The Mountain of Light (15 page)

“Thank you,” Azizuddin said. The audience was over.

Mr. Taft was led out from a side entrance and came loping over the soggy ground to grab the tray with the diamond necklaces, which he wrapped in soft muslin and put into his dispatch case. Then, holding the case snug under his arm, the tray itself in his other hand, he followed them to the riverbank.

On the way back, Fanny was grim. The rain had let up almost completely, although thin, gray clouds still tarried in the sky, and the sun shed its light upon them as though through a veil—translucent and golden.

Halfway through the guava grove, Emily's horse refused to budge. They tried cajoling it, kicking it, feeding it lumps of
brown and raw
jaggery,
but nothing would work. So Fanny dismounted from her horse and said, “Let's walk back.”

They did, Emily hesitant at first, following her sister's example of tucking the hem of her gown into her waistband—only long after the others had disappeared toward the British encampment.

Fanny said suddenly, “Did you see the Kohinoor?”

“The Maharani was wearing it?”

“On her arm. He must really love her, that Runjeet.”

Emily was disdainful. “It cannot have been that big after all. Even though”—here a doubt crept into her voice—“Bill said it was.” Then she remembered the joyful face of Runjeet's young bride. Emily sucked on her tongue. “He's so old, Fanny. I cannot . . . think of them together. And that child who cried, it was their son. He won't ever become Maharajah of the Punjab, will he? There are other, older sons.”

“And us,” Fanny said. The grimness had come back to her expression now.

Emily knew what she meant, but she didn't respond. What was there to say? Fanny and she saw things differently, just as they had when they were younger. What was there to say?

“Why does George want to invade Afghanistan, Em?”

She shrugged and waved her hand in a vague motion. “I think . . . the Russians. Shuja's there to be put on the throne; we could do with a friend in Afghanistan. George doesn't think . . . that Dost Mohammad is . . . er . . . friendly toward the British Empire.”

Fanny slashed at the nearest tree with her whip, and the parrots rose in a mass of green and red, scolded her, and vanished into the sky. “We're not a very friendly people, are we? Look at what we did to the King of Oude; we annexed his kingdom. And if Runjeet's heirs are not careful, we'll do that to the Punjab also.”

At another time, before their talk of this morning, Emily would have shouted at Fanny. Something short, something biting, and ended the conversation. But now, as their boots were sucked into the mud, as they walked together, alone, for almost the first time in their lives, she put a warning hand on her sister's arm.

“Don't say this in public, Fanny. Not even to George—it makes a mockery of why we are here in India. It's preposterous, this kind of talking. The East India Company has a right . . .
we
have a right—”

Fanny's eyebrows arched until they were lost in her dark hair. “A divine right, Em?”

“Why not?” This, doggedly.

“I wonder,” Fanny said slowly, “if we consulted the Indians at all in this matter. The East India Company has eaten up great big chunks of India; you're right, we will not spit it out without a fight.”

Emily laughed, and Fanny looked at her in surprise. “Perhaps you're not so different from George and me after all, Fan. You take advantage of George's position as Governor-General of India, of the money he makes, and then you complain about it.”

A voice came to them through the forest. George, squelching in the mud, his shirt sticking to his chest and back, brown riding up his trousers. How was the visit? What did the Maharani say? Anything about the meeting with Runjeet? And so, they walked back together, each of them hanging off one of their brother's arms, thankful for the support after the long, damp day. When they parted within their tents, it was as though the day had not happened, they had not talked, not delved into their hearts and held out secrets to each other. It was as though that twenty yards of corridor had come to stretch between them again.

But Emily forgot all of that, for when she stepped into her tent, there, on the little footstool by the bed, was a wicker
basket crammed with white roses. And a letter, on custard-thick paper, filled with elegant, sloping writing.

•  •  •

On the day they were to meet Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the comings and goings between the two camps began well before the break of dawn.

At five o'clock, a British emissary went across the Sutlej, on a raft, alone, rowing himself blindly in the heavy, cotton-like mist that skimmed the river's waters. He had been expected, of course, but that didn't stop the Maharajah's men from sending a few harmless rifle shots zinging through the fog around him. So he arrived sweating and shaking, the air still redolent with the stench of gunpowder. The Maharajah's emissary met him at the banks. They bowed to each other, drank a few cups of steaming
chai,
and the British man ate two or three gluey sweets he could not give name to and did not want in his mouth.

“His Excellency, Lord Auckland of the British Empire wishes to visit the great Maharajah Runjeet Singh and present his compliments in person,” he said, wiping his teeth with his tongue and worrying bits of stickiness from them.

The Maharajah's man nodded. “The great and
glorious
Maharajah Ranjit Singh, Lion of the Punjab, Maharajah of Lahore, Head of State, and Lord of the Five Rivers, will be happy to receive the Lord Auckland.”

A line of the Maharajah's soldiers, dressed in white and gold, with flimsy gold gauze scarves wrapped around their long beards, came smartly to attention behind. Auckland's emissary bowed again, and again, until he could get on the raft and row himself back to the British encampment. The mist had lifted in all of the talking as the sun sliced over the horizon, and if the Maharajah's men had wanted to practice their shooting, he would have been an open, and standing target. But he arrived back south safely.

An hour later, another emissary rowed from the Maharajah's side to the British side to thank the first one for his visit and to assure the British of Ranjit Singh's acute keenness in meeting Lord Auckland and how much he was looking forward to it. This went on, back and forth, a few times in the morning, and the Sutlej was muddied with all the traffic.

Finally, around ten o'clock, Mr. McNaghten himself went over to the Punjab side, and he was met halfway on the river by Sher Singh, Maharajah Ranjit Singh's adopted son. The two men conversed in the middle, standing upright on their rafts, maintaining their balance precariously while the rowers struggled to keep them afloat. It was agreed by all that the time had finally come for Lord Auckland to make his way to the Sikh encampment.

So at eleven o'clock, Emily and Fanny came out into the warm morning air. George was standing by William McNaghten; Bill, their nephew; and the ADCs. The Queen's Buff regiment stretched out to the riverbank in two solid and parallel lines, rifles held up above their heads and slanted inward, forming a tent of armament.

George stepped forward and put out his arm for Emily, who slipped her small hand through it, and they went down the line of soldiers. Emily could feel the stiffness in George's movements, his sudden intake of breath when he saw the row of caparisoned elephants lined up on the other bank, and the lone, white horse prancing in front. The figure atop the horse was small, hunched, and yet he rode as though born on that elegant horse.

“That is the Maharajah?” Emily asked, patting her brother's arm.

“Must be,” he muttered. “Must say he makes a finer figure than I expected. Oh, Emily”—he stumbled, and she held him tight until he had regained his stride—“two months of this to get through.”

She glanced at her brother. His black velvet tailcoat fitted
about his shoulders, emblazoned with ribbons and decorations, the epaulets rimmed in gold braid. His linen, high-waisted trousers had been dusted off just five minutes before by his
jemadar
in his tent, but they had already become sullied with dirt; his knee-length boots were dull. George wore a white shirt with a short collar, and a red velvet vest. Above his collar, his thin face was taut and shiny with sweat, his hair lying flat against his skull.

Behind them, Fanny murmured something in a low voice into Bill's ear, and his muted laughter followed them all the way.

Emily and George climbed into a sumptuously decorated howdah on an elephant's back—after two years on the move, she could do this without much effort. George, who had never become used to anything in India, tripped and finally heaved himself over to fall onto the cushions. When they had settled themselves, Emily turned to watch the rest of their party climb onto the backs of other elephants.

The mahout, a slim, dark man clad in only a
dhoti
covering him from the waist down, knocked with his ankh on the elephant's head and it rose laboriously. First on its hind legs, tipping them forward, and then on its forelegs. Emily held on to her hat with one hand and the pillars of the howdah with the other. They could not have rowed over the Sutlej, or ridden on horses, or even walked on foot. Nothing less than an elephant and a howdah would do for the Governor-General of India to meet the Maharajah of the Punjab Empire.

The elephant trudged slowly into the Sutlej, drops of water splashing upward. Emily and George ducked and shielded their faces. She took out her handkerchief and wiped the mud from George's cravat as best she could.

And then, the elephant halted in the middle of the river, its trunk punching through the air, its huge ears fluttering at the edges. The mahout banged on its head, prodded the heavy, gray skin with his ankh, spoke into its ear. But it stood
there, obstinate. And then, its trunk sneaked downward, they heard an intake of harsh breath, and before Emily or George could react, the elephant had raised its trunk over its head and bathed them with a rush of warm water.

The mahout turned, took off his turban, and wiped his forehead with the cloth. His voice was filled with a hidden laughter. “I'm sorry, Lord Sahib, he will not move.”

The other elephants and camels trudged through the Sutlej, passing them by, uncontrolled for the most part by their mahouts and drivers. Fanny waved. “We're going to get there first, George!”

George sank back and hid his face in Emily's lap. “We should have taken a damn boat. It was McNaghten who insisted upon these animals. He knew, from Fakir Azizuddin, that Runjeet meant to meet us with his entire stable of elephants, so we could do no less, McNaghten said.”

“And it's his war also, isn't it, George?” Emily said, looking around her in despair. Fanny was hanging half out of her howdah, and at that moment, a fistful of wind blew her hat onto the waters. Emily followed its path and saw it float for a moment before it sank. And then she searched for the man who was responsible for this fracas—William McNaghten, George's political secretary. In the normal course of things, to meet a native king, George would have brought along his foreign secretary, but the visit to the Punjab Empire was a political one, for the purpose of embarking on a war, and McNaghten had kidnapped the foreign secretary's duties for his own.

On the other bank, the lone figure on the horse threw his right hand up into the air, and then he jerked at his reins. The more orderly elephants on the northern bank of the Sutlej opened their ranks and gave way to their king. When he had galloped out of sight, the elephants moved back into formation, solid and unyielding.

Emily and George sat on their elephant in the middle of
the Sutlej River for an hour. Each time a raft was rowed near the animal, it trumpeted and bumped it away with its trunk. The mahout jumped into the waters and disappeared in the crowd and the shouting. If he had stayed, he would have felt the lashes of a whip on his shoulders before the end of the day. The elephant had no such compunction. He doused his trunk into the Sutlej and sprayed them with water again and again. On the other bank, the reception committee went back to their quarters, and only the Maharajah's normal guard remained, lounging on rocks, smoking
beedis
and watching them with avid curiosity.

McNaghten and the other members of George's council scurried up and down in the sand, like so many crabs. Some of them had guided their elephants safely back to land, some had splashed back through the water.

Finally, Emily dangled over the edge of the howdah and clambered down the elephant's broad torso, using the ropes that tethered the howdah to its back as a ladder. The Sutlej ran shallow here, only some three or four feet deep. A flurry of ADCs, stripped to their shirts, made a chair with their arms and carried her back. Emily flushed, acutely conscious of their heated breaths upon her neck, of their arms around her waist, under the backs of her thighs; she had never been so close to these young men, not even when dancing with them. And so, George and she returned to their camp, bedraggled and filthy, her gray velvet gown ruined forever.

When darkness dropped, an infantryman waded into the waters up to the stubborn beast, raised his rifle, and shot it between the eyes. Within the hour, the carcass had been towed away.

In her tent, Emily lay in her bed. A kind message had come from the Maharajah that since they had been . . . ah . . . unable to meet today, would tomorrow work equally well? Same time? Same place? McNaghten said yes, yes, yes, of course, your Majesty; the Governor-General of India will be there.

George slept early, mopping up the frightful day with the fabric of the night. Emily could hear Fanny and Bill playing a noisy game of cards in her room—it had all just been a great deal of fun for Fanny. We've given the Maharajah some rollicking entertainment, she had said, that's all. Emily held the note that had accompanied this morning's roses.