The Sandalwood Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

sleeping in the same dormitory and so, when they returned to Rose Hall each Christmas, they shared Adela’s big four-poster bed, a custom that would continue through the years. If they had had separate rooms, Adela would not have been able to pet Felicity’s hair while they talked of Fanny Parks. In the morning, they would not have been able to share the tea tray Martha brought, laden with boiled eggs and rashers and toast and Cook’s special marmalade. They would not have been able to conspire while Martha built up the fire and, outside, triangles of snow collected in the corners of the wavy windowpanes.
    Martha made a Christmas kissing ball—a double hoop covered with evergreen boughs and decorated with holly, apples, and ribbons. A sprig of mistletoe hung from the center and anyone who wandered under it had to pay the price of a kiss. On Christmas Eve, Felicity and Adela walked under the kissing ball and Adela covered Felicity’s face with soft, urgent kisses. Felicity laughed and said, “Enough, Adela. That’s enough.” That Christmas, Adela often caught Felicity beneath the kissing ball; it almost seemed as though she was lying in wait.
    Felicity was voluptuous by fourteen. Her voice deepened to a smooth and womanly tone, while her complexion remained radiant and her rose-gold hair grew thicker and more lustrous. Her school uniform strained across the bosom, nipped in at the waist, and rounded over her hips.
    Adela was not beautiful in the ordinary sense, but intelligence and striking green eyes animated her expression. Her body, however, remained all bones and knobs. Her dresses fell as flat as glass on her chest, and her hands and feet grew large and ungainly. Her lack of femininity was compounded by the fact that Adela remained abnormally bookish. Mrs. Winfield lifted a lock of her daughter’s limp brown hair and let it fall with a sigh. She said, “A man doesn’t like a girl who thinks herself more clever than he.”
    Adela sniffed. “Then let him read a book or two of his own.”
    This was the year Mrs. Winfield engaged a young lady’s maid to look after the girls during the holidays and otherwise help around the house. She was a plain Irish girl, Kaitlin Flynn, who smelled strongly of lye soap. She had coarse, ruddy skin and curly black hair escaping from a white mobcap. Mrs. Winfield handed Kaitlin her uniform, saying, “See if you can’t do something with poor Adela’s hair.”
    “Yes, madam.” Kaitlin curtsied prettily and gave the girls an arch smile that seemed to say she was on their side. After she disappeared up the servants’ stairway, Adela said, “I don’t think Kaitlin is much older than we are.”
    “No,” said Felicity. “And I think she has a touch of mischief about her.”
    They smiled at each other and said in unison, “Thank God!”
    Amid the flurry of Christmas preparations, only Adela and Kaitlin noticed that Felicity seemed listless. When Felicity began coughing, Dr. Winfield spent half an hour in her room with his black bag, thumping her back and asking questions in a low murmur, then came out and somberly diagnosed consumption. Hetouched a knuckle to his mustache and bowed his jowled head like an undertaker. Adela rushed to Felicity’s side and crawled into the sickbed with her, but her parents pulled her away, saying she must not expose herself to the illness. Still Adela sneaked back whenever she could, youth and love making her reckless.
    Felicity lay in bed for weeks, limp, hot, and coughing, with pink spots burning high on her cheeks. Adela would wait until her mother was occupied with visitors or gardening to creep into Felicity’s darkened room with a cup of beef tea, which she spooned between the patient’s parched lips with great patience. When Dr. Winfield visited Felicity, Adela hovered outside the door, pressing him for assurances he could not give.
    Kaitlin, however, walked boldly in and out of the sick room at will. She waited with a washbasin and