Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  Ku-Fel suffered much, as well. She was first hung up by her thumbs in the lowest dungeon, where insects bit her naked flesh and the rats of Pradesh climbed upon her body, trailing slime. Then her tongue was pulled out with hot pincers, and the master sent her back to Rajasthan. He sent a guard along with her: the Sherpas who had conspired with her during the time she was at court in Jabal-Mahal. But the Sherpas were killed first and tied into place on their horses. If Ku-Fel managed to reach her homeland alive, she would be surrounded by a guard of putrefying corpses.

  The maharajah was mad, wild for revenge. He did not even seem to care if war with Rajasthan should be the result of his vindictiveness. His honor was the only thing that mattered, and he saw to it that his honor was avenged.

  It was the savagery that alarmed Selena most, and which cast a deep pall over her relationship with the master.

  And then there was the child.

  In Quest of Steel

  She grew gloriously toward her first year, bright, playful, exuberant. Soon she would be walking, speaking, and Selena thought it was high time that she be taken to a European settlement in Calcutta, from which, if fate was kind, she might eventually return to her maternal homeland, and to her kinfolks, thus fulfilling Selena’s promise. Selena herself was resigned to concubinage here at Jabal-Mahal for as long as she could envision, but if they waited too long to move the child, the transference might have a terrible effect upon her spirit. At least, before her first year, a sound adjustment was quite possible. She loved the little girl deeply, dearly, but it would not be good to keep her here.

  The maharajah bridled whenever she mentioned the subject, however, and his eyes narrowed, showing a fiery glint. He said nothing, but his meaning was plain: the little girl is mine; she stays with me. It would not do to mention that he had promised—or at least implied—otherwise.

  Then there was the matter of the name.

  “It should be a Christian name,” Selena once ventured to say.

  “The child was born here in Jabal-Mahal, and this is India,” he told her. “Moreover, this is Jabalpur, in Pradesh, where I rule. The child shall be given an Indian name.”

  “When?” Selena wanted to know. Privately, she called her Gayle; in public, simple endearments like “darling” or “love.”

  “When I have the appropriate impulse” was all he would say. “I wish to find something perfect. It can be none other.”

  For a time after Rupal and Ku-Fel were removed, Selena once again enjoyed the unremitting favors of her master. But it was different now. Not that it was no longer good. Rather, something had shifted in their relationship, and, more especially, in the maharajah himself. The trial and its result had been more than disconcerting to him.

  One night he loved her hard, with no gentleness. His body pounded down upon hers, and his stalk of flesh rammed deeply inside her, again and again. She thought at first that he was approaching the frenzy of imminent, tantalizing release, which she understood from the responses of her own body during love, but it was something else. It was a need to dominate her, to master her, to make her cry out in pain.

  She did.

  He ceased, and grinned above her in the darkness. “You do not like it? I had been informed that Western men do it so.”

  How? Who had told him that? “It’s not true,” she said. “You’re hurting me.”

  “No, that is the way. Gayle told me, many times, about Captain Randolph. So I decided to attempt it. Perhaps it is because I am growing tired of you.”

  If he waited for an expression of anguish, it did not come.

  “So,” he said, sliding off her, as if an issue of great import had just been resolved, “you may return to your quarters.”

  After that, it was almost impossible to speak with him about the child or to plead with him about making arrangements regarding Calcutta.

  “Little no-name,” she murmured to herself one afternoon, playing alone with the girl in her special nursery, “what’s to become of us? What’s to become of you?”

  It was March now, early fall of 1776. Upon the hills of Pradesh the colors were changing, just as they did far away in Europe. But here it was winter that approached, and even if it was to be a gentle winter, she did not look forward to it. Nor did she look forward to much of anything now, except an occasional conversation with Davi, who sensed her disconsolation.

  He entered that day, bearing as usual a tray of refreshments for the afternoon: juices and sherbets and sweet-breads thinly sliced. The child loved to see him come, and tried first to totter over toward him. But that took too long, and she dropped to her hands and knees, crawling fast, saying something like A-vee, A-vee, and reaching up for a treat. She responded to his gentleness as well, and Selena often thought that the two of them, she and the Dravidian, were the only ones in the whole place—including the maharajah—who responded to the child as anything but a thing. Certainly, the master was solicitous, but to him the girl was a symbol, not a human being. A symbol for whom an appropriate name had to be fashioned, which took as much time—if not more—as devising the perfect epitaph. Then she understood. If this baby stayed here, she would be as dead all her life as, even now, her mother was dead beneath the white cross.

  “You are worried?” Davi asked, setting the tray on a low table so the child could reach it. But he did not so much ask it as say it. Nor did she have to answer.

  “Much is happening,” he went on, “and none of it calming. This morning a messenger arrived from Rajasthan, demanding the return of Ku-Fel’s dowry, upon threat of war. The master is most distressed. In the first place, Ku-Fel is alive. Somehow she made it through the mountains. Perhaps the dead Sherpas were guard enough and scared away brigands. Or even suitors,” he joked. “Ku-Fel without a tongue is not so bad. Then, too, if he were to return the dowry, a great part of his wealth would be gone, and he would be forced to deal with the approaching British merchants from a position of weakness.”

  “They are dose? The British?” She was still a MacPherson, all right, and felt a shiver of distaste course through her, like bad blood. But they would be European and, as such, brothers in a lost land.

  “Yes. Three days ago they bargained with the Nawab of Allahabad, for purchase rights to his crops of grain and wheat. They also suspect the presence of certain metals beneath the earth, of which I do not know, a vein which is said to extend through Pradesh, and which is controlled by our master. But about which he knows nothing either. So, if he must bargain from weakness and ignorance, he is lost. He needs the dowry, and he might even decide war is preferable to losing it.”

  Selena remembered the time the master had led her into the vast room of wealth, and she had seen the chest of matchless jewels.

  “So you have seen it?” Davi asked, reading her thoughts.

  She smiled. “It is incomparable. With a handful of any of the stones in that case, I could live like a queen for the rest of my life… If I were out of here,” she added.

  “About that, Ku-Fel was correct, I am afraid. The discipline cells may be gone, but once one is here, one remains. One of your appearance fleeing through the countryside would stand out like a rabbit in a school of fish.”

  She tried to laugh at his joke, but it was difficult.

  “But you could flee if you planned it,” she suggested.

  He shook his head. “I am Dravidian. I go where I am kicked.”

  They sat there in the nursery for a time, wrapped in their mutual sadness, until Selena felt the little girl’s chubby hand pulling at her sari. She looked at the tiny face with its tentative smile. Is everything all right? the baby wanted to know. Let’s play. And that snapped them out of it for the time being.

  Just as Davi was about to leave, taking the trays and glasses with him, and just as Selena was putting the child down for her nap, a great commotion broke out somewhere in the front courtyard of Jabal-Mahal.

  “War? Already?” Selena wondered.

  “No,” Davi said, rushing to the w
indows and looking out. “A group of men is coming up the road. They must be…yes, they are the trading party. Your people,” he cried, happy for her. “You may not be permitted to speak to any of them, but you might at least look.”

  Not speak to them! She would find a way! One of them might have heard of Sean Bloodwell, even get a message to him. She rushed to the window and saw them. The distance was great—several hundred yards—but they were Europeans, all right. She could tell by the way they sat their horses, erect, confident, with just the slightest trace of arrogance, which seemed to be a British trait. There were six altogether, speaking to the gate guards as their horses stamped. It was too far away to see any of them clearly. She was straining to see when one of the maharajah’s attendants came to the door.

  “The master wishes your presence at once,” he said to Selena, impudently neglecting the ritual bow of courtesy.

  “I shall be there in a moment.”

  “At once,” the attendant repeated, with a hard edge to his voice.

  “Go,” Davi said. “I shall see to the child.”

  Wondering about the reason for this sudden call after so many weeks of coldness, Selena followed the attendant out of the nursery, down the gleaming white marble halls of the palace, and into the wing in which the maharajah performed his public, judicial, and administrative functions. It, too, contained a raised platform with a golden, thronelike chair upon it, and a long carpet stretched out in front so that supplicants and subjects might approach their temporal deity on their knees. She had never seen one who did not do so. Yet, she had never heard of an Englishmen who had done so to a foreign ruler.

  At least it would be interesting.

  The attendant stood aside at the entrance to the master’s private office and waved her inside with a leer and a casual gesture. She found the maharajah greatly vexed, although he tried not to let it show.

  “Those British traders are at the gates,” he said. “I have given the order to let them enter. I shall grant them an audience immediately.”

  He said nothing, and neither did she. It was not her place. But it seemed to her as if he actually wanted her to speak. The silence went on. He paced a bit, not looking at her.

  “I was summoned here,” she said tentatively.

  “Hmmmmm?” He looked up. “Yes.” He spoke quickly, in his clipped tones. “This is difficult for me. I wish you had never set foot inside Jabal-Mahal. Yet, I have appreciated you, in my way, and even—as you say—I may love you…but…”

  He let the thought lapse. She waited.

  “I did not mean to offend you,” he started again, “with my words about your setting foot here. It is simply that…that since you have come I now realize I have certain…” he gritted it out “…certain weaknesses, I lack certain information, and such deficiencies will not be of use to me. In dealing with these British.”

  He paced a little more now, and then glanced out into the courtyard to note the progress of the trading party. Servants were bringing them toward the palace; Selena could hear the hooves of the horses ringing on the white stones, a sound that called back memories for her.

  “My ruler friends in other parts of India have done badly in their dealings with the traders, with the East India Company. We cannot understand it. We own the land. We have the power. We possess the wealth. But suddenly much of it is gone, and the British are swarming about our provinces, and even our people begin to obey them. I sadly fear that a time may come when India shall cease to be what she is, and become instead some terrible bastardization of East and West…”

  He stopped pacing and looked at her.

  “These, are your people,” he said. There was a note of pleading in his voice. “You understand them. I want you to be present with me when I begin the audience. You will listen but must not speak unless I grant you leave. The sight of one of their women hare may cow them.”

  She did not want to tell him that such a sight a Christian woman obviously subject in all ways to a pagan ruler, would be guaranteed to elicit just the opposite effect. Perhaps that might nerve one of them to help her! Dream on, Selena. If anything, knowing how men were, it would only make them contemptuous of her, and perhaps jealous of the maharajah.

  “I understand the British,” she said coldly, “and I hate them.”

  He smiled. “So you are perfect as my adviser. Come, let us go to the throne. You stand to my left…”

  “Davi has had training in business matters,” she said.

  An odd, unpleasant, yet satisfied expression appeared on his intent, dark face. “You must know this anyway,” he said, “so you may as well know it now. I am having your little black friend arrested right now. And executed in due course.”

  She could not believe it. It could not be true! “Why?”

  But it was. His sudden cry rang in her mind: Selena! Help!

  “Even now it is being done,” he told her. “I cannot stand to have in my palace a piece of lower-caste scum who has seen me in weakness and error.”

  “We are human,” she cried. “We all possess weakness. We all err. It is…”

  Selena! They are putting me in chains!

  “…it is natural.”

  This knowledge did not move him. She had not the slightest idea what to do. Other than to defy him. But, in a strange way, she and Davi were one, and the maharajah could not act against either of them, this minute, with the visitors at the gates. But she had done other dangerous things, too, she told herself. And she could do this one.

  “Release Davi this instant,” she demanded, looking at him coldly, their eyes level at each other. “Release him and bring him here, that I may know he is safe. Or I will not help you with the British.”

  Selena! Davi pleaded.

  The maharajah stared at her, incredulous. But he was doing his own calculating, too, and she saw him accede to her demand before he spoke. But, she saw as well, he also knew that later would arrive, when he might do as he wished.

  “Free him now,” she said again.

  He did not speak to her, but instead turned away and gave the necessary orders.

  Davi, it is all right, she spoke with her mind, but in a little while, after he had been brought to the throne room and placed on a low chair, present to watch the British, both of them knew it was not all right. The maharajah was a young man and not an untalented one, but the pressures upon him of late—the trial, an impending war, the British foray—caused him to dismiss logic, to act upon impulse. And his impulses were the willful, arbitrary reflexes of the one born to power, and luxury, and the righteousness of caprice.

  He mounted to his throne, drew about him a robe of silk, took in his hand a silver staff with the silver head of a tiger at one end, silver talon of an eagle at the other, and bade the doors be opened, the visitors approach.

  Selena looked up with mild excitement as the great golden doors parted, revealing the small group of men standing there. They had not been allowed the time to change from their riding gear, and Selena knew this had been done intentionally, that they should appear with the sweat and dust of the road before the impeccable ruler of Jabalpur. She saw them shuffle there a moment, and then begin a slow approach toward the end of the carpet that led to the throne.

  First confrontation, she thought, and then her heart went cold and her mouth dry as dust.

  The man who stepped forward, into the lead, with his broad shoulders, erect carriage, thick hair of reddish-blond, and bold yet friendly eyes…

  …was Sean Bloodwell.

  He was not looking at her, and this gave Selena time to curb her wild, contradictory emotions. She had not realized, as a silly young girl in Scotland, how truly powerful and competent he looked, and how assured. The sun of the Southern Hemisphere had tanned him well, setting off the shrewd intelligence in his eyes. She watched him as, walking slowly, formally, he first glanced at the maharajah, to measure the latter—his degree of hauteur, his probable character—and then glance down at the beginning of the ritual ca
rpet. He knew immediately what it was there for, and stopped just at its edge. He looked up at the maharajah, bowed slightly. The master lifted his chin, and waited.

  “I am a citizen of Great Britain, and a subject of King George,” he said straightforwardly. “I am aware of your customs, sir, but I am admonished not to bend knee to another ruler, even one so great as yourself.”

  Selena saw the maharajah deduce the principle that was concealed in the flattery, and frown.

  “Nor would you wish a subject of yours to bow down before the ruler of another land.”

  Selena saw the maharajah accept the principle.

  “I and my colleagues come as representatives of the East India Company, to establish trade with…”

  And then, confident that he had made his point about not approaching the maharajah on his knees, Sean let his eyes wander just a bit, take in the throne, and the canopy, and the woman standing beside the Indian…