A Beggar at the Gate

by Thalassa Ali

  The sun had been overhead by the time the dusty walls of the garden had appeared in the distance.

  At the gate, ignoring the row of beggars who pleaded for her attention, she lowered the chador from her face and breathed deeply. Once she was inside the garden, sounding the alarm would be easy. She had only to repeat what she had overheard from the verandah window, and the Vulture and Uncle Adrian would understand at once, and do everything necessary to thwart Hassan's plan. But what of her? How was she to forgive herself? How would she ever recover from her remorse at letting herself be fooled by the Waliullahs, deflowered by Hassan, ruined for life?

  Throughout her year of gossip and ostracism in Calcutta, she had taken refuge in the knowledge that she was pure. Now even that small comfort was gone.

  She must tell no one, not her mother in England, not her sister Charlotte. She could never marry. Even if she met Harry Fitzgerald again, even if he fell to his knees and begged for her hand, she must refuse. She would never have a single fair-haired baby of her own. She would never see Saboor again.

  She had never even kissed him good-bye

  Minutes later, red-eyed and bone-weary, she entered the gate and presented herself at the Vulture's tent.

  “Political Agent Sahib is not here,” declared his head servant, a liveried fellow with a superior air. “He is sitting over there, with visitors.”

  He pointed to a distant tree where the Vulture sat in an upright chair waving his arms at four armed men in coarse, Afghan clothing who stood in front of him, listening.

  “Call him at once,” she ordered, tearing off her chador. “Tell him Miss Givens is here to see him.”

  “Miss Givens! Good heavens, I hardly recognized you.” The Vulture looked her up and down a moment later, astonishment on his face. “How have you come? Is your divorce arranged? Why are you wearing native dress? Why are you so dirty?”

  “I walked from the city, Mr. Clerk. I have something important—”

  “Have you discovered the time and place of Sher Singh's assault on the city? Have you learned anything else I should know? Will the Rani accept his offer of safe passage, or will he launch an attack upon the Citadel?”

  She paused, aware of the need for care in telling her story. If the Vulture thought she was hysterical, he might not believe her. “I have overheard a conversation between my husband and one of his friends,” she began, measuring her words. “They were speaking of an assassination in a garden.”

  “Yes?” He leaned forward eagerly.

  “My husband said there were to be shooters and victims. They mentioned a ‘center pavilion.’ They hate us all. I was shocked at the bitter, murderous way they spoke of us.” Mariana shivered. “As soon as I heard those words, I escaped the haveli in disguise and came to tell you.”

  He flapped an impatient hand. “I am sorry to hear that, but what I want to know is the day and time of Sher Singh's attack.”

  Why was the man so fixed upon Prince Sher Singh? “Mr. Clerk, I am trying to tell you that Hassan Ali Khan is sending Afghan marksmen to Shalimar with orders to enter the garden, station themselves near the center pavilion, and shoot all of you on sight—everyone: you, Lady Macnaghten, Mr. Mott, and my aunt and uncle.”

  The Vulture drew himself up, his Adam's apple bobbing. “My dear young lady,” he inquired, his eyebrows raised in astonishment, “whatever has given you that idea?”

  He was mad. They were all mad. Without another word, Mariana turned on her heel and limped away, leaving the Vulture gazing after her, his mouth ajar.

  She had nearly reached her tent when someone called out to her. “Miss Givens,” he shouted, “I thought it was you!”

  Mariana looked in the direction of the voice and saw Charles Mott galloping awkwardly toward her, his expensive frock coat flapping about him. “We must speak,” he panted, stopping short. “I have something—”

  “Get out of my way,” she snapped. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  Of all the people she did not wish to see…

  “But, Miss Givens, I—”

  “Memsahib?” Before Mott could say anything more, Dittoo appeared in the doorway of Mariana's tent, his eyes wide. “But how have you come here? Where is Saboor Baba? Why are you wearing that filthy chador?”

  “I will explain later,” she replied, then hobbled into her tent and sank wearily onto her bed. “Bring me a bucket of hot water and a cup of salt,” she ordered as she peeled away her ruined slippers.

  Before he shuffled off, Dittoo turned to her, his ugly face creased with worry. “You should know, Memsahib,” he said, “that your uncle is very ill.”

  As the door blind fell into place, she bit back hot tears. With Uncle Adrian ill and the Vulture refusing to listen, there would be no one to help her. How, then, was she to save any of them?

  Later, in the dining tent, she toyed with a plate of boiled chicken as the conversation rose and fell around her. Since her arrival at camp, nothing had gone as it should. After soaking her feet and bandaging them as best she could with several handkerchiefs, she had changed her clothes, forced on a pair of boots, and hurried to her uncle's tent, only to be shooed outside by an exhausted-looking Aunt Claire.

  “He has finally fallen asleep,” she whispered, waving Mariana away from the entrance. “It is cholera, just as we thought. For several days he was unable to eat, and then he developed a pustule on his hand. The real illness set in yesterday afternoon. His purgings went on all night. They have ceased this morning, but that only makes me fear the worst.”

  She stared briefly at Mariana. “Why do you look different, and why are you so dirty?” She sighed and pushed bedraggled hair from her face. “I do not suppose it matters now. I am quite at my rope's end. Will you sit with Adrian until dinner, while I lie down in your tent?”

  Mariana nodded.

  “Thank you, my dear. If his thirst should return, there is a jug of sweetened vinegar water beside the bed.” Aunt Claire gestured toward a grizzled old servant who stood anxiously by the doorway. “Adil will help you if you need anything.”

  Uncle Adrian had curled his body so tightly under the sheets that Mariana could see only the bald top of his head and a fringe of gray hair. Perched stiffly on a chair beside him, she willed him to awaken, to hear her story, to tell her what to do.

  It seemed like hours before he spoke. When he did, his voice sounded slurred and indistinct beneath the covers.

  “It's Mariana,” she told him quietly, leaning over the bed. “What did you say, Uncle Adrian?”

  “Clerk,” he said with an effort, “is up to no good.”

  “Yes, you told me that in your letter.” He was clearly too ill to be told of the coming attack. She pressed a hand to her forehead, forcing herself to put aside her own desperation, to be patient with her uncle's irrelevant concerns.

  “Mott will give you the details of Clerk's plan. I know you do not like Mott, but you must speak to him about this. You must try to stop them before—” He groaned.

  “Of course I will, Uncle,” Mariana lied. As he began to thrash, throwing himself from side to side on the bed, she reached out, then pulled back her hand, unsure whether to touch him.

  “What are you doing?” Aunt Claire burst through the doorway, a dripping cloth in one hand. “You are not to let him exhaust himself with speaking,” she snapped as she applied the wet cloth to her husband's shifting forehead. “Go to the dining tent and have your dinner. Tell them to send me a tray. And for goodness’ sake, wash your face before you go.”

  But dinner had already begun. When Mariana rushed into the dining tent, she found everyone already sitting down. In his seat beside Lady Macnaghten, the Vulture was buttering a piece of bread. “It is a pleasure to be dining with you, Miss Givens,” he observed, nodding as Mariana took her seat, splaying his fingers on the butter knife, “although you certainly surprise me with your extraordinary appearance.”

  His tone was especially unpleasant. Mariana glanced up to see Lady Macna
ghten staring covertly at her face.

  “Your face is dirty,” Lady Macnaghten hissed. “It is all smudged with dust.” She leaned across Uncle Adrian's empty place. “But your eyebrows are nicely done,” she added, offering Mariana a conspiratorial half-smile before straightening in her seat, “and I quite like your hair.”

  “Miss Givens,” the Vulture interjected, “arrived precipitously this afternoon from the walled city. I am quite mystified as to why she has come. She has brought us no information of value, nor has she achieved her divorce.”

  “You know exactly why I have come, Mr. Clerk.” Mariana did not bother to keep the anger from her voice. “I am here to inform you that sharpshooters are being sent from the walled city to kill us all.”

  Lady Macnaghten gasped. Around the table, officers exchanged glances.

  “You are quite wrong, Miss Givens,” drawled the Vulture. “Nothing of the sort is going to happen. You must pay no attention to her.” He inclined his head toward Lady Macnaghten. “We are perfectly safe here at Shalimar.”

  “But how can you—”

  “You, Miss Givens,” he said coldly, dropping one of his hands onto the table with a thump, “would have done well to have remained at Qamar Haveli. You should have made it your business to confirm necessary information, instead of rushing here with false intelligence and trying to frighten everyone.” He sniffed. “I certainly do not need advice from a young woman with a grimy face and a dirty black cord around her neck.”

  At the end of the table, the senior baggage officer cleared his throat noisily, as if to drown out the Vulture's rudeness. The three other officers began to speak at once.

  Charles Mott put down his napkin and leaned toward her. “I have been trying to tell you, Miss Givens,” he murmured, “that the sharpshooters you fear belong to Mr. Clerk, not the Punjabis. They are to assassinate not us, but Prince Sher Singh in the Hazuri Bagh while his troops are storming the Citadel.”

  Mariana felt her face go pale. Before she had time to pull herself together and question him, Mott shook his head warningly

  “I will tell you more after dinner,” he said quietly.

  Later, after ushering a mystified Mariana from the tent, he glanced over his shoulder before speaking. “The Hazuri Bagh, the Garden of Nobles,” he said quietly, “lies between the Badshahi Mosque and the main Citadel gate. It is from there that Prince Sher Singh will blow open the gate and launch his attack on the Rani. Clerk's plan is to send sharpshooters into the Hazuri Bagh. They are to lie in wait near the center pavilion, and shoot Sher Singh during the battle.”

  “The Garden of Nobles?” Mariana's mouth went dry. “A center pavilion? Sharpshooters? But why?”

  “Clerk is ambitious, Miss Givens. He wants the Punjab annexed to British India whilst he is Political Agent. The simplest way is to make sure this country has no decent ruler, then to step in during the inevitable chaos. Sher Singh is too popular and too competent for Clerk's taste. Of course, in time the Sikhs may kill each other off without any interference from us, but Russell Clerk is not a patient—”

  “Are you certain of this?” Mariana interrupted.

  Mott mopped his forehead with a damp-looking handkerchief. “I know you think me a fool, Miss Givens,” he said bluntly, “and I have been one. But I also have a great deal of respect for your uncle since he—I do not suppose we should go into that. In any case, when your uncle suspected that Clerk was up to something, he asked me to discover what it was. As Clerk had taken me into his confidence, I was able to learn the details of his plan. I am an intelligence officer, after all,” he added with a sour smile.

  “But now Mr. Lamb is ill,” he went on, “and I do not know what to do. We are, of course, forbidden to engage in any sort of intrigue with the natives, but Clerk is our senior-most officer here. There is no one for hundreds of miles with the authority to stop him.”

  What had she done?

  “Men in the city already know of the assassination plot,” Mariana croaked. “Let us pray they will know what to do,” she added as she started painfully for her tent.

  LADY MACNAGHTEN had been quite correct about her face. As Mariana held up her looking glass and stared into it, she saw that her cheeks were smeared with the dust and tears of her journey. Pointlessly elegant brows now framed her face. Her skin, where it was clean, looked uselessly fresh and dewy.

  On another day, Lady Macnaghten's friendly words would have given Mariana joy. Now that she had thrown away her chance at happiness, they only added to her misery.

  Why had she not asked Hassan whose assassination he had been discussing as he stood with his friend under that open window? Why had she rushed so hastily to judgment against people who had offered her nothing but acceptance and love, who had only wanted to protect her from the Vulture's treachery?

  I am keeping her here, Hassan had said. She is to know nothing about this.

  She gulped back tears as she scrubbed the dirt from her face.

  From the very beginning when she had accepted his proposal in front of the court, she had done everything wrong. Blinded by ignorance and her own stupid, headlong nature, she had behaved again and again like an ogre in a fairy story.

  You shout, you fight, you interfere, Hassan had told her, in that cold, implacable voice.

  He had been right. She had done all those things. And worst of all, she had failed to trust him.

  She must return at once to Qamar Haveli and throw herself upon his mercy, and the mercy of his family. Safiya had forgiven her before; perhaps she would again, but what of her tender, elegant Hassan? What of the heavy finality of his last speech to her? What if he refused to take her back, to let her be his wife, to let her be Saboor's mother?

  If he would not, she would surely die.

  But she could not leave for the city now, with her uncle so desperately ill. And even if he survived, she and Aunt Claire would face days and nights, perhaps weeks, of difficult nursing before he was fully recovered.

  Whatever decision she made now, it would come with a terrible price. Whether she returned to the haveli or stayed at Shalimar, she stood to lose critical things—her uncle, Hassan, Saboor, Safiya, the possibility of happiness, her own self-regard.

  Whatever her decision, its results would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  But wait. She ceased drying her face and straightened, the damp towel dangling from her hand.

  Who had told her that Safiya Sultana had a cure for cholera?

  It had been the woman who had brought the young, despairing mother to be cured. It is said that she can even cure cholera, the woman had confided.

  “NO, MARIANA, this is madness.” Aunt Claire drooped in the upright chair an hour later, her eyes large in her yellow face. “You must stop asking me. It is much too dangerous. I could not bear to lose both of you.”

  “But it is his only chance.” With her uncle moaning on the bed beside them, Mariana summoned the last of her persuasive power and knelt beside her aunt's chair. “I shall ask Safiya Sultana to return here with me,” she insisted, gazing into her aunt's face. “She is a native, but she is renowned for her ability to heal. They would never have told me she had a cure for cholera if it were untrue.”

  It was no use. As Mariana moved to stand, her strength very nearly exhausted, her aunt closed her eyes. “Very well,” she sighed. “You may go, but not until the morning. And after you do, you must return as quickly as you can.”

  The Citadel and its accompanying Badshahi Mosque occupied the northwestern quarter of the walled city of Lahore. On its western edge, the Citadel's ninety-foot-high Alamgiri Gate and the mosque's equally tall, carved entrance faced each other across the rectangular expanse of the Hazuri Bagh, or Garden of Nobles.

  While Mariana toiled her painful way to Shalimar, the Bagh had entertained no idle visitors. There was no sign of those who normally escaped the airless alleyways of the city to stroll the dusty garden or sit under its old trees. Instead, four men, three of them heavily
armed, stood deep in conversation on the upper floor of the two-storied marble pavilion that adorned the garden's center. As the men talked, the unarmed member of their group pointed toward the Citadel Gate, whose pair of massive towers stood squarely in front of them, less than fifty yards away.

  “If your information is correct, Zulmai,” said Hassan Ali Khan, “then Prince Sher Singh will watch his men storm the Citadel from this vantage point. Nowhere else in the garden has a better view of the gate. And if the assassins succeed, it is here that he will die.”

  “Hah!” Yusuf Bhatti clapped him on the back. “Stick to negotiating, my fine friend,” he advised, “and leave the fighting to others.”

  He waved dismissively about him at the pretty upper floor of the pavilion, with its scalloped arches and marble inlay. “This upper story is wide open and unprotected. Look there,” he added, pointing to the thick, crenellated wall stretching away on either side of the heavy gate separating the Citadel from the garden. “The Rani's own marksmen will be shoulder to shoulder up there, each one praying for an opportunity to shoot Sher Singh.”

  “He cannot conduct the battle from the ground floor, either,” Zulmai said, in his accented Punjabi. “It is as open as the upper story, with all those archways. You can see straight through it.”

  “I could see well enough,” Habibullah put in eagerly, “to put a bullet into the Prince's heart, wherever he was standing.”

  “There is an underground room,” offered Hassan, “where the old Maharajah used to spend hot summer days.”

  Yusuf and Zulmai exchanged nods.