by Wilbur Smith
He stood there for a time, pondering what he should do. A fragment of that last conversation with Tamaana came into his head.
Where could we go, if we were free? If we wanted to be together, somewhere nobody knew our past?
Tiracola, she had answered. A land without laws or constraint. A place you and I could be truly free.
Perhaps one day we will find ourselves there, he had said.
He remounted the horse, and turned her head north.
Tom found Tungar’s body lying on the blood-soaked sand. His right hand had been cut off, but he saw no mortal wound. Tom approached carefully, wondering if he might yet be alive.
A fly crawled out of Tungar’s mouth, along his lolling tongue, and Tom saw he had nothing to fear. He found the severed hand a few paces away, where the ground was thick with hoof marks. But of the sword it had carried, he saw no sign.
The last of the Rani’s troops had reached the edge of the beach and were disappearing into the jungle. One caught his eye – a tall, bald-headed man who seemed familiar. At that distance, shaded by the palm trees, Tom could not see the sword in his hand.
Disappointment seized him – only for a moment. One of the soldiers must have looted a sword from the battlefield, but Tom did not give up hope. Such a prize could not be kept hidden. Men would talk, and when they did he would make sure he heard of it. If the Rani tried to withhold it, he would burn her palace to the ground.
‘Put down your weapon!’
Tom turned, and saw two dozen muskets all trained on him. The marines had come ashore. They stood formed up in a line, the sun behind them, their stockings still wet from the surf.
Tom raised his weary arms. ‘Peace,’ he called. ‘I am a friend.’
His voice was little more than a croak – but the marines recognized the words. Their sergeant ordered them to lower their weapons.
‘My apologies,’ said a new voice. A blue-coated man wearing the uniform of a captain in the East India Company strode out from among the marines. ‘When word of your plight reached Madras, we feared we would find no Englishmen left alive.’ He halted. ‘Good God. Can it be …?’
Tom shaded his eyes against the sun. After everything he had endured, he needed a moment to place the captain’s face: the weatherbeaten cheeks and stern blue eyes, the russet hair streaked with grey.
‘Captain Inchbird?’
‘We meet again, and this time I am able to repay the debt I owe you.’ Inchbird eyed him keenly. ‘How the deuce did you come to be here?’
‘A long story.’
‘I cannot conceive of what you have suffered.’ Inchbird gestured to the fort. ‘To have held out so long, against such odds. Your name will be the toast of Leadenhall Street.’
‘I do not need their gratitude. I did it to save myself and family. If it were not for the Company’s high-handed avarice, the Rani would never have been provoked to war.’
‘Nonetheless,’ said Inchbird wryly, ‘there is nothing the merchants in London love quite so much as a hero. Especially one who saves their dignity and their profits.’
‘All that matters is my wife and Agnes – Mrs Hicks. Were they well, when you left them?’
Inchbird’s face clouded. ‘I do not take your meaning.’
‘You sailed from Madras, yes?’
Inchbird nodded.
‘Then surely you saw them. How else did you have intelligence of our plight here?’
‘No survivors reached Madras. We had our news from Tamil traders coming overland.’
‘But Sarah and Agnes sailed months ago,’ cried Tom. ‘They must have arrived by now.’
‘It is possible they arrived after we sailed.’ Inchbird saw Tom’s stricken face and softened his tone. ‘The seas have not been easy, this monsoon season. Very likely, they put in to some safe harbour to wait for kinder weather.’
But Tom heard his reassurances for what they were: empty words, without real hope. Despair gripped him; he almost wept. What use was surviving the siege if he could not find Sarah? Terrible fears for what might have befallen her crowded his mind, each more dreadful than the last.
Yet against the darkness, one glimmer of hope held out. If Sarah had died, he would surely have felt it in his heart. She had to be alive.
‘I must find them.’ Tom looked into Inchbird’s eyes and saw his sympathy. ‘You spoke of the Company’s gratitude to me. If that means anything at all, take us to Madras.’
Tom, Francis and Ana anchored in the Madras roadstead three weeks after leaving Brinjoan. It reminded Tom of pictures he’d seen in books of medieval cities. Hard stone walls the colour of rusty iron ringed the town, engineered with many batteries and half-moon bastions for protection. A great variety of fine buildings rose within the walls, while to north and south stretched the low, ramshackle towns where the native merchants who had flocked to the Company’s trade lived.
The anchor had barely touched bottom when a great flotilla of small boats and catamarans rushed out from the shore, offering coconuts, rum, fruit and fish. Some of the women who thrust them up to the waiting sailors were almost naked; Tom guessed they were for sale too.
‘They have marked you as orombarros,’ said Inchbird. ‘Men who are strangers to the town. They will expect to make a good penny from you.’
‘Then they will be disappointed, for I do not have a penny to my name,’ said Tom. ‘When will you send the cargo ashore?’
‘We will wait until the morrow to unload,’ said Inchbird. ‘I must secure the ship and procure refreshment for the men. But the Governor will expect me to send my packet ashore forthwith. I should be obliged if you would deliver it for me.’
Tom understood what he was doing, and was grateful. He clambered into one of the small boats with Francis and Ana. The planks, tied together with ropes rather than nails, shifted and squirmed under their weight; water oozed through.
‘Will we even make it ashore?’ Francis wondered. ‘This boat seems designed to tip us into the sea.’
‘They know what they are doing,’ Tom countered. ‘Unlike our longboats, these craft are made to flex in the surf. You may get wet, but they will not overturn.’
And so it was. The boat brought them damp but safe to the jetty by the Sea Gate. They had no difficulty gaining admittance with the ship’s papers to deliver. Directly inside the gate, they stepped straight into a market. The sandy street was thronged with traders, standing around and shouting bids at each other, while bills posted on the wall advertised when the next ships were due. Some of the merchants broke away when they saw Ana and embraced her warmly. Tom was pleased to see the affection they had for her. Francis stood back, frowning.
Ana spoke to them rapidly in their own language. Her face was grave. ‘They have had no news of Sarah or Agnes. But they say a ship brought a man from Brinjoan last week – an Englishman. He is at the citadel.’
‘Then I will go there,’ said Tom ‘You and Francis see what else you may discover on the docks.’
In the centre of the walled town, the citadel was like a larger model of the fort at Brinjoan – though twice the size, and with an imposing three-storey house in its centre. Tom felt a pang of memory as he passed under the archway, an echo of those last desperate moments in the fort when he had feared all was lost.
Inchbird’s correspondence got him as far as a waiting room. He handed the packet to a servant, and waited as he disappeared into the large first-floor office.
The minutes passed. The grandfather clock in the hall struck the hour. Tom stared at the door with furious concentration, willing it to open. He gripped the arms of his chair to keep from launching himself at the door.
When he thought he could not wait one more second, the door opened. The footman beckoned him through, into an airy room with high windows. The walls were decorated with antique weapons, fixed in patterns: a rosette of muskets, a fan of swords, and crossed pikes. It reminded Tom of the weapons in the library at High Weald, which he had not seen in so many years.
Tom nodded. Fraser clasped his hand firmly. ‘Then I and the whole Company owe you a great debt of gratitude. Captain Inchbird’s report leaves no doubt that but for your gallant intervention, the fort would have been lost and all her garrison enslaved or slaughtered. The damage to the Company’s prestige, to say nothing of her commerce, would have been incalculable, if the blacks got it in their heads they could bloody our noses with impunity.’
Tom went uncharacteristically quiet. He had not expected to become the East India Company’s champion: the irony was not lost on him. Nor the danger. In these comfortable surroundings, after months of suffering, feted as a hero, it would be too easy to drop his guard. If anyone recognized him, or if Guy got to hear of it …
‘I am sorry more of your men did not survive,’ he muttered. ‘Mr Foy did not leave many to save.’
‘He has paid the price for his recklessness.’
‘So did a great many others. And they had no choice in the matter.’ Tom felt all the frustrations of the past months boiling up inside him. He wanted to tear down the heavy curtains, smash the pictures on the wall and sweep all the paperwork off Fraser’s desk.
He forced himself to keep his temper.
‘Before we were besieged, one of the factors escaped in a boat with the women from the settlement. Foy’s wife, Captain Hicks’ wife and my own. They were making for Madras.’
Fraser’s face grew solemn. ‘Until last week, I would have counselled you to fear the worst, for I had heard no intelligence of them. Now I can tell you more, though whether you think it better news I cannot say.’
Tom’s ribs seemed to crush against his heart. He gripped the rim on Fraser’s desk, knuckles white. ‘What is it?’
‘Sit.’ Fraser gestured him to a chair. ‘You may hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.’
He rang a bell. Tom slumped into a high-backed chair. He heard the door open, tentative footsteps approaching.
‘Mr Kyffen,’ the footman announced. He closed the door.
Kyffen was halfway into the room before he glimpsed Tom in the chair. He recoiled; his head jerked around as he darted a furtive look at the exit.
‘Mr Weald,’ he exclaimed, with no warmth at all, when he saw he could not escape. ‘Thank God, sir, that you have survived. I dared not hope I would live to see you again.’
The last time Tom had seen him, they had been running for their lives from the Rani’s palace. The intervening months had been kind to neither of them, but Kyffen had come off worse. His nose was heavily scabbed where the sun had burned it raw. His eyes seemed to bulge from their shrunken sockets, and his fingers trembled.
There were many things Tom could ask him, but only one he cared about. ‘Where is my wife?’
Kyffen shuddered. He sank into a chair, angling it so he would not have to look Tom in the eye.
‘I fear, sir, you will not like what I have to tell you.’
The boat barely moved on the flat sea. Eight men and three women sprawled in her heavy-laden hull. The men were stripped to the waist; the women’s dresses were torn to the very limits of modesty. Four oars dipped and pulled with little conviction on the glassy water. Soon they would stop, for they had long since learned there was little point trying to row through the heat of the day.
The sun shone from a cloudless sky. The monsoon had been feeble that year. The storms that heralded it had come on schedule, but not the rain that usually followed. Inland, peasants would be scratching the dry earth, and praying they would survive to the next season. In the boat, they did not know if they would see the next week.
Since the age of ten, Agnes had lived her whole life in India. The soft hills and gentle rain of her native Yorkshire were memories so distant they might have been dreams. She had survived more than twenty years – twenty feverish monsoons, twenty parched summers where the heat seemed to set her bones on fire. She had borne five children, and buried each one before the age of three. She had known hardship.
But nothing in her life compared to this. She had spent three weeks crammed with ten other people in a thirty-foot boat, so heavy laden the gunwales barely broke the water. There was no shelter, and no privacy. After the first monsoon storms had passed, Leigh – the Kestrel’s boatswain – had rigged a piece of canvas as a modesty screen at the stern, and another as an awning. But another storm had blown up out of nowhere and torn them away, together with the mast and the sail. After that, they had had no choice but to put in long days on the oars. Agnes took her turn, when she was not nursing Sarah, until her hands were as calloused as any tar’s.
‘I should help row,’ Sarah protested that morning. Her fever had passed and she could sit up, though she was still very frail.
‘Nonsense,’ said Agnes. ‘In your condition, you would not be able to lift the oar.’
‘But it would show the men I value what they do. Everyone else takes his turn.’
‘Not everyone,’ said Agnes. She shot a dark look at Lydia Foy, who sat in the bow of the boat with the Company’s strongboxes. Kyffen sat beside her, affecting an air of command. Even by the cramped standards of the boat, they were inseparable, squeezed together under the parasol which Lydia refused to share.
‘The men know how much you care for them,’ Agnes told Sarah. ‘All they want is to bring you to safe harbour.’
Sarah smiled weakly. ‘Then I suppose—’
She broke off with a cough that became a retching. She just got her head over the side before the small portion of rice and salt pork she had eaten for breakfast came up and was vomited over the side.
Agnes sighed, and held her sister until she had finished. This happened every morning.
‘We should not waste food on her if she cannot hold it down,’ said Lydia Foy tartly. ‘Not when the rest of us are starving.’
‘Sarah gets her share like all the rest,’ Agnes insisted. Of all the people in the boat, Lydia seemed to have suffered least from the meagre rations they shared. Her complexion was healthy, and her breasts filled her bodice as amply as ever. Agnes suspected Kyffen had been slipping her extra morsels – and perhaps more. Some nights, she had heard strange noises coming from the bow of the boat.
‘I do not wish to be a burden,’ said Sarah. She lay back, her stomach still heaving with its exertions. Agnes sat beside her, positioning herself so that she shaded Sarah’s face. She tipped a cup of water to her sister’s lips. It was a fine, porcelain cup painted with willow leaves, the most incongruous vessel to have in their circumstances. Agnes had been shocked when she discovered that Mrs Foy had managed to stow her entire dinner service in the boat.
‘Careful,’ said Lydia. ‘Unless it rains again, we will run short before long.’
It was one of the many cruel ironies of their predicament. When the rain came, it fell so hard it almost filled the boat. All hands had to abandon their oars and bail furiously to keep from being swamped, literally throwing water away. But they had no casks to store it in, so when the rain ceased and the sun came out, they were soon parched with thirst.
Agnes stared at the nearby coast, the dense forests broken by golden beaches. After the storms, they had kept close to land for fear of drowning.
‘We should go ashore,’ she said. ‘We might find water – or a village. Perhaps we could get food from the natives.’
‘Food?’ said Lydia, with a withering look. ‘Why should they help us? More like they would cut our throats and steal all our possessions.’
‘We have gold enough. We could buy it from them.’
‘You are touched by the sun. I would not give these natives one fanam of my gold.’
‘It is the Company’s gold,’ Agnes pointed out.
‘It was my husband’s,’ Lydia insisted.
‘And it will do you no good if you are dead.’ In all her years in India, Agnes had learned to play t
he dutiful wife. To ignore Guy’s snubs, and the slurs from her sister Caroline that only became more barbed as Caroline grew older, fatter and unhappier. To bite her tongue, for the sake of her husband’s career.
Now she could feel those old restraints falling away. If it was the loss of her husband, or the heat of the sun, or merely the extremity of her situation: she did not care. The anger rose inside her and she did not try to check it.
‘My sister needs sleep and a place to lie,’ she said hotly. ‘All the men want food, shelter and rest. I will not let you sit smug on that chest of gold and deny them what they need to survive.’
The men on the oars paused their rowing and looked up. Lydia glared down the length of the boat. ‘You forget yourself, Mrs Hicks.’
Agnes turned to Leigh, sitting in the stern at the tiller. ‘Alter course to larboard, if you please. We are going ashore.’
‘To be robbed and enslaved by natives?’ Lydia tugged at Kyffen, who had fixed his gaze elsewhere to keep out of the argument. ‘Mr Kyffen! You are in command here.’
Kyffen looked uncertainly between the two women. ‘Mrs Foy is correct,’ he mumbled. ‘Hold your course. We cannot risk going ashore.’
‘Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am, but wearing the Company’s blue coat don’t make you a captain,’ said Leigh. He put the tiller over. The men on the oars started to row.
Lydia blazed with fury. ‘This is mutiny. When we reach Madras, I will inform the Governor of this and he will have you strung from the nearest gibbet.’
Leigh stared her down. ‘I’ll take me chances. If we make Madras.’
‘Mr Kyffen,’ screeched Lydia. ‘Will you permit this insolence?’
‘I am sure he will not,’ said Agnes coldly. ‘Seeing as you have been so free with your favours, you have him by his privies.’
Agnes heard the words come out of her mouth and hardly believed she’d dared say them. Lydia’s face went white with anger. She looked at Kyffen, but he simply gaped at Agnes in astonishment.