The Sapphire Child (The Raj Hotel #2) - Janet MacLeod Trotter Page 0,3

sure there’ll be time for both.’

‘Anyway,’ said Stella, ‘I’ve written out instructions for you . . .’

‘Yes, yes, I know all that.’ Ada waved an impatient hand. ‘Is it true Jimmy is courting that girl from Lovell’s haberdashery – Yvonne Harvey?’

Stella shrugged. ‘I can’t keep up with my brother’s girlfriends.’

‘I saw them doing the quickstep at the railway dance last Saturday,’ said Ada. ‘She was flirting with him all evening.’

‘I didn’t know your dad let you go. Pa wouldn’t like me going to the railway dance.’

Ada huffed. ‘There’s nothing wrong with railwaymen. Uncle Charlie is too fussy – just because you’re fair-skinned and mix with the likes of the Lomaxes, he thinks you can marry above us Anglo-Indians.’

Stella defended her father. ‘Pa doesn’t look down on anyone and neither do I. It’s just that he doesn’t want me marrying anyone till I’m older – and when I do, the choice will be mine.’ She held up her list of jobs. ‘Come on, we’re supposed to be going over this.’

Before she could begin, though, Stella was interrupted by her father hurrying across the hotel courtyard, his look agitated.

‘There you are!’ He stopped and mopped his brow with a lilac-coloured handkerchief. ‘Sorry to spoil your evening, young ladies.’ He gave Ada a distracted look.

‘What’s wrong, Pa?’ Stella said, getting quickly to her feet.

‘It’s the Lomaxes – I’ve just had a telephone call.’

‘What’s happened? Is Mr Lomax all right?’

‘Yes, yes, I spoke to him. They’re coming to Pindi. They’ll be here in a couple of hours so we must prepare their rooms at once.’

Stella brightened. ‘That’s good news, isn’t it? Are they coming to shop?’

‘No, it’s not shopping that brings them down from Kashmir.’ Charlie’s brow furrowed. ‘It’s Master Andrew.’

‘Andrew?’ Stella felt a moment’s anxiety.

Her father dabbed his upper lip with his handkerchief. ‘There’s been some sort of trouble in Murree.’

Chapter 2

Nicholson School, Murree, earlier that day

Andrew sat outside the headmaster’s study, squirming in his seat. He couldn’t sit still. He jiggled his leg and rubbed at his sore knuckles. He pulled at his constricting tie and gnawed at a calloused finger, noticing his palm was still engrained with soil from scrambling up the ravine behind the school. He sat on his hands and tried to calm his racing pulse. Was it only four days ago that life had been normal?

Today, he should have been playing cricket but here he was, like a condemned man, sitting in disgrace, awaiting his fate. None of his friends had spoken to him since the incident; instead they were avoiding him as if he could infect them with his sudden unpopularity. He had put another boy in the school sanatorium with a broken cheekbone and a bloody nose.

‘You could have damaged his sight!’ Mr Bishop, the headmaster, had fulminated. ‘We won’t tolerate bullying at Nicholson.’

Andrew had refused to say why he had attacked George Gotley. He was prepared to take his punishment and he forced himself not to cry out when Bishop had given him ten strikes of the cane on his backside. His skin still smarted from the beating. He’d thought that would be the end of it, but Gotley’s father was a major in the Peshawar Rifles and had arrived at the school demanding further retribution.

‘If you don’t expel that Lomax boy,’ Major Gotley had thundered, ‘I shall take the matter to the police.’

Now, two days after the major’s interference, it was his father’s voice that Andrew could hear remonstrating with the headmaster beyond the door of the study.

‘Surely a suspension for the rest of term would be punishment enough?’

‘Major Gotley thinks not,’ said Mr Bishop in his whining nasal voice. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Lomax, but I’d rather the police weren’t involved.’

‘Then let me speak to the major – man to man – and see if we can sort out the misunderstanding.’

‘I fear it’s too late for that. If Andrew had shown any remorse for his actions, Major Gotley might have been mollified. But your son refuses to apologise.’

‘I’ll damn well make him apologise!’

Andrew cringed to hear the anger in his father’s voice. Of all the people in the world, it was his father whom he wanted to please the most. When his parents had arrived twenty minutes ago, his father had given his shoulder an encouraging squeeze and said, ‘We’ll get this sorted.’ Esmie, his stepmother, had hugged him and kissed his cheek, but there had been no time for him to explain anything as Mr Bishop, with a nervous twitch of his billowing