The Strangler Vine (24 page)

I could not see, but I could feel twigs and stones digging into me. I could not move my hands nor feel my legs. My head throbbed. I was pulled upward, but my legs would not work. Something fell hard across my shoulders, stinging and heavy. That roused me. My legs held after that. I shouted out to Blake and Mir Aziz, and was rewarded with another blow. Something – a stick, a knife – prodded me in the back, and obediently I staggered forward. My face was tied tightly in a cloth; my mouth was very dry.

The stick, constantly needling me in the back, prodded me onward. We walked for what seemed a long time. There were no voices, just the constant snap underfoot of grasses and leaves. At last someone seized my shoulders and half pushed and half hoisted me into a room of some sort. I could tell I was no longer outside because the sounds had changed. I was thrust on to a dirt floor. There I rolled over and passed thankfully into unconsciousness.

When I awoke I choked. My mouth was so dry and full of dust that my tongue stuck to its roof. I still could not see. I endeavoured to spread the little moisture under my tongue about my mouth. My face and chest were pressed into the earth. The cloth about my face smelled rank, of old sweat and other unpleasant things. My hands, still tied, were awkwardly twisted into my stomach. All was silence. I struggled to sit up and braced myself for another blow, but none came. I put up my hands to dislodge the cloth from my face, pulling it down past my chin. It was pitch black and I wondered for a moment if I was blind, but abandoned myself to the relief brought by the cold air pouring into my mouth and lungs. I longed to lay my head down and lapse into oblivion. Instead I examined myself for injury. There was grit on my lips and in my nostrils. I was sore, but nothing felt broken or bleeding. The floor beneath me was dry and
dusty, the wall behind me rough, and the air still and cool. I was as cold as I had been since coming to India. I thought I must be in a cave. I began to make out shapes in the gloom. I felt cautiously around myself, and to my right laid hold of a prone body. I felt for the head and made out the ragged top of an ear.

‘Blake? Blake!’ I whispered, as loudly as I could.

He barely breathed. I shook him gently, and then more urgently, pulling his head free of his blindfold. Hindered by my bonds, I tried to rub his hands, then to slap him on the cheek. He began to cough, eventually turning to one side to hawk upon the ground. I swear, I was never so glad to hear an expectoration in all my life.

I got on to my knees and tried to haul him up by looping my arms about him from behind and then propping him against the rock wall. ‘Are you injured?’ I whispered.

For a moment there was no answer, just shallow coughing and wheezing. ‘Nothing that hasn’t been knocked about a good deal before,’ he said, his voice little more than a croak. We sat for a while. He whispered, ‘Damn me, what I’d do for some water.’ Then he said, ‘There’s someone here with us.’

There was a rustling, a tiny shift, a light breath some way to my left.

‘Mir Aziz?’ I said urgently.

‘Alas, no.’ The voice had a languorous, drawling quality to it. ‘I told you to go back to England, Jeremiah Blake. See what happens when you disregard my advice?’

Blake said, ‘Company sent me to look for you. Couldn’t leave you to the “deaf tyranny of fate” and all that, could I?’

‘That is one of Byron’s, Jem, not one of mine.’

The voice reminded me of a rakish uncle of mine who had resided – when he could afford it – in Bath and of whom my father had greatly disapproved.

‘Damn me,’ Blake croaked, ‘must have misremembered.’

‘My line – if you recall – speaks of “slipping the rusty bonds of circumstance”. The metaphor is quite different.’

I recalled it very well.

‘Magnificent as it is, Xavier, I’m more in need of a cup of water than some stirring lines.’

I felt I had been struck ten times across the head. In the course of our travel, I had moved from a sneaking suspicion that we should never find Xavier Mountstuart, to a conviction that someone in Jubbulpore had done him to death, to a belief that we would probably never find out what had become of him. The sudden confounding of these presumptions, encountering the man in a cave in the midst of the Mofussil, was almost too much to comprehend.

‘You are the very apex of mundanity, Jem,’ Mountstuart said. ‘And you are speaking like a plebeian again. After all those years of practice.’

‘I am a plebeian, Xavier.’

‘Well, there’s a water crock somewhere about.’ There was a shuffling and the sounds of gentle tapping. ‘They have deposited us among their stores. There is a wick and a tinderbox. Like the deity on the first day, I shall make light.’

There was the sound of flint clicking and a small flame appeared. It lit a small wick floating in a bowl of ghee, which did little to chase back the darkness, illuminating only a limited space about it. There was a clack of pot on pot and the sound of water pouring.

‘My dear young man, will you oblige me?’

It took me a moment to understand he meant me. I sprang forward to take the bowl in both hands and brought it to Blake’s mouth. He drank greedily, then stopped and pushed it at me. I gulped and swallowed and choked, and gulped again, then used my sleeve to try to clear the worst of the grit from my face and mouth. When I was done, I turned to look surreptitiously at my hero.

The light, as I say, was dim, so it was hard to make him out clearly. He was older than I had envisioned him, and bore the marks of captivity. He was very thin, his once blond hair longer, darker and wildly unkempt; he had a stringy beard. His long fingers were grimy, his face dark, whether from dirt or sun I could not tell. But the famous dark brows furrowed over the famous eyes – I fancied even in the gloom I could just see their blueness. He was dressed in a thin shirt and pyjamas and native sandals, and had about him a blanket.
Around him there were jars and sacks and small crates. To his left, the cave narrowed to a dark hole; to my and Blake’s right was another larger exit.

‘Well,’ Mountstuart said conversationally, ‘I am most flattered you have come. It has been some time, hasn’t it, Jem?’

‘Five years. Before they told me, I didn’t even know you’d returned from England.’

‘You were still rotting away in Blacktown when I came back, an ill-tempered recluse barring the door to visitors.’

Blake exhaled slowly.

‘Wallowing in grief,’ Mountstuart went on, ‘having cast aside every privilege you had won. That
I
had made possible for you. Having wasted all the advantages that had come your way. Because of a native woman. For God’s sake, Jem, I trained you to speak like a native, not to become one.’

‘She was my
wife
, Xavier. I was proud to call her such, and I loved her. You of all people should have understood that,’ said Blake quietly.

‘You knew how things worked,’ Mountstuart went on. ‘You might have lived with her quite respectably in the traditional manner, as your
bibi
, but you had to marry her and thrust your choices in everyone’s faces. And then all the rest followed. The contrariness, the insubordination.’

‘Contrariness and insubordination. That’s good, coming from you.’

‘I am an aristocrat, and that allows me a certain leeway. Besides, I understood the boundaries.’

Blake’s voice was uncomfortably calm. ‘Well, I chose my path, it was not forced upon me. Do you really wish to argue?’

‘No, by all means let us not.’ There was silence. ‘So, you are still with the Company.’

‘It was the price of staying on.’

‘You recovered your captaincy then?’

‘I didn’t want it.’

‘What do they have you doing?’

‘Cleaning up their mistakes, small and tawdry things mostly.’

‘
Plus ça change
,’ said Mountstuart languidly.

‘The mistakes were on a grander scale then.’ There was suddenly the sound of breathy chuckling. Then at last, Blake said, ‘Xavier, why’d you come back?’

‘Oh heavens, Jem! For the money of course! The estate is mortgaged to the hilt. I must have something to live on.’

‘Hence
Leda and Rama
,’ said Blake, drily.

‘It’s good enough.’

‘It is a masterpiece!’ I said.

‘My dear young man, it is hardly that. But it should make me some money and do some mischief in Calcutta.’ Mountstuart let out a long and elegant sigh. ‘I came back because I missed it. I could not abide the endless grey, and those long damp winters.’

‘Xavier,’ Blake said, ‘we were three. Have you seen or heard about another captive? A native. His name is Mir Aziz.’

‘Not one whisper. I have seen only you. I imagine they would have killed him at once. I am alive because I am European – and famous, of course – and they do not know what to do with me.’

Neither of us spoke.

‘They have, by the way, treated me really quite well. They now let me more or less live among them. I generally sleep in a house on the edge of a nearby hamlet. I have learnt a particularly recondite and little-known dialect from a fellow from north of Etawah, and a plethora of fascinating details about their sexual practices. Tell me, have you been in Doora? How is Vishwanath?’

‘Well enough,’ said Blake, with the smallest hint of impatience. ‘Surviving assassination attempts. Is there something to eat?’

‘There is roti and a little dahl left from my breakfast. You are welcome to them. There may be something in the sacks. Poor Vishwanath. His court has always been a veritable pit of snakes.’

He reached about for the food. ‘Perhaps you will introduce your young companion?’

‘May I present Lieutenant William Avery, not quite of the 7th Bengal irregular cavalry. A great admirer of yours. Avery, Xavier Mountstuart, esquire.’

‘Truly, I am deeply honoured, sir,’ I said, suddenly breathless. ‘I know all your verse, I came to India because of your writings. I cannot tell you how—’

‘An admirer, you say?’ he said, ‘how refreshing. Jem has always been curiously resistant to my work.’

‘I’ve told you, Xavier, no man is a hero to his valet.’

‘Oh God, is he still quoting Montaigne?’ Mountstuart drawled. ‘I wish I had never given you that book. Can you tell me, young man, how my new book is faring? Does it sell?’

‘It is the talk of Calcutta, sir. I had to bribe the bookseller for my copy.’

‘And the reviews?’

‘Scandalized, sir.’

‘How gratifying.’

‘This is the way out?’ said Blake, pointing to the right where the cave narrowed.

Mountstuart nodded. ‘We are quite deep in, deep enough to keep their supplies from spoiling. From the outside one can hear little.’

Blake stood up unsteadily, took the light from Mountstuart and hobbled towards it.

‘It turns to the right. It is some way before one reaches the open air.’

‘How many?’

‘Between fifteen and twenty. It varies.’

‘Do you have any idea of the hour?’ said Blake.

‘Mid-afternoon. I think we have some time. Here, eat this, we can talk of escape later.’

We tore at the rotis, smearing the last of the dahl on them, and stuffed them into our mouths. He contemplated us, settling the blanket around himself.

‘So, you came to rescue me. And may I say what a fine job you have done of it so far.’

‘Buchanan sent me to find you. Brought all his pressure to bear – threats, promises. Told me you had disappeared into the Mofussil for the sake of a poem about a Thuggee chieftain. I didn’t believe it.’

‘Buchanan, eh? Not Theo Collinson? No word from him?’

‘He’s out. Returning to England, I heard. Buchanan’s Chief Military Secretary and very senior in the Political Department.’

‘So he clawed his way to the top. And Collinson gone. I would not have predicted that.’ He shrugged. ‘But to return to me. It is an excellent story, no? The great poet seeks out the Thugs to enshrine them for ever in verse! I have actually been composing a ballad in my head while I have been here. I already have several thousand lines. Not that anyone will buy it. It is all novels now; ballads are sadly out of fashion.’

‘What were you really doing, Xavier? Sleeman hates you.’

‘Perhaps you might tell me.’

‘I think someone in the Company asked you to look into the Thuggee Department. I wonder why?’

‘Again, I am sure you have divined the answer.’

Blake said nothing.

‘The Board of Control in London invited me to investigate Thuggee,’ said Mountstuart, ‘but in secret. There have been certain disagreements between London and Calcutta regarding the growth of the Thuggee Department. Calcutta loves it. The Board, however, is terrified of rumours of misdemeanours. It worries they fuel those in Parliament who would transfer India to direct rule. It knows it cannot afford a scandal that demonstrates misgovernment. I was commissioned to look into the Thuggee Department but Sleeman was not to know the reason why. I am to give my report to the Governor General.’

‘So there had been rumours.’

‘There were always some sceptics, like Lushington in Bharatpore, but Calcutta has always dismissed their concerns. An officer from Jubbulpore has lately been in correspondence with the Board in London about his concerns. He disappeared last year. There was some confusion about how he met his end: some say it was fever, others that he was shot.’

‘And what were your conclusions?’ asked Blake.

‘Much the same as yours, I imagine,’ said Mountstuart.

‘There is no such thing as Thuggee.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Thuggee exists only in the mind and writings of Major William Sleeman,’ said Blake. ‘There is no secret fellowship of Thugs that acts across Hind. There is no Thug language. There is no common method of killing. There is no Thuggee cult of Kali.’

‘Just so. And Calcutta cannot see it, for the Thuggee Department is too great a success,’ said Mountstuart. ‘But I am curious, what set you off?’

‘You, go all the way to Jubbulpore for a poem? You were always happy enough to make it all up before. And Sleeman’s book,
Ramaseeana
. A secret language of Thugs? What language? Words you would find in any rookery in any bazaar anywhere in Hind. A few phrases of thieves cant, the language of the poorest and meanest castes. As for his “Thug omens” and rituals – a list of superstitions and old customs common to ryots and petty thieves, anywhere between here and Lahore. And the so-called family trees – when you examine Sleeman’s lists, hardly any of them had been born into “Thuggee”. Some had been adopted. Plenty had no children or family at all. Many had been driven to banditry for a season or two because the harvests have been bad and land rents have gone up. As for the Approvers, many are bandit chiefs escaping the fate they deserve by delivering their subordinates up to the authorities and saying what Sleeman wishes to hear.’