Free East of the Sun by Julia Gregson Page B

the pink silk georgette to that, or is it a bit much?
    When you write, send your letter to Cook’s Office, 15Rue Sultan Hussein, Port Said. You can also send a telegram.
    The breakfast gong has gone and there is a lot of scuttling above my head.
    Write soon. Give Copper a big kiss for me and a handful of carrots.
    With bestest love,
Rose
    But she’d suddenly lain down on her bunk again and thought about her father and their last camping trip together in late summer.
    They’d gone fishing on a small trout stream in Wales that he particularly loved near the village of Crickhowell. All the familiar paraphernalia had been loaded into the back of his ancient Daimler: the rickety Primus, the two dogs, with their beds, the big tartan thermos, rods, camp beds, and the stout old army tent that had seen active service in Africa. She’d loved these camping excursions as a child—Tor often came, too, and her father would instruct them in all kinds of boy things: épée fencing with pieces of stripped alder, trout casting, how to fold a tent, and make a tree house—he’d even brought up one of his guns once and they’d had a competition shooting tin cans out of a tree, which Rose to her amazement had won hands down and been called Dead-Eye Dick for the rest of the trip. She and Tor had swung on a rope over the river; they’d burned sausages over fires at night.
    She’d only been dimly aware then of trying to be as brave as Simon, the boy her father had lost and wanted back so badly, but on that last trip, when they were alone together, the view had changed. One night, after they’d fried up the salmon they had caught and he had lit a fragrant pipe, he’d said to her clearly and urgently that he hoped he and Mummy hadn’t let her rush into this Jack thing. He’d said that he wanted more than anything else in the world for her to find a man who was worthy of her. He’d looked at her anxiously and his voice had trembled with emotion as he’d told her that finding the right person was the greatest gift of your life. And he’d suddenly looked so old and anxious, sitting hunched on his stool in the fading light, that she’d known that even if things weren’t a hundred percent perfect when she got to India, it was her turn to protect him now.

Chapter Ten
    Kaisar-i-Hind, 150 miles from Port Said
    T or woke up in darkness hearing the noise again. It was coming from the boy’s cabin next door. A series of escalating moans, like something being held down and tortured, then broken words, then the sound of the bunk creaking, then silence.
    She lay back in the dark, frightened. If the boy had been a friendlier type, she might have gone straightaway to see if he was all right, but she found him odd and disturbing. They often saw him on deck smoking and glaring out to sea, and only a few nights ago, at a ball in the Siena Room, he’d made quite a spectacle of himself. The orchestra had been playing, the kind of waltzes that appealed to the colonels and the older people, and he’d suddenly stood up and danced wildly and inappropriately by himself. Because they were, so to speak, neighbors, and because the older people had been tutting, she’d tried to smile at him, but he’d turned hurriedly away.
    He’d also made that fuss about only eating with Viva, which was a great relief to them because he wasn’t exactly laughinggas, but they were sorry not to have more time with Viva, who was, Tor had decided, mysterious and exotic.
    “I bet I’m no more than three years older than him,” she’d complained to Rose, “but he makes one feel such a maiden aunt.”
    “Don’t forget,” said Rose, always kinder about these matters than Tor, “how absolutely vile we could be at that age.”
    “You were never vile, Rose,” Tor said. “I was vile for both of us.”
     
    The noises stopped as suddenly as they had started, and because Tor wasn’t sure what to do, she put her head on the pillow to think about it and fell asleep and