hammered on the roof and turned the garden to a quagmire. It rained in England, they said, but never as hard as this. There were times when I had longed for that land of
softness, of gentle rain and cool winds, of sunshine that didn’t sear the skin from your face. But now that it seemed close, a reality, I drew back from the pictures in my mind. ‘But
the thought of being dependent on others, on strangers . . .’ I shuddered, picturing the young women I knew, the vapid existence they led, fluttering from one ball to another,
flirting with young civil servants or subalterns, waited on hand and foot by obsequious servants. To have to live that sort of life, with people I didn’t know, in a cold, strange country . .
.

‘But they’re not strangers. They’re your family.’

‘They’re strangers,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve never known them. My father hardly knew them – even those that are left. He hasn’t seen England since he was
twenty; he left home in eighteen fifty-five. Forty-six years ago! Of course they’re strangers. And they may not want me.’ My voice quivered a little and I frowned, angry with myself for
my self-pity. I wasn’t normally prone to weeping. But since my father had died, tears had overcome me on the most inappropriate occasions.

Perhaps it was because I had not cried enough when my mother had died. I was only a child then, but the three of us had seen death more than once on our travels together, and my father’s
grief had been so intense that I could not inflict my own upon him too. And perhaps there had been a strange, painful pleasure in knowing that I was now the most important person in his life.

If that were so I was paying the price, for all the pent-up sorrow of the past nine years was welling up in me now and refusing to be suppressed.

George Ledger looked embarrassed, as men always did when confronted with emotion. British men, anyway. The Indian men I knew, like Chanden Singh and the Tibetan lama, Rimpoche Tayang, were not
afraid of feelings, either their own or those of others. But people like George Ledger believed in the stiff upper lip, and although they acknowledged that ‘the ladies’ might be prey to
vapours, they preferred not to be forced to witness them.

‘Not want you?’ he said gruffly. ‘Why shouldn’t they want you? You’re family, ain’t you? Of course they’ll want you – only natural they should. As
for being dependent on them, you’ve inherited a house, haven’t you? You can live in that, or sell it. Anyway, I don’t see where else you’re to go.’

Neither did I. And I understood that George Ledger would not have welcomed any further discussion, with its awkward overtones of penury and the necessity for employment. In his view, a young
lady should be content to remain at home, and consider herself fortunate to have a family who could enable her to do so. He thought I should have been doing so long before this anyway; he had never
approved of the ramshackle life I had led with my father.

As soon as the monsoon was over I packed my bags, bade a sad farewell to my friends and departed on the train for Calcutta.

Leaving India had been like tearing a tree from the ground in which it had grown, wrenching the myriad tiny roots from the earth to which they clung for nourishment. I felt the pain of each one,
adding to the almost intolerable pain of losing my father, and it was not until the steamer was within a day or two of reaching England that I could begin to look forward to my new life.

After all, I thought, I was quite accustomed to travel, to arriving in strange places and adapting myself to local customs. Only a few days before his death, my father and I had been planning a
new adventure – a trip to South America, where he could make new discoveries for his books and I find new flowers and trees to draw. Could I not look on England as a foreign country –
which indeed, as far as I was concerned, it was – and treat this journey as the first part of a new adventure?

And once I had sold Pennington Hall, the house my father had inherited and passed on to me, together with a small income from the family mines, I would no longer be poor or dependent. I could
choose my own life. I could go to South America, just as we had planned.

Now, after further travelling which seemed more tedious than any of the days at sea, I was in Furness and gazing about me at the place that was to be, for a while at least, my home.

It was May, but where was the golden sunshine I had been promised? Where the soft blue sky, the temperatures that would have been pleasantly cool to skin more used to the searing heat of
northern India?

As I stood on this windy upland, staring across the raw, broken hills to a grey, sullen sea, I felt cheated. The people I had talked to back in India, people who had grown up in England and had
a nostalgic memory of it, had told me that England was beautiful, that although it rained often, the rain was soft and gentle, making a landscape green with grass and bright with flowers. They had
not told me that it was like this.

I turned my head. Mark was watching me.

‘Are you disappointed?’

I hesitated. Perhaps I should be tactful. But my face must already have answered him and the tactful words would not come.

‘Not disappointed, no. I knew it was a mining area. I know the family mine haematite and I’ve seen plenty of mines in India – antimony mines, mostly. But somehow I’d
expected it to be different here. My father used to talk of green hills and valleys, and mountains in the distance.’ I looked up at the hovering clouds, the smoke-filled sky. ‘It all
looks so grey. So hopeless. And this is spring. What must it be like in December, in January?’ I turned back to him. ‘I’m sorry. I think it will take me a while to get used to
it.’

He inclined his head. He was, I guessed, about seven or eight years older than I, tall and well-muscled with dark hair that sprang in a strong wave from his forehead. His eyes were very brown,
almost as dark as those of the Indians I had known, but without their liquid quality. They were eyes that could be warm but might also be cold and hard, like stones found on a riverbed. They were
neither particularly warm nor cold now but were watching me thoughtfully. I returned his look. There was something passing between us, some communication, but I could not quite interpret it. I
turned away again. Perhaps I did not want to interpret it. After all, I wasn’t intending to stay in Furness. There was no need to make either friends or enemies of the people who just
happened to be my family.

Not that Mark and I were related by blood. He was the son of Elinor, about whom my father had been able to tell me very little – he had left England soon after her marriage to Nicholas
Craven, so he had not known much about her, only that she was Nicholas’s second wife. The first had been Father’s half-sister Louisa, the one who had died in childbirth. And that child,
Rupert, now being dead also, they had no interest for me.

‘You’ve had a long journey,’ Mark said abruptly. ‘Let’s go home.’

I turned and climbed back into the motorcar. I had been surprised and impressed to find such magnificent transport awaiting me at Ulverston railway station. I had seen only a few motorcars in
India, owned by such people as the Viceroy and other high Government officials, or one of the rajahs, and I had never ridden in one. As Mark drove through the streets of the old market town I
looked about, half expecting to see more, but there were none.

‘Most people still use horses,’ Mark said when I asked him. ‘There are one or two other motors in the area, but modern ideas take a long time to reach us in Furness.’ His
hand rested proudly on the dashboard. ‘This little beauty came from Scotland – the Argyll, she’s called, made by Hozier’s in Bridgetown. They produced five hundred cars last
year.’

‘Five hundred! But they must be very expensive.’

‘I suppose they are. But worth it for the convenience.’ A cart, dragged by a sweating, mud-caked horse, came round a corner and with much yelling and shoving the carter managed to
force it close against the hedge so that the motor could pass. Mark glanced back and frowned a little at the mud left on the car’s painted sides and I hid a smile. Clearly, it was a new and
very precious toy.

We drove slowly through the narrow lanes. It was a difficult journey, for there was a steady stream of carts being dragged from the mines to the railway sidings. They were loaded with iron ore,
great bulging rocks of haematite that gleamed round and knobbled, like petrified kidneys. The horses that hauled these heavy loads were caked in the same crimson mud that turned each road into a
mire, and the carters themselves were streaked and spattered with the raddled stain, their faces like those of painted warriors under their battered caps.

‘But some of them are women!’ I exclaimed, turning in my seat. ‘Do women do the same work as men?’

‘Some of it. Ore-dressing, carting, jobs like that. Not underground, these days.’

He spoke casually enough, as if it were commonplace for women to do hard manual labour. In India I had seen plenty of women labouring in the fields, but they had always been women of the lowest
caste, and never white. Somehow, never having known any other than those of my own class, it had not occurred to me that white women might do such work. I was shocked, yet at the same time
ironically amused. Suppose I were to write to George Ledger and tell him I had found employment in a mine . . .

‘You mean they used to work in the mines themselves? Below ground?’

‘Oh yes. That was stopped quite a few years back – women and children working underground. We know better now. And the new tramways mean there’s much less carting.’

Another cart passed us, drawn tightly against the high bank. I looked into the face of the carter and saw an old woman, grey hair straggling under the grime, who glanced at me with sullen
indifference and then turned away. Her back was bent, her feet shuffled in broken boots, and the clothes she wore looked as if they relied upon their caking of ferruginous mud to hold them
together.

My amusement vanished and I fell silent. Had this woman been leading carts all her life? Was this all she had ever known – as a young girl, as a mother with children tagging at her heels,
as the crone she had become? Had she seen nothing but these narrow lanes, the twisting ways from mine to furnace?

‘Where does the ore go?’ I asked. ‘Where are they taking it?’

‘To the furnaces, or to the quays at Ulverston or Barrow. Some of it goes to Scotland to be smelted, some of it stays here at Hindpool or one of the other furnaces. There are still one or
two old bloomeries at Coniston and Nibthwaite and Newland – quite a few, really.’

The names meant nothing to me. I tried to remember if my father had ever used them in his reminiscences. But he had not spoken much of the haematite mining and I had not been interested enough
to press him. Now I wished I had. Dismayed though I was by this first sight of Furness, I was already aware that its history was my history too, and I felt a sense of deprivation that I knew so
little of it.

Even of my own family, I knew little more than names. Not until I had met them, seen their faces and heard their voices, would I begin to think of them as real people, as my own family. Did they
feel the same about me, these shadowy figures? Did they look forward to meeting me, to growing to know me? Or did they accept my arrival with no more than a grudging sense of duty, a sigh of
resignation and a hope that I might as soon depart again?

The car grumbled its way out of the narrow lanes and along the moorland road. I sat up straight, suddenly interested. The sky had begun to clear – perhaps the wind was blowing the clouds
away. And the views had begun to take more definite shape.

We were heading due west, away from Ulverston with its busy canal and quays, its cobbled streets. And before me, stretched almost at my feet, I could see the broad, dun-coloured sands of an
estuary, carved with winding channels, while beyond them rose a hummocky hill, shadowed with black, and away to the north were the craggy outlines of dark silhouetted mountains.

‘Stop!’ I exclaimed, and stared at the spaces that had so abruptly opened before me. ‘Can we stop for a few minutes? I want to look at it.’

Mark drew the car to a halt and I stared at the expanse of sand with its pattern of channels stretching like fingers towards the open sea. The sun had thrust aside the clouds now and was sending
shafts of brilliance down to the dancing water. On the sand itself I could see people moving about, digging, leading small carts, pushing barrows. The edge of the water was fringed with birds and
on the far side, at the foot of the great round hill, there was a town, with ships moored alongside a quay.

I had seen larger estuaries in India, and more people. But I had never seen quite this quality of light, this aspect of sun gleaming capriciously on pewter water, this darkening of hills. My
mountains had all been glimmering white peaks, reaching high into harsh blue skies, the colours of trees and flowers a brilliant foreground. Here there was a subtlety I longed to grasp, and my
fingers itched suddenly for my paints.

‘That’s the Duddon estuary,’ Mark said. ‘You can walk across the sands, if you’re careful. But I don’t advise you to try it. The tide comes in very fast, and
there are quicksands.’

‘Have you done it?’ My eyes were still on the scene below them.

‘A few times. I know the way.’

‘Will you take me sometime?’

He glanced at me in surprise. ‘It’s not an afternoon stroll. You can be up to your waist in water in places, even at the lowest tide.’

‘And so?’ I asked with some amusement. ‘There are no other dangers, are there? No crocodiles or water snakes?’

Mark laughed. ‘No, of course not! But it’s still hardly a jaunt for ladies.’

‘Oh, ladies,’ I said dismissively, and turned to him. I searched his eyes. Could I trust him? Could I tell him how I felt without risking scorn or censure? There was
something there, surely, a warmth, an openness, that told me he might understand. Or if not understand, at least accept my feelings. ‘Mark, please help me. I’ve lived such a different
life from the people you know. I don’t know how I shall settle to the life of an English lady. I don’t believe I want to settle to it, not if it means being very quiet and
genteel, paying calls of an afternoon and sewing in the parlour. I’ve never done that sort of thing.’

Mark looked surprised. ‘But surely in India the ladies live much the same sort of life as they do here?’

‘The ladies, yes. But I don’t believe I ever was a “lady”. My father was an explorer, he travelled all over northern India, even into Tibet, carrying out surveys. And I
went with him. My mother died of malaria when I was twelve and there was no one to take care of me. He wouldn’t have left me anyway. He had very strong ideas about how parents should look
after their children.’ I looked down at the estuary again, thinking of the many journeys we had undertaken together, the dangers we had faced – and the sense of security I had always
known in his company and now so sorely missed. ‘We would have crossed something like that, not knowing any of the dangers, charting it as we went. It was his job.’

‘And you enjoyed that?’ He sounded unbelieving and I laughed.

‘It was my life! I never thought about enjoyment. But yes, I enjoyed it – I must have done, since it’s what I want to go on doing.’

He looked more than surprised now. ‘But how can you? Ladies don’t—’

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been a “lady”. I’ve never sat in drawing rooms with my mother, making polite conversation with other women. She
wasn’t interested in that sort of life – she wanted to be with my father. She had no family of her own, her parents had both died when she was quite young and she’d been taken in
by an officer and his family as a companion for their daughter. Then, when the daughter was sent to England, she stayed on as a companion to the officer’s wife. But they always treated her as
if she were a servant, and she hated the tedium of all the afternoon parties where she was only supposed to speak if spoken to, and never given credit for any intelligence. Life with my father must
have seemed like being let out of prison.’ I paused, thinking of the tales she had told me, of her constant encouragement to think my own thoughts, to treat my life as my own, as something
precious.

‘I’ve spent my life travelling, and not the kind of travelling you know, either. We would hire a couple of yaks and a native porter or two, and just set off across mountains higher
than those,’ I nodded towards the craggy hills that lay to the north, ‘and with no cosy villages to put up for the night. We camped on bare, stony ground, made fires from the dung our
yaks dropped, and lived on what we could carry. Sometimes we managed to acquire horses and could ride, but that was a luxury. Once or twice there were nothing but sheep to be used as pack animals,
and that’s a slow, painful business. And sometimes we simply had to carry our own loads.’ I smiled at his astonished face. ‘One soon forgets about being a “lady” in
such conditions. No large trunks or travelling cases, no ball gowns or fashionable dresses. Most of the time, I went dressed as a boy – it was easier and safer.’

‘And you enjoyed it?’ he asked again.

‘It was my life,’ I repeated. ‘And I think I want no other. To exchange it for the kind of life women have to live in England . . . How would you feel, Mark, if you had lived
wild and free and were suddenly put into a cage?’

‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘I’m a man.’

‘No,’ I answered him, ‘you are a human being. And so am I.’

He climbed out of the driving seat and went round to the front of the car to start the motor again. As he swung the starting handle, I could see that his brow was furrowed in concentration. He
hadn’t understood, but he was trying to. And at least he hadn’t sneered at me.

The engine coughed a bit then stuttered into life and he got back into the car.

‘So what do you plan to do?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Travelling is expensive – my father could do it because he was paid for the surveys he undertook. It depends on how much the income is from the mine,
and what Pennington Hall is worth—’

‘You mean you’ll sell it?’ The car had begun to move forward, but now it jerked to a standstill as if it were as startled as he, and the engine stopped again. He
sighed and climbed down to go through the starting procedure once more. This time, we both waited until we were well under way before continuing the conversation.

‘Yes, I suppose I’ll sell it,’ I said. ‘After all, what else can I do with it? I don’t want to live there.’

‘How do you know? Until you’ve seen it, how can you tell?’ He sounded quite dismayed, I realised with surprise. ‘You can’t make decisions like that without seeing
all the evidence.’

‘And Pennington Hall is part of the evidence?’ I shook my head. ‘No. It’s just a house. A house that has had no part in my life. It means nothing to me, Mark. Furness
means nothing to me. Whereas India, Tibet, Peru – those are all exciting. Foreign countries with everything to be discovered. New sights to see, new people to meet, new
experiences—’

‘You’ll see new sights, meet new people and have new experiences here,’ he interrupted. ‘And the house is part of your life. It helped make your father what he
was and so it had its influence on you through him. The people who lived there – some of them living there still – had their influence as well. They are all part of you.’ He
turned his head and met my eyes. ‘Unless you know them, you’ll never know yourself, Joanna. And whatever experiences you encounter through life, you’ll never be able to realise
their true value if you don’t know yourself first.’

I stared at him. There were echoes of Eastern thinking in his words. But what could Mark, an English solicitor not many years older than myself, know of such things?

I turned my head away. I was not ready for this. I wanted still to live by the rules I knew, the freedom I had grown up with.

‘How far is it to Pennington Hall?’ I asked abruptly. ‘I think I’ve had enough of travelling for the time being anyway.’

He smiled and we drove on in silence. But I knew we would talk more, when the time was right.

Pennington Hall was a long, low, stone-built farmhouse, its uneven walls limewashed white under a grey slate roof. Square windows looked out from each side of the stone porch
and a whole row of them from the upstairs rooms. The porch itself was festooned with climbing roses and the walls almost hidden by creeping plants – wisteria, honeysuckle and a shaggy
lime-green ivy.

I stared at it. My father’s descriptions had never prepared me for this, the picture he had painted in my mind was of stark grey, a grim-fronted, frowning house planted firmly in a bare
yard. It must have been since his time that someone had turned that empty yard into a garden, bright with a profusion of plants and flowers. Who had done it? Susannah? Timothy? It seemed
unlikely.

My Aunt Martha was at the door to greet us as we drove up and I looked at her with interest. My father had told me about her, and her sister Jane. They were the daughters, by her first marriage,
of his mother, Susannah, who had married his father Timothy Sherwin after his first wife Margaret had died. It was all so complicated, I had barely listened to him, but since his death I had looked
out many of his letters and drawn up a family tree, to fix them all in my mind.

Martha was seventy-nine, I knew, but she hardly looked it. Bundled up in scarves and woollen jumpers, for the wind was spitefully cold, and with rosy cheeks and bright, inquisitive eyes, she
looked more like a middle-aged farmer’s wife than a genteel maiden aunt of advancing years. I tried to relate her to the plump, giggling girl my father had described to me and failed. But I
knew he’d been fond of her. As a baby, she and her stepsister Louisa had played with him and taken him for walks. Jane, the eldest, had had little time for him and neither, it seemed, had his
mother.

And now Jane and Louisa were dead and only Martha was left, to live alone here at Pennington Hall while my father spent his life thousands of miles away. Had she ever wondered what would happen
to her if he came back? Had she expected him to come back – perhaps when he married? And what would he have done? I could not believe that he would have turned her out.

‘So you’re Joanna!’ she was upon me the moment I stepped from the motorcar. ‘After all this time!’ She came barely to my shoulder, but she hugged me tightly
nevertheless and I felt an unexpected emotion at the warm contact. I had experienced so little such contact since my mother had died. A brief kiss of greeting or parting from my father, a light,
impersonal touch from the wives of some of his Civil Service or Army friends – no more than that. Sudden tears were hot in my eyes and I dashed them away, afraid of their being seen.

Aunt Martha stepped back and looked me up and down. ‘Oh yes. I can tell you’re Walter’s daughter. You have his look – his eyes. So much like dear Louisa and
Papa. In fact, with the right dress and your hair done a different way, you could almost be Louisa . . . Rupert was quite different, much more like Mark.’ Her eyes rested for a moment on the
man who stood beside me, dark as a gipsy. ‘They take after the Cravens, of course, though Nicholas is quite fair . . . But don’t let me keep you chattering in this cold wind. Come
inside and have a cup of tea. You must be parched after your journey.’

I followed her indoors, curious to see the house, the first English one I had been in. I had stayed in a hotel in Liverpool after leaving the ship, but hotels were impersonal and nothing like a
private house. And this house was something special, for it was mine.

My house. I stood in the hall, gazing about me. It was wide and spacious, but crammed with furniture – hallstands, whatnots, a heavy dresser made of some dark, glowing wood with mirrors on
top, a scatter of tables each bearing a collection of enormous-leafed plants in ornate china bowls, and two or three chairs with worn upholstery, striped in cream and gold. The walls were papered
with a dark red, embossed paper, though little of this was visible between the multitude of pictures and mirrors hung upon them. The whole effect was crowded and stuffy, as if the hall were in fact
much smaller than it was, and I thought of the airy lightness of the bungalows of my father’s friends in India. How different this would look furnished with chairs and tables of bamboo, with
a few graceful plants instead of these heavy creatures that looked as if they were ready to swallow you, and the walls painted white.

Well, I could do it if I wanted to. It was my house. I could do with it whatever I liked.

Aunt Martha was leading us into the drawing room off the hall, a large room that could also have been airy and spacious but was equally crammed. I gave up looking at each separate piece of
furniture and instead resigned myself to seeing them as a mass, without individuality, although I was sure that many of them were very fine. Many others were quite hideous, though, and I determined
to get rid of them as soon as it was decently possible.

‘And now we’ll have tea,’ my aunt said, and rang a little bell. The tea soon appeared, brought in by a maid who stared at me with unconcealed curiosity – as if she
expected me to be black or have two heads, I thought with amusement. Aunt Martha’s teas were something I could certainly approve of – muffins, scones, plenty of sandwiches, and at least
two kinds of cake. I was hungrier than I had thought and had eaten several platefuls and drunk three or four cups of tea before I could really pay attention to conversation again.

‘. . . and so William has invited Julian to stay for a few weeks,’ Mark was telling my aunt. ‘He’s very keen for the Millom company to amalgamate with Sherwin and Craven,
and I believe he thinks that if this friendship between Julian and Violet comes to anything, old Mr Barlow will be more willing to agree terms.’

‘No doubt he would,’ Martha agreed. ‘It’s always been common enough for businesses to benefit from such a marriage. I don’t say I approve of it myself, mark you. To
my mind, a marriage entered into for any reason other than love is bound to come to grief. But there’s no doubt it happens.’

‘Well, perhaps they are in love,’ Mark said, sounding amused, but my aunt shook her head positively.

‘No. I’ve seen them together and they’re not.