Nizams Daughters mh-2

by Allan Mallinson

  There was nothing for it but to brazen things out, as if it were of no great moment. ‘There is indeed,’ replied the fourth in council, ‘and want of intelligence is our greatest affliction. I fancy that the commander-in-chief would welcome your seconding there, if such could be arranged — which I very much doubt. Haidarabad is a closed book to the Company.’

  ‘Why do you doubt it?’ asked Hervey, with as little air of concern as he could manage.

  ‘Because,’ smiled Lucie, ‘the nizam appears to be in one of his periodic bouts of inscrutability.’

  ‘And not helped by the Company’s resident, and the Pindarees,’ added the collector.

  Lucie shot an urgent look at him. ‘Somervile has also the rather tedious difficulty of having as a neighbour a small state which seems to be permanently at odds with Haidarabad. He is especially sensitive thereby, for when elephants fight — so to speak — they trample on a good deal of their neighbours’ crops. You understand what is the function of a Company resident, I take it?’

  Hervey took the opportunity to learn more. ‘Perhaps if you would remind—’

  ‘By all means, sir. The Company’s policy for some years — initiated, indeed, by the brother of your Duke of Wellington when he was in Calcutta — has been to conclude treaties with the country powers whereby their security is guaranteed by the Company in exchange for their surrendering the right to engage in war on their own account. These subsidiary alliances, as they are known, are bolstered by a force raised and officered by the Company but paid for by the country power itself. And a resident is appointed to the court as an ambassador of the Company.’

  Hervey was intrigued by the earlier intimation of difficulty with the Haidarabad resident — and the Pindarees (whoever they might be). He judged it inexpedient to pursue the question, however, for there was more than a suggestion that the nizam might be not nearly so well disposed towards the Duke of Wellington as imagined. He would try to change rein for the time being at least. ‘And this state which is at odds with its neighbour?’ he asked, again as innocently as he might.

  ‘Chintal,’ replied the collector, helping himself to whiskey and seltzer from the decanter making its slow progress around the table. And the Rajah of Chintal was largely to be pitied, he continued, for he was a Hindoo and wholly in awe of the nizam, in whose territory the princely state of Chintal would have occupied no more than a fraction of a corner. ‘If all the nizam’s subjects spat at once in the same direction,’ he sighed (to Lucie’s evident distaste), ‘Chintal would be drowned out of sight.’ ‘Just so, Somervile. I myself would have described Chintal as a nine-gun state, however. Less colourful than your description, but more telling.’

  Hervey seemed not to understand the claim.

  ‘I mean that the rajah receives a nine-gun salute from the Company — the minimum.’

  ‘The nizam gets twenty-one,’ added the collector; ‘as do only four others.’

  ‘Others?’ enquired Hervey.

  The collector looked at Lucie, who took up the challenge: the country powers were his business, after all. ‘Mysore, Gwalior, Kashmir… and Baroda, though heaven knows why, for it is a trifling place.’

  Hervey wondered how he might enquire of Chintal’s condition, but could think of no way that might not arouse suspicion.

  Lucie was growing more agitated by the minute, however. The collector had often enough made known his view that circumspection was no asset in India, so he now sought emphatically to deflect the conversation away from matters that might lead to graver indiscretion. ‘Come,’ he said firmly, ‘it is time for some air. Shall we go and see your horse, Hervey? And perhaps Somervile will show us his too, for they carried off all the trophies at the racecourse last evening!’

  The stables at Fort George were solid, whitewashed affairs which would have been the envy of London. The Governor’s Bodyguard, a hundred native troopers under a British officer, were as pampered as His Majesty’s Life Guards — though hardened by not infrequent forays into the field. The numerous little fires about the yards, lit in the evenings to drive away the flying insects which otherwise plagued the occupants, were dying down, and although it was now much cooler, the punkahs were still swinging. The syces had gone to their own charpoys some hours ago, leaving the lines to the chowkidars, each of whom made low namaste as the visitors passed.

  Jessye was lying at full stretch, perhaps pleased at last there was no motion beneath her bed. She raised her head as the four approached, her ears pricked with her habitual alertness, and she drew up her forelegs in preparation to rise should the disturbance threaten her. But on seeing Hervey in the lantern light she relaxed visibly, her ears flattening to the sides in anticipation of some word from him, and she whickered — scarcely more than a grunt, but enough to alert the other horses in the lines, each of whom echoed the sound of pleasant expectation. Hervey bade her stay down, pulling her ears a little and giving her candied fruit which he had stuffed into his pockets as they left the dining room.

  The collector made approving noises: he could see her obvious handiness, he said.

  Lucie was less restrained: ‘She is not a looker, but I can vouch that she swims well!’

  Her master pulled a face, but the collector beckoned him towards the further stalls, where his own mares stood.

  ‘Arabs!’ exclaimed Hervey. ‘I have never seen them this close before.’ And both mares flattened their ears and flared their nostrils, intending that he should get no closer.

  The collector smiled. ‘I prefer to call them Kehilans — the Arabic for thoroughbred.’

  ‘More literally, “of noble descent”, I think,’ said Emma Lucie.

  ‘Just so, madam,’ replied the collector, surprised. ‘I defer to your uncommon facility with languages!’

  ‘No,’ she laughed, ‘merely a good memory. I was once shown the Kehilan in Newmarket. I wanted to see what was your facility.’

  ‘Oh,’ he replied absently, ‘just the here and now.’

  Lucie would not hear of this modesty. ‘Somervile has studied at the university in Fès, Hervey. The languages of the Orient are his passion.’

  ‘And horses, evidently,’ replied Hervey, who had coaxed one of the mares forward to take candy from his hand.

  ‘Indeed yes,’ replied the collector; ‘a measure of a civilization may be largely had from its horses. You will never comprehend, say, a Bedouin unless you acquaint yourself with that which he holds above even his most favoured wife.’

  ‘And rather more prosaically,’ said Lucie, ‘Somervile takes from us a prodigious number of rupees each time he brings his horses here to race!’

  The collector smiled, with satisfaction. ‘Tomorrow they return with me to Guntoor. Why don’t you do the same?’ he said to Hervey. ‘You would see more of India than hereabouts. In Madras you may as well be in Brighton. There is a brig leaving tomorrow. And you, too, Miss Lucie. You were saying only yesterday that you had calls in Rajahmundry which were overdue. It is a short distance only, and a good time of the year to be travelling.’

  With the knowledge that Nisus would remain in the roads for at least five more days, it was, said Hervey, a capital invitation. ‘Might you extend it to my friend Mr Locke?’

  Somervile seemed content.

  The invitation held its appeal for Emma Lucie too. ‘There is also a ship leaving for England tomorrow, Captain Hervey. It will take letters of ours; do you wish it to take any of yours?’

  Indeed he did. And he would write an additional one to Henrietta to tell her of this fortuitous meeting. ‘In her letter to you, madam, was there anything that I might know?’ he added cautiously.

  Emma Lucie considered a while. ‘Not really, sir. Henrietta merely says that you are to come to India on affairs of the Duke of Wellington. She asks that we receive you, if it is expedient — for she knows you are bound for Calcutta rather than here. She says that she hopes herself to make the journey here soon.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Hervey, quickened — thou
gh he had said in his letter that he thought it better he should first return.

  ‘That is to say, perhaps,’ added Emma promptly, ‘after you are married? For her letter bore the marks of being written in some haste, and her meaning was not altogether clear in that respect. I shall, of course, write to her and say she is welcome here at any time — subject, of course, to your wishes.’

  Hervey seemed confused. ‘I don’t know what is best. I am under orders, and cannot therefore vouch for my movements at this time. She may come here and we never see each other!’

  ‘Then I think it best if that is said. Henrietta will make up her own mind — as she always has.’

  Hervey agreed somewhat ruefully. ‘How long shall this ship take to reach England?’

  Emma Lucie turned to her brother, who was still engrossed in contemplation of Somervile’s champion Kehilans. ‘How long shall our letters take home, Philip?’

  ‘It is one of our fast pinnaces with despatches for Leadenhall Street: two months.’

  ‘Only two months? Nisus took the best part of—’

  ‘The pinnace goes to Egypt,’ explained Lucie, ‘and then the despatches are taken overland and by the Mediterranean: two months, at most, this time of year. That is the way your affianced’s express came.’

  VI. LICENCE TO PLUNDER

  Guntoor, 23 February — two weeks later

  No pleasanter beginning to the month of purification could Hervey remember. Candlemas, which had come as Nisus had only lately recrossed the Equator, had been so warm that he could scarcely comprehend that this same day in Horningsham might be chill enough to freeze his father’s breath as he said the offices in church, and numb his fingers so much that turning each page of the prayer book became a labour. The nights were a little cold in Guntoor, perhaps, but each morning came as the one before, and the days followed the same course — a warming which progressed precisely by the clock, and with it the lives of the people who depended so much on its regularity. ‘Brighton’, the collector had called Madras, and Hervey might have believed it when he attended morning prayer in St Mary’s church the following day. But now he was seeing India beyond the Company pale. The strangeness of its gods, its beliefs and superstitions, the dangers which attended routine things, the revolting deformities, the sensual possibilities in the dirtiest of corners — it was a heady, elemental place as alien and fearful as the pagan lands of the Old Testament. But it was beginning its work with him as surely as it had with the collector and thousands before him, for none but the most desiccated could be untouched by the promise of so much. Not that Guntoor was Babylon, or even Gaza.

  Hervey, Emma Lucie and Henry Locke (to whom Peto had seemed relieved to grant arrears of furlough) had spent a week in the collector’s company, a week equally pleasing to each, for Mr Eyre Somervile was generous, cultivated and sporting to an uncommon degree. Dinner had just finished, Emma Lucie had retired to her quarters, and Locke had repaired once again to the bazaar, whose unselfconscious delights had instantly captivated him. Hervey had accepted the collector’s invitation to a final brandy and seltzer, and they were sitting in the comfortable leather armchairs of his drawing room, wondering which of two brightly spotted geckoes would reach the ceiling first. ‘They are singularly lazy beggars,’ opined Somervile after a while. ‘The house snake will have them by morning if they don’t look sharp.’

  ‘House snake?’ said Hervey, suddenly alarmed.

  ‘House snakes, I should say, for there are two,’ replied the collector casually.

  ‘Oh! I am very unpartial to snakes,’ confessed Hervey, lifting his feet and looking all about him. ‘What kind are they?’

  ‘One is a wolf snake, the other a cat — both female, I reckon. And there is a big male rat snake which comes in from the garden from time to time.’

  Hervey was now certain he had been living within an ace of death these past seven days. ‘Are they very venomous?’ he asked, shuddering.

  ‘Venomous?’ said the collector, incredulously — but thoroughly warmed to his teasing. ‘Not in the least, though a rat snake killed one of the writers at Fort George last year!’

  ‘How so then?’ asked Hervey, quite horrified.

  ‘It looks somewhat like the cobra, but it has a more pointed head — and bigger eyes. And it doesn’t spread a hood, of course. But to a writer not long from England it can look like a cobra — or several if you’ve taken too much whiskey. As it seems had Mr Fotheringham when he fell headlong down the residency steps in his fright.’

  Hervey frowned at Somervile’s wry smile, recovering his composure somewhat.

  The smaller of the geckoes had finally reached the top of the wall when one of the collector’s babus entered with a despatch. ‘Read it for me, if you will, Mohan: I have left my eyeglass in my dressing room.’

  The babu put on his own spectacles, and lifted the paper to the light of a wall sconce. ‘Sahib, it is from the deputy collector in Tiruvoor subdistrict. He writes: “A body of Pindarees, by estimates one thousand strong, entered the Circars three days ago from Nagpore and have laid waste villages along the Tiruvoor. There is much destruction of property and life, and the horde proceeds unchecked.” ’

  The collector’s donnish affability vanished in an instant. He sprang up, seized the despatch from the babu, held it up close to the oil lamp on his desk and scanned its details with increasing dismay. ‘I knew it! I knew it! I’ve been warning for months but Fort George didn’t wish to hear!’

  Hervey, on his feet now too, pressed him for details.

  ‘There are twenty villages along the Tiruvoor, probably ten thousand souls at the mercy of these devils. And there’s not a standing patrol in miles!’ He was railing so loud his bearer and khansamah came running.

  ‘What’s to be done?’ asked Hervey, having no notion of the proximity of the villages, and therefore of the predators.

  ‘What men are there in the garrison at present?’ said Somervile to the babu.

  ‘At present, sahib, there are being only one troop of cavalry. Infantry will not be returning inside of one week.’ His head rocked from side to side in the manner of babus offering news that might be disagreeable.

  ‘Very well then, be so good as to have it parade here at five tomorrow morning ready to take to the field. I shall ride with them myself: I wish to see at first hand the scale of these depredations.’

  The babu took off his spectacles, made namaste and scurried from the room. Later he would tell his wife he had seen the collector in a rage, and she would not believe him, for the Collector of Guntoor had never been known to raise his voice. The meanest bondsman who had ever heard of his magistracy, or of his administration of land revenues, knew him to be of the purest fire and the most gentle, generous heart, and the most fastidious Brahman knew him to be of an intellect and sensibility no less remarkable.

  And yet the collector’s gorge was now so risen that he could barely contain himself. He sank into his chair and struck the table with his fist, sending coffee cups spilling from their tray. ‘I dearly wish I could believe in your god, Captain Hervey, so that I might be assured that the fiends who inflicted such evils on their fellow humans would savour the same!’

  Hervey poured a large glass of brandy and seltzer for him. ‘Do you have any objections to my accompanying you? And Mr Locke would, I know, wish to come too. As long as we may return within the week, for Nisus will be off Guntoor then.’

  ‘No objection at all. I should be glad of it,’ said the collector, springing up again and searching the maps on his desk.

  ‘Locke will be the best of men in a fight,’ continued Hervey. ‘I’m glad his captain felt obliged to be so generous with leave.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Somervile, having found the map he wanted. ‘Your Mr Locke is a good sort, though I regret there’ll be no need of his sword arm, for there won’t be a single Pindaree east of the Ghats by now.’ He sank down in his chair again and wiped a hand across his face. ‘I’ve been warning of it, I know;
and yet I can hardly bring myself to believe it can have happened — that a native body has deliberately violated the territory of the Honourable East India Company, ravaged that which is under the Company’s protection’ (he took another large gulp of brandy), ‘plundered its villages, tortured and murdered native people under the dominion of the Company and, therefore, of His Majesty!’ He took out a large silk square and dabbed at his eyes.

  Hervey tried to think of something that might help him regain his composure, but could not. ‘Somervile, I have not enquired before, since I formed the impression that it was Company business of a confidential nature,’ he tried, refilling both glasses and fixing him with a look that demanded serious attention, ‘but I should be very much obliged if you would tell me all that there is of the Pindarees.’

  The collector paused a moment before laying aside the map. ‘Very well, I shall tell you all. And, I might add, if your Duke of Wellington were here I have not the slightest doubt that this would never have happened, for the policies which the previous governor-general pursued were too yielding, and the present one, though more vigorous, has yet to make his mark.’

  ‘Though he has subdued the Ghoorka tribes, I understand?’

  ‘I fear he was driven to it. I doubt he had any real appetite.’

  Hervey was reassured that his principal was held in high regard by one official of the Company at least. ‘The Pindarees, then: what is their peculiar menace?’

  The collector sat in his armchair again. ‘From the beginning? The Pindarees are a body — several bodies — of irregular horse who serve without pay and who have licence to plunder wheresoever they can: chiefly south of the Nerbudda river, in the territories of the nizam and the Rajah of Berar and the peshwa.’ He dabbed at his brow again and loosened his collar. ‘They originated — as far as we may know — a century and a half ago in the Dekhin, in the service of the Mughal rulers, but as Mughal power declined they transferred their services to the Marathas — against whom your duke fought with signal success a dozen years ago. As Maratha power declined in turn, the Pindarees have become even less disciplined and predictable.’ He emptied his brandy and seltzer, peered at the motionless geckoes for what seemed an age, and then resumed as they began their descent of the wall. ‘They’ve separated into three clans, each led by the most odious of men. These chiefs rarely themselves lead a plundering foray; rather they appoint sirdars. That band which has penetrated hereabouts is led, it seems, by one Bikhu Sayed, who is known for his especial insolence and depravity. I fear we shall see and hear things that will make the strongest stomachs turn.’