In the Far Pashmina Mountains Read online

  ALSO BY JANET MACLEOD TROTTER

  THE INDIA TEA SERIES

  The Tea Planter’s Daughter – Book 1

  The Tea Planter’s Bride – Book 2

  The Girl from the Tea Garden – Book 3

  The Secrets of the Tea Garden – Book 4

  HISTORICAL

  THE JARROW TRILOGY

  The Jarrow Lass

  Child of Jarrow

  Return to Jarrow

  THE DURHAM TRILOGY

  The Hungry Hills

  The Darkening Skies

  Never Stand Alone

  THE TYNESIDE SAGAS

  A Handful of Stars

  Chasing the Dream

  For Love & Glory

  THE GREAT WAR SAGAS

  No Greater Love (formerly The Suffragette)

  A Crimson Dawn

  SCOTTISH HISTORICAL ROMANCE

  The Jacobite Lass

  The Beltane Fires

  Highlander in Muscovy

  MYSTERY/CRIME

  The Vanishing of Ruth

  The Haunting of Kulah

  TEENAGE

  Love Games

  NONFICTION

  Beatles & Chiefs

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503903166

  ISBN-10: 1503903168

  Cover design by Lisa Horton

  Cover photography by Richard Jenkins Photography

  For my gorgeous and lively granddaughter,

  Connie – you bring joy into our lives. A heroine in the making!

  CONTENTS

  MAP

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  GLOSSARY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  Northumberland, 1810

  Alice Fairchild was born on a rock in the North Sea during a storm. Giving birth, her mother, Charlotte, writhed on the lumpy bed high up in the lighthouse while the roaring wind shook the tower and drowned out her screams.

  ‘Hush, madam,’ Effie, the keeper’s wife, fussed. ‘You’ll frighten my boys with your noise.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Charlotte snarled. ‘Just get this thing out of me.’

  Effie was offended but bit back a retort; it was the fear and pain of childbirth that made this strange gentlewoman say such things.

  ‘It’s coming – just push a wee bit harder,’ she encouraged.

  ‘I’m dying!’ Charlotte wailed. ‘I’m going to die in this horrible place, and he’ll never know, and it’s all because of this – this—’ She screamed as another agonising contraction paralysed her body.

  Effie had never seen such unseemly behaviour at a birth; this woman bucked and shrieked like someone possessed. As the shutters rattled and sea spray hissed through cracks in the brick walls of the lighthouse, Effie tried to calm the uninvited guest, who had stepped alone off a small boat just hours before the storm began. Effie worried about her husband, marooned in the lamp-room above, trying to keep the guttering candles lit. Through the hatch to the kitchen below, she could hear her two young sons squabbling over cards and disobeying her order to stay in bed. But who could sleep through such a storm or this caterwauling from Mrs Fairchild?

  An hour later – an hour of cajoling, shrieking, blaspheming and sweating – a long-legged baby with a crinkled red face emerged with a querulous wail of indignation.

  ‘A lass!’ Effie cried, eyes smarting with tears. ‘You have a bonny daughter, Mrs Fairchild.’

  Charlotte recoiled. ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘After all that hard work?’ Effie exclaimed in disbelief. ‘Just a wee cuddle—’

  ‘Not now.’ Charlotte sank back, utterly exhausted. ‘Please take it away.’

  Effie was shocked more by this rejection than by the hours of invectives and swearing. She and Arnold had lost three babies – all of them girls – between ten-year-old Danny and five-year-old Sam. Effie kissed the bleating infant.

  How could a mother not want to hold a living baby in her arms?

  Hours later, Charlotte woke, numb and sore and wondering where she was. The claustrophobic room reeked of tallow, sweat and blood – her blood. In the flickering and dancing of the weak lamplight, the curved walls seemed to be moving towards her. She lay on a four-poster bed that had no room for a canopy; the bed posts scraped the ceiling as if they held it in place.

  Was it still night-time? Low down in the wall, the shuttered window let in no crack of light. The wind continued to howl. The baby. Had it just been a nightmare? Charlotte winced at the pain of sitting up. No, the ordeal had been only too real. Someone – perhaps that lowly lighthouse-keeper’s wife – had tried to clean her up but there was no sign of the thing that had been pulled out of her. The horror of it swept over her anew. How had she not known it was a baby growing inside her? There had been cravings for sweet foods and the strange twistings in her belly that she had worried were the manifestations of some parasite; women in pregnancy billowed like full sails but her small hard bump had hardly shown.

  She struggled out of bed. She must leave. Her lover, Captain Nielsen, would arrive at any moment to rescue her; they had agreed a rendezvous at the island’s secluded harbour. Charlotte lost her footing on the rag mat and fell hard on the rough wooden floor.

  Effie’s head appeared through the hatch in the floor at the sound of her cry. ‘Madam, what are you doing? Is it the chamber pot you need?’

  ‘I need to dress. I must go.’

  Effie chided, ‘It’s back to bed you must go, Mrs Fairchild.’

  Charlotte tried to resist. ‘I have to leave. He’s coming for me.’

  Effie gave her a reassuring pat. ‘No one could launch a boat in this storm. You’ll just have to be patient, madam. We’ll get word to your husband that you are safe as soon as we can.’ She coaxed a trembling Charlotte back under the
covers.

  ‘How long will it last – the storm?’ Charlotte panicked.

  ‘Could be days.’

  ‘Days? I simply can’t stay here that long.’

  ‘I’ll bring the baby up for a feed.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Charlotte said, tears of frustration springing to her blue eyes. ‘I can’t—’

  ‘There’s nothing to it. I’ll help her latch on.’ Effie ignored her protest. ‘You’ll soon get into the way of it.’

  ‘No, I won’t – I refuse to!’

  As soon as Effie disappeared down the ladder, Charlotte pulled the covers over her head and yelled in fury. By now she should be safely away with her Danish sea captain, Eric Nielsen. Where was Eric now? Was he safe in harbour or tossed in the storm? The thought of shipwreck – or, worse, that he might never come at all – plagued her. But he loved her – adored her – so of course he would come. It was he who had chosen the lighthouse island so as to attract as little attention as possible; Eric said that George Gillveray at Black Harbour House was always spying through his telescope at shipping. She just had to be patient. But Charlotte knew she wouldn’t be; never in her life had she understood why patience was considered a virtue.

  The storm lasted three days, but the swell of the sea was so violent for the following three that Arnold Brown, the lighthouse-keeper, said no boats could land safely at the island no matter how experienced this Captain Nielsen was.

  ‘Don’t know which is worse,’ Effie complained, ‘the foul weather or that madam’s moods.’

  Charlotte was bad-tempered and tearful but Effie was insistent that Charlotte put the baby to her breast.

  ‘No one else here can feed the lassie.’

  Effie plagued Charlotte with questions: what was she doing travelling alone in her condition without even a maid? Where was her husband? Why had she come to the island? To stem Effie’s curiosity, Charlotte swallowed her irritation and played the grieving widow.

  ‘Colonel Fairchild died of his battle wounds,’ she wept. ‘He’s buried abroad. I’m going on pilgrimage. Captain Nielsen has kindly agreed to take me. My maid suffers terrible sea sickness. Another one will be provided for me on board.’

  Charlotte was unsure if Effie believed her – the lighthouse-keeper’s wife sighed and muttered under her breath in some heathen language – but she treated her with robust kindness if not with the deference that Charlotte expected from a woman of such low degree.

  Charlotte tried not to order Effie about like her servant; she hated the stuffy bedchamber but was even more loath to descend to the cramped kitchen with the cooped-up boys, their scolding mother and taciturn father who was trying to sleep. And the querulous baby. She did not think of the infant as hers and dreaded the times the creature was brought to her for milk. It would latch onto her like a leech and suck until her breasts were sore and she could bear it no more. She prayed for deliverance and for Eric to come. Long hours of boredom stretched between feeds. Only to dark-eyed boisterous Daniel – who brought her indigestible meals of porridge or pease pudding – did Charlotte take a liking.

  ‘Stay and talk to me, Danny; stop me dying of boredom,’ she pleaded, and then spent an age telling him about her life in a grand house outside Newcastle. At times, Charlotte wondered what had possessed her to run away, paying off her maid and pretending to her husband’s family that she was going to London for a month. Then she thought of Eric Nielsen – handsome, jovial and reckless – who was offering her a new life of adventure.

  A week after Charlotte gave birth, she demanded to be taken up to the lamp-room. On shaky legs she climbed the ladder to the top of the lighthouse and, with Danny holding her arm, gazed about. She hoped each speck on the horizon would be Eric’s ship come to rescue her; each time her hopes were dashed as yet another ship sailed on. A week of incarceration turned into two and then three – every day she stood on the wooden gantry for hours at a time – but Eric did not come.

  One day, Arnold told her bluntly that they were running low on supplies and that he could row her and the baby across to Black Harbour on the mainland.

  ‘Would you like me to carry a message to your own people,’ he asked, ‘to fetch you home?’

  ‘No!’ Charlotte cried in panic. ‘I must wait for Captain Nielsen as arranged.’

  Arnold sighed. ‘And if he does not come?’

  ‘He must be delayed by the storm. Give me another week, then I promise I will go.’

  Arnold took Danny to help him carry supplies. When they had gone, Effie coaxed Charlotte down to the kitchen and poured her a drink from a dusty bottle kept in a linen chest.

  ‘Sherry,’ said Effie. ‘Drink it, madam, and then we can have a wee chat.’

  While Charlotte swigged gratefully at the sweet, warming liquor, Sam sat eyeing her from his stool, where he kept watch over the baby in her makeshift cradle. Effie sensed her discomfort and packed the boy off to pick shellfish from the rocks.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on Baby,’ said Effie, shooing him down the ladder. When he’d gone, she smiled. ‘Wee Sam’s appointed himself her guardian angel, so he has.’ Then her look turned serious. ‘It’s none of my concern – this business with Captain Nielsen – but would it not be better to delay this – er – pilgrimage until the babe is weaned?’ When Charlotte said nothing, Effie went on. ‘My husband could get a message to Captain Nielsen’s ship; tell him all is well but now that there is a baby—’

  ‘He mustn’t know about the baby,’ Charlotte blurted out. She reddened. ‘I mean I don’t want him burdened with having to accommodate it – the pilgrimage mustn’t be delayed.’

  ‘That can hardly be avoided,’ said Effie. ‘If he comes he will find you here with your child.’

  ‘Not if you say it’s yours! Keep the child,’ Charlotte pleaded. ‘I beg you.’

  Effie was shocked. ‘The child is not ours to keep.’

  ‘I can give you money.’

  ‘We don’t want your money,’ Effie bristled.

  Charlotte burst into tears and sank to the floor. ‘I didn’t know I was with child! I am ruined!’ she wailed. ‘Why won’t you help me?’

  Effie, alarmed, put her arms about the distraught woman.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Mrs Fairchild,’ Effie urged, pushing the tangle of red hair out of Charlotte’s eyes.

  ‘Colonel Fairchild isn’t dead of his wounds,’ Charlotte sobbed. ‘He’s been away fighting the French for four years – we’ve only been married for five. I’ve hardly seen my husband and can barely remember what he looks like.’

  ‘So is the baby the captain’s?’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t know about it. How could he, when I didn’t even know myself?’

  Effie was gentle but firm. ‘You should go back and face your husband.’

  ‘I can never do that.’ Charlotte was adamant. ‘Colonel Fairchild is a stranger to me. I am going to my captain and no one will stop me.’

  ‘Then the child is his responsibility.’

  ‘It would be too much of a shock,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘But if he cares for you, madam, he will accept the girl,’ Effie encouraged, ‘and she’s a bonny wee thing.’

  ‘Maybe in time he will. But not now. Please, would you keep it? I know nothing of babies – you are a born mother, and Danny has told me how you long for a daughter and of the three who are buried on the island.’

  Effie gasped. ‘He shouldn’t have told—’

  ‘Now is your chance,’ Charlotte interrupted. ‘Take mine and bring it up as your own. Please, Mrs Brown!’

  Charlotte scrambled to her feet and, reaching to grab the baby, thrust her into Effie’s arms. Effie’s heart melted anew as the infant fixed her with trusting, inquisitive blue eyes.

  ‘Perhaps we could keep her for a while.’ Effie’s resolve weakened.

  ‘I’ll come back for it, I promise,’ said Charlotte.

  No one was more surprised than Effie when, later that day, a ship appeared off the Black Needle
– the most easterly of the treacherous reefs – and sent out a rowing boat to the island to fetch Charlotte Fairchild.

  The young woman could not flee the lighthouse fast enough, ordering the silent stocky Sam to struggle down the ladder with her baggage. Effie had sudden qualms about the baby; what on earth would her Arnold say about her foolhardy gesture?

  ‘You will come back for her, won’t you?’ Effie asked, gripping Charlotte as she stood at the top of the ladder.

  ‘Of course,’ Charlotte said, impatiently pulling away. As she reached the storeroom below, she hesitated and glanced back up. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done for me, Mrs Brown. I’ve left money in your bedchamber to compensate you for your trouble.’

  ‘There was no need,’ Effie protested. Just as Charlotte hurried out of view, Effie called, ‘Wait! What shall we call the child?’

  There was a pause, then Charlotte called back. ‘My mother’s name was Alice. So I suppose Alice will do.’

  Effie hurried up to the lamp-room to watch the contrary gentlewoman escape in the open boat to the waiting ship. Her heart drummed to think how she had taken an active part in the plot; her husband would be furious. Well, the deed was done and fate had dropped a baby girl into her empty lap. Effie hastily descended and went outside to milk their goat.

  By the time Arnold and Danny returned, Effie was sitting in her chair, spooning milk between the baby’s pink lips. The infant was making soft smacking sounds while Sam crouched beside her holding the baby’s tiny fist and humming tunelessly.

  ‘Come here, Danny,’ Effie said to her eldest son, putting on a brave smile, ‘and say hello to your wee sister Alice.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Isle of Skye, Scotland

  Four hundred miles north-west of Black Harbour Island, in the same storm that caused Alice to be born in a lighthouse, an uprooted beech tree changed the course of young John Sinclair’s life.

  ‘Can you take the boy with you today?’ Mairi Sinclair asked her husband that blustery morning. She was exhausted from the early stages of her second pregnancy and could hardly move from the box-bed without being sick.

  ‘Aye,’ John’s father said, ducking out of the door of the neat gardener’s cottage with John at his heels.