The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  The grander rooms were downstairs, and when she had done with the locked rows of bedchambers, Bella went there. There was no one to see her now, and she swept down the stairs, skirt gathered in one hand, nodding to left and right like an empress. And she was eighteen again, and the great ball to mark the end of her childhood was just stirring into life; the faces tipped upwards, watching her descent with adoration. The library, the pilfered library, and here it was that Bella, so often, had stood and wept at her father’s fierce reprimands; the music room, that perfect wedding gift, like the translucent inside of a blown egg; the red dining room; the drawing room; the saloon; and then the ballroom. So full of her life, this house; and every memory was false.

  Quite false. Mamma had died in London; her father had never reprimanded her, in the library or otherwise; there had been no ball here for two generations; Elizabeth had never expressed any particular love for one room over another; and the memories fell on her like rain. Here was her imagined life, the life in her head, and in the ballroom she paused, and thought that life through from beginning to end.

  There was one story she invented which was real: she dreamt it, but she knew it was true. Christmas, now, had come: and it had been at another Christmas she had been banished: and at another Christmas her father had died. After she had gone, he stayed in London. For a while, he had continued as he had done, dressing and going out, with one daughter the fewer. But then his life had started to grow smaller, and he left the house less often. Some days, he would go from his bedchamber to his study, and remain there the whole day, the trays of food returned untouched to the kitchen. No one disturbed him. And his occasional walks became fewer, and fewer, and in a year, he never left the house.

  What was he thinking, there, in his dark shrouded study, with his books and his opium? Nothing: oblivion had settled over him, and he waited, patiently, with no one but the ruby witch and his own empty brain. From the study, for months on end, there came no sound but pacing footsteps in the dark and the clink of the bottle being freed from the tantalus. To those black rites none was admitted: in his grief there were no sharers. From time to time, the household met him on the stairs, his eyes blazing in his gaunt white face, and each of them shrank into a deep bow, but for days and weeks, nothing was heard or seen of him, and he backed with a warning expression into his own catafalque.

  It was late in the year, two years after Bella’s final departure, when the household began to hear new noises from his quarters: deep, rasping, human noises, retching coughs, cries of pain instantly muted, the noise of black matter being torn up from the belly of the old Colonel. Still no one went up; the tray was delivered at the set times, and returned at the set times, and the Colonel was not seen, but only heard. Elizabeth, once, attempted the entry, distressed by the noises of pain, the unremitting evidence of physical anguish, but her offer to call for the physician was refused. The Colonel was weak, and wretched, but his eyes could still blaze contempt, and she backed out, helplessly.

  By the time the Colonel could no longer refuse help, it was too late. A maid heard a heavy fall, late one night, from the study, and, neglecting all commands, rushed in. He was lying on the carpet, a thin stream of vomit from his mouth, and his arm at an unnatural angle where he had fallen, hard, against the divan. There was no Colonel now to reject help, and Elizabeth, roused from her bed, sent immediately for the physician.

  How the Colonel died, no physician could explain: he was weak, and undernourished, and frail, but none of that need have led so rapidly to his death. But it did: in ten days, the Colonel sank by degrees, his eyes emptying by the day. They could do nothing but supply opium for the pain: and what pain had required the opium of the decades before these last days, no one could say. He said nothing; there were no last words; he did not call for Bella, and Bella did not come. That was how he died, and Bella told herself the story, inventing it as she went, and knowing that she told herself the exact, the incontrovertible truth, incontrovertible as the empty funeral, the lines of empty ducal carriages outside in a display, no more, of grief.

  It was there, in the dark empty acres of the Adam ballroom, that she heard it. A strange noise, coming from somewhere far away, outside the house. An unfamiliar noise, unlike anything she knew, cutting through the cold murmur of the rain, the sobbing distant rooks. It was a sound like something breaking, like a huge violin string stretched to its final point and then snapping; a crack and a twang all at once. Somewhere, the noise was loud, somewhere far away, and she sought it again, her ears sharpened; but it did not sound again. It was the sound of something breaking, out there, and as the memory of it faded like an echo, it was like something breaking in her; it might be the sound of grief. She was alone in her silent dark house; she had unlocked everything now, and it was all empty.

  Perhaps she stood there for minutes, or hours; the gloom of day was seceding into the gloom of night, and as she stood there, she started to understand that her life here was at last over. Her long, slow, imaginary life. The moment had come to go into the world of substance and flesh. Not to return to it, because now she felt that she had never truly gone into the world. But now the moment had come, for Henry’s sake, and for hers. She wanted her son by her, to hold and kiss, but that could wait. What had come to an end there, in the dark January ballroom, she could not say; what newness was beginning, now, she would not guess.

  She came out of the ballroom, slowly, and locked the door behind her. The housekeeper was there, waiting, an expression of mild concern on her face, and, wordlessly, Bella handed her back the keys. Together they walked back upstairs. Bella said nothing until they were almost at the door of her chamber, and then she turned to her, smiling a little.

  ‘I think, next week, we must go to London, Henry and I,’ she said. And then something odd; the housekeeper bobbed, as if she had been expecting Bella to say this very thing, and perhaps she had; perhaps she, too, had heard the crack of the breaking string. ‘I trust you will make the necessary arrangements? The beginning of the week, I think.’

  She went alone into the chamber, and shut the door behind her. Lord, Lord, how tired she was, all at once. The windows were wet with rain, and she went to look out. She had so much to do, now, all of a sudden, but all that could wait. The clock chimed five, singingly; and shortly Henry would be with her. She hoped he had enjoyed his day. But then, he always did. She sat down, and prepared to wait for her son.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE FORT AT JALALABAD was the colour of rock, and rose from the earth like a desert outcrop. Massive, square and blunt, it seemed hardly to have been built by men. Its asymmetrical blocks and buttresses presented, rather, the appearance of something formed in the course of aeons by the slow processes of geology, and discovered by explorers, who then inhabited it. It was lost in this terrible waste, like a system of caves. The fort was all but invisible until the traveller was almost upon it, melting into the yellow-brown rock; it emerged, from nothing, a sudden gigantic mountain, its walls like smooth cliffs. No army, the centuries had learnt, could break these brutal facades, and each assault broke over it like the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days; ferocious, howling, and in the end devoid of substance.

  For the moment, the British were here, and for the moment, they hid and crouched inside like rabbits. The sentries were posted, and watched at the gates for day after day, but nothing came. Night after night fell, and the officer of the watch came to General Sale and told what he had seen; nothing. From the west came no further word, and the English were immobile within their walls. On Sale’s table were three letters. The first reassured him that no help was required or needed; he had read it, and ordered preparations to be made for a sortie in force. The second, a week later, had demanded support, and contained Elphinstone’s declaration of the utter hopelessness of the position in Kabul. They were still readying themselves, however, when the third letter had arrived with its unspeakable news. Sale read it, and learnt that the Army of the Indus was in full retreat. He or
dered his men to stand down, seeing in his mind’s eye the loss of not one, but two armies. And then they waited in the desert silence. But no word came, and nothing appeared on the horizon.

  It was the afternoon, and the watch had just changed, when something was seen. Something, out there, in the bleak deserts which surrounded the fort. The officer of the watch was summoned, and raised his telescope. Out there was a small wavering shape, moving with incomprehensible languor. From here, the figure hardly seemed to be progressing forward; it drifted and swayed like a galleon at anchor, seen from shore. The officer of the watch sent for Sale, who appeared within a minute, his coat unbuttoned. The shape resolved itself; it was, incredibly, a rider. For some minutes, they thought it a riderless horse, but then they saw more clearly what the burden on the back of the animal was. That burden, lolling about – left – right – back – forward – until it seemed impossible it should not fall – that, that was – it was a man, at the last inch of consciousness, and clinging on somehow.

  They stood there, watching without belief. It might have been a headless corpse, bound to a limping, exhausted horse. Closer it came. So slowly, but the horse somehow seemed to know where safety lay.

  Abruptly, Sale came to himself. ‘Go and bring him in,’ he muttered, and turned heel and went. The men stood there for a moment. Behind the solitary black rider making his insensate path towards them, there was nothing and nobody to be seen.

  Three officers rode out. From the fort, they seemed unnaturally, indecently lively as they approached the broken figure. They seemed to circle him in nervous inspection. The horse did not stop at their approach, but carried on with its slow awful tread as if it had been blinded. The man on the horse, too, made no kind of effort, lolling and swaying from side to side, drunk with exhaustion. The officers dismounted, and came towards him, cautiously. One took the bridle of the horse, and, with a shudder which could be seen even from the fort, the animal halted, its head falling down almost to between its forelegs. The two other officers reached up to the man, and, between them, tenderly, they loosened him from his seat, and let him fall, so slowly, to the side, into a pair of strong waiting arms. They placed him traverse over the saddle of one of their horses, and then, on foot, leading their mounts, they returned to the fort.

  At the open gates, twenty soldiers stood gaping. When the little party was inside, and the man lowered again to the ground, everyone gathered round. None of them said anything as water was brought, and held to the mouth of the man. He was not dead, and drank a little, helplessly, like a child. Most of it ran down the sides of his face, as he coughed and spluttered. Sale pushed his way through, and stood looking at the man lying on the floor; looked at what everyone knew was what remained of the Army of the Indus. ‘His name is Brydon,’ he said eventually.

  For three days, Brydon was left alone, in bed. His horse did not survive the afternoon. By the end of the week, he was a little stronger, and started to tell his story. The story Brydon had to tell, over and over again, was a single one, and it was all he could tell; it was the story of how an army died. Brydon was the only person who saw that death, and who could tell it at all; but it so often occurred to his listeners, then, in Jalalabad and for the rest of his life, that he could not know everything they wished to know. An army died, there, in five days; but the army was sixteen thousand people; and sixteen thousand stories found their ending there. Sixteen thousand stories; sixteen Scheherazades, telling night after night, would never be done with their telling, and every single story ending in the same way.

  Or almost every story; because from the agonizing retellings emerged an appalling, tiny hope. Brydon told his story, and it was simple and brief; and then he told it again, and it was a little longer; and then he told it again, and had remembered something. A junior officer had been deputed to sit by Brydon, and note down what he said. Brydon’s face was bruised and battered and wrecked against the clean white sheets, and the junior officer listened to whatever he had to say. Brydon’s recovery was not certain yet, and what he remembered must be recorded. In a few retellings, he recalled something; it seemed, out of nothing.

  ‘No,’ he said suddenly. ‘Not everyone. Some of them returned with the Sirdar. That’s right. The fourth day out of Kabul. Akbar. He said – I think he said – that he would take some of the women back with them, and they would be safer there and Elphinstone agreed. I don’t know why. Elphinstone, too.’

  ‘Elphinstone?’

  ‘Elphinstone went back, with Akbar, he went too.’

  ‘How many?’ the officer asked gently.

  ‘Many?’

  ‘How many went back with Akbar?’

  Brydon said nothing.

  ‘A hundred? Two hundred?’

  ‘Perhaps twenty,’ Brydon said.

  ‘Were they killed?’ the officer said.

  ‘I did not see them killed,’ Brydon said placidly. ‘I saw them being led away, though. That was the last thing I saw.’

  ‘Who were they, Akbar’s prisoners?’ the officer asked. ‘Whom did Akbar take? Can you remember?’

  Brydon shook his head, sinking back in exhaustion. The officer persevered.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘I did not see them killed,’ Brydon said again, and closed his eyes.

  Brydon grew in strength, slowly, and told what he could, over and over, but that was all he could say. The women and children and Elphinstone had been led away, and nothing more had been heard of them, and perhaps nothing more ever would be.

  Brydon had been there, but he had not seen every ending to every story, and even what he had seen, he could not always retell. Did he not know, or could he not say, how Frampton died on the first day, raising his arm up to the sky as a horseman rode at full pelt amongst them, slicing his snickering blade down upon Frampton’s bare neck, down, again, and a third time as the blood spurted in the air and fell on the packed dirty snow? Or how Macnaghten’s nazir, so tremendous a personage, was found on the second morning, his face and hands black with the frost, his lips drawn back in a black animal snarl? Digby was shot in the back, the third day, scrambling up the crumbling sides of the canyon. Brydon never saw how Elphinstone died, in Akbar’s prisons, shitting and puking into his blankets, crying and yelping out, and knowing nothing of where he was, died regretted by no one. Perhaps he did not know that McVitie was there, at the last, on the fifth day, was trampled over by the horses, and lay there screaming for half an hour; could not tell how he, too, had ended, taking his own rifle with resolve and shooting himself in the head. Brydon had seen so much, had seen so many men fall, and there were many thousands of stories which he had seen reach their end. But there was only one story he could tell, of how an army, all at once, died; and it stuttered from the tongue of the incurable doctor, again and again and again.

  He told that story so often, and each time, General Sale crept into the room as he was talking, and stood, listening, just outside the circle of the candlelight, his eyes wide and empty. Each time of the telling, Sale listened, saying nothing, and when silence fell, he turned away, and left with his face white and sick. No one spoke to him, and he seemed to wish to be left alone. His aide-de-camp followed him from place to place, saying nothing, wishing the old man would confide or break down. It was three weeks after Brydon had reached Jalalabad, and still lying, feeble, in bed, that the aide-de-camp went to his quarters, and sat with the doctor. For half an hour, he questioned him directly, and found out what he knew. Then he left him, exhausted, to sleep again, and, summoning up all his bravery, he went to General Sale and, unbidden, offered him what Brydon had told him. It was what the General, he knew, wanted to know, and terrible as it was, he had to be told. The General sat and looked at the aide-de-camp, summoning up all his resources, and learnt what he feared to know, and feared to ask; that there was every possibility that Florentia had not died in the march, but had been taken hostage by Akbar, and led away by the blood-steeped Prince. That was all that anyone now could know, an
d where she was now – what she was now – what had fallen upon her could not be told, and perhaps never would be known. The General listened to what his aide-de-camp had been brave enough to ask, what his fear had shrunk from, and, when the officer had talked himself out, his eyes fixed firmly on the wall behind his General, he shook his head, and with a wave of his hand, silently dismissed the man. What thoughts were in the old man’s head, no one could know; what look came into the old man’s deadened eyes when the doors were shut, and the lights extinguished, and he was alone once again, was not for them to imagine.

  There was nothing further the fort could or would do with Brydon, and he was left alone with his amanuensis. He remembered a little more every day, but he lacked for willing listeners. For some weeks, the watch kept an eye on the horizon, waiting for others to appear. Perhaps when the snow melted, the remnants of the army would emerge; perhaps a few had found shelter and safety among the tribesmen of the hills, and in time would make their way cautiously to Jalalabad. But day after day they gazed at the horizon, and slowly they came to accept that no one would come.

  Only one came.

  One day, after weeks, months of waiting: months which taught the fort, taught every man in it that there is one thing worse than despair, and that thing is hope. It was late in the afternoon, one cold day. One of the unpredictable caravans of native pedlars, a line of slow horses loaded with goods and women, trudged before the fort, and, as it passed, a small child was let down from the horses.