Not Yet Drown'd

by Peg Kingman

  Who was this woman, this widow? This apsara, this celestial musician? This lover of Catherine’s own beloved brother? This pillar of fire leading onward through a wilderness, through a desert? Of course Sandy had fallen in love with her. Fallen—tumbled, like falling off a cliff—in love with her. Who could not? He had saved her life; then he had heard her sing. She was as exquisite, as rare, as any one of Mr Fleming’s objets de vertu, only perfect and undamaged. Until then. Until Sandy had abandoned her.

  So sad! Why must it always end in sorrow, loss, pain, grief? Catherine felt herself trembling with her own loneliness. Master yourself! she thought grimly. Never let them see it or suspect it. And she heaved a strangled breath, then another, and made the welling tears sink away again, blinking and feeling the flush in her face.

  Sharada’s music reached its crescendo, its fullest expression, then veered toward resolution—approached and veered again. Again. Is it not to be achieved? Not yet? Yes, now. It is over. The final phrase resonated, then decayed in the marble-floored room.

  It is finished.

  “Brava!” cried Lady D’Oyly. “Why, she is very accomplished, your ayah, Mrs MacDonald! Has it a name, that song?”

  Having no idea herself, Catherine looked to Sharada to answer. “It is ‘Kakubha Ragini,’ memsahib,” said Sharada modestly. “It is for this hour of the day, late in the morning toward midday. The peacocks dancing on the terrace made me think of it.”

  “Well, it is a charming composition, very pretty. And you have it by memory! I daresay it would be hard to remember it all, so long and complicated. I wonder you do not have it written down.”

  “Oh, no, memsahib, we do not write down our music in India. Music is to be made fresh, each time, for each occasion, like making delicious food,” said Sharada. “Or love,” she added very quietly.

  “Making up music as one goes along! How peculiar!” said Lady D’Oyly, and she cocked her head and examined her painting. “But I do like what I have got of her expression. This will be a fine addition to my collection of local types. So many of my models, the women in particular, cannot bear to be looked at. But then, if she plays music for an audience, she is accustomed to being looked at.”

  “She has played at Lucknow for the Nawab of Oudh himself,” Catherine said.

  “Oh!” said Lady D’Oyly, impressed. “For the nawab!”

  “And my portrait has been painted before now, memsahib, on one occasion,” said Sharada quietly.

  “Ah! Well, I must go and wash my hands. Sir Charles says I am the messiest of painters. Are we ready for our tiffin as soon as I come back? Ayah, on your way out, go and tell the cook that we are ready for our tiffin.” And Lady D’Oyly left them to themselves. Sharada uncoiled herself and picked up her vina.

  “Wait, Sharada,” said Grace, still seated at the round table in the center of the room, where she had been paging through Sir Charles’s albums. “Don’t go. Come here and look at this.”

  Sharada came and looked over Grace’s shoulder. There was a faint musical crash then as she involuntarily banged the vina against the edge of the table. Shakily she set down the fragile instrument and leaned heavily on the table with both hands. Her breath came coarse and ragged, like an asthmatic’s.

  “Whatever is the matter?” said Catherine, for she saw that Sharada was struggling not only for breath but for composure.

  “Come see this, Catriona,” said Grace in an odd voice, in Gaelic.

  “Do speak English, Grace, and you mustn’t call me Catriona,” said Catherine, but she came and looked over Grace’s other shoulder. Sir Charles’s big album lay open, flat upon the table. Its pages were large, perhaps sixteen by twenty inches, of substantial paper. Mounted onto each right-hand page was a piece of artwork. Facing it on the left-hand page was written in Sir Charles’s hand a brief account of the picture’s provenance: the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of it, the name of the artist, the date painted and the date acquired, the price he paid for it; the subject of it, the names of the people pictured if it was a portrait; or the location depicted if it was scenery.

  The album lay open to a traditional Indian picture of two musicians in a garden—a man and a woman. The painting was skillful; the colours and composition were pleasing. At first glance it was much like a great many Indian pictures Catherine had seen. The two figures sat on a carpet laid out on the terrace before a pavilion, with a tray of refreshments nearby. The garden foliage made a rich dense enclosure about them, a luxuriant textured green wall of tropical foliage starred with flowers. In the foreground were plants in pots, and a small round pond in which ducks sported and lotus flowers bloomed. The sky showed the first bright stars of evening between dark dramatic clouds. The picture itself was bounded by three narrow bands of scarlet, azure, and gold; and above this painted frame was a caption—a few lines of writing in the native script that Catherine now recognised as Devanagari.

  But as she looked, Catherine saw that in its details this picture was rather different from others she had seen. Although the female musician, who played a vina, was certainly a traditional type, with Indian features depicted in profile, the male musician was not. He was portrayed full face; he had pale skin and a long nose, and wispy reddish hair escaped from under his turban. His cheeks were puffed out comically and unbecomingly around the mouthpiece of his instrument. Like the female musician, he was sitting cross-legged on the carpet; but what was the instrument he played? Catherine peered closely at it. There could be no doubt that it was meant to represent a Scottish Highland bagpipe, though the artist had got the drones arrayed in the wrong order, with the tall bass drone to the outside. And no piper in Scotland ever could, or ever did, or ever would play sitting down cross-legged on the ground.

  Grace pointed to a word written in delicate script on the sash of the vina player. “That says ‘Sharada,’” she said. There was a word written likewise on the piper’s sash: “And that…says ‘Sikander.’”

  Catherine could not help glancing up into Sharada’s face. She was pale; stricken. And her veil betrayed that she was trembling.

  “But the most curious thing of all,” said Grace, “is this writing above the picture.”

  “What does it say?” asked Catherine.

  “At first I could make nothing of it,” said Grace, “for while it is written in the Devanagari script, the words—well, they are just gibberish. They are not Hindi words, nor Urdu, nor anything I could make out. So I tried to whisper them to myself, you know, sounding them out as I used to do—and…and Catriona, they are English words but written in Devanagari, not in our English letters. You cannot recognise them as words; you have to read aloud the sounds, then you can hear the English words in them, do you see?”

  “No, not exactly…”

  “If you read the sounds, just the sounds, it says: ‘If you love me, beloved, as I love you, then come with me to the abode of clouds and mist, to dwell in a garden of perpetual delight, feasting on music and love and the nectar of the gods. Come tonight, my own heart and breath, at midnight. I await you at—at—’…But this bit I cannot quite make out. It says, challeesaturn…”

  “‘Chalis Satoon,’” corrected Sharada softly. “At the Hall of Forty Pillars….”

  “Have they not brought our tiffin yet?” broke in the voice of Lady D’Oyly as she came briskly in again with clean hands.

  “We are so very interested in this picture, Lady D’Oyly,” said Catherine. “What is it, and where did it come from?”

  “Oh, let us see. Yes, that one. What does my husband’s catalog entry say? Hmm, hmm, yes: ‘Purchased at auction for ten rupees on January 17th, 1822. Musicians in garden. Possibly portraiture but subjects unidentified. Unsigned & artist unknown, but may be Hulas Lal.’ Oh, yes, of course! It was the most shocking thing…. Do you remember, Mrs MacDonald, my telling you of that band of Thugs which was broken up last year up near Ghazipur? Yes; sixteen of them were hanged—the youngest only fourteen years of age—after confessing to the
murders of thirty-seven poor travelers which had taken place in the previous year alone. Dreadful. But this painting, wrapped in a very handsome shawl, was found among the booty of this gang of murderers. They must have taken it from one of their poor victims after strangling him and before throwing the body down a well. After the trial, of course its rightful owner was advertised for, but, as is so often the case, no one stepped forward to claim it, so it was auctioned off with the other unclaimed goods. And that is how Sir Charles acquired it, up at Ghazipur, last year. It is an odd picture, is it not? What is one to make of it? I do not read Indian writing myself, but my munshi—my steward, you know—cannot make any sense of it either. But I suppose Sir Charles thought it interesting, and worth setting aside at any rate in this album of miscellany and curiosities. He gave me the shawl that was with it—I have it in my room. I suppose we shall never know.”

  “Memsahib, it belongs to me,” said Sharada, putting her hands together and making a very deep namaste. “I am the rightful owner.”

  “IT WAS INDEED Lal-ji who made this painting of us: Hulas Lal,” said Sharada later, alone with Catherine and Grace in Catherine’s little sitting room. “He was a dear friend of my father’s, even though my father—who had been blind for many years—could never appreciate any of Lal-ji’s beautiful paintings. It was Lal-ji’s small joke to show Sikander-ji thus, a joke appreciated even by himself, for your brother understood even our small jokes, memsahib. There was no caption written on it when I saw it last, when my father gave the picture to Sikander-ji.”

  The picture itself now lay on Sharada’s lap, for Lady D’Oyly had been persuaded to part with it to its claimant. Catherine reimbursed her the ten rupees that Sir Charles had spent on it; and Catherine had been reimbursed in turn by Sharada, who insisted. Sharada kept her fingertips on the edge of the paper. She had to touch it, to trail her fingertips over the writing at the top of the picture. “But this is Sikander’s own handwriting,” she said softly. “I would know it anywhere, to the end of my life.”

  His own handwriting? How strange, thought Catherine, that although she herself would instantly know Sandy’s writing in English or Gaelic, recognise it as easily as recognising his face, his own hand in this unknown script was utterly foreign to her.

  “He came in the evenings,” said Sharada dreamily. “I waited for him always in my father’s garden. I had little sweetmeats awaiting him which I had prepared myself. Nothing was too laborious. He had a liking for our little delicious morsels—even paan, which other sahibs refuse. I was teaching him many songs of India. And he was teaching me songs of Scotland. He helped me to speak English. We were talking, singing, playing…Oh, those beautiful nights, in my father’s fragrant garden! I begged him to stay, stay, and sometimes he stayed even until the sky began to lighten in the east. But he was always afraid of tiring me, of staying too long. I never tired of his company, of his caresses. Of his talk. He spoke of his desire for making tea gardens. He brought me a present, a tea plant in a pot. Look, there it is, in the painting—that one in the corner.

  “Only death, I believed, could ever separate us! And after all, it was only death that kept us apart! But it was not his death; it was the death of the messenger, the poor chaprasi by whose hand he sent this. He did send for me! How long did he wait there at the Chalis Satoon in the pounding rain that terrible night? He could not know that his message miscarried. What did he think of me? Why did he not send again? Why did he not come and capture me, taking me from my father’s house? Did he suppose I lacked the resolve to go away with him? I would have gone anywhere with him. Anywhere for him. But we went away from each other, each not knowing. I went away supposing him dead. He went away supposing perhaps that I had not devotion enough.”

  “But where has he gone?” said Catherine. “Where in the world has he gone?”

  Sharada came back up from her reverie, her contemplation of the picture on her lap. “But to Meghalaya, of course,” she said.

  “Meghalaya?”

  “To Meghalaya, in Assam, in the rainy hills beyond the Brahmaputra. That is what he says here: ‘to the Abode of Clouds and Mist.’ In Sanskrit, that is Meghalaya, and it lies in the hills of Assam beyond the great Brahmaputra River.”

  “‘Abode of Clouds and Mist?’” repeated Catherine. “He would feel at home among clouds and mist. That is what Skye is called at home: the Misty Isle.” Sandy! So deceptive, that trickster! How could he have done this? It was like his own handwriting transformed into something unrecognisable, unknown, unsuspected. “But how could he? How could he let us all suffer so!” burst out Catherine.

  “But he did send you a message, memsahib, a private message that he was not drowned. He did not wish that you should suffer, that you should grieve. That message did not miscarry, for did I not carry it myself! And then you, you and Grace, and Lady D’Oyly, too, were the means of carrying his message to me at last, at last—so very late! He will be amazed when he learns of it. When I find him.”

  “Do I understand you to mean that you propose to go to Assam to find him?”

  “Of course, memsahib. I am going there—with you.”

  “Hmm! I remember when you said to me, at the inn at Leith, that I would go to India. I knew you were only a charlatan then. Now I am not so sure.”

  Sharada laughed, a deep, full-throated laugh, her teeth glinting.

  “But just how do you expect that we are to get to Assam?” said Catherine. “Perhaps you will arrange a magical bird or a flying chariot to carry us?”

  “Those steamships which your brother has made are most wonderful vessels, memsahib. Able to swim against the strong current.”

  “Unfortunately, the wonderful steamships do not belong to me. Mr Fleming has other plans for them. And in any case there is a war brewing in Assam, or so I have heard. So says Major Leslie. And what will Hector say! I dread to think of it.”

  “I expect he will roar,” said Sharada. “But I myself will walk to Assam if I must. And as you are going there, too, memsahib, and as you will not like walking so very far, therefore I suppose you will be arranging something better.”

  “BUT IT IS out of the question, Mrs MacDonald,” said Mr Fleming. “It would be so unwise for you to go to Assam just now. There, you know, you would be outside even the scant protection which the East India Company affords to Britons within its territories.”

  He loomed dark and heavy, standing over her in her own little sitting room in Patna, uninvited and unwelcome. For once she had been unable to avoid him.

  Who had asked for his advice or his help? No one. Without any reference to him, Catherine had made her own arrangements with Major Leslie for going to Assam. She took a firm hold of her heat-worn temper and answered mildly: “No, Mr Fleming, I daresay you are quite right. I do understand that Assam is not entirely safe. Nor are we entirely safe, I suppose, elsewhere in India. Indeed, Grace and I left Scotland because we were not safe there. It may be that no place in the world is entirely safe. Dreadful things may happen anywhere.” Had Hector sent Mr Fleming to try to dissuade her when his own efforts had failed? “I have excellent private reasons of my own for wishing to go to Assam, and the sooner, the better,” she said.

  “Yes, your brother has told me of your reasons,” said Mr Fleming. “I think you might have told me yourself long before this. Why did you never mention to me this belief of yours that Alexander is alive? You knew that he was my dear friend, too.”

  Why had she not? Why had she held this private intuition back from him, even during their long voyage, when she had still liked and trusted him? She had not wanted, then, to appear silly in his eyes. She had not wanted to forfeit his good opinion then. That was before she had learned that he did not merit her own good opinion. She said, “Oh, being scoffed at by Hector was quite enough for me, thank you.”

  “I would not have scoffed at you,” he said. “I daresay that you are right about this feint of Alexander’s. When I knew him, all too briefly, I saw something of his determin
ation, and his cleverness. I did form an impression that he was even then devising some plan, and that no entity so puny, so inconsiderable as the entire East India Company, could thwart his intention once he had made up his mind to it. You warned me once, some time ago, that MacDonalds never do give up.”

  “And I advised you also, I believe, that we are often proven right in the end.”

  “So you did. And I told you that we Flemings are just the same way.”

  Catherine said nothing, only sitting quietly, pretending a calm she did not feel. His presence oppressed her; there was not air enough in the room for them both.

  “But there is no compelling reason for you to go there immediately,” said Mr Fleming. “Even in peacetime, Assam is infested with tigers, wild elephants, rhinos—not to mention the headhunters in the more distant reaches of the mountains. And it is not even peacetime. The whole of the Brahmaputra Valley has been wracked these last four or five years by the most hideous atrocities. And now the monsoon is due; it may arrive any day. The monsoon comes early and very hard to Assam. Going up that river in June is for fools and madmen. If you will only wait—”

  She interrupted him: “Is Major Leslie a fool and a madman, then?”

  “Oh, Major Leslie! You may find that he is both those things, and worse. But I did not come to talk about Major Leslie. I was going to say, wait until after the monsoon, and after this voyage to China which your brother and I must make. Wait until October. October or November, if all goes well. The monsoon will be over, the cool weather returned. And then, if go you still must, I will take you up the Brahmaputra in Castor or Pollux.”

  That was a generous offer, and unexpected. But unwanted. “Thank you; no,” she said. “I have made up my mind to go immediately. And as Major Leslie is already carrying Mrs Hill and her infant up to Goalpara to rejoin her husband, and to take up his new command there, he has invited me to join their party.”