From the consignment ship? Well, he brought this over with him last week and posted it from Liverpool. It arrived at my digs in Portsmouth yesterday,” Sam explained. “Bertha got in touch with him. After Mamma died she sorted through all her things and came across this letter. Apparently it was in a box containing a huge stash of correspondence with postmarks from India. Knowing William was a friend of mine, Bertha asked him to bring the letter with him to England when he next sailed.”
For the past few months, May’s grief had subsided like an exhausted butterfly beating its wings against a closed window. The sight of her mother’s writing threatened to revive the receding pain.
“You open it,” Sam said encouragingly. “Your name is on the top. Girls first.”
The seal on the envelope gave way easily and cleanly. The date at the top of the page was the date of their sailing to England, in December 1935. Sam moved closer to May on the bench and she began to read aloud.
My beloved children,
I have no idea in what circumstances you will read this letter, if indeed you ever will. What I would like best is to come over to England, and hold both your hands as we always do when there is something important to speak of, and then I would read this to you myself. The purpose in writing the letter is as much for myself as for both of you. Sometimes (as I know I have said so many times that it makes you groan), I feel that the very act of writing things down makes truths true and whole.
I want to begin by saying that the only consistent source of emotional happiness in my life has been my love for you, my children. And now, on the day in which you have both sailed away from me, perhaps to a new life that I will never know, I feel it is the right time to tell you the truths that, as my children, you have the right to know. So here is the story of my life as simply as I can set it down.
I was not in love on the day of my wedding. I married on an impulse, probably for security, possibly as an adventure, but whatever the reasons were, I soon realised I had made a terrible mistake. Duncan (as I will call him here) devoted more care to his work than to anything or anyone else. I was lonely. I missed Scotland. I missed my sister. I missed my parents. And I felt I had missed out on life’s opportunity to love and to be loved.
At the beginning of the Great War, Duncan left Barbados and joined the navy, expecting to be gone for just a few months and I stayed behind to care for our son, Sam, who was by then two years old. I longed for companionship and while Duncan was away I fell in love.
Gabriel Nischal Ramsay was half-Indian and his middle name, that suited him so well, meant “calm.” I used to call him Nishy. His British father, Mr. Ramsay, had worked for the maharaja of Jaipur looking after the regal elephants, just as his grandfather had before him. Time and science moved forward and, with the arrival of the motorcar, working elephants were no longer used for transport at the royal court. One of Mr. Ramsay’s chief responsibilities was to oversee the upkeep of the maharaja’s cars, a job in which he took pride and from which he derived much pleasure. Although Nishy’s parents were happy enough together, his mother, an English teacher to the royal children and a woman of great beauty, had a brief affair early in her marriage with the maharaja’s younger brother and conceived a child. Nishy’s phial of royal blood was well known to those at court, accepted although never discussed.
Looking for adventure, Nishy left the court at Rajasthan in 1912 and travelled to the West Indies, where he got a job at Duncan’s plantation. He worked hard and was well liked, particularly by Duncan. Soon Nishy was promoted to the role of deputy manager while in his spare time he made sure all was well with our car.
When Duncan was given leave for one wartime visit to the plantation in the early autumn of 1915 (and here I apologise to Sam for revealing something that no child should hear from his mother), I could not bear to be intimate with him.
Duncan