The Distant Kingdom Page 14

  ‘You are jealous of them all; that is the trouble, Perdita,’ her stepmother said to her one afternoon. When Perdita protested, Aneila had added:

  ‘Yes. You want your husband to put you first before anyone else and he does not. Why should he? They are old friends; they shared many things before you ever came to India. You cannot become a friend like that to your husband, but you have other weapons to fight with.’ And she went on to tell Perdita all the things she had tried to explain over a year before. This time, still shocked, Perdita listened, but she could not imagine herself doing any of it. Marcus had not resumed his visits to her room since the birth of Charlie, and she wondered, sick and ashamed of her suspicions, whether it was because he and Maria Jamieson were lovers. The idea hurt her, but it frightened her too. Aneila saw her shiver and asked what the matter was, but even to Aneila she could not speak of that particular fear.

  Nevertheless, she tried to put the rest of the advice into practice, and found that Captain Thurleigh did indeed seem less contemptuous and unpleasant when she allowed him to thrust her into the background. When he paid any attention to her she confined herself to topics such as sketching, or the work she was doing for Miss Eden’s fancy sale in June, or the picnic in Annandale that she had planned with some of the other ladies. Each time she had to make conversation with him, she felt Mr Byrd’s curtains of boredom closing around her, but it seemed worth it to keep Thurleigh’s contempt at bay and win Marcus’s approval.

  She often smiled to herself when the truth of one of Charles Byrd’s shockingly apt phrases was brought home to her, and she tried to describe him in one of her weekly letters to Juliana. When she had finished a paragraph, she sat at her writing table, looking out over the magnificent view of Jacko.

  The mountain’s look of rugged strength pleased her almost as much as the frothy flowering shrubs that grew on its lower slopes. It seemed to put the difficulties of her life with Marcus into perspective. As she gazed out of the window, she had a peculiar fancy that the mountain offered a reflection of her marriage. While she had been at the edges of acquaintance with Marcus, she had found endless small pleasures like the flowers that turned Jacko’s slopes almost into a garden, but as she had come to know more about him it was as though she had had to climb higher and higher up the mountain, leaving those easy joys behind. It was a hard climb, and the higher she went the fewer flowers she found, but perhaps when she reached the top she would feel the splendid solidity of the bare rock beneath her feet, the struggle would be over, and she would be free in the uncorrupted air of the summit.

  At that thought, Perdita laughed at herself: it was ridiculous to make such a parallel, and in any case, there would always be other, higher, peaks to reach.

  She picked up her letter to re-read it:

  He is not tall. In fact he is almost small beside Marcus or Captain Thurleigh, but he is very charming. I find him by far the most entertaining person here, and almost the only one I can talk to about anything other than the weather, the price of Mrs Fletcher’s new bonnet or our children. For some reason he and I share many ideas and jokes. There was a terrible moment last Sunday, for instance. We were all in church listening to the new clergyman preaching. It was the thirteenth, and so perhaps there is something in the superstition after all. He suddenly decided to give us a demonstration of the raising of Lazarus from his tomb, and positively shrieked the words the Lord is supposed to have used to call the corpse forth. I tried so hard not to laugh, and had almost succeeded when he became a trumpeting angel and flung his arms about so that the sleeves of his gown flapped like moth-eaten black wings. It was too much for me! I had to turn my head away in case he saw me laughing. Alas, Mr Byrd was sitting behind our pew and I caught his eye. His expression so exactly mirrored my feelings that I had to take refuge in a fit of coughing. Happily, though, we were not the only ones affected. Even Sir Henry Fane, who is the Commander-in-Chief, was laughing when we eventually escaped.

  He by the way has done me such a good turn …

  Perdita picked up her pen again, dipped it in the square glass inkwell, and went on to explain to Juliana that Sir Henry had decided, in the face of worsening news from Afghanistan, that it would be absurd to send able-bodied officers down country, and had commanded Marcus to remain at Simla until further orders were received. All the same she dreaded the prospect of his going to war.

  Unlike Perdita, most of the English in Simla that year were exhilarated at the possibility. They felt as though they stood on the edge of great events. By May Lord Auckland had decided that he would have to send troops into Afghanistan to sort out the dangerous quarrels, and by July his decision was known to almost everyone.

  The Russian Tsar, who had been steadily moving his armies southwards towards India, extending his empire yearly, was known to be suborning the Shah of Persia from an old alliance with England. The Shah’s new and perhaps more powerful ally had persuaded him to cross the frontier of Afghanistan and lay siege to the city of Herat. It was frighteningly obvious to Lord Auckland in India, no less than to Lord Palmerston in London, that the siege was the first step in the Tsar’s battle for India, and they decided that he must be stopped.

  But he would have to be stopped in such a way that his altogether friendlier dealings with the English in Europe were undamaged. Therefore, Lord Palmerston could not be seen to be at all involved. What must be done in Afghanistan must be seen to be done by Lord Auckland alone, and to have nothing to do with Russia. It was the Governor General who had to find the excuse, and the means, not only to stop the Russians but also to turn them back, and to effect the permanent removal of their envoy from Caubul.

  To that end he sent Mr Macnaghten to Lahore to negotiate a new alliance with the Sikhs of the Punjab, which lay between British India and Afghanistan. Without the Sikhs’support any expedition across the Afghan frontier would be doomed. And it seemed likely that the Sikhs’leader, Runjeet Singh, could also furnish an excuse for it.

  Some years earlier he had seized the city of Peshawar from the Dost Mohammed Khan, and since then several raids had been made across the border to retake it. If Auckland could negotiate a satisfactory treaty with Runjeet, he might be able to justify moving his troops up to Afghanistan as an effort to protect the territory of an ally.

  The next problem would be how to act once the troops were established in Afghanistan. Lord Auckland therefore summoned to Simla Alexander Burnes, whom he had previously sent to Caubul to assess the character and loyalty of its ruler, the Dost.

  Burnes had been much impressed with the Dost and he believed that there would have been no question of Russians in Afghanistan if the English had been more generous in their support of its ruler. But when Burnes reached Simla in July, he discovered that Auckland and Macnaghten had decided that the Dost was too dangerous to English interests and would have to be removed.

  Their excuse for this piece of meddling in the affairs of a country over which they had no rights was to be Shah Soojah-ool-Mulk, once king in Caubul, but who had escaped unharmed to Lahore thirty years earlier.

  Most deposed Afghan kings had been killed – or simply blinded – by their successors; indeed the Shah’s own brother Zemaun had had his eyes put out before he, too, had reached the sanctuary of the Punjab. But Soojah had retained all his faculties, and could be presented to the Afghans and the world (or as much of it as was interested in the machinations of the English) as a monarch, unjustly thrown from his kingdom, being returned to power by the disinterested generosity of a third party.

  He would be indebted to the English both for his restoration and for the large subsidy they promised him, and so he would be far easier to control than his cousin, the Dost. But, just in case he should waver in his loyalties, there would have to be plenty of English soldiers in Caubul to stiffen him. The Shah was to be provided with English officers for his own army and some regiments of the Company’s to help him control his country.

  Many of the subtleties of Lord Auckland’s posit
ion escaped the notice of the English in India, but all were agog at the thought of a magnificent foray that would display their invincibility and provide ample opportunities for advancement and fame. There was hardly a political or military officer in the whole country who was not intriguing for a place on the expedition.

  Charles Byrd, a detached spectator in Simla, probably saw further into the background of the picture than most of the English. He was both a political historian and an outsider, and to him at least it was clear that the government in London, who gave Lord Auckland his instructions, would have to tread very delicately to avoid disturbing Count Nesselrode, the Tsar’s envoy in Europe.

  The American, like others, waited with interest to see how the difficulties would be resolved, and eased the tedium of life in Simla with his pursuit of Lady Beaminster while he waited.

  They met at one of the innumerable picnics held in late May, before the rains came to put an end to outdoor life.

  After tiffin, Perdita had left the chattering party behind to wander slowly through the valley, allowing the tranquil beauty of the place to soak into her. And it was beautiful: the water of the stream was the clear, hard, greenish blue of aquamarines except where the rocks churned it into white foam. The white cedars scented the air with their pepperiness, which mingled seductively with the gentler scent of the wild white dog roses that wreathed and tumbled through the big dark trees. Looking up for a moment, Perdita was enchanted with the sight of one spray smothered in small white flowers. Arching against the translucent blue of the sky, the flowers curiously echoed the small, soft, pearl-coloured clouds that drifted idly by at the edges of her vision. Birds sang to each other, and the long-tailed butterflies flipped past her to settle for a second or two on the honey-rich flowers before tossing themselves into the air again.

  She was far enough away from her companions for the sound of their voices to be drowned in the birdsong, and she thought to herself that heaven, if there were such a place, might look and smell and sound rather like that valley. She paused in the shade of an immense tree to reach up and smell a spray of roses, a smile on her half-parted lips and the glint of happiness in her blue eyes.

  Charles Byrd had followed her, and stood watching her with pleasure. His own taste had previously been for the vapidly pretty, whose shallow minds and conventional chatter promised satisfaction without the threat of emotion. He was surprised to find himself so intrigued by this virtuous creature, however charming her perfect oval face and increasingly alluring figure. He longed to touch her, and occasionally as they waltzed in one or other of Simla’s larger houses, he had believed that she too felt the first small shivers of desire. He watched her as she stood oblivious to him, and thought about how to break what he felt was a half-spun web of enchantment that was threatening to enmesh him completely. She sighed, and he said her name quietly.

  Perdita turned slowly, almost languorously, to see him standing quite close to her with the sun glistening on his fair hair. His greenish eyes were narrowed against the glare, but his delicately cut lips were relaxed and smiling. It seemed as though he was part of the world in which she had lost herself. As she smiled back at him, his hands started to stretch out towards her in an involuntary movement, which he checked before saying formally:

  ‘Forgive me for disturbing you, Lady Beaminster.’

  She blushed, which amused him, and waved his apology aside.

  ‘You do not.’

  He smiled again, and searched for something acceptable to say to control his sudden desire.

  ‘How is your son?’

  ‘Well, I think,’ she said, but her face lost some of its happiness and Charles said gently:

  ‘What is it that troubles you about him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to bore you with my maternal prattle.’

  ‘You could never bore me.’

  She looked up quickly as he spoke, and then laughed.

  ‘I am very sure that I could. But, since you ask, I am troubled at the way the servants treat him. Not only do they keep telling him what a brave warrior he will be when he is older, but his ayah always addresses him as “chota rajah“ or “bahadur “, and the other day I heard her say, “When you are grown you will be a great man and beat all the black men from the Ganges to Attock”.’

  Charles felt the moment of intense emotion relax, and said more easily:

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t let that worry you. All children’s nurses say absurd things to them, and presumably you will send your son back to England before too long. Or at least when it is time for him to go to school.’

  ‘I suppose so. But he will have a terrible time, if he goes straight from being a king here to being an ordinary small boy in an English school. Tell me, Mr Byrd, what would your mother have done in such circumstances?’

  His eyes danced as he said:

  ‘Now I shall bore you.’

  She shook her head and indeed listened in genuine interest as he told her more about the woman who, he had already made it clear, was at the centre of his heart.

  But soon he checked himself and, despite her protests, refused to tell her any more about his childhood. But he did say:

  ‘I wish you could know her. She would like you so much.’

  Perdita felt herself blushing once again and tried to stop it by saying:

  ‘Would she? It is charming of you to say so.’

  ‘Yes, she would. She admires the English; and then you are rather like her: gentle and yet as strong as anyone.’

  ‘You are being very kind, but quite wrong, I’m afraid. I am not strong at all; in fact the most shocking coward. Almost everything frightens me.’

  She did not understand why he smiled at her in just that way, but she felt enfolded by his obvious approval. Then he said:

  ‘I am afraid that I have made you conspicuous by seeking you out like this. Perhaps I should walk on for a while to let you return alone.’ He put out his hand. ‘Until we meet again.’

  Perdita took the hand and liked the firm clasp of his long fingers. She watched him walk away, surprised at his concern for the conventions they both found absurd, but when she returned to the chattering, bustling party, she caught several inquisitive glances and was glad that he had not returned at her side. She wished that Charles was one of Marcus’s particular friends so that she could see as much of him, undisturbed by the curiosity of people like Maria Jamieson, as of the men of her husband’s regiment.

  Chapter Ten

  Neither of the Beaminsters saw Charles Byrd again until a dinner on 14 June given by the Colvins. The weather had been disagreeably hot in the interval, and the heaviness of the air heralded the rains, as did the incessant plague of fleas. Everyone agreed that the more you had your rooms cleaned and agitated the worse the beasts became, and at times it seemed that their bites would bring social life to an end even quicker than the wet. It was said that at least one lady would faint at each dinner from the torment of the bites that she could not scratch.

  That particular evening no one had actually lost consciousness, but Perdita herself was feeling too unwell to sing and for once refused her hostess’s request. She could see irritated disappointment on Emma Colvin’s face and understood the cause: meeting each other almost every day, the guests had very little left to say, and without some diversion the endless parties tended to flag after dinner.

  Mr Byrd strolled over to where Perdita stood, and said quietly:

  ‘I hope you are not ill, Lady B.’

  ‘Not at all. Only so very warm. I do not think I could sing tonight; I am so sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. It means that you and I can talk. Let me take you to that sofa.’ As they walked away to the edge of the room, Mrs Colvin exchanged smiles with little Mrs Jamieson. Lady Beaminster’s predilection for the American’s society had not passed unnoticed, even though it caused some surprise. He was so insignificant compared to dear Lord Beaminster.

  Perdita, completely unaware that, she was providing scandal for her bor
ed acquaintances, said as they sat down:

  ‘Do you know, Mr Byrd, I am surprised to see you still here. I thought you would have escaped weeks ago.’

  ‘Alas, I fear I gave myself away to you when we first met. It’s true that this town is probably the most tedious spot on earth, but interesting moves will be made here soon, and I would not want to miss them.’

  ‘Interesting for your book?’

  ‘Partly. Lord Auckland is providing me with some first-rate material on the management and extension of conquered territory, but there are other things that keep me here.’ He smiled as he spoke, and Perdita found herself smiling in return.

  ‘I cannot imagine what: you do not like mountains, you hate English ladies, you are homesick for Virginia…’

  He interrupted her:

  ‘Not Virginia. I know I told you that I sometimes long for home, but it is my mother’s house that I miss, not my father’s.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said with the warmth of genuine interest.

  ‘Where to start?’ he asked, laughing. ‘It is not like this place at all, although it is her summer home – at the Cape. I suppose it is the colour I miss most: and the space. Unlike the sickly pink and grey and green of these hills, the Cape seems to be entirely blue and gold, blazingly so in the sun, and the dunes stretch, flat, for miles. You never feel shut in there. It is the right setting for my mother, too. Like me, she is happier there than in any other place in the world.’

  ‘Does she not like Virginia?’

  ‘No,’ he said curtly, and Perdita hastened to apologize, suppressing a question about why he was not at this cape if he liked it so much.

  He stopped her apology, saying:

  ‘Please don’t. You can ask me anything you wish. That is just a difficult subject for me to talk about. But I’ll try. My mother was born in Boston, and she always found Virginia strange and almost uncongenial, but she lived there as best she could until a few years ago when she went back to Boston. My father did not understand.’