The Secret Mandarin Read Online Free PDF

to one side. In the photograph none of us is smiling and Robert looks exhausted, the sepia only highlighting the bags beneath his eyes and the indents of his hollow cheeks. At least we would have a record of the last weeks we were together.
    ‘You will carry it with you, Father?’ Thomas asked.
    ‘All the way to China,’ Robert promised. ‘And when I return you will have grown beyond all recognition. You will be tall and speak Latin perfectly.’
    A mere five years before, we had had another photograph taken. John, their eldest boy, now away at school, was held by Jane while I had little Helen on my knee. All of us were in jovial spirits that day. I was playing Cleopatra at the Olympic and had not yet encountered William. The kohl around my eyes had been almost permanent that summer. The dark lines did not come off fully until weeks after. They lent me an air of mystery, a sense of the forbidden.
    In India the women wear kohl. They paint their skin with henna and scent themselves with moonflowers. The Hindus will not eat animals. But there is gold cloth as fine as muslin and as many servants in each household as work a whole terrace in London. I studied Hindustani from a book. ‘Fetch this. Bring that.’ So I could give orders. But still I did not want to leave.
    In my last week, Jane and I engaged the nanny together. Harriet whistled as she worked, very pleased at this development, for it would greatly ease her workload. Jane’s too, I suppose, for though principally in the house for Henry, the girl would also undertake duties for Helen and Thomas. With William’s money in hand, Jane had placed a newspaper advertisement. She offered ten pounds a year plus board and we had over twenty enquiries.
    We interviewed the more eloquent applicants—a mixedbag of ages and experience. Jane was drawn towards the older women, the more prim the better. They came with references, of course, each woman from one wealthy family or another fallen on hard times and making her way as she could. For my part, I wanted laughter in the nursery and I took to asking, ‘What games do you play with your charges?’ The women Jane favoured invariably faltered at this. I despaired that we would come to an agreement and I had to concede that it was my sister, after all, who had to live with the successful candidate.
    Our second but last interview was with a younger girl, new to the city. Her name was Charlotte. As soon as she opened her mouth and we heard her accent, it was as if a spell was being cast. Charlotte came from a little town not ten miles from where Jane and I were raised. Scarce seventeen and plain, there was a familiarity about her that we liked immediately. As a nursemaid she had looked after a family of two children outside London as well as having experience of her own, large family. ‘There are many at home. I am the eldest of eight,’ she grinned. She was well versed in poetry, I was glad to hear, and her favourite game was hide and seek. On Jane’s list of priorities, Charlotte’s manner was businesslike and respectful and although she had only one reference, it was excellent and, in addition, she was acquainted with many of the farming families we remembered from our childhood. After a fifteen-minute interview, Jane and I knew we had found someone who fulfilled our requirements and we offered her the job.
    Charlotte’s trunk arrived later that very afternoon and the children took to her immediately. Jane was quietly delighted at having another servant in the house.
    ‘You will call her Nanny Charlotte,’ she told Helen and Thomas, proudly.
    It seemed to me she might have added, ‘In the hearingof as many of the neighbours as possible’, for to have a third domestic servant in the house was a leap up the social ladder indeed, whatever circumstances had brought about the engagement in the first place. We ordered a uniform of course, and Jane wrote to William to inform him of what she had done. I had no heart to add a