There was a moment, an instant in time, all over India, every year, when one knew that the monsoons were here. It was a moment of madness, pagalpan, a jubilation so intense that it ate up the whole spirit of the person experiencing it and flung him into the air as though he was formed of nothing but exhilaration. As Mila leaned over Sayyid, she felt this insanity and recognized it for what it was. Every atom of her body was filled with this unnamed frenzy, her brain died to nothingness, and a happiness came flooding over her. She looked skyward and saw the stars blotted out by a canopy of thick, rain-bearing clouds. Lightning crawled across the sky and an enormous boom of thunder followed, shaking the very earth.
“Memsahib,” Sayyid said, awake now, looking up at her.
“The rains come, Sayyid,” she said.
Halfway across the desert, Sam heard this thud of thunder too and at the same moment Mila looked up into the sky, he raised his head and inhaled that sweet aroma of rain. He thought he had never sensed something like this before—it was not just a lack of heat, it was a lunacy. But the frissons of pleasure coursing through his veins were replaced by a fear and a watchfulness and Sam kept his Colt leveled at Sims, outside the field punishment center.
They were both lit by the headlights of the jeep that Sims had driven into the desert and parked outside the wooden gates of the center. Sam had reached here in relatively good time, considering how long it had taken for them to drive to Chetak’s tomb a few days ago, but the horses were fleet and sleek and more sure-footed among the dry dirt and stones of the Sukh desert than the jeeps had been. The horse dealer had thrown a whistle out into the air, and even before it had died down, a door, set inside the enormous wooden gates, just the size of a bending man, opened and the dealer’s brother had stepped out. He had put out his hand for the money, but Sam, one hand on the pistol in his holster, the other holding the rupee notes, had shaken his head. “Bring out the sahib first,” he said harshly.
“Bring him out, and soon, you stupid fool,” the horse dealer had shouted in Hindustani; he had spoken very fast because he knew that Sam understood the language, but had not realized that Sam understood the language even articulated at such speed. “Do you want to get us all killed? Give him the gora, and let me get out of here before that other sahib arrives. Get to it, motherfucker.”
The guard beckoned and Sam pulled out his pistol and entered through the door to see Mike standing in the center of the square courtyard. He stood with his legs apart, his face awash with bewilderment in the moonlight, his arms and legs loose and flapping, as though he had lost all coordination in them. The door to the guardhouse on one side was open, and light streamed out and with it the sound of snores—the British guards were asleep, or drugged.
“Come to me, Mike,” Sam said.
“Ah,” Mike said, as though he had found his voice after many months. “I thought this must have had something to do with you. Are we going to leave now?”
“Yes,” Sam waved him toward the gate, “now.”
The guard barred their way out. “The money, Sahib.”
Sam wedged his gun against the man’s ribs. “When I get out and get on my horse, I will give you the money, not before that.”
They had just stepped out of the prison when the door slammed shut behind them with such ferocity that Sam’s hair flew out in front of his eyes. He turned around. He had not paid the guard yet, what was going on? And then the hairs at the back of his neck prickled and Sam turned very, very slowly as light bathed the two of them and from behind the headlights of the jeep, Sims said, “Game’s up, Captain Hawthorne. Or should I call you Ridley too?”
“Sims, you behenchoth,” Mike said wearily, pulling himself out from under Sam’s arm and falling back on the wooden gate. He had no energy left to even move, but it did not stop a rash of insults in fluent Hindustani from his mouth.
“Shut up,” Sims shouted as he came out into the pool of light that had imprisoned them against the wooden doors of the field punishment center.
Now Sam understood the horse dealer’s haste at wanting to get away; he had told Sims of his plans. But what did he care? Sims was responsible for Mike’s incarceration, and from the colorful invective still spewing from his brother between coughs and pauses for breath, it seemed as though Mike knew it too. They were yelling at each other like fighting dogs, snarling and sniping, but Sam’s gun, which kept Sims’s stomach steadily in sight, kept him away from Mike. Sims had a gun also, but he waved it around a lot.
“We don’t need the lot of you,” he screamed. “Go back, go back to America, or better yet, just rot in this land, no one will know.”
A branch of lightning flashed across the sky then, turning the pale gold of the jeep’s headlights into silver, blinding them all. The thunder followed, the immense madness followed, and it took hold of all of them, even Sims, who began to breathe more easily. Sam watched him carefully, wondering what was going to happen now, how this was all going to play out.
And then he remembered Sims’s conversation with Blakely during that hot afternoon, and that filthy little ditty. In Burma, Ken had said, almost indifferently, that the Cardamom Club had been exclusively the province of spies. There could not be two such clubs in Calcutta, or two such clubs with two women who had their faces slashed because they were half Indian and half British, or two women with the same unusual name.
“Rosalie,” Sam said, almost conversationally.
“Wha—” Sims stopped in midsentence, a hard coldness seeping into his eyes. “What do you know of Rosalie?”
“Just enough,” Sam said, and shot him as he was raising his pistol. Sims crumpled to the ground just as the rains came, at first in big, fat drops and then in a deluge, catapulting the light from the jeep’s headlights into a thousand different directions. He slumped slowly, his chin hitting the dirt first, and Sam heard the crack of bones as his jaw fractured, but Sims was already beyond feeling any pain from that.
The horse dealer had disappeared somewhere behind the field punishment center and Sam untied the two horses and smacked each of them hard on their rumps, sending them out into the wet desert night. He helped Mike into the jeep, switched off the headlights to conserve the battery, and they waited, watching the rain form a thick puddle around Sims’s inert body.
“What was that about?” Mike yelled, leaning into Sam’s ear.
“Something I should have done in Burma,” Sam said grimly. “I did not have the courage then, but Marianne—I will explain all that later—taught me that when the time comes to kill, a man must kill, and not just because he is in danger of being killed himself.”
They waited for an hour, until the rain abated and light began to seep into the sky from the awakening sun. Mike asked, just once, when he woke from a light sleep, “Is this about a girl?”
“Yes,” Sam said, sending his yearning out into the desert and to Mila. Where was she? Why was she not here, with him? He should never have left her in the house and come away. Sam began to think that he had been right in saying, even though he had spoken then without really considering what he was saying, that if he did not take Mila away with him, she would never leave Rudrakot. He laid his weary head against the steering wheel of the jeep as the rain misted around him warmly. It was a rain much like the Burma rain, like a bath, purging. The rain stopped then, abruptly, and the clouds broke lines to reveal a gently shining moon on the wane. Sam heard the muffled sound of horse hooves somewhere out in the desert and lifted his head hopefully. He could not see very far into the desert, unlike two nights ago when Vimal and he had first stormed the field punishment center and visibility had stretched to the edge of the earth and beyond. Now, there was simply a pool of silver light draining down upon them from the skies and the gap in the clouds and beyond that was all darkness.
Sam saw the figure of an enormous horse emerge from the gloom in front of him and race across the dirt, its muscles gleaming under its black hide, its nostrils flaring from the exertion, its mane silver and flo
wing behind it. He touched Mike on his shoulder and his brother raised his gaze to the horse. Both their hearts stilled at the animal’s beauty, at its ferocity, at its mad dash across the desert night when no one but they were watching.
“Chetak,” Sam said softly. “I’ll be damned. The legend is true.”
Mike’s voice had the hidden hint of a smile in it. “All legends are true in India, Sam.”
They finally saw the headlights of the jeep flickering and throbbing near Chetak’s tomb. It came nearer and nearer and Sam jumped out of his seat and ran to meet Mila.
But only one person was in that jeep, only the person driving—Sayyid.
Thirty-three
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
—Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Mila married me two weeks after Sam left. We were not to marry for quite a while yet, so the shortness of time sent rumors into a frenzy. As for the wedding itself, it was grand, my dearest Olivia, as though it had been planned for years. But I am, was, a prince, you know, and we have our resources, our abilities; money buys speed. Money speedily buys marigold garlands to decorate entire forts; twenty orchestras littered around the city to announce their prince’s marriage to the woman he loved; silks in abundance in colors from the center and the edges of rainbows; jewelry for the bride, smelted in two days, fine, shining gold, still warm from the goldsmith’s hand and kiln. Did I mention that I was a prince? That I ruled Rudrakot? That I was, for the many denizens of Rudrakot, the kingdom itself?
We found out a month later that we were to have a child and I was ecstatic. There was something of a great sadness within Mila, though, even as the child grew. When she laughed, it seemed to edge her laughter, when she cried (and she seemed to cry very often in the early months and everyone said that it was a woman’s way at this time), it was as though her heart would fragment. And at this time perhaps, I began to think that Sam Hawthorne was not just who he was to us, to Rudrakot, to the Rifles regiment, and to Raman. He had meant something to Mila too. It was not a suspicion, but a fear really, one I never voiced or even dared to formulate fully in my own mind. I never talked to her about Sam, and she never seemed to even think about him, or if she did, it did not change her attitude toward me. I loved her, and I felt loved by her. Mila gave you to your father, and she gave me her love.
But before Mila married me, ten days after Sam had left Rudrakot, Marianne Westwood came for a visit. She came on Sam’s behest, at his asking. She stayed with me, in the fort, as my personal guest. While we had not heard of Samuel Hawthorne before he came to hurl our lives into disasters, we had, in some fashion, known of Marianne. She was practically famous, and her escape from Burma, with the Japanese at her very heels, her killing of an American soldier who was about to provide secret photographs of the Calcutta docks to the Japanese had been in all the newspapers. Sam came to Rudrakot so soon after Marianne was lauded for her courage and her bravery that we did not make the connection between them, and it allowed him for a while at least to keep his identity and his work with the Office of Strategic Services hidden. All we had read was that another American soldier had parachuted into Burma to bring her back to India.
So Marianne was a wartime celebrity, and I took her to my palaces and insisted upon inviting everyone important to meet her in a series of three dinner parties. But it was Mila she wanted to see the most, and she fell upon your mother with such a great affection, with tears in her eyes at the first sight of her, with such love, that it was curious…but I gave it no more thought, even after she told me about her trials in Burma. Mr. Raman allowed Mila to come to the palaces more often during the week that Marianne stayed as my guest, and we talked for a long while after all the other invitees had left, sitting out in the terraced verandah under the fading night stars. And that was when we learned of Sam’s Burma story and that he was the unnamed American soldier in the newspaper accounts. But even so, only Mila and I knew of this, since Marianne begged us to keep Sam’s name out of circulation.
I did not stop to consider then why Marianne was in Rudrakot, or rather why she had chosen a private journey to my kingdom when she could have traveled anywhere else in India and have been feted in a much grander manner. She had come, of course, to find out how Mila was faring, perhaps even to ask her why she had not fled Rudrakot with Sam. He most wanted a response to this question. I was overwhelmed with a little shame, I must confess, at hearing of Sam’s heroism in Burma, and was remorseful at…shall I say, not having been too welcoming or friendly with him while he was here. But then, he came back to Rudrakot, and I intercepted his letters to Mila, and everything began to make some sense, and I was no longer riddled with even the slightest guilt.
Sam came back for a week, six months later, only to hear that Mila was married. It must have been a shock to him; I wonder how he managed that news, for he had not known, you see, we had heard nothing of him after he left Rudrakot other than the news from Marianne—he had simply disappeared. Did he go back into Burma and into the war? But he came back in December, I remember, for the nights were cooler then and we sat outside for dinners and lunches without being ambushed by mosquitoes as in the days of the rains. I did not see him, but knew he was here, because I know—knew—everything in Rudrakot. He came in stealth, since his exploits had not yet lost their luster; the Victoria Club talked of it, the Lancers and the Rifles buzzed with his rescue of Michael Ridley and the strange and unexplained death of that officer…what was his name, ah, Sims. So Sam came into Rudrakot dressed as a peasant, bronzed by the sun, given away only by the tint of his eyes. He seemed to have well perfected the art of this deception by then, had almost become native, something he would doubtless have been immensely proud of—this ability to shed his skin, and to don the skin of another people without the seams showing. He kept his gaze down, mumbled in Urdu and Hindustani, gesticulated, scratched, and spat like a farmer, smiled with teeth stained by paan. He played his role well, but I knew he was there. I was not prince of Rudrakot for nothing, even if I may have to seem immodest when I say this, my dear child, but I had my spies, I had my resources.
Your father rowed out into the lake in a little boat he had hired on the other side, the side away from the lawns of the Victoria Club and my hunting lodge. This he did every night, and finally, on the last day of his stay, I took Mila to the lakeside verandah for dinner. Sam had written to Mila, two letters for each of the previous five days he had been here, some of them no more than a note, some long and pleading epistles asking for a glimpse of her, and all of these, quite naturally, fell into my hands. I read only the first one and kept the others, why I did not know then, but I send them to you so you can learn of your father’s love for your mother in his own words.
To Sam it seemed as though Mila did not respond to him. But that was not true; if she had known he was back in Rudrakot, she would have fled with him to wherever he had asked her. He only saw her then from the dark waters of the lake, and when she turned in profile he must have seen that she was heavy with a child. My child, as he thought then, as I thought then. I could not have let her go, for if she had, what would have happened to me? This then, was my…little…deception. Your father prevaricated with us; I manipulated the truth just a bit, for the cause of my own happiness. At least he had that sight of your mother. Mila too stood at the parapet and gazed out into the murk beyond for a very long time that night after dinner. Once she said to me, “Do you see a light out there? Is someone fishing?”
I saw nothing when I stood by her, but she sensed your father’s presence. She would not leave her place by the parapet and stayed there for three hours, waiting, watching, until the night draped its coldness over us. And then, finally, she consented to come to bed.
Then you came. Two weeks early, not by much really, not early enough to set the gossiping
old women chattering, who counted backward on nine fingers, and no less. It cast sorrow upon their brows; you could have been on time, could have come early on your own, not by any design of your mother’s or mine—for they thought, of course, that the wedding was hurried because of me, not Sam. Sam did not figure in anyone’s calculations, or if he did at all, it was because he had lied to us, misrepresented himself, assailed the hitherto unbreachable—only because it was in the middle of the desert, not because of any effort on the part of the laggard guards—field punishment center, taken away one of its inmates, and doubtless had lived to tell about it.
You had black hair, Mila’s hair, mine even, though there is a subtle brush of brown in mine in an ambient light; some ancestor had doubtless dallied with one of our masters. And yet no one would have dared to call me a half-caste; I was born for the throne of Rudrakot. However…that is not important, for what was important was that your hair was black and you were well chubby for a month early, fully formed in your mother’s womb before your time. But your eyes were blue, like settled indigo in its stewing pot, with a ring of dark iris. Sam’s eyes. Mouths fluttered, voicing thoughts that were true, though not evil.
I did not see you again for a whole month after you were born, though I did come to satisfy my curiosity when you first came to us. Sadness, anger, spite, a jealousy that ripped me apart—they all came to lodge within me. Mila died, you see, a few days after your birth. How my hand shakes even now to write those words, Mila died. It was then such a colossal physical pain to my heart; I thought I would die too just from the ache in my chest. I did not eat for five days; I saw no one, I talked with no one. I lit the funeral pyre first, as was my duty as her husband, and it was the only duty to her I loathed so much that the torch shook in my hands and fell to the ground three times. She had the best care possible, but something had fled from her when Sam left Rudrakot, something he took with him, and in doing so, took away her will to live. You kept her alive, as long as you were within her, but once she delivered you safely into other hands, she left Rudrakot too. She died because of an infection from the childbirth, that is the official conclusion, but I think she died because she could not live without your father.
The Splendor of Silence Page 42