Ryman, Rebecca Read Free Page A

spinster and, somehow, I can't really see that happening!"
She grinned.
    Estelle
tossed her flaxen curls with an air of disdain and jabbed her paintbrush into a
pool of crimson lake. "I'll make sure it doesn't! When I'm eighteen, I
shall do exactly as I please, so there!"
    "You
do pretty much as you please right now."
    "Not
as much as Polly does. Her mother lets her use lip salve and kohl
and go to burra
khanas with
her beaux—and Polly's a whole six months younger than I am." The enormity
of the injustice depressed her. She pushed away her water-colour, picked up the
orange and started to peel it, scowling. "Uncle Sean never bullied you,
did he? Can you imagine Papa letting me carry a derringer and taking me
on a wagon train?"
    "There
aren't any wagon trains in India," Olivia pointed out.
    Estelle
dismissed the technicality with a wave. "If Uncle Sean always treated
you as an adult, why can't they me? I'm not even allowed to eat what I
want to when I want to without Mama making a fuss." She glowered at the
orange segments, demolished them in a single mouthful and spat the pips out of
the window with deliberate defiance.
    "But
you still manage to," Olivia remarked drily. "What you can't have at
table you bribe Babulal to give you later in the kitchen—and I've seen those
biscuit tins under your bed, remember?"
    "Well,
I'm not going to let Mama starve my body to death like she tried to crush my
spirit, am I? I'll lay a wager Uncle Sean never—"
    "Our
circumstances were quite different, Estelle," Olivia said hastily, uneasy
in her cousin's persistent and misplaced admiration. Estelle was as lovable as
she was exasperating, but Olivia had no intention of being blamed for inciting
rebellion. "Now tell me," she changed the topic swiftly, "is
Uncle Josh absolutely certain the ship will reach here in time? There's no
chance of your dress being held up, is there?"
    Forgetting
everything else, Estelle brightened. "Papa has promised he won't allow
anyone to let me down. Oh, Olivia . . .," in her sudden change of mood she
squealed, swept her puppy Clementine up in her arms and hugged it, ". . .
I'd die, just die, if
anything went wrong now. I'd never be able to look that silly Charlotte
Smithers in the face again, not after everything she's been saying to Jane
about my ensemble. Do you know what Jane actually had the gall to tell Mrs.
Cleghorne, who told Marie who told Polly? She said ..."
    Olivia
closed her eyes and stopped listening, satisfied that with the floodgates once
again open her cousin's energies would all be expended on the most momentous
future day of her life— her eighteenth birthday next month and the
coming-of-age ball being planned for it. As the familiar torrents of gossip
flowed out of an excited Estelle, Olivia allowed them to wash over her
unnoticed, her monosyllabic responses all that Estelle desired.
    A
year.
    Twelve
months.
    Three
hundred and sixty-five days—minus only sixty!
    Against
the soothing murmur of Estelle's unheard chatter, Olivia's own familiar
torrents of thought flooded her mind. How would she ever survive these three
hundred and five remaining days of an exile that stretched ahead like a sterile
desert, dull and joyless? She should never have come, never have given in to
her father's well-meaning persuasions, insisted that he take her with him, as he
had often done in the past. Glumly and for the thousandth time, Olivia decided
that her coming to India had perhaps been a mistake . . .
    Which
was an introspection very similar to the one Lady Bridget was indulging in as
she absently supervised the pruning of the bougainvillea above the front
portico. Had Olivia not taken so impartially and so equally from both parents,
she mourned silently, there would have been no problem. That wilful
stubbornness and hard set of the chin, those disarming hazel eyes so filled
with innocent fire, that smile of blinding radiance that seemed to illuminate
her face from within, the vulnerability behind the