The Far Pavilions (111 page)

Some twenty minutes later a party of four horsemen could have been seen riding swiftly across the croplands towards the dusty main highway that runs between Khed Brahma and Ahmadabad, and on reaching it they broke into a gallop, heading south.

Twilight overtook them when they were still many miles from the city of Ahmad Shah. But they pressed on through the dusk, and later in the starlight; and when at last they came within sight of the twinkling lights of the cantonment, the moon was rising. They drew rein near a clump of trees and Ash lifted Juli down from the saddle. They did not speak, for they had already said everything that was necessary; and besides all four were anxious and more than a little weary. Gul Baz handed over his horse to Bukta and salaamed to Ash, and followed by Anjuli, who walked a pace behind him as befitted a woman, he went away in the moonlight towards a village on the outskirts of the cantonments where he could hire a tonga to take them back to the bungalow.

Five days later Ash returned to Ahmadabad, riding one of Sarji's horses and attended by one of the syces from Sarji's stables.

The syce had been entertained by Kulu Ram and others before taking the horse back with him later that day, and before he left he told his hosts, with a wealth of detail, the story of the death of his master, who had been tragically drowned while attempting to swim his horse across one of the many tidal rivers that ran into the Gulf of Kutch, and of how the Sahib's horse had also been drowned, and the Sahib himself only saved by a miracle. The tale had lost nothing in the telling, and Gul Baz had been able to report later that it had obviously not occurred to the teller – or to anyone else – to doubt it.

‘So that is another ditch safely crossed,’ said Gul Baz. ‘As for the other matter, that too was passed over in safety. No one has thought to question the identity of the one who returned here with me. Nor will they, for she keeps to her room, feigning poor health; which I think is in part true, for during her second night here she cried out in her sleep so loudly that I awoke and ran out to her hut, fearing that she had been discovered and was being abducted. But she said that it was only a dream and that –’ He broke off, seeing Ash's expression, and said: ‘Has this happened before, then?’

‘Yes. I should have thought of it, and warned you,’ said Ash, angry with himself for the omission. He himself had not been troubled by any further dreams of Shushila, but she continued to weigh on his conscience: her small, reproachful face was still apt to rise up before him at unexpected moments, and if this was so with him, how much worse must it be for Juli, who had loved her?

He asked if any of the other servants had been awakened, but Gul Baz did not think so. ‘For as you know, my quarter and the one that was Mahdoo-ji's stand apart from the others, and the hut in which the Rani-Sahiba lies is close behind it and thus well shielded from those that are occupied by the other servants. But on the next day I purchased opium and made a draught for her to take after sundown, since when she has slept soundly and made no further outcries in the night – which is as well, for the
shikari
spoke truth when he said that the Sahib might be spied upon.’

According to Gul Baz, on the previous day several strangers had come to the bungalow, one asking for work, another purporting to be a vendor of drugs and simples, and a third inquiring after an errant wife, who, so he said, was believed to have run off with the servant of some Sahib. This last one, on hearing that Pelham-Sahib had left for a shooting trip in Kathiawar earlier in the month and had not yet returned, had asked many questions…

‘All of which,’ said Gul Baz, ‘we answered. Sympathizing with him in his distress and telling him many things: though none, I fear, that were of help to him. As for the seller of drugs and such-like, by good fortune he was here again today when the Sahib returned, and he stayed to listen to all that the syce had to tell. Afterwards he packed up his wares and went away, saying that he had many other customers to attend to and could waste no more time here. I do not think he will return, for he has seen for himself that the Sahib came back alone, and learned from that syce, whose tongue wagged as freely as an old woman's, that no third person accompanied the Sahib and the
shikari
when they brought the sad news of the drowning in Kathiawar to the family of the Sirdar Sarjevar Desai.’

‘There will be others,’ observed Ash pessimistically. ‘I do not believe that the Diwan's spies will be satisfied so easily.’

Gul Baz shrugged and said that in his opinion they would very soon tire of hanging about the compound to exchange gossip with people who had nothing of the least interest to disclose, and of shadowing the Sahib round cantonments only to find him engaged in such unsuspicious and mundane matters as social calls and farewell parties, and the tedious but necessary arrangements that must be made with railway officials and booking clerks regarding his return journey to Mardan.

‘You have only to go to-and-fro daily,’ said Gul Baz, ‘letting it be seen that you have nothing to conceal and are in no haste to be gone, and the watchers will soon weary of the game. Another week or ten days should suffice, and after that it will be safe enough for us to shake the dust of this ill-omened place from our shoes and board the
rail-ghari
for Bombay. And may the All Merciful ordain,’ he added fervently, ‘that we never have reason to return here.’

Ash nodded absently, for his thoughts were on Juli, who must spend a further eight or ten days cooped up in the hot and stifling little hut, not daring to show herself for even a short breath of air, or to sleep at night without the aid of opium. But he had taken Gul Baz's advice, and had seen to it that every minute of the succeeding days should find him openly employed in some leisurely and innocuous activity, because the fact that someone, or more probably several people, were interested was soon clear to him. For though he was careful not to look over his shoulder to see if he was being followed, he realized that even if he had not been warned he would still have been aware that he was under constant surveillance. It was purely a matter of instinct, the same instinct that tells the jungle creatures that they are being stalked by a tiger, or that can warn a man waking in darkness and silence that there is an intruder in his room.

Ash had experienced that feeling before, and recognizing it (with him it took the form of a coldness between his shoulder-blades and a prickling of the hairs at the back of his neck, coupled with an intense and uncomfortable alertness) he had his bed moved up to the flat roof of the bungalow, where anyone who so desired could keep an eye on him and see for themselves that he did not leave it to engage in any surreptitious meetings by night.

The tale of Sarjevar's untimely death and the loss of the peerless Dagobaz had spread through the cantonment, and Ash received a good deal of sympathy from the officers and sowars of Roper's Horse and various members of the British community. And also from the dead man's great-uncle, the Risaldar-Major, who was touched by the Sahib's grief for his lost friend and urged him not to blame himself – which was not in Ash's power, as he knew very well that he was to blame, because he could so easily have refused to let Sarji go with him to Bhithor.

The fact that Sarji's family and friends believed that cock-and-bull story that he and Bukta had invented, and repeated it as the truth to all who called to commiserate, was of great service to Ash, as it conveyed the impression that they had known all along that the two had been shooting in an area that was a great deal further to the south of Ahmadabad than the border of Rajasthan was to the north. And this, taken in conjunction with Ash's behaviour and the absence of any evidence that the late Rana's widow was in Gujerat (or even that she was still alive), evidently succeeded in convincing the Diwan's spies that they were on the wrong track, for by the end of the week Gul Baz was able to report that the bungalow was no longer being watched.

That night there had been no skulking figure among the shadows, and next morning when Ash went riding he did not have to be told that he was not being followed or spied upon, for he could feel it in his bones. All the same he took no chances, but was careful to behave as though the danger still existed; and only when a further three days and nights passed without sign of a watcher did he feel able to relax and breathe freely again – and began to think of the future.

Now that he was no longer under surveillance, there was no reason to linger in Ahmadabad a moment longer than necessary. But it was not possible to leave immediately, because two of the three dates proffered by the station master on which he could guarantee accommodation on the train to Bombay with a through booking to Delhi and Lahore had already been lost. The remaining one entailed a further delay of several days, but now Ash closed with it and told Gul Baz to see to all the necessary arrangements for the move, he himself having other things to occupy him.

Despite the anxieties that bedevilled the tense days that followed upon his return to cantonments, the need to engage in trivial pursuits had proved a blessing, for together with the long hours of enforced idleness and the longer nights it had provided him with ample time in which to sort out the problems of the future. Yet the major one still remained unsolved: what to do about Juli?

It had all seemed so simple once; if only she were free he could marry her. Well she was free now, free from both the Rana and Shushila, and there should have been nothing to prevent him doing so. But the trouble lay in the fact that the gap between day-dreaming about remote possibilities and dealing with the reality was so wide as to be almost unbridgeable…

The same could be said of his feeling for the Corps of Guides, for at one stage of the unforgettable journey with the bridal camp he had actually considered deserting – leaving India, with Juli, to take refuge in another country and never see Mardan or Wally or Zarin again. It astonished him now that even in the first fever of his passion for Juli he could ever have contemplated such a thing: except that he had been in disgrace at the time, banished from the Regiment and the Frontier, and with no idea how long his exile would last – or any certainty that some future Commandant would not decide that it would be better not to have him back at all. But things were different now… he had been recalled to Mardan to take up the duties he had abandoned when he joined the hunt for Dilasah Khan and the stolen carbines, and there was no question of his refusing to return. The ties that bound him to the Guides stretched too far back into the past and were too strong to be easily broken; and even for Juli's sake he would not – could not – bring himself to sever them and lose both Wally and Zarin. Nor was there any point in doing so, when even if he could persuade someone to marry him to Juli, he would never be able to claim her openly as his wife.

‘The problem is this –’ explained Ash, discussing the matter with Mrs Viccary, who, besides being the only person in Gujerat whom he felt able to tell the story to, could be trusted not to let it go any further and to listen to it without being swayed by any prejudice on the score of Juli's ancestry or his own.

It was not advice that he needed (being well aware that if it ran contrary to his own wishes he would not take it) but someone to talk to. Someone sensible and sympathetic who loved India as he did and with whom he could discuss this whole situation, and by doing so get it straightened out in his own mind. And Mrs Viccary had not failed him: she had neither blamed nor praised, or been shocked by his desire to marry a Hindu widow, or by Anjuli's view that no legal marriage was necessary.

‘You see,’ said Ash, ‘once it was known that we were married she wouldn't be safe.’

‘Or you either,’ observed Edith Viccary. ‘People would talk, and news travels fast in this country.’

That of course was the point; and Ash was inexpressibly grateful to her for seeing it at once instead of bringing up all the more obvious arguments against such a marriage – beginning with the fact that, until he reached the age of thirty or the rank of Major, he could not marry without the consent of his Commanding Officer (which in the circumstances he would certainly not get) and going on to point out that in a regiment such as the Guides, which recruited Mussulmans, Sikhs, Hindus and Gurkhas, a British officer who married a Hindu widow would be anathema. By doing so he would sow dissension among the men under his command, offending not only the caste Hindus, but probably the Sikhs as well, causing the Mussulmans to despise him for thinking so little of his own religion, and Sikhs, Mussulmans and Gurkhas together to suspect him of favouring his wife's co-religionists whenever he was called upon to judge between a Hindu and a man of another faith, or to recommend one or other for promotion. The Guides would ask him to leave, and no other Indian Army regiment would accept him for the same reasons.

Ash knew all about that; and so did Mrs Viccary. But none of it was worth worrying about for the simple reason that even if he could arrange to marry Juli, to do so openly would be tantamount to signing her death warrant – together with his own – since such a marriage, once made public, was bound to cause a great deal of talk and speculation and scandal. And in a country such as India where not only regiments but members of the Civil Service, medical officers, policemen, clergymen, men in trade and numerous other Britishers, all accompanied by large numbers of Indian servants, were moved about from one end of the country to another at short notice, a story of this kind would be gossiped over in the Clubs of every military station from Peshawar to Trivandrum, and in every bazaar where the servants of the ‘Sahib-log’ gathered to talk over the doings of the
Angrezis
and retail the gossip of the station they had just left. And the Indian grape-vine was the swiftest and most efficient in the world…

It would not be long before Bhithor came to hear that the same Guides officer who had escorted the late Rana's wives to their wedding (and been stationed in Gujerat at the time of the Rana's death and the disappearance of one of his widows) had subsequently married a Hindu widow. The Diwan would add two and two together, and coming up with the correct total, would send someone to investigate; after which it would only be a matter of time – probably only a very short time – before Juli died. For Bhithor would require vengeance for their own dead – all those who had died (and there must have been many of them) in the fight to defend the entrance to Bukta's secret road – as well as for the insult that had been put upon them by the abduction of their late Rana's widow.