Nightrunners of Bengal (7 page)

“Why?” The startled question was jerked out of him by an unthinking reflex.

“Because I do—oh, pride. Don’t you understand?” He nodded foolishly; that was what Dellamain had said. He didn’t believe it, and didn’t know why. She was saying, “You are good. I have seen you, seen the improvement in the officers. It will be a contract for ten years. Perhaps you will want to stay by then. Things change. You will have the local rank of major general, with pay of four thousand rupees a month. Let me know your answer by the end of the tiger hunting.”

Her voice cracked on the last words. She ran across the roof walk, and he listened to the hurrying echo of her slippers as it faded down the stairway.

“I
T’S LIKE going out to sea in a little boat. Look, there’s the city on the land, there are the fishing boats anchored in the harbour, there’s the open ocean ahead, great dark waves with the sun shining on the crests.”

Geoffrey Hatton-Dunn’s wide sweep embraced the fort behind them, the huts in the misty fields, and the jungle-covered hills rolling away ahead. Rodney smiled, and Lady Isobel exclaimed, “What a lovely idea!”

The elephant swayed steadily on; the mahout dozed, squatting cross-legged on its neck. Geoffrey’s imagination raced happily, and animation shone in his long face. His wife and friend listened, chuckling, and he forgot to drawl.

“Dash it, yes—but we’re not in little boats. We’re a battle fleet in line ahead. Now that the Lieutenant Governor’s gone back to Agra, don’t you agree that it’s Dellamain’s duty to make a signal: ‘England expects …’? He could hoist it on that parasol they’ve put up in his howdah, or stream it from the elephant’s tail—yards and yards of bunting.”

Leaning forward, he gestured with his hands; the monocle, forgotten, swung and tapped the pearl buttons of his sleek tan coat.

“A fleet’s too cramping. We have all
sorts
of nautical people. Look—ahead there on the next elephant: de Forrest—he’s obviously poor Franklin frozen up somewhere in the Northwest Passage. Caroline—she’s Bligh, browbeating the crew of the
Bounty
. I do hope Sir Hector doesn’t make her walk the plank or anything. Sir Hector—h’m, he’s just himself. Surely Napoleon couldn’t have worn a great tall beaver hat like that on the
Bellerophon
? Let’s say he’s a low figurehead to overawe the poor Indian. Behind us we have Colonel Bulstrode, the gallant marine, spitting over the gun’l into the
sea and picking his teeth with a marline spike. What is it really? Dash me, it’s a hunting knife! Mrs. Bulstrode—she’s perfectly dressed for a voyage on an elephant, I mean a ship, on a beautiful morning, and all the rajahs looking so romantic and princely. She’s got eight hatpins to keep her hat on, she can’t see a thing through the veil, and she’s
knitting,
dash it; she’s knitting the colonel a red wool cummerbund! Let’s pretend she’s a bumboat woman.”

“Geoffrey! that doesn’t sound very polite.”

“You’re wrong, my dear, it is. Well, call her Lady Hamilton if you prefer. Now there’s Victoria with them. She’s a spoil of war and is about to be ravished—dashed if I don’t think it would do her a world of good.”

“Geoffrey!”

They were passing through the grove at Monkeys’ Well and Rodney glanced over the side to look for the hamadryad, but it was not visible. Trying to think, he listened with half an ear to the others and did his best to join in. Isobel knew him too well; she had eyed him questioningly once or twice these past two days. He did not know why he shouldn’t tell her his problem, except that he guessed the Rani would rather have it kept secret, at least until he had made up his mind whether to accept.

It was a hell of a problem, because Joanna was at the root of it. The pros were clear enough, and mainly benefited him; the cons were not so clear, and affected Joanna. He’d have to get away by himself and think. He might talk to Colonel Bulstrode about it. Bulstrode knew a great deal about India; at least he’d give a shrewd and unbiased opinion. Dellamain would have to be asked too; it might have to go higher. That depended: if the politicals really wanted Kishanpur to have the assistance of a British officer, they would probably have him seconded for indefinite duty but hold him on the books of his regiment; if they didn’t care much one way or the other they might make him send in his papers before allowing him to accept. That was a large con; he did not want to resign his commission.

Lady Isobel was speaking to him. “Rodney, Joanna is a little—put out that they did not invite her to this, when you were here.”

He shrugged and muttered that he’d done what he could, short of begging.

Lady Isobel pressed him. “Yes, but surely it’s very extraordinary of the Rani. It isn’t as if she were quite ignorant of what we call good manners——”

To his relief, Geoffrey turned and butted obliviously into the conversation. “You’re looking peaked, old boy—been workin’ too hard. Bhowani’s been very gay, ha! while you’ve been rottin’ heah. Twinkle won first prize for carriage horses at the show. Two-Bottle Tom finally got the D.T.’s; John McCardle took his Old Testament away and says he’ll recover soon. Louisa Bell had a boy; Mrs. Caversham managed to look quite gracious at bein’ a grandmother—better not remind her of it too often, though. Dotty van Steengaard’s expectin’ anothah in May. Eddie Hedges is mashin’ Victoria, poor girl—but you’ll have heard all this from Joanna. Haven’t had a moment to talk to you since we got heah, except in that crowd on Saturday after dinnah, and then deah cousin Caroline was bombardin’ you with questions about the riot——”

Rodney broke in hastily, anxious for Lady Isobel to forget the Rani and her unexplained rudeness. “By George, yes, she fairly cross-examined me, didn’t she? Even de Forrest seemed interested—or pretended to. What’s come over him? Did he go out yesterday to see the city with Miss Langford? She said they were going to.”

Lady Isobel answered with an abstracted frown, “They did. They missed the Installation to do it. There was plenty of time before or after——”

“That Installation, or enthronement, or whatever you’d call it, was one of the most gorgeous sights I’ve ever seen,” Geoffrey interrupted eagerly. “And do you know what I noticed most? The gold stripes down the Lieutenant Governor’s and Dellamain’s trousers! The rajahs and maharajahs
and nawabs and courtiers and all the rest of them were lavish, brilliant—but formless. Then, in the front row, those two in plain blue civil uniforms, and if you half-closed your eyes the stripes down the outsides of their trousers—broad gold stripes—absolutely dominated everything. They were so—disciplined.”

Lady Isobel said, “I noticed the little boy most. He looked so pathetic, loaded with jewels and that toy sword—with those huge eyes. You’ve seen the Rani, of course, Rodney. Is he like her?”

“Yes.”

At the Installation Sumitra had conformed to the Indian custom and watched from a screened balcony. Rodney had glanced up once, but there were no lights on the balcony and the princesses could look out through the gauze over the hanging forest of cut-glass chandeliers without themselves being at all visible.

The conversation died. The path wound southward, keeping fairly close to the river, so that sometimes they saw the flash of water through the trees. This area, for centuries the hunting preserve of the Rajahs of Kishanpur, was typical dry jungle of Central India. Scrub-covered ridges, rough with the outcroppings of trap rock, rolled ahead into a distant smoke-blue haze. In friendly silence they passed through a bare stretch, then a mile of dwarf teak where the huge skeletal leaves crackled and turned to powder under the elephants’ feet, then open land again, yellow with coarse grass and picketed by stunted thorn bushes.

They had covered nine miles from the fort and reached Kishan Falls. Lady Isobel looked up ahead and caught her husband’s sleeve; Rodney whistled; Geoffrey gasped, recovered himself, and lifted the monocle carelessly to his eye.

A tented city rose on parkland running back from the high bank of the river. At one stride of their elephant they passed out of the jungle’s neutral greens and yellows into a brilliance from the past. Mounted sentries, wearing yellow robes and domed iron helmets and carrying old-fashioned
spears, guarded each entrance to the camp. Tents of many colours stood in long loose ranks separated by wide avenues. Some of the tents were a hundred feet in length by forty feet in width, and rose thirty feet above the grass. Screens of coloured canvas curtained off separate clusters of tents, making cities within the city, so that each rajah could withdraw into his own place and amuse himself in his own way. Here Phillora would fondle the twenty breasts of the ten girls he had brought with him, and dream of the six hundred and forty-four breasts left unfondled in his far-away palace; there Kiloi would smoke opium pipes and listen to zither music; there Purkhas would drink cold water and compose poetic apothegms in classical Persian; there the little boy who reigned in Kishanpur would play with a velvet doll and pull Sumitra’s hair.

In the light air the standards and banners flapped close to staffs tied insecurely to the tentpoles. Above all the others, as befitted them, were the primrose of Kishanpur; the dull purple of Jamalpur, as sedate and imperial as the state itself; and the irregular tiger stripes of Lalkot, whose history was a gloomy book of murder, treachery, and tyranny. Above the Commissioner’s tent in the British enclave a momentary breeze tugged at the largest Union Jack Rodney had ever seen; he laughed suddenly and nudged Geoffrey: the flag was upside down. The elephant stopped; the mahout called and grunted; the elephant shuffled and slowly knelt. They had arrived.

Later, as the sun was setting, Rodney left his tent and walked through the camp towards the river. A knoll by the lip of the falls overlooked a mile-long stretch of water, and there he sat down under a wild lime tree and let the wind dry his sweat-soaked hair. Upstream the river ran four hundred yards wide between low wooded banks, and looked shallow. Still at that width, it slipped smoothly over a fault in the trap rock to make a hissing green-cold curtain one hundred feet high. Below, the banks closed in at once and crowded the tormented river through a steep gorge. The last
of the sun shone on Rodney’s face and gilded the mist which hovered at the break of the fall.

Across the river a man worked with a sickle to clear a tiny field slanting down to the cliff edge. That would be his hut, three hundred yards above the falls on the far bank, with a smoke smudge drifting northward from it. He watched a bullock cart creep down and past the hut, and heard the driver’s faint “Ah! ah!” as he urged the bullocks on into the water. There was a track there; the cart dragged a dust cloud behind it. He glanced up the near bank—yes, another hut, opposite the other, the sure sign of a ford. It could be passable only for a few of the dry months. He wondered how many men had tried to cross when it was too deep, and been swept down and over the falls. He bit the end of a cheroot and half-closed his eyes….

… Commander-in-Chief of the Army of His Highness the Rajah of Kishanpur. Major-General Rodney Savage. Major-General
Sir
Rodney Savage, K.C.B., perhaps, if the Queen approved of his work in Kishanpur. Four thousand rupees. Four hundred plus four hundred plus four hundred plus—it went on for ever. It was too much money, too big a job. He couldn’t do it.

Goddam it, he
could
do it, and do it well. He wouldn’t have to report to that bloody sodomite of a Dewan, but would be responsible only to Sumitra. Now he had to face it: the people hated her, and the better he did his work the firmer he would clamp her rule on to them. But it was silly to think like that. If the Company was going to support her as Regent—and the Governor General had just announced through the Lieutenant Governor that it was—then nothing on God’s earth could upset her rule. He would just be doing his professional duty, on a wider field than he might ever reach in the Company’s service. He’d jump about thirty paralytic years of promotion, and have the work while he still had the zeal. It would be a great task, and exciting, and would stretch his capabilities to their utmost: to burn out corruption in a well of corruption—Sumitra could have no
idea of the Dewan’s extortions and perversions, or she’d have sacked him long ago—to make these few thousand men contented and efficient, worthy of their profession, a fighting force welded together by comradeship, trust, and confidence, like the sepoy armies; a force fit to take on any enemy.

He stopped short and shook his head, puzzled. Kishanpur need fear no enemies. A century or more ago it would have been different: the British not established as a paramount power, India a turmoil of warring rajahs. Then, by God, there would have been real work for him to do—gentleman-at-large, adventurer-in-ordinary. Frenchmen, Italians, Dutch, Portuguese, Irish—they had written their own and their employers’ names all over India. But now the Kishanpur Army would be a mere showpiece, a typical rajah’s toy, expensive and useless. That wasn’t like the Rani. He shook his head again.

No matter. He could live in splendour and retire in magnificence with her decorations glittering on him—and perhaps that red ribbon from the Queen.

How would Joanna like it? How would Robin grow up, removed from all contact with English people in these next few years before he went home? Rodney could send them both home, immediately—— He stopped dead in his thoughts and stared at the water. Joanna didn’t want to go back to England, and he had no right to let himself think of ordering her off. She would like the money, but she would hate being the only Englishwoman in Kishanpur. He fidgeted uncomfortably; the Rani wouldn’t mind if Joanna never came.

And there was Robin without English playmates. And he himself would never serve with the 13th Rifles again. He could make something out of the Kishanpur troops, but he he could never make them the 13th Rifles. That settled it.

“Captain Savage, I wish to talk with you.”

He started, looked up, and suppressed a desire to swear. Caroline Langford, dressed in russet brown, stood by
the tree. He made to scramble to his feet, but she shook her head and sat down near him. As he had done, she looked slowly round at the bright tents, the green falls, and the red afterglow in the sky.

She said, “Was the Field of the Cloth of Gold more beautiful? But that’s not what I want to talk about. Yesterday Major de Forrest and I absented ourselves from the Installation and instead visited the city. We went to Sitapara’s house.”

Rodney locked his arms round his knees and rested his chin. Sitapara was the woman at the second-storey window the night of the riot; he’d found out her name the next day, for everyone knew her as the madam of a high-grade whorehouse. On Saturday evening, when relating the story of the riot, he had mentioned her name but not her profession. Still, de Forrest at least must have guessed what sort of place he was taking this young lady to.