The Faraway Drums (24 page)

“What has he to do with all this?”

“All what? Nothing, as far as I know. Why should he?” But Farnol knew the Nawab was lying.

He had never met the Rajah of Pandar. The State of Pandar was neighbour to the States of Serog and Kalanpur; once it had been the only State in this region, till tribal chieftains, long before the British came, had fought the ruler of Pandar and set up their own principalities. But Pandar was still the biggest and richest of the three States and till six months ago had been ruled by an elderly recluse who had never encouraged visitors, least of all officers of the British Raj. Perhaps Savanna had visited him on courtesy calls, but Farnol would have to wait till he got down to see George Lathrop before he could check that. The ruler had died and his only son and heir, Prince Sankar, had come home from Europe, where he had lived for ten years, to become Rajah. The State had had a reputation for stability and the British, not wanting to stir quiet waters, had never interfered more than was necessary.

Farnol himself sighed, decided he was going to get nowhere with the Nawab. And it was time he found a background other than the silver river, made himself a much less exposed target. “Righto, Bertie, we’ll leave it at that. I don’t believe you and I want you to know it. So we’ll both know where we stand from now on. But with the murder of your wife, I thought you might be forthcoming. Just for her sake.”

“
Goodnight, Clive.” The Nawab went up the bank and across to his tent.

Farnol was left alone, outlined against the bright silver background. He shivered, waiting for the bullet to hit home; then he went up the bank and across to the dining-tent. It took great effort not to run.

No one ate much, the talk was desultory and Farnol was glad to escape from the table. Bridie followed him out into the night and at once he was concerned for her.

“You shouldn’t be near me. You saw what happened to that girl.”

“I can’t keep avoiding you all the way down to Delhi. Let’s sit down here.” There were two canvas chairs outside Farnol’s and the Baron’s tent. “I’ll sit apart from you, if it’ll make you feel any easier.”

He went into the tent, turned out the paraffin lamp so that they would not be silhouetted against it. Then he came back and sat down beside her, not bothering to move his chair apart from hers. He felt comforted, which was something he had not felt with a woman in a long time. He had certainly never felt comforted by Mala.

“Bertie seems genuinely upset. He says he loved her.”

“How old was she? She was very young, wasn’t she?”

“Not quite sixteen.”

“Oh my God! And he’s—what? Forty?”

“They marry young in this country.”

“But the difference in their ages!” She knew of elderly men back home who had young mistresses; but that was different. The girls were always free to leave, they would have laughed at the thought of marriage unless a huge settlement was written into the marriage contract.

“I thought it happened a lot in Ireland. Old men marrying young girls. I remember reading once that Sir John Acton, who was the Prime Minister of Naples in Nelson’s day, was sixty-four when he married his thirteen-year-old niece.”

“Disgusting!”

But they were both just making words. He put out a hand and took hers, forgetful of targets and snipers. “It’s better, of course, if you’re much the same age. How old are you?”

“Old enough.” She turned her hand over, linked her fingers in his. “But I still say, that poor girl. Bertie’s wife. Not just that she died the way she did, but that her life was already decided for her. Women
should
have more—more freedom than that.”

“I agree.” But he would have agreed with anything she said that evening. Anything to be comforted.

III

The youngest wife, Ganga, was cremated early next morning beside the river. Farnol insisted that the caravan move on, but he stayed behind with the Nawab and the four escort guards. A pyre had been built and the body already laid on it before the sun came up. The caravan moved off and only Magda and the Baron, riding backwards in the coach, looked back.

“Don’t cremate me, sweetheart.” Magda shivered and looked up at her husband riding beside the coach. But she couldn’t resist torturing herself, singeing herself with flames not yet lit. She said to the Baron, “Do you want them to make ashes of you, Herr Baron?”

“I am a Catholic, Madame. We only burn our sinners.”

“Catholics,” said Lady Westbrook to the Ranee. “They think they own Hell as well as Heaven.”

By the river Farnol divided his attention between the pyre and the surrounding hills. He knew he was exposing himself once again to risk, but he felt he owed it to Ganga to be there. She had lost her life because of him.

“I should take her back to my palace,” the Nawab said. “But that bridge going down—it would mean going back up the main road, it would take so many more days—I’d miss the Durbar—”

“You’d be excused. It isn’t a command performance, is it?” But all at once the Nawab’s grief and love for his dead wife looked spurious.

And he seemed to realize it: “It’s not just being there to honour the King. I have business—there are things I must do—”

Now was not the time to interrogate him. Later perhaps, but not now. He said sympathetically, “I don’t think she would mind going all the way down to Delhi. Not if you take her ashes home afterwards.”

“I’ll do that.” The Nawab nodded absently, as if the idea had not occurred to him. “But it takes time for the body to become just ashes. You mustn’t stay, Clive.”

He seemed to bear no animosity this morning; or perhaps he was still genuinely wrapped in grief.
His
face was pale and strained, his eyes red-rimmed. Farnol could not imagine his weeping all night, but it looked as if it might have been so. He took a torch from one of the guards and put it to the paraffin-soaked dead wood of the pyre.

The flames leapt high and at once some of the branches fell in on themselves; the body slipped, seeming to flinch away from the flames. Farnol had witnessed dozens of cremations, but he could never reconcile himself to the sight of the fire devouring the body. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine what the girl had looked like alive; but he had seen her face for only a moment and she had been dead then. He smelled the sweet, sickening odour of burning flesh and he tried to shut his nostrils against it. He opened his eyes and saw the shroud turning to flaking ash, saw the lovely face for an instant, then the flames wrapped it hungrily and he shut his eyes against the horror.

He turned away, keeping his eyes averted. “I’m going on, Bertie. You should catch us up when we stop for lunch.”

The Nawab nodded, but said nothing, just continued to stare at the fire devouring what might have been his one true love. Farnol went across to his horse, mounted it and set off at a canter down the road. He put the thought of any sniper out of his mind; if he were going to be murdered this morning, the shot would already have been fired. He reined in the horse a quarter of a mile down the road and looked back. The pyre was a mass of leaping flames, bright red and yellow in the early morning light; a wreathing column of smoke climbed straight up through the still air. He had noticed that the smoke from pyres almost invariably turned black, as if the bodies flew their own mourning flag. He wanted to weep for the dead girl, but he hadn’t known her well enough for that sort of grief. But he felt sadder for her than he had for Rupert Savanna.

He caught up with the caravan several miles down the road, fell in for the moment beside Karim and Ahearn riding at the rear. “That sniper is still with us. He was trying for me last night, not the Nawab’s wife.”

“You are sure of that, sahib?”

“Of course.” But then he was not so sure. Once a target, always a target: a man’s conceit could run away with him. What if Ganga had been the target, if someone had wanted her silenced before she told him too much? Could Bertie have suspected her and arranged for her to be watched and disposed of? Was
all
his grief a sham?

“How much longer before we get to Kalka, sir?” said Ahearn.

“What?” His mind was spinning like a lottery barrel. “Two nights, I should think.”

“What happens to me then, sir?” Ahearn was thinking of doing another bunk. Things were too bloody dangerous around here. He’d be far better off on his own, yes.

“That’s up to you. I can turn you over to the provosts in Kalka or you can come on down to Delhi with me and I’ll see what I can do about having you transferred to my regiment.”

Karim Singh looked sideways at Ahearn, wondering why the sahib would want a deserting Irish bugger in Farnol’s Horse. The Indian Army was meant for better men than that.

“I think I’ll be coming down to Delhi, sir,” said Ahearn, who had had experience of being handed over to the provosts.

Farnol rode on up ahead and the Irishman and the Sikh were left to themselves. The Ranee’s escort were riding immediately behind them, but neither Karim Singh nor Ahearn thought of getting into conversation with them. Each had his own standards for the proper company he should keep.

“You think I’d be doing meself a favour if I joined His Nibs’ regiment?”

“His Nibs? You mean Major Farnol?” Karim sounded as disapproving as a governess. “You’d have to smarten yourself up. We’re a very posh regiment, as good as The Guides or the Bengal Lancers or Probyn’s Horse, or any of them. We only take the best chaps.”

Karim’s father and grandfather had served in Farnol’s Horse, always as bearer to a Farnol. Sikhs preferred to be soldiers of the line, but the Singhs had never considered themselves as being anything less by being a bearer to a Farnol. They were never expected to do menial tasks, there were always coolies to be found to carry the water, make the bed, clean the boots; but when they were alone together in the field, camped in the hills, Karim took as much pride as a family butler in caring for his master. He and the sahib were part of the regiment and, in Karim’s eyes, everything they did was in the name of the regiment. The top brass in Calcutta or Delhi might not think so, but Karim Singh’s second religion was the regiment and one of his gods was the sahib and he never gave a thought to the brass. The only judges, in his eyes, were the other posh regiments.

He was 35 years old and he hoped he would grow old in the regiment. He had a wife and two
sons
in a village in the Punjab and, more often than he would confess to the sahib, he longed to see more of them. To his secret shame, he had found he was also a family man; he kept it hidden, as if it were a venereal disease. But the pox would be forgiven; but not love of a wife and kids. His trouble was that he did not know his sahib as well as he thought: Farnol would not only have forgiven him his love of his family but been delighted by it. Farnol, too, had his secrets.

“Do you have a wife?” Karim said.

“Me?” said Ahearn and almost fell out of his saddle laughing. “Jay-sus, man, who’d have me? Some coolie girl?”

“Some coolie women make good wives.” His own wife was not a coolie: not to him, though maybe to the English.

“No offence, man. But if I married a cool—an Indian woman, I’d be trapped here in this bloody country for life. Yes. I could never take her home to Belfast with me when me time was up. Not to Belfast, they’d never let her in.” He could not take himself home, either: he knew that now for a fact, yes. He dreamed of America or Australia, where there were opportunities for the Irish, so long as there wasn’t an Englishman or a Scotsman ahead of them for a job. The trouble was, the bloody English and Scots were everywhere. The Welsh left home, too, but wherever they went they disappeared down the coal mines and were never heard of again. “She’d die in bloody Belfast, if they let her in at all. So would I.”

“There are women going to waste in this country.” Karim was glad he had no daughters, though his wife always wished for one.

“I know. I been looking at them wives of the Nawab. Five of ‘em. Six of ‘em in another week or two, I suppose—he’ll get a replacement for that one he’s burning back there. Them fellers run their
zenanas
, they can always get reinforcements. I’d like to reinforce one of them wives, make her pregnant, up the duff.” He looked up ahead at the howdahs swaying like coracles on the tide of the elephants’ backs. A wife looked back at him and he dreamed that she was smiling at him behind her veil. He raised a hand and waved, but she turned her head away disdainfully. He said bitterly, and he meant Mother India as well as the contemptuous wife, “Bitch.”

“You watch out,” said Karim. “You get too close to those wives and the Nawab’s chaps will put a bullet in you. Or cut off your balls.”

“
Jay-sus,” said Ahearn, who had never heard of an Irish eunuch and did not want to be the first.

It was mid-afternoon before the Nawab caught up with the caravan. Farnol did not question him as to what had delayed him, but it did seem as if the cremated Ganga’s ashes had taken a long time to cool. The ashes were in an Army and Navy Stores’ biscuit tin and were under the care of the eldest wife in one of the howdahs; as if the Nawab still thought the youngest wife was safe only within the
zenana
. He was quiet and sober-faced as he joined Farnol, Bridie and Mahendra at the head of the line. He was no longer Bertie, the flannelled fool.

“Will you report her death?” he asked Farnol. “I’d rather you didn’t, you know.”

“Are we still in Serog?”

“I think so. Are we, Bobs?”

Mahendra, quiet and sober-faced as his fellow prince, nodded. “Our boundary is the next bridge.”

“Where shall we be then?” said Farnol.

“In Pandar.”

Oh Christ, thought Farnol. It struck him that he had worked the wrong side of the Simla hills, always to the north and never down here where they sloped towards the plains and British rule. But that was where he had been ordered to go; the English always had a blind eye for trouble close to home. They treated the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh that way and it worked; so, they had evidently thought, with the States of Serog, Kalanpur and Pandar. But now trouble could be on the very doorstep and he knew nothing of the lie of the land.