Sword of Fortune

by Christopher Nicole

Acting on an intuitive feeling, Richard called out, ‘Surrender,’ in English.

  The big man stared at him. ‘Surrender, is it?’ he yelled back, also in English. ‘I’ll carve yer liver for you, that I will, begorrah.’

  ‘You’ll never reach me,’ Richard told him. ‘If you do not surrender, my men will shoot you down.’

  ‘I’ll not surrender,’ the big man said. ‘I’ll not have me balls carved by any Indian bitches.’

  ‘No one will carve your balls,’ Richard assured him. ‘You have too much courage to die uselessly, Irishman. Surrender, and I will offer you employment in my own army. More, I will offer you fortune as well.’

  The Irishman gazed at him for several seconds, then again looked at the bayonets of the infantrymen. Then he threw his sword and pistol to the ground. ‘Ye’re right, God damn ye, Englishman,’ he said. ‘These rascals are not worth dying for. There’s me sword, and here’s me hand. Me name is George Thomas. And if ye break yer word, now, I’ll throttle ye in hell when ye get there. But if ye’d happen to have a flask of whisky about ye, why, I’d forgive ye even treachery.’

  Part Two: The Sword

  Diary of Mrs Alistair Lamont, 3 February 1781

  The monsoon is over. But will my pain and suffering ever cease?

  To endure such discomfort, such distortion, such pain—and all to give birth to a lifeless scrap of flesh. Is this truly God’s will?

  Dr Adams says I am fortunate I did not also die. Would that I had.

  Aunt Lucy says she cannot understand it. She says if ever a woman was created for child-bearing, it must be me.

  Uncle Jonathan says not to mind, there will soon be another. Can I truly contemplate facing such an ordeal again?

  Poor Captain Lamont is desolated. He feels it is somehow his fault. Well, no doubt it is.

  Dr Adams says I may leave my bed in another week. He does not recommend riding for a while, except in a carriage, but I may go out and about, a little.

  I shall call on Mrs Walkenshaw, and pat her bonny babies on the head, and hate them, and her. Twins, my God, and I cannot have even one.

  I shall play at cards in the Ladies’ Room at the club, and listen to endless inanities.

  I must gaze across a crowded room at dear Andrew, and never let him touch my hand. Not that he would wish to touch the hand of an old married woman.

  And I must lie beneath my husband and be stabbed, time and again, without an iota of pleasure for myself, merely waiting for my belly to start to swell all over again.

  Oh, why did I not have the courage to visit Richard in gaol. It might have been worth being tied naked to a bed to be discovered by a Hindu and sent home!

  But Richard would not have left me behind! He and I would have escaped together, and faced the jungle together. Would that not have been a preferable fate to this?

  6: The Mercenaries

  The Begum Sombre gazed at the chest which lay on the floor before her. The lid had been thrown up, and her eyes gleamed almost as brilliantly as the heaped jewels and gold coin.

  ‘A king’s ransom,’ she whispered.

  ‘The ransom of Allahabad, Highness,’ Richard told her. ‘Paid by the rajah to prevent my men entering his city following the destruction of his army. We have also returned with a battery of six cannon.’

  ‘Six cannon! An army destroyed! A fortune gained…truly you are a man amongst men, my Richard.’ Aljai glanced at Peyraud and le Cocq, who stood at Richard’s shoulders; even they looked proud and happy this day, though not as happy as their general. ‘You are all men amongst men. My men. I am proud of you. Here…’ She delved into the chest, selected three jewelled brooches, and tossed one each to her three commanders. ‘I am proud of you,’ she said again. Now, where is this prisoner of whom I have heard?’

  Richard beckoned the guards who had been waiting just outside the doors, and George Thomas was brought in. He had been allowed to wash, but finding suitable clothing for so enormous a man had been difficult; his uniform jacket would not button, and his breeches had been split at the thigh.

  He had also been given a couple of flasks of rice beer, about which he complained bitterly.

  ‘Faith and begorrah, but this muck has no strength,’ he had growled. He certainly had a greater capacity for drink than any man Richard had ever met.

  But a few mugs of rice beer were not likely to make him drunk, and he had been warned to be on his best behaviour when he met the Begum.

  Aljai, for her part, gazed at him in open-mouthed admiration. ‘By Allah!’ she exclaimed. ‘But is this not the greatest prize of all?’

  Richard wasn’t sure how much Thomas understood. He had gathered from his strange prisoner that he had been nothing more than a master gunner on board an Indiaman, who had jumped ship, determined to seek his fortune in the Indian jungle. He was quite illiterate, although he had picked up a smattering of local languages, of which Hindustani was certainly one.

  ‘Ye kowtow to this little bint?’ he now asked, in English.

  ‘Be discreet, I beg of you,’ Richard said, in the same language.

  ‘What does he say?’ Aljai demanded.

  ‘He praises your beauty, which is such as he has never seen before, Highness,’ Richard explained, wondering how much English the Frenchmen understood.

  Le Cocq’s expression did not change, but Peyraud gave one of his snorts.

  ‘Well, he possesses beauty himself, or at least grandeur,’ Aljai commented. ‘And will he prove faithful to our cause?’

  ‘I have no doubt of it, Highness. He is a gunner. I have a mind to place him in charge of our artillery, with your permission.’

  ‘How is he called?’

  ‘George Thomas, Highness.’

  ‘Can he not speak?’

  ‘Say something, George,’ Richard told the giant in English. ‘Politely, if you would stay alive.’

  ‘It is a great pleasure to meet a lady of your distinction,’ Thomas said in halting Hindustani.

  Aljai clapped her hands with pleasure. It also summoned her girls.

  ‘You may leave us, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I would speak with this strange fellow in private. And I am sure you have much to do. You more than anyone, my Richard. Have you not a wife and son to see to?’

  Richard had been afraid to ask. He hurried from the Begum’s apartment to his own.

  ‘I watched you ride in,’ Caty said, so proudly. ‘All the city speaks of your triumph.’

  ‘And of yours, my dearest girl. Where is our son?’

  ‘Sleeping.’ She held his hand and led him into the bedchamber to stand above the cot. ‘Your child,’ she said.

  He had dark hair rather than yellow, and was still rather wrinkled, but he was only a week old.

  ‘He looks like you, Richard sahib,’ Hanif remarked.

  ‘Hanif, you old devil!’ Richard shook hands with his servant, and then with Biriappa. Did all go well?’

  ‘No midwives could have been kinder, or more efficient than Hanif and Biriappa,’ Caty said.

  Richard wondered what Barbara Smythe would say to being assisted in her delivery by an Indian man and woman. But Barbara Smythe was more remote than ever; the Indiaman on which George Thomas had been a sailor had stopped in Bombay before continuing to Calcutta, and Thomas had told him that Miss Smythe was now married to a Colonel Lamont in the Company artillery.

  No one in Bombay, it seemed, had yet heard of the new general of the Begum Sombre’s army. If they thought of Richard Bryant at all, they supposed him dead.

  Amy Holder had been returned to England.

  Well, he thought, they would hear of him when news began to seep south from Allahabad.

  And meanwhile, he had a son.

  ‘What have you named him?’

  ‘I have not named him. He is your son.’

  ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘Michael.’

  ‘Then that shall be his name.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Richard. But what of your fat
her?’

  Richard grinned. ‘We will name our second son after my father.’

  Then Caty was in his arms, clinging to him. ‘I am so happy. I have no right to be so happy.’

  Hanif and Biriappa discreetly left the room.

  ‘You have every right to be happy, my dearest,’ Richard told her.

  She had grown during his absence, and her body was no longer that of a child. Now she was a woman to be loved.

  ‘I, too, am so happy,’ he told her.

  But their embrace was interrupted by cries of alarm from the Begum’s apartment.

  ‘Oh, Christ! Thomas has angered her!’

  Richard leapt from the divan, pulled on his clothes, snatched his sword and pistols from Hanif as he ran along the corridors.

  He burst into Aljai’s bedchamber, having to thrust aside several officers to do so, including the new captain of the guard, le Vasseult, for none of them would dared have entered the Begum’s bedchamber unless summoned.

  ‘Richard!’ Aljai was standing on her divan, naked. ‘Cut him down! Tie him to a cannon! Then give me a knife!’

  Her face was livid with anger and outrage.

  ‘That’s a heathen lassie, begorrah,’ Thomas declared. He too was quite naked. ‘Tried to have her way with me, she did. And me with me hands tied behind me back.’

  Richard looked at the silken cord, which lay on the floor at the Irishman’s feet; he had popped it as if it had been string.

  ‘Cut him down!’ Aljai shrieked.

  ‘You’d best leave, George,’ Richard decided.

  ‘I’ve no clothes, man.’

  ‘I’ll bring your clothes. Go to my apartment and wait there.’

  Thomas hesitated but a moment longer, then left.

  Aljai was furious. ‘I want him tied to a cannon!’

  ‘For failing you in love, my mistress?’

  ‘Failing me in love?’ Her breasts were heaving as she panted. ‘He called me a heathen witch.’

  ‘There must have been a reason.’

  She glared at him. ‘He knows naught of the language of love. He wished to lie on me, that huge brute. I should have been crushed from existence. And when I told him I knew of a better way, he became abusive.’

  ‘As you, say, Highness, he knows naught of the language of love. That is no reason to kill him.’

  ‘He has insulted me! Me, the Begum of Sardhana! Me, the Begum Sombre!’

  Richard realised that she valued that last title the highest. ‘I will point out his error, Highness.’

  Aljai allowed her legs to give way, and knelt on the divan. ‘Are you refusing to obey my order?’ she asked in a low voice.

  ‘I am attempting to reason with you, Highness. This man, this Thomas, is of enormous strength, enormous courage. He is also a skilled gunner, which is something we sorely lack. He will be of enormous use to your army. I know he is rough and uneducated, but he is none the less, as you yourself said this morning, perhaps worth more than all the booty I brought you from Allahabad.’

  ‘Booty,’ she snorted. ‘Peyraud has been here. He has told me that he would have brought me twice as much, by refusing the ransom and assaulting the town.’

  ‘With less than two thousand men, Highness? Once our army…your army, became lost in those streets, it were lost indeed.’

  ‘Well,’ she said grumpily. ‘The rajah was clearly terrified of you. You could have held out for another chest.’

  ‘It was all he had readily available, Highness. To wait while he accumulated more would have exposed your army to counterattacks. I deemed it best to leave while we were so far ahead, and before the enemy could recover.’

  ‘You deemed it best,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I want that man punished.’

  ‘And I have promised him his life, Highness. I gave him my word.’

  She stared at him. ‘And your word is more important than my command?’

  ‘A man’s word, Highness, must be the most sacred thing in life to him.’

  Another long stare. Then she threw herself down. ‘Leave me,’ she said. ‘Send me le Vasseult.’

  She was definitely angry, or she would have asked him to stay, Richard reflected. But she had not pressed her point about Thomas. He told le Vasseult to go in, and hurried back to his apartment.

  There he found Thomas, wrapped in a towel, drinking rice beer, while Caty fed the baby, watching the big Irishman anxiously as she did so.

  ‘Well, Master Bryant,’ Thomas demanded. ‘Am I to be blown to smithereens? By God, I’ll pull her palace down about her ears first.’

  ‘No, you are not to be blown to smithereens,’ Richard said. ‘But it was a damned close business. You may think the Begum is a chit of a girl, George, but you have to get it through your head that she owns every one of us…’

  ‘And she can be the devil incarnate,’ Caty said.

  ‘Thomas looked at Richard enquiringly.

  ‘Caty is right.’

  ‘And you expect me to fight for her?’

  ‘You will be fighting for me, as you offered to do. And your rewards will be great.’

  ‘’Tis not what I’d expected,’ Thomas growled, and peered at his empty mug. ‘By Christ, to have some whisky in there.’

  ‘It’s a damned good thing there is none in Sardhana,’ Richard confided to Caty.

  *

  Aljai was definitely displeased. When she reviewed her troops the next morning she paid far more attention to Peyraud than to Richard; indeed, she hardly appeared to notice her general at all.

  Richard refused to take offence, but was as servilely polite as ever. He had no doubt that she would get over her huff soon enough. His business was to keep George Thomas out of her sight as much as possible. And himself, until she regained her affection for him.

  In fact Aljai soon seemed to recover from her ill-temper; she had something else on her mind.

  She announced that she wished to become a Christian.

  Richard was totally taken aback. Even Father Martin was astounded. Nor did Richard feel he could take much credit for her decision; he suspected it was being done to please le Vasseult, of whom she seemed to have become as inordinately fond as she had for a while been of him, he reflected bitterly.

  Thus, he must wait patiently for her to tire of her new toy. At least he remained general of the army. However, he did not suppose that Aljai’s ‘conversion’ was going to make the least difference to her morals, or to her ruthless cruelty.

  The Irishman continued to be a delight, even if a constant source of apprehension. His strength really was prodigious; he’d lift and move a fully laden table rather than walk round it. Caty regarded him with awe.

  She also stared askance at his drinking. As there was no whisky he would put away several jugs of rice beer every morning, while in the evenings he turned his attention to the rum made from the sugar cane ground in Aljai’s mill. It was potent stuff, but Thomas could drink several jugs of it before turning in, and awake the next morning with his hand as steady and his brain as clear as if he had consumed nothing but water.

  And he was most certainly a skilled gunner. Richard carried out his plan to make him colonel of artillery with no objection from the Begum, and it was a treat to see him lining up his sights, and drilling his gunners.

  He also possessed a far keener intelligence than was readily apparent. He knew much more of men and affairs, especially Indian men and affairs, than he let on. He had apparently made several voyages to Calcutta before deciding to jump ship.

  ‘There can be no doubt, Richard me boy,’ he said, ‘that a man with darin’ and courage and a sense of destiny could carve for himself…what do they call it in this heathen tongue?’

  ‘A jaghir?’ Richard suggested.

  ‘That’s right, a jaghir. It means principality, does it not?’

  ‘A very small one.’

  ‘Acorns are very small,’ Thomas pointed out. ‘Didn’t this character Sombre begin with just a jaghir? Which he turned into a
kingdom.’

  ‘Well, a viceroyalty, at least,’ Richard conceded.

  ‘Are ye sayin’ that two men like ye and me, my strength and yer generalship, couldn’t do as well. Or better?’

  ‘I hope you’re not thinking of attempting to take over Sardhana, George.’

  Thomas considered, then grinned. ‘That’d be somethin’ eh? But there’s too many damned Froggies about. Can’t trust the Froggies. But why are we wastin’ our time working for that Hindi bint when we could be doin’ somethin’ for ourselves?’

  ‘She’s not a Hindi bint,’ Richard reminded him. ‘She’s a Muslim queen, recognised in Delhi.’

  ‘She’s still a wee girl who doesn’t know her bum from her backside. And she gives all the orders. Richard, let’s ye and me light out o’ here.’

  ‘And go where?’

  Thomas tapped his nose. ‘I listened to a lot of people in Calcutta before I came north. What lies over to the west of us?’

  ‘Scindhia. So I have no doubt Benoit de Boigne would welcome us in his army, but we’d be exchanging a mistress for a master. I happen to get on very well with our mistress.’

  ‘Aye, but this Scindhia is a big place, I’ve heard tell. And the present Scindhia…what’s his name?’

  ‘Mahadoji.’

  ‘That’s the boyo. He has his troubles, even with de Boigne to run his army. There’s civil war in the north-east, with local chieftains declaring independence, an’ that sort of thing.’

  Richard stroked his chin. Thomas’s knowledge of Indian affairs never ceased to impress him. ‘Appa Khunde Rao.’

  ‘Aye. Now, these rebel chieftains don’t have Europeans fightin’ for them, Richard me boy. But they surely would like to.’

  ‘Another master? And a mere rebel at that?’

  Another tap of the nose. ‘Until we had the army buttoned up, old son. Then who’d be the master? It’d be our army, not a bunch of Froggies’.’

  ‘Something to think about,’ Richard conceded.

  ‘Somethin’ to do!’

  ‘Not until my boy is old enough to travel safely,’ Richard reminded him. ‘We’re talking about six months.’

  Thomas looked at Caty, who watched them with anxious eyes.