Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Kelly stifled a giggle, which nonetheless popped through his cupped hand as a snort and a cough. He kept his hand clamped over his mouth to disguise his devilish grin.

  ‘If I ever see you on my property again, Kelly, you have my word that you’ll be thrown into the tiger pit,’ Cavanaugh hissed through gritted teeth. ‘That, Kelly, is no idle threat; indeed, it is a promise I fully intend to keep. I want you and your vagabond rider off of my estate before sundown, or I’ll shoot you both. Your debt to me … is now … settled. Bah! BAH!’

  Kelly snorted and coughed into his hand again, unable to completely suppress the violent giggles that longed with such desperation to escape his throat. Through his shaking and trembling he managed to nod and cough a simple ‘yes’ in reply to this.

  The servant returned with two glasses of brandy, and after Cavanaugh snatched his from the frightened man he promptly got up and stormed off in a huff of fiery wrath. Kelly took his glass, shamelessly beaming out an ear-to-ear smile, and leaned back in his chair to savour the taste of the expensive liquor as he sipped liberally on it.

  ‘Where did you manage to find that fellow?’ Bingham asked as he retrieved Cavanaugh’s field glasses from the floor and peered out over the field at the victorious jockey.

  ‘Oh, I picked him up at the docks around two years ago when one of my shipments from Hong Kong was coming in. He was arguing with an Arab ship captain, who had just brought him and his horse in from Sevastopol – that same stallion he’s riding now. The fool was penniless and had lied to the Arab, saying that he had connections here in India who would pay handsomely for his passage upon arrival.’

  ‘And you paid the Arab?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ Kelly answered, grinning into his tumbler as he sipped on his brandy, ‘like any businessman with a knack for the game, I spotted an opportunity.’

  Bingham nodded, scratching his chin with a contemplative forefinger.

  ‘Your gamble paid off, Kelly.’

  ‘Handsomely. Very handsomely.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone ride like that fellow did today,’ Bingham mused, staring out at the shabbily attired rider. ‘He is absolutely superb on horseback.’

  ‘Dang right. He’s paid back what I spent on him many times over.’

  ‘Pray tell though, why does he stick with a fellow like yourself? I understand that he is totally loyal to you – yet, and I mean no offence by this – you are not the type of man who inspires loyalty in others.’

  Kelly laughed uproariously at this.

  ‘Why yes, your powers of observation never fail you, do they Bingham? I am a scoundrel of the lowest sort! Ha! And I do so delight in my fiendish ways, I say, and my … perversions … However, let me tell you, sir, that I learned many a thing about loyalty on my father’s plantation when I was growing up. See, we had slaves, lots of ‘em. Niggers, most brought over fresh from West Africa, along with some second and even third generation ones too. Now, other plantation owners in our area would keep their niggers in line with all sorts of brutality and violence; really distasteful, if you ask me. I’m not a man of violence, y’see, and neither was my father. No, he was not, not at all. So he found a better way than the whip to keep them slaves under his thumb.’

  ‘And what, pray tell, was that?’ Bingham asked, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘This,’ Kelly answered, tapping on the side of his head with a finger as he smiled smugly. ‘You keep this chained up, the mind, see, and you’ll never again have to put a steel shackle on their black hides, nor take a whip to ‘em neither. No you won’t sir, no you will not.’

  Bingham took a swig of his brandy and nodded slowly.

  ‘I understand the theory, but how do you apply the method?’

  ‘You find out what it takes for a man to build his own cage,’ Kelly said, raising a haughty forefinger, which he wagged at Bingham. ‘That’s how you do it. You get him to love those steel bars that you’ve so cunningly set up in his mind, so much so that he’ll never leave, even if you give him the key. See, he doesn’t know them steel bars are even there. You don’t even have to lock him up at night. No sir, he’ll do that all by himself, he will! And he’ll be in your pocket forever.’

  ‘So, this scruffy fellow out there on the horse … you figured out how to get him to construct his own cage, so to speak, then?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Kelly answered gleefully. ‘From the very instant I first met the wretched fool, I saw that it would be very easy to ensnare him and keep him trapped. That’s why I was willing to take a gamble on him in the first place, see? A man who is in desperate need, who is possessed of a dire and aching longing, well, such a man makes for very malleable putty in the right hands. Oh yes, you certainly can believe me about that, Bingham, I say, I do say!’

  Bingham sipped slowly on his brandy and swished it around his mouth for a while before continuing.

  ‘And what was that, specifically? Opium?’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t smoking it when I first met. No, haha, I introduced him to that,’ Kelly stated with a proud chortle. ‘It was a very effective way of tempering his pain, while of course making him beholden to me, the one who supplies him with his little painkiller, to which he is now hopelessly addicted. But I work at the source of the pain as well, y’see. I keep it there, I keep the wound fresh and raw so that he needs that painkiller. Words, Bingham, never underestimate their power. Words, I say!’

  ‘Oh, I understand their power, Kelly, I do. But, pray tell, what words are the shackles that bind the limbs of this wretch?’

  Kelly smiled coldly.

  ‘There are so many, dear Bingham! He’s full of grief and guilt, and blames himself for the deaths of his dearest friends. He’s guilty about deserting the army, too. But there’s also another malady that afflicts him with the greatest severity: love.’

  Bingham laughed cruelly at this.

  ‘Well then, I see your point, Kelly, I see your point.’

  ‘Yes, the fool is hopelessly in love with some aristocrat’s daughter back in your part of the world, and of course as he owes me a lot of money and has none himself, he relies on me to maintain the flow of correspondence between himself and his sweetheart. Oh, and that, that I’ve gotten down to a fine art!’

  ‘How so?’

  Kelly flicked a few curly locks out of his eyes before continuing.

  ‘Oh Bingham, if only you knew what wild tales I’m capable of spinning, if only you knew! I say sir, I do say! Why, it’s an ability I’ve had – or should I say, a power I have possessed, because it most certainly is a power – since I was a boy. As a child I had a neighbouring farmer’s slave flogged senseless, his punishment based entirely on a story I fabricated out of thin air about the unfortunate wretch. That’s when I discovered just how powerful a well-placed lie can make you.’

  Bingham shook his head and smiled wryly.

  ‘You’re quite something, Kelly, quite something indeed.’

  Kelly giggled and slugged on his brandy before continuing.

  ‘Bingham, you don’t know the half of it! No sir, not even the half of it! Anyway, this horseman of mine is absolutely reliant on me, not only for his supply of opium, but also for the stories I concoct and the letters I write to his lover in England.’

  ‘And what sort of stories might those be?’

  ‘As I said, I’m a masterful weaver of tales, sir! Masterful, utterly masterful! When I visited London a few years ago and discovered the “penny dreadful” novel sensation of which the lower classes are so fond, I immediately thought to myself, “why Niall, you could churn these lil’ works of fiction out by the boatload, and make yourself a fortune!”. I almost did get into the industry, but, well … other factors prevented me from staying in London. Anyway, this fool of mine is desperate to conceal the fact that he’s a deserter from the army from his lover, so I’ve concocted an elaborate tale about him being part of an elite British cavalry unit who perform secret missions in the darkest d
epths of India for your old Queen Victoria. It’s quite masterful, I say, I do say! The stupid cow he’s in love with still hasn’t caught on that it’s all a fabrication! Ha!’

  Bingham nodded appreciatively, set his tumbler down and clasped his hands together.

  ‘An effective method, I’ll give you that,’ he said. ‘By Jove, I’d love to know where he learned to ride like that though.’

  ‘British cavalry,’ Kelly answered nonchalantly.

  ‘Oh really?’ Bingham said, rather surprised. ‘So he was actually part of the British cavalry? Most deserters are infantrymen, I’ve always found.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Kelly said with a shrug and a quick swig of brandy, ‘but this one really was a cavalryman. Still has his uniform and everything. Believe it or not, this wretch charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava two years ago.’

  Bingham’s eyes were now locked on the horse and rider in the distance, and subtle furrows appeared on his brow as he studied them.

  ‘Well now, isn’t that interesting,’ he murmured, half to himself.

  ‘He was with the 17th Lancers before he deserted and fled here to India, and he told me he spent most of his life around horses. He said he grew up a stable hand in the Scottish Highlands.’

  Bingham picked up the field glasses so that he could scrutinise the mounted man more intently.

  ‘He’s not much to look at, I must say,’ he remarked, ‘but by Jove he can ride. Rather impressive skills with the sword and lance as well.’

  ‘I make sure that when he isn’t chasing the dragon, he spends adequate time practising and honing his skills. I prefer not to gamble unless I can be assured of the outcome, y’see.’

  ‘How much do you want for him?’ Bingham asked abruptly.

  Kelly’s smile quickly morphed into a combative look of flat defiance.

  ‘He’s not for sale,’ he growled, his fingers tightening their grip on the tumbler of brandy.

  ‘Oh, I think with the price my employers would be willing to offer for him you will quickly change your mind on that.’

  ‘Your “employers”, Bingham? I thought you owned your own tea exporting company?’

  Now it was Bingham’s turn to smile slyly.

  ‘That is merely a front, Kelly. My actual employment is of far greater consequence – and profit – than mere tea trading. I work for a very, very powerful and spectacularly wealthy company called the Huntsmen. We are active all over the world.’

  Kelly’s eyes lit up at the mention of the words ‘spectacularly wealthy’. Suddenly it seemed that he was not so stubborn on the point of keeping his mysterious horseman to himself.

  ‘Tell me, Bingham,’ he murmured, leaning forward, ‘just what sort of an offer would your employers be prepared to make to enlist the services of my most exquisite equine master?’

  Bingham leaned over and whispered a sum into Kelly’s ear … and the fop’s hands immediately began to tremble. He swallowed a gulp of brandy, and then raised a balled fist to his mouth and bit intensely on the knuckle of his forefinger. Eventually he looked up at Bingham and nodded.

  ‘Done,’ he said quietly. ‘The sum will be paid in cash?’

  ‘It will be, yes.’

  ‘Done I say. Done!’

  Kelly let out a fit of mad giggles, and he stood up, cupped his hands together and shouted out across the field.

  ‘William! William Gisborne, my dear friend! Come over here! There’s someone you just have to meet!’

  66

  WILLIAM

  November 1856. Darjeeling Himalayas, India

  ‘Good God, what was that sound?!’ Kelly cried shrilly, sitting bolt upright in his bedroll and fumbling for his revolver.

  ‘Put it away Kelly, you don’t even know how to use that thing,’ Bingham grumbled.

  The older man rolled over in his bedroll and yawned, and then pulled the blanket back over his head to shut out the night chill that trickled down through this hilly forest from the distant mountains. Kelly’s eyes, however, remained wide and white in the darkness, and his hands trembled with fright.

  ‘Didn’t anybody else hear that sound?!’ he whimpered, his gaze darting frantically from shadow to shadow as he clutched his revolver tightly with both trembling hands. ‘Why aren’t any of you alarmed?!’

  ‘It’s a tiger,’ rumbled Ajit Sanyal, a burly middle-aged Bengali with a great bushy beard and a prominent, eagle-hooked nose. Against the backdrop of the night forest, the deep brown skin of his face melted almost entirely into the shadows, leaving only the whites of his eyes visible, stark against the dark, while his black greatcoat camouflaged his body completely. He yawned, nonchalantly flicked a twig into the undergrowth, and shifted his huge elephant gun idly in his hands. ‘It’s not the tiger we’re after though,’ he added as an afterthought before turning around and staring calmly into the shadows again.

  ‘Roll over and get some dang shuteye, Kelly,’ Jeffrey Milton, a fellow Confederate, sneered in a throaty voice. ‘You’re such a goddamned Mary-Anne I’m downright ashamed t’ call you my countryman! Ain’t no goddamned tigers gon’ come near this camp. They don’ like fire, an’ they don’ like us with our guns. I done shot enough a’ the bastards t’ know that much about ‘em.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Ajit said, stroking the stock of the rifle. ‘I’ve lived my whole life in this region. Tigers – those who become man-eaters anyway – only take people who are alone in the dark, and even then the man-eaters are usually old, desperate beasts who are too weak to hunt their normal prey. Look, we’ve got a big campfire here, we’ve got guards on watch, and we’ve got plenty of rifles too. I’ve shot many a tiger, often while being charged by them. It’s nothing to me. Trust me Mr Kelly, if a tiger comes within a mile of our camp, I’ll know. And I’ll kill it.’

  ‘Not if I get it first,’ growled Milton, who was polishing, almost to an obsessive degree, the stock of his Winchester repeating rifle. ‘Last year I bagged fifty-seven lions in Southern Africa. Got sixteen leopards too, but them bastards are way more elusive. This year, I’m after tigers, and lots of ‘em! Bring the sum’bitches out, I’ll bag ‘em I will, yessirree!’

  ‘Gentlemen please!’ Bingham protested from his bedroll. ‘Some of us are trying to get some sleep! Keep the banter to a minimum outside of daylight hours, will you? For God’s sake, we’ve got many miles to cover still, over steep hills and through forest that’s nigh on impenetrable. I don’t know about you lot, but I certainly need my rest for such endeavours.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Milton muttered. ‘Tell that curly-haired dandy over there to keep his damned trap shut, then I’ll do the same.’

  ‘I should never have come here,’ Kelly whimpered to himself as he pulled his blankets up around his acne-reddened cheeks. He then began to gnaw anxiously on his knuckles. ‘I should’ve stayed in Calcutta, and let them take William by himself. Oh God, the noises, the insects, the pitch-black darkness of the forest … it’s all too much! It’s too much for me, I say!’

  At the other end of the campsite, William was sitting in a circle around a smaller bonfire with the luggage porters. The porters were diminutive, wiry young men hired from nearby villages to haul the expedition’s cache of food, weapons, and other heavy equipment on the long trek through the hilly and densely forested terrain. William had picked up a fair amount of Bengali during his time in India, and as he drew in the sickly-sweet smoke of the herb the locals called ‘ganja’, he smiled and chatted with the porters in their language. The smoke, inhaled through a chillum pipe, brought relaxation and relief to his otherwise troubled mind. The high was not nearly as intense as the euphoric oblivion that opium brought on, but while on that drug William was barely able to function, so his usage of it was strictly controlled and rationed by Kelly. William still considered the American to be his master, on account of the huge debt he believed he owed him for paying for the passage of himself and River King from Sevastopol to India.

  William could not go too long these days without c
hasing the dragon; he felt that he had to, to ease the torture of the memories, the terrifying, almost debilitating battle flashbacks, and the grief and the words and faces that haunted his dreams with relentless persistence. And then, of course, there was the guilt he carried that hung forever from his neck, slowly choking the life out of him, like a bulging sack full of rotting flesh and leaden bones. For these attacks and maladies – and for just a little extra money tacked on to his already billowing debt – it seemed that Kelly was always happy to provide a little relief.

  ‘I’ve never been this deep into the forest,’ a long-limbed teen porter was saying. ‘Are you sure these men know where we’re going?’

  ‘He knows,’ replied another porter, this one a wirily muscled youth with oily hair that hung lank around his shoulders. He pointed at Ajit, who was still gazing out into the labyrinth of trees in silence.

  ‘Shh!’ his friend hissed in a frightened tone. ‘Don’t point at that one! He’s dangerous!’

  ‘Relax, he can’t hear us over there.’

  ‘He can! He’s got the hearing of a tiger, and the strength and ferocity of one to match. I heard he killed two armed men in single combat once … both with his bare hands.’

  ‘Come on, do you really believe that?’

  ‘I heard him talking to that American hunter about killing British soldiers in battle. He said he’s taken off at least twelve of their heads with his talwar. And he’s been shot nine times before, but he’s still alive and walking. He can’t be killed!’

  ‘Any man can be killed,’ William interjected, speaking in shaky but reasonably comprehensible Bengali. ‘It’s just a matter of how.’

  The long-haired porter scoffed as he took the smouldering chillum pipe that William passed to him.

  ‘What do you know about killing, Englishman? You look more like one of us than any kind of fighter. They say that you’re some sort of expert horseman, but I’m not sure I even believe that.’

  ‘I still remember the face of the first man I killed, clear as day,’ William said quietly. ‘Every soldier repeats that old cliché, but it’s repeated so often because it’s true.’