A Beggar at the Gate (9 page)

November 5, 1840

C
areful, be careful,” whispered the Prime Minister as court servants lifted the dying Maharajah Kharrak Singh from his bed in the Lahore Citadel. Half a dozen white-bearded priests stood by chanting prayers as the servants lowered their king to the floor of the crowded room, so that he might die in the lap of Mother Earth.

The Maharajah shivered, whimpering beneath the shawls they had laid over him on the tiles. His long hair unfurled dankly about his head. A priest knelt by him, reciting. As other priests joined in, incense clouded the air, causing the watching nobles to blink and rub their eyes.

“Ram, Ram, Ram,” chanted the priests. “Say it, Mahraj,” urged the kneeling priest.

The Maharajah attempted to speak, but abandoned the effort. His eyes rolled upward. Someone came forward, felt for his pulse, then shook his head.

A high-pitched sound came from one of the nobles. The chanting grew louder. A man wearing several emerald necklaces stepped forward. He set a gold lamp, already lit, beside the shrunken, gray-faced body. An aristocratically dressed youth followed, unbuckling his sword belt as he did so. Dry-eyed, Prince Nau Nihal Singh untied the precious Kashmir shawl he wore around his waist and, with a single swift gesture, spread it over his dead father.

Later, in the anteroom, the Prince stood before his father's body, now propped on a wooden stool for its last bath. While servants worked to hold the shirtless corpse upright, the son dipped a brass vessel into a pail of water from the river Ganges and poured it over the dead man's head, reciting as he poured.

Later, after his father's stiffening body had been dressed in saffron-scented clothes and jewels, Prince Nau Nihal Singh strode from the antechamber and past the attending nobles. Alone, he climbed a winding staircase to the sunlit courtyard beyond, while behind him the eunuchs began to wail.

The scent of jasmine and frangipani hung in the air of the queens’ garden. The Prince made his way to a fountain in the garden's center and sat on its marble edge. There he stayed, so lost in thought that he scarcely looked up when approaching footsteps heralded the arrival of the Foreign Minister.

“May I offer my condolences, Prince?” asked the minister.

The young man nodded an invitation to the black-bearded man, who sat down beside him and pulled his coarse-looking robe together over his knees. “I am sorry to be bringing this up so soon, Mahraj,” he said, “but there is much to be done. I fear that if you do not act quickly, you may find it difficult to control the other contenders for the throne, especially your uncle Sher Singh.”

The Prince's nineteen-year-old face hardened. “Most of my family members are as weak as my father was. As for my uncle Sher Singh, he is popular with the army, but no more than I am. I have no fear of him, Faqeer Sahib.”

“And the Prime Minister, with his riches and his private army?”

“I will keep Dhian Singh close to me. His guns and men will be at my command.”

“Ah.” The Foreign Minister nodded. He got to his feet, embroidered silk peeping from beneath the coarse beggar's robe he had affected for years. “Your grandfather,” he said smoothly, “was a great man. He was a brilliant soldier and horseman, and an inspired leader. He loved a good joke, and he passionately loved the Punjab. I pray that you will be able to wield his sword.”

The young man met the Faqeer's eyes with his own level gaze. “They will be taking my father's body outside now,” he said coldly, then rose to his feet.

THE ELEPHANTS and the horses had been given away in charity, as had hundreds of thousands of rupees and gold mohurs. The dead Maharajah's body had been placed on a gold and silver bier and covered with more shawls. The moment had come for the funeral cortege to pass through the city and on to the garden outside its walls, where the square sandalwood and aloes-wood pyre stood waiting.

The Foreign Minister and his assistant walked at the end of the train. Having witnessed the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh's last procession only two years earlier, Hassan Ali Khan and Faqeer Azizuddin had no need to see the forced passage of his dead son's golden, shawl-draped bier through the crowded streets, or to hear the praying of male onlookers. They did not need to hear the wailing of the women thronging the latticework balconies above them, or see the people surge toward the four doomed queens who walked barefoot behind their husband's bier, throwing their jewelry into the crowd.

“Sati Ma,
Mother Sati, pray for me, pray for my sins!” cried the crowd as it pushed forward, heedless of the guards, to clutch at the clothes of the stony-faced queens.

“Have those poor women been drugged?” Hassan asked the Faqeer, as the two men followed at a distance.

“I do not know,” the Faqeer answered, “but I was told that the four who are to be burned laughed and danced at the Citadel before the procession left. All the rest fainted when the bier was carried out. That should tell us something about those women's condition.”

He grimaced and tipped his chin toward the front of the procession. “But I had not realized that seven serving women were to burn, too.”

After an hour of prayers and ceremony, the crowd sighed gustily as the four queens climbed onto the pyre in the order of their seniority, followed unsteadily by the seven chosen serving maids, each one helped by two other women. Slowly, as if half-asleep, the women lay down, the Maharajah's wives at his head, the servants at his feet.

“The senior queen is not among the
satis,
” murmured Hassan.

Men climbed onto the pyre and covered the corpse and all the living women with oil-soaked reed mats. Others poured vessels of clarified butter over the logs. The chanting grew louder. The Prime Minister took a flaming torch from a priest and handed it to Prince Nau Nihal, who nodded and began to circle the pyre, his lips moving.

As the fire took hold at all four corners, the Faqeer gripped Hassan by the elbow. “Come,” he ordered. “We can respect this rite of theirs, but we need not watch it.”

The crowd sighed again. Flames shot into the air as the two men, the only Muslim officials at this Sikh funeral, edged their way toward the city gate.

The pyre was still burning two hours later, when Hassan and the Faqeer rode back to join the procession returning the dead Maharajah's son to the Citadel.

Hassan gestured through the crowd toward the hook-nosed Prime Minister who rode beside the ample, heavily bearded figure of the Prince's uncle Sher Singh. “Should we ride with them?”

“It does not matter. I believe our posts at court are safe. We should let others push their way to the front.” The Faqeer sighed. “I only pray that Nau Nihal Singh will display the qualities so absent in his poor father.”

The afternoon sun threw shadows across the flat ground. An old stone archway stood along the high wall of the great Badshahi Mosque, marking the path to the Citadel Gate. Watched by high-circling vultures and ragged villagers, the procession of nobles and courtiers rode toward the archway, while in the distance a black water buffalo lowered its head to charge a passerby. Preoccupied with the buffalo and its fleeing victim, Hassan and the Faqeer did not turn to look until a heavy rumbling sound came from the direction of the archway, followed by thudding and shouts. The arch, together with the young Prince and his party, had all disappeared inside a billowing cloud of dust.

Men threw themselves from their mounts and ran toward the scene. A horse squealed somewhere, in terror or pain. The dust-covered figure of a man staggered out of the dust cloud, clutching his shoulder.

“The arch has fallen!” someone cried.

“The Prince!” shouted someone else. “Where is he?”

“Help us! Help!”

Hassan and the Faqeer kicked their horses and galloped toward the scene.

Behind them, a pair of pigeons circled the pyre twice, and then, as if at a signal, dropped into the flames.

THE MAN outside the curtain raised his voice to be heard over the boom of cannon fire. “They are saluting the ascension of Prince Sher Singh to the throne,” he shouted.

“Sher Singh?”
Rani Chand Kaur, wife of one dead king and mother of another, started forward from her place on the floor of the royal ladies’ chamber. “Which one of you fools has snatched the throne from my family and handed it to the son of a clothes dyer?”

“It was not one man, Maharani-Ji. The decision was made by the full court. Who else but your brother-in-law can be Maharajah now that your son is no more?”

“Who else?”
Chand Kaur had already screamed herself hoarse. Her face with its bloody, vertical scratches, was as wild as her hair. “Did any of you ask whether my daughter-in-law was with child?”

She pointed to a frightened-looking girl who crouched silently in a corner of the incense-filled chamber. “When my grandson is born,” the Queen rasped,
“he,
not an upstart son of shame, will sit on the throne of the Punjab. Pah! You are fools, sons of owls, all of you.”

The cannon fire had ceased. “We did not know this, Maharani-Ji,” said the male voice.

But Rani Chand Kaur had lost interest in the conversation. Seizing the neck of her long shirt with both hands she tore it wide open.

“They have killed my son!” she shrieked.
“My son!

“When I find the man who took my injured son to the Hazuri Bagh instead of to this palace,” she added, breathing hard, the tattoo on her chin changing shape with every word she spoke, “when I find out who locked all the garden and the Citadel gates so that I could not go to him when he was dying, I will put his eyes out with
my own hands.”

January 2, 1841

M
ariana watched from her horse as the first of Lady Macnaghten's elephants stepped gingerly onto the bridge of boats leading out of British-held India and into the independent state of the Punjab.

Built across the Sutlej River two years earlier for Lord Auckland's state visit to Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the span still held, although it had clearly suffered since that time. Broken timbers now threatened its stability, causing the elephant to tread cautiously on the shifting surface, its mahout watchful on its neck.

As the second elephant joined the first, a chill went down Mariana's spine. If on this journey there were a point of no return, this bridge of boats was it. She glanced behind her, looking for someone who understood, but saw only Charles Mott stopping to blow his nose. It was no use anyhow. No one understood her feelings, not even Uncle Adrian. He had said only yesterday that her divorce would lift a “terrible burden” from her shoulders.

How could she look forward to her divorce when she was about to lose Saboor?

Needing to think, she guided her mare away from the bridge. The Punjab, now only yards away, could no longer exist only in her imagination, but what had it become since the death of old Maharajah Ranjit Singh? Lahore must be quite different without the flamboyant, one-eyed Maharajah, who had taken the stability of his self-made kingdom with him when he died, leaving only lesser men to quarrel over his treasures and his power….

Other things must also have changed in the old city. Shaikh Waliullah still lived, for Mariana would surely have heard otherwise, but was his stout, sensible sister still alive? Mariana could hardly bear to think of arriving too late to see Safiya Sultana again, a woman who had captured her imagination more than anyone else except the Shaikh himself.

Safiya was a poet, Mariana's elderly teacher had told her, and a philosopher, too, one whose fame had spread far beyond the walls of Lahore. Mariana had even learned Safiya's best-known poem, composed after the loss of both her daughters to smallpox:

Would she meet Safiya Sultana, or even enter the upstairs ladies’ quarters of the Shaikh's aristocratic old house? Her only mission, after all, was to obtain the Shaikh's consent for her divorce. That transaction would properly occur in the men's part of the house. In fact it was quite possible that she would be excluded from even those negotiations.

When it was over, as plundered of Saboor as Safiya Sultana had been of her children, she, too, would be lost.

She tried to imagine Harry Fitzgerald, now aware of her purity and filled with newfound respect for her, sitting down to write an apology for his earlier remarks, hinting that he would like to beg her forgiveness in person, but it did no good.

Hoofbeats approached. “Come along, Mariana,” her uncle urged, interrupting her thoughts. “You'll be late to breakfast if you dawdle here.”

Ahead of them, Lady Macnaghten rode toward the bridge, accompanied by the newest member of her party, the British Political Agent and liaison officer to the Sikh court, who had arrived hours earlier to escort her into the Punjab.

Russell Clerk, a thin person whose great, hooked nose and chin-less, jutting head gave him the look of a vulture, had arrived that morning with much fanfare and many assistants. Mariana watched without interest as he leaned from his saddle to say something to Lady Macnaghten. He was said to know a great deal about the workings of the Sikh court, but at this moment she cared little for the political intricacies of the Punjab.

An hour later, after leaving her horse with a waiting groom, she stepped distractedly into the camp dining tent, then stopped short at the sight of Russell Clerk at the table, hunched over a plate of eggs and lamb kidneys. It was not Clerk's appearance or even the size of his breakfast that caused Mariana's sudden halt, but where he was sitting, for he now occupied Charles Mott's place beside Lady Macnaghten, while Mott, newly ejected from Paradise, slouched sullenly in the previously empty seat beside Mariana's chair.

She sat down reluctantly and returned Mott's dismissive nod with an equally dismissive one of her own, which he did not see because he had already looked away. Across the table, Aunt Claire flapped a hand encouragingly between the silver coffeepots.

“Now that we are on land,” she had confided weeks ago, “you may converse with Mr. Mott out of earshot of the rest of us, whilst still maintaining propriety. You
must
make yourself agreeable to him, Mariana. He is to be an intelligence officer in the government at Kabul. I have several times observed him glancing covertly at you when he believed no one was looking. I am certain he thinks more highly of you than you realize.”

“I do not like him, Aunt Claire,” Mariana had replied flatly. “He is too pale and damp-looking, and he has—”

“You are not to say again, Mariana, that Mr. Mott has
beady eyes.”

* * *

THE ENGLISH party's overland journey had begun nine weeks earlier, in the last days of October. During the ten days that followed the steamer's arrival at Allahabad in mid-October, Lady Macnaghten and her nephew had been feted by the British society of that station, spending evening after evening at dinner parties, theatricals, and balls, while Mariana, Saboor, her uncle, and a very disappointed Aunt Claire had waited in a rented house, ignored by everyone. Only after Lady Macnaghten had grown tired of the festivities had they all joined the baggage train, which had arrived by land from Calcutta some weeks earlier.

Spread out over a large, empty ground, the train had looked exactly as it had before it left Calcutta, with the same soporific elephants, superior-looking camels, distracted British officers, hordes of natives, and endless mountains of luggage.

Lady Macnaghten had made a great display of nerves as she watched her more valuable belongings being packed onto the bullock carts, but nothing dire had yet happened to her chandeliers, her porcelain, or her brandy, although the camels had managed to smash more than half her ordinary china before the train reached Allahabad.

The arrangement of the traveling camp had been fixed from the first day. Lady Macnaghten's grand tent and Charles Mott's smaller one were set up together on the right-hand side of a dining tent large enough to seat twelve. Mariana's tent and the one housing her uncle and aunt were on its left. The kitchen tent and the servants’ small tents and cooking fires stood some distance behind the dining tent, as did the long lines of horses and pack animals, and the piles of unloaded baggage, both under heavy guard against thieves. The whole area was then enclosed in a wide circle of pickets, sent from the neat army camp that bordered Mariana's tent.

Over the weeks, the camp had fallen into a routine. At five-thirty each morning, Mariana and Saboor were awakened by the sound of Dittoo bumbling his way into her tent carrying a tray with coffee for Mariana and an egg for Saboor. Half an hour later, having sent Saboor to travel with Dittoo, Mariana got sleepily onto a horse and rode between ten and fifteen cross-country miles at her uncle's side to the next campsite, while Lady Macnaghten rode clumsily ahead of them, accompanied by her nephew and the Vulture.

The only person who refused to travel on horseback was Aunt Claire, who insisted on riding in a palanquin carried by a team of bearers.

Behind all of them crawled the baggage train with its elephants, creaking carts, and walking servants. If all went as well as it had today, at the end of their ride Mariana and the others could expect a hearty breakfast in the dining tent which had been sent on ahead after dinner the previous evening.

The Vulture swallowed a last bite of buttered toast and looked about the dining tent through half-closed eyes. He nodded to the assembled party, but allowed his gaze to slide over Mariana and her family without acknowledging their presence.

He knew her story already, of course. Who did not, in this gossiping country?

Lady Macnaghten smiled prettily over her fan, revealing a perfectly smooth, rounded arm. “And now, Mr. Clerk,” she cooed, “we breathlessly await your news of the Punjab.”

“Yes, indeed,” Uncle Adrian put in quickly. “We have heard nothing but rumors since we learned of the collapse of the archway after Maharajah Kharrak Singh's funeral. Did the young heir die by accident, or by treachery?”

“No one knows,” the Political Agent replied in his high, nasal voice. “Of course one of my couriers came to me as soon as the accident occurred. In fact,” he added importantly, “the man killed a horse in his haste to bring me the news. But even
I
do not know for certain what happened to Prince Nau Nihal Singh. Those most easily blamed had relatives injured or killed in the accident. The stones that fell may have been dislodged by all the cannon fire after Maharajah Kharrak Singh died.” He shrugged, bird-like, inside his black frock coat.

“And will there now be competition for the throne?” asked a baggage officer.

“Oh, yes.” The Vulture leaned back in his seat and made a steeple of his fingers. “The mad Kharrak Singh's famously difficult widow, who somehow escaped dying on his funeral pyre, has suddenly claimed that her dead son's wife is expecting a child. Insisting that the unborn child will be male, the woman has named herself Regent until it comes of age, forcing the Sikh Council, which had already pronounced the young Maharajah's uncle Sher Singh to be the next Maharajah, to rescind its decision. Sher Singh, naturally, is infuriated.”

“And what is he like?” asked another officer.

“I have met Sher Singh twice. He is an entertaining, larger-than-life character: a heavy-drinking Punjabi who might be said to resemble Henry the Eighth. He is popular with the army, which apparently supports his claim to the throne.”

“This seems a dangerous business,” observed Uncle Adrian. “The Sikh army under Sher Singh could be a formidable force.”

“It would. I shouldn't be surprised,” the Vulture added carelessly, “if there were an explosion of violence between Sher Singh and the Regent Queen.”

“But we had planned to stay three weeks in Lahore!” cried Lady Macnaghten. “Surely you do not mean there will be fighting whilst we're there?”

“Oh, I very much doubt it will come to anything yet,” soothed the Vulture. “By the time that happens, Lady Macnaghten, you will already be in Kabul, giving your first ball. And unpleasant though the Queen may be,” he added with a smile, “she has been most charming to us. She has,” he said grandly, “offered us the Koh-i-noor diamond.”

“Which diamond?” Lady Macnaghten leaned forward.

“The diamond known as the Mountain of Light. It weighs twenty-nine carats, and is coveted by everyone who has ever seen it. Princes have fought over it for centuries.” The Vulture leaned back in his seat. “The Koh-i-noor is one of the great treasures of India.

“I am also glad to say,” he went on, “that the Regent Queen has cooperated quite well with us in the matter of the Afghan tribesmen who come down through the Khyber Pass to attack and rob Englishmen traveling to Kabul without sufficient escort. Only a month ago, a Major Effington was robbed of his money, goods, and horse, and left for dead. I have persuaded the Rani to take strong action against this sort of behavior.”

“And all of this is in exchange for what?” inquired Uncle Adrian, taking the words out of Mariana's mouth.

“The Queen has somehow convinced herself that we are going to help her against Sher Singh.”

Uncle Adrian's face had begun to redden. “And how has that occurred?”

The Vulture shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“And what action does the Rani propose to take against the Afghans?”

“Oh, nothing unusual,” the Vulture replied casually. “All Afghans who come into the Punjab are to register with the Sikh government. Those who do not will be subject to public floggings, being shot from cannon, that sort of thing. Some of them are useful to us, of course,” he added, as he stirred his coffee. “They bring intelligence and so on, but most Afghans are no more than savages.”

Charles Mott set down his own cup with a little groan of boredom. Mariana inched her chair away from him. Why did the fool not listen to this important conversation? Who had appointed him an intelligence officer?

“Whatever happens to the Sikhs and the Afghans,” Lady Macnaghten said, laying down her fan with a decisive little gesture, “I certainly hope
we
do not meet any savages on our way to Kabul.”