Fire on the Mountain: Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

A British colonel named MacDougall built the house in 1843 in hopes that the mountain air would prove wholesome for his sickly wife and children. It didn’t. After their deaths, the house stood empty, but not quiet: one day its roof blew off in a thunderstorm and decapitated a poor laborer nearly two miles away in another town. After the roof was replaced, the pastor of Kasuli’s only church lived in the house with his wife. He planted—and loved—the apricot trees. His wife hated him so much she tried daily to murder him until her own accidental death. He later died in a tuberculosis sanitorium, and his ghost allegedly still haunts Carignano.

Afterward, a series of English maiden ladies occupied the house, starting with Miss Appleby, a former governess with a wicked temper, who once severely beat the gardener for planting marigold flowers. Then it was occupied by Miss Lawrence; the two Miss Hughes, who planted the yellow creeper rose which blooms extravagantly all around the house and garden for one month each year; and Miss Jane Shrewsbury, who brewed herbal medicine and once tried to save her cook from choking by stabbing him in the neck to create a passage for breathing. He died anyway, and her actions caused a brief scandal. Miss Weaver and Miss Polson lived in the house before and during World War II, entertaining British soldiers far from the front lines. But they fled, along with the rest of the British, on the eve of Indian independence in 1947.