By Eastern windows (16 page)

All the Hindu girls were laughing now. At first they had been frightened of the young Memsahib, for it was not the Sahibs that looked down on the native people of Hindustan with a prejudiced eye, it was the
Mem-logs
– the white women.

But not this white woman – she stayed mainly in the officers' quarters as was her place, but she was also happy to venture down to the married quarters when the men were away doing their morning drills to speak to their wives in a broken fashion, she knowing some of their language, and they knowing some of hers.

As the months passed and the weather grew very dry again, Jane often watched the Hindu girls as they went about their lives of serene domesticity, cheerfully cleaning out their huts in the morning, singing as they prepared their food on small fires outside their huts in the evening, and obviously making love with their men at night, for some who had not been pregnant on arrival very soon were.

In turn the Hindu girls watched the young Memsahib going about
her
life, and were both shocked and charmed to see her fitting into the life at Calicut in her own way, refusing to recline in languor like most Mems, but regularly setting off beside the Captain-Sahib, carrying her own knapsack and happily roughing it as a soldier's wife.

The men liked her, too. They usually couldn't bear the officers' wives, regarding their high-nosed snobbery with sneering disdain. But Jane's ‘bonnie’ personality and unfailing good humour had made her a great favourite with them all.

The Macquaries' bungalow was perched on the side of a small hill. Often in the late afternoons Jane would stand on the veranda and look out to sea, then over the sun-drenched station of Calicut and think how relaxed and friendly it all was. Even the officers had discarded their scarlet coats to stamp around in high boots, white breeches and white shirts with the sleeves carelessly rolled up.

In the evenings the sun would still be blazing, but low in the sky and reddening the light. Then Jane would lean over the veranda rail watching Lachlan's white-clothed figure coming up the path through the green brilliance of the trees, and she would smile and run down to meet him.

The nights were starry and hot, and those soldiers who were single regularly ventured into the town four miles away for the pleasure of flirting with the dancing girls that could be found in every town in southern India.

Nearly every night the songs of the soldiers could be heard drifting from the isolated military settlement in Calicut, tankards of beer were drunk regularly, but not a whiff of opium could be sniffed.

At the end of nine months their simple style of living had enabled Lachlan to pay off most of his debts. So much so, that he was able to write to John Forbes

From our economical mode of living since we came down the coast, I have nearly cleared off all my debts; and by going on in the same course for a few months longer, I shall not owe one single anna to anyone.

But while the inhabitants of the military station at Calicut peacefully spent their days in the sun; thousands of miles away on the cold continent of Europe, a short dark-haired soldier stood by a window in a grey-stone chateau staring gravely out at the garden, thinking about India.
 
His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.

‘
Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!
’ The drums of revolution that had first sounded in Paris in 1789 were now resounding throughout most of Europe. Louis XVI was dead. His Austrian queen, Marie-Antoinette was dead. All of the French aristocracy and most of the old order were dead. Even the butcher Robespierre was dead. And the French drums were still beating, through Belgium, the Netherlands, everywhere. ‘
Vive la Republique!
’ ‘
Vive la Revolution!
’

They marched as conquerors. Armies upon armies of French soldiers in blue uniforms with red facings, challenging the whole of Europe to join them. ‘
Drive out your tyrants!
 
Let France protect you!
’

In Spain the King trembled on his throne. In Amsterdam the Dutch Revolutionary Committee issued a proclamation to a cheering crowd: ‘
Brave citizens! By the mighty aid of the French Republic, you have cast off the tyranny that oppressed you!
 
You are free of the Stadtholder! You are free! You are equal!
’

The Prince of Orange fled to England where he begged his royal relatives to help him. The French, he was sure, intended not only to conquer Europe, but the world.

To the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, the Stadtholder gasped out his fears about losing the Dutch territories in India. Already it was known that the Dutch in Cochin, having heard of the rage of their people at home against the Stadtholder, were preparing to throw in their lot with Napoleon if he came to India. He begged the British Prime Minister to protect the Dutch possessions in India and hold them in trust until the French had been defeated.

William Pitt had seen it coming. As soon as the Dutch Revolutionary Committee had been formed, he had been convinced the unhappy subjects of the Stadtholder would eventually join in an alliance with the French. And that was one of the reasons why various regiments of the British Army had been moved from the cities to strategic posts around India. The British had always wanted the lucrative Dutch trading territories in India. And now, it seemed, France wanted them too.

William Pitt smiled. Britain's fight for possession of the Dutch territories in India was about to begin.

*

Four months later a ship carrying orders from the War Office in London arrived in Bombay.

General Balfour fumed as he read the Prime Minister’s instructions, which had been delivered to him personally by Colonel Petrie.

`War! I have no problem with war – if it comes to that.’ Balfour said furiously. ‘But how in blazes can I order an army of men out into the field in lashing rain! At the very least most of the gunpowder will get soaked and become useless!’

For a moment Colonel Petrie could not answer, due to his confusion. Outside the sun was blazing and the temperature was unbearably hot.
 
He gestured to the window. ‘But, General, the weather is – ‘

‘About to change!’ Balfour snapped. ‘But coming from London you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Well the first thing you will learn about India, Colonel Petrie, is that we move with the weather – and right now we are awaiting a
monsoon
.’

*

Down the coast in Calicut, everyone was feeling irritable with the continuing fierce heat.
 
Jane fanned herself moodily and opened the buttons of her bodice. ‘Even Antigua was never this hot,’ she said to Marianne. ‘Look – ‘ she pointed to the mahogany dresser, ‘it’s so hot even the furniture is perspiring.’

‘No, no, Mem-Jane, the furniture is showing polish.’ Marianne giggled. ‘This morning I polish, and now you see the shine, not heat.’

Jane smiled at the girl’s giggles, and then sighed. ‘So where is the monsoon?’

‘The monsoon it comes …’ Marianne moved over to the window, `very soon. One day, two days, very soon.’

The monsoon arrived three days later. Everyone revelled in the rain. The soldiers whooped, the women laughed. In the bazaars of the town merchants and coolies began to dance.

Wet, cool, beautiful rain. Life-giving rain! Now the drying rivers would be replenished, the wells would fill, and the crops would grow abundantly.
 
Rejoice!
The sound of conches blasted over the land.
Rejoice!
The monsoon has arrived.

A troupe of young Indian males, hoping to earn a few rupees, cheerfully skipped the four miles from the town of Calicut out to the military station where they began to dance for the soldiers. The soldiers cheered them on as they leapt and gyrated down the streets of the huts, their supple brown bodies covered only in white loincloths. In a dancing line they moved to the beat of the clapping soldiers and the drumming of the rain, singing a song that sounded like a rhapsody of vowels.

‘Ho! Hi! Hu! Ha!’

The arrival of the monsoon was a time for celebration, for the rains meant more to India than a banishment of the annual dread of drought and famine. It was a time when man sat back and looked at the glistening beauty of the earth.
 
A time for both the land and man’s refreshment
  
after the leaden apathy of the heat. A time for nourishment of the spirit in the exhilarating cool winds that came with the rain.
 
A time when all felt younger, healthier, stronger; reborn.

The monsoon was also the time for love, for steamy and smouldering passion, when all India believed that earth and rain joined in a kind of lovemaking, uniting and procreating, and during the monsoon season there truly was a soft and vibrant sensuousness in the Indian air.

For the first three weeks of the rainy season Lachlan and Jane found it impossible to venture outside the house at all. A solid wall of water crashed around the bungalow in a non-stop torrential downpour. But apart from this inconvenience, and the pounding of the rain, the days spent within their enforced seclusion was as blissful as Eden.

With all duties suspended, no fixed hours, no callers, they were free to select their pleasures according to their inclinations. To read books. To drink wine. To make an even deeper discovery of each other through long and relaxed conversations sitting on the window-seat looking out at the warm rain. To smile and tease each other. To make love in every desirable way that pleasure suggested, however the mood took them; the mood was the thing, the atmosphere perfect.

They slept late and were not awakened by the sun. The God of Rain ruled and made the days short and the nights long.

Then the rain began to ease. Sometimes it stopped for a few hours, or even an entire day when the air would steam in the heat of the sun.
 
On days of light rainfall some of the officers came to call, spending the afternoons sitting on the veranda drinking wine and conversing while gazing at the wet garden.

Only the Brigadier seemed to find displeasure with the monsoon. `Damn me but I hate all this rain,’ he said glumly. ‘The weather in this country is shocking. First the dry heat of the hot season, now the damp heat of the rainy season. It fills me full of gloom. What about you, Macquarie?’

Lachlan looked at the raindrops glistening like crystals on the green leaves of the trees and gave a sigh of perfect contentment. ‘Well, sir, at times like this, we must console ourselves with what the Hindus say: “What does it matter if we are unhappy, as long as we are all unhappy together.”’

The Brigadier thought about it, and then looked at Jane who immediately fixed an unhappy expression on her face. ‘Yes, I think there may be something in that,’ he said, his mood brightening.

He turned on his seat to look behind him at Lieutenant Lacey who was lolling in a hammock, covertly studying the love positions of the
Kama Sutra
inside the covers of a more sober book,
The Rules and Regulations for the Formation, Exercises, and Movements of His Majesty’s Forces.
More commonly known by the officers as
“Stuff every Redcoat should know.”

‘You feel miserable too, eh Lacey?’ the Brigadier asked. ‘With all this rain, what?’

Lieutenant Lacey was thinking about the beautiful young harlot he had met in the town of Calicut and who was now his exclusive and regular playmate, and whom he would be seeing later.

‘I feel it won’t be long before I find myself going completely out of my mind, sir,’ Lacey replied, without lifting his eyes from the book.

The Brigadier cheered up immensely – there was nothing quite so uplifting as knowing others felt even more miserable than oneself.
 
He reached for his wineglass and said cheerfully, ‘Still, we mustn’t grumble.’

‘
This is physically impossible …
’ Lacey mouthed the words silently to Lachlan while holding up the Rule Book behind the Brigadier’s back, showing him an illustration within the
Kama Sutra.

‘I’ll not quarrel with that,’ Lachlan said, smiling at the Brigadier. ‘More wine, sir?’

*

By mid-August all were refreshed and ready for a long spell of sun again. And with the sun, came Colonel Petrie.

As soon as he had settled into his quarters, Petrie summoned all officers to his house and read out the order from the War Office and the Prime Minister – to prepare to take possession of the Dutch settlement of Cochin.

‘The Dutch in Cochin are declaring themselves allies of the French and no longer subject to the Stadtholder.’ Colonel Petrie's contempt was obvious. `Governor Van Spall and his army may open the gates of the Cochin fortress and receive us as friends,’ he continued.
 
‘But if they don't, we are ordered to attempt negotiations in a friendly manner, and if the Dutch
still
refuse to be reasonable, we are to move in and reclaim Cochin in the name of the Prince of Orange.’

Colonel Petrie looked directly at Captain Macquarie, and as soon as he spoke Lachlan knew that Petrie had received his orders directly from General Balfour.

‘The rest of the combatants will travel to Cochin by ship, but you, Captain Macquarie, will take the overland route with your company, and bring with you the regiment's nine-pounder cannon.’