The Distant Kingdom Page 37

  ‘Then why did you send him away? I know he was always in trouble. But why did you send him to that horrible school? He hates it so much.’

  She had not quite said, but you do hurt, every time you make him go back, but the words seemed to be there between them. Without letting Annie’s hands go, Perdita said:

  ‘You know that we had to send him, Aneila. I know he does not like it much, but Annie, don’t you remember the things he used to do? He is so much calmer now, and kinder. Isn’t that worth a little unhappiness?’

  The bent head lifted and Perdita saw that there were tears sliding out of the big dark eyes, the first tears she had known Annie to shed since her childhood. She did not sob or cry out; she just wept and wept.

  ‘You see, I love him’she said.

  At that Perdita took the girl in her arms and rocked her, murmuring:

  ‘I know you do, dearest. And he loves you, even if he doesn’t often show it. But he will learn to, Annie, as you will both learn to love other people. I know it seems now as though no one else will ever be as important to you as he is, that nothing will matter so much for the rest of your life, but it isn’t so. I promise you that. I know it from my own life.’

  As they sat there, Perdita wondered whether this perhaps might be the end of it; whether all the memories of the war’s cruelties could be finally buried with this revelation of Annie’s. She felt as though the burden she carried was lightened as they sat together, surrounded with the smell of sized canvas, paint, turpentine and linseed.

  But her new happiness was short-lived. The following morning, her footman brought the letters to her little writing room, and she saw that there was another addressed in Charles’s writing. Never before had he sent letters in such quick succession. With fingers trembling in quick anxiety, she broke the seal to read:

  Simla

  My darling,

  Your father died last night. The doctor assures me that he was not ill – just old and very tired.

  I know that the news will be a great shock to you, but if you had seen him you would not have been able to be too sad for him. It happened on the evening we were both to dine at Government House. He decided not to go at the last minute – he said he was too tired – and so I went alone. When I got back there was still a light burning in the library. I went in to have a word with him and try to persuade him to go to bed.

  He was sitting in that big wing chair to the left of the fireplace, and the fire had died down so that there was just a dim, red glow lighting his face. He had your writing box on his knee and a pen in his hand. For a while I thought he had just fallen asleep over the letter, and it was not until I went to take the inky pen out of his hand that I understood.

  He looked so peaceful, Perdita, that he could have felt no pain or fear. When my time comes I shall be pleased if I can die like that – in my own home, unafraid, writing a letter to you.

  I do not think there is anything else I can tell you. The lawyers will be writing to you soon, but I wanted you to hear the news from someone who truly cared for him, and I wanted you to have his letter as quickly as possible. Don’t grieve too much, my dear. He had spent his life well and had fewer regrets than most men.

  Charles

  It was some time before Perdita could bring herself to open the other piece of paper. Pictures of her father flashed through her mind faster and faster and she ached all over with the knowledge that she had lost him completely. It hurt badly that she had spent the last few weeks believing him to be alive when he was not. Although she could accept, rationally, what Charles Byrd had written, her whole being felt flooded with grief.

  When she could control herself, she picked up her father’s last letter but when she unfolded it for a moment or two she could not read the words. She brushed the back of her hand against her eyes and looked down again.

  The whole piece of paper was covered with her name, spelled differently each time, as though he had been trying to force his dying mind to focus enough to tell her something he wanted her to know.

  Perdita, Perdata, Perdy, Perdi, Pertada. The writing was shaky and some of the words ran off the sheet. Through the tears that rushed inexorably to her eyes, she felt the love of which he had been trying to tell her and she whispered with a breaking voice: ‘Papa, oh my dearest dear, my dear Papa,’ until the knowledge became just bearable.

  She folded the two letters together and searched for a handkerchief. The door opened, but she heard nothing until Marcus’s voice reached her:

  ‘Perdita, my dear, what has happened?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Has something happened to you? I felt just now as though you were calling out. I came as quickly as I could. What is it, my love?’

  ‘Papa …’ She couldn’t speak, but she was so grateful that he had come.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He is dead.’

  Marcus found his way to her chair, let his stick drop to the floor, and put his hands to her face. She felt his thumbs gently wiping the tears from under her eyes as his fingers cupped her face. It was the first time he had touched her for years except when he needed her help. He said in a voice that seemed to come from miles away:

  ‘Oh, my dearest child, I am so sorry. I know how much you cared for him.’

  Tears welled up again.

  ‘But I never told him so, Marcus.’

  ‘He knew.’

  ‘I wish I had told him. I could so easily have written it. I wish I had never left him there alone.’

  Marcus moved his hands to her shoulders and helped her to her feet. She found herself leaning against him with his arms wrapped tightly round her and his lips on her hair. Very quietly he said:

  ‘My darling, I know how much it cost you to leave him to bring me home. And I have always honoured you for it. I know …’ He stopped, finding it almost impossibly hard to break a reserve that had grown nacre-hard around his deepest feelings. But her need was of overmastering importance and so he tried again:

  ‘I know that I have never told you all the things I ought to have said, but I hoped that you knew them anyway.’

  Perdita was so moved by his touch and the thought of what he might be trying to tell her that she could not answer.

  ‘When we married …’ Marcus stopped again, the difficulty of what he wanted to say silencing him. Perdita felt his hands tighten on her back. He tried once more:

  ‘When we married, I did not know how to love you, and for a long time afterwards I did not understand what was happening to me. It was not until I realized what you had done for James Thurleigh that I began to learn what it was I felt, what I had felt for a long time.’ He felt her stiffen in his arms, but at last he knew how to say it: ‘I had always wondered about those two shots, you see, because I did not understand how you could have missed an animal at such close range. And then Charlie came to tell me what he thought he had seen. Then I understood, Perdita, and I was so grateful, so desperately grateful that you had had enough courage.’

  Feeling his arms securely around her as he spoke, Perdita laid her head on his shoulder in complete trust.

  ‘It was … terrible, Marcus. But I knew that I had to do it. I have wanted to tell you about it so many times, but he made me promise never to let you know what had really happened.’ Her voice dropped so that he had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘And I thought the truth might make you hate me.’

  Marcus could feel her heart beating fast against him. He said at last:

  ‘I never hated you, Perdita. I could not. I loved you then. And I love you now.’

  The rest of her burden slid away and another life began.

  Author’s Note

  There can be few things more absurd than a bibliography in a novel such as this, where historical and topographical fact has to be adapted to fit into a fictional setting, but there are some debts that need to be recorded.

  Anyone who has read Emily Eden’s wonderful Leiters from India (1869) and Up the Country (1860) will see a
t once how much I owe to them. The journals of Fanny Parkes, published in 1850 as Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, have also provided much invaluable background detail about the voyage to India and the life an English woman could expect there, as have the letters of Honoria Lawrence quoted in Maud Driver’s biography (1936).

  J. W. Kay’s History of the War in Afghanistan (1859) is the standard Victorian work on the First Afghan War, but most of the detail I have used has come from Alexander Burnes’s Mission at Cabool and the eyewitness accounts written by the few survivors, particularly: Lady Sale’s Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan, Vincent Eyre’s Military Operations at Cabul, and G. R. Gleig’s Sale’s Brigade in Afghanistan. Of more modern works, the most interesting analysis I have found to the political background to the war is J. A Norris’s The First Afghan War (1966), and it is that book that drew my attention to Napier’s marginal invective in his copy of Eyre’s account, which is now owned by the India Office Library.

  Where historical characters, such as Emily Eden, Florentia Sale and John Colvin, speak, I have used their own words as much as possible. Where I have had to invent, I have tried not to misrepresent either their attitudes or their actions at the time. Apart from such historical characters, the facts of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the subsequent retreat from Kabul, all the characters and events are imaginary. There were no Beaminsters, Whitneys, Fletchers, Jamiesons, Fullers, Fleckers, Byrds or Smythams, and no Europeans except Dr Brydon reached the fort at Jellalabad, but other people did live and die in such places in such a way, and their journals and letters are eloquent witnesses to what they endured.

  In the matter of the spelling of Indian, Sikh and Afghan names, I have not used modern transliterations, preferring to give readers some idea of the way early Victorians would have pronounced the words. I have followed Kaye, who wrote in his preface: ‘I have written all the names in the old and vulgar manner, most familiar to the English eye, and, in pronunciation, to the English ear; and I believe that the majority of readers will thank me for the barbarism.’ Thus, Kabul becomes Caubul; Ranjit Singh, Runjeet Singh, and so on.

  Copyright

  First published in 1987 by Michael Joseph

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-3895-9 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3894-2 POD

  Copyright © Daphne Wright, 1987

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