White Mughals (70 page)

Unknown to Charles as he cantered down the road to the coast, back in Madras there had been a major hitch in Henry’s plans. Quite unexpectedly—at least to Russell—ten days earlier, on 10 June, Jane Casamajor had called him to her house and told him the marriage was off. She gave no reason. Henry returned home, astounded that anyone would or even could turn him down. It was only late the following morning that he remembered that his brother was by now in all probability on his way to Masulipatam to deliver a message that could only come as shattering blow to Khair un-Nissa.

Rushing to his desk, he quickly wrote out two notes. He sent one to Hyderabad and the other direct to Major Alexander at Masulipatam, with urgent orders that it be given to Mr Charles Russell the minute he arrived in the town. Then he sat down to await what would happen.

The express letter to Masulipatam read as follows:

The letter sent to Hyderabad was longer, more leisurely, and a little more self-aware. It was, Henry acknowledged to Charles, ‘impossible to conceal from either you or myself that I am nettled and annoyed at anything like a refusal from any woman whatsoever; but excepting the violence that my pride, or perhaps rather my vanity has sustained, I really am quite astonished at the degree of coldness and apathy with which I have submitted to a separation from a woman to whom I already conceived myself to be irrevocably and eternally united … be that as it may, my vanity is certainly more deeply injured than my heart’.
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He went on to speculate how it was that Jane could possibly have found it in herself to turn down such a splendid chap as himself. In the course of this passage he reveals one reason why his relationship with the Begum had never developed into the marriage that Khair un-Nissa had clearly hoped for and, at least initially, set her heart on. For Russell explained to Charles that the most likely reason for Jane’s action was that she had been alarmed by his total refusal to tell his father of their forthcoming marriage, which in turn was due to his father’s almost certain refusal to condone it. The reason for this was that Jane had a Malay great-grandmother, and Sir Henry, an ambitious
arriviste
who had closely orchestrated the careers of all his children, had long made it quite clear to them that he would never agree to any of them marrying anyone ‘contaminated by one streak of black’.
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Henry Russell was deeply in awe of his father, who was evidently a very strong personality. It was out of the question that he could ever have dreamed of marrying Khair un-Nissa if he dared not tell his father even about his relatively uncontroversial match with Jane Casamajor.

The letter to Hyderabad arrived too late to catch Charles; he had already set off to Masulipatam to break the news to the Begum. But the express note to Alexander got there just in time. After a week’s journey, the ever-obedient Charles read it and headed straight back to Hyderabad without even waiting to pay a courtesy visit to Khair un-Nissa.

But it was only a reprieve, a putting-off of the inevitable. Five months later, Charles was back, on the same errand. Jane Casamajor had changed her mind. She eventually married Henry Russell in St Mary’s church in Madras on 20 October 1808. ‘Dear Jane,’ wrote Henry to his brother, ‘has made me love her ten times more than I ever did before... ’
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Russell had fully briefed his brother on the story that was to be told to the Begum, and it involved what he described as an ‘innocent deception’—perhaps something along the lines that he had been forced into the marriage by his father, and had no option but to submit. Whatever lie it was, it did little to soften the blow, for the news shattered Khair un-Nissa’s already fragile composure and self-assurance. Henry was pleased that Charles had kept his description of the encounter to a minimum: ‘Your account of what passed between you and the Begum was quite sufficiently full to be satisfactory, and not so detailed as to be unbearably painful to me. The subject is a distressing one; and I shall therefore say as little upon it as I can.’ But he still wanted to know one detail more: ‘You said that you went to see the Begum again the day you left Masulipatam. Did you see her? Was she more composed and more satisfied of the necessity of submitting to what you had told her the previous day?’
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Charles’s reply does not survive. But the answer to his question is quite clear, as Khair un-Nissa’s subsequent story shows.

With that final conversation, the curtain descends once again on the Begum, but this time not for a month, or a year, or even two years, but for five. In that time Russell wrote thousands of letters, but barely one that mentions Khair un-Nissa. And with his gaze turned elsewhere, she again vanishes from history.

Following his abandonment of the Begum, Russell’s own life was engulfed in tragedy. Jane Casamajor died quite suddenly of fever only six months after their marriage. For once something genuinely seemed to have moved Russell, and his grief was absolute. He wrote to his brother Charles: ‘Your poor Jane, your poor sister, my wife, my comfort, my darling, my everything, is gone. At ten o’clock this morning her sweet, her heavenly spirit left the frail but lovely tenement it had inhabited; and all hope but her happiness in a better place is now fled. I felt the last vibration of her pulse, I heard the last faint flutter of her breath; and she expired on my arm.’
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He tried to continue at Madras, but gave up and returned to England for a year, spending much of the time working on poems to his late wife and writing endless drafts of her epitaph. On his return in 1809 he was appointed briefly to the Pune Residency before, in 1810, finally gaining his long-held ambition of becoming Resident at Hyderabad.

His first act was to summon Aman Ullah from retirement in Benares and to offer him place of honour at the Residency (his elder brother, Aziz Ullah, was now too old to begin work again). The old
munshi
immediately accepted, but died on the journey, just ten days’ march from Hyderabad.
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Mir Alam had died of his leprosy on 4 January 1809, and it was at this point that Khair un-Nissa and her mother appear to have limped back to Hyderabad from Masulipatam, and attempted to resume their life in the family
deorhi.
Fyze Palmer also reappears in Hyderabad around this time, spending time with her son William—and presumably with Khair—in the extensive new Palmer mansion, known as the Kothi, facing the main gate of the Residency.

After the return of the two Begums to Hyderabad, Sharaf un-Nissa makes occasional fleeting appearances in Russell’s letters: at one point, for example, he receives a petition from one of Nizam Ali Khan’s widows, Pearee Begum, on receiving which he tells Charles: ‘Pearee Begum’s letter I will answer, if necessary, after my arrival at Hyderabad … She is a particular favourite of the Old Begum’s, and so … I should not like to offend her by shewing any sort of slight to her favourite.’
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On another occasion Sharaf un-Nissa sends Henry a broken watch and a chipped locket containing James Kirkpatrick’s hair. Russell succeeds in mending the watch, but manages to lose the precious locket, telling the old Begum, somewhat insensitively, that ‘if she sends some more hair he will have another made’.
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There are also references to Henry having finally received the Chinnery of the children from Calcutta and promising to send it over to the old Begum. But while Sharaf un-Nissa seems to have intermittently kept in touch with Russell, her daughter—significantly—did not.

It was not until the late summer of 1813 that Khair briefly re-entered Russell’s life. The occasion was the visit of an aristocratic Scottish tomboy from the Isle of Lewis named Lady Mary Hood. Mary Hood had temporally deserted her rich, elderly admiral husband and gone off on her own around India, breaking a series of diplomatic hearts as she passed: Mountstuart Elphinstone, William Fraser and Henry Russell himself all seem to have been, to different extents, a little in love with her. During her stay at Hyderabad, Mary had asked Russell if she might meet some ‘Hyderabadi women of rank’, and he brought Khair and Fyze to see her at the Residency, though whether he attended the meeting and actually saw Khair face to face after all that had passed between them is not clear.

Either way, Lady Hood was entranced by the sadness, beauty and intelligence of the ‘poor Begum’,
^io
while Khair in turn seems to have liked Lady Hood enough to promise to make her a dress. This dress weaves its way in and out of Russell’s letters over the following three weeks: initially it was too small, and Lady Hood asked Russell to ‘let the Begum be told with my regards & salaams, that if she will allow me I will make a body for the dress myself at Madras to fit me, & send it to her to be trimmed, as I know the one she has kindly made already for me is not large enough for a Scotch princess’.
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But in all these letters there is no hint of Khair un-Nissa’s former engagement with the world. She appears instead like some broken butterfly, wounded, and unhealed by the passage of time.

At her most vulnerable point, she had opened up her heart, only to be seduced, banished and then betrayed. Five years had passed since she had been abandoned by Russell, but despite her beauty and her fortune, she had never remarried.

Khair’s last recorded action, towards the end of September 1813, was to send a brief note to her former lover—her first for five years—simply telling Russell that she was dying.

Russell, for once, rose to the occasion. Perhaps struck with remorse he invited the Begum back to the Rang Mahal, to end her life where she had once been happy. By 1813 those days must have seemed far distant to her: it was, after all, eight years since she had been widowed, eight years since she had kissed first her children and then her husband goodbye.

Khair un-Nissa—already fading—was duly carried in, and the couch on which she had once given birth to her daughter now became her deathbed. There was no clear cause for her condition: she just seems to have finally turned her face to the wall. Maybe revisiting the Residency—with the flood of memories it must have brought on—had been too painful. But she did not recover, and over a period of two weeks she got weaker and weaker, and her pulse fainter and fainter. She finally slipped away, without pain, on 22 September 1813. She was aged only twenty-seven. By her side, holding her hand to the very end, were Fyze Palmer and Sharaf un-Nissa.

The following morning a clearly shocked Russell picked up his pen to break the news to Lady Hood: ‘I am sure you will be very much concerned to hear of the poor Begum’s death which happened yesterday morning,’ he wrote.