Ford was giving muttered instructions to his havildar. Richard was still in the process of learning Hindustani, but he gathered the lieutenant was sending half of his men to the far side of the village to prevent anyone running away. Richard thought this ridiculous: every woman and every child in the village knew they were there, and would have run away long ago had they chosen to.
But he decided against arguing on this occasion, for Ford had been on several of these details and knew what had to be done. Eight of the sepoys made their way through the bushes, somewhat noisily, to their new positions.
A dog barked, and then another. The women ignored the sound, and studiously continued to stir their pots. The odours were now quite mouth-watering.
‘Time,’ Ford said, and stood up. He did not draw his sword, and his men left their muskets slung, but they moved forward smartly.
Richard marched beside them, his satchel banging his thigh, feeling distinctly foolish.
The dogs snarled at them, and were driven away with kicks. The children shouted and ran to the village, brown bodies flashing in the fierce sunshine.
The women turned from their pots to gaze at the invaders. There were perhaps twenty of them. They wore brightly-coloured cotton saris, and were barefoot. Their braided hair was black and heavy, their features were boldly handsome, their complexions a very dark brown, their eyes a liquid black. Richard had become used to Indian woman during his year in Bombay. He had been obliged to follow fashion and bed the one procured for him by his seniors, and had not enjoyed the damage done to his pride: he had been a virgin and she had known everything there was to know about the art of love. If he had from time to time repeated the experience, it was only because he was a man and there was no white woman available to him. He had come to regard all women with vague distrust, and Indian women, who knew things to which his imagination could not yet aspire, most of all.
But there was something different about these women; their faces seemed curiously exposed. For a moment he could not determine why, then Ford snapped his fingers.
‘The bitches,’ he growled. ‘They’ve hidden their gold.’
An Indian woman normally carried all of her wealth on her person at all times, usually in the form of gold bangles on arms or ankles, and every married Indian woman wore a gold ring in her nose.
These women’s arms and legs were quite unadorned, and there were no nose rings to be seen.
‘I’ll deal with these doxies as they deserve,’ Ford said, and strode towards the fire. The women drew together protectively, their children clustered against them.
‘Where are your men?’ Ford demanded in Hindustani.
‘They have gone to chase the tiger, sahib,’ one of the women replied.
‘The tiger? There has been a tiger here?’
‘It was here,’ the woman asserted.
‘We have seen no spoor.’
‘It was here,’ the woman repeated. ‘It stole a young goat. Our men have gone after it.’
‘All of the men? They have left you here, unprotected?’
‘What have we to fear, with the John Company soldiers to defend us?’ The woman looked from the white man to the sepoys. Her lip curled.
‘You are lying,’ Ford told her, pointing. ‘This village has not paid its tax. Your men have fled into the jungle so as not to have to pay.’
‘They have gone after the tiger, sahib,’ the woman said.
‘Then they have left you the tax money?’
‘I know nothing of tax money,’ the woman said. ‘When our men return, I will tell them you have been here, and they will bring the money to the island.’
Ford glared at her, but she did not lower her eyes. She was not the oldest of the women—a couple of them had white hair—but she was certainly in her thirties, handsome and strongly built, and possessed a subtle arrogance. Richard guessed she was the wife of the headman. Clearly she was not afraid of the Company’s men.
‘My soldiers are hungry,’ Ford said.
‘There is food,’ the woman agreed.
Ford summoned the havildar and his men from the edge of the clearing, and they sat down. The women served them. The food was good, if scorching to the tongue. The women did not speak. They were carrying out a well rehearsed manoeuvre.
‘What are we going to do?’ Richard asked again.
‘We are going to collect what is owed to the Company,’ Ford said. ‘That is what we were sent here to do.’
‘But the men have run off. They won’t come back until we leave.’
‘We will leave this afternoon,’ Ford said. ‘With the money. Or payment in kind.’ He blew his nose, and Richard followed his example. The spices were very hot.
‘Why have you no gold?’ Ford asked the woman.
‘We do not wear gold when we are alone in the village.’
‘But it is in the village.’
‘We know where it is, sahib.’
‘Go and fetch it. I will take from your gold what is owed to the East India Company.’
The woman gazed at him imperturbably. ‘You cannot take our gold. That is our personal possession.’
‘The taxes must be paid,’ Ford told her. ‘If your men will not pay, then you must pay.’ He grinned. ‘You will have to make your men buy you new gold.’
‘That is not right,’ the woman declared, her face angry now.
‘Your men are cheating the Company. I will not allow this. Now fetch your gold.’
Still the woman stared at him, but insolently. ‘I have forgotten where it is.’
‘Do not lie to me, woman. Fetch your gold, or tell us where to look.’
‘I have forgotten,’ she said again.
‘If you do not remember, now, you will suffer.’
Richard licked his lips; suddenly the air was filled with tension.
‘I have forgotten,’ the woman repeated, stubbornly.
Ford stood up, and signalled to the sepoys. The other women shrieked, siezed their children, and ran for the houses. The chickens squawked and scattered, the dogs slunk away.
The sepoys surrounded the woman. Ford stepped up close to her.
‘I’m not going to harm your people,’ Ford said. ‘But I will harm you, if you do not tell me where the gold is.’
The woman’s breath hissed. ‘I will speak of this to my husband.’
‘And he will lodge a complaint with the factor. To do that he must come to the island. We shall be glad to see him there.’
The woman’s breath hissed again.
‘The gold,’ Ford said.
The woman made no reply.
The tension had now spread to the sepoys, who shuffled and looked uneasy; Richard was sweating harder than ever. He had no idea what Ford had in mind. But he had been on tax gathering expeditions before, and knew what had to be achieved.
Ford snapped his fingers, and two of the sepoys grasped the woman’s arms. She made no attempt to defend herself.
Ford reached into his haversack, and from it took a piece of bamboo, some eighteen inches long. He held it in both hands before the woman’s eyes, and very slowly pulled the upper part into two; the bamboo had been carefully split with a knife for the top six inches of its length. Ford pulled it apart to about an inch, then let it snap back together again.
‘Where is the gold hidden?’ he asked.
The woman stared at him.
Ford thrust the length of bamboo through his belt, then seized the woman’s sari and tore it away to expose her breasts. Richard caught his breath in dismay. He knew that the Hindus resented sexual mistreatment as much as anyone. And public exposure of a woman was a most grievous insult.
The woman also gasped, but kept her unwavering gaze fixed on her tormentor.
‘Tell me where the gold is hidden,’ Ford said.
‘I have forgotten,’ she sneered.
Ford pulled the bamboo from his belt. With his right hand he teased the woman’s left nipple erect. She had splendid breasts, large and full with on
ly the slightest sag, which swelled as she panted.
Ford was enjoying himself. Richard licked his lips apprehensively as he watched.
Ford released the distended nipple, took the bamboo and pulled the split end apart. Carefully he slid the two halves over the nipple, then released them.
The woman gasped, as the tight jaws of the bamboo closed on her flesh. Richard could not imagine the pain of it. He wanted to protest, but did not.
‘Tell me where you have hidden the gold,’ Ford repeated.
The woman searched her mouth, and spat. Ford moved his head to avoid the spittle, and at the same time jerked on the bamboo. Blood spurted, and the woman uttered a low wail, sagging into the arms of the sepoys.
‘Hold her up,’ Ford snapped. Blood was dribbling down on to her stomach, soaking the sari.
Ford grinned at her, and began to play with the right nipple. ‘Tell me where the gold is,’ he commanded.
*
‘Payment in gold!’ The eyes of Jonathan Smythe, the senior factor, gleamed. ‘You are to be commended, sir. You met with no resistance, I hope?’
‘None, sir. The men had run off rather than pay their dues. So we collected from the women.’
‘Admirable, admirable. You are learning from a good master, eh, Mr Bryant?’
Richard opened his mouth, then changed his mind. On the march back to Bombay, he had seethed with indignation at Ford’s bestial behaviour, and had thought of denouncing Ford for using methods which could surely earn nothing but hatred for the English. But his resolution had weakened. Smythe’s approbation was no more than he had expected. And he had his own way to make.
‘Indeed sir,’ he agreed.
Ford snorted. ‘The boy did not like my methods,’ he said.
Smythe wagged a finger. ‘I do not wish to hear of them, lieutenant. Suffice it that you were given a task, and you carried it out successfully. Remember that, Mr Bryant. My thanks to you, Mr Ford.’
‘Remember that, Mr Bryant,’ Ford mimicked as they came out into the brilliant sunlight.
‘I intend to,’ Richard said drily.
Ford glanced at him. ‘What I did is accepted Company practice, when dealing with recalcitrant females. It hits them where it hurts, in their pride.’
‘Was there any need to maim her?’
‘She’ll heal. And when it comes to maiming, you want to remember what those bitches can do to a white man whenever they lay their hands on one. They slice you bare, Richard my boy. Slowly. Slice by slice. And they smile while doing it.’
‘No doubt they have reason,’ was the best reply Richard could think of, as he walked away, distaste still rankling in him. Ford had been given a task, and he had carried it out. And his superiors tacitly condoned his brutality in doing so. Richard Bryant aspired to be a soldier, but he knew he would not have had the ruthlessness so to mistreat a woman, even a native. He wondered whether Ford would have so humiliated a white woman, whether any British officer would. He had been told of the deeds of Butcher Cumberland’s redcoats in Scotland after their victory at Culloden, only thirty-three years ago...
Richard made his way through the bazaar to the bungalow he shared with Albert Forsythe, through the teeming masses of men and women he had been taught to regard as his inferiors. Even if this were true, he reflected, there were so many of them! The white men and the handful of women who had accompanied their husbands on the perilous voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, or made the journey on their own in the certainty of finding matrimonial security amongst the wife-starved officers and merchants of Bombay, had but to look around them to see the extent to which they were outnumbered.
The island belonged entirely to the Company, or so the Company said, and following the collapse of the Empire of the Great Mughal in this year of 1779, there was no one to dispute their claim. Anyone who lived on the island did so only with the permission of the Factor, and thousands did. Yet only a handful were British. The Indians were needed, as servants to take care of their white masters and mistresses, as merchants to supply food and materials, and most of all as soldiers. The Company had one or two entirely British battalions, but these were submerged among the several thousand sepoys who garrisoned the presidencies as well as the outlying posts, and who were also employed on tax gathering and punitive expeditions. Since developing from a small trading concern into the huge business that it had become, the Company had become a state within a state. To exist, it needed to create perimeters of control, and within those perimeters there were many, many people who needed to be governed. Government not only meant protection from marauding neighbours. It also meant laws to be enforced, and taxes to be collected.
The natives accepted it all with amazing resignation, as they had accepted domination throughout their history. A thousand years before the birth of Christ the splendid natural harbour had been a base for trading with Persia, and a few hundred years later the great Ashoka had made the island part of his empire.
Then in the fourteenth century they had surrendered to the Muslims, sweeping down from the north. Bombay had become the seaport for the kingdom of Gujarat.
But soon others were casting envious eyes at that harbour. The Portuguese obtained possession of it in the early sixteenth century, and remained its rulers until 1661, when it formed part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to King Charles II of England. Seven years later the King granted the island to the East India Company as its headquarters; it was another hundred years before the centre of gravity shifted to Calcutta. Still Bombay remained the most important British-controlled port in the Far East.
No one apparently either knew or cared what the Great Mughal thought of these developments on the fringes of his vast empire. Because that empire had fallen into chaos. But the Europeans had actually been in possession of Bombay before Babar had swept through the Khyber Pass. Bahadur Shah of Gujarat had ceded the Island to Portugal in the very year, 1526, that the Mughals had gained the decisive victory of Panipat and opened the road to Delhi. Gujarat itself was not conquered until the days of the greatest of the Mughals, Akbar, who in 1572 had personally led his cavalry, marching four hundred and fifty miles in eleven days, to reach the sea.
No doubt the Great Mughal had been amused at the small settlement of white-skinned merchants with their prudery and quaint religious customs. He had not troubled them. Two years before his death in 1605 he had welcomed another white-skinned merchant, John Mildenhall, and granted him too trading concessions. What reason had Akbar to fear these representatives of a far distant people who sought only to trade?
John Mildenhall’s portrait hung above the factor’s desk. He had been the true founder of the Company.
*
The Mughal Empire had continued to expand for a hundred years after Akbar’s death. Indeed his great-grandson, Aurangzib, had been the most formidable of all the Mughal warriors. But Aurangzib had also sewn the seeds of the collapse of the imperial edifice, by his religious intolerance, and by his pathological suspicion of all around him. With his death in 1707 decline had followed fast. Now, in 1779, Shah Alam II, great-great-grandson of Aurangzib, the ninth generation in a direct line of descent from Babar, might still rule in Delhi. But he no longer sat upon the Peacock Throne. That had been looted forty years before by the Persian adventurer Nadir Shah. Delhi itself had been reduced to a ghost-haunted village by the Persian massacre. The viceroys had ceased sending tribute, and had claimed their independence, while always paying lip service to the Mughal.
Out of the chaos had arisen the great states of the Sifts and the Rajputs in the north, Hyderabad and its offshoots the Marathas in the south; out of the Maratha rebellion against the Nizam had come the no-less-powerful viceroyalties of Scindhia and Mysore. It had been a time for daring men to make their fortunes. Richard Bryant sighed as he kicked his way through the dust to the bachelor compound. Oh, to have been born only a generation ago!
Robert Clive had travelled to India, like Richard himself, as no more than a
Company clerk. But by the 1740’s the French had set up the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, and the most ancient of European rivalries was transferred several thousand miles to the steaming jungles of India.
Both sides had sought alliances with native princes, seeking concessions, opportunities of expansion, and ways of restricting the other. In these little wars and battles, seldom involving more than a few thousand Europeans who, with their superior weaponry and discipline, had been enabled to play a role out of all proportion to their number, Clive had proved himself the master. His earlier campaigns in the Carnatic had guaranteed the safety of both Madras and Bombay, and his crowning achievement now was in Bengal, where his victory at Plassey in 1757 had made a British protectorate of the huge eastern state.
The French had had enough. Twelve years later, in 1769, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales was dissolved, and the exploitation of the sub-continent was left entirely to the British.
They had not been slow to benefit. Many had grown rich, to an extent that shocked their less fortunate compatriots at home. Merchants returning from the East became known as nabobs, rich enough to buy themselves vast country seats and places in Parliament. They had become the most potent force in Britain.
It was this dream that still lured every young man of ambition to Bombay. No matter that for every nabob who returned to England a millionaire a score of clerks died of fever or dysentery, still penniless. No matter that even for those who had climbed the heights life was not always a bed of roses. Only five years ago Clive himself had committed suicide. Perhaps he had always had a suicidal bent; it was said that he had more than once tried to blow out his brains as a young man, but that on each occasion the pistol had misfired. On the other hand, perhaps no one had taken so much wealth as well as fame out of India. When accused of peculation the great man had retorted that he stood amazed at his own moderation, yet continued criticism had driven him once again to put a pistol to his head, and this time it had exploded.
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