The Kashmir Shawl (20 page)

The little girl jumped in front of Nerys, bunching the soft wool in her fists. ‘Rupees? Rupees?’

The woman touched her fingers to her mouth, all the lines of her face drawn into a plea for money.

In agony, Nerys took out her leather purse. The boy scrambled to his feet and bumped against her shins, trying to catch a glimpse of wealth. She knew what lay inside – just a few coins, and small-denomination notes worn soft in the Indian way. Enough for a
shikara
ride across the wide lake, back home to the
Garden of Eden.

Nerys shook the little sum out and held it in the palm of her hand for them all to see. With shame, she realised that there was not enough to pay for even a single cocktail at the Srinagar Club.

The little girl turned away. She busied herself with refolding their treasure inside its cloth. The woman nodded, holding up her hand for Nerys’s money. She hid it away inside her tunic. She was embarrassed that an honourable potential sale had transformed itself into unvarnished charity, and she wouldn’t meet Nerys’s eyes. The boy knew exactly what was happening and was already pinching his mother’s thin arm again and wheedling for food.

Abruptly Nerys turned aside, upset and disturbed by what she saw. In her eagerness to get away she was out in the lane once more, where twilight was gathering, before she recalled that she was hopelessly lost. She had to duck back under the lintel and face the family again. She performed a small mime of confusion, pointing one way and the other, shaking her head and holding up her hands. The mother sighed a brief instruction to the children and bent to her spinning wheel.

Hand in hand with her brother, the little girl led Nerys back past the beggar, who was now sleeping, and the inert dog. The cohort was turning a corner as another, bigger, band of children scuffled out of the shadows. An older boy screeched and began snatching at the clothes of Nerys’s tiny guide. She slapped back at him, shouting at the top of her voice as the newcomers set on her and her brother. Their hands were darting all over the children’s filthy clothes, searching for the money that Nerys must have given them. Nerys waded in between the two groups, dragging them apart and hustling her friends up the alley towards a glimmer of light.

But now the disturbance had drawn more attention from the warren of dark alleys and passages, and a gang of much older children rushed out at them. These ignored the small fry and jostled Nerys close up against a wall. She tried to slap away their hands as they grabbed at her pockets. The biggest of them, a hulking youth with the dark beginnings of a beard, tore off Myrtle’s circlet of pearl and brilliants that she wore pinned at the throat of her blouse.

‘Give that back to me,’ Nerys screamed.

She was ringed by hostile faces, but she was relieved to see her own threesome retreating under cover of the confusion and melting away. She could give her full attention to her own plight. She stood taller, and pushed the youth in the chest. Instead of stepping back he came closer, thrusting his face into hers. She smelt his breath and the sweat of his body. She was afraid now, and gathered herself to run.

But which way, in this maze of darkness?

Nerys balled her fists and ducked under his arm. She feinted a dash in one direction, the youth followed, then she broke away in the other. But to her horror she saw that a man’s misshapen figure loomed ahead, blocking the escape route she had chosen.

Now she was trapped.

The man shot out a hand to catch her wrist and his grip was like a vice. To her amazement he said calmly, in accented English, ‘Stand behind me, please.’

The next thing she knew he had interposed himself between her and the mob of children. He said something commanding in Kashmiri and they all fell back a step.

Nerys realised that the man’s silhouette appeared distorted because he carried a big bundle of rope over his shoulder. He let the coils drop at his feet and drew out a length to the full width of his outstretched arms. Then, from an inner pocket, he produced a vicious knife and there was a flash of steel as he cut off the length he had measured. Slowly he raised the blade to his lips and kissed it.

Nerys’s assailants now watched in reluctant fascination, and she edged to one side in order to gain a better view for herself.

With the knife gripped between his teeth the man took the ends of his yard of rope in each hand and snapped it taut across his chest. Then he quickly doubled the length and snapped that too. He caught up the mid-point in his left fist and, with a flourish, he withdrew the knife from between his lips. The blade flashed once more as he cut the doubled rope in two. The children murmured to each other and pushed closer, and the man let the biggest youth inspect the four ends that were bunched in his fist.

Now, grinning, the man joined the two severed ends in a knot and pulled it tight to test the join. He held the knot up to Nerys. ‘Please be kind enough to blow on it for me.’

Intrigued in spite of herself, she did as he asked.

He brandished the knotted rope in front of them. With surgical precision he placed his thumb and forefinger over the knot and slid it down the length of rope.

The knot slipped free, and the magician held up the uncut rope for them to see.

The gang of children gasped. As one body they moved backwards, distancing themselves from this sorcerer. He shook the intact rope at them, giving it a sharp snap in the air and with that they turned and ran, falling over themselves and each other in their anxiety to escape. A second later Nerys was alone with the magician, and the only sounds were of scurrying feet and a dog yelping.

The man bowed. He was of average height but broad-chested and muscular, with a mane of tawny hair. She already knew where she had seen him before.

‘Would you like to follow me?’ he asked politely. He dropped his rope length into a pocket, sheathed the knife somewhere about himself and shouldered the coils once more. A couple of turns down the alleyway, and a lane thick with weeds brought them out to a wide loop of the Jhelum river. There were lights everywhere, in the tall houses and on the bobbing boats, and music gaily echoed over the water.

The man stopped and bowed again. ‘My name is Rainer Stamm,’ he said, and held out his hand.

They shook, his huge fist enveloping hers.

‘I am Mrs Watkins.’ This sounded cold so she added, ‘Nerys Watkins.’

‘How do you do, Mrs English Watkins?’

He was laughing at her. Nerys withdrew her hand. ‘I am Welsh,’ she said.

‘I apologise for my mistake.’

Swiss, or something, was how Myrtle had dismissed him. He wasn’t British, anyway, Nerys was sure of that. He was too confident, too taunting, with his wide smile. Altogether too …
leonine
, was that it? ‘Thank you for rescuing me.’

Her handsome hero looked at her. ‘You didn’t need rescuing.
You were looking after yourself. I just provided a moment’s diversion.’

‘How did you do that, by the way?’ Nerys pointed to an end of the rope trailing out of his pocket.

‘Ah, it’s known as the cut-rope trick. Would you like me to show you? It might come in useful, next time you lose your way in the bazaar. My house is just there. I could offer you a drink with the lesson, perhaps, now that we have introduced ourselves.’

Rainer Stamm pointed a few yards along the
ghat
to one of the fine old Srinagar houses, built of brick and wood and decorated with carvings. Its gabled windows projected over the water.

‘Thank you, no.’ Nerys smiled politely. ‘I must go. My friends will be wondering where I am.’

‘Of course. I saw you at the club with Mrs McMinn, I think. Let me call a boatman.’ A moment later a
shikara
came gliding to the step where they waited.

‘Those little devils didn’t rob you, did they?’ he asked casually.

Nerys’s hand flew to her throat where the neck of her blouse gaped. ‘That big one took my brooch.’

‘I want you to have it,’ Myrtle had insisted. ‘It suits you better than it does me.’ Her mind was made up and Nerys had known that there was no point in protesting. Since then she had worn the brooch almost every day.

Rainer Stamm bent forward and gently placed his finger in the notch at the base of her throat. ‘I’m sorry for that,’ he murmured.

Nerys stiffened, but he had withdrawn his hand. The boatman whistled softly between his teeth and she turned to the river.

Rainer offered her his arm, but she made not to see it. She clambered awkwardly into the boat, which rocked violently, causing her almost to lose her balance and the boatman to call a warning from his perch in the stern. Nerys collapsed on to the cushions, irritated by her gaucherie. She would have to
borrow the fare money from Archie when she got back to the houseboat. But, as if he had read her thoughts, Rainer gave the man a note.

‘Thank you again,’ she called, from beneath the awning.

Rainer touched his forehead. He said crisply to the boatman, ‘Dal Lake, the
Garden of Eden
boat.’

He wanted her to know that he knew where she lived. It would be difficult, she already sensed, to keep ahead of Rainer Stamm.

The man dipped his paddle and the boat swished forwards.

‘Goodnight,’ the magician called, across the width of water.

SEVEN

The band struck up and the maharajah himself led out Mrs Fanshawe for the first waltz of the Resident’s Autumn Ball.

Nerys watched from the thicket of gold chairs at the side of the ballroom. Mrs Fanshawe in silvery lamé, with feathers nodding in her hair, was entirely outshone by her partner, who wore a jade-green brocade frock coat with a massive emerald fastened among a cluster of lesser gems in his turban. After a respectful interval the floor slowly filled with other couples, European wives and daughters wearing elbow-length white gloves with their ballgowns, as Residency protocol demanded, partnered by a sprinkling of uniformed British and Indian officers, portly dinner-jacketed civilians, handsome men of the maharajah’s retinue, and representatives of the various upper echelons of Residency staff. There was a scent of dried lavender, camphor and face powder.

The wives of the Hindu guests didn’t dance in public but they had been present at the dinner beforehand, splendid in silk saris that made them look like a flock of exotic birds. Nerys wondered if they had withdrawn to one of the Residency’s salons to admire one another’s cascades of gold jewellery and privately indulge in unrestricted gossip. Over the silver plate and crystal glasses at dinner the general talk had been of the unseasonably cold weather, the looming probability of war in
Asia, the inconvenience of forthcoming rationing and – in whispers – of the latest Srinagar social scandal. Nerys had been in the city for only three weeks but she had already met Angela Gibson, the wife at the centre of the latest murmurings, and her husband had been pointed out to her at several gatherings.

It was odd to realise how quickly you could be drawn into this vortex, even someone as socially marginal as herself.

The thought of the whispers and gossip made her sit up and smooth the skirt of her dance dress, the first she had ever owned. It was rose-pink silk, made up for her by Myrtle’s tailor from a pattern in
The Colonial Lady’s Fashion Companion
, and she was wearing it tonight with a corsage and a pair of long white gloves borrowed from Myrtle. Myrtle had also rolled up her hair for her, dabbed French perfume behind her ears, and even applied some makeup.

When she had finished, Myrtle had stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘Nerys Watkins, you have a mouth like a film star,’ she proclaimed. ‘If I were a man, I’d want to join the queue to kiss it.’

‘
What?
’ Nerys examined her own barely recognisable reflection.

Myrtle snapped open her beaded evening bag and stowed away her gold cigarette case and lighter. ‘I said
if
, darling. I’m not that way, not even at my hideous boarding school, where such behaviour was not unknown, believe me. But if we all have to do without our men for much longer, who knows?’

Smiling at the memory of this exchange, which until recently would have seemed deeply shocking, Nerys glanced round for her friend. Myrtle was in dull-gold satin, exotic among her powdery British compatriots because of her short black hair and scarlet lips. Naturally enough she was at the animated centre of a circle of interested men, but Nerys would have wagered her grandparents’ legacy – or what was left of it, after she had made the substantial payment to the tailor – that Archie McMinn had nothing to worry about.

Rubicund Mr Fanshawe now foxtrotted past, steering a plump woman decked in dowager’s purple. Nerys wasn’t nearly high up enough in the pecking order to be honoured with a dance herself, but the Resident had greeted her cordially at the reception before dinner. ‘Mrs Watkins, welcome to Srinagar. Is Mrs McMinn looking after you? Will your husband be joining us soon?’

She had explained that Evan was still very busy with outreach work in Kargil, but that he hoped to reach Kashmir in good time before the winter closed in. As she said this, she heard the warning of the cold wind, sharp with ice, that rattled the branches of the chinar trees in the Mogul gardens.

‘I’ll look forward to meeting him,’ the Resident said, in his polished way, and the line of guests shuffled forward.

Nerys studied the pearl buttons at the wrist of her glove. What would Evan think if he could see her now, dressed up and lipsticked, slightly dizzy and fond with the Residency’s fruit punch?

She told herself that, as he wasn’t here, it really didn’t matter what he might or might not think.

The gold chair directly in front of her was twirled aside. ‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins,’ a voice said. ‘Our acquaintance did begin in an unorthodox manner, but maybe you will overlook that.’

She looked up to see tawny hair and a wide smile. ‘Good evening, Mr Stamm,’ she rejoined.

He didn’t wear patent-leather dancing pumps, like the other male guests, but a pair of serviceable black oxfords lightly rimmed with riverbank mud. The rest of his evening clothes were unremarkable, except that they were unbrushed, but still he seemed more notable than any other man in the room, including the maharajah.