The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  “You’re really saving the Punjab,” she said slowly.

  “If it comes to that, yes. On the day the Governor-General crosses the Sutlej to come for his first official visit, he will be greeted by my soldiers in formation. My hand may be open, but it also holds the sword.” He nodded. “It has always held the sword, but now it has learned to temper aggression with money, diplomacy.”

  She squatted on the floor beside her husband and leaned her head against his knee. Ranjit Singh hadn’t said this time, although he’d said it before, that taking care of the guest was the host’s first duty. It was something the British had not learned in India. This entire diplomatic dance had been taking place for about a year now. Fakir Azizuddin had led a contingent from Ranjit Singh’s court first to Calcutta to meet Lord Auckland and then, this past summer, to Simla, where the Governor-General had halted in his up-country tour. When the political secretary, McNaghten, had come at the head of his own group from the Governor-General to the Maharajah’s court in Adeenagar soon after, it had been the same. They were met at the Punjab border, escorted by Ranjit Singh’s cavalry and infantry, no food or drink that passed their lips had been paid for by the British. When they returned to Simla again, they were burdened with gifts from the Punjab.

  The reception of Fakir Azizuddin’s embassy at Simla had not been quite as enthusiastic. They had set up an encampment on the lower slopes of the valley, and an hour later a thunderstorm had come booming in over all of them. The tents had been shattered, the downpours dug deep gouges into the hillsides, and it had rained for two days and two nights. At the end of the storm had come a polite note from Lord Auckland’s office asking if they were all right, and of course, Azizuddin had written back saying that the bond between the British and the Punjab had created a shelter for them from the storm. In reality, he had rented a mansion in Simla within the first hour of the storm, after the tents collapsed. When the Maharajah had heard of this, he’d sent for the state treasurer, Misr Makraj, and had him count out sovereigns into Azizuddin’s hands until his palms curved around a pile of shimmering gold.

  Maharani Jindan Kaur sighed. She didn’t think that the British were a threat to the Punjab. Wanting to see Emily and Fanny Eden was just . . . curiosity; if nothing else, asserting her right as the Maharajah’s wife, as the mother of his child.

  “I will be meeting the Governor-General’s women,” she said.

  “I will also,” Ranjit Singh said. “They are very free and open with their women, these British. I hear General Avitabile is . . . interested in the older one. I don’t see—”

  “And this Lord Auckland does not mind?”

  “She’s his sister, my dear, perhaps he’s looking for a way to get rid of her.”

  “Ah,” Jindan said, and then her frown cleared. “They’re both his sisters? What man travels with his sisters to India? Where are his wives? What kind of a man does not have a wife?” There was a genuine perplexity in her questions. In India, everyone married. It was as simple as that. There was no question of falling in love, of course, unless you were fortunate enough to do so after you were married, as Jindan herself had, but every man had a woman—someone, somewhere, anyhow—who fitted into his life.

  The Maharajah’s mouth deepened into its lopsided smile. “I will ask him.”

  Prince Dalip Singh gurgled in his sleep. Jindan rose, ran to the cradle, and placed a soothing touch on her child’s brow. Ranjit Singh could hear a hiss of breath from his son, and a chomping of his gums before he settled down again. He watched his young wife, saw the intent look on her face as she gazed down upon the boy, and felt a pang in his heart. He had had two strokes already, and another one would finish him off—this was Honigberger’s studied opinion. He had one useless heir in Kharak Singh, weak of face, weak of character, with a marked weakness for wine and the women of his harem. He had another son, and Kharak had a son with an ambitious mother, and they would all fight one another for the throne, and perhaps one of them would hold it long enough for the Punjab Empire to survive. There was already an intense jealousy among his sons and their wives, that he had allowed Jindan to wear the Kohinoor. Since he had taken it from Shuja, no one, other than Misr Makraj, who was treasurer, had been allowed to touch it. But he liked seeing the massive diamond upon the arm of the woman who had attempted to carry a water bag up from the Ravi, who wore with such grace a stone whose value was, even now, to her unimaginable and impossible. Who had, after all these years when he had considered himself old, desiccated, given him a son. A new boy. A new life.

  He smiled to himself. If there was a curse upon the diamond, that no man could keep it and retain his kingdom, he had shattered the curse, looked upon it and spat at it, stomped it into the ground. The Lion of the Punjab had kept the Kohinoor within his mammoth paws for twenty years. The smile faded from his mouth and he grew grave. He had built his empire and he meant for it to endure. Would it?

  And what of that child in the cradle? What would become of him? Would he be a pawn in someone’s game? Would this young wife of his, who had given him such immense joy at a time when he most needed it, would she survive also?

  • • •

  The lamp spluttered, and a thin spiral of smoke curled its way upward. Emily Eden laid down her pen on the blotting paper and scrubbed her forehead tiredly. The flame wavered once, and again, and extinguished itself with a sigh. The outlines of the tent disappeared, and then reemerged, lit faintly from the glow of torches in the camp outside. The roses in the silver vases on her desk seemed to come abloom in the dark, heavy-scented, padding the air with their aroma. Emily touched the supple petals, bent in to breathe the perfume, thought of the man who had sent them to her.

  “Not asleep?”

  She moved quickly, straightened from the flowers, yanked the top page from her desk and burrowed it under other papers. When he had reached her, he sat down heavily upon the carpets, near her chair.

  “Not on the floor, dear. Jimrud swept, but snakes . . .” and scorpions, insects and spiders, in fact, all of India on many, varied legs would ooze into a darkened tent, gnaw at the furniture, leave malodorous droppings.

  “I don’t care,” George said, his body slackening. A blurred tangerine glow trickled through the white canvas. Her desk lay flush along the wall, in front of a window. Their mother had given it to Emily for her tenth birthday, the first substantial gift she had received in her young life. At sixteen, she’d moved into an attic bedroom by herself and tucked it under the steep slope of the roof, knocking her head each time she rose. When they came to India, they had been told to take everything with them—servants, furniture, clothing, shoes, books, pens, paper, knitting, wool. Once they got here, she realized that things were not quite so dire, but she was still glad for the desk—its amber-hued oak, its scarred legs—because it tethered her to home, to England.

  Emily trawled her fingers through George’s thinning brush of hair. India had done this. When they left home, his hair had been a rich brown, now it was heavily woven through with strands of white. “I used to think that bringing my old room to India would make it England. So everyone told us, you remember, when we first embarked—take the comforts of home with you.”

  He glanced up. “Who are you writing to? Mary?”

  “Eleanor,” she said, falteringly, glad that he couldn’t see the flush that crept up her neck. “Although by the time this letter gets to her, it will be May or June, and her garden will be in full bloom.”

  George wrapped his arms around her leg, and she felt the warmth of his face seeping in through the thin cotton of her nightgown. She dabbed at her nape and her hand came away damp with sweat. In Greenwich, at Park Lodge, where George had been Commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, the garden would have gone into its quiet hibernation, now, in December. Frost would carve patterns on the thick glass of the casement windows; the branches of the birches would be rimmed with ice, trunks stripped of bark, lying about in paper curls of white; the grass would crackle with frozen de
w. There had been other houses, other gardens, but the memory of the Park Lodge garden—where Emily had planted the rosebushes, the elms, the rhododendrons—was the one that came swooping clear to her when life in India troubled.

  When their mother had died, Emily and Fanny, the only unmarried girls in the brood of fourteen, had left Eden Farm and gone to George. If George had been married, Emily and Fanny would have had to live by themselves—two mistresses in George’s home were already one too many, but three . . . unthinkable. Fanny was three years younger than Emily, George thirteen years older. And so they had muddled along now, for what, some twenty years almost, Emily thought with surprise—in this triangular marriage.

  Outside, a horse coughed. In a sick horse, this was a painful whine, a hoarse and labored drawing in of breath. Emily said, “What’s the matter with that animal?”

  “Pneumonia, I think. He won’t last long; there’s no cure for it.”

  Emily sank her chin into her chest and whispered into the lace collar of her nightgown. “I hate it here.”

  George did not speak for a long time. They just listened to the tortured hacking of the horse and watched as the shadow of its neck and head flailed across the tent’s walls.

  “How long have we been in India?” George’s voice was subdued.

  “Two and a half years,” Emily said tiredly. “We arrived at Government House in Calcutta on March fourth, my birthday.”

  “They weren’t expecting us,” George said, with a dash of unexpected humor.

  The then acting Governor-General of India, Sir Charles Metcalfe, had known that Lord Auckland and his sisters had arrived at the mouth of the Hooghly River, and had boarded a ferry on their way to Calcutta to relieve him of his duties. That by itself meant nothing—in India, a ferry ride of a few hours could become a journey of days, or the boat could capsize, or become stuck on the bank . . . or . . . So Metcalfe had gone on with his dinner party on the night of the fourth of March 1836. In the meantime, George, Emily, and Fanny had landed at the port at Calcutta to a small band playing an abbreviated and surprised welcome, and a convoy of horse-drawn buggies to rush them through the plummeting dusk of the crowded streets. After traveling through a vast park, they had confronted Government House, set on the banks of the river, with its Ionic pillars, its central dome, its twenty-seven acres . . . it was like a blessed piece of England, this mammoth house. Later, Emily would learn that it was England, more specifically, Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, built according to the same plan at the turn of the century by an ambitious Governor-General. They had climbed the steep steps leading up to the front door of Government House, gone through the reception area and into the dining room.

  Metcalfe, caught at the head of the table with his wineglass rising to his mouth, had set it down carefully and hailed the travelers, who were still teetering on their land legs after so many months at sea. He had caught hold of George, Lord Auckland’s arm, dragged him to his place peremptorily, sworn him in as the new Governor-General of India, demanded that one of the waiters move his plate—with the remains of the fish he had been eating—to another setting down the table, and sat down to enjoy his meal again.

  “Happy birthday to me,” Emily said.

  George agreed. “It was a frightful introduction to India.” Disoriented, his mind filled with the flash-by images of the Calcutta docks, the sweating trumpeters of the band, the ramshackle slums of the native quarter, he had stared at the eighty-five guests his predecessor had amassed in the dining room for a casual night—as Metcalfe had said, nothing special. George loathed making speeches, and he’d wondered what kind of a crowd a formal event demanded if this was just a few friends to dinner. He had swallowed air, he’d stumbled through the words, he’d toasted the King, his voice had failed, he’d collapsed into his chair and been watched as each forkful of tough goat meat went to his mouth and he chewed.

  “Poor George,” Emily said softly, kissing the top of his head.

  Things didn’t get better, because the Governor-General of India was the representative of the Crown and the East India Company. He had to stand up to talk at every occasion, stiff and uneasy with a stultifying formality to his language; he had to be seen everywhere, his frock coat cut at the right angles, his hair brushed, his collar pristine, his boots shining. That was usually in the evenings. In the mornings, at Government House in Calcutta, where his offices were downstairs in the front, George was buried under the weight of papers that came in the red dispatch boxes from every corner of British India. He had a staff of seventy people, most of whom were snappy, blindingly rich young men—younger sons of earls and dukes all eager for their India experience and with little else to do back home—who were his ADCs, his aides-de-camp.

  Government House was an open house. Emily had privacy only in her bedroom upstairs; once she opened the door, she was likely to find almost anyone around: ladies come for a visit, the native servants creeping about, the ADCs running down hallways. She had a personal staff of thirty servants, including one whose job was only to pick up her handkerchief, if she dropped it.

  “It’s a difficult life,” Emily said quietly, “but no one who had come to India before told us it would be easy.”

  “And we came for the money,” George said, surprising even himself by the honesty. When Emily moved in her chair in protest, he said, “It’s true, Em. Macaulay was only a member of the Governor-General’s council, remember, and he came back home with a purse of twenty thousand pounds, enough for him and his sister to live on for the rest of their lives. I make that amount every year. When we return, we will be rich. This is why we came to India. Why I came to India. Fanny and you were very good to accompany me. I wouldn’t have known what to do without you.”

  Emily gave a half laugh, embarrassed. Well, it was true, but they’d never talked about it before. And how could they have let George come here alone, without them? It was their duty, no matter how frightful the prospect had been.

  “Go to bed,” she said. “Or do you want to sleep here tonight?”

  “No,” he said, rising. A sheet of paper fell onto the carpet from the pocket of his nightshirt and lay there, glowing white on the dark of the wool. “Oh, this came today.” He held it out. “Runjeet’s wife wants to meet you. And Fanny, I suppose.”

  Emily flipped open the letter and held it up to the faint light that glowed around them. “It’s in Persian. Did McNaghten translate? But, this wife, George”—a small frown gathered on her forehead—“she’s common, isn’t she? The daughter of a cleaner or some such?”

  This also was the unfortunate part of India to Emily. Even among the British inhabitants of the country, there was no telling who came from where. Some of them had money; some had the advantage of a long enough residence in India that their origins were forgotten; some were simply people Emily, Fanny, and George would not have met or talked with in England. Here, the social order was in a dreadful jumble.

  George put his hands around her face and bent down until their breaths mingled. “You’ve got to see her, Em. Every raja’s wife is common, by our standards anyway. And this royalty in India is common also—they’re not usually born to the title, they snatch it from their brothers, fathers, and friends. It doesn’t matter. I want Runjeet to help us in Afghanistan. So, you’ve got to see his . . . er . . . wife, or whatever she is. She’ll probably give you a heap of jewels as a gift, you know how ridiculously generous Runjeet has been.”

  “What are we giving them?”

  “Wait.” He ran out of the tent and came back with a rectangular package enfolded in newspaper. Emily tore open the wrappings and gazed upon the portrait she had painted of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes. She had taken the face from a newspaper clipping, the gown from a very bad description, the jewels from her imagination, because they had been in India when Victoria was crowned sovereign of England; in fact, news of the king’s death and the new queen had come to them only in October, four months later. George had had the portrait framed in g
old, embedded with rubies and diamonds, and shells.

  “Is it enough? We don’t want to seem mean . . . and, Runjeet keeps his women in a harem, would he care to see our Queen thus?”

  “She’s our ruler, Emily.” His mouth drooped in distaste. “One day she might well rule over the Punjab. I don’t care what the native rajas think. And, I thought of giving him this also, along with some guns and cannons.” From the lower pocket of his nightshirt, he pulled out a clatter of green stones, smoothly rounded, linked with tiny gold chains. Pure emeralds, fashioned into a cluster of grapes, so realistic that Emily’s mouth had watered when she’d first seen them in Calcutta.

  “It’s beautiful,” Emily said. “But Runjeet has the Kohinoor, you know; these will seem like paltry gems to him.”

  “Maybe he’ll give us the Kohinoor in return.”

  They were silent, listening as the unwell horse shifted about on its feet, trying to be comfortable.

  “Imagine that,” Emily said softly, “you could be the Governor-General who sent the diamond to the Queen.”

  George grunted. “Mr. Taft would snap it out of my hand before we even had a chance to look at it and bear it away to the Company’s treasure house.”

  George, Lord Auckland, had been appointed Governor-General of India by the King of England and the Prime Minister of England. And, though the British government could offer the highest post in India to any man it chose, the English East India Company, a private trading concern, still ruled over most of India. Every gift, every honor paid to the Governor-General, or the members of his council, had to pass through the hands of the Company.