Companions of Paradise

by Thalassa Ali

  “He might also,” she had added, her voice dropping, “have died.”

  Uncle Adrian's face had changed color. “You never divorced that man, after all the trouble we went to?” he had croaked from his pillows.

  “I tried, Uncle Adrian, I really did. There was fighting in the city and my husband was constantly—”

  “Never mind ‘fighting in the city,’ ” Aunt Claire cut in from her folding chair. “For the past weeks you have led us to believe that all was accomplished, that you were free to marry an Englishman once we reached Afghanistan. You have lied to us, Mariana.”

  “I merely avoided the truth. Uncle Adrian has been so ill. I did not wish to burden you with more than—”

  “I should have insisted.” Aunt Claire's chins wobbled with outrage. “I should have questioned you as soon as you returned from the city.” Her eyes narrowed. “Mariana, I demand to know the truth. Did you ruin yourself while you were there? Did you allow your native husband to take liberties with you at his father's house?”

  “Please, Claire. Adil is here.” Uncle Adrian signaled to the elderly manservant who hovered, fascinated, near the doorway of the tent.

  “I allowed nothing,” Mariana snapped, as soon as the servant had gone. “With Lahore under attack, there simply was no time for a divorce. Besides, my husband was wounded during the battle at the Citadel.”

  “But we told you a thousand times that your one chance at happiness depended upon the dissolution of that hateful native alliance of yours. Even with your uncle half-dead with cholera I should never have trusted you. My mother-in-law,” Aunt Claire said cruelly, “told me never to trust a woman with green eyes. Everyone thinks you are free now,” she added mournfully. “Lady Macnaghten has told me herself that Lieutenant Fitzgerald is waiting anxiously for you in Kabul.”

  She found her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. “Why do you do these things? What will your mother say? I promised her I would look after you—”

  “Why should we tell anyone?” Uncle Adrian interrupted. “People will not talk about something they do not know.”

  “Oh, but they will, Adrian, they will! But wait—” Aunt Claire's tired face had brightened. “Perhaps you are right.”

  “Aunt Claire. I—”

  “No, Mariana. You must listen to us. That native wedding of yours was a fraud from the beginning—nothing but mumbo jumbo recited outside a tent by a native in a headdress. Since you were never really married, there is no need for a divorce. We shall go on exactly as we had planned,” she concluded firmly, holding up a silencing hand when Mariana tried to speak. “No one is to learn what you have told us. They must continue to believe your marriage has been dissolved. As far as we are concerned you are free to wed an Englishman.”

  After leaving them, Mariana had stopped outside, straining to hear what her aunt would say next, then jumped back, stung by what she heard, and furious with herself for listening.

  “Nothing would make me happier,” her aunt had declared, “than to learn that the man is dead.”

  Three weeks later the camp had folded its many tents and set off for the Khyber Pass and the journey into Afghanistan.

  March 25, 1841

  By the end of March, Kabul's bazaars and caravanserais echoed with the shouts of merchants from India and Arabia selling chintzes, indigo, drugs, and sugar, or perfumes and spices. To the north, the caravans from Russia and China, from Orenburg, Bokhara, and Samarkand, had already begun to thread their way down through the high, icy passes of the Hindu Kush mountains, bringing Chinese crockery, tea, bales of silk, and fine Turkmen horses.

  Even without the northern traders, the city bustled with more excitement than usual, for the royal race meeting was expected to attract horses, riders, and serious gamblers from far outside the capital.

  From every direction, heavily armed men and boys streamed toward the city.

  The races were to be held on a flat plain in the shadow of the brown Bibi Mahro hills that rose from the flat plain north of the city. There, the old racecourse ran in a straight line from west to east, ending almost at the brick ramparts of the British cantonment. Two miles long, it offered plenty of room for horse and camel races, wrestling, and naiza bazi, the graceful game of tent-pegging.

  On the morning of the meeting, Mariana crept about the house hoping to avoid her aunt, but to no avail. “Come and join us in the verandah,” Aunt Claire hallooed after breakfast. “It is so lovely here in Kabul,” she murmured, adjusting her shawl as Mariana sat down in a basket chair. “With such delightful weather and clear air, I have quite forgotten the discomforts of India.”

  Mariana nodded warily. Please do not mention Fitzgerald, she pleaded silently.

  “And now, my dear,” her aunt continued, in a voice that must have carried all the way to the road outside, “we have just learned that he will be present tomorrow. This is very good news, all we could wish for. You and Lieutenant Fitzgerald are to meet again at last!

  “Of course the meeting will not be quite as I had imagined,” she added severely, “but the important point is that you will meet. You must heed our advice. Do not mention your current situation. No one must know of it, no one. And do not be too free with the lieutenant on your first meeting.”

  Mariana stiffened.

  “Now, Mariana,” her uncle begged, “we encourage you to be careful only because we know how much this meeting means to you. After all, whether we like it or not, you are well-known for your indiscretion.

  “And now,” he added, rising from his seat, “I must be off.”

  “I shall be more than discreet with Lieutenant Fitzgerald,” Mariana retorted. “I shall barely speak to him.”

  “What nonsense.” Aunt Claire peered into Mariana's face. “What have you done to your eyebrows?”

  Mariana jumped to her feet. “I must change,” she said hastily.

  “Whatever you do,” her aunt called after her, “remember to behave normally.”

  Normally. Mariana closed her door firmly behind her. What was normal behavior in a person who might still be married to a native man, but was not allowed to say so? She jerked open her latticework window shutters and leaned outside, her face to the sun.

  Her aunt was correct about one thing. Whether she wished to or not, she would have to face Harry Fitzgerald.

  He had been handsome, with his straight blond hair and fine Roman profile. He had been good-humored and unconcerned by her less than perfect appearance when she lost her hairpins or buttoned her gown wrong. Like her, he was fascinated by military history. His high-collared blue jacket, the uniform of the Bengal Horse Artillery, smelled deliciously musty. Harry Fitzgerald had been the perfect husband for her, or so she had thought.

  Then a piece of false gossip about him had surfaced that had ruined their prospects. Forced to give him up, she had thought she would die from the pain.

  She sighed and turned from the window. Now, too late, he had been redeemed, and everyone from Aunt Claire to Lady Macnaghten was anxious to see them engaged.

  Had she married Fitzgerald, she would have been a military wife for the past year—stitching embroidery all day, and paying calls on the wives of senior officers, none of whom knew, or cared, about India. She would already have endured months of loneliness, while he campaigned in Afghanistan.

  Perhaps she would not have minded.

  But she had not married him. Instead, she had gone from adventure to adventure, and become a different person in the process. She had also done more than fail to divorce Hassan Ali Khan.

  I allowed nothing, she had lied when Aunt Claire had demanded the truth. But the fact was that three days after she returned little Saboor safely to his family in Lahore, Hassan had slipped into her bedroom, and she had given herself to him without a murmur.

  As sweet as musk, she is, he had whispered that night.

  She reached absently into a tin trunk, pulled out a silk afternoon gown, and shook it out. Of course her life in Lahore would have been larg
ely confined to the Shaikh's upstairs family quarters, and she would have spent much of her time waiting for Hassan to return from his work or his travels, but she did not care. Any amount of confinement would have been worth it, if she were Hassan's wife.

  Besides, there was so much to learn in the Waliullah house. Among the Shaikh's family women, she would have found a whole world of knowledge to absorb—poetry, philosophy, and the mysterious science of healing. At night, Hassan, long-limbed and compelling, would have bent over her as he had once before, his bearded face intent, his warm, inviting perfume barely covering the scorched scent of his skin.

  That night, he had called her Mariam.

  She had foolishly lost him the very next day, but perhaps not forever. Perhaps he would change his mind, and come to find her….

  She looked without interest at the striped, silver-gray gown in her hands. Lady Macnaghten had already complained that its color was too dull, but Mariana did not care. She buttoned herself into it, twisted her curls up and pinned them to the top of her head, found her fine straw bonnet and left the room.

  If only people would stop interfering in her private life

  She sighed as she approached the drawing room where Aunt Claire sat with her sewing. She should tell Fitzgerald the truth. Before he showed interest in her, she should tell him that her marriage to Shaikh Waliullah's son had not been the repugnant mistake everyone thought it was, but an accident of fate that she hoped had set her on the threshold of a new life. She should apologize for any past misunderstanding, and state firmly that although her marital state was unknown, her sole ambition was to return to a comfortable old haveli in the walled city of Lahore.

  But the cost of such honesty would surely be too high. Tainted by her association with natives, called a liar by people who thought she had divorced Hassan, she would be ostracized—flung to the bottom of an invisible social ladder, to be trampled by everyone but the natives themselves.

  And by association, her aunt and uncle would suffer, ignored, insulted, and barred from the company of “decent” people.

  To them, her marriage to Fitzgerald was a social necessity. To Lady Macnaghten, arranging the marriage of a social inferior was a pleasant way to pass the time.

  Mariana sighed again as she opened the drawing room door. If Hassan did not take her back, her feelings would cease to matter, for Harry Fitzgerald would represent her last chance to marry and have children of her own.

  BY THE time Mariana and her aunt arrived at the race meeting, the morning's events had already taken place.

  As her trotting bearers huffed their way toward the spectators’ tents, Mariana opened the side of her palanquin, and peered disobediently out.

  Tea sellers with tall, brass samovars and hawkers of trinkets and tobacco were everywhere. Men in loose gray or white clothes and embroidered waistcoats squatted beside pits of hot coals, threading bits of mutton and goat's meat onto long, wicked-looking skewers. Others sold dried apricots, raisins, and roasted pine nuts from the backs of donkeys. On a low rise near the tents, a group of white-bearded men sat beneath a spreading plane tree, sharing a water pipe, their eyes on the pairs of boys who wrestled below, in the time-honored way, each one gripping his opponent's arms, trying to throw him off balance.

  The crowd thickened. Mariana's palanquin slowed. As her bearers shouted for room, someone bent to look inside.

  “Mairmuna,” he cried, blocking her view. “Mairmuna!”

  It was the slim boy with the heart-shaped face whom she had encountered three days before. As her palanquin began to move again, he kept pace with it, talking rapidly and unintelligibly, his urgent face a foot from hers, his clothes smelling unpleasantly of unwashed human skin.

  “I have no idea what you are saying,” she told him in Farsi, waving him away.

  For all his fuzzy-chinned youth, the boy gave off an odd depravity. He looked at her exactly as he had on the road, his arms loose at his sides, his whole being focused upon her.

  Unnerved, she banged on the roof above her head, signaling her bearers to hurry.

  “Khanum, lady!” he cried after her, as the palanquin surged through an opening in the crowd, using, too late, a word she understood.

  The spectator tents stood twenty feet apart on sloping ground above the racecourse. Between them, British civil and military officers clustered, laughing loudly, the sound of their voices drawing stares from the Afghans.

  The Shah's splendid enclosure of densely embroidered woolen hangings put the British family tent, a mess tent commandeered for the occasion, to shame. As she passed it, Mariana glanced guiltily inside. The pudgy, nervous-looking Afghan who sat on a dais covered in gold satin must be Shah Shuja. The king's turban was pushed well back above a sour face, revealing a bulging forehead and a shaven hairline. Other Afghans sat around him on the carpeted ground, while folding chairs held rows of British officers in morning coats and top hats or dress uniforms.

  The Amir's chiefs were quite unlike the officials of an Indian maharajah's court. Accustomed to the style of the Punjab, Mariana would have been unimpressed by males covered in jewels and silks, but here was something very different. These men were not showily attired, although their long, fur-trimmed coats looked soft and expensive, and their turbans were all of striped silk. Most were handsome, with strong features and full beards—even the evil-looking old man with missing ears, who bent, whispering, over his king—but more than their appearance, it was the Afghans’ watchful tension that caught Mariana's eye, so different from the relaxed, almost languid poses of some of the British officers.

  The bespectacled, top-hatted Sir William Macnaghten sat on one side of the king, accompanied by a rotund younger gentleman who lounged, smiling, in his chair, one foot extended in front of him. He must be, Mariana concluded, Alexander Burnes, the British Resident, and Macnaghten's second-in-command.

  At the Shah's other side, resplendent in gold epaulettes and many medals, three senior army officers looked stiffly out at the crowd. Mariana identified the first easily. An elderly, wizened general, he was surely the old Commander in Chief, who might soon be leaving for India. An officer, also a general, with a long nose and a scarred face, might be Sir Robert Sale Mariana stared at him, fascinated.

  Now known as the Hero of Ghazni, General Sale had personally led the charge that had captured the great fortress by the same name, as he traveled north to Kabul with the invading British army.

  A real, fighting general—she must find a way to converse with him. Her father would be so pleased.

  The last of the three—a sour-looking one-armed brigadier— turned to speak to someone behind him.

  Mariana ducked hastily into the shadows of her palanquin. That someone was her uncle.

  Inside the second, plainer tent, a double row of chairs faced out at the racecourse, where quicklime had been used to mark off lanes and starting lines. There a few ladies and uniformed officers stood uncertainly, as if waiting for someone important to arrive.

  Lady Macnaghten swept inside on her nephew's arm a few moments later, feathers bobbing in her hair, her blue watered-silk rustling. Before lowering herself into an armchair in the front row, she offered Mariana and her aunt a discreet nod of greeting.

  Charles Mott offered Mariana a longing glance.

  Aunt Claire beamed with pleasure at such public recognition, then bent toward Mariana as a tall, plain-looking woman strode in, escorted by an army major and followed by a young, sour-faced version of herself.

  “That is Lady Sale and her daughter, Mrs. Sturt,” Aunt Claire murmured, as the two women were handed to front-row seats.

  Mariana studied the new arrival's angular profile. No one could have been less like the manicured Lady Macnaghten than the wife of the Hero of Ghazni, with her thin-lipped face and unbecoming gown. As Mariana watched, Lady Sale nodded abruptly to Lady Macnaghten, then, without another word, raised a pair of opera glasses and surveyed the racecourse.

  “I find her quite difficult,” Lady
Macnaghten had confided to Mariana. “She says whatever she chooses, whether it is rude or not, and she discusses military matters as if she were an officer herself. And if you can imagine it, she had her portrait done while wearing a man's striped turban!”

  A moment later, wedged into a folding chair between her aunt and a pregnant woman with gray hair, Mariana craned her neck toward the track, looking for a sign of horsemen.

  Lady Sale beckoned to the stiff-backed major. “What is the purpose of those?” she inquired, pointing toward four small tents that had been set up opposite them, along the margin of the course.

  “I have no idea, Lady Sale,” the major replied, standing at attention. “They were not here yesterday.”

  Martial music sounded in the distance. The crowd fell silent. Nearly hidden by a cloud of dust, a mounted procession had begun its approach from the far end of the racecourse.

  A group of smartly uniformed British officers came first, riding glossy horses and carrying the regimental flag of the 5th Light Cavalry. They were followed by bearded Afghans, whose handsome, brightly dressed mounts were easily as good as those of the British. Each group had its own colorful triangular standard, and each of its four riders carried a nine-foot lance with three prongs at its end. A second lot of British officers came next, then a few more Afghans, followed by members of the Irregular Horse, and finally, a large, disorderly group of tribesmen on showily caparisoned horses, carrying the same unusual-looking lances.

  Mariana looked carefully at the Afghans as they rode past, each one radiating a careless self-possession. Hassan had been wounded in the Hazuri Bagh; the Afghans who had saved him had looked like these men.

  She thought of them now, carrying him through the dark, violent city, risking their lives for a man they hardly knew….

  As the second group of British officers passed by, Lady Macnaghten drew herself straight, her feathers quivering. “Why,” she trilled pointedly, “I believe that is the Bengal Horse Artillery!”