Love In The Clouds

CHAPTER ONE 1895-1

CHAPTER ONE

1895Coming back from the village Chandra saw a chaise outside the front door and quickened her pace.

It was annoying that someone should have called to visit her father when she was not at home and she knew he did not want to be disturbed. However, she thought guiltily, it was her own fault because if she had not stopped to gossip, she would have arrived home twenty minutes earlier.

She always enjoyed going to the village because the owners of the small shops who had known her since she was a child were invariably ready to reminisce about ‘the old days’ and her mother.

Mrs. Geary in the baker’s always exclaimed as soon as she saw Chandra,

“Ah! there you are, Miss Wardell! And growing more like your dear mother every time I sees you.”

“You could not say anything that would please me more,” Chandra would reply.

Then Mrs. Geary would be off, telling long rambling tales of how beautiful Chandra’s mother had been when they first came to The Manor and how everyone in the village had loved her.

This was true enough, Chandra thought, for her mother had a gift of making friends wherever she went and perhaps she used it more than another woman might have done to make up for her husband’s shortcomings.

Professor Barnard Wardell found people bores and wanted only to be left alone with his books.

He was the greatest Sanskrit scholar of his day. The Royal Asiatic Society had made him a member, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Societé Asiatique de Paris gave him high distinction.

Unfortunately the general public was not interested in his works of scholarship which meant, of course, that his books were not widely sellable.

He received a grant – a very small one – from the Asiatic Society of Bengal, but otherwise they had to rely on a small amount of royalties that arrived intermittently from his publishers.

“Do you not think, Papa,” Chandra had said to him dozens of times, “that you could write a book that would interest ordinary people who would like to know more about the East and the literary treasures they do not even know exist?”

“I am not throwing my pearls of wisdom before swine!” her father had replied.

“But, Papa, we need the money and, careful though I am with every penny you give me, we cannot exist on air.”

She knew, even as she spoke, that her father was not listening to her.

His mind was far away in a Lamasery in Tibet or a Monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas, anywhere the sages of the past had hidden their manuscripts which none other than scholarly men could decipher.

Sometimes when she read of the sales of a popular novel or a travel book running into thousands of copies, Chandra would wish her father was different.

Then she knew proudly that he was unique and whatever the difficulties she would not have him change.

It was because they were so short of money, and it was quite impossible for the Professor to afford a secretary or an assistant, that Chandra had started five years ago working with him on his translations.

After the initial work, which was very exhausting, she found it interesting and, in fact, absorbing.

The Professor was not a good teacher. He was impatient and given to shouting at his daughter when she found it hard to understand some very difficult Sanskrit word or an almost incomprehensible nuance of grammar.

But gradually because she was extremely intelligent, Chandra grew, as the years passed, more and more proficient until in this last twelve months, she found herself doing most of the draft translation of a manuscript, leaving her father the easier job of revising.

He was growing older and the long journeys he had taken to obscure parts of the world where he had contracted malaria and every other sort of Asiatic fever, were now beginning to take their toll.

Not that he would ever admit to weakness, so Chandra would say to him,

“I will finish this, Papa. There is a very interesting article in today’s newspaper on which I would like you to give me your opinion. I have put it by your chair.”

Her father would obey her and sit down in his favourite chair only to fall asleep almost as soon as he had picked up the newspaper, which was, Chandra thought, proof of the fact that, while he would not admit to his fatigue, it was nevertheless undeniable.

She thought now, as she hurried down the short drive which was badly in need of weeding, because they could not afford a gardener, that it would not only annoy her father to have a visitor, but would undoubtedly tire him.

She had had a suspicion recently, that he was forcing himself to use up his strength and do more than was really prudent.

Chandra reached the open chaise and saw that it was drawn by two horses and there was a very smart groom wearing a cockaded hat on the box.

She wondered who could be the caller, knowing from the style of the conveyance in which he had come, it was certainly not one of her father’s literary friends who were mostly as impoverished as he was.

She only hoped that it was not Lady Dorritt from The Castle, because if there was one person her father really detested, it was the Lord Lieutenant’s wife who was not only infuriatingly patronising but also extremely garrulous.

Yet Chandra had never known Lady Dorritt to drive in anything but a closed carriage and therefore, even though it was warm for September, she was unlikely to be her father’s visitor.

She walked into the oak-panelled hall where a beautifully carved Elizabethan staircase curved up to the first floor.

It was as she was hurrying towards the study where she knew her father would be ensconced with his visitor that she saw a man’s tall hat on an oak chair.

She then knew that whoever was with her father, it was not Lady Dorritt, although it did not suggest the identity of the caller.

Chandra’s hand was actually outstretched towards the door of the study when she heard a deep voice that she did not recognise and stood listening.

She could not hear very clearly what was being said, so on an impulse instead of entering the room, she moved quickly to another door in the hall and opening it, entered the drawing room.

This was a room that was seldom used since her mother’s death where the curtains were drawn to prevent the sunshine from fading the carpet, because the fewer the rooms that were used, the easier it was for old Ellen, who was the only servant left to clean them.

Moving silently across the carpet, Chandra went to the far end of the room where there was a corner cabinet let into the wall probably in Queen Anne’s time, when the room had first been panelled.

It was, however, only recently that Chandra had discovered that, when she opened the door of the cupboard, in which were arranged various attractive pieces of china, she could hear distinctly what was said in the study next door.

She imagined that in order to fit the cupboard, the bricks had been removed until only a thin veneer of plaster had been left on the wall in the next room.

When she told her father of her discovery, he had laughed.

“I cannot believe this house which belonged to a most respectable County family until my father bought it, was ever used for spying. Nevertheless we might find your secret listening post convenient.”

“How, Papa?” Chandra asked.

“When some of those bores who call and stay too long,” her father replied, “I will merely raise my voice a little and you can come and rescue me.”

“There is no need to raise your voice Papa,” Chandra replied. “We will just have a code. If you say, ‘it’s cold for this time of the year’, I shall know you are anxious to be rid of them, but if you say, ‘I smell smoke’, I shall know that you need rescuing immediately.”

“I will always it that whenever you inflict those chattering fools on me,” her father growled. “Why I cannot be left alone, I cannot imagine!”

It was a constant cry of the Professor’s, for all he wanted was to be left alone with his books and, as he made this very obvious to anyone who called on him, he was, in fact, frequently undisturbed for weeks on end.

Chandra, as she pulled open the cupboard door, now heard the deep voice that she had listened to in the hall, saying,

“If my information is correct, it will be the most amazing find of all time!”

“I agree with you,” the Professor replied, “but you know as well as I do, that reports of such manuscripts are usually based on hearsay and they generally turn out to be entirely valueless.”

“My informant is a man of complete integrity, but of course he may have been mistaken.”

“Has he been of actual help to you in the past?”

“I have always found him very reliable, and he took the trouble to come all the way to Calcutta to see me, just as I was boarding my ship to return to England.”

“It certainly sounds as though he was convinced, but you have not told me yet, Lord Frome, how I can help you.”

Chandra started.

She knew now who her father’s visitor was.

Damon Frome was one of the younger men interested in Sanskrit treasures and her father had often mentioned him.

The Professor had been sent several manuscripts by Damon Frome in the past two years which Chandra had helped him to translate.

They had, she remembered now, been much more exciting and much older than most of the other papers her father had been working on.

What was more, he had been better paid for the time he had spent on them.

If Lord Frome had brought her father some new work, she thought with delight, that it was exactly what they needed at the moment.

Just before she had left the village, Mr. Dart the grocer had said to her,

“I knows the Professor’s busy, Miss Chandra, but if you could ask him if he’d give us a little on account, I’d be most grateful.”

Mr. Dart was a nervous, somewhat inarticulate man, not the type of blustering exuberant character one would expect in his trade.

Chandra knew that he would have keyed himself up to speak to her and she was uncomfortably conscious that their bill with Mr. Dart had been growing higher and higher for several months.

“I will speak to Papa, Mr. Dart,” she said quickly. “I feel sure that he must have overlooked what we owe you. You know how absent-minded he is.”

“I apologise for troubling you, Miss Chandra, and the Professor,” Mr. Dart replied, “but times are hard and it’s difficult to order from my wholesaler without paying cash.”

“I understand, Mr. Dart,” Chandra said, “and I will speak to my father as soon as I reach home.”

To relieve the uncomfortableness of the situation, she had asked after Mrs. Dart and the children, all of whom she knew by name.

Yet, as she walked away from the small shop with its bow-fronted window, she wondered how it would be possible to let Mr. Dart have even a token p*****t of what he was owed.

She could, of course, write to her father’s publishers. She had done that in the past and he had been very angry when he had found out she had done so.

But there was very little chance of their agreeing to let her have any further p*****t on the books that they had published the previous year which, though praised in the scholarly reviews, aroused no response from the public.

‘I wonder if there is anything left in the house to sell?’ Chandra had thought as she walked back along the country lane.

She had known the answer even as she asked the question.

Now she felt her spirits rise.

Lord Frome had brought her father some work and she was confident that everything would be different now and in the future.

“What I want in this instance,” Lord Frome was saying, “is your help, Professor, in a different way from anything we have done together before.”