The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  The Afghans had been settled on the field of snow for some hours there, observed from the cantonments. They had set blankets on the snow, and squatted about it; there was no food evident as the English rode up, but it had, incongruously, the air of a pic-nic in the deep snow. Akbar rose, followed by his entourage. There were, Macnaghten noted, three or four of his usual followers there with him, the fine martial sirdars; but there, too, five unfamiliar faces. Akbar’s court came and went, and the regular appearance and disappearance of new attendants was, the English thought, a part of his demeanour, to display what sort of men were behind him. Today, Macnaghten did not care; he looked at those faces, and felt he knew what Akbar could no longer be certain of: that some of those men, surely, were no longer Akbar’s men, and were his without knowing it.

  (And from the low walls, the men of England, of Wales and Scotland, stood, their thin guns raised, and watched the horsemen ride into the snow.)

  Macnaghten dismounted; the others followed his lead. Mackenzie, the adjutant, seemed to hesitate for a moment; or perhaps his foot was just caught in the stirrups. Macnaghten advanced resolutely. Akbar stood there, making no gesture of welcome or acknowledgement, and Macnaghten almost felt like making a triple bow to this small imperious Prince.

  ‘Sit,’ Akbar said. His manner was quite different from those of other princes of the East; the situation did not suggest an exchange of civilities, but in no circumstances, you felt, would he have troubled with trivialities before reaching the necessary point.

  ‘Sirdar,’ Macnaghten said. ‘We have received your communication, and are grateful for it. Our principal concern has always been to preserve the good relations between our nations, and feel that on the terms you propose, that good intention may be pursued. It was never the intention of Her Majesty that we should remain here indefinitely, and since we understand that Shah Shujah will be secure in his possession of the kingdom without our continued attendance—’

  ‘Prince,’ Akbar said wearily. ‘Let us come to the point. You have received our letter.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Macnaghten said. ‘For which we are grateful.’

  ‘You assent to its terms,’ Akbar said.

  ‘We assent heartily,’ Macnaghten said, relieved. Akbar stretched out his hand, his empty small hand; Macnaghten, idiotically, reached forward as if to shake it, but the sirdar shook his hands irritably.

  ‘The letter, sir,’ Mackenzie said, leaning forward.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Macnaghten said, and, fumbling in his pockets, extracted Akbar’s letter. He handed it to Akbar, who, after a short glance, handed it to his entourage. For a few silent minutes, they passed it from hand to hand, inspecting it carefully. Macnaghten waited in silence. Finally it returned to Akbar, who handed it back to Macnaghten.

  ‘And you assent to the terms contained in our communication,’ Akbar said heavily.

  ‘Why not?’ Macnaghten said, a little puzzled. Akbar gave a small glance to left and right, almost smiling; it was so difficult to tell, but anyone might have thought there was a touch of contempt in his expression. ‘Sir, may I beg you of the favour of learning who these gentlemen are? We are familiar with only part of Your High-ness’s extensive suite.’

  ‘It is of no concern,’ Akbar said. ‘They are all in the secret, Prince. They all know of our discussions. We are all—’ Akbar smiled again, that mild, contemptuous smile, ‘—in the secret.’

  The sky and land were silent, all at once, for one moment, and then a great scream; so full of rage and triumph it seemed hardly human, seemed as if it could not possibly come from Akbar’s open mouth. ‘Take them, take them!’ he was crying. ‘Begeer! Begeer!’ Macnaghten had no chance to move; four Afghans had fallen on him, and were dragging him away, all at once; and before Mackenzie and Trevor could move, the Afghans were on them, and their corky arms bound tight behind them. Macnaghten’s face, astonished, looking about like a dog who hears gunshot and cannot understand what it means; Macnaghten, crying out in Persian, ‘Az barae Khooda! Az barae Khooda!’ over and over again. Mackenzie heard it, and as he himself was being borne away, and thrown over the back of his horse, he committed it to memory. Az barae Khooda; what Macnaghten was screaming as he was pulled away, screaming and screaming like a wounded fox, Mackenzie did not know what it meant, and would not for many months; but in his dungeon, kept like a beast by Akbar, expecting every day his own death, he kept hold of those words, a sentence he did not understand; and in the end, he found out what Macnaghten was crying out as they took him away to kill him. Mackenzie, in the end, was released, and then he found out what Macnaghten’s last cry had been. For God’s sake, he had been crying out, his last words in a language not his own, and no one heard him but Mackenzie, who did not understand. No one saw Macnaghten’s end, but that was not the last of Macnaghten; because somehow, as his trussed subordinates were led into the city, into their faces were thrust the last of Macnaghten, on seven dripping poles. The head was thrust against theirs, and Mackenzie was not likely ever to forget the weight of a human head falling against his face, or the heavy fatty film of blue over the eyes, or the look, so alive, so flaming, in the eyes of the man who held the pole and screamed for justice, and revenge, and right.

  10.

  In the cantonments, the men stood, and looked for command, looked for the reassuring word of order and security. But they did not know whom to look to; and as their minds went through those dead – those lucky dead, they were already learning to think – their minds alighted, incredulously, on Elphinstone. That was all there was, and they lowered their muskets, having no idea what the next day would bring, fearing to contemplate it. Elphinstone, too, stared out at the terrible empty country, echoing with the distant throaty roars of joy, and waited for some word to come from on high. In his mind was a black memory of Macnaghten; the moment when Macnaghten had dismissed them all, and before Elphinstone could go, the commander of the Army of the Indus had collapsed in a hysterical uncontrollable storm of tears and trembling, his fists clenched and flailing helplessly at the air. Even from Macnaghten, Elphinstone, now, would welcome a word, to know what to do, what action to take. But no word came from the head and limbs being passed around the bazaar in those long nights of riot. And in three days, Akbar, so leisurely, sent word, and his instructions were these: that the next day, the Army of the Indus would pick up its belongings, and return whence it came. The next day. The word spread in the cantonments, and from Elphinstone, helpless in his tent, no word came. All that terrifying day, the camp resembled a squirrel colony in the last days before winter, burrowing and discarding and packing and sorting what goods they could, white-faced as they threw what need not be taken into the mud and snow. The men and women and children, the sepoys and the camp followers, all sixteen thousand of them, followed the instructions of the new Prince of the Afghans, and prepared with all the appalled haste they were capable of; prepared to flee wherever Akbar the Great wished to send them. And the next day, at dawn, they departed; and behind them the city howled its raw shah mat, and the dogs of the city howled as they devoured the limbs and entrails, the body and face of Macnaghten, the Prince of the English.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ON 6 JANUARY, the Army of the Indus turned away from Kabul and, in the snow, began its march to Jalalabad.

  Behind them rode the Afghans, firing on the rear, riding among the column, their long knives raised.

  That was the first day, and the snow was crimson with blood.

  In the morning of the second day, it was found that many had died in the night of the cold, and many had lost their limbs to frostbite.

  In the middle of the second day, Akbar presented himself, and assured Elphinstone that he would escort them to safety.

  Three hostages were given to Akbar, and the Army of the Indus halted.

  That was the second day, and the snow was crimson with blood.

  On the third day, the Army entered the Khoord-Kabul pass. Above them were the tribesmen, shooting down at
them, and behind them were the Afghans, their guns raised and their knives falling.

  It is said that Akbar rode among the people of his country, and spoke to them in a double tongue; in Persian, he called on them to spare the infidel, and then, in the language of the people, he called on them to kill the English.

  That was the third day, and the snow was crimson with blood.

  On the fourth day, Akbar rode again to the Army of the Indus, and, in his goodness, he took the women and the children of the infidel, nineteen in number, and removed them to a place of safety. The infidel army watched the women and the children go, and marched on.

  That day, the snow fell hard, and the Army of the Indus went forward blindly, falling underneath the blows of wrath, dying in the snow.

  Akbar was wise, and he told the princes of the army that under his guidance, all would be well for them; and the people of his nation fell on their enemy without mercy.

  The silver of the knives, the black of the night, the white of the snow, the red of the blood.

  That was the fourth day, and the snow was crimson with blood.

  On the fifth day, the English were seized with a terrible despair, and did not stop, but marched on, through the night. But Akbar had foreseen this, and, there, in the night, they found that the pass was blocked with a great wall the Prince had caused to be built. The Afghans fell upon them from the rear, and there in the dark they died; every man died; every one; under the knives of the Afghans; and in his mercy, Akbar paused at the last, and saw the last man alive over the wall, and let him go.

  ‘Let them know,’ he said. ‘Let the English know what Akbar has done. There goes the messenger, and he will bear the tale. Let him ride to safety, with his terrible burden, and the world will know of the deeds of the Afghans, and they will tremble.’

  The horsemen of Afghanistan gathered about their Prince, and listened humbly. How lucky they were! How great! How blessed are their children and their children’s children, whose forefathers were the first to know of the greatness of Akbar, whose deeds will never be forgotten until the world turn to dust.

  They rode away, each by himself, his noble heart soaring. That was the end of the fifth day, and the snow from there to Kabul was crimson, crimson, crimson, with the blood of the infidel. The empire was cleansed, and washed clean with blood, and the princes of the empire rode over the fallen warriors, and their wicked bones crushed like dry bread under the glory and might of the Afghans.

  TWENTY-SIX

  IN GLOUCESTERSHIRE IT RAINED.

  The seasons here grew together, and the indifferent months passed with the steady slow mixture of weather, and it always came down to rain; slow, dripping, unstopping. The water fell, not torrentially but steadily, and the battlements dripped into the moat, onto the terrace, onto the heavy jutting sills. Water gathered where it could, and dripped into the unattended rooms of that empty house, rotting away the substance of Queen’s Acre, bit by bit. The estate was silent, and the house silent too; only a distant crow, cawing its misery into the rain, and the tapping sound of the rain, a single drop, close by, and the greater massed hiss further off. No ghosts walked at Queen’s Acre, but the tap, tap, tap of the rain was like the step of a phantom, feeling his way with a stick, and the hiss of the rain was like the far-off noise of crowds of ghosts, feeling their slow undying way through the bowed-down groves of trees, sullen as September. Thousands of them; uncountable thousands, falling from the sky, and making a single sound, and then they were gone for ever, seen by no one. It rained thus at every season of the year, indifferent to the circuit of the great earth about the sun, falling from the cold dark Gloucestershire skies onto the cold dark Gloucestershire earth with no suggestion of summer, spring, autumn, winter. The house knew this, and did not mark the seasons; it was winter now, but that did not seem to matter. It was the day, the first nameless day, which falls after Twelfth Night, but for this house, all days were nameless, and the long season at the heart of winter had passed through the house without anyone acknowledging it. The heart of winter; it had taken hold, here; it never arrived, it never left. Christmas and its twelve attendants, the twelve days following like apostles, were nothing here. There was nothing but the rain, and that needed no acknowledgement.

  In her lair sat the mistress of the house, sat Bella. It was the room she spent her days in, and it had, over the years, turned into her life. Two niches had been adapted by the estate carpenter, long ago, and held the five hundred books she liked and read, over and over; a ragged selection of bindings, rather than a wall of imperious unbroached authority, it merely held the books she liked in no especial order. It was nice to reach out, and have one’s hand fall upon a book read before, a book certain to please, because it had pleased before. But the shelves of books filched from the long-locked library of the house presented a chaos to the critical eye. The third volume of Dryden jostled with The Wanderer, a slender satire about poets drinking from skulls next to a knee-high folio which contained every facial expression known to man with, no doubt, serious explanations in German. Her work was thrown casually over the sofa; a screen cover, begun seven years before, never to be finished, but good to hold and dream. An oak table – barely larger than a loo table – had been placed here, and here Bella ate with Henry; on it, now, the remains of luncheon still sat, unregarded, although the tea things had been brought in ten minutes before. On another table, nearby, stood a half-finished game of Patience, at the point it had reached a week before; she did not think it would come out, now, but left it, with its piles of blunt, bright, regal faces, as it was. Nobody saw Bella but her son, and the servants, and she trusted the love of one, and did not consider the feelings or opinions of the other, so her pink dress was old, and somewhat stained. She stood, now, at the window, and thought nothing. All that she could see was her own; the terrace, beneath, shining phosphorescently in the gloom with wet moss; the moat she crossed once a month; the wilderness which could now no longer be distinguished from the wild neglected lawn, the walks and beds buried under years-long growth as the land took back its own, the smooth hills rising, the sunken dark copse Elizabeth once so loved. She looked at it, and her eye might have been looking at nothing, so familiar was the land this window framed. All her mind was filled with the pat of water, the tick of drops from the gutter onto the sill, popping its mournful tattoo; she saw nothing but the slow slide of a drop down the leaded window; falling, holding, pausing, then joining with another drop and continuing its path downwards. Stop – on – stop – on – following its imperatives, its mysterious path.

  Henry was with his tutor, and her hours were long and empty today; they weighed on her. She went back to her chair, and reached for her book for a moment. She read on. The Doctor is with us. Aunt Nell is in love with him. He ordered his matters, and came to town at Lady L.’s request and mine – Bella turned back to discover who was writing, and saw the heading at the beginning of the chapter, ‘Lady G. to Miss Byron’ – and Beauchamp’s, that we might sooner come at my brother’s Letters. She stopped. These people; who were they? She forgot. Lady G., Miss Byron, the Doctor, Aunt Nell, Lady L., Beauchamp; they could be anyone. And yet someone had created them, and thousands of readers had cared about their fate, quite as if they had been flesh and blood. She had no idea who they were – in an hour of idle inattentiveness, they had gone from her mind – and for a moment, her thoughts ranged idly, creating them for herself. Lady G., a woman with a toothy face like an ass’s and untidy hair; Miss Byron, who talked indiscreetly; the Doctor, who was kind to women if they remembered to weep; Aunt Nell, a beauty of thirty-two; Lady L., a ballroom martinet; poor witty Beauchamp, who had fifteen thousand a year and a stutter which made him sweat and meant that his best jokes were confided to his lucky correspondents. It seemed to her, then, as she lay back in the chair and looked at her land and her rain, that all her life she had been hearing names of men and women, and discovering what properties they might have, what goodnesses they would be capable of, and as
her imagination roamed, they came to life and presented themselves to her, and for a season even she herself believed them real.

  All at once she got up, and set the book down. She had a strange fancy, now, to take a walk, and see everything that was hers. There was a bell pull set into the wall of Bella’s chamber, which she almost never used; the rhythms of her day meant that the servants came quite often enough, to bring meals or remove them, to bring Henry in or to ask for instructions. There was no need to summon anyone; they would be with her quite soon enough, on the whole. But she went to the bell pull, and tugged it; somewhere in the house, a bell would be sounding, and a maid rising without enthusiasm to attend the mistress. It was odd, but now, she felt impatient, and waited to be attended with her fingers drumming on the table.

  It was lucky that the bell summoned the housekeeper.

  ‘I have an odd fancy,’ Bella said casually. ‘I should like to open up the house, and look at it for an hour or two.’

  ‘Madam?’ Mrs Bruton said.

  ‘For no reason,’ Bella said. ‘But if you would be so good as to lend me your keys?’

  Mrs Bruton reached into her basket, and extracted the heavy set of keys, handing them to Bella.

  ‘Will that be all, madam?’

  Bella dismissed her. She sat there with the keys for a few minutes, as if this was all she truly wanted; and then, all at once, impatiently, she leapt up and left the room. First, her mamma’s bedchamber, dusty and cold; here mamma had died, and dying had pressed on Bella her diamond brooch, the brooch Bella always wore. Then the Chinese room Elizabeth always loved best. ‘When I am grown,’ she always used to say, ‘I shall always sleep in the Chinese room, and dream most beautifully, every night.’ Papa’s bedchamber, and – because Bella, now, would omit nothing – his dressing room, bare as a box, and his bathroom. In the washbasin, a spider crouched; Bella benevolently left it, and went on.