9
NOT A SOUND reached down to those hidden in the water-passage. The guards watched and slept in turn. Marjorie and her husband dozed fitfully. Once Carruthers sat up, sure that morning had come, and, examining his watch, saw that it was just half-past one. Towards dawn Shuja-ul-Mulk crept out of the cavern on to the road with one of the sentries. They filled the bucket they had brought with them from the house and their water-bottles from the river and crept back again. The morning light filtered in through the crevice in the rock; Marjorie and Frank Carruthers moved down the cluttered passage to where the daylight showed that they might breathe the sweetness of the air.
“We shall have to-day to get through,” said Frank; and he looked with envy on Shuja-ul-Mulk, who, stretched on the ground, slept as only tired boyhood can sleep.
On the ground above the search was renewed in the morning. Once the sentries at the upper end of the passage heard the mob thrusting spear and stick into the pile of boulders just over their heads. It was the voice of the Mullah who saved the fugitives. For he cried aloud that they had been given shelter by Nizam, and the whole of the rabble marched off to the Fort. The gates were closed, but a parley took place between one of the Khan’s household mounted on the wall and the Mullah on the ground below. The Mullah and one of his partisans were admitted under a flag of truce and conducted over the Fort, so that they might assure themselves by the evidence of their eyes that the Agent and his wife had not sought sanctuary there. Thereafter the search was extended through the orchards, up the hillsides, and guards were posted on all the paths. Meanwhile Umra Beg waited behind the hills across the river. Tokot must seal its pact with the blood of the English runaways, before he was going to move. And so the day dragged on to twilight and the dark.
Shuja-ul-Mulk, waking then, explained that he would creep out and bring them news. But as he rose, the levy who was standing sentry bent forward and in a whisper bade him keep still. There was someone close to the mouth of the cavern on the road, with a sword in his hand.
Shuja-ul-Mulk crept to the narrow crevice and looked through. The moon had risen, a bright full moon in a sky of cloud; so that now the man’s shadow fell across the floor of the cavern like a black figure on a tomb, and now the darkness hid it altogether. Shuja-ul-Mulk took his long knife from its sheath at his back and drew his brown cloak over his head. Marjorie raised an arm to hold him back, but he slipped from her grasp. When the next cloud had covered the moon and passed, Shuja-ul-Mulk had disappeared from the refuge, but another big, rough boulder was added to those which already littered the floor of the cavern. There it remained motionless until again the moon was hidden, but when it shone again the boulder had moved nearer to the mouth of the cavern and to the watchman on the road. A third time the boulder changed its place, and now it lay so close to the watchman that he could have kicked it with his foot. Shuja-ul-Mulk waited until his chance came. Then he sprang with a great leap from the ground. His left hand clutched and held the watchman’s throat, and his right drove the knife into his back until the hilt smacked against the flesh. The man made a little bubbling sound as the blood burst from his mouth and his sword clattered on the ground. He fell and lay still. The boy dragged the body across the road and toppled it into the river. The torrent rushing over its great rocks took charge of it. As Shuja-ul-Mulk gathered up the sword, the rain began to fall. It fell in a sheet with the roar of many drums. There would be no more search for the fugitives that night.
Towards morning, however, it ceased, and the sun rose in a clear sky. As the light spread into the cavern and made a twilight in the recess on the inner side of the crevice, the sentry made a movement. Carruthers joined him and looked out. Across the river, through the fields men were streaming away, seeking their homes, to hide their weapons and resume their occupations.
What had happened?
One of the men rising from his sleep in the Agency grounds had climbed on to the top of the wall. Looking to the skyline at the head of the valley, he had seen men come over the crest and begin to descend. For a moment he had stood staring. Then he had uttered a loud cry:
“They are coming! They are coming!”
In a second there were twenty men watching as he watched. Over the crest, against the sky, still they came like a wheel turning, the troops of the relief expedition. The grounds of the Residency rang with the cries of alarm, the cries of fear.
“To your homes!”
The warning was taken up on every side, and panic followed upon it, panic and flight. . . .
10
A DAY LATER Carruthers, standing at the door of Colonel Marsh’s tent, said:
“Do you bring any instructions for me from the Governor?”
“None,” said Marsh; and a wave of relief swept over the Agent’s face.
“Thank the Lord!” he said, and then more formally, “I have summoned the chief men of Tokot to a durbar in the Fort at eleven o’clock. I ask for your presence and that of your chief officers.”
At eleven o’clock, then, in a big inner room of the Fort, Marsh, Adare, Morris, Shuja-ul-Mulk took their places. There was a guard of British soldiers outside the door, a Sergeant-Major and a file of men within the room. A big arm-chair stood empty in the middle of a row of chairs. On the right of it sat Carruthers, and next to him Shuja-ul-Mulk, and next to him again Adare of the Gurkhas. On the left of the big chair sat Marsh and Morris.
Carruthers turned to a servant of Nizam’s household and said:
“We are now ready for the Khan.”
Nizam came into the room, and though all stood ceremoniously to receive him, never could a man have looked more uneasy and confused. He had compliments of a fawning kind on the tip of his tongue, but Carruthers cut into them, the moment he began to stammer them out.
“We have business,” said Carruthers coldly, and to the Sergeant-Major at the door, “The durbar is open.”
The Sergeant-Major threw open the door, and the chief men, and the young nobles, arrayed in their best clothes, filed in and knelt facing the chairs. At a sign from Carruthers, the door was closed. Then Carruthers spoke:
“It is obvious that Tokot is not well governed. The Government of India offered to Tokot its friendship and protection. In return Tokot has allowed itself to be led astray by a false adviser like Dadu and a treacherous Mullah. Both these scoundrels have fled. Fugitives they are, and if they wish to live, fugitives they will remain. Meanwhile your Khan, Nizam, has not been equal to his work. I depose him.”
A little gasp broke from Marsh, and a smile spread over the broad face of Adare.
“That’s the stuff,” he said in a low voice.
With a contemptuous gesture Carruthers told Nizam to leave his chair and take a seat at the end of the row. In a dead silence, Nizam obeyed.
Carruthers stood up.
“Your Khan by right of birth, by right of courage, by right of loyalty, is Shuja-ul-Mulk.”
He took the boy by the hand and seated him in the great chair. A murmur ran along the rows of kneeling courtiers, a murmur of astonishment.
“The Khan will accept the help and advice of the British Agent until he reaches man’s estate, and will have an escort worthy of his rank. I have spoken. You will in turn make your obeisance to your Khan.”
Cowed by the firmness of Carruthers’ language and discountenanced by the swiftness of his procedure, one by one the head men and the young nobles prostrated themselves before the boy. Finally Nizam himself, humiliated and shamed, shuffled along to the big chair. A gasp of stupefaction passed round that audience, as Nizam put his knee on the ground. But he went no further. The young Khan bent forward quickly and raised him to his feet.
“My uncle, you shall not do that,” he said gently; and Carruthers got to his feet again and said:
“The durbar is closed.”
The head men and the courtiers filed out first. Adare touched Marsh on the arm:
“Our turn,” he said.
Carruthers and Shuja-ul-Mulk
were left alone in that big hall.
“What will you do?” Carruthers asked.
The boy turned to him with the shine of tears in his eyes.
“Great changes have come,” he said. “I shall thank you for them on another occasion. I shall listen to you on all occasions. You have been my father and my mother. But on this day I should like for a few minutes to sit here alone.”
And Carruthers left him, a little boy swallowed up in a great chair, alone in the Council Chamber of Tokot.
But after a few minutes the boy rose, he went out through a door at the back of the throne. He passed down a passage and climbed a stair. He pushed open a door. He stood in a bedroom looking down the valley. On a table in the bedroom stood the Yudeni drum with the drum-sticks held by the lacing. Picking up this drum, he climbed a dark and narrow stairway. At the top he opened yet another door and came out upon the flat roof of the tower fenced in with a low parapet. Far and wide now, his little kingdom extended on every side of him, orchards and fields and foaming river flanked by the hillsides black with cedars and overtopped by the eternal snows.
Shuja-ul-Mulk gently laid the drum on the roof where it had always lain, and turning towards Mecca, made his obeisance.
Königsmark (1938)
CONTENTS
I. TELLS OF A REHEARSAL
II. PHILIP THE PAGE
III. BERNSTORFF’S FIRST TASTE OF POWER
IV. A NIGHT OF TERROR
V. BERNSTORFF RETAINS HIS POSITION AND PHILIP LOSES HIS
VI. A MESSENGER TO HANOVER
VII. SOPHIA DOROTHEA GIVES A TASTE OF HER QUALITY
VIII. TAKES PLACE IN ENGLAND
IX. MURDER IN PALL MALL
X. THE END OF A FRIENDSHIP
XI. A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
XII. CLARA PLATEN FORGETS SOMETHING
XIII. DUCHESS SOPHIA AND THE FORLORN HOPE
XIV. SOPHIA DOROTHEA MARRIES
XV. BERNSTORFF QUOTES RACINE
XVI. ANTHONY CRASTON TAKES A FALL IN HANOVER
XVII. CRASTON MEETS A REDOUBTABLE LADY
XVIII. PHILIP COMES TO HANOVER
XIX. TWO OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN
XX. ACHILLES AND IPHIGENIA MEET AGAIN
XXI. A CONSPIRACY IS PLANNED
XII. AND HOW IT WORKED
XXIII. IN THE GARDEN THEATRE
XXIV. A DANGEROUS HOUR
XXV. ANTHONY CRASTON TURNS SPY
XXVI. STEALING ACROSS THE TRAPS
XXVII. ANTHONY TELLS
XXVIII. LETTERS ARE THE DEVIL
XXIX. A PLOT FOILED
XXX. A COTTAGE IN ARCADIA
XXXI. GOSSIP FROM DRESDEN
XXXII. THE NIGHT OF JULY 1ST, 1694: CLARA VON PLATEN
XXXIII. THE NIGHT OF JULY 1ST: PHILIP’S APOLOGY
XXXIV. THE NIGHT OF JULY 1ST: THE HALL OF THE KNIGHTS
XXXV. CLARA SEES IT THROUGH
XXXVI. GEORGE AUGUSTUS, PRINCE OF WALES, MAKES A PILGRIMAGE
The first edition
I. TELLS OF A REHEARSAL
CHANCELLOR SCHULTZ LEANED comfortably back in his cushioned chair and crossed his fat little legs. He laid his fat little hands side by side and palms downwards on the big mahogany table in front of him. He slid them apart over the polished surface to the full reach of his arms. Not a paper remained to reproach him. It was half-past eleven by the gilded clock against the wall. In a few minutes Duke George William, with his huntsmen and his dogs and his horns, would come clattering back from the moorlands. The day’s work was over and, for Chancellor Schultz, his life’s work too. The tablets of his service were clean now, and he was pleased to think that, though much written upon during twenty years, they had never been smudged.
He took a pinch of snuff, inhaled it slowly and struck a bell upon the table.
“Theodore,” he said to the footman who answered it, “will you please tell Councillor Bernstorff that I shall be happy if he will spare me a few minutes.”
But he wouldn’t be happy. Chancellor Schultz was never even comfortable with Councillor Bernstorff. Councillor Bernstorff was suave but secret. He wanted to jostle and push. He pined for things to happen. Now for Chancellor Schultz the flash of those pigeons burnished by the sunlight as they swooped down from the cupolas above the Castle’s yellow walls to the alley of lime- trees beyond the rusty old bridge over the moat — that was all that he wanted to see happening in the Duchy of Celle. However, Bernstorff was clever — and there was no one else. Only — and a little spasm of doubt shook the Chancellor, not for the first time, in the wisdom of his choice of a successor — there was the shape of the ferret in Councillor Bernstorff’s face, a sharpness to the cheek-bones, a needle-point to the nose, which his experience had taught him to link with a passion for land. Never had Councillor Bernstorff breathed a word to justify the Chancellor’s suspicion. He was, in every detail of his conduct, the mere industrious servant of the Chancery, modest in his outlook, frugal in his life. Yet Schultz nursed that suspicion and shook his head over it. A landless man hungry for land — who else in the world was so liable to the bribe? And what bribe could equal the feel of your very own clods of solid earth beneath the sole of your foot? But — but — there was no one else.
Chancellor Schultz heard the light tread of Bernstorff in the corridor and hurriedly adjusted his heavy peruke upon his bald head. This was an important moment in the simple history of Celle — though how important neither he nor anyone else could on that summer day foresee — and Councillor Bernstorff was a stickler for ceremony.
Bernstorff entered discreetly, a thin, tall young man in his twenty-eighth year, austere and correct from his top-knot to his heels. He bowed to his chief.
“Sit down, Bernstorff.” The Chancellor pointed to a chair and Bernstorff sat on the edge of it. “What devilish thin knees the fellow has!” Schultz reflected discontentedly. “But there’s no one else.”
Aloud he said: “This afternoon His Highness will hand over to you the seals of the Duchy.”
For a few moments Bernstorff stared at the Chancellor with incredulous eyes. Then the blood mounted slowly up his long neck into his cheeks.
“Your Excellency resigns?” he asked, subduing his voice to the hush which fits calamities. Inwardly he was saying to himself, “So the old fool’s going at last and high time too!” And he himself was going to move from his dark little office in the Court, overshadowed by the big lime-tree, into this spacious room which, across alleys of cedars and lawns smooth as emeralds, commended and surveyed the town.
“I shall make some changes in the furniture,” Councillor Bernstorff let his thoughts run on. “I’ll have that fine table against the window, so that the light may fall over my left shoulder. Not that I mean to write much more than my name in the future. But I don’t like doors behind me. And I’ll have the great clock opposite so that I can’t but see it when I raise my head and know if I’m wasting a minute.”
There would be corresponding changes outside the great window. To use a phrase not coined in the year 1680, Councillor Bernstorff meant to put the Duchy of Celle on the map, and himself with it. In the great carpet of Germany, as it was patterned then, Celle never caught the eye, so quiet was its colour. Other principalities, Brandenburg, Saxony, Hanover — yes, even Hanover, Celle’s little next-door neighbour — claimed all the attention. They glittered with jewels and fine clothes, even if the villages were dark and the villagers hungry. They were noisy with entertainment and, by the way, loud eating. They had country palaces and parks laid out on the model of Versailles. Had not Herrenhausen the highest fountain in Europe which flung a jet of water one hundred and forty feet high into the air? They sparkled, these Duchies, and if from time to time the sheen wore thin and offered a glimpse of dark passions and secret crimes — why, an astute Chancellor might easily turn such things to his profit. Whilst here, on the edge of these excitements and possibilities, Celle slept — placed, patriarchal, an everlasting Sunday afternoon!
At this point in his reflectio
ns Councillor Bernstorff was startled and alarmed. Schultz was talking: and after all he still had the seals of his office in his keeping. It would not be that the old fool was reading his thoughts as if they were printed in an open book. Yet he was saying: “Celle was not always this quiet and contented little Paradise. When I first became Chancellor, there were speeches at the street corners, deputations to the Palace, refusals to pay taxes, plots of revolution, such a pother and uproar as no man can imagine today. His Highness was squandering the revenues with Madame Buccolini in Venice. He could make the money fly in those days, I can tell you! Talk of the Doge marrying the Adriatic once a year. The Duke and his young brother, Ernest Augustus, the Bishop, married all Venice twice a night and with something more than a golden ring.”
Councillor Bernstorff sat back in his chair. Chancellor Schultz was only musing contentedly over the twenty-five years of his service. Duke George William had yielded to the remonstrances of his people He had returned and had dutifully offered his hand to Sophia of Bohemia and, unable to face so incongruous a match, had passed her on to his brother at a price.
“We were well quit of that good woman,” said Schultz.
“She is the granddaughter of an English King,” Bernstorff returned, shocked at so disparaging a phrase.
“And always aware of it,” said Schultz drily.
“She is a philosopher, learned, and the friend of philosophers,” declared Bernstorff.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 693