The White Pearl Read online

  Kate Furnivall was born in Wales and now lives by the sea, with her husband, in the beautiful county of Devon. She has worked in publishing and television advertising. Look out for her four previous novels, The Russian Concubine, Under a Blood Red Sky, The Concubine’s Secret and The Jewel of St Petersburg, also published by Sphere.

  Visit the author’s website at www.katefurnivall.com

  Also by Kate Furnivall

  The Russian Concubine

  Under a Blood Red Sky

  The Concubine’s Secret

  The Jewel of St Petersburg

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748119158

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 Kate Furnivall

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Sam and Duncan,

  with love

  Contents

  Also by Kate Furnivall

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Reading group questions for The White Pearl

  Q & A with Kate Furnivall

  Kate Furnivall on her Research Process

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Joanne Dickinson and all the superb team at Little, Brown for their unfailing enthusiasm and commitment. Special thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, for believing so fervently in the book. It makes my job easier.

  I am grateful to Anne Goring for generously sharing her personal experiences of old Malaya with me. Also I owe thanks to Marie Bedford for her sharp eye and expertise concerning all sailing matters, and to Marian Church ward for her mastery of my keyboard.

  And as always, many thanks to Norman for living through each page with me.

  1

  Malaya 1941

  It was not the first time Connie had killed someone. But today there were witnesses.

  A car’s bumper should be a mute object, but on 12 November 1941 the chrome bumper on Constance Hadley’s 1938 Chrysler Royal found its voice. It screeched, an ear-ripping noise of metal against metal. It cracked, snapping one of the wooden supports on the covered walkway that ran along Alexandra Parade. It thudded, a warm, muffled grunt as it smacked into human flesh. Those sounds were to play over and over in Connie’s head. A screech. A crack. A thud. Over and over, like one of the fairground merry-go-rounds where the tinny music knows no end.

  The sun is a source of life. Connie had heard those words on the wireless last night. Whoever said them had never lived in Malaya. She squinted through the windscreen as she drove through the crowded streets of Palur, and felt the sun battering her brain with its fist. She had considered, on more than one occasion, taking her husband’s best hunting rifle, the one he’d had specially shipped over from London last year, aiming it at that massive yellow orb hanging in the sky and pulling the trigger. Popping it like a balloon. She’d once mentioned this desire to Nigel, and he’d looked at her oddly.

  Today she’d broken her sunglasses, damn it. That’s what was making her bad-tempered. Without those, she always started a vicious headache in the sunshine. Sunshine. She grimaced as she peeled her back off the seat, feeling her damp blouse stick to the upholstery. Sunshine was far too gentle a word. Sunshine was what existed in England. Sunshine warmed your bare toes in the grass and peeked at you under the brim of your straw hat. She loved sunshine. The brutal heat and humidity here in the heart of Malaya were killing her.

  There had been a mud-slip on the road north of Palur after yesterday’s rain, which had delayed her drive into town, and she was hurrying now to make it to the Victoria Club in time for a swim with Harriet Court. Harriet was a stickler for punctuality, and hated it when Connie was late. She squeezed her big American car past one of the bicycle rickshaws that darted up and down the high street, as irritating as the fat black flies, and spotted a gap in the traffic. Instantly she accelerated into it and swung the wheel to take the corner into Alexandra Parade, an elegant, tree-lined boulevard of imposing stone buildings where the British Empire had placed its colonial stamp on this docile patch of the Malay Peninsula.

  At exactly that moment, another car did the same. It was a sleek coupé that cut through the flow of motorcars and lumbering carts as ruthlessly as a black-finned shark carves a path through the heavy waves of the Indian Ocean.

  ‘Damn you, look out!’ Connie shouted and slammed on her brakes.

  It was too late. She fought the steering wheel but the back end of the Chrysler cut loose. With a sickening lurch of her stomach, she felt it start to swing in a wide, uncontrollable arc. Sweat greased her palms so that they slipped on the wheel. Her wing raked the black car, but instead of slowing, it seemed to gather momentum from the impact. It was the screech of her bumper that alerted people. Faces turned to stare at her, wide-eyed with shock as the two-ton metal missile hurtled towards them on the pavement. The car jerked when a wheel caught in one of the deep storm drains, but still it didn’t stop, and figures scattered in all directions.

  The moment seemed to elongate. Appalled, Connie watched it happen. She saw a woman yank her child off its feet and open her mouth in a huge melon-sized scream. An old man in a straw boater stood paralysed with fear directly in front of her, and a dark moist patch blossomed on the front of his pale flannel trousers. Connie dragged at the steering wheel, her heart slamming against her ribs. The car’s bonnet shifted a fraction to the right, and took down one of the timber uprights of the covered walkway that gave shoppers respite from the scorching sun. The crack of the wood was like a gunshot. The old man ducked down on the ground, hands covering his head. The bumper missed him by the width of the brim of his hat, and instead selected a different victim: a stocky native woman wearing a bright green sarong, a woven basket perched on her shoulder.

  Connie screamed at her through the windscreen as she stamped on the brake pedal. ‘Run! Run!’

  Please, please, run faster!

  But the woman knew that her time had come. That the spirits had chosen her, and there was no escape. She swung round at the last moment and faced the oncoming car. She stared straight into Connie’s eyes and her lips moved, but the words were swallowed by Connie’s own scream as the bumper uttered its muffled grunt. It had found
flesh. The woman’s eyes became huge black pools of pain for one brief moment before she disappeared from Connie’s sight and the car shuddered to a halt.

  No! The word resounded in Connie’s head. No!

  She was shaking, teeth chattering. With an effort of will she unclamped each finger from around the steering wheel and seized the chrome door-handle. She forced it open, tumbled out of the car and raced to the front of the bonnet. She caught sight of a pair of bare feet, their soles covered in red dust, then caramel-coloured legs and the edge of a green sarong. On the ground the rest of the woman’s body was hidden from sight behind the crowd that had gathered around her, but they drew back at Connie’s approach, opening a path for her. As if she were unclean.

  ‘Call an ambulance! Pangil ambulans!’ she shouted to a man in a striped butcher’s apron and he said something in reply, but the connection between her ears and her mind seemed to have broken because the sounds meant nothing to her.

  The Malay woman lay on her back, not crumpled, not in a tangle of blood and fractured bones, but straight and unharmed as though she had dozed off by mistake in the heat. With a rush of relief Connie dropped to her knees on the pavement beside her and lifted the limp hand. It felt warm and dry against her own damp palms, with short stubby fingers that curled around hers in a stubborn grip. She isn’t dead, thank God, she isn’t dead. But the woman’s eyes remained firmly closed.

  ‘An ambulance is coming, a doctor will be here very soon. Don’t try to move,’ Connie told her, her throat so tight the words sounded as if they’d come from someone else’s mouth. She leaned over the motionless figure, shielding her from the glare of the sun, and asked softly, ‘Are you in much pain?’

  No response.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Connie said. ‘I didn’t mean to …’ Her voice trickled away.

  She wanted to wrap the woman in her arms and rock her gently, to sing a cradle song to her the way she did to her son, Teddy, when he fell over and scraped his knee. She wanted to ask where it hurt, so that she could kiss it better. Most of all, she wanted to look the woman in the eye.

  ‘Please,’ she murmured, ‘open your eyes if you can hear me.’

  Still no response.

  Thick black lashes lay on the plump dusky cheeks and fine veins traced a network back into her temple where the beginnings of a bruise were starting to form. She looked a similar age to Connie herself, about thirty-four, but the woman’s dense black hair that she wore pulled back into a knot behind her head was showing the first few streaks of grey. Maybe she was older. Her nose was broad, and the skin of her arms a patchy, uneven brown as if she worked with chemicals of some sort. What world have I wrenched her out of?

  There was no blood. Not a mark on the sarong or on the woman herself, except for the slight bruise, and Connie allowed herself to hope it was just concussion. Softly she started to talk to her, to entice the woman’s stunned brain back into action. She asked her name, her address, who should be told about the accident, what was in the crushed basket at her side. She stroked her hand, tapped her arm, touched her cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again.

  The eyes opened suddenly. There was no flicker of warning, just closed one moment, open the next, in a narrow slit of life that sent Connie’s heart clawing up into her throat.

  ‘Selamat pagi,’ she said to the woman. ‘Hello.’

  The eyes weren’t black any more; they were drenched in blood.

  ‘An ambulance is coming,’ Connie said quickly.

  The woman’s lips moved but no sound emerged. The stubby fingers gripped harder, pulling at her, and Connie leaned forward, so close she could feel the moist breath on her ear as she tried to catch the faint words. For the first time since she’d knelt down, she became aware of the circle of people gathered around her in the street. White faces. Sunhats. A ginger moustache. A dark uniform with brass buttons. Voices aimed at her but jumbled together in a blur. With a jolt she realised that there was a young native girl of about sixteen crouched on the other side of the woman, a curtain of silky black hair half obscuring her face, but her eyes were fixed on Connie and her expression was accusing. Behind her stood a tall native youth, his face set hard. He was wearing a waist sarong and a sleeveless shirt from which his fingers were unconsciously tearing a button.

  ‘Do you know her?’ Connie asked.

  The girl stared at her coldly. ‘She is our mother.’

  Connie felt a rush of nausea.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said yet again. Empty, useless words. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘White lady.’ The English words came in a guttural gasp from the lips of the woman lying on the pavement, a flutter of sound that barely reached her.

  ‘I’m here,’ Connie squeezed her hand. ‘And your children are here.’

  ‘Listen, white lady.’

  ‘I’m listening.’ Her ear was almost brushing against the struggling lips and there was a long pause, during which the heat of the day seemed to gather itself and launch an attack like a blow on the back of Connie’s neck. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I curse you. You family. You children. And you. I curse you all.’

  Words sharp as a cobra’s bite, but Connie did not release her grip on the small hand. The blood-filled eyes opened wider, flashed at her full of malice, and then abruptly closed. Her fingers grew limp.

  ‘No!’ Connie cried. ‘No, don’t go. Curse me again, curse me as much as you wish, call your evil spirits down on my head, but don’t go.’

  A policeman stepped into her field of vision. ‘Mrs Hadley, the ambulance is here. They’ll take over.’

  Men in white uniforms gently moved Connie aside. She rose to her feet, tremors grinding up through her body and jamming her mind. Soft voices spoke to her, careful hands guided her, treating her as if she were glass and might shatter. When she realised she was being ushered off the street into the shade of a nearby building, she broke free and searched the crowd for the woman’s son and daughter, but they had vanished.

  ‘Sit down, Mrs Hadley.’

  ‘Drink this, Mrs Hadley.’

  ‘You’ve had a nasty shock.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. We have witnesses.’

  Policemen, with questions and notebooks, brandished their sympathetic smiles in her face and told her she could go home, they would drive her home, but she shook her head.

  ‘No, thank you. I have to pick up my son from school.’

  The building that had given her refuge was a British bank with thick stone walls to keep out the heat, and a vast, cooling fan that stirred the leaden air with brisk efficiency in the small office where she was seated. The bank manager had a sunburned bald head and a kind smile.

  ‘Take your time, my dear,’ he said. ‘Take all the time you need.’

  She sat there alone, listening to the sounds in her head. The screech. The crack. The thud.

  How do you tell your seven-year-old son that you have killed a woman in the street?

  Connie’s fingers gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles chalk-white. She didn’t say anything at all in case the wrong words spilled out of her dry mouth. Heavy insects blundered against the windscreen as she drove out of town with her son, Teddy, on the front passenger seat, swinging his legs and chattering about the different colours of a python’s skin.

  Did children in England talk of such things? How many told their mother, as Teddy did, that a king cobra could move as fast as a galloping horse? Was this normal?

  In Malaya, nothing was normal.

  They were heading back home along the eight miles to the Hadley Estate. It was a vast tract of land that had been in the Hadley family for three generations, hacked by hand out of the raw jungle at the end of the nineteenth century, and was now the largest rubber plantation in the region, just to the north-east of Kuala Lumpur. It stretched in shimmering layers of dense green for over five thousand acres towards mountains that reared up blue and hazy in the distance, and employed nearly seven hundred l
abourers, a mongrel mix of Malays, Tamils and Chinese.

  Nine years ago when Connie, full of youthful excitement, first stepped off the boat into the sweltering heat of Malaya, she had been astounded not only by the size and lush extravagance of the beauty of the estate, but also by the power of an estate owner – the Tuan Besar – over his work-force. It seemed to her that Nigel was like a god, a father, a judge, a bank manager, a doctor and King Solomon all rolled into one. If he put a black mark against a labourer’s name, then that native would find work nowhere else in the district, but if a man was a skilled rubber-tapper or a diligent finisher of the rubber sheets in the packing sheds who buckled down to the tough discipline of plantation life, he was highly valued and treated well.

  Nigel knew nearly all his workmen by name. That fact alone had stuck in Connie’s mind, and impressed her enormously when he had mentioned it as she danced in his arms to a slow foxtrot at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Out here in the tropics, swamped by a never-ending tide of brown and yellow faces, she had found it even more incredible.

  ‘Why are you driving so slowly, Mummy?’ Her son’s voice was impatient.

  ‘I’m being careful, sweetheart.’

  ‘But it will take ages to get home.’

  ‘There’s no rush.’

  Teddy swivelled to face her on the front seat of the Chrysler. ‘Yes, there is, Mummy. I have to build my aeroplane again.’

  She risked taking her eyes off the dirt road for a split second. It was full of potholes and gullies where monsoon rains had scoured channels in the red earth that could crack a car’s sump if you weren’t alert. Teddy’s young face was so earnest, his eyes as round and bright as chestnuts, and there was an added eagerness in the way he regarded her today. She noticed that his school uniform of white shirt and grey shorts was streaked with grass stains, the collar torn, and there was a telltale scratch on the tip of his chin.

  ‘What is it, Teddy?’ she asked, before returning her attention quickly to the uneven road surface. The car still worked despite the damage to the bumper and mudguard, but she steered it around a deep rut with caution. ‘Have you been fighting with Jack?’