The Nizam's Daughters

by Mallinson, Allan

  The guns were now fiercely hot, despite vigorous sponging, yet still their sowars showed no fear in serving them. Indeed, the jemadar ordered double charges and canister, believing he could just reach the nearer barge. Two discharges put an end to the volleying from behind the gunwales, allowing the sowars to fire with more measure at the hull. The third shot, perhaps finding some weakened part of the clinker-built side, stove in a dozen feet of timber just on the waterline. The barge began to list at once. Those sepoys who had not been hit by canister sprang up in dismay from behind the gunwales, only to begin falling again to the sowars’ carbines. And then the barge, under the weight of the two giant cannon – now exposed as the canvas covers fell away – turned on its side like some great beast of the river, the cannon plunging free of their lashings into the Godavari, and then rolled over completely before disappearing. All attention now turned to the last barge, but Hervey wished to make it a prize: the nizam’s guns would be of incalculable value in the rajah’s service, and the sepoys would surely have intelligence of the nizam’s intentions. But before he could make his orders clear to the jemadar, the sepoys began trying to stave in the timbers, their officers having at least determined that the cannon should be denied to Chintal. Hervey ordered the galloper guns to reopen fire at once with canister, and the sowars with their carbines, to try to prevent the destruction. Guns and carbines worked terrible havoc – men fell almost continuously for a full five minutes – but still the sepoys hacked away with whatever they could find. In another five they were dead or dying to a man, sixty or more of them. But they had done their work, and the barge began to settle in the water. In five minutes it would be gone. Silence now returned to the Godavari. Hervey looked slowly from right to left, up and down the river, along its banks and its shallows. He had seen butchery of this kind before – but never so fervently and efficiently done.

  XVII

  GOOD AND EARLY INTELLIGENCE

  Later that morning

  Hervey threw up violently. The slaughter at the river had been no greater than at Waterloo or any number of affairs in the Peninsula, but he had never seen men so drunk on blood. When the sowars had killed every last one of the nizam’s gunners they had turned in their frenzy on those they had killed first, until there was scarcely a body that had not had a limb sliced away or been several times impaled. He had tried to stop it, but it was futile. Had he not, in truth, encouraged it? He had shouted ‘no quarter’ when they came on them, for he could spare no quarter until the last barge was destroyed. None of the nizam’s men had held up their hands – except to Allah – and none had called for mercy. War was fury, not sport – victory the only consideration, was it not?

  He now sat under a tree scribbling a second note for Henry Locke, out of sight of the river carnage. The rissaldar marched up as if on parade. ‘Sahib! We have counted all bodies,’ he announced. ‘More than two hundred, sahib!’

  Two hundred: what did it matter? It wasn’t as if they were British, or even French. Just a lot of heathen natives. He would have slaughtered a hundred more to bring Jessye back. How the soul grew cold, he mused, even in so hot a place as Chintal.

  ‘What is it, sahib? Is sahib unwell?’ The rissaldar bent to take his shoulder.

  This was absurd. He couldn’t see the bodies now. Throwing up because he felt nothing? ‘No, Rissaldar sahib – I am just a little winded still from the ride.’

  ‘Brandy, sahib?’

  ‘Yes, brandy would do very well, Rissaldar sahib.’

  He took the canteen – water and brandy mixed, as reviving as it was slaking.

  ‘Take it all, sahib – there is plenty more.’

  He took it all. Then he threw up a second time.

  The rajah, like the King of Spain in his chapel when the Armada sailed, would do nothing but pray. To the exasperation of those courtiers who had not fled or given way to a debilitating panic, he remained inaccessible, ministered to solely by a sadhu. Hervey, sick with killing, full of brandy but unquestionably triumphant, stormed into his apartments in fiery resolve.

  The rajah stared at him, eyes fearful.

  ‘Your Highness, the guns are now at the bottom of the Godavari. I shall ride tonight for Jhansikote and I urge you to follow as soon as you’re able. Your sepoys must see you. We do not yet have complete victory.’

  The rajah expressed every degree of relief, gratitude – obligation, even. But he was reluctant to leave his capital. Not for fear of the enemy on the plains but for fear of what might be done in Chintalpore were he now to quit it. ‘I am convinced of the need for me to remain, Captain Hervey. And of my prayers in this place.’

  Hervey sighed. How he wished for less of the pious inactivity of the Spanish king, and more the spirit of the English queen rallying her sailors. But no amount of reasoning could change the rajah’s mind. ‘With your leave, then, sir,’ he said at length before retiring.

  He left the rajah’s apartments unsteadily, taking deep breaths to force out the brandy’s ill effects. But the air was heavy and gave him no relief. More than once he turned the wrong way in the labyrinth of marble. Where in heaven’s name were Selden’s quarters? Instead he found a door opening into the courtyard, the sun strong in his eyes, an overpowering smell of horses, donkeys, mules, bullocks, elephants, sweating bearers – almost making him throw up again. And there was the raj kumari, and all about her treasures being loaded into hackeries and yakhdans.

  She showed no surprise at seeing him. She already knew of the affair at the river. As soon as firing began she had galloped one of her Kehilans straight to the sound of the guns. He seized her roughly by the arm. ‘What—’

  ‘My father sends me away; that is all you need know.’ She struggled free.

  ‘The danger to the palace is gone, but beyond the walls—’

  ‘I have no care. I take what is mine and leave.’

  ‘For where?’

  ‘You need not know!’

  He seized her arm again, then the other, pulling her round to face him. The jasmine scent of loose hair drew him closer. He searched the sullen eyes for their secrets, but they yielded none. They never had. The same mastering urge as at the slaughter swelled again, a lust he would later revile just as much. He let go, turned about and walked away without looking back. Had he done so he would have seen her look of defiance turn to one of despair.

  He saw the squatting shape as he turned the corner to his quarters. It was too early for a chowkidar to have taken post, and his senses returned with the recognition of danger. The figure rose in one easy movement and made namaste. The long black hair, falling loosely about the shoulders, the gaudy saree, the earrings, the bangles, the fat necklace hiding the Adam’s apple – the creature’s profession was unmistakable.

  The hijda looked him up and down insolently. Hervey was close to scourging him. ‘May I speak with you, Captain Hervey?’ The English was heavily accented but confident, the voice that of neither a woman nor a man – and without the deferential ‘sahib’.

  ‘Of course you may speak,’ replied Hervey warily; ‘about what?’

  The hijda looked at him as if to say he would not tell while they stood outside.

  ‘Come, man!’ snapped Hervey, only then realizing the incongruity of calling him thus.

  ‘Mr Selden,’ replied the hijda.

  Instinct made him look about, but there was no-one to overhear. ‘Come,’ he said, opening the big teak doors.

  Inside, the hijda glanced here and there in a sort of sneering approval, before pouting in the way the troupe had done that first night at the rajah’s banquet.

  ‘Well, come to it!’ demanded Hervey testily.

  ‘Mr Selden is most sick of the fever which comes and then goes again.’ The English was delivered in a modulating half-strangled alto.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At our hijron. He is better cared for there than he would be here,’ he sang defiantly.

  ‘Why do you come here then?’

  ‘Because S
elden-sahib wants very much to speak with you. He is too ill to come himself. I will take you to him.’

  ‘Very well – but not now. Be at the palace gates at three,’ he snapped, intending to keep him at a full arm’s length.

  The hijda made namaste as if playing to a fuller stage, took a peach from a bowl and bit into it suggestively. Hervey cursed him roundly, making him cackle like a bazaar harlot as he fled the room.

  When the hijda was gone, Hervey lay with his arms outstretched on the great bed. A pair of collared doves outside his window were enjoying a vocal courtship. Before the female had finished answering the male, he was asleep.

  He was awakened soon after midday by a bearer who shook him with all the resolve he would a sleeping leopard. ‘What in heaven’s name—’ He felt blindly for the sword that was not there.

  The bearer was saying something but the Telugu made no sense.

  ‘He says that I would have words with you, Captain Hervey,’ came a voice from near the door.

  Hervey got to his feet, as full awake now as he had been before he closed his eyes. ‘Miss Lucie!’ he exclaimed, blinking. ‘I had thought you were gone to Guntoor.’

  ‘No, indeed: it seemed to me the very best time to be in Chintalpore!’

  Outside, the usual silence of the afternoon was broken only by a peacock calling from the menagerie, for all the world as if Chintal was a place of profound peace.

  ‘How may I help, madam?’ he tried.

  Emma Lucie came to the middle of the room as the bearer left. ‘Soon after you were gone last night a hircarrah arrived from Calcutta with this letter.’ She held out a wax-paper package. ‘His orders were that he should deliver it only into English hands.’

  ‘And yours were the only ones to be found?’ asked Hervey, taking it.

  ‘As you see,’ she smiled.

  ‘You will excuse me?’ He broke the seal and took out the letter.

  She showed no inclination to leave. He read the copperplate with dismay, until his anxiety became evident to her.

  ‘It is ill news, I take it?’

  He nodded. ‘It is very late news, madam. A letter from the agent of the Company – my facilitation – who died before I was able to meet with him.’

  She smiled. It was the sort of knowing smile that only increased his discomfort. ‘And it reminds you of the need to do things which are quite contrary to those you do now?’

  ‘Just so, madam.’

  She smiled again. ‘I can scarcely give an indifferent opinion since my own brother’s view I would know perfectly well. The treaty between the Company and the rajah is of the first importance. But you may know something that they do not, and if your Duke of Wellington troubled to send you here it must be with good reason.’

  He could not but concede both points. And he would have wished to share more with her, but that would have been indulgent. ‘What shall you do now?’ he essayed airily. ‘I myself have an assignation with Mr Selden somewhere in the city. It seems he has something of moment he must tell me.’

  ‘And I fancy that, in general terms, I may know of what he will speak,’ she replied, and none too cheerily.

  ‘Oh?’ he said. Was there no end to her discernment?

  ‘Mr Selden asked me to assist him in examining what pass for the accounts in the rajah’s treasury. They are ill-kept but conceal nothing – now that they are at hand, for certain of them came to light only when the babus fled three days ago.’

  Hervey made as if to speak, but she held up a hand.

  ‘Two and a half lakhs, approximating to the batta which had not been paid to the sepoys, was sequestered. It is evident that Kunal Verma did this, but other entries referred – I’m very much afraid – to payments to the “gora log”. There are no white people in Chintal other than the European officers, are there?’

  Hervey could scarce make himself believe it.

  ‘You had better believe it, I think, Captain Hervey, for there is the very canker which has need of a knife!’

  He knew it well enough, but it was for the rajah to dispose of the corruption, he said. ‘And he is as like to go into a faint as soon as he hears of it!’

  ‘Then perhaps you might leave that to me?’ she said resolutely. ‘Yours, I think, is a more pressing duty down the Godavari.’

  That much he was more than happy to leave to her. How favoured he felt himself, for he doubted that wiser or more resolute counsel would have come from her own brother, or even the collector. ‘Is there any other account on which Selden must see me? Does he have more especial intelligence?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I should be surprised if he did not, for I believe the company he keeps is – how shall we say? – fertile.’

  Hervey looked astonished. How had she learned so much?

  ‘Merely by observation. And, I might add, an ear for the native languages – which all who wish to make their fortune here would do well to acquire. But one thing I must tell you, Captain Hervey, for earlier I sowed seeds of doubt in your mind about Mr Selden – so that even now you may think him not without a hand in this. To me, however, it is quite inconceivable that Mr Selden had any part in the business, or even that he knew of its occurrence.’

  He was more glad to hear this than anything: ‘I had begun to doubt whether anyone might be trusted in this country.’

  The hijron lay in one of the quieter parts of Chintalpore. Hervey had expected – inasmuch as he had given it any thought – quite the opposite, that the hijron would be in a place of some bustle and squalor. But instead it was a pleasant-looking haveli, a sizeable single-storey building with well-pointed brickwork, a good tiled roof, a courtyard swept clean and full of sweet-scented mimosa in pots, and an air of calm not unlike that he had known in some of the religious houses of Spain. His hijda guide beckoned him inside one of the open, slatted double doors, where the scent of mimosa turned to one of incense. He was conscious of other figures scuttling away, like mice. It should have set him on his guard, but here, unaccountably, he felt no fear of ambush. The hijda led him along a dark passageway, to an inner room where light streamed through tall windows at which muslin curtains hung perfectly still in the sticky, airless heat of the afternoon. There, in a large bed, its sheets perfectly white, lay Selden, his face as ochreous as that day in Toulouse when it looked as though the fever would finally carry him off. He was, however, without the delirium into which the fever periodically cast him, and he greeted Hervey with an attempt to raise himself on an arm. It ended, nevertheless, in a bout of coughing that was only relieved by lime-water and the hijda’s gentle ministrations.

  Hervey sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Selden, this is a wretched business. Is there a physician who treats you?’

  He coughed again. ‘No, and there is no need, for there is nothing to be done but to sweat out these attacks. It will pass: I feel it.’

  But Hervey could at least alleviate his discomfort now by telling him that the nizam’s guns were no more a threat.

  Selden, though he had heard the nizam’s forces had received a check, was so amazed that he began another bout of frenzied coughing, which only brandy from Hervey’s pocket flask was able to put a stop to. ‘I should never have thought it possible, Matthew Hervey – not even with your address. In truth I feared I should never again see you alive!’

  Hervey smiled. ‘There is still business to attend to down the Godavari!’

  ‘Just so, Hervey, just so. And there’s more danger there than you might suppose. Three lakhs and more have been drawn off from the pay that was due to the rajah’s sepoys, and it seems that some may have gone to the pockets of his white officers. And one of them remains – the German.’ He began coughing so violently that Hervey thought he would expire, but more brandy eventually stayed the paroxysm. ‘But it is worse. The nizam learned of this through one of his spies – Kunal Verma no less, the same that was found in the well. And, so my own spies inform me, he will use it to coerce that officer into taking absence of leave while the Pinda
rees are active – or even to throw in with them in the field.’

  Hervey was more sickened by this news than before. That an officer should steal from his men was beyond his comprehension, but that he should then abandon them, and the rajah, to whom he must have taken some sort of oath, beggared belief. A more ignoble deed he had not heard of in all his time in the Duke of Wellington’s army – an army which had had more than its share of rogues and felons.

  ‘Don’t be fooled, Hervey: jewels here – and there are many – will buy most men in the end.’

  A month ago, perhaps two, Hervey would have railed against the betrayal, cursed the dissipation. But instead, wearied with both the heat and the intrigues of the past fortnight, he simply sighed. Yet, perhaps strangely, his resolve was not diminished. Rather was it strengthened – as had been the resolve of many at Waterloo when they saw others break and quit the field. ‘Well, so be it!’ he pronounced. ‘We shall see how the rissalahs fare under their native officers!’

  ‘I’m afraid there is more – worse, indeed,’ said Selden, shaking his head.

  Hervey could not have imagined it.

  ‘The nizam now has guns on the lower Godavari.’

  Hervey did not know what to address first – this new intelligence or Selden’s knowing it. In the end he was pragmatic. ‘But how did they get there?’ he demanded. ‘Not a single one escaped our ambuscade.’

  ‘It seems they have been taking guns downriver – disassembled – these past several months. The rajah’s concession to dastak enables any Haidarabad vessel to navigate the river unmolested.’

  ‘And how have you learned of all this – and now, at this time?’

  ‘My dear Hervey, I remember once your quoting to me what the Duke of Marlborough was wont to say – that no war is won without good and early intelligence. And I have told you that in India war is made with spies and bullock carts. The people who nurse me now, the hijdas as we know them, have been my trusty spies these last dozen months. And an exceptional source of intelligence are they.’