The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  Macnaghten laughed graciously. How delightful it was to sit and listen in this way, to feel oneself admired!

  ‘You know, sir,’ she went on, ‘we have placed the highest trust in you in this matter. I hope you are not daunted by the prospect.’

  ‘When a cause is just,’ Macnaghten said sagely, ‘one’s courage may be assured.’

  ‘I see,’ Emily Eden said. ‘You do not share your friend Elphinstone’s doubts as to the wisdom of our action.’

  ‘There can be no doubt,’ Macnaghten said, warming to his theme. ‘The Amir of Afghanistan has made a most sudden and unprovoked attack on the lands of our ancient ally, has insisted on his most unreasonable pretensions—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘—and presents a serious threat to the security of the frontiers of India. It is the most extraordinary mystery how he was ever presumed to be capable of forming any kind of alliance with us. And he is unpopular with his own people. This is not an invasion, you understand, madam; we are restoring the rightful king of the Afghans to his throne. I have no doubt that we will find his popularity among his people quite unabated by time, and he will enter his country to the wildest acclamation.’

  ‘And why are we aiding him in this worthy endeavour?’ Emily Eden said. The table had fallen silent, to Macnaghten’s piquant delight; all ears were on him. There were ten people around the table, and about the walls, twenty manservants, impassively watching their masters like hawks, and, Macnaghten realized for one moment of pure glee, every single one of them believed every word he would say.

  ‘It is to be regretted that those whose cause is just cannot always pursue it,’ Macnaghten said, assembling his solemn face. ‘We, happily, are in a position to aid our neighbours, and there is no reason not to do so. It is a small step, and a wise one; it will ensure the security and happiness of a large tract of the world for generations to come.’

  ‘And meanwhile,’ Fanny Eden, safely at the end of the table, murmured to Burnes, ‘we, and our children, and our children’s children, contemplate that most delicious curry growing colder by the moment. I understand congratulations are in order, Sir Alexander.’

  ‘You are most kind,’ Burnes said. ‘The Governor General had to tell me bluntly, so very tactful were his initial means of letting me know of my elevation. He sent me a letter, which I opened without reading the direction, and it was only when he told me to look at the outside more carefully that I realized what a very tremendous personage I seem to have become.’

  ‘Lieutenant Colonel and a knight at thirty-three,’ Fanny said. ‘That, at least, is nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘A consolation, I suspect,’ Burnes said. ‘I lost the argument, all in all, and my friend Dost Mohammed seems to have become my enemy.’

  Fanny Eden looked at him quizzically; perhaps she had forgotten, or never known, the efforts Burnes had made on the Dost’s behalf.

  ‘What manner of man is he?’ she said finally. ‘Your friend, Dost Mohammed.’

  ‘Very agreeable, I confess,’ Burnes said. ‘But unwise.’

  ‘At last,’ Fanny said, as Macnaghten reached the end of his glowing indictment, and the servants, at a gesture from Lord Auckland, moved forward to serve what could only be rather a cold curry. Burnes sat for a moment, with an ineradicable feeling of ennobled defeat.

  5.

  It was an essential part of the charm of the Princess’s Thursdays that they were not grand occasions. To an outside observer, they certainly appeared grand; no one could recall one of the Princess Fanny’s Thursdays which had not failed to supply at least two of the Grand Duchesses, dividing the salon between them. No one came to the Princess’s Thursdays who did not have the highest possible claim to be there, but she and her Thursday habitués made a point of speaking of them in the humblest terms. ‘We shall be very simple, and I fear it will bore you greatly,’ she would say to a new recruit, offering the golden invitation. ‘Merely a very few old friends, drawn together by a love of music. I cannot offer you any excitement, but if you wish to make a dull old woman very happy, I should be most pleased to see you at my house one week.’ Those fortunate enough to be welcomed there were always wise enough to understand what the Princess meant, and everyone knew that the Princess’s simple Thursday evenings were occasions at which the highest pinnacle of St Petersburg society was to be found.

  The Princess was in deep conversation with General Scherbatsky one Thursday. At the far end of the salon, a soprano was giving an account of some melancholy Polish songs, but no one listened to the music at the Princess’s Thursdays, save the Grand Duchesses and nervous newcomers. The General, too, was a relatively new attender at her evenings, and, taken by his hostess from the duty of listening to the music, was most eager to please. Much as he longed to send his eyes searching about the room, he did not dare divert his attention from his hostess for a moment, and listened to her drawling out the story of the tantrum the Tsar had fallen into the day before as if he were Moses, fearing to miss a word of divine writ. She was a most charming woman; her voice low and musical, her face presenting the irresistible appearance of a great beauty, five years past her prime. No breath of scandal had ever come near her, and she relayed the mild events of the court in a manner that was charmingly flavoured with a touch of indiscretion.

  She finished her story with a muted peal of intensely genteel laughter. Her footman had been standing patiently with a silver plate by her side, waiting for her to finish. She turned to him, taking the card from the plate, and he bowed. She examined the name on the card for some minutes, her pretty brow wrinkling in puzzlement.

  ‘I confess,’ she said finally to the General, ‘this gentleman is quite unknown to me. A most curious thing, for strangers to present themselves at one’s house, but perhaps I am old fashioned in these matters. Can you enlighten me in any way?’

  She passed the card to him.

  ‘M. Vitkevich,’ the General said cautiously. Here was a difficult one: the General knew quite well that Vitkevich had been one of the stalwarts of the Princess’s Thursdays. Indeed, before his own wonderful elevation into this happy society, he had greatly resented the status of one of his junior officers. He also knew quite well that Vitkevich would never be received by anyone, ever again. ‘I am unable to be of any assistance, I fear.’

  ‘No matter,’ the Princess said carelessly. ‘Ah, Stepan Mikhailo-vich – one moment, if you please!’

  Stepan Mikhailovich Layevsky was passing, and smilingly bowed to his hostess. His corsets audibly creaked as he did so.

  ‘How curious,’ he said when he had looked at the card. ‘Yes, I think I know of the gentleman. An adventurer, I believe. Well, he has been travelling in distant lands, and when he returned, it became apparent that he had been making all sorts of representations to oriental potentates which he had no right to make. He has placed us in a most awkward position, all in all. You know, madam, he had the audacity to present himself at court last week, and the Tsar himself – well, I need not say how angry he was. In front of the whole court, he said, “Vitkevich? I know no such man, except some poor criminal, lately returned from India. Show him out.” An extraordinary man, to present himself here.’

  ‘Shall we admit him?’ the Princess said. ‘It may be amusing.’

  Layevsky bowed. The Princess’s whims were not to be contradicted.

  ‘Or it may not,’ she went on. ‘No, I think if I start admitting people of whom I know nothing, I shall soon find myself pouring tea for my dressmaker. Tell the gentleman I am not at home,’ she finished, turning to the footman.

  6.

  What he had not dared to ask for had been granted him. What he had not dared to dream of had been made flesh.

  Masson was the last European in Kabul, and now he was preparing to leave. Burnes had gone, his mission failed. The Russians had gone, bearing their tinsel triumph; Masson had gone out to watch their splendid departure, deeply wrapped in cloaks; the pomp of their procession, spurs tinkling, impressed
the city, and only Masson saw how empty it was. Soon Dost Mohammed and his court would flee; either that, or they would fight and lose; and the city would be left to the English. Masson had no doubt that the English were on their way, and in force. He had one thing to do, and then he, too, would go. The time had come. In a year, this would be no place for him to be.

  Before his departure, he had one thing to do; to destroy Burnes. In these few days, he did not leave the house; he sat in his upper study, and wrote and wrote, hardly sleeping, in an ecstasy of creation. He alone had seen Burnes, and his failure; he alone could tell the story of Burnes at the court of the Amir, and he wrote and wrote, piling lie upon lie, knowing that there was no one to contradict him. With his pen, he would destroy Burnes, and everyone, until the end of time, would know that Burnes had failed, and caused his own failure. He lied and lied, and as he wrote, his eyes opened and stretched with a savage righteous joy. Every monstrous line bubbled helplessly to the point of his pen, and there he was, there was the fool, Burnes, striking attitudes before the Amir, helping the Russians, insulting the Dost’s wives, heading towards disaster with every step. Only sometimes did it occur to Masson that he was writing about a real person, and the face of Burnes swam before his eye. He pushed the feeling of regret away, and went on writing. The man who took the seal on a bag of sugar for the Russian imperial seal! Burnes’s laughable Persian! Burnes’s appalling ignorance! The fool who destroyed his own chances, the fool who knew nothing but how to strike poses of his own honour! Masson wrote and wrote; he described how Burnes ran and hid from Vitkevich, wrapped his head in towels and called for his smelling bottle. Before his eyes, the scene swam up, clearer than memory. One day, these lies would be as true as history, and one day, one day, everyone would know of the clear-sightedness and wisdom of Masson, the one man who could have helped Burnes, whom Burnes, the fool, ceaselessly insulted. For long hours, Burnes seemed to him like a monster of his own creation, the embodiment of what had hurt him most and insulted him most. Everything he had written had been the dry notation of truth, until now; at this moment, he sat and invented, wildly, and knew that what he wrote would come to be the truth. Every little hurt came to Masson, and he wrote and wrote in a golden fury of righteousness, deep into the night.

  He paused for a moment. The candle guttered at a draught. Masson raised his head and listened; a creak downstairs. It was the door to the house, being pushed open. Masson did not fear robbers. He trusted his luck too much, and he waited. A powerful thought came to him, like a hot storm of wind, and he almost trembled at it. He heard no more noise, and waited, silently, trying to tell himself that he had been mistaken; knowing that he had not. Long minutes passed, it seemed, before there, in the room, was his thought. Standing there. What he had not dared to ask for had been granted him. What he had not dared to dream of had been made flesh. Hasan, robed in white, sombre and beautiful, radiant, shining, shining, there. Hasan had returned.

  7.

  The Army of the Indus was assembled, and the fifty thousand men, their thirty thousand camels, waited like a town. Two weeks before, this stretch of the Punjab was barren, bare and beautiful; now a city, a city on wheels, pulsed and screamed here. It might have been there for centuries; it had acquired, already, its myths and stories and heroes. Everyone had heard of the lieutenant of the 16th Lancers, the magnifico who was followed by a train of no fewer than forty servants; everyone had heard that the 4th Dragoons had assigned three camels to carry the cigars of the regiment’s officers, and were delighted to know it. The order had gone out to travel with the barest essentials, but no officer took that remotely seriously. The on-dit in the Army of the Indus was that there was no realistic prospect that these damned Indian princes would hold Kabul on their own, and they packed their pleasures in accord with their belief, that once they were there, the Governor General would decide that it was, after all, necessary for them to stay there for months, and perhaps years. Hence the camels for the cigars; hence the immense trains of servants, the beasts laden down with dressing cases and colognes and – if it were all amassed in one place – a lardy mountain of hairdressing unguents. The Governor General would be an utter brute, Framp-ton opined, if he honestly expected anything else.

  ‘When we are settled there,’ a lieutenant drawled, ‘we must send for a pack of foxhounds. Excellent hunting to be had, I understand.’

  Like a carpet borne by ants, the Army of the Indus inched forward with its vast burden of necessary comforts, followed by a vast and increasing train of jemaudars and mahouts; inched eastwards, a few miles a day, and as it went forward, like a ball of snow, it grew larger and larger, amassing more and more camp followers from each place it rested. The kings of the shifting city observed this process calmly; Macnaghten and Shah Shujah and Burnes, each with his court. Observed, too, the others’ courts and rituals with mild, uninterfering curiosity, listening only to gossip.

  The army had paused at the bank of the Indus for some days, while the pontoon bridges were constructed. Beyond the borders of the straggling town, the river, roaring like a millstream, stretched away. Macnaghten, who, with the departure of the Governor General, had risen beyond all his expectations, spent his days in his tent; his subordinates brought him papers from time to time, and he examined the communications with his best air of calm authority before nodding. It was terribly easy, to be in charge, and the ceaseless universal deference now afforded him was what had always appeared to him as no more than his due. News was occasionally brought of Shah Shujah, but Macnaghten rarely saw him, ensconced in his splendid palanquin, a mile away, and gave little credit to what he heard. The news that the new King of the Afghans had ordered one of his men to whip an English drummer-boy caused him some discomfort – the boy’s crime had been to carry out an errand too slowly (and it was not, in truth, Macnaghten had to concede to his outraged subordinates, the task of English soldiers to run errands for this oriental prince). Other tales of Shah Shujah, his cockfights and dogfights and the summary punishments meted out to members of his entourage, Macnaghten listened to without comment; that was the sort of thing to be expected of these princes, and even those who suffered most directly under their whims accepted them without the fury an Englishman might evince. He agreed, however, that the whims of a potentate must not be allowed to extend to the Queen’s forces, and he was persuaded to send a remarkably mild note to Shah Shujah, pointing out that the discipline of English troops was a matter for the Queen’s representatives, and asking him to report any further delinquency without taking action himself.

  ‘Dreadful old fool,’ Burnes said to Frampton when he heard of this. The boy’s wounds had been displayed across the camp, to general mutterings of disapproval among the ranks.

  ‘And that fwightful old Shah Shujah,’ Frampton sputtered through a mouthful of food. ‘One might have thought he would understand it worth his while to ensure a modicum of loyalty. After all, it is we who are supposed to keep the wetch there. Not that it did the boy any harm – that sort of conspicuous discipline, much to wecommend it.’

  Burnes could not dissent from this, and the boy had made a perfect nuisance of himself, displaying the results of Shah Shujah’s summary discipline to any passing sepoy or jemaudar with indignant delight. Still, one had to keep an eye on this sort of thing; and, as Mohan Lal said, Shah Shujah’s reputation for enjoying the sight of these atrocities was remarkable even by oriental standards.

  ‘Doesn’t he have his own army to whip?’ Frampton said.

  Burnes shook his head mournfully; Frampton shook his head mournfully; and, together, they contemplated the sad business of Shah Shujah’s army. Macnaghten and Auckland had refused to countenance the idea of a prince of Kabul without any kind of army at all. Even they could see that Shah Shujah, entering Kabul, would have to be able to show some Afghan supporters, rather than a lot of English red-faced mercenaries. The Army of Sugar and of Milk, as the officers’ tiffin had christened it, had been put together out of any old passing tinker or
merchant or fakir, pressed into some kind of uniform and left to pick up the rudiments of drill at leisure. By now, there were five thousand members of the instant army, wandering around the camp with perplexed expressions; sometimes you came across a pair of them, pretending to stab each other in the stomach with their bayonets in play. Shah Shujah seemed as pleased as Punch with the ragtag army the English had pressed together for him, and from time to time inspected their dismal appearance, carried back and forth on his second-best palanquin. Anyone would have thought the troops, who could not even agree which shoulder to carry their rifles over, were the men who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, so austerely approving was their Emperor’s gaze. But the important thing was to keep Shah Shujah happy, and, by means of these endless inspections and turning a blind eye to his extravagant, wilful punishments, that end seemed to be in sight.

  ‘But whipping a drummer-boy …’ Frampton said.

  ‘How are the bridges?’ Burnes said, changing the subject.

  ‘Slowly, slowly, slowly,’ Frampton said, shaking his head. ‘Five days behind, five whole days.’

  From the great looms and pulleys, the temporary workshops on the side of the river, rafts the size of housefronts were emerging, piling up for the huge task of the crossing. Boats had been seized, and lashed together; planks nailed on top into great squares. These littered the plain like dance floors, or the cast-down books of a giant’s library. The carpenters sawed and hammered without cease. The army was idle, and sick of pointless drilling to occupy the time; the officers made inroads into their camel-loads of cigars, and wrote letters and journals. The connection (rather a distant connection) of Lord Palmerston so ran out of things to say that he described the crossing, days before it had happened. Ah, well; there was no reason not to write it now, since it would all happen as planned, and after the Indus were traversed, there would be little time to set pen to paper.