The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I feel sure that the Court now will be entertained every night with Her Majesty’s recitation of a fragment of Sappho,’ Stokes said. ‘Chth. From memory too, in all probability. I must say, the Duke’s fragment is remarkably poetic, when one comes to think of it.’

  ‘She read awfully well,’ Lord John said. ‘No one else could have done it so convincingly.’

  ‘And she seemed so moved by it,’ Bella said.

  ‘Appallingly moved,’ Lord John said, his chuckling dying away gracefully. ‘People say she is interested by nothing but the circus, but we three, now, we will be able to correct this sad misapprehension. She is a woman with a true respect for learning, you see. Miss Garraway – I must tell you this – it is such a pleasure to see you once more in town – we have been deprived too long of your company.’

  Stokes turned away in mild embarrassment to inspect the Duke’s books, and it was too late now either to make his excuses and repair to the supper room, or to join in the conversation; and, after all, Lord John’s sudden compliments to Bella were rather what he had been thinking of making himself. He took down a book at random, and began to flick through it. Like the rest of the library, it seemed to be in Latin, and he stood stiffly with his evident tactful fraudulence.

  ‘I am sure you have contrived to console yourself in other manners, sir,’ Bella said. ‘It is difficult to believe that you have been lying prostrate, waiting for my return to society; and, after all, I had a very serious reason to disappoint you, regrettable as it may seem to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lord John said. ‘Yes, I heard you had been ill, and I am happy to see you looking so well again. I do hope you will permit me to call while you are in London.’

  ‘Lord John,’ she said, and Stokes could see that this question, so ordinary, had taken her by surprise, and she could not field it immediately. ‘I would be – I would – I think it may prove difficult, so short is our stay, my sister’s and mine, but – I would not be unfriendly for the world, and I am most honoured by, by …’

  ‘Miss Garraway,’ Lord John said. ‘I quite understand. Let us say no more, but enjoy our evening.’

  Bella crimsoned, as if Lord John’s smiling kindness were too great to bear, and whatever reasons she had to excuse herself from his attentions, it was clear she was not about to reveal them.

  ‘When we meet again—’ she began, but Lord John was too quick for her.

  ‘Whether we shall meet again, I know not,’ he said. ‘But if we do meet again, why, I shall smile.’

  ‘I shall smile, too,’ Bella said, with a look of relief on her face. ‘Lord John—’

  ‘Miss Garraway, Mr Stokes,’ Lord John said, and seemed to make an effort, and take notice of the editor again. ‘You must both be hungry. Let us go in to supper, and leave these dusty old relics behind.’

  Bella followed him; and afterwards, her odd feeling was one of pity; not just pity for Lord John, refused by her for a reason she could never explain, and of course not in any degree pity for herself, but pity, all the same, for Elizabeth. As Lord John took one last look at her, full of regret and tenderness, she felt she knew that what supported a human being was the sense of touch, another pair of arms around one’s neck, consoling. And by accepting the single enriching joy of Henry, embracing her every day, she saw now that she had taken that support from her sister, for ever. The touch of Henry was all she needed, and the evident prospect of becoming Lady John was no more substantial than the idea of Burnes’s return. But yes; they might meet each other again, they might; and when they did, why, she would smile. That would have to do, as it would always have to do for her poor sister. And Stokes followed her, unregarded, with his gaze, and him she never thought of.

  8.

  The coachman cracked his whip, and the carriage set off into the plum-pudding richness of the warm London night. Bella drew her wrap about her, and thrust her hands into Elizabeth’s muff. They sat there for a moment, with their hands jammed together cosily.

  ‘It is just as it was,’ Bella said. ‘Just exactly the same. Society, I mean. Did you have a pleasant evening? I saw you dancing without a break.’

  ‘I did,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I wish I could tell you who took me in to supper – a very agreeable gentleman, and an officer, I slowly gathered. He seemed to know me quite well, full of solicitude for my strength and your health, you will be pleased to hear. His face was not unfamiliar to me, I admit, and for two solid hours I was in a state of terror, in case some kind acquaintance demand an introduction. And Lord John?’

  ‘He is so agreeable,’ Bella said. ‘He asked if he might call, and I had to make an excuse.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, that is probably all for the best. I hardly know him, but … Have you seen the Queen before?’

  ‘No, not since the accession,’ Bella said. ‘Whom is she to marry?’

  ‘A German prince, they say,’ Elizabeth said. ‘A very handsome German prince, I hope for her sake. And for the sake of the little princes to come.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t produce a very engaging impression,’ Bella mused. ‘I spoke with her, a little, you know.’

  ‘You spoke with her?’

  ‘Lord John took us to see an antiquity or two, and she happened to be showing the same interest. I mean that gentleman Stokes and I. A very important personage, now, I understand.’

  ‘So I believe,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But just as he was. They are all exactly as they were, as you say. Apart from the Duchesse de Neaud, of course.’

  ‘Yes, I heard that. I wonder that you did not think of telling me so great a scandal. And who were your partners?’

  ‘Oh, my old dancing partners,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The day is fast approaching when, if they ask me to dance, they will be fulfilling one of the cardinal virtues and not expressing an ambition towards one of the mortal sins – the worst of them, too.’

  ‘And they could as easily fulfil that ambition, like me, by staying in Gloucestershire and never moving,’ Bella said. ‘I refer to sloth, you understand, merely sloth. Still, you have no shortage of willing partners, and that is something.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘As you say: that is something. Lady Frampton’s tomorrow, I believe. She has a son out with the Army of the Indus, you know. Gracious heavens—’

  A boy, a street-boy, had taken advantage of the momentary slowing of the carriage, and had leapt onto the running board; against the window, his face pressed violently, gurning and smudging against the glass. Behind him, half a dozen of his familiars ran, barking with laughter. Elizabeth rapped sharply on the glass, then, taking the stick which was always kept in the carriage, on the roof; the coachman noticed, and cracked his whip at the urchin. The boy fell off, and they continued on their way.

  TWENTY-TWO

  1.

  THIS WAS THE WORST of the billets so far.

  They did not stay more than a few days in any place, riding on without apology or delay. It would not be wise. The English, in Kabul, might or might not know of them, but they would not be pursued or caught, and for that reason, they arrived in a place in the high mountains, commandeered a few houses, and, after a few days, moved on. Where they went next, they never announced; where they had come from, they never told. Sometimes they doubled back on themselves, but for the most part they did not know where they would end up that night. Only Akbar knew, and he kept his council.

  The settlements were rarely comfortable, but none had been as raw as this one. High in the mountains, it amounted to a dozen houses built out of mud walls, lodged in a deep horizontal crevice. It was almost invisible until you were upon it, and would do very well for the next week. The villagers were evicted, and were now staying in the smaller settlement over the brow of the hill, with anyone prepared to take them in, returning at dawn to serve the Prince and his retinue of brothers. They were a remote and a helpless people, existing somehow on a few sheep and a scrap of land, vulnerable to any transitory marauders. Their language was stran
ge and ugly, and would be barely comprehensible half a day’s ride away. It was difficult to make them understand what they had to do, and they seemed barely capable of realizing who it was demanding the use of their homes. Akbar’s retinue had stayed in many places now, and this was the first where no display of awe or obeisance had followed the explanation, where Akbar’s name meant nothing. They had no idea where they lived, or who ruled them, and seemed not to care that it had once been their Dost, and was now the red-faced infidel. They gave the court whatever it asked for, but they gave it grudgingly, as they might have followed the instructions of any rich traveller.

  It was a wretched hole, and its seclusion was its only recommendation. In the deep cold of winter, Akbar’s court shivered. Most houses in the eastern marches of the empire were kept warm with an underfloor heating, a tawkanah; the villagers crouched outside and fanned the fires, blowing hot sparks into the hollow underneath of the house. This was a dismal place, and there was nothing to do but place the settlement’s two crude braziers under a table hung with blankets, and bury your hands in the depths of the muggy heat.

  It was night, and the Prince’s brothers were assembled around the table, silently trying to warm themselves. Akbar himself was in the largest of the houses, alone, thinking. The brothers had finished eating, and the villagers had taken the coarse brown dishes away. Four sheep had already been killed for the court’s food; this was a poor place, and if they stayed more than another day, then the villagers would have to be sent out to steal another from their neighbours. That, Akbar’s brothers generally assumed, was not their concern; the honour bestowed on these ignorant shepherds was payment enough, as everyone would understand.

  They were high in the mountains, and as they moved from place to place, never knowing whether they were pursued or tracked, they were hiding the world from them as effectively as they cloaked themselves from the world’s hostile intentions. What events were occurring in the rest of the empire, they did not know; whether, when they reclaimed the empire, it would be for Akbar or for the Amir, who by now might have been executed by his enemies, they did not know, and would not speculate. But from day to day they lived, holding out the idea of their return to the great jewelled city with the certainty of faith.

  Akbar’s retreats into his inner sanctum occurred unpredictably, and the band of princes accepted them as a mark of his eminence. They sat and waited for him. What he contemplated, they did not know; but they accepted the gravity of his contemplation. There was a suspension of the rules of his father’s court, here; they were not courtiers but warriors, equal against the invader. But there was an unarguable and undisputed sense of hierarchy, and as Akbar entered, there was a general stiffening as they acknowledged him.

  Akbar himself was not, perhaps, an inspiring figure; slight and small, he passed unnoticed in a city crowd. And that was his power. When he closed his hand on a dagger, his fingers were thin and delicate as some exotic white vegetable; impossible, too, to believe that a hand so clean could inflict damage, and there had been dozens who looked up, amazed, from the savage gash in their stomachs to the fine-boned Baroukzye face as if, somehow, they had been betrayed. Akbar was graceful and fastidious as a girl, cleaning himself devoutly, like a cat; constant small acts of grooming were characteristic of his habitual demeanour as he shook off the dirt and mud of the world. Even out here, he washed. The villagers were each day handed a full set of robes, and wondering, their women made their way down the hill to the three murky ponds, to pummel the great Prince’s apparel into a white never seen before in this high filthy settlement. In the coarse mud house he had commandeered, a pail of water stood, constantly refreshed, and the cousins who stood outside the door, watching and waiting, listened to his occasional splashing and puffing with a satisfied sense that this man was not like them. No one imitated him; no one could; not even Musa, his current favourite, who was summoned nightly to share the great Prince’s bed. And catlike, too, was his stillness in thought, his ability to appear in a room unseen and to slink from it. He was small and slight and feline; as he grew, his father’s court had inspected him, wondering at where in the outer shell of his being his ferocity showed itself. They peered cautiously into his mild pensive eyes, and soon they all remembered an old proverb. The cat walks alone, and his cousin is the tiger/and when the cat grows, walk from him; for he will turn and eat you. They remembered it, and it seemed ancient to them; but Akbar might have inspired it, and planted it newly in their minds with the appearance of memory. There had, they knew, never been a man like Akbar before; never.

  ‘I was sleeping,’ Akbar said, entering quietly.

  ‘It is good to sleep,’ Khadi offered. Khadi, like most of them, was some form of brother or cousin, and, like most of them, he found it wise to offer quick approval of all Akbar’s actions. ‘Did my brother dream?’

  Akbar came and sat at the table, pulling impatiently at the horsehair blanket until his hands and feet were thrust into the heat under the table. ‘I dreamt,’ he said. ‘I dreamt of my father.’

  ‘A good dream,’ Zemaun hazarded. ‘A propitious one.’

  Akbar turned his head and regarded him with pity. ‘I dreamt I killed my father. He came to me in my dream with his arms open, and I killed him, and in my dream, I was not sad, but calm.’

  The princes drew back. Khadi was bravest, and quickest. ‘The honoured Amir is alive,’ he said. ‘Your dream is a good one, Prince; it says that none will kill the Emperor but his son, and when death comes to the Amir, his son will be there to live on. Dreams are wise, and they often say things which are contrary to their seeming appearance. To dream of the killing of a father speaks of the honour you bear him, and tells us that he lives on, beyond the hills.’

  ‘Fool,’ Akbar said, reasonably. ‘It may mean that I wish to kill my father. A dream of bad luck. I slept badly. The food here is unfit for dogs, and my dreams were poisoned by it.’

  They sat for a while, toasting their limbs nervously. Hours could pass in this way, as they waited on Akbar’s pleasure.

  2.

  Nadir came in the night, and, they later gathered, had waited patiently until dawn, and Akbar’s rising. When the court rose and wandered out into the bright mountain air, there was Akbar, and a stranger, crouching. Akbar was listening intently to the man, and they retreated. It was Nadir, and they went back inside, wondering what this could mean. No one had tracked them down until now, and how the Prince’s cousin, the son of the Newab Jubbur Khan, had found his way here could not be guessed. They put it down to the profound contemplation of Akbar, one of those plans he had not shared with them.

  Akbar listened intently to what Nadir had to say. The sun was barely up, and the long shadows on the mountains were blue-edged and sharp. Below on the hills, a boy shepherd was singing; an aimless, multiplying song which filled the valley; a song for himself and his sheep, a song which would last out the day with its improvisations and changes. The land was quiet and unmoving, and it seemed as if he sang with the landscape, as it echoed each soft falling strain. Akbar sat and listened; listened intently to Nadir, talking, but, behind that, to the noise of his father’s morning lands as the sun rose slowly, showed its broad expanse.

  Presently Musa came out of Akbar’s hut, yawning, his robes wrapped about him approximately. He had woken and found Akbar gone, and, not knowing what else to do, had gone in search of him. He did not know what would happen when Akbar tired of him; he had been around for long enough to know that some of his cousin’s favourites stayed, and some, inexplicably, disappeared. Some of the Prince’s entourage had had their day basking in the sun of his favour, Musa had slowly learnt from the direction and unexpressed meaning of their gaze; Zemaun, for instance. And others disappeared. The chalk-clean morning was beautiful, and still, and empty. This beautiful land; and his Prince would fight for it. But when the day came when Akbar tired of him, Musa, too, would stay, or he would go; and until that day came, he did not know which it would be. And until then, all he
could do, whenever he woke and found his Prince gone, was to rise swiftly and follow him. Akbar gave a swift, angry gesture, not turning, but for a moment Musa did not understand as he gazed at the two men and, behind them, the opening morning. The Prince repeated the gesture again, with a short fierce hiss. Perhaps it would not be long, before the day came. Musa went back inside, with his fear that Akbar was beginning to find him tiresome. It was best to leave the Prince to his task, listening to the news from Kabul.

  ‘They live outside the gates,’ Nadir said. ‘The English, I mean. They have set up there.’

  ‘And the Bala Hissar?’

  ‘Shah Shujah lives there, the pretender. They say he insisted on it, and insisted that he would live there without any English. The English agreed – no one knows why. Perhaps they think that the people will come to see him as their king, and not the king the English chose. It is so changed. He loves riches, the usurper, and the great halls of the palace are hung with gold and jewels, with frippery. He is protected day and night. The people hate him – they know they pay for all this, and groan under the weight. They hate the English, too, and talk always of Dost Mohammed as their Amir, with love and sorrow. Sir, you know, when Shah Shujah rode first into Kabul, the people all came to see, and they stood in silence. Not one man cheered. He fears for his life, and will not ask the English for their protection. They live outside the gates like beggars.’

  ‘Do they fear me?’ Akbar said, quite calmly.

  ‘They will learn to fear you,’ Nadir said with simple tact. ‘They do not know where you are. Cousin, there is no need for you to flee from place to place; they are not searching for you.’

  ‘I am not fleeing,’ Akbar said scornfully. ‘Flee the English and their foolish six-months’ king? Nadir, if I chose to stay and fight, I would stay and fight. We must travel for one reason; to let the people know that I am here, and one day, soon, they will fight for me. You will see; the mountains will rise and fight for me. That is all.’