Ghost Fire

by Wilbur Smith

  “Theo-sahib has returned,” he announced.

  Mansur rose. “I wasn’t aware he had gone out.”

  Theo stood on the doorstep between two sepoys. Meridew waited beside them, red-faced with fury. A large gathering of Indians and Englishmen crowded behind them.

  “I was not expecting so many callers at this hour,” Mansur said calmly.

  “He broke into my garden, clambered onto my roof and interrupted a private entertainment I was hosting for the most eminent citizens of Madras,” said Meridew.

  Mansur considered this. “I wish I could say that does not sound like my son.”

  “And what was the nature of this entertainment?” asked Verity, innocently. She was behind her husband, peering over his shoulder.

  Meridew blanched. “I would rather not say in front of a lady.”

  “But if I am to punish my son, I must know the nature of the offense.”

  Meridew tried to catch Mansur’s eye. “If you and I could discuss this in private—between gentlemen, as it were—”

  “My husband and I have no secrets from each other,” said Verity.

  She fixed Meridew with a stare that brooked no argument. Meridew flushed and looked away.

  “I am sure the entertainment must have cost a great deal of money,” added Mansur. “If you send your man to my office in the morning, I will see you are properly compensated.”

  Meridew took the offer for what it was—a bribe. “I dare say you know best how to discipline your own children,” he muttered.

  “I promise you it will not happen again,” said Verity. She shot Theo a dark look. “Will it?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “What were you thinking?” Mansur exclaimed, as soon as the door had closed on Meridew. “Where did you get such a ridiculous idea?”

  The truth was, it had been Constance who first heard about the dancers, and Constance whose curiosity had insisted they try to peek in. But Theo would not betray her. There was still a chance she might have escaped unseen.

  “I heard some of the boys talking about it,” he lied. “I—I wanted to see the nautch girls.”

  Mansur and Verity shared a parental look.

  “I understand a boy your age will have certain—interests,” Mansur said awkwardly, “but you cannot embarrass us like this. Our family is not so secure here that we can afford to antagonize the Company.”

  Theo stuck out his chin. “I don’t give a fig for the East India Company.”

  “Go to your room.”

  Theo made to argue—but one look at his father’s face convinced him to think better of it. He stomped up the stairs.

  Mansur turned to Verity and sighed. “He is a growing young man, with a young man’s desires,” he reflected. “It is natural he should want to see such things.”

  “But not in such a manner,” Verity responded tartly. “Soon Constance will need a husband, and if it is said that her brother goes around ogling native women from rooftops, there is not a reputable family in the whole Presidency who would countenance such a match.”

  Mansur grinned. “Of course, my love, you would never have dreamed of marrying a disreputable young man. You would not have countenanced it, Cousin.”

  Verity glared at him. She and Mansur were cousins, though they had grown up unaware of each other’s existence. Their fathers, the brothers Dorian and Guy Courtney, had been mortal enemies. But from the first moment Mansur spied Verity through a telescope, on the deck of her father’s ship, he had fallen absolutely in love with her.

  “I conducted myself with the utmost decorum,” said Verity.

  “You leaped onto my ship during a sea battle, and left your father clutching a fistful of your blouse, so keen was he to keep you from me,” Mansur answered.

  Guy Courtney, Verity’s father, had been a monster, who beat his daughter savagely and abused her for his own purposes. Later, he had tried to kill the whole Courtney family. When he had held a knife to Mansur’s baby cousin Jim’s throat, Mansur’s aunt Sarah had shot him dead.

  “I wonder how Sarah and Tom are faring,” Verity mused.

  Mansur sucked on his hookah and didn’t reply. Thinking about Tom and Sarah, their son Jim and grandson George, reopened old wounds he preferred not to dwell upon.

  Verity read the expression on his face. She rose. “I should see that Constance is all right. I hope she has not been disturbed by all the commotion and Theo’s foolishness this evening.”

  But when she put her head around Constance’s door, everything was as it should be. Her daughter lay in her bed, her golden hair spread across the pillow, breathing softly in her deep, untroubled sleep.

  •••

  The next day, Mansur received a summons from the governor to attend a meeting of the East India Company council. The note came with no explanation, and even the offer of a silver fanam could not pry any more information from the servant who had brought it.

  I hope this is not about Theo’s escapades, Mansur thought, as he mounted the steps of the governor’s mansion in Fort St. George. Officially, he and the East India Company were competitors. Though they had developed a tacit understanding that benefited both parties, Mansur preferred to keep the Company at arm’s length whenever possible. They, in turn, rarely allowed him into their confidence.

  But now the whole council was waiting for him—all the most senior traders and officials in Madras. They sat around a long mahogany table in an airy first floor room with high windows. Dust marks on the wall showed the outlines of the swords and muskets that had once been on display, at a time when the Company needed to proclaim the force of its arms. Now even the shadows were barely visible, poking out behind the paintings that had replaced them.

  Mansur had dressed, as usual, in the Indian style. He wore billowing shalwar breeches of striped silk, a fitted coat of cotton dyed bright green, and a turban threaded with gold. Silk slippers with pointed toes completed the ensemble—yet none of the men in the room gave his dress a second glance. They were used to the eccentricities of their fellow merchants. Some, in private, would wear similar garments when they visited clients or their mistresses. In the heat, tumult and sensuous living of India, men behaved in ways they would never dream of in London. Mansur, with his Omani blood, they considered more than half Oriental anyway.

  There were a dozen men on the council, none of them above forty and most nearer twenty. Their faces were burned red by the sun or too much liquor, their young bodies prematurely aged and gaunt from the diseases they had survived. But all had the same glint aflame in their eyes: a hunger for fortune that would never be sated. For all their affability, there was not one—Mansur knew from personal experience—who would not sell his own daughter if he could make twenty percent.

  They had no loyalty to their employer. They wielded the power of the East India Company, and drew their salaries punctiliously, but every man earned ten times more by cheating the directors in London. As much as they traded on the Company’s behalf, the best goods and the fattest profits always somehow accrued to their own accounts.

  And the man to whom they looked to facilitate their commerce away from the jealous eyes in Leadenhall Street was Mansur Courtney. With a fleet of ships, and a network of agents that stretched from Canton to Calcutta to Cape Town, they could rely on him to move any cargo anywhere, with the utmost discretion. All for a very reasonable fee.

  At the head of the table, Governor Saunders banged his fist on the arm of his chair to bring the meeting to order. He was sweating.

  “I received intelligence today from London. War has broken out in America. We have fought an action with the French at a place called Fort Necessity, on the frontier of the Virginia colony.”

  There were murmurs of alarm as the men took in the news. Mansur knew they would not be thinking of casualties and loss of life. Each man would be computing in his head the impact on his balance ledger. Would demand for tea from the colonies fall? Would the price of saltpeter, the crucial ingredient in gunp
owder, rise? Several of the merchants edged toward the door, each wanting to be first to reach the market and profit from the news, before it became widely known.

  “We must not think we will be immune,” continued the governor. The room quieted. America might be ten thousand miles away, and Fort Necessity was no doubt some tiny stockade in a trackless wilderness. But the threads of commerce, and of empire, had made a web around the world. A twitch in one, however distant, could reverberate to the ends of the earth. And there were Frenchmen a great deal closer than America.

  “When the French garrison at Pondicherry hears of this, they will no doubt seek to take advantage. They may be marching on us already.”

  “Then let us march to meet them,” said a man named Collins. He was the youngest in the room, fresh to India and only appointed to the council on the strength of his father’s connections. His cheeks were still milky white, not yet tempered by the Indian sun. Mansur had seen the type before: he guessed he would not survive the first monsoon.

  His suggestion fell on silence.

  “The French have two thousand men,” said the governor.

  “We have six hundred,” persisted Collins, transported by dreams of glory. “And one stout Englishman is worth at least five Frenchmen.”

  “Our official complement is six hundred,” Saunders corrected him. “Our actual numbers are . . . fewer.”

  He did not like to say exactly how many fewer. As far as the account books were concerned, he was still drawing pay for all six hundred men.

  “Battles in India are not fought as you read in the histories of Europe,” Mansur counseled him. “They love the pomp of war, here, but not the barbarity. They will fire a few shots at us, and we will gallantly return fire, and then they will offer to retreat upon receipt of a certain sum of money. Which—after a respectable amount of haggling—we will consent to. It will hurt us in the pocket, but nothing worse. Until then, we shelter safe behind our walls.”

  The men around the table nodded, grateful to Mansur for speaking good sense. Only one, standing at the back of the room, did not share the general approval. He wore a plain black coat, with none of the lace or ornament of the merchants’ clothes, and no wig. He stepped forward.

  “You have something to say, Mr. Squires?” said the governor. He had already half risen from his chair, eager to get to the market. By now, his factors would have had almost an hour to use the intelligence to stake various advantageous positions.

  “The west wall is no better than sailcloth,” said Squires. He was the fort’s engineer, a plain-speaking Yorkshireman, who baffled his Company colleagues with talk of ravelins, revetments and lunettes. “The only way the wall will help us is if it falls down on our enemies.”

  The governor frowned. A chatter of consternation swelled around the table. “Surely you are exaggerating.”

  “If you’d read one of my reports, you’d not be so surprised,” Squires retorted. “It was no better than a garden wall when they built it, and no one’s done any upkeep since. ’Tis no fortification at all. The only thing that keeps it upright is all the shacks and houses the blacks have built against it.”

  “The directors in London voted two hundred thousand pounds for the improvement of the fortifications,” said Collins.

  “I never saw a penny of it,” said Squires.

  “Then where did it go?”

  “That is hardly the question before us now,” the governor interrupted hastily. He would not have welcomed a lengthy investigation into where the money for the fortifications had gone. “What matters is that we do not panic the populace, or give succor to our enemies, by revealing our weaknesses.”

  “Our enemies will find them out soon enough,” muttered Mansur. Saunders didn’t hear him.

  “We will not be cowering behind walls, like women,” the governor insisted. “A few shots, a show of valor, and honor will be served. Then we will be able to get back to business.” He stood, concluding the meeting. “Good day, gentlemen.”

  The merchants nodded heartily. Squires, the engineer, stood alone, staring pensively out of the high windows.

  As the others hurried from the room, Mansur sought him out. “Are the defenses really so bad?”

  Squires nodded. “And the siege may be harder than you and our esteemed governor think. The French have their eyes set on the world. America, India, the East—they mean to take all our commerce. I would move your family into the fort, if I were you.”

  “You said the walls availed us nothing,” Mansur protested.

  “Better than being caught by the French in your home,” said Squires. “A storm is coming, and we must seek what shelter we may.”

  •••

  “Are you sure this is necessary?” said Verity. She stood by her harpsichord in the middle of the drawing room, surrounded by baggage. Furniture had been covered with dust sheets, while a small army of servants bustled about filling the chests, boxes and valises that littered the room. The house looked as if a typhoon had torn through it.

  Mansur kissed her forehead. He smiled, so she would not realize his concern. “What do you see through those windows?”

  Verity did not have to look. Beyond the shady veranda, a line of trees fringed the road and the river. Past those, visible between the powder mill and the hospital, the angular towers of the western defenses projected from the walls.

  “If the French come, our house will make a fine artillery platform.”

  “‘If the French come,’” Verity repeated. “We do not even know that they will. And this is our home.”

  “I am taking no chances.” Mansur lowered his voice. “I lost my own father too young because he was stubborn in the face of danger. I will not let my pride orphan my children.”

  Mansur’s father, Dorian, had lived an extraordinary life. Captured as a boy by Arab pirates, he had been sold into slavery to a prince of Oman, who had afterward freed Dorian and adopted him as his son. Thus, through many adventures, Dorian had become a Muslim known as al-Salil. But he had made a mortal enemy of another of the prince’s sons, Zayn al-Din, who had poisoned his father, usurped the throne, and later sent a man to murder Dorian’s wife, Yasmini.

  Mansur touched his eye socket, a gesture Verity had seen many times before. It still hurt when he was tired. He had found his mother’s killer and fought him at the mouth of one of the great rivers of Africa. Although the man had almost ripped his eye out, but in the end Mansur had disemboweled the man, and watched sharks devour his corpse.

  Mansur picked up a curved dagger mounted above the mantelpiece. It had been his father’s. The scabbard was ivory, traced with gold and studded with jewels.

  “I lost my father needlessly. I came to Madras because I was done with wars and fighting. I do not want my children to grow up without their father.”

  Verity’s face was somber. “In this world, it is a possibility we cannot ignore, whether the French come or no. How many of the writers and factors who arrived from London last summer have survived the year? Half, maybe? We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we will not be here to protect them forever.”

  “But they are so young,” protested Mansur. “Who would look after them if we were gone?”

  Their eyes met. He knew what she would say even before she spoke.

  “There are always Jim and Louisa.”

  Jim was Mansur’s cousin. They had grown up almost as brothers in Cape Town. Then Jim had fallen in love with an escaped convict woman, and the whole family had had to flee. Eventually, they had settled in an uncharted bay on the south-east coast of Africa, and built a compound they named Fort Auspice. Because Jim had many enemies, its location remained a secret known only to a few trusted friends.

  It was more than ten years since Mansur had visited.

  “You should make your peace with Jim,” Verity insisted. “It is time to forgive. Jim and Louisa would not recognize Theo and Constance—and their little Georgie must be a strapping young man by now. I am sure they miss yo
u.”

  Mansur picked at one of the gems in the dagger, his thoughts far away. “I curse the Elephant Throne,” he whispered.

  His father, Dorian, had lived an extraordinary life, in the course of which he had become the heir to the Elephant Throne of Muscat, in Oman. But it had been taken from him.

  “My father should never have tried to reclaim the crown,” said Mansur. “It was sheer vanity.”

  “It was not,” Verity rebuked him. “Your father never wanted the Elephant Throne for his own glory. He went back because he felt obliged to serve his people. They were crying out for a fair and honest king.”

  Mansur blew a thin cloud of smoke out through his lips. “Still, he should not have gone.”

  It had been a disaster. Early on, Dorian had suffered a wound that festered, but he had hidden the true extent of his suffering even from Verity and Mansur. He could not afford to appear weak before the desert-hardened sheikhs of Oman, whose support he needed in the war for the kingdom. In the crucial battle, in the thickest fighting, Dorian had fallen from his horse. Too weak to remount, he had been dragged away by his enemies and killed. Mansur and Verity had had to flee for their lives.

  “It would have been different if Tom and Jim had come.” While Dorian and Mansur sailed for Muscat, the rest of the family had stayed in Africa. Afterward, Jim and Mansur had quarreled bitterly. Mansur blamed Jim for not coming to help, while Jim blamed Dorian for leaving before he was fully recovered. Their friendship could not survive it. And so Mansur and Verity had sailed for India. With a Courtney’s instincts for commerce, Mansur had built up a tidy business trading across the Bay of Bengal, all the way to the East Indies and China. He had prospered. But he had never repaired the breach with the family he had left behind in Africa.

  Mansur said nothing for a long time. They had had this argument many times, and he had never yielded. But now emotions he had kept pent up for years roiled inside him. Imminent danger—fleeing his home with his family in peril—had unleashed feelings that peace had let slumber. What was more important than family?

  He put the dagger down on a table next to Verity’s harpsichord. He smiled. There had been another harpsichord, and another house, and another flight a long time ago, pursued by soldiers of the Dutch East India Company. It was a time when he and Jim had been friends.