One
Friday, 28 October 1910
As the last strains of a waltz died away, Harriet Gordon looked up into Simon Hume’s handsome face. Her heart skipped a beat as he bent his head toward her and whispered, “It’s too early to go home and it’s a lovely night, let’s go for a walk.”
“Yes, let’s,” she whispered back.
After a wonderful dinner and a few turns around the dance floor at Raffles, a walk in the warm tropical evening seemed the perfect end to a perfect night.
With the lights of the hotel and the bright music of the band behind them, they strolled arm in arm across Beach Road to the beach itself. Away from the hotel, the soft night enfolded them. Harriet threw her head back to look at the stars bright in the inky velvet blackness of the sky. She had had, maybe, one glass of wine too many, but she didn’t care.
The peaceful sea sighed as it lapped gently onto the white sand and Simon pulled her away from the solidity of the palm groves toward the water.
“Simon. I’m not dressed for beach walking,” she protested.
“Then take off your stockings and shoes,” he said, and undid his own boots, hanging them from the laces around his neck. He rolled up his trousers and held out his hand.
“Coming?”
Harriet looked down at her expensive gray leather evening shoes and her one pair of silk stockings.
“Oh, hang it all,” she said, and while Simon discreetly stood with his hands in his pockets looking out to sea, she pulled off her shoes and stockings. She rolled her stockings into the toes of her shoes, and holding the shoes in her left hand, she indecorously hitched her skirts almost to her knees, gathering the fabric into the wide velvet belt, before stepping gingerly out onto the sand.
Simon caught her spare hand and tugged at her, pulling her down toward the water.
“Simon!” Harriet protested as he swept her into his arms and waded out into the sea. “My dress!”
“It’s only ankle-deep, and it’s wonderfully warm.”
He set her down but didn’t release her, his arm circling her waist. The water embraced her bare calves, her toes sinking into the sand as he pulled her closer. She slid her free hand beneath his jacket and closed her eyes, but even as she leaned into the warmth of his hard body beneath his shirt, the memory of another man intruded, a man who had rescued her from kidnappers and carried her to safety. She had pressed her cheek to the hard, damp khaki cloth of his uniform, grateful for his strength and the staunch heart that had driven him to risk his life for her and a small boy . . .
“A moonlit night, a beautiful girl, and a tropical breeze. It doesn’t get any better,” Simon whispered into her hair before bending his head and kissing her, lightly at first.
The heady effect of wine and the romance of time and place swept over Harriet, and she sent all other traitorous memories spinning across the water like a stone. She wound her arms around his neck and abandoned herself to the moment, allowing herself to respond to his kiss. She tasted the saltiness of his lips and breathed in the scent of soap and man.
This should have been a magical moment, their first proper kiss after months of stepping out together. She held her breath, waiting for the sense that this was it, this was him.
But she felt . . . nothing.
She pushed away from him, but he caught her hand, his brow creased as he studied her face.
“Harriet, that was presumptuous, I . . .”
Presumptuous? They had been keeping company since August. Presumption was not the issue.
She smiled. “It’s fine, Simon. Really. I’m just a little . . . out of practice.”
He brushed her cheek with his forefinger. “I know how hard it must be, but your husband has been gone a few years, Harriet. It’s not fair that you should be alone.”
She stood quite still, unsure how to respond. Her hesitation came not from a loyalty to the memory of James Gordon. It was not James, but that other man who slid like a shadow between them.
“I just need time, Simon. I like you, I really do—”
“Enough to—?”
She stared at him. “To . . . what?”
He looked at her, and in the moonlight a thousand conflicting emotions crossed his face before he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. The last thing I want to do is put pressure on you.”
Despite the warm night, she shivered. “I think I should get home, Simon. It’s getting late and I have a rehearsal tomorrow.”
Simon laughed. “Oh, not that damned show. It’s bad enough I have to put up with Maddocks rehearsing ‘I am a Pirate King’ in the bathroom every night. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“I shall ensure you have front row seats. I would hate for you to fall asleep,” Harriet chided.
“With cat-like tread . . .” Simon sang as they strolled hand in hand back along the beach, barefooted in the warm water, the soft sand sliding away beneath their feet. When the lights of Raffles came into view and distant music once more spilled across the road, they ran up the beach to the tree line and sat on a fallen palm tree to pull on their shoes. Harriet grimaced as the lingering sand rubbed against the hard shoes, but it would never do to saunter back into Raffles barefooted.
As they walked back to the car, Simon slid his arm around her shoulder, leaving her with no alternative but to slide her own arm around his waist.
He swung her around to face him, lightly clasping her chin between his thumb and forefinger and raising her face to his.
“Harriet. I’ve never known a woman like you—”
“I should hope not,” she said with a laugh, gently disengaging his hand and climbing into the green Maxwell tourer, the greatest love of Simon Hume’s life.
He shut the door, and they drove in silence through the quiet streets, back to St. Thomas House, where a kerosene lamp had been left on the verandah to light her return.
Simon opened the passenger door, and as she stepped out, Harriet looked up at him and smiled, her hand on his chest.
He’d done nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Apart from the kiss, he had, as always, been the perfect gentleman. He was handsome, single, kind and considerate and from wealthy landed gentry in Australia. The perfect suitor in every way.
“Thank you for a lovely evening, Simon.”
He bent his head and lightly kissed her again. She did not protest, closing her eyes and allowing herself to enjoy the moment.
“I’ll be back from Kuala Lumpur in a couple of weeks. I can hardly wait to see you again,” he whispered, curling a lock of her hair in his finger.
“It seems like a long time to be away,” she said.
“I know, but the story’s a big one. I will need the time.”
“You haven’t told me what the story is about—”
He silenced her with a kiss. “Another time, Harriet.”
He vaulted back into the motor vehicle and, with a wave of his hand, turned the vehicle onto St. Thomas Walk.
Harriet stood at the top of the steps and waited until she could no longer hear the noise of the engine, discordant among the familiar sounds of insects and animals in the tangle of jungle behind the school.
She sighed and turned to pick up the lamp, smiling as she pushed open the door of the slumbering house.
Something in their relationship had changed on the beach tonight, and despite her initial reaction, a small tingle of excitement ran down her spine. Her friendship with Simon Hume had crossed an unspoken line and Simon was right; James Gordon was dead, and he would be the last person to grudge her a new relationship. If she was ready to allow another man into her life, then why not Simon? If she felt no choirs of heavenly voices when he kissed her, that didn’t matter. They were neither of them green youngsters and love would come as friendship deepened.
As for the other . . . ? The khaki-clad shadow . . . ? That was an illusion that had no more substance than the shifting sands beneath her feet.
Two
Saturday, 29 October
He kissed you?”
“Shush!” Harriet laid a hand on Louisa’s arm as she glanced around, hoping no one else on the verandah of the old McKinnon plantation, now known as the headquarters of the Singapore Amateur Dramatic and Music Society, was within earshot of Louisa’s exclamation.
Rehearsals for the Christmas production of The Pirates of Penzance had been ongoing for several weeks and, mercifully, the pirates were all in the rehearsal room belting out “With cat-like tread” while the policemen’s chorus waited to join in. The girls were at the far end of the verandah, reclining on battered chairs, fanning themselves as the torpid heat of the Singapore afternoon leeched whatever energy they needed.
“He kissed you?” Louisa repeated sotto voce. “I hope you kissed him back.”
“Louisa!” The heat rose to Harriet’s cheeks.
“Of course you did, and it’s about time. How long have you been stepping out together?”
“Only since the end of August.”
Louisa rolled her eyes. “And now it’s October. Harriet, really! You are still young and James has been dead for over three years now. He wouldn’t expect you to be carrying a torch for him. It’s time to start over.”
James Gordon, like his friend Euan Mackenzie, Louisa’s husband, had lived for his work as a doctor. He valued Harriet’s share in his vocation and she had worked with him in the Bombay slums, but most of the time he wouldn’t have noticed if he had missed a meal or his shirts were unlaundered. She had spent many evenings alone waiting for him to return from a difficult birth or an urgent surgery. Many nights she had gone to an empty bed.
No, Louisa was right, the Australian journalist Simon Hume was not James and it was unfair to compare them. She had loved James and he her, but now, maybe, just maybe, she had a second chance at love.
“I . . .” She struggled to find the words. “I like him very much, Louisa, but there is no . . .”
“No what? Bells and angelic choirs singing? Harriet, you know very well that sort of romantic nonsense only belongs in books or silly operettas.” Louisa narrowed her eyes. “Or is there someone else? I always thought you and Griff—”
“Griff?” Harriet all but shot out of her chair. “Definitely no bells and angelic choirs with Griff!”
“Did someone mention my name?” Griff Maddocks, getting well into character as the Pirate King, sauntered out onto the verandah, wiping his brow with a handkerchief while his other hand rested on the hilt of a wooden sword.
“I was just telling Louisa that it is entirely your fault that I allowed myself to be talked into this production,” Harriet lied.
Griff snorted. “I didn’t twist your arm.”
“No. You just said you couldn’t play tennis on Saturdays for a few months, leaving me without my doubles partner,” Harriet complained.
Griff grinned. “Oh, come on, old girl, you make a simply splendid Kate and deep down you have to admit you’re enjoying mingling with a different crowd.”
Harriet’s gaze swept the verandah where the company of the Singapore Amateur Dramatic and Music Society, or SADAMS as they referred to it among themselves, were spilling out of the rehearsal room for a well-earned break.
They were certainly a different crowd, drawn from the expatriate community and coming from all walks of life: from lawyers, such as the company’s president and director, Charles Lovett of Lovett, Strong & Dickens, to the Straits Settlements Police Constable Ernest Greaves, typecast in the policemen’s chorus. SADAMS existed on the understanding that a love of Gilbert and Sullivan united the British Empire, even though the cast had been drawn entirely from the British expatriate residents of Singapore.
Harriet had to admit that she was enjoying the experience. She had tried to enlist Julian, but he declared he detested Gilbert and Sullivan. To find himself dragooned into the chorus of Pirates of Penzance as a policeman, when he would rather be spending his Saturday afternoons playing cricket or comfortably ensconced on the verandah of St. Tom’s House reading Virgil, was a trial beyond bearing and he had refused point-blank.
“Oh, there you are, Mrs. Gordon.”
Elspeth Lovett, wife of Charles Lovett and the company’s secretary and costumier, came out onto the verandah, clutching a large bundle of white cloth. She thrust the top garment at Harriet. “That’s your nightdress for Act Two. The lace ruffles on the neck and wrists have come loose and need a stitch or two. I’m sure you can manage the repair.”
Harriet shook out the voluminous garment. “I’m sure I can, Mrs. Lovett.”
“Same for you, Mrs. Mackenzie.” Elspeth dropped the nightdress on Louisa’s lap. “And we have decided that the sisters will each have a color assigned to them. Kate—you, Mrs. Gordon—will have green, and Mrs. Mackenzie, you will have yellow. Mabel will have blue. Where is Alicia?” Elspeth Lovett cast a glance down the verandah where the principal soprano playing Mabel, Alicia Sewell, had just come out of the rehearsal room in conversation with Elspeth’s husband, Charles Lovett. “I am getting in some lengths of ribbon to trim the nightdresses,” Elspeth continued, and before either Harriet or Louisa could say anything, she had already moved on to a group of women farther down the verandah.
“I bet Alicia Sewell doesn’t have to mend her own costume,” Louisa remarked with some acerbity, her gaze moving to the leading lady, who had adjourned to a rickety planters’ chair and reclined there, languidly fanning herself with her libretto.
Griff laughed.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Eunice Lovett came out onto the verandah, balancing a tray with two cups of heavily stewed tea and a plate of digestive biscuits.
Harriet had not appreciated how heavily involved the Lovett family were in the society. Apart from Charles and Elspeth, their only daughter, seventeen-year-old Eunice, was a familiar sight at rehearsal. Eunice tagged along to every rehearsal in the role of general dogsbody, doing everything from serving teas to organizing props. Unlike her handsome parents, Charles Lovett and pretty, blond Elspeth, Eunice was dark haired, pale, painfully thin and easily overlooked.
Harriet thanked the girl and took the offered cup. Louisa held her hand out for the second cup but Eunice moved it out of reach.
“This is for Mr. Dowling,” she said, her gaze scanning the verandah for the company’s leading man, Tony Dowling, who leaned against the verandah rail holding court with a group of young ladies. Eunice trotted across to him and he took the cup without even looking at the girl.
Louisa tutted. “Bit too fond of his own importance,” she said, referring to the handsome leading man.
“But he is very good,” Harriet said.
She’d gone to see the July production of Iolanthe at the invitation of Constable Ernest Greaves, who had joined the company not long after he had arrived in Singapore. Happy to be in the back row of the chorus, being part of the SADAMS company had fired some life into the shy young constable and Harriet had been happy to support him.
It had been a pleasant evening. Charles Lovett had proved to be a fine comic actor with a good singing voice and brilliant timing in the patter song, but it had been Alicia Sewell and Tony Dowling who had stolen the show as Phyllis and Strephon. They were both born to be leading players.
Louisa had told her that before her marriage, Alicia had been a celebrated actress on the London stage but it had surprised Harriet to learn on joining the company that the famed Alicia Sewell was quite a few years older than her. There was, in the words of one of the characters in Pirates, “the remains of a fine woman” about Alicia. Even if Alicia might have been past the first blush of youth, once she was on the stage, she quite literally shone, and when she played the role of Phyllis or Mabel, the audience would be fully invested in her character.
Tony Dowling, the company’s leading man, must have been at least ten years younger than Alicia and he made a dashing male lead with his chiseled good looks, dark blond hair and a fine tenor voice. The perfect Frederic, in fact.
Charles Lovett, red-faced and sweating, appeared at the door and rang a large handbell. Tall, gray haired and aging well, he had the sort of mobile face that lent itself to the older comedic leads, this time playing the Major-General.
“Ladies and gentlemen, chorus only,” he shouted.
The chorus members set their cups down for Eunice to collect and filed into the rehearsal room. In its day, it had probably once been the main living quarters for the plantation house, with long, elegant French doors opening up onto the verandah that wrapped around two sides of the house. Set high on Emerald Hill, it afforded a lovely view across the island.
The battered piano struck up and the still-uncertain chorus began with the policemen singing “When a felon’s not engaged in his employment.” Being principals and having no desire, or need, to return to the stuffy rehearsal room, Louisa, Griff and Harriet remained on the verandah.
Griff pulled up a chair, rested his feet on the rails and opened his libretto, mouthing his lines.
“Do you want me to test you?” Harriet asked.
Griff handed her the libretto, and Harriet began with the first scene. As she fed Griff his cues, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Tony Dowling and Elspeth Lovett at the far end of the verandah, in what looked to be an indistinct but heated conversation. Tony’s brows were drawn together, and his hands bunched at his sides. Elspeth, by contrast, looked to be pleading with him. An argument over Frederic’s piratical costume, Harriet wondered.
“Harriet, what’s my next line?” Griff demanded, jerking Harriet back to her task.
“I object to pirates as sons-in-law,” read Harriet.
“We object to major-generals as fathers-in-law . . .” continued Griff.
But Harriet wasn’t listening. Whatever Tony and Elspeth were discussing, it was not costume. Elspeth grasped Tony by the forearm, her face white and her shoulders stiff.
Tony threw off her hand. “No!” he said.
The word ran down the verandah, causing even Griff to look around. Elspeth turned and flounced through the nearest door into the rehearsal room. Tony watched her go before picking up his discarded libretto. He flicked through a couple of pages and looked up, his gaze lighting on Harriet and her friends. He waved, with a smile and a deprecatory shrug of his shoulders, dismissing the altercation as just a minor disagreement of no consequence.
“Mrs. Gordon is just going through my lines.” With an encouraging smile Griff waved the man toward him. “I wonder what that was all about?” he added under his breath.
“Excellent. Do you mind if I join you?” Offstage, Tony spoke with the flattened vowels of a New Zealander, making the word excellent sound more like ukcellent.
“Words with the grandam?” Griff, always the journalist, asked.
Tony laughed. “She wants me to wear the most ridiculous costume. It involves skirts or some such. Apparently, it was proper piratical wear. Damned if I’m going to wear a skirt.” He glanced at Griff. “And I’m pretty sure she has the same planned for you.”
“Good God! I’ll have her keelhauled if she tries to get me into something like that.”
Tony drew another chair up on the other side of Harriet. “If you don’t mind, can we start at the beginning of Act One?”
Harriet turned the pages back to the end of the opening song and began with “Hurrah.”
She didn’t for a moment believe the argument between Elspeth and Tony had anything to do with differences over a costume.
Lovett stuck his head out of the nearest door and summoned Griff and Tony Dowling to the rehearsal room, and Harriet and Louisa, who were playing Mabel’s sisters Kate and Edith, returned to her own lines.
Harriet looked up at the sound of quick, light footsteps and a whiff of expensive perfume. Alicia Sewell smiled and came forward to lean her hands on the rail of the verandah. She greeted them both and stood gazing out over the overgrown garden to the view of Singapore beyond, perfectly poised had a passing photographer wished to capture an image of wistful imagining.
“How long have you been out, Mrs. Gordon?” she asked.
Out being shorthand for “out in the Far East,” Harriet replied, “I arrived in January.”
Alicia turned to look at her. “I’ve been hearing rather strange stories about you. Is it true that you were involved in that terrible case of the sapphire and rubies in March?”
Harriet nodded. “Quite true.”
Up close, Alicia Sewell could not quite hide her age. There were lines at the corners of her eyes and her neck that put her in her early to midforties, but with the rosebud pout of her lips and the large blue eyes, she was still, and probably always would be, a beauty.
She sat on the chair vacated by Griff Maddocks and pulled a heavy tortoiseshell comb, inlaid with an intricate pattern in silver, from her head, allowing the heavy knot of gleaming light-brown hair to fall. She tossed her head, running her fingers through the thick tresses before twisting them into a knot and securing it again with the comb with a practiced art that made Harriet quite envious.
“That’s better,” Alicia said, wincing. “I get headaches. I wish I could just cut my hair short like a man and be done with it.” She sighed. “I’ve been here for eight years but I still long for seasons, don’t you?”
Harriet thought of the gray, miserable London winters and shook her head. “No. I lived in India for ten years. I am used to this climate.”
Alicia tilted her head. “This is your first show with the society?”
“It is. I would rather be playing tennis but my doubles partner is Griff Maddocks. He and Louisa talked me into joining the cast.”
Alicia laughed, a pleasant tinkling sound that echoed around the verandah.
“Alicia?” The three women turned to see Elspeth Lovett standing in the doorway. “You girls are on next.”
Alicia rose gracefully from her chair and smoothed down the skirts of her cream muslin dress.
“Time to shine,” she said, and sashayed into the rehearsal room as the pianist struck up “Climbing over rocky mountain. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
