The Distant Kingdom Read online

  She wished that Marcus would give her more opportunity to be a wife to him, but he hardly ever came to her room in those days, and she had not plucked up the courage to try out any of the skills Aneila had described to her. But one evening towards the middle of August, they had been to dine at Sir Alexander’s and were driving back across the plain by moonlight, admiring the heavily fruiting trees and the starry reflections in the small intersecting canals. He took her hand and she felt herself to be blushing. She turned her hand within his to clasp it. To her surprise and pleasure he did not immediately withdraw, and so when he came to her later, she forced herself to touch him, and try to do all the things Aneila had told her a woman should do. She could not quite bring herself to open her eyes, though, and so she did not see his expression of half-stifled disgust. Nor could she feel that her interventions had had the desired effect, and she soon reverted to her usual statue-like inertia. But for once he did not apologize when he left her. She tried to think that that at least meant that she made some progress.

  She learned the truth some six days later when she was lying down on her bed, feeling unwell, in the early afternoon. She had told Marcus that she would be having tiffin with Mrs Jamieson, and so he must have supposed her to be still out when he came to the bungalow with James Thurleigh just after one o’clock. Thurleigh had returned that morning from an expedition to Ghazni with messages from Sir William, and they had not seen each other for almost a fortnight.

  Marcus ordered the meal and called for a bottle of claret while it was being prepared. Perdita, who had been wakened by their arrival, heard the bearer take the wine into them and then leave, only half-closing the drawing room door behind him. It quickly became clear that the two men were in the middle of a quarrel.

  As soon as the bearer had gone, Perdita heard Captain Thurleigh say, with considerable bitterness:

  ‘You have no feeling left for me. You spend all your time with that woman and your son, and I never see you. You wouldn’t have behaved so to any friend in the old days, let alone to me. You have forgotten everything.’

  Then she heard her husband say in a voice she would hardly have recognized as his:

  ‘James, my dear, don’t say that. You know that you are more important to me than any woman could ever be.’

  Lying stiffly, wishing that she could not hear and yet unable to block her ears, Perdita heard Captain Thurleigh say angrily:

  ‘But you’re plugging her again, aren’t you?’ The word meant nothing to Perdita, but he went on to make its meaning all too clear: ‘You obviously enjoy her now and soon there’ll be another brat and then another. By God you have changed.’

  Then came the other voice, low now and almost choked with anger or emotion. Much of what it said was mercifully too quiet for Perdita to hear, but snatches of it carried across to her.

  ‘You don’t understand, James … I married to … in India with you … you never listened when I tried …’ Then the voice rose, and she heard it all: ‘God damn it, of course I care for you. And if you think I enjoy … If you must know her body revolts me. I can hardly bear to touch her. It wasn’t so bad at first; she just lay there, but now …’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Marcus. I’m sorry. You are right: I didn’t understand. Oh, don’t look like that, my dear. Come here to me.’

  If Perdita had not known that those words must have been spoken by James Thurleigh, she would never have recognized the voice as his: it was so full of gentleness; so different from the harsh arrogant tones she knew as his. He spoke again:

  ‘You should have told me, Marcus. I promised you once that nothing could hurt you while I was with you. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I think I remember everything, James. But marriage seemed to be something I had to cope with on my own. I can’t think why, because nothing ever goes right when I’m away from you. James, thank God you’re here.’

  It was the kind of voice she had always longed to hear Marcus use to herself: full of warmth, sureness, love. She had dreamed of it too much to misunderstand it now; but she had not known that men could love each other like that. Bitterly humiliated to remember her stupid, irrelevant jealousy of Maria Jamieson, and her efforts to wake such a love in Marcus, Perdita lay still, tears of shame and horror pouring down the sides of her nose. She could not wipe them away for fear that, moving, she would make some noise that would alert the men to her presence.

  Their voices murmured on, too low now for her to distinguish the words, and she was left to think horribly of what they must have said to each other since the time of her marriage, what they must have thought of her clumsy demands on Marcus. Her mind could not encompass thoughts of any physical expression their love might take; it was the idea of complete trust and openness between them that hurt her so much – that and the knowledge that they must be able to give each other what she had wanted, and been forbidden, to give to Marcus.

  After what seemed an eternity she realized that they must have had their meal, and she heard them leave. Appalled at the idea of meeting either of them, she gave them half an hour to get clear of the house and then, without even calling for her ayah, she dragged one of her habits from the wardrobe and pulled it on, sobbing with frustration at the tiny buttons on the shirt, and reaching agonizingly behind her to hook up the tight-waisted skirt. At last she was dressed, and hunted for boots. Finding a pair, she thrust her foot down and tried to pull the boot up. Her thumbnail bent back sickeningly and cracked. The small pain made her cry out, and she sucked the mutilated nail for a moment or two. Then she tried again to pull up the heavy leather. At last her heel slipped down into the boot, and she wrenched on the other one, stamping her foot to force it on. Forgetting her hat in her determination to be gone out of the house where she had heard such things, she ran out and round to the stables, where, ignoring the surprised looks of the syces and grass-cutters, she waited impatiently for her mare to be saddled. Eventually, just as she began to think she could control herself no longer, the groom brought her over.

  Perdita thought vaguely that the man looked rather ill, but she had no wish to draw his attention to her face, and so she did not speak. She turned her back, mounted and rode off, looking straight ahead and praying that she would meet no one she knew.

  It was not until she reached the edge of the plain, at the foot of the Seah Sung hills, that she was hailed. She had not noticed the horseman riding towards her at an oblique angle from the direction of the Bala Hissar, but she recognized his voice at once. She did not stop but he soon caught up with her, and taking one look at her face, waved his own groom and hers back and said urgently:

  ‘Lady B, what’s up?’

  She said drearily, not expecting to be believed and not much caring if she were:

  ‘Nothing.’

  She urged her mare forward, up the steep path towards the little plateau where the fox-tail lilies grew tall and white in the dusty brown earth. He followed silently, but when the path flattened out and he saw the flowery stretch ahead, he told the two syces to remain where they were and rode forward to her side. She let the mare walk on to the further edge, where a dry stream bed broke the little plain. Then he caught her reins and brought her mount round so that she faced him.

  ‘Tell me what has happened. I have never seen you so unhappy. Tell me.’

  ‘I could not,’ she said, ashamed partly at the too obvious state of her face and partly at what she had learned.

  ‘You can,’ he said. ‘You know that you can say anything to me.’ And he leaned forward over his horse’s neck to take hold of one of her gloved hands.

  ‘Come, whatever it is will not be so bad if you tell me about it.’

  And so she did: all the pain and difficulty of her unreturned love for her husband came pouring out, culminating in one despairing phrase:

  ‘It seems that I would disgust any man.’

  The anger he felt shook Charles Byrd with its force. He dismounted, and made her join him on the ground. Having loosely tethered
their horses’reins under a rock, he took both her hands in his and said gravely:

  ‘Perdita, any man who is a man would do anything to sleep in your arms.’

  At that she raised her swollen eyelids and said:

  ‘It is very hard to believe.’

  He pulled her gently towards him and said into her hair:

  ‘I wish I could prove it here, but people ride this way.’

  ‘I know,’ she said and drew back from him a little. But he kept his hold on her left hand, and peeled back the tight leather glove until it was covering only the tips of her fingers. Then he turned her hand over, holding it in both of his, bent his head and kissed the palm.

  Perdita looked down at his head and felt his warm lips on her skin. Her heart seemed to be beating twice as loudly as usual, and there was a strange, half-pleasurable ache in her legs. She touched his hair with her free hand and suddenly wanted, almost unbearably, to put both her arms round him and hold him to her.

  Charles raised his head and said gently:

  ‘You see what we could mean to each other.’

  Perdita said nothing, and he started again with some difficulty: ‘I never expected to say such a thing to you, but I want you to know how desirable you are. I want you. Yet more than that: I want you to know what you are and to value it.’ He waited, still holding her hand, and then as she did not speak, went on: ‘And I want to know that you care for me.’

  ‘But you do know that already. You have known it ever since I sang to you that night.’

  His smiling green eyes lit a trail of warmth right through her. He touched her face briefly.

  ‘Ah, Perdita, I did not think you would admit it so easily.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  All the way back to cantonments, Perdita prayed that Marcus would not have chosen to dine at home that night, thinking that it would be unbearable, impossible, to pretend to him that nothing had happened. As she rode silently beside Charles Byrd, down from the hills and across the plain, past the Afghan forts to the Caubul river, she wondered if she would be able to speak to Marcus again.

  The shame was still there, but now she felt anger too, furious anger that he should have put her in such a position. It was true, she reminded herself, that he had never said that he loved her, but to marry any woman feeling as he seemed to feel was a cruelty of which she would not have thought him capable. Charles Byrd’s voice broke into her thoughts.

  She turned her head to look at him and his smile caught her unaware. She smiled back at him.

  ‘I am sorry, I did not hear what you said.’

  ‘I asked only if you would like me to come back to the bungalow with you.’ Her smile died back.

  ‘Thank you, Charles. But no. Here’s the road to the town. We had better say goodbye here.’

  ‘Very well, but send for me whenever you need me.’

  ‘I shall, Charles. I am glad you were here.’

  He kissed her hand formally and rode away, with his groom following him. Perdita watched him for a moment or two, before spurring her own horse forward. She was still trying to decide how she would greet her husband when she eventually walked up the steps to the front door.

  But when she opened it, all thoughts of the afternoon’s emotions were driven from her mind by a sharper shock. Charlie had fallen off his pony and when Perdita entered the house she found his ayah staunching a frightening flow of blood from a cut high on his scalp.

  Perdita quickly sent a syce running for Assistant Surgeon Brydon whose quarters were nearer than any of the other doctors’ and took the howling child on her lap, replacing the ayah’s reeking towel with a pad of fine linen from her work basket. He kept rearing up in her arms, saying between screams:

  ‘Let me see. Let me see it, Mama. Bring a looking glass.’

  But she was afraid that the sight of the gash and the matted, bloody hair around it would frighten him even more than the pain and the stickiness of the now clotting blood, and so she ignored his frantic requests and tried to reassure him. She herself hated the tackiness of the blood drying between her fingers and under her nails, and she was disgusted and frightened by his pain.

  When the doctor arrived, he said the cut would have to be stitched and so Perdita held her son’s head clamped against her shoulder while the man dug needles into his head. Submerged in what was happening to him, she did not notice that small Annie had crept into the room and was standing behind her shoulder, silently watching everything that was done to her foster-brother. But when it was all over, and the cries had blessedly stopped at last, Annie was sick all over the floor.

  The servants clustered around, clucking reproachfully, telling her that she was an owl to add to the terrible trouble of the chota-raja’s hurts. Why could she not have kept out of the way as befitted a girl child? they asked.

  But Perdita saw the marbled look to her skin and the dazed fear in her eyes and stretched one of her arms to the child, saying:

  ‘Annie, come here, my love. See, poor Charlie is better now. But it was frightening, wasn’t it?’

  The little, pale-faced, dark-haired child crept forward into Perdita’s embrace and was held warmly until Charlie, either by accident or design, kicked her face.

  By the time Perdita had calmed them both and stayed with them in the night nursery until they slept, she was exhausted, fit for nothing but her own bed and quite unable to face the thought of dinner. She scribbled a note for Marcus to tell him about the accident before she went to her room, desperately hoping that it would prevent his feeling that he must overcome his disgust and come to her. She did not think she would ever be able to accept him into her bed again.

  It was easy to avoid seeing too much of him in the following weeks, for like most of the other officers, he was sent on frequent missions around the country. Sir William Macnaghten chose to think, and report to Calcutta, that the Afghan nation was at peace and the people happy under the benevolent rule of their new king and his English advisers. But it was not so.

  They were hardly a nation in any case, being divided into three great tribes: the Dourranis, to which Shah Soojah belonged; the Barukzais, who were the Dost Mohammed Khan’s people; and the Ghilzais, who held the eastern and western passes between Afghanistan and India. Each tribe was subdivided into smaller clans named after the areas in which they lived – Kohistanis Khyberis and so on; and even within the clans individual families pursued blood feuds to the ultimate point. Fiercely loyal, taking revenge as a matter of principle these people could also change their loyalties in an instant, impelled by anger, hatred, greed – or honour. They were governable only by strength and cunning.

  The English could no doubt have supplied an adequate measure of both; after all, it was their strength and cunning that had brought so much of India under their hand, but they had embarked on their hazardous Afghan adventure as an exercise in influence, not conquest. In Caubul they spent themselves to try to turn the Shah into their own ways of government. They persuaded him not to execute his enemies – or even blind them. They sent their young political officers to persuade and cajole any rebellious chiefs who looked askance at the Shah and they resorted to force only when they could see no other way.

  But Shah Soojah-ool-Mulk was not an Englishman, and he wished to govern in his own, traditionally Afghan way. His affairs were in the hands of a much-hated and incompetent tyrant named Mullah Shikore, whose savage taxation raised the fury of his countrymen The English disliked what was done yet had to support it and chastise those clans and villages that resisted.

  Sir William had to be seen to be the Shah’s friend, not his master. He had to walk a tightrope slung for him by his government’s policy between weakness and over-interference and, despite his own tremendous confidence, the rope kept slackening disastrously and threatening to throw him off.

  He had to divide his forces dangerously, too: part of the army had had to be left at Candahar and Ghazni, under the command of General Nott, an acerbic man who had risen in the Com
pany’s army, to keep the south of the country pacified, while the main force had marched on to Caubul; and the political officers were spread about all the neighbouring states. Among them were young Lieutenant Loveday at Khelat-y-Ghilzai, working to keep its unpredictable ruler allied to the British interests so that their southern lines of communication were not broken, and Colonel Stoddart in Bokhara, attempting and so far failing to impress the mad Nasrullah, who alternately supported and hindered the Dost Mohammed Khan.

  Within Afghanistan there were two prime threats to the stability Macnaghten was trying to ensure: Shah Soojah’s nephew who ruled in Herat and who had little love for his uncle, but great ambitions; and the Dost himself, who soon managed to escape from Bokhara whence he had fled before the invading army. Both were interested in fomenting rebellion against the Shah, and the Dost was raising an ever-increasing body of irregular troops. Macnaghten and the military commanders were bombarded with reports of his presence in villages all over the north of the country and they sent force after force to chase after him. But so far they had never succeeded in engaging him, and had to fall back on punitive skirmishes against the clans and families that openly supported him.

  It began to seem to Perdita that the English were surrounded by an almost entirely hostile population, but she spoke of her fears to no one except Charles Byrd. He said one morning when he had come to call:

  ‘Yes. Your people need to get hold of the Dost. While he is at large causing trouble, you’ll never be able to keep the chiefs quiet.’

  ‘But as far as I can understand,’ protested Perdita, ‘we cannot subdue even one small chief without losing thirty or forty men. What happens when they meet the Dost himself?’

  ‘Perhaps then the force will be led by an experienced officer for once, instead of these gallant, thoughtless lieutenants. Are you afraid?’

  She looked at him and said simply:

  ‘Yes.’ Then she added, ‘I cannot help seeing how easy it would be for any attacker to break into cantonments. The other day I saw an officer back his horse up the ditch and over the wall. And those are our only protection against intruders. I do not mean to croak, but what if the chiefs unite and decide to besiege us? The stores are all in the commissariat fort and the ammunition is outside as well. How could we live if they took those?’