by M. M. Kaye
Alex had brought him remorselessly back to the subject under discussion, and Mr Barton had been horrified and disbelieving. It was obvious, he said, that Alex had happened upon some queer religious rite; it never did to pry into such things - leave ’em to wallow was his motto. At such ceremonies the blacks were bound to get above themselves and talk a lot of inflammatory nonsense. It meant nothing. As for Alex’s assertion that an English child had been murdered in cold blood, he could only suggest that Alex had been carried away by the - er - the unusual circumstances; the atmosphere, the fumes from the brazier he had spoken of, or the effects of fatigue. He would not like to suggest that Alex had been drinking; although some of these country-brewed spirits were far from mild. Of course it had been a young goat that he had seen killed! A very common form of sacrifice. And if Alex took his advice he would refrain in future from play-acting in native dress and mixing himself up in such affairs. It did not consort well with the dignity of a Company’s officer and might lead to a deal of trouble. That wounded arm should be a lesson to him!
And now that that matter was settled, Mr Barton would like to know what news Alex had brought of the Condesa. He hoped that she was well. No beauty, what? - but looks were not everything. A good child, though plain. It was a thousand pities that he had found himself unable to travel to Calcutta, but he had not been well. A bout of fever. It was inconvenient, this journeying to Delhi, but he had thought it better to allow the girl to proceed there in the care of Mrs Abuthnot, as he himself would be going to Delhi shortly on official business. Two birds with one stone—
The past year had done nothing towards improving either Mr Barton’s health or his appearance. He had, it is true, intended to take both in hand, and by means of daily exercise and abstaining from over-indulgence in the matter of wine and women, to have effected a considerable improvement. But on consideration he had come to the conclusion that such a course was entirely unnecessary. This was his last year of freedom and he would make the most of it. After this he would have a mewling, puking, scrawny and ill-favoured girl for ever about the house, who would doubtless kick up a fuss at all his amusements and might, if he overstepped the mark, rouse her influential relatives to protest on her behalf. Not that that would make much odds once he had his hands on the girl’s money. Still, life would not be the same and so he would enjoy himself for this last year. Having reasoned thus, Mr Barton had abandoned all ideas of abstinence and exercise with a thankful sigh, and the result was the obese, balding, slack-lipped figure who now confronted Alex Randall with a glass clutched in one unsteady hand and his moustache and chin all slopped with brandy.
Alex had dismissed the Condesa in a single brief sentence and returned grimly to the question of Kishan Prasad and the meeting of seditionists at Khanwai. He had argued, expounded and pleaded, but Mr Barton remained obdurate. There was nothing he could do. It was all an unfortunate business and had best be forgotten. No sense in stirring up a hornets’ nest.
The same opinion was expressed by Colonels Moulson and Packer, commanding two of the three regiments of Native Infantry stationed at Lunjore, and by Major Beckwith, in temporary command of the third in the absence of Colonel Gardener-Smith.
Colonel Moulson, who had neither forgotten nor forgiven Captain Randall’s behaviour at Alexandria, had taken particular pains to be offensive. He had brought all his influence to bear to prevent the Commissioner from taking any official notice of the report, and had done his best to discredit the whole story. Colonel Packer, a bigoted Christian, was content to leave the entire matter in the hands of the Almighty, assisted by prayer, while Major Beckwith, uncertain of himself and convinced of the indestructible loyalty of every sepoy in his Regiment, had listened to Colonel Moulson’s scathing and outspoken criticisms of jumped-up over-promoted pets of the Civil Service, and taken refuge in the fact that in Colonel Gardener-Smith’s absence he could do nothing. Army officers such as Alex, who were removed from regimental duty and sent to occupy civil posts where both pay and power were greatly in excess of that enjoyed by their fellow-officers, were more often than not regarded with jealous resentment, and Major Beckwith was no exception in this way.
Alex asked for a week’s extension of leave on account of his wounded arm, and rode to Agra to see Mr John Colvin, Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Province. But the mission had proved abortive.
The Lieutenant-Governor was that same Mr Colvin who twenty years ago, as Lord Auckland’s Private Secretary, had been one of the primary instigators of the disastrous folly of the Afghan War. He had never been able to forget it or ever again trust entirely to his own judgement. Mr Colvin did not believe that disaffection was rife in the country and still less that the Army was affected. There had been rumours, of course - but then there were always rumours. He could not take it upon himself to order the arrest of men like Kishan Prasad - influential men whom there was no reason to suspect of being anything but loyal - especially when, as Captain Randall had admitted, the Commissioner of Lunjore was prepared to swear that the man had been nowhere near the scene of this - um - gathering at Khanwai. He too thought that Captain Randall must have been mistaken, and that he was surely exaggerating the dangers of the situation. He too suggested that it was hardly suitable for an officer of the Company to take such investigations upon himself. There were paid spies among the native population who were entirely trustworthy, and better qualified for the work on account of their dark skins. He would of course pass on the information Captain Randall had given him to the proper authorities, but in the meantime …
Alex had set his teeth and listened with a gathering sense of frustration and bitterness. This was what it must feel like to be a lunatic confined in a cell, beating your head against the padded walls and convinced that it was you, and not your captors, who were sane. Perhaps he had indeed been mad to imagine that anyone would listen to him when men like General John Jacob were written down as alarmists. He had thought that if he could produce proof he must be believed. But it seemed that the evidence of his eyes was not proof and, as Kishan Prasad had truly said, the great majority did not wish to believe: they found it more comfortable to close their eyes and look the other way, in the hope that if they ignored its existence the danger would pass. To take any form of preventive action, they reasoned, would be to advertise a lamentable want of confidence and possibly precipitate thereby the very dangers whose existence they refused to admit.
The most that Alex could gain was permission to take six sowars and three British officers to see if any concrete evidence could be brought back of the murder that he professed to have witnessed. There had been a report of the disappearance of a child a week earlier, admitted Mr Colvin reluctantly. The three-year-old son of a private in a British regiment stationed in Cawnpore; and it was always possible, though hardly credible …
Alex had ridden back to Khanwai with six troopers and three sceptical but enthusiastic officers. They had found exactly nothing. The stair shaft leading to the underground chamber was open to the sky and choked with fallen debris that had the appearance of being there for some considerable time. There had been a heavy and recent fall of earth and stonework from the spot where the roots of the peepul tree had forced their way downward, and the vault appeared to be in too dangerous a state to encourage a thorough search.
Ten paces within the jungle behind the ruined fort they uncovered a grave, but it contained only the rotting carcass of a white goat.
BOOK THREE
CONWAY
20
It was over six weeks since the Abuthnots had left Calcutta on the long journey northward to Delhi. A journey on which they had been accompanied, somewhat unexpectedly, by Lord Carlyon and the Gardener-Smiths.
Lord Carlyon, having taken a fancy to visit the old Mogul capital of Delhi, had requested permission to avail himself of the pleasure of their company on what, he said, he must otherwise find to be a singularly tedious journey. Such a pleasantly worded request had been impossible to refuse, and
it had been a source of some annoyance to Mrs Abuthnot that the Gardener-Smiths, having made a last-minute change in their plans to allow for a few weeks’ visit to Delhi, had also attached themselves to the party.
Delia’s mama had announced that the heat and humidity of Calcutta was really not to be borne, but Mrs Abuthnot, without wishing to be uncharitable, could not rid herself of the suspicion that Mrs Gardener-Smith’s dislike of the Calcutta climate had only manifested itself when she had heard that Lord Carlyon would be travelling to Delhi with the Abuthnot party. She could also not entirely bring herself to believe that it was the pleasure of their united company that had prompted Lord Carlyon to make his flattering request. He was of course well aware that both Lottie and Winter were affianced and shortly to be married, but could it possibly be that he was attracted by her Sophie? Sophie, though a mere child, was such a sweet little thing! Could it be Sophie?
Mrs Abuthnot had indulged in a few maternal daydreams, and her lack of enthusiasm over the addition of the Gardener-Smiths to the party was understandable. Delia, thought Mrs Abuthnot with a sigh, was so very striking!
Colonel Gardener-Smith, like Colonel Abuthnot, looked upon the journey as a necessary evil, while his wife and daughter found it uncomfortable, fatiguing, and except for the presence of Lord Carlyon, insufferably tedious. As for Carlyon, he was not impressed with what he saw of India - although he was pleased to approve of the opportunities for rough shooting that it offered to travellers. Winter alone found interest and enchantment in every mile of the road: in each dawn that broke over the plain or the jungle in a wash of saffron yellow, and each evening when the sun would plunge to its rest in a dusty glow of gold and rose and amber, leaving the moon like a silver nutmeg in the sky … the silver nutmeg that a ‘King of Spain’s daughter’ had travelled far to see.
The land unrolled itself before her in a pageant of beauty. The tangled jungle, the low hills and the level plains. The wide, wandering curves of the Indian rivers with their silver sandbanks and white flocks of egrets pricking through the shallows. The glimmering jheels from which the wild duck rose in dark skeins against the green evening sky. The palm trees and the yellow, mimosa-like blossoms of the thorny kikar trees. The sun-baked silence of the dusty roads and the cheerful tumult of the paraos. Little villages with their small bazaars, creaking well-wheels, tanks and temples. The scream of peacocks in the dusk and the cry of wild geese and sarus cranes at dawn …
Winter could not understand how anyone travelling through such a land could find it, as Lord Auckland’s sister, Emily Eden, had found it, ‘a shrivelled cinder of a country’, and ‘quite hideous’. How was it possible for the self-same thing to hold such enchantment and beauty for one pair of eyes and yet appear only ugly, daunting and repellent to another’s?
But there was one aspect of the journey to Delhi which she did not find pleasant. The presence of Lord Carlyon.
Winter had not been favourably impressed by Carlyon on the occasion of their first meeting at Sybella’s Summer Ball at Ware, and although his manner towards her since their meeting in Calcutta had been outwardly unexceptionable, she was uneasily aware of hidden undercurrents.
Carlyon’s languid gaze had a way of resting on her with a look of insolently comprehensive appraisal, as though she were a slave girl on the block or a blood horse whose purchase he contemplated. His words too, though apparently superficial, frequently contained the same underlying suggestiveness, and he took every opportunity to touch her - gestures that she found hard to avoid without appearing ungracious or childishly rude. The pressure of those lingering hands, as white and well kept as a woman’s despite their efficiency with reins or gun, would send a shrinking shiver of dislike and apprehension through her.
Carlyon was aware of that shiver, and he misinterpreted it. He was an egotistical and self-centred man whose languidly disdainful manner and cold eyes disguised a sensual appetite that had never yet had to go unsatisfied. Riches and position, combined with handsome features and excellent physical proportions, had brought him all that he demanded of life. His amours had been many, but he had avoided matrimony, or any entanglement of a serious nature, with the same practised skill with which he shot, rode across country or seduced another man’s wife. But until now he had never been in the least interested in single young ladies. They were, in his opinion, too raw, too uninstructed and too dangerous, and he had never yet distinguished one of them with his attentions. But Winter de Ballesteros had not been in any way like the general run of demurely blushing debutantes.
Intrigued by her unusual looks he had been sufficiently interested to pay her some attention and considerably taken aback by her reception of the compliment. To be put in his place and given a sharp set-down by one so young and inexperienced had, by its very novelty, both piqued and intrigued him. But he had found the quarry remarkably elusive and presently his good sense had reasserted itself. The pursuit of an unmarried girl of good family could only lead to scandal or the altar, and he did not fancy either.
Now, however, the situation was entirely different, since here there were no influential relatives to interfere. The Abuthnots need not be considered as any impediment, and the girl herself was about to be married to some clod of a Commissioner whom Carlyon dismissed as of no account; it being his considered opinion that any man who elected to serve in such a country as India must of necessity be negligible, both socially and mentally, for were it not so he would remain in England.
Carlyon was the product of an age in which rich members of the aristocracy regarded themselves as being above the laws that governed the behaviour of the lower and middle classes, and he had always considered the Droit de Seigneur an admirable institution and regretted that it could no longer be enforced. It could do no harm - and should prove delightful - to give this delicious young innocent an advance course of instruction in the pleasanter aspects of matrimony, and she would enjoy the subsequent embraces of her nonentity of a husband all the more for having been introduced to the delights of passion by an expert. No girl with such a mouth and so sweetly seductive a figure could prove anything but an apt pupil in the art of love-making, and a journey of several weeks had seemed to offer endless opportunities for sentimental dalliance by the way.
But however carefully he manoeuvred he found it impossible to speak to the little Ballesteros alone, for she kept close to Lottie or Sophie. She would not be drawn into private talk with him, and Carlyon, who had started the journey in a spirit of pleasurable and entirely confident anticipation, began to lose his temper.
Had he really wasted his charm and his conversation on ingratiating himself with this set of middle-class bores, not to mention delaying his departure from India and embarking on a long and uncomfortable journey made the more uncomfortable by the fact that his hitherto faithful valet had flatly refused to accompany him, and all to no purpose? He could not believe it! But as day succeeded day and the travellers drew nearer to Delhi he found himself no nearer to attaining his objective. The other ladies of the party, in particular the lovely Delia, found him charming, while the two Colonels pronounced him an excellent fellow - no side and a first-rate shot. But Winter remained as cool as her name and tantalizingly out of reach.
With his temper Carlyon lost some of his caution, and Mrs Abuthnot began to regard his behaviour towards her charge with anxiety. Naturally he could mean nothing by it and was only paying dear Winter the extra civility that was due to a girl of her position, but all the same … She began to keep a closer watch upon Winter; with the result that Lord Carlyon, angry, frustrated and piqued, ended by doing what he had always pronounced to be the very height of folly. He fell in love.
Carlyon had played with that emotion for so long that he did not at first recognize it. Love had been an amusement and the gratifying of a strongly developed sexual appetite, but it had never once touched either his heart or his emotions, so that he had come to believe that he at least was immune from this particular form of madness. The discovery
that he - Arthur Veryan St Maur, 10th Baron Carlyon - had actually fallen in love with a chit of seventeen, astounded and angered him. It could not be true! It must be the effect of this atrocious climate or the fact that he had kept free of women for the unprecedented space of over eight months.
Nevertheless, he was in love. And being so, he found himself incapable of avoiding any one of the agonies and ecstasies inherent in that condition, or of behaving in a rational manner.
He discovered that he could not sleep, and that the finesse that had led him scatheless through a score of affairs had deserted him. He behaved like a boor and knew it - and could not prevent himself. Mrs Abuthnot took fright and Mrs Gardener-Smith took offence; the older men, with more understanding than their wives would have given them credit for, regarded him with sympathetic concern, while Delia sulked and pouted and Winter remained warily withdrawn.
As Carlyon’s desire for her changed its quality, Winter’s initial dislike of him changed in turn to something that bordered upon fear, and she longed for the journey to end. Once she was married to Conway she need never be frightened of anyone or anything again. Oh, to be married to Conway! - to be safe and protected from the cold unkindness of the Julias, the kitten-clawed malice of the Sybellas and the crawling gaze of people such as Colonel Moulson and Carlyon! The days that had been a delight ended by becoming a torment of embarrassment and strain, and Carlyon was the only member of the party who was not inexpressibly relieved at the sight of the rose-red walls of Delhi.