Read The Sandalwood Tree for Free Online Page B

almost physical, like being stretched on a rack, and I welcomed it. I was grateful to Rashmi for letting me into a little corner of India.
    After I had searched the entire house, I stood in the middle of my living room with my lips scrunched up to one side. More information about my Victorian ladies would have to come from the letters I already had, so I brought them out from under my panties, spread them over the kitchen table, and chose the letter with the greatest number of legible words.
    From … … Ad … Winfield
… shire … England
September 1855
    Dear Felicity
,
    … last night …                                    … a chinless little man …
                                        … bored …
                                                                 … a good cry …
    … duty to yourself …                … but your health …
    … intrepid Fanny Parks … not consumptive …
    … worry about you …
    I blew on the bottom half and raised a small puff of dust, which exposed two more words. Encouraged, I fetched a pastry brush, and tickled away flecks of dirt. A couple more words emerged, and I held the paper up in a shaft of afternoon light.
                        … Mother …                          … utterly determined …
    … Katie …                                     … consolation …
    The third letter provided a bit more:
    October 1855
    Dearest Felicity
,
    … most terrible, most wonderful …          … Mother …
    … Katie & me …                                     … Poor Katie …
        … I do not know where …
                                                                                            … Calcutta …
                     … long hearty cry …                           … wrote Katie …
          … so sudden & so bittersweet …
                              Tears course down …                … even whilst a smile …
                                                         … feel quite mad …
                 I will … after all …
          … sister in joy
,
          Adela
    I refolded the letters and stared out the window. Now who was Katie?

Demo version limitation

Demo version limitation

1854–1855
    F elicity watched them cast off the ropes and felt the
Cambria
move off. As the great ship slipped away from the wharf, the cheering crowd surged forward, Adela and Kaitlin with them, drowning out the singing missionaries with hearty hurrahs. Soon the figures on the wharf dwindled to specks and barefooted lascars in red turbans climbed among the ropes like a circus act.
    She wandered into the dining saloon and sat down in a revolving chair where she watched a fat ayah singing a baby to sleep on the floor. She thought of Yasmin and the sorrow she had once felt at leaving her and India, yet now she was ambivalent about leaving England. It was really Adela she regretted leaving, but in any case there was, once again, a sense of loss. She watched the baby pat the ayah’s face and play with the gold hoops in her ears as the ship throbbed down the river to the sea.

    In Gibraltar, she rode in the rattletrap conveyances of the place through its twisted high-walled streets, out past the Spanish market, where everyone bought figs and pomegranates. Then she trottedthrough the sand and the short grass round the mighty gray foot of the Rock to look up and marvel. Afterward, she strolled through the roses and verbenas of the Alameda Gardens and