His sensibility did him credit. She smiled at him for the first time in many days and nodded her assent. There was moisture in her eyes, though she was trying hard to hide it.
For three days the raj kumari tended her little mare herself, allowing the syce only to clean the stable of the few droppings the horse managed. She used sponges to cool her, she wiped the discharge from her nostrils with cotton waste, she applied poultices to the swellings, she coaxed her to eat – handful by handful of bran and crushed barley, sweetened with syrup. And she slept for the most part in the stable, with her chowkidar as sentinel and only a zenana to attend her. When all was done each day, she would cross the maidan and tend the others. Half the horses were now showing symptoms of the plague, and since her arrival a dozen more had breathed their last. Hervey visited her mare as many as a dozen times each day, but the fever was not abating. Nor were the swellings coming to any head.
‘It is as the sadhu said: the poison in her is too great,’ said the raj kumari on the fourth morning.
Hervey had not supposed her capable of the devotion she had shown these past days. Even the sowars remarked on it: a princess who would do the work of a sweeper, who would sleep in a stable. More than once he had felt a powerful urge to encourage her by an embrace, but after the forest there could be no question of it. And as to any notion of her implication in the affair of the batta, he could no more contemplate it now than he could of Alter Fritz, for her honest affection for these men was plain to see.
But this morning it looked as if the sadhu’s prophecy had been right, for as they stood trying to coax Gita to a barley sweet she suddenly fell to the ground, struggling violently to draw breath. The raj kumari began to sob quietly. Hervey was only grateful the mare’s ordeal – and hers – was coming to an end. But there was one last effort, he knew. If, that is, the raj kumari could bear it. He had never before done it; nor even had he seen it done. Long ago, Daniel Coates had shown him the point at which he must make such an incision, and he had never forgotten – as he had never forgotten a single thing that Daniel Coates had told him, for such were that veteran’s years of experience.
He took out the farrier’s razor and began to feel along the mare’s throat for the point to cut.
‘What do you do?’ exclaimed the raj kumari, seizing his hand. ‘You would not slaughter her in the fashion of the nizam’s people?’
‘I am going to open her windpipe,’ he said, indicating its line, ‘so that she can breathe in air from beyond the obstruction at the back of her mouth.’ The raj kumari did not grasp the principle and seized his hand again, but Hervey persisted gently. ‘The horse breathes through its mouth, not with it,’ he explained. He pointed to the heave line: ‘See, the muscles are trying to draw in air, but can’t because of the obstruent in the mouth. If I make a hole in the windpipe, air can be drawn in directly. It will relieve her for the moment.’
‘But she will bleed to death!’ protested the raj kumari.
Hervey was only too aware she might be right. ‘She need not,’ was all he would allow himself.
‘Make the hole then,’ said the raj kumari resolutely.
He took a deep breath and tried to locate – to avoid – the jugular groove. At last he felt sufficiently confident, and in went the point of the razor about half an inch. There was no blood – a trickle only. That was encouraging, not to say a relief. He used the blade’s edge to elongate the incision, and there was a loud sucking noise, at first alarming but then reassuring as he realized it was the sound of success – of air being drawn down towards the lungs. He held wide the hole with his fingers and told the orderly-dafadar to bring him some cartridges.
‘How many, sahib?’ he asked in Urdu.
‘Just a handful.’
The dafadar looked puzzled, but he doubled away nevertheless, soon returning with a half-dozen carbine cartridges.
The raj kumari asked him what was their purpose, and Hervey explained that he needed something to keep the incision open, for Gita would have to breathe this way for several days. He told the dafadar to remove the bullet from the paper cartridge, and to shake out the powder and open the closed end. Then he pushed the makeshift breathing tube gently but firmly into the windpipe and turned to the raj kumari with a smile of satisfaction. ‘It will do until I can find something more apt – a reed, or bamboo perhaps.’
She could say nothing, tears running freely.
Once the mare was comfortable he left the raj kumari with her and went to find Alter Fritz. The old German looked exhausted as he laboured with a dozen sowars to free a big gelding cast in its stall. ‘Rittmeister Bauer,’ said Hervey, with considerable resignation in his voice, ‘I believe we are losing the battle. We have to take drastic measures. I want you to set up lines the other side of the river, the horses with at least ten lengths between them, and I want you to put a torch to these stables.’
Hervey expected him to protest, as would any quartermaster, but the old German simply looked at him and nodded.
It took all day to move camp. The sowars had the running-ropes up quickly on the other side of the river (they were, after all, well practised in bivouacking), but it took time to ferry the animals across. Three horses that could not rise were put down where they lay, and for a while Hervey thought they would have to do the same with Gita, but towards evening she was coaxed to her feet, and she even managed a small feed before being led, unsteadily, to the ferry. Once night was come, and the worst of the heat gone, so that the thatch on the rest of the cantonment buildings was not so tinder-like, Alter Fritz and the officers of the infantry posted a line of fire pickets, and the torch was put to the rissalah stables. By dawn, all that was left was blackened walls. Everywhere smoke drifted upwards.
Hervey was standing contemplating his destruction – the razing of some of the best stables he had ever seen – when a voice broke the silence. ‘He maketh wars to cease in all the world: he breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, and burneth the chariots in the fire.’
He looked round. ‘Selden! I am very glad indeed to see you!’
‘I thought the burial service apt,’ he smiled. ‘It’s the only scripture I’ve heard these past five years.’
Hervey had no wish to contemplate the Prayer Book at this moment. ‘You are restored, then?’
‘Ay: quinquina spooned to me by a faithful Bengali – which is more than I could have expected in England. Now, tell me: what exactly have you been doing – other than making work for Chintal’s builders?’
Hervey recounted the tribulations of the past week, Selden nodding his approval at both diagnosis and treatment. And of the burning of the horse lines he seemed positively admiring. ‘No doubt you superintended the conflagration like King Charles at the Great Fire – astride your charger?’
‘The fire did burn out the plague from the City, as I recall,’ replied Hervey in mitigation.
‘Of course, of course!’ said Selden, smiling even wider. ‘A refiner’s fire!’
He was able to laugh for the first time in days. He had had doubts about every action he had ordered. The only thing of which he was certain was the need to take action. Selden’s presence was, indeed, a great comfort. As they walked about the new lines, the sowars greeted the salutri’s arrival as a sign that their trial was at an end.
And so it proved. In the next twenty-four hours only six horses developed the strangles’ symptoms, and on the fourth day there were no new cases at all. Gita’s abscesses were lanced the day after she crossed the river, having come rapidly to a head with poulticing, and her breathing returned to normal soon afterwards, allowing Selden to remove the bamboo tube and sew up the incision. There was a great roast of pig to celebrate the passing of the contagion, the sowars dancing and carousing until dark, and the sadhu filling anew his bowl with silver. When Hervey retired that night, he felt more content than he had been in many months, for he had been – as it were – on campaign with his troopers, and they had triumphed. This, he knew, wa
s his proper calling; not the affairs of the staff, with their errands, diplomacy and deception. He was sure he must return to it as soon as he decently might.
XVI
WEAKLY TO A WOMAN
Chintalpore, 3 April
Pleasure, though intense in India, seemed fated to be brief. Hervey was in his quarters with pen and paper once more, about to write to the collector to hasten both the subsidiary force and, in his view just as important, the officer who was to win the rajah’s approval and thence take command. Since returning from Jhansikote three days ago, he had heard of so many causes for alarm that he was now certain that Chintal faced the most pressing danger. He had written on the first evening to Guntoor to urge the collector to send, in advance of the subsidiary force, any troops he could spare, for a mood of deep foreboding seemed to have settled on Chintalpore – on merchants, beggars and courtiers alike. Rumours abounded and there had been signs in the heavens. Shiva himself had been incarnated several times, had murdered good and bad alike and ravished many virgins. There was, as yet, no riot, no general hysteric passion, but Hervey did not imagine such seething would end in ought else. His chief alarm, however, lay in what was reported to him by Locke (who was increasingly privy to the gossip of the bazaars), that there was a widespread supposition that Chintal was soon to be attacked by a confederacy of Haidarabad and Calcutta, and that the European officers were the harbingers of this aggression. It troubled him principally because, until the Company officer arrived to take command, he considered himself obliged to the rajah; yet any order he gave would be questioned, especially if its purpose were equivocal – in which case attempts at deception would carry grave dangers.
It did not help that the demeanour of the rajah himself was daily more unfathomable. He neglected the usual formalities of the court, would receive no-one without their absolute insistence, and remained for the most part in his quarters, forsaking his menagerie even. All this Hervey had laid before the collector in the first letter, and he repeated it now – together with further intelligence of the nizam’s malevolent intent (so alarming, indeed, was the intelligence that on receiving it this very morning the rajah’s first minister had fled the city). Officials in the west of Chintal had reported movement of Haidarabad’s sepoys all along the border, and – worse – cannon. Even more alarming, and more perplexing, were similar reports from the other side of the country, where the nizam’s territories reached over the Eastern Ghats and abutted Chintal on the plains of the lower Godavari. Hervey could divine no purpose in these movements, except the crudest attempts to overawe, and he asked for the collector’s assessment. Next he gave his estimate of the fighting power of the rajah’s army in the light of the recent depredations. It was not encouraging. At his instigation, since the mutiny, the rajah had removed those officers who he considered had shown insufficient discernment when trouble was fomenting, or who had shown particular vindictiveness when rebellion actually came. Locke had urged Hervey to dismiss all of them – indeed, to blow them from the mouths of the galloper guns in front of the rest. But Hervey had resisted: he could not, in one sweep, remove all the facility for order and fighting. Instead, he had urged the rajah to keep a core of the most junior officers (no-one above the rank of jemadar, except the Rajpoot and Maratha subedars) and to make each of them swear, at the oxbow durbar, by all that was sacred to their faiths, their unquestioning loyalty to him personally. He had had the rajah promote several of the Rajpoots – paragons, he was now convinced, of the martial spirit. But in all, he wrote, the rajah could muster only one battalion of fewer than a thousand sepoys. The reduction of his cavalry was, however, Hervey’s gravest concern. Alter Fritz could mount, serviceably, fewer than a hundred sowars, for the horses that had survived the strangles were in so poor a condition that it would be at least a month (perhaps more in this oppressive heat) before they were fit for service. He had sent to Nagpore for remounts, but anything that the collector could arrange, begged Hervey, would be of inestimable value, for there were no means to patrol the border with Haidarabad while at the same time keeping any sort of handy reserve in Chintalpore and Jhansikote for interior security. He implored the collector to send him a full troop of Madrasi cavalry at once.
All this he read over a second and then a third time before attaching his signature and seal, hoping he had managed to convey the necessity for prompt action, yet without its appearing too importunate a plea, as if he were anxious at any price to leave the city. Yet leave was all he wished, profoundly, to do. Every day he delayed – every hour – lessened his chances of being received by the nizam, and therefore the success of his mission. The first part of that mission – the jagir deeds – was in any case still unfulfilled, for Selden had found nothing but confusion in the chancery since the death of Kunal Verma. Hervey knew he stood in default of reporting to Colonel Grant, for it had been many weeks since he had sent any despatch to Paris. But so damning a testimony to his own shortcomings would such a despatch be that he had put down his pen, dry, on every occasion he had attempted the task. This letter for Guntoor, however, ought to bring him the means of at least presenting himself to the nizam, and therefore of having something of substance he might relate to Paris. He would thus entrust it to Cornet Templer, who had arrived only the day before to assist with arrangements for the subsidiary force. He could ill spare him, but who else might he send? Without Johnson, who would have done it admirably, he was at a loss over so many things, and Locke’s standing with the sepoys might be invaluable: indeed, without him he was not sure they could be relied on.
Private Johnson was unconvinced by Hervey’s eloquence when he heard the contents of the despatch. As they watched the farrier hammering in the last nail of a new set of shoes, Jessye standing as patiently as if they were at the forge in Horningsham, he gave his candid opinion. ‘Tha’s not said owt about them Pindarees, and no matter ’ow quickly them Company troops comes they won’t ’ave big enough guns to take on them that you said t’nizam ’ad.’
Johnson’s dalliance with a daughter of the palace these past weeks had done nothing for his elocution or refinement, thought Hervey, but, as so often, he had addressed the material issue. ‘In truth,’ he replied, frowning, ‘I’d been calculating that the Pindarees would not trouble the rajah this year – not this side of the festival of Dasahara, at least. And I saw no reason for the nizam to bring his so-called daughters into the field. For since he knows that Chintal has no artillery he would manage perfectly well with smaller pieces – which we ought to be able to deal with by other means.’
Johnson snorted. ‘Tha always used to say that ’ope wasn’t a principle of war!’
And Hervey was inclined to concede the point, except that there was an entirely reasonable element of calculation: it was not strictly hopefulness that made him optimistic – if indeed that word could be used to describe his condition. Before he could get too far into a justification of his optimism, however, they were interrupted by a jemadar with an urgent summons to the rajah’s quarters. ‘What occasions this?’ asked Hervey cautiously, knowing how reclusive the rajah had become in recent days.
‘There has been fighting on the upper reaches of the Godavari, sahib,’ replied the jemadar, measuring his Urdu so that Hervey was able to grasp it first time.
‘And a sahib has been found murdered on the road outside Chintalpore.’
‘A sahib? Which sahib? Who?’ demanded Hervey anxiously, though hardly wishing to hear the name.
‘His face is not known, Captain sahib.’
That much at least was a relief. ‘I’ll come at once. Has Locke-sahib been summoned also?’
The jemadar did not think so.
‘Then please send for him too.’
Fighting proved perhaps too strong a word to describe the incident on the Godavari, and Hervey thought he might have misunderstood the Urdu. The rajah’s dastak officials had been roughly handled by the nizam’s men, and though that hardly bode well it did not constitute an attack. But the officials
also reported seeing guns with uncommonly long barrels.
‘Captain Hervey, an official of the Company was found dead this morning on the road from Guntoor.’ The rajah seemed perfectly composed as he handed a letter to him, unlike several minor officials also gathered in the audience chamber. ‘He seems to have been travelling alone, and set upon by thieves, for his pockets were empty and his horse gone. But sewn into the lining of his coat was this letter, addressed to you.’
The seal was unbroken. Hervey was astonished – and then thought meanly of himself for supposing it would be otherwise. He read the letter with mounting despair.
‘Does it reveal who was this man, Captain Hervey?’ said the rajah, still perfectly composed.
‘It does, sir – though a man I never met. He was Colonel Forster, whom the Company – and, indeed, I myself – hoped would take command of the subsidiary force once he had gained your confidence.’ As he spoke the words he could feel the fetters closing fast on him, and his stomach heaved at his abject failure to discharge the duke’s mission. ‘The letter also bears disturbing intelligence, sir,’ he continued, his voice once or twice betraying his turmoil. ‘Word has come from Nagpore that several thousand Pindarees have been swarming along the Nerbudda river, and that the Nagpore subsidiary force is not yet embodied – and that Appa Sahib, the regent, earnestly requests you to lend him all support at once.’
The rajah still seemed remarkably composed at the news. Yet, to Hervey, the situation could hardly have been graver – and he said so. Chintal faced threats on both flanks simultaneously, there was insufficient intelligence of what the nizam’s forces were about, especially in the east, and in the west they appeared to be staring in the face of the most powerful guns in India.
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