The Himalayan Summer

by Louise Brown

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Historical Fiction; Historical Romance

Synopsis

THE HIMALAYAN SUMMER is a spellbinding novel of the British Raj period, the quest to find a child, and a love story beyond boundaries - for all fans of Dinah Jefferies 'THE TEA PLANTER'S WIFE and of Louise Brown's earlier novel, EDEN GARDENS. 'Beautifully written, you can smell the spices, feel the heat, and your heart will break. You will laugh, cry and you will want a sequel' Lovereading.com Ellie Jeffreys arrives in Darjeeling with her British husband, en route to Kathmandu. They have ten-month-old, golden-haired twins, and despite appearing to be a happy family, Ellie's relationship with the overbearing, philandering Francis is disintegrating. At a cocktail party, Ellie meets Hugh Douglas, a maverick explorer and botanist. Despite the rumours surrounding Hugh, Ellie is drawn to him. A year later, Nepal is devastated by a catastrophic earthquake and in a falling building, Ellie is forced to make an instant, and terrible, decision: she has time to save only one of her children. When she returns for her son's body the next day, it has gone. Ellie knows he cannot have disappeared; someone, somewhere has her child, and it is to Hugh that she turns for help.

Release date: March 9, 2017

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

WHEN THE EARTH shook, the great houses on San Francisco’s hills stood firm. Windows cracked, plates smashed and ornaments were broken. Nearer the water, on acres of badly reclaimed land, the poor in their shoddy homes sank into liquefying sands, and the residents of Chinatown were entombed in their collapsing tenements. When the tremors stopped, the silence was eerie and unnerving. Then the screams began, and the fires started to spread.

Across the bay in Oakland, the damage was minimal, except for a grand old house set high in the tree-lined hills. The first jolt woke the children and sent the little boy running from his room. He jumped into his big sister’s bed, clutching his teddy, and buried his face in the pillow. A second later, the room shook. It was thrust up and spun round. The quake twisted the tall chimneys skywards and weakened the ageing mortar. They snaked back and forth and then the tallest leaned forward, suspended at an impossible angle for several moments, before toppling, at first in slow motion, and then in a torrent of bricks that smashed through the roof and into an attic room where two maids had slept only half an hour before. The floor timbers broke under the weight, and the chimney crashed into the room below, driving the girl’s bed down into the dining room, where it landed on the walnut table, snapping its legs instantly.

The roar of the quake died and the dawn sky was visible through a gaping hole cut through the heart of the house. Under a pile of bricks, rafters and floorboards, Ellie couldn’t see a single chink of daylight. She reached out her hand. She felt the soft fur of her brother’s teddy, and then his arm. He didn’t move and she couldn’t pull him closer because she was pinioned by a web of splintered wood. Dust and soot from the chimney coated the inside of her mouth. She could smell wood smoke, and she would have shouted for help if the weight of the bricks hadn’t stopped her filling her lungs with air.

She whispered, ‘Bobby.’

He didn’t respond and his breathing was shallow. Stretching her arm until it hurt, she wrapped her fingers around his wrist. ‘Bobby,’ she said again.

He moaned but didn’t move, and she began to cry. Dust, soot and tears clogged her eyes and made them sting. As she tried lifting her other hand to wipe them, the debris creaked, shifted, and settled more heavily on her.

Ellie listened to her brother’s breath grow fainter.

‘Bobby, don’t go to sleep on me, you hear,’ she said, trying to generate enough saliva to loosen the dry coating from her mouth. ‘Pa is going to buy you a bicycle for your birthday. Mom told me.’

Bobby didn’t stir, and gradually his breathing grew so shallow she thought it might have stopped. ‘Stay with me, Bobby,’ she pleaded. As his skin cooled slowly under her hand, she talked to him, and to God, her voice rasping, begging her brother to live. When the rescuers lifted them off the bed, she realised that no one had been listening. Bobby lay limp in a man’s arms, perfect and untouched except for the dust on his pyjamas and the soot that turned his golden hair black.

SOON AFTER BREAKFAST, a wall of water crashed through the forest and dropped a veil over the tea gardens. The deluge thundered on the red tin roof of the bungalow and beat the chrysanthemums to the ground. By mid-morning the first rain of the monsoon had slowed to a steady drizzle and clouds cloaked the mountains. The bright saris of the pluckers were soaked to their waists as the women worked among the flat, tightly packed tea bushes spreading like a soft green blanket over the steep mountainsides, down to the river and up over the next ridge.

Ellie sat in a cane chair and watched water drip from bright green tree ferns on to earth that smelled of fertility and decay. She looked up to see Shushila, the new ayah, walk on to the veranda, a thread from the thin blue fabric of her sari catching on the silver chain around her ankle.

‘Where were you last night?’ Ellie asked. ‘It’s almost ten o’clock now, and it’s the first time I’ve seen you.’

The girl looked blank, pretending she didn’t understand, even though she spoke perfect English. She held her head high and thrust her chin forward, just short of insolent. Instead of replying, she spun very slowly on the smooth, buffed skin of her heel and sauntered along the veranda, humming and looking out over the misty hills, then drifted into the bungalow without giving Ellie a glance. God knows why Francis hired her, Ellie thought. She’s useless; she doesn’t even like children.

A bearer brought Ellie tea on a tray. It was the estate’s second flush, and although a big fuss was made about it being the finest in Darjeeling, Ellie knew it was an insipid drink. She rarely took tea, even in England, preferring coffee, the way they made it at home. She toyed with a slice of lemon, holding it with tiny silver tongs before dropping it into the tea with a splash. It sank slowly through the amber liquid to the bottom of the porcelain cup.

When the untouched tea had grown cold, she returned to the bedroom. The toys were arranged neatly and the sheets had been changed by a servant she’d neither seen nor heard. She spotted her reflection in the dressing table mirror, and paused. Hazy light from the open door to the veranda fell across her face. The soft glow should have been flattering, but the angle was all wrong. Ellie winced at the middle-aged woman whose cheeks were slowly hollowing out. She imagined them sliding down her face; soon they’d be gathering in little puffy bags around her jaw.

Nanny Barker’s brown brogues made a loud clomping noise as she strode along the veranda. She stopped and dropped on to a cane planter’s chair, looking grey, her energy sapped by the short walk from her room at the far end of the bungalow.

‘Are you feeling good today?’ Ellie asked.

‘Much better, thank you,’ Nanny said, and then looked around. ‘Where are the children?’ she asked.

‘The house servants have taken them for a walk,’ Ellie said.

Nanny Barker bridled. ‘I hope they’re not feeding them foreign food.’ On any other day she would have marched off to find the twins, but, exhausted by the last purges of ‘hill diarrhoea’, she remained in the chair, and for a moment there was an uncomfortable silence because she knew she really shouldn’t be sitting there.

Ellie glanced at Nanny’s salt-and-pepper hair that was escaping from its tight bun and winding itself into wild, frizzy curls around her ears and over her forehead. In one of his especially mean moments, her husband, Francis, had said that Nanny Barker had the perfect face for a nanny. He meant that she was so ugly no one was likely to marry her, and so she could be relied on to stay in service. She’d been plain even when she was young and had spent her days wiping his snotty nose and organising the nursery for him and his brothers. But for some reason, Francis liked her. Ellie thought he might even have loved her, which seemed inexplicable, because she’d never warmed to the woman herself. She always had the feeling that she fell short in Nanny’s opinion: she was too old to be a mother; she didn’t have a suitable aristocratic pedigree; and she certainly wasn’t good enough for Francis. Ellie frequently felt Nanny’s watery hazel eyes on her. They were cold as a dead fish, and her mouth was all too often tight with disapproval.

Today, though, sitting crumpled on the cane chair, Nanny hadn’t the energy to be judgemental. She didn’t even have the strength to stir from the chair when a car horn blared repeatedly in the drive. Several servants shouted at once, and Ellie ran with them to deal with the crisis at the front of the bungalow.

The hunters had returned from the shoot, and Francis was grimacing as he walked slowly, supported by Davies, his gunman, and Black, the owner of the tea garden. Rain had plastered Black’s shirt to his thin torso, and his old-fashioned moustache drooped on a face that was too big for his body. Davies was swearing, uttering such a torrent of vile expletives that Ellie winced. She’d once thought the gunman’s voice was charming, but now she associated it with Davies’s behaviour, which he’d learned in the worst parts of London’s East End and honed during fifteen years in the Indian Army and five in the Burmese police.

‘What’s happened?’ she gasped.

Francis pushed aside Black and Davies and hobbled on to the veranda, his boots squeaking. He shivered and shed foliage over the floor.

‘He has a nasty injury,’ Black said.

‘It was the niggers’ fault,’ Davies said, nodding his head towards a group of Indians standing on the lawn.

Ellie couldn’t see her husband’s injury. She scanned him for bloodstains, knowing that even a small wound could be deadly. A tiger’s claws were hollow and filled with the decaying flesh of its last kill so that a simple scratch could lead to infection and a painful death.

‘Jungli suir is a saitan pig, sahib,’ one of the Indians said. He was older than the others, and seemed to be their leader.

‘We know. You keep telling us,’ Davies snapped. ‘He’s a big fucking devil pig who eats your crops and pisses on the ones he doesn’t eat.’

Ellie shuddered, thinking Francis had been slashed by a boar’s razor-sharp tushes.

Black ordered a bearer to bring them burra pegs: Francis would need a large whisky to help him tolerate the pain.

‘The pig was holed up in elephant grass,’ Black said. ‘I could smell him, and there’s nothing worse than the stink of an old boar. The beaters made a complete mess driving him out. They did it too fast. Half the jungle was sent down the funnel towards us. We were stampeded by deer, a peacock, a whole family of porcupines, and a dozen wild chickens. Then the big fellow came charging at us from nowhere. He was the biggest, blackest boar I’ve ever seen. His tushes were a foot long.’

‘Longer,’ Francis said, shaking. He leaned against the wall and Ellie watched his hands tremble.

‘Did you kill him?’ she asked.

‘Your husband got him in the shoulder but it wasn’t enough to bring him down. Worst thing you can do, really,’ Black said gravely. ‘An injured boar is a dangerous creature.’

‘He was four foot away from us. I thought my fucking innards would end up on the jungle floor,’ Davies exclaimed.

‘What did you do?’ Ellie said.

Black cleared his throat, and looked at his feet.

None of the men wanted to say that Francis and Black had dropped their rifles and climbed a tree, and that Davies, out of ammunition, had scaled another. The Indian beaters had seen the sahibs sitting among the branches looking down as the angry boar snorted and paced about below them, and they had turned on their heels and fled, because if burra sahibs with rifles could be outwitted by the saitan pig, then what chance did they have armed only with staves and drums?

This story wouldn’t have surprised Ellie, if anyone had had the courage to tell her. She’d married a professed crack shot, a hunter who trailed big game and who’d vowed to bag an eight-hundred-pound tiger. But although Francis had new guns from Manton’s on Calcutta’s Chowringhee and an entire wardrobe of hunting clothes made by Hall and Anderson, shikari specialists on Park Street, he rarely returned from a hunt with much to show for his days in the wilderness. His best bag had been a wild chicken and a stubby pig.

‘Will the sahibs kill the jungli suir tomorrow?’ the villager leader asked.

Black waved them away. ‘I’ll deal with the beast myself,’ he said. ‘Lord Northwood needs to recover from his injuries.’

Francis staggered through the bungalow and into the bedroom. He began to unbutton his shirt.

‘Let me help you,’ Ellie said, taking the shirt. ‘Is Black calling a doctor?’

Francis let his shorts drop to the floor, and at once Ellie saw the extent of his wounds. She stifled a laugh. He hadn’t been mauled by a tiger or slashed by a boar’s tushes. Two dozen thorns had embedded themselves in his backside when he’d slipped in the mud and fallen into a bush on the long trudge back from the inglorious pig hunt.

Francis lay face down on the bed while Ellie dug the thorns out of his buttocks with tweezers and applied iodine to the punctured skin with cotton wool. He was completely silent and perfectly still, his muscles tense, his teeth gritted. When it was over and the wounds were covered in lint dressings, he rolled over and winced. He watched Ellie tidying away the first-aid kit.

‘Get me another drink, will you?’ he said.

‘I’ll tell the bearer.’

‘I need one now, Ellie. This minute.’

‘Don’t shout; I’m getting a headache.’

‘What’s wrong? Bloody mountain sickness?’

‘I didn’t sleep last night. There was no electricity because the generator stopped working, then I ran out of oil for the lamp and couldn’t find any candles.’

‘For God’s sake, I’m married to an invalid,’ Francis sighed. ‘You drag around like it’s the end of the fucking world.’ He looked away from her and stared blankly at the ceiling fan. ‘It’s all in your head.’ He turned to look at her and tapped his forefinger on his temple.

Ellie backed away from him.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to write to Momo.’

‘Get me that Scotch.’

She picked up her battered leather writing case and threw open the louvred doors. As she walked along the veranda, heavy with wisteria, she heard him laughing.

Francis was a drunk; Ellie had known it when she married him, but at that point he was a charming, playful drunk given to endearing, if very formal, displays of affection. A year after the wedding, he’d abandoned the charm, the humour was a memory, and he’d become an unadorned, angry drunk.

They’d met in the south of France while she was on vacation with her friend Margaret ‘Momo’ Jackson, who was recovering from her second divorce. Ellie and Momo were unlikely friends: Ellie was tall and serious, and wore sensible clothes; while Momo was beautiful and petite, and always in trouble. The only things they had in common were that they were rich and their parents had been killed when they were children. Ellie’s parents had died in the great San Francisco earthquake, and Momo’s were hit by a ‘death driver’ in one of the city’s first automobile accidents.

Both girls had attended the Hamlin School, where they sought each other’s company because they were the odd ones out: they never invited friends to their homes; they didn’t have family to talk about; and they were both looked after by a long line of people who were paid to do the job and who didn’t bother to pretend they enjoyed it.

Almost thirty years on, Ellie had known Momo well enough to predict that their European tour was going to be accompanied by scandal. They’d made a similar pilgrimage to the Old World in 1926, following Momo’s first divorce, and Ellie wasn’t very keen on repeating the experience.

‘But we girls need a vacation,’ Momo stated.

Except that we’re no longer girls, Ellie thought. They were, in fact, fast approaching forty, and Ellie wondered where their youth had gone. Momo had spent hers, and some of her fortune, on unruly men and wild times. Ellie tried to think how she’d spent her own youth, and found she couldn’t remember. She certainly hadn’t lived it in a giddy whirl. It had simply passed her by, because she made an effort to shy away from life and big emotions, as if by enjoying herself too much and loving too deeply, she would risk everything being snatched away. Ellie protected herself by asking for little, and expecting less.

Momo’s good intentions on the post-divorce holiday lasted exactly a fortnight. In Rome, she met an Italian count at a lavish party.

‘Do you think the count would look like an orange-picker without his military uniform?’ she asked Ellie as they lay on their beds in the hotel room. She adjusted her eye mask, bothered by the soft light from the standard lamp Ellie insisted on leaving on all night. ‘He’s very dark.’

‘And very handsome,’ Ellie added as she admired Momo’s short, wavy copper-coloured hair on the snow-white pillows.

‘He says he’s a close friend of Mussolini,’ Momo said. ‘And he’s married.’ She lifted the corner of the mask to gauge Ellie’s reaction.

Momo clearly didn’t care if he looked like a Mexican fruit picker, or if he was married, because the next night Ellie returned alone to their hotel.

The affair lasted until they left Rome. Momo spent the next few days pining for her lost love, but then they arrived in Nice and met a group of young Englishmen, all three of them titled, and all embarrassingly poor. They were wintering on the Riviera and staying in barely respectable lodgings well away from the seafront because it was cheaper than the big hotels on the Promenade des Anglais, and certainly cheaper than trying to keep up appearances at home. Momo and Ellie invited the men for drinks and luncheon at their hotel, the Negresco, because Momo needed something to take her mind off the count, and the English crowd lifted her spirits.

‘They’re very young,’ Ellie said as she looked over their room’s wrought-iron balcony to where England’s penurious nobles were making their way very slowly down the Promenade.

Momo snorted. ‘Listen, Ellie. Take a rest now, because tonight we’re going dancing.’

‘We are?’

‘Sure we are. I saw the way you clicked with that sweet English lord.’

That night, Ellie danced demurely with the blue-eyed Lord Northwood, who held her at arm’s length and kissed her hand when they parted.

The next day they sat together on a seat overlooking the Bay of Angels and marvelled at the azure water. During the following days they visited Monte Carlo and he drove her at high speed along the Grande Corniche in a burnished red Mercedes Benz roadster, borrowed from a wealthier friend.

‘You could be British royalty if you married Lord Northwood,’ Momo sighed.

‘Francis is eight years younger than me,’ Ellie said.

‘What is wrong with you? He’s handsome – if you like English lords. And his accent is adorable.’

Ellie hesitated, feeling she was on the brink of a precipice, and wondering whether she should abandon a lifetime of caution.

Four weeks later, Ellie and Francis were married in a quiet ceremony in London. The following morning, as they stood on the deck of a liner and embarked on their honeymoon in South Africa, Francis stared down at Momo, who was waving ecstatically from the dockside. Then he turned to look at Ellie, his blue eyes suddenly icy.

‘Your friend is a fucking trollop,’ he said. ‘Don’t see her again.’

A knot tightened in Ellie’s stomach, and she gazed at Momo’s overjoyed face. She’d been swept along on a tide of wine and champagne. She’d listened to her friend’s reckless views of the world, and she hadn’t obeyed her own usually solid judgement. I know nothing about this man, she thought, and looked at Francis properly for the first time. I must be a total fool. Who else but an idiot would take advice on men from the mouth of Momo Jackson?

Leather-skinned tea planters in khaki shorts gathered at the bar, drinking pink gins beneath a portrait of Clive of India. At the far end of the club, a group of young Scottish assistant managers kept their straight backs turned to the English. Ellie sat at a side table and watched Francis and Black walk to the bar. The men greeted Black and nodded at Francis, unaware who he was. She knew they would fawn when they were introduced.

‘Got your Mr Stripes yet?’ a heavyset, freckled man called to Black. He was covered in a thick mat of red hair and rested a boot on a copper rail running around the base of the bar. Ellie was fascinated by the luxuriant fuzz that ran up his calves and over his kneecaps. It sprouted from his open collar and coated his bare arms below his short-sleeved shirt. From a distance it looked like a golden aura.

The men brought their drinks to the table and sat with Ellie.

‘Mr Stripes has eluded me so far, Johnson,’ Black said stiffly and slightly apologetically, because everyone knew you couldn’t be called a genuine shikari until you’d bagged your first tiger.

Another group of men settled down to play cards at a table near the entrance to the bar. They were probably up from Calcutta and had come to fish in the Teesta. The sportsmen with Ellie knew their sort and gave them dismissive glances: the newcomers were pansies and poodle fakers who were happy to waste time playing cards and who were far too much at ease talking with women. They didn’t have the grit and dedication of true shikaris.

‘You made a good choice coming here,’ Johnson said to Francis. ‘We’ve some of the finest hunting in India. Only Kashmir has better game.’

The hairy planter was right: the local jungle was a sportsman’s paradise, although Francis pointed out that it was not a patch on Kenya, which was still populated with plenty of animals and where hunting laws were easy to flout. Francis knew this because he’d lived in Kenya, in Happy Valley, for three years, enjoying the life of an aristocrat on the cheap. That was in the days before Ellie’s money allowed him to behave like nobility at home and not just in the colonies.

‘Kashmir’s not what it was,’ Black said, with a shake of his oversized head. ‘The ibex are finished.’

‘True,’ Johnson said thoughtfully. ‘Nepal is the new frontier. Old King George bagged thirty-nine tigers in the plains.’

‘By himself?’ Ellie asked, paying closer attention now someone had mentioned Nepal.

‘With help from the Nepalese maharaja, the Viceroy, a troop of hunting elephants and five hundred coolies,’ Johnson said.

‘Gentlemen,’ Black announced, twirling his moustache, ‘you are looking at the first Englishman to hunt in the Nepal Terai since old King George himself.’

‘You?’ Johnson exclaimed, aghast.

‘Lord Northwood,’ Black said, pointing to Francis.

Johnson smiled, mollified now he knew the honour was being given to a titled man. ‘By God, how did you manage that?’ he said as his wife came to sit beside her substantial and colourful husband. She looked very small and insipid in her flowery dress. She stared in awe at Francis, who was growing in stature.

Ellie had heard Francis’s story a dozen times during the previous month, and the tale changed slightly each time he told it. She knew some of it was true because she’d been there to witness it.

Three months ago, at the start of the hot season, they had been in Calcutta, where Francis was busy ordering guns and having hunting clothes made. Then he went to the Sundarbans to bag a Royal Bengal tiger or two, and left Ellie and the twins in a suite in the Great Eastern Hotel, with only Nanny Barker for company. It was like a prison. Outside, everything baked. The Maidan, Calcutta’s great green park, turned a crisp brown, and the city was covered in a choking layer of dust. Nanny Barker became ever more officious and Ellie was increasingly nervy. She was so miserable that she was pleased when Francis returned from the hunt, tigerless as usual. A few days later, he appeared with an ayah, a Bengali girl, whom he insisted they needed because Nanny Barker was getting old, and her puffy ankles were a sure sign she wasn’t coping with the heat. The new girl looked at Ellie without smiling.

Francis seemed happy for a week and then became irritable. ‘I need to be back on the hunt,’ he explained to Ellie. ‘You won’t understand, but there’s nothing quite like it. It’s man against beast; you pit your wits against the King of the Jungle.’

What a load of garbage, Ellie thought, totting up the carnage Francis had wreaked during his career as a sportsman: the small animals he’d maimed and slaughtered; the creatures who had crawled into the jungle to die after being wounded by her husband’s wide shots.

Francis spent every evening in the hotel bar or in one of Calcutta’s many clubs. He was invited by members who were eager to be seen with a peer of the realm, and he recounted his exploits in the Sundarbans, Kenya and South Africa to a rapt audience. Every night, he returned to the Great Eastern raging drunk, and usually in a vicious temper.

‘They’re the most bloody awful plebs,’ he said to Ellie, launching himself on to the bed after a long evening at the Tollygunge Club. ‘They’ve got the natives running after them like they’re royalty.’ He lay on his back, lit a cigarette, put one arm behind his head and blew smoke very slowly through his nostrils.

The next night he planned to go to a bar on Park Street, where, he told Ellie, he was less likely to meet offensive middle-class products of minor public schools and Oxbridge.

When he returned, he was twitchy with excitement. ‘The place was full of adventurers, explorers, hunters,’ he explained, though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly which bar he was referring to. He wasn’t specific when he told the tale to others, either. The club, he said, was packed and he was just about to order a drink when a foreigner – an enormous Dane – elbowed him and then pushed a tiny Indian man out of the way. The Indian fell, sprawling on the floor, and when Francis remonstrated, the man threatened in his thick, guttural accent to kick his head in. Francis rose to the challenge, stood his ground, ducked a few punches and then cleanly and surgically, with a single well-placed blow, knocked the brute out.

The Indian picked himself up off the floor, dusted himself down and, to Francis’s surprise, revealed he wasn’t Indian after all. He was, in fact, Nepali, the favourite nephew of Nepal’s maharaja and a great shikari himself. So, over a bottle of Scotch, the peer of the British realm and the nephew of the Maharaja became fast friends, and Francis was persuaded to visit Nepal and teach the Maharaja’s nephew all about the excellence of British sporting traditions. He was going to explain the practicalities of hunting with hounds, and the possibility of developing grouse shooting in the mountain kingdom. In return, the Maharaja’s nephew promised to take him to a camp in the Nepal Terai, where they would ride in bejewelled howdahs on the backs of giant tuskers and shoot more tigers than the old British king.

The version of the story that Francis told the planters in Darjeeling was embellished by details of the Dane’s enormous size and belligerence, the impressiveness of Francis’s own chivalry, and the fervent gratitude of the Maharaja’s nephew. The essence remained the same, however, including the outcome: in January they were going to travel to Kathmandu as guests of Maharaja Juddha Shumsher Rana, Prime Minister of Nepal, and his ill-treated nephew.

The planter. . .