The Distant Kingdom Page 24

  He looked at her with passionate gratitude and spoke rapidly in Pushtu. She thought he said something like:

  ‘You have made it possible for my family to regain their honour,’ but she could not be sure and did not want to prolong the painful interview by asking him to repeat what he had said.

  She dismissed him by asking him to bring the ponies to the front door, and went to the nursery to collect the children for their ride.

  Both children were at ease in the saddle now, although Annie was less ready to tackle obstacles than her foster-brother. At three and a half, Charlie was tough and adventurous. His frightening rages seemed to be more controlled, but he was still apt to hit out or roll on Annie if she got in his way. To Perdita’s surprise, the girl seemed to take it all in good part, and followed him everywhere she could. She often told Perdita admiring stories of his exploits, and if she did not want to do something would use his words as apparently irrefutable support for her point of view. ‘Charlie says’ became a phrase that always made Perdita smile.

  They were happily riding races between the houses when Perdita was greeted by Maria Jamieson. They had seen very little of one another during the occupation since Major Jamieson had spent several months at Candahar, but he had recently been summoned back to Caubul, and Perdita encountered his wife day after day. As usual she was full of complaints and scandal. Almost her first words were:

  ‘Have you heard that Lord Auckland has resigned?’

  ‘No. But how can you know such a thing?’

  ‘Most of the senior officers know, and I expect all the spies. It is obvious really, to anyone who knows anything about government circles: when the Whigs lost the general election at home, Auckland was bound to go. I expect he thought it better to leave than be recalled.’

  ‘I wonder what that will mean to us,’ said Perdita, more to herself than to Mrs Jamieson.

  Nevertheless, Mrs Jamieson answered:

  ‘Who can tell? Jamieson thinks that it will probably mean less than Macnaghten’s departure.’ She saw from Perdita’s expression that that too was news and a pleased smile spread across her plump pink-and-white face as she said:

  ‘Oh, yes. He has been appointed Governor of Bombay, and poor, dear Sir Alexander will become Envoy at last. He has waited long enough for it.’

  ‘I wonder if he is old enough – I mean experienced enough – for the task,’ murmured Perdita.

  ‘Well, he can hardly do worse than Macnaghten,’ said Mrs Jamieson tartly. ‘And at least Sir Alexander has some knowledge of the Afghan people.’

  Perdita could not help thinking of a remark of Lady Sale’s she had heard a day or two before, that it was easy to tell how affairs stood in Caubul because when the skirmishes were being won and peace seemed possible the Envoy and his wife were referred to in cantonments as ‘Sir William and my Lady’; when things seemed black, they were the Macnaghtens’.

  ‘It must be trying, though, to keep pressing on against the tribes, persuading the king into civilized ways, organizing the administration when every dawk brings letters up from Calcutta demanding retrenchment.’

  ‘Sir Alexander will think of ways of achieving it. He is so charming I find. Don’t you?’

  The syrupy voice irritated Perdita, but she said in her normal tone:

  ‘I do not think I should be able to trust him very far. He seems too volatile to me, too partisan in his judgments. But, perhaps,’ she added, wanting to be fair, that is because he hasn’t really got a job to do. Oh, forgive me, Maria, I must get the children indoors. Charlie! Annie! Come here please.’

  After a respectable show of rebellion, Charlie cantered up, soon followed by Annie looking breathless and pink, but very happy. Perdita made them say good afternoon politely to Mrs Jamieson and then took them away.

  Perdita soon discovered what the news meant for her. Marcus’s regiment was to form part of the Envoy’s escort. They would march through the eastern passes to Jellalabad, winter there and then leave Afghanistan completely in the spring. She had never thought that she could look forward to returning to the Station, but the prospect of exchanging its ugly dullness for the glittering terror of Caubul seemed inviting. As she started to make her preparations for departure she was happier than she had been since Charles Byrd had ridden away from her. The only flaw in her pleasure was Marcus’s fear that the force might have to fight its way through the passes.

  That fear strengthened into conviction when news flew among the English that Sir William had at last found a way to cut the expenses of the occupation which were rumoured to have reached nearly one and a quarter million pounds a year. He had decided to halve the subsidy paid to the eastern Ghilzais, who were in control of the passes, thus saving about 40,000 rupees. In view of that the plans for his return to India had had to be modified.

  For once Perdita shared Captain Thurleigh’s views. He came to dine one night at the beginning of October and said irritably to Marcus:

  ‘He says he chose them because they have been so peaceful compared to the western Ghilzais. Why does he think they have behaved so well? Because they have been paid for it, with 80,000 rupees per annum.’

  ‘But didn’t some of you protest?’ asked Marcus.

  ‘Of course we did, but that idiot is so determined to leave for Bombay that he hardly cares what he’s doing any more. He and his doddering poodle Elphinstone. At least that fool has done the decent thing now and resigned on the grounds of his health. You know that the date has been set now? For the twentieth?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve had our orders. We are being sent to clear the Koord-Caubul pass with General Sale’s brigade. He has arranged for Lady Sale and Mrs Sturt to follow on with the Envoy’s party, and my wife will stay until then and go with them.’

  ‘But if the whole of Sale’s brigade and the 121st leave doesn’t that mean that the garrison will be seriously depleted?’ asked Perdita, as worried at the prospect of having to stay behind even for a few days as she was for Marcus’s safety in the passes.

  ‘Well done,’ said Captain Thurleigh sarcastically, ‘but the Envoy believes that since the countryside is “quiet from Dan to Beersheba”, there will be no risk. By the way, Beaminster,’ he went on turning back to Marcus, ‘have you heard about poor Flecker?’

  ‘No, don’t tell me he’s got it?’

  ‘Yes. He was set on just the other side of the Koord-Caubul. Two of his sepoys managed to escape and rode on to Jellalabad with the news. We’ve only just heard it. And those thugs are the sort Macnaghten thinks are so peaceful!’

  He happened to look at Perdita at that moment and wondered why she was so pale. But he said nothing, and Marcus appeared not to notice. She rose, shaken to the depths of her being, and made some excuse to leave the dining room, remembering with horrible clarity her groom’s dark eyes glittering as he said to her something that had sounded like ‘You have made it possible for my family to regain their honour’and she wished passionately that she had said nothing to him until the lieutenant had reached his destination. However much she hated what he had done to Aktur’s sister, however much she had wanted him to be punished, the news of his death appalled her. And she blamed herself for it.

  She also worried desperately about Charles Byrd. She had had no word from him and had no idea whether he had yet reached the safety of the Punjab. Horrible visions began to torment her of his body, broken and bloodied, lying among the rocks of the inhospitable Afghan mountains.

  Marcus arranged that Captain Thurleigh should take over his house in cantonments once Perdita and the children had left, and with worsening news from all quarters he asked his friend to move in as soon as he had to leave, to give her some protection. Thurleigh had all his kit brought out from the city in time to join the Beaminsters’last dinner together.

  His presence added the final touch that turned the meal from an unhappy occasion into a nightmare for Perdita. Marcus was to march the following day into a probably murderous fight to clear the pass; he was likely to be
wounded once more and ran a real risk of death. There were so many things she wanted to say to him, or ask him before he went, that Thurleigh’s presence was almost unbearable.

  As she sat at the foot of her elegant dining table, with Thurleigh on her right, discussing absurdly unimportant topics, she could hardly eat. She watched the two men and wondered whether they felt the same whether their determination to dress as usual and go through all the other absurd rituals of the dinner table was only a mask to hide an anxiety and desperation that matched her own.

  ‘Won’t you try some of the fowl, my dear?’ Marcus’s kind voice so startled her that her hand slipped from the stem of her wine glass, which crashed on to the edge of the table and splashed its contents over the immaculate white tunic of the hovering bearer.

  Averting her eyes from the spreading red stains, she said shakily:

  ‘I do beg your pardon. So clumsy. No, no fowl, thank you.’ She tried to stop there, but the act of speaking seemed to have smashed her inhibitions and she burst out:

  ‘How can you be so calm? Tomorrow may terrible disaster and you both just sit here discussing fowls and claret.’

  She saw Captain Thurleigh look at Marcus and then snap out an order to the servants. They left the room shocked at the break in routine and at the lady-sahib’s uncharacteristic, raucous voice. Marcus stood up and came round the table to her chair. He took one of her hands, and in the warmth of his she realized how clammy hers was. He said:

  ‘Perdita, we have to behave like this. If soldiers discussed everything that might happen to them before a battle, it would be impossible to go out and do what must be done. Do not think about it. You must think instead of the benefits of getting the children away from here before the cold becomes severe. You will like wintering in Jellalabad before we press on to India. James has very pleasant memories of last winter there. And then in the spring we shall all go back to the Station.’

  She put her other hand on top of his and looked at him. She said with difficulty:

  ‘I am sorry to have fussed. But there are so many things I need to say to you before you go.’

  ‘Not now. Tell me in Jellalabad.’ He smiled at her, almost tenderly, and said, ‘You are very tired, dear. Come, forget the rest of dinner and go to bed.’

  Ashamed and unhappy, she could not force herself on them, and so she rose and left them.

  Later, lying in bed, unable to sleep, her imagination took her back into the dining room to witness all kinds of intimacy and trust between the two men, and truth and frank admissions of fear and danger. Angry with herself for her jealousy, she turned over, beating the pillow as though trying to make it softer. Five minutes later, she turned again, and then once more.

  Sometimes she slept for a while, but then she would dream that she was awake and desperately trying to lose consciousness. When she heard the servants moving about the next morning, she felt frighteningly tired, resentful and almost ill. She waited until she could see light round the edges of the curtains and then rang for her ayah.

  Thirty minutes later, dressed and outwardly serene, she was about to go out into the hall when she heard the men’s voices.

  ‘Do your best to keep her from worrying, and make sure they all get off on the twentieth, whatever has happened. If necessary they can go to her father.’

  ‘Of course, old fellow.’ There was a pause and then in a choked voice she could hardly recognize as Thurleigh’s:

  ‘Until Jellalabad, then.’

  ‘Jellalabad.’

  ‘Oh, God, why won’t they let me march with you? Marcus, take care.’

  There was silence. After a few moments, Perdita opened her bedroom door and joined them. Marcus, shocked at the deep black crescents beneath her big blue eyes and the almost transparent pallor of her complexion, said:

  ‘You should not have troubled to get up. You needed rest.’

  ‘I had to see you off, Marcus.’

  He hoped that she would not become emotional. The veneer of calm over his own turmoils was so thin that the smallest load would crack it.

  Almost as though she understood, his wife said only:

  ‘I had to wish you Godspeed, and to tell you that I shall be praying for you all.’

  He smiled tightly, gripped her shoulder, looked once more at James and walked away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bad news became almost commonplace while the garrison waited in Caubul. First came the announcement that Sale had been wounded and had lost nearly sixty men in the Koord-Caubul pass. They had been fired at from behind every rock in that precipitous, narrow pass by Ghilzai tribesmen: sixty of them according to the first report, two hundred according to Lady Sale, who dismissed the first paltry number as an insult. Perdita could not see that higher numbers of enemy made the situation any better, except for the English pride. What was very clear was that the road to Jellalabad was blocked by the ‘peaceful’Ghilzais.

  In the intervals of trying to contain her fears for Marcus, Perdita consoled herself with the thought of the southern route back to India. But then came the sad story of a Mrs Smith, the wife of a collector, who had been travelling with a small guard through the southern, Bolan, pass towards Candahar, when her escort was attacked. The guards fled and Mrs Smith apparently got out of her palkee and ran as fast and as far as she could before she was caught and killed with a knife.

  Perdita listened to the story in dismay. Neither route could be guaranteed any longer. More and more people were saying openly that the occupation had been a failure and that the Caubul chiefs, and probably the Shah himself, were behind all the insurrections and assassinations of the past few months. Few of the English would admit it, but to most of them their cantonment seemed to be a trap from which there was no escape.

  Day after day towards the end of October, Sale’s guns could be heard from Caubul, and the Envoy’s departure was postponed again and again. More and more wounded were brought back with news of attacks and treachery in the pass. To Lady Sale’s disgust, several Afghan miscreants were caught deserting from the Shah’s regiments and others deliberately hamstringing the English’s ammunition-carrying camels. The criminals were hailed back to Caubul and brought before Macnaghten. But he refused to punish them, offering by way of excuse that the Shah’s advisers had told him that the men were of good repute and that they could not possibly have committed the crimes of which they stood accused. The suspicion that His Majesty was involved in the troubles began to harden.

  The difficulties experienced in clearing the pass had meant that the Envoy’s departure was put off until 3 November. His wife took to calling on several senior ladies to inform them that virtually all the country was quiet, that the chiefs were responding well to the Political Agent’s negotiations and that a peaceful settlement was likely. She did not tell them that Sir William had been warned by at least three different Afghans not to ride out as was his custom in the early morning and late evening, or that three other men had sworn on the Koran to kill him. But everyone knew.

  Those days in Caubul seemed like an unending and ever-deepening trial by endurance. Military officers in search of orders were sent by General Elphinstone to Sir William and back again. No one seemed to know what was happening; no one seemed to be in charge. Everyone was irritable, and absurd quarrels broke out at all hours between the most placid of people.

  Perdita, like the other ladies who were to travel with the Envoy’s party, had had everything packed in time for the first departure date and so the house seemed like some demented entrepôt, stacked with trunks and boxes, many of them opened by the servants in search of some vital piece of equipment or clothing. She knew that the mess exasperated Captain Thurleigh, who had an insatiable desire for neatness and order, but she could not help it. Their always uneasy truce became spiked with unspoken argument.

  The only event that lightened the days for Perdita was the arrival of a dawk from the Punjab. One of the letters she was handed was from Charles Byrd. It seemed to her almos
t incredible that the mail should get through to Caubul as though nothing had happened, but the knowledge that Charles at least was safe helped her to fight her terrors.

  Every caller who came to the house strengthened Perdita’s anxiety, even Lady Macnaghten or Captain Lawrence, the Envoy’s Military Secretary, who always tried to reassure. Lady Sale came once to tell her of Sale’s wound and another morning that the brigade had lost ninety men. Then Aktur begged permission to talk to the lady-sahib and she went out on to the verandah to talk to him, wrapped in a huge black and red shawl, for it was growing very cold. He told her that he would not be able to come to work for her any longer.

  ‘But why, Aktur? Have we displeased you in some way?’

  ‘Of course not, lady. But it is difficult for me to leave the city each day to come to you. And something terrible is going to happen. We do not know what, but you should be on your guard. Something will happen.’

  When he had gone, Perdita sent a chit over to the Mission to warn Captain Thurleigh of what her groom had said, but she had no answer.

  When her unwelcome and reluctant guest returned to her house for dinner he told her:

  ‘These Afghans love a drama, you know. We discussed your chit but it is Sir William’s opinion that the young man is bored with working and was making an excuse to leave your service.’

  But next morning, they were all woken at dawn by a tremendous commotion and the sound of firing from the city. Worried and frightened, the English dressed. The soldiers stood to arms. Everyone waited anxiously for news.

  At seven it was confirmed that there was a rising in the city, but that it was not thought to be serious; at nine, that Captain Johnson’s house had been sacked and his treasury plundered; at ten, that Sir Alexander was by the grace of God safely in the Bala Hissar; at twelve, that the first message had been a lie and that no one had seen him and the worst should be assumed.

  The troops had been standing to since dawn and when no firm clear orders had come by eleven, Brigadier Shelton sent Sturt to the city to discover what he could. Later in the morning, Perdita heard that Sturt had been treacherously set upon and knifed at the Lahore Gate, and that Shelton’s men had marched into the Bala Hissar.