by Jane Feather
“How the hell does he think we’re going to get out of here … camp followers, women, children, babes, accomplishing seventy miles to Jalalabad under fire?” Mackenzie exclaimed in disgust. “The only way we are going to leave here is with the permission and support of Akbar Khan and the other sirdars.”
“Tell that to Macnaghten,” Kit said wearily. “He’s still firmly convinced that his plan to sow dissension amongst the chiefs will work, and if we can hold out in the Balla Hissar through the winter, all will be well.”
“Captain Ralston?”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” Kit returned the new arrival’s salute automatically.
“An Afghan force, sir, has been sighted moving from Kabul toward Behmaroo.”
Kit’s short expletive was echoed by Colin as they absorbed the implications of this fresh disaster. “You’d best deliver your message to Brigadier Shelton, Lieutenant,” Kit said.
“If only Shelton were more than a good duty soldier,” Colin muttered as the lieutenant left. “Someone has to show some vigor and initiative around here. The troops are thoroughly dispirited, fighting this constant defensive battle without adequate rations. I can’t get so much as a crisp salute out of them, and I’m not sure I’d trust most of them much further than I could throw ’em.” It was a gloomy truth. Morale was so low that it was becoming increasingly difficult to rally the troops in the field.
“It’s not all Shelton’s fault,” Kit pointed out. “In all justice, Elphinstone is not making life easy for a second in command. He’s still hanging on to his prerogative of command, although he can’t make a decision and can hardly get out of bed.”
“True enough.” Colin shrugged gloomily.
“Kit, I need a cavalry diversion with a field gun,” a hurried voice broke in from the doorway. “I’m told that’s your specialty. Ready to march in half an hour.”
“Yes, Major,” Kit said to the retreating back of Major Swayne. “Since when have cavalry diversions and field guns become my specialty?” he wondered aloud.
“Since the storming of Mahomed Shereef,” Colin said with a faint grin. “Quite a reputation you acquired, my friend, during one of our lamentably few field triumphs.”
“A reputation justly belonging to one Havildar Abdul Ali,” Kit said frankly. “He has his own troop of sepoys and they’d follow him into Dante’s inferno. For some reason, Abdul has elected to follow me.”
“Well, take care this time,” Colin said. “And keep the havildar at your back.”
Kit nodded. “I’d better let Annabel know. I’d rather face a Ghazi scimitar than my green-eyed lynx in one of her passions.”
Colin chuckled. “You’re a lucky bastard, Ralston. Wish I had something of that nature to take my mind off gloom and doom.”
For some reason, the remark failed to draw forth the light response Colin had intended. Kit shook his head, his gray eyes shadowed. “It’s the very devil, Colin, when you find yourself with hostages to fortune. I can live with the certainty of my own death … if not during this fiasco, then at some other time … but I cannot live with the certainty of Annabel’s. And I am tormented by the knowledge that if I had not with such blind arrogance taken it upon myself to interfere in her life, she would not be in danger now.”
“Does she feel that?”
Kit shook his head. “I have tried to persuade her to return to Akbar Khan, but she will not. She has this infuriating Afghan belief in destiny. We all behave in a preordained fashion and the outcome is laid down, so the choices that lead to enjoyment and suffering are out of our hands. You take what’s coming to you, and smile when you can.”
“There are worse prescriptions,” Colin said seriously.
“I suppose so.” Kit shrugged. “I’d best be about my business, Colin.”
“God’s speed.”
Kit raised a hand in a gesture of acknowledgment and went out into the street. He saw the glimmer of the white chadri as he turned toward the stables and quickened his step. For some reason, Harley was pushing a wooden barrow in the wake of the white chadri.
He didn’t want to call out in the open street. The presence of an Afghan woman under Captain Ralston’s roof was now common knowledge throughout the cantonment, but he deemed it best to maintain discretion. The subject was treated with gentlemanly restraint by his colleagues and conspicuously ignored by such arbiters of conduct and moral standards as Lady Sale.
Lengthening his stride, he came up with them in a few moments. “Whatever are you doing?” He peered at the contents of Harley’s barrow.
Harley stared straight ahead in a manner that managed to convey his complete separation from his present endeavor. “Miss says the hillmen use dung for fuel, and since we’re reduced to burning the furniture, sir, she decided—”
“Dung!” exclaimed Kit, wrinkling his nose at the steaming, aromatic pile. “Annabel, be serious.”
“I am,” she responded matter-of-factly. “You don’t burn it wet, of course. We make cakes of it and dry it. There’s no sun, but the wind will do as well. Sheep’s dung is better than horse manure, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“No,” agreed Kit faintly. “Doesn’t it stink?”
“Not much. And it creates warmth.”
A much-prized quality, Kit reflected. Glancing at Harley, he read the same reflection beneath the batman’s apparent lofty disavowal of his odorous assignment.
“The Afghans are attempting to occupy Behmaroo.” It seemed simpler to go straight to the point and allow dung fires to go by default.
“Are you going to intercept them?” she asked.
“I have orders to create a diversion for Major Swayne’s infantry.”
“Christopher!” An imperious hail came from across the street. Lady Sale billowed toward him. “Whatever has your batman got in that barrow?” Momentarily diverted from her errand, she stared in astonishment.
“Makes a satisfactory fire, m’lady,” Harley declared stoutly, aligning himself with Ayesha, who had taken one step backward and stood with head lowered, the perfect picture of Islam diffidence and modesty.
Lady Sale ignored the veiled figure. “I am reduced to burning my armchairs. I shall send Ghulam Naabi to the stables in that case. Christopher, is it true that those savages are attempting to attack Behmaroo?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kit said. “But Major Swayne is taking a detachment to intercept them, and I am ordered to provide a diversion with cavalry and artillery. We will secure the village, I have no doubt.”
“I do trust so,” said her ladyship. “Provisions are scanty enough as it is. No one can remember what it was like not to be hungry.” She billowed on her way.
“Doubtless you will secure the village,” Annabel murmured from beneath her veil.
“Do I detect a hint of skepticism?”
“Possibly. Have a care, Kit.”
“I will. And for God’s sake make sure that muck is relatively dry before you start burning it.”
* * *
All day they struggled against the Kohistanee garrison occupying the village of Behmaroo. The occupying force had blocked all the approaches to the village, and any attempt to take it by storm was clearly futile.
Kit watched helplessly as his own troopers and gunners fell beneath the enemy jezzails. Abdul Ali had been wounded in the first half hour and on Kit’s orders been carried off the field by his own sepoys. Kit felt strangely bereft and vulnerable without his phlegmatic sergeant and the five sepoys who were his invariable companions. The arrival of reinforcements under Shelton offered momentary encouragement, but still they came no closer to their goal and at dusk the recall was sounded.
It was a much-depleted force, grim-faced, eyes shadowed with an emotion akin to despair, who reentered the cantonment. They had seen their companions mown down, been deafened by the appalling inhuman screams of the wounded rising above the incessant gunfire, and they had advanced not one step toward the village where lay their only recourse against slow starvation during the brutal ferocity of a
mountain winter in the midst of a harsh and implacable enemy.
Kit went first to the hospital where Abdul Ali lay amongst the dead and dying. The helpless moans of those whose pain had become an intrinsic part of them were, if anything, even worse than the battlefield screams of the newly wounded. The havildar was fortunately wandering in morphine-induced delirium, a blood-soaked bandage around the stump of his left leg. Kit felt a surge of intense anger, an anger directed at everyone involved in this pointless, murderous, suicidal idiocy.
He left the hospital and made his way to his bungalow, his step dragging with bone-deep fatigue, his eyes filled with a profound depression. Voices rose from the sitting room, and the door flew open just as he laid a hand on the latch.
“I saw you come in through the gate so I knew you were safe.” Annabel held herself back from him for a moment, as if giving them both opportunity to adjust to the vanquishment of terror one more time, to savor once again the piercing intensity of relief. Then she flung her arms around him, permitting as always on his return the uninhibited show of emotion she denied herself on his departure.
He held her, drawing strength from her strength, then looked over her head to where Colin and Bob had risen and now stood discreetly gazing into the sullenly smoldering, extremely pungent fire.
“I see you’re burning that muck,” Kit observed, trying to sound cheerful but not quite managing it.
Annabel subjected him to a swift, all-encompassing scrutiny. “Bad?”
He sighed and dropped the pretense. “Worse than anything before, I think. Unless it’s just that one more failure, one more day of wasted lives, seems like one day too many.”
“Sit down.” She pushed him into a chair and poured brandy. “This is the last bottle, but I think tonight you need it.”
“I won’t argue. Pass it around.”
“No … no, dear chap, wouldn’t dream of drinking your last bottle,” Colin said hastily.
“Oh, nonsense! When it’s gone it’s gone.” Kit waved aside the polite objection. “Have we got anything to eat, Annabel?”
She smiled. “A feast. I invited Colin and Bob to join us. We have eggs and flour pancakes, antelope meat and noodles … and best of all, tea.”
Kit looked astonished. “What fantasyland is this?”
“No fantasyland,” she said smugly. “Very ordinary. I went to the bazaar in Kabul—”
“You did what?” Kit sprang to his feet, his face chalk-white, the skin drawn tight across his cheekbones.
“It was perfectly simple,” she said, seemingly unaware of the effect her revelation was having upon him. “I bought sufficient for several days, and I will go back when we run out. I cannot imagine why I didn’t think of it before.”
“Perhaps because you have only just lost your mind,” Kit said with a strange calm. “I have wanted to shake you on more occasions that I can count, but this time I think I am about to do it.”
“We’ll be on our way,” Bob said, coughing awkwardly.
“Yes … yes, indeed,” agreed Colin, making for the door.
“No, don’t go!” exclaimed Annabel, when it seemed Kit was going to make no attempt to prevent them. “You are staying for supper so don’t take any notice of Kit. He’s just tired and wretched—”
“Not nearly as wretched as you are going to be,” Kit warned softly. “But it’ll wait.” He waved a detaining hand at his friends. “There’s no need to leave. Stay for supper, since I imagine this is the only household in the cantonment with anything deserving of the name of food.”
“If you’re sure—”
“Of course he’s sure,” Annabel said briskly, not a whit disturbed by Kit’s threatening demeanor. “I am going to see if Harley is preparing the antelope and the noodles the way I explained. Have some more brandy, Kit. It will help you relax.”
The door closed on her departure and Kit inhaled sharply. “So help me, I am going to … Did you know she had gone into the city?”
“Only after the event,” Colin said. “When she invited us for supper. She’s so much an Afghan when she wants to be, looks like one in that chadri, speaks like one, behaves like one, that I didn’t think too much of it, to tell the truth. I mean, m’dear fellow, Annabel’s not exactly an ordinary woman, is she?”
“No,” Kit said, his lips taut. “And Akbar Khan is very anxious to get his hands on her. And Akbar Khan is in Kabul. And Akbar Khan’s Ayesha is a familiar figure in the city. I cannot believe she could have been so foolhardy!”
“It wasn’t foolhardy.” Annabel reappeared and spoke calmly from the door. “You take your life in your hands every time you go out of the cantonment on one of these futile exercises in recklessness. My errand was not futile and I fail to see why I should be expected to sit here twiddling my thumbs and starving when a little effort and ingenuity can put food upon the table. The situation is desperate and requires desperate measures, so I should stop behaving in this stiff-necked fashion, if I were you, or your supper will curdle in your belly and then I will have wasted my time.”
“You are not to do it again.”
“I will do whatever I deem necessary, whenever I consider it necessary, Christopher Ralston,” she returned smartly. “Supper is ready.”
“I once told you you’d bitten off more than you could chew,” Bob commented with a degree of compassion.
“Mmmm,” Kit muttered, for the moment unable to agree or deny the statement.
He glowered for about fifteen minutes, then gave up the struggle against Annabel’s determined cheerfulness and the beneficial effects of the first square meal any of them had had in several weeks. But he had no intention of abandoning the issue, and once his friends had left and Harley had bidden them good night, he marched Annabel into the bedroom.
“Now there’s no need to be cross,” she said hurriedly, trying to pull out his grip.
“There is every need.” His hold tightened, as did his lips.
“Kit, I was just another woman shopping in the bazaar.”
“In a distinctive white chadri, the badge of Akbar Khan’s favorite!” he exclaimed. “How could you have been so witless?”
“Witless? Me?” The jade eyes flashed with anger as all thought of placation left her. “I did not wear the white chadri. Harley managed to borrow a plain dark one from a servant in Lady Sale’s house. I slipped through the breach in the earthwork that the mess girl uses, and once out I was completely indistinguishable.”
“You walked two miles to the city and two miles back, unescorted and in broad daylight.”
“Yes, I did.” She sighed wearily. “In the company of a dozen other women from the settlements along the canal. And I will do it again, when the need arises.”
“You will not.” The flat statement lay between them, cold and heavy in the angry silence.
Annabel, even through her anger, thought how desperately tired he looked, the day’s defeat still etched stark in his eyes. Perhaps his need to control her actions came from the complete inability he or any of them had to check the seemingly effortless ascendancy of the enemy. It came from fear for her, too, that she did know. But whether she could understand it or no, she would not permit it.
“I do not give you the right to dictate my actions, Kit.” She broke the silence, keeping her voice low and evenly pitched, her tone reasonable. “I am living under your roof because we both chose that I should. I said I would stay with you until what happens happens. I would not presume to tell you what you may or may not do, and I ask only for the same courtesy.”
“I want you to be my wife.” He heard his voice coming from the depths of his fatigue and disillusion, speaking at quite the wrong moment the words he had managed so far to bridle, even in the euphoria of passion’s fulfillment.
Her reaction was instantaneous. “Don’t be absurd!”
“Why is it absurd?” He still held her upper arms, and his eyes now gazed down at her with painful intensity.
Her voice took on the note of mocke
ry that had so dismayed him in the very early days. “You will wave your feringhee wand, will you, Ralston, huzoor, and turn the erstwhile inhabitant of an Afghan zenana into a pillar of polite British society?” She twisted free of his hold. “I would rather die.”
“You would rather die than be married to me?” He had not known it was possible to hurt so much.
She saw the hurt, heard it in his voice. “No, I did not mean that. I meant only what I have said to you so often before. I could not fit into your world, Christopher Ralston, and I do not wish to. I am happy with the world we have created here, but it is one that has no roots in any other. It belongs just to us, and for as long as we can live in it, then I am content.”
“But there is no future there,” he said, feeling the hurt fade beneath a resurgence of anger at her obstinacy.
“No,” she said firmly. “There is only a present. That is the way it must be.”
“I do not accept that.” He caught her, swinging her around to face him. His expression was wiped clean of fatigue and disillusion, washed away by the pure light of conviction and the determination to impose that conviction and deny her opposition.
“You will tell me there is no future to this?” He clasped her head and kissed her. There was no lingering tenderness or spiraling passion to this kiss. It was a bruising assertion against which she fought blindly for a minute, but he held her head still as his tongue possessed her mouth. Ignoring the vigorous writhing of her body, he bore her backward to the bed, his mouth still in possession of hers. They fell together and his legs scissored hers into stillness, the weight of his body subduing her struggles. A hand pushed up beneath her tunic to cup the warm satiny roundness of her breasts, and at his touch, the touch that she knew she would crave when it was no longer hers for the asking, her nipples peaked hard and the coiling tension began to build deep within her.
Still she squirmed beneath him in an effort to free herself, to fight off the invasion that she knew would render her vulnerable to his conviction, because she would not be able to bear the thought of no future with Kit. Her head twisted beneath the capturing mouth, but he simply moved deeper within her mouth so that he seemed to be within her head, a hot, stroking muscular presence becoming a part of her. She tightened her thighs against the hard knee that would force them apart, and his hand left her breast, sliding over her flat belly where the muscles contracted involuntarily at the touch, sliding inside the chalvar, reaching down, touching her with deep, intimate persuasion so that finally she yielded and her legs parted, her breath sighed in submission against his mouth, and at last he raised his head.