by Jane Feather
The two survivors of the morning delivered Akbar Khan’s expressions of regret and desire for a renewal of negotiations, and Elphinstone quavered and wheezed, alternating expressions of acute dismay at the fate of the Envoy and Trevor with bursts of outrage at the murdering, treacherous Afghans. But the outrage was not translated into action, except to have the garrison put under arms and maintain defensive positions continuously.
“Major Pottinger must take over the negotiations now that poor Sir William is gone,” Elphinstone muttered. “We must come to an agreement without delay. There’s not a sack of grain in the cantonment, I understand.”
Colin felt a pang of guilt for his full belly, satisfied at the enemy table, but he dismissed it as too nice a reaction in the face of calamity.
“Annabel will be glad to see you,” Kit said softly as they left the general’s office. “We all believed you dead.”
“I have a gift for her from Akbar Khan,” Colin said. “I do not understand what it means, but he said she would.” He looked at his friend gravely. “It struck me as somehow sinister, but I don’t know why.”
“Anything from Akbar Khan would be sinister at this point,” Kit responded, looking grim. “I have felt like a mouse being toyed with gently and with infinite care ever since I first made his acquaintance. And I can’t do a damn thing about it, Colin. Annabel is just so … so … fatalistic about it. I know she expects the worst in the end, believes that there is no protection from Akbar Khan’s long reach when he decides to close his hand over her, and no protection from the death we all face in this godforsaken land. But I refuse to accept that so tamely. There has to be something we can do.”
They had reached the bungalow as he said this and the door burst open. Annabel, hair flying, came hurtling down the path. “You are safe, Colin.”
“As you see,” he mumbled with some embarrassment as he found his arms full of this warm, lithe body. “It did not suit Akbar Khan, apparently, that Lawrence and I should be cut down also.” His hands drifted awkwardly over her, as if seeking some safe spot to touch as she clung to his neck. “You know, Annabel, this display is very gratifying, but it is a little public in the open street.”
Laughing, she released him. “You English are all the same. You think there’s something wrong with displaying affection.”
“And what, pray, are you, miss?” demanded Kit.
Her eyes glinted mischievously. “Neither one thing nor t’other, Ralston, huzoor. Come into the house where we may be as frank as we please without drawing unwelcome attention. I wish to hear everything about this morning. Maybe it will give me some idea of what Akbar and the other sirdars intend now.” Linking arms with both men, she hustled them into the bungalow.
“I am charged with a message for you,” Colin said as they reached the sitting room.
She released his arm and stepped away from him, her body suddenly vibrating with tension. “From Akbar Khan?”
He nodded and in silence drew forth the bracelets from his coat pocket. “He said you would understand.” He held them out to her.
For a moment she did not take them, but stood looking at them instead with the fixed fascination in her eyes one might exhibit before a cobra, reared to strike.
“What does it mean?” Kit asked in low-voiced urgency as the tension radiating from her still figure seemed to set the air humming.
“He did not send the key?” she asked, although it was clear from her voice that the question was rhetorical.
Colin shook his head, still holding out the bright silver objects, gleaming richly in the dim light of late afternoon.
At last, she took them, hesitantly as if afraid they would scorch her fingers. “They’re very beautiful,” she said softly, “and very valuable. Ancient Persian craftsmanship, he told me, when he first showed them to me.”
“What are they for?” Kit asked insistently. “Why would he send you such a beautiful and valuable gift at this juncture?”
She smiled, a wry, almost mocking smile. “Akbar Khan has a love of symbols.” She slipped the bracelets onto her wrists, where it was clear that once the wide silver bands were closed, they would fit as tightly as if they had been made on her. “Once I close the clasps, I cannot remove the bracelets without the key. He holds the key.” She looked across at him. “Do you understand now? They are a mark of ownership.”
Colin felt that cold finger on his spine again as he understood what it was about these undoubtedly beautiful bracelets that had given off that strangely barbarous aura.
“Take them off!” Kit said with sudden violence, grabbing her arm and wrenching the unclasped band from around her wrist, then doing the same with the other. He dropped the silver manacles on the table with a gesture of disgust, as if they were contaminated. “I cannot endure this!” he declared with the same violence. “The man is playing with us … they are all playing with us, standing gloating outside this stockade watching us starved into submission, waiting for the first real snow to fall—”
“Peace, love.” Annabel laid a hand on his arm. “Railing hysterically isn’t going to achieve anything.”
“And sitting back accepting the whims of your damned Destiny is, I daresay,” he snapped, his raging frustration turned abruptly upon her. “That attitude is simply an excuse for cowardly inaction and I cannot stomach it, on your lips or anyone else’s, so don’t let me hear it again, do you understand?”
Annabel flushed and bit her lip fiercely, trying to bring under control her anger at being spoken to in such fashion and so unjustly in front of Colin, who was looking extremely uncomfortable. Absently, she picked up one of the bracelets, running her finger over the intricate chasing on the silver.
“Put that down!” Kit snatched it from her, his face set in livid lines, the gray eyes as hard and lifeless as pebbles. “I have had as much as I can take of Akbar Khan’s goddamned symbols. Don’t touch them again.”
It was too much, to be dictated to in such peremptory fashion, as if she were somehow responsible for rather than the victim of Akbar Khan’s unplayful games. Her anxiety was subsumed under a wash of temper that with a certain perverse and flagrant enjoyment she made no attempt to bridle.
“They are mine,” Annabel asserted vigorously. “Just as my attitudes are mine. I do not give you the right to tell me what I am to touch and what I am to believe.” With a gesture that Colin could only describe as blatantly provoking, she picked up the other bracelet and slipped it around her wrist. “And if I choose to wear these, I will, Christopher Ralston!” For one horrifying moment, it looked as if she were about to snap the clasp, and Kit sprang at her with an exclamation of incoherent fury. Annabel squealed and leaped for the door, the outraged Kit on her heels. The bedroom door slammed.
It couldn’t hurt to have such an outlet for depression and anxiety, Colin thought with an envious sigh, going into the hall. Even anger, when it was the other side of passion’s coin, had to provide relief from this deadening reality.
“Dear me, sir.” Harley popped his head round the kitchen door. “Has miss upset the captain?”
“I think it’s rather a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other,” Colin said wearily. “There’s not a pin to choose between them.”
Harley nodded sagely. “It’s usually the case, sir.”
“I’ll be on my way,” Colin said, picking up his cloak from the hall table. “Tell the lovebirds … or fighting cocks … or whatever they are now, that I’ve gone in search of some rest.”
Within the bedroom, Annabel was bouncing on the bed, dancing out of Kit’s reach as her impassioned lover lunged for her. Annabel found that she could not help herself as she continued to taunt him with her semi-braceleted wrist. She thought they had slipped back from the edge of anger and into play, rough play certainly, but sometimes there was a necessary place for such deflection, when tensions and tempers ran as high as they were at present and one lived on the brink of desperation.
Kit suddenly caught her ankle,
tumbling her onto the bed, her hair swirling, her cheeks flushed, eyes bright with the spirit of the game or the residue of anger or the promise of passion, or all three intermingled. “You damnable, green-eyed lynx,” he said, bearing her backward with his weight, seizing her wrist in a grip verging on the painful as he tore Akbar Khan’s bracelet loose and hurled it across the room. “How could you make a game of that?” His hands circled her throat, thumbs pushing up her chin. “You fill me with such confusion sometimes, I could as easily smack you as love you.”
Her eyes looked up at him as she struggled to catch her own breath, and they contained not a flicker of alarm at the infuriated assertion. Although the pulse at the base of her throat beat fast against his hand, it was an emotion other than fear that set her heart speeding.
“Which do you want to do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Kit groaned. “The whole house of cards is collapsing around our ears, and you start playing the most appallingly provoking game over something which is not in the least amusing!”
“Maybe that’s why I had to make a game of it,” she said. “It was too deadly to take seriously.”
“Maybe there was a little of that,” he said, “but there was a devil of a lot of pure mischief. Admit it, you wretched woman.”
“You provoked me first,” she offered in partial admission. “And I could just as easily hit you as love you.”
Kit laughed, reluctantly at first, then he yielded to the seduction of amusement. “We are an admirably suited pair,” he declared. “Clearly a match made in heaven. Let’s settle for a kiss, shall we?”
“With the greatest of pleasure. So long as it doesn’t stop there …”
That evening of violent emotions and crazy loving was one they would long remember. It was the last time in the cantonment when they were able to annihilate catastrophic reality in the fires of passion.
It began to snow in earnest and negotiations continued. Major Pottinger, the senior political officer, was a different kind of man from his predecessor, a soldier rather than a politician, but he was obliged to accept majority rule in headquarters. And majority rule decreed unconditional acceptance of the terms laid down by Akbar Khan and the confederate chiefs, however humiliating. Pottinger produced letters maintaining that reinforcements were on their way from Peshawar and Jalalabad; he urged the reoccupation of the Baila Hissar, or a forced military retreat through the passes, abandoning baggage and all encumbrances in the cantonment, as preferable to a surrender which failed to guarantee safety and ensured the loss of all honor. The council decreed that those alternatives were impracticable, and Major Pottinger perforce assumed the miserable burden of negotiating the release of the army and its dependents from the cantonments.
He was forced to agree to pay huge sums to the chiefs for their efforts in supporting the treaty, since only on that agreement were supplies sent into the cantonment. He agreed to the surrender of all significant artillery, and then came the demand for hostages, four married officers and their wives and children. A circular was sent around the cantonment asking for volunteers in exchange for the promise of a substantial stipend. But no volunteers were to be found, and Pottinger was obliged to beg the sirdars to excuse the women from remaining as hostages. The sick and wounded who were unable to march were sent into the city under the care of two surgeons, and on New Year’s Day a ratified treaty was sent into the cantonment.
The British garrison at Kabul undertook to evacuate the cantonment under the protection and escort of certain chiefs, within twenty-four hours of receiving transport animals.
Annabel stood on the ramparts, snow sticking to the hood of her cloak. The snow had done nothing to inhibit the now-familiar throng of townsfolk and Ghazi fanatics yelling their taunts, throwing stones, jeering at the rigid gunners lining the ramparts beside the muzzles of the loaded guns they were forbidden to fire. She could feel the deep, fulminating resentment of the soldiers denied the right of reprisal, and she stared down at her adopted people and cursed them in their own tongue with a virulence that shook her.
She knew that the undertakings of the chiefs were not worth the paper they were written upon. She knew it, and so did everyone else, but they were all mired in the slimy tendrils of hopelessness and helplessness. What could they do but what they were doing, whether it was profitable or not? Mohun Lal, loyal still to his British paymasters, warned that if the British did not insist on taking as hostages the sons of the sirdars, they had no guarantee of safety during the retreat; but how could they demand such a thing when they were completely powerless, and had voluntarily yielded all power, both material and emotional?
The snows fell, as relentless as the excruciating night frosts which destroyed any residue of morale amongst the semi-starved troops, shivering in their barracks empty of fuel. And still the chiefs failed to provide transport animals.
Annabel knew why they were delaying. Every extra debilitating day of fruitless waiting, every extra inch of snow in the passes would augment the torture of the journey that lay ahead—a journey to be undertaken by some eighteen thousand souls, the elderly and infirm, babes in arms, children, women newly recovered from childbirth and those great with child—a journey reasonably to be undertaken only by the hale, even if they were well supplied and were to be permitted to make it unmolested. And Annabel knew that they would not make the journey unmolested.
Her fingers circled one wrist. When would Akbar Khan fulfill the promise of the bracelets? How far would she be permitted to travel with the people of her birth on their journey into near-certain death?
On January fifth, the military authorities ordered the engineers to throw down the eastern rampart, creating an exit from the cantonment wider than that provided by the gate. They were still without the promised escort, without adequate supplies or transport, but evacuation could be postponed no longer.
Chapter Eighteen
At nine o’clock on the morning of January sixth the great exodus began. The advance force was mostly sepoy infantry, ill-clad and debilitated by weeks of semi-starvation, their thin-soled shoes offering little protection from the thick snow covering the plain. The cavalrymen fared a little better, and Annabel, sitting astride Charlie as she watched them go, recognized the weather-beaten face of the rissaldar commanding his own troop. She thought of those sessions in the riding school and wondered if the rissaldar was remembering them now as he rode out of the cantonment beneath the drooping banners that seemed somehow to exemplify the brooding foreboding in which they were all enveloped.
“We ride with the main body under Shelton, moving out as soon as the advance is through.” Kit rode up to her, his voice curt, but she did not take the tone personally. “The ladies, invalids, and sick all will be with the main body, but you may ride in the van with me. I will be accompanying Elphinstone as staff officer. You are known to everyone at headquarters, so it will cause no remark.”
“Less than if I were to be cast amongst the ladies,” Annabel commented dryly. “I’m sure they would not welcome me.”
“Probably not, but it seems of minor importance at this stage. More relevant is that Charlie will carry you well, for all that he’s somewhat skinny these days.” Kit leaned over and patted the horse’s neck, as if the gesture would expiate the guilt he felt at the mute sufferings of his animals. “He’ll be more at home with the cavalry horses than the camels and ponies.”
Bob rode up, looking pale and distracted. “Wouldn’t you know it! That damned temporary bridge the sappers were supposed to have completed over the river is not yet in place. The advance has had to halt on the bank. God knows how long it will be before they can cross.”
Annabel looked behind her at the milling, seething scene. Camels lifted their elongated necks in disconsolate fashion, their howdahs occupied by the officers’ wives and children, their drivers shivering in the freezing air as they stamped their feet on the icy ground. Litters and palanquins crowded the square, their bearers yelling at each other, the f
emale occupants peering out and giving conflicting orders. Children were wailing and whining, in fear and cold and bewilderment. Pouring into the square, getting underfoot of beasts and soldiers alike, were the skimpily dressed camp followers, some twelve thousand or them, who could not be forced or persuaded into the rear with the baggage, but insisted on mingling with the main body. The sharp crack of whip leather, the exasperated bellows of officers, the whinnying of horses, the cries and protests of all and sundry made a hellish din, redolent with chaos and frustration.
She glanced at Kit and shook her head in a gesture of helpless resignation.
“I know,” he said. “Not a chance.”
“Not a chance.”
“Hey, less pessimism, if you please!” Bob attempted a jocular tone of voice but the shadow of his own knowledge left a jagged edge. “The general’s so weak, I wonder if he’ll manage to sit his horse,” he said, dropping the pretense. “Are you riding with him?”
“Yes. If he fails, there’s a litter prepared. It’ll slow us up, but then I hardly imagine speed is going to be the order of the day. Annabel, are you going to be warm enough?”
It was a seeming nonsequitur, but they all knew it wasn’t.
“Warmer than most,” she answered and didn’t add Thanks to Akbar Khan. Her leather trousers were lined with cashmere, the tunic with fur, and over the tunic and trousers she had a sheepskin, fur-lined jacket, and over that the fur-trimmed hooded cloak. Her leather gauntlets and boots were also fur-lined. She was a great deal better protected than Kit and his colleagues, and was immeasurably better off than the vast majority of those attempting this journey. But then she was dressed as an Afghan, one who made her life in this inhospitable land and was prepared for its savagery. Akbar Khan had not intended she should start this journey ill-prepared …
“They are beginning to move out,” she said abruptly, veering away from that train of thought. “Should we join the general, Kit?”