The Parasol Flower by Karen Quevillon

Author:Karen Quevillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty

Idlewyld is not as George remembers it in the days of the Boonstras. Ten years, God, how they pass in the blink of an eye. The orchards are a mess now. The plum trees flanking the long laneway have suffered, too. As they come into the almost blinding sun at the front, west-facing entrance, he tells the driver to stop.

“I won’t be long,” he tells the man. He’s had to borrow Finch’s cart and syce. “Just wait here.”

But the Malay is looking anxiously about him and talking gibberish to the oxen.

“Well, take them to the stables, then,” he says loudly. “Let them have a drink.”

Alone, and looking up at his task, George reconsiders his initial impression. The mansion is just as imposing as ever.

A house girl answers his knock. She is confused by his request to see Hannah.

“What about Mrs. Peterborough?” he tries. “Memsahib? Is she here?”

“No. She no here.”

The girl has a cleft palate and he can hardly understand her speech. He wants to shake her by the neck. “Well then, where on earth are they?”

“Forest,” she says.

“The forest? Is that what you said? Look, can I speak with somebody who knows what’s what?”

Abandoning the useless house girl, he heads around the side of the house, where the syce is still in the process of unhitching the bullock. George walks past him into the cart house. Inside the shelter sits the Peterborough’s ostentatious blacktop carriage as well as his own family bullock cart. So she is here somewhere. Crossing back through the stable his curiosity is further aroused. In one of the stalls a police mount sways its collared head.

George strides back across the lawn, already drenched in sweat. He will not sit and wait for his wife—his goddamned wife!—to emerge from the jungle. “Where is sahib?” he demands of the idiot house girl, having rapped on the front door again. “Tuan? Where is he?”

“Caarrin?” she says.

“Is that an answer, or a question? Do you not know anything? Can you not find out? No! Wait!” he corrects himself, as she starts to shuffle away. If she goes searching he’ll be stuck waiting, and he’s not interested in waiting. He is interested, come to think of it, in seeing firsthand what the precious doctor has in his laboratory. “Take me. Take me to him.”

The house girl looks even more uncertain than before.

“Listen to me.” He grabs her flimsy forearm. “I am Colonel George Inglis, Deputy Resident of the Province of Perak. Take me at once to Dr. Peterborough.”

She leads him through the house—an incredible house—to the back of the property and walks him to the edge of an expansive patio lined with palms. A wooden cabin is just visible where the lawn ends and the orchards begin. Perhaps, in plantation days, it was an overseer’s hut.

“Caarrin,” she says.

“That—? He’s in there?”

“Nnnh,” the girls says emphatically, almost viciously, before turning back to the house.

George puts a hand to the now pulsing pain in his gut and resumes walking. At the cabin he knocks loudly, reminding himself that he has good reason to interrupt the doctor’s work.

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