Companions of Paradise (8 page)

She imagined the terrible scene that would follow her outburst— the accusations of brash ignorance, of disloyalty to the Queen, of siding with the enemy. Who would speak first, General Sale, his features swollen with martial fury, Sir William Macnaghten, his thick brows knitted in disbelief, or Lady Sale, whose attack would be the deadliest of all?

What right, they would say, had she, an unmarried woman, to voice an unfavorable opinion about a British army action? Who was she, a person of no great fortune or family, whose reputation had already been blackened once by scandal, to criticize her elders and betters?

All this would mean the ruin of Lady Macnaghten's carefully arranged party. Lady Macnaghten, who was generously trying to help her, would never speak to her again.

But General Sale, it seemed, was too intent on his remembered triumph to take her breach of manners into account. “The horses were a different matter,” he boomed, shaking his head. “Dozens of them had been wounded in the assault. When we entered the fort, we found them galloping about, hysterical and dangerous. In spite of all our efforts to spare them, quite a number had to be shot.”

“A pity,” agreed Burnes.

Macnaghten nodded sorrowfully.

Mariana gazed from face to face, searching for someone who shared her feelings.

“I shall be leaving for Kandahar in the morning.” Fitzgerald leaned toward her, interrupting her troubled thoughts. “I do not know when I shall return. May I write to you while I am gone?”

“Yes, of course.” She nodded absently. She had studied military strategy since she was twelve. All that time she had likened war to a game of chess

General Sale turned to her. “And now, young lady,” he trumpeted, “may I ask if you have seen our cantonment?”

“No, Sir Robert, I have not,” she replied flatly.

“Since you have such a keen interest in military matters, if you will present yourself at the gate at three o'clock sharp tomorrow afternoon, one of my subalterns will bring you inside and show you about. And bring your uncle. I like him.”

“Thank you,” was all she could manage.

N
ow, Mariana,” her uncle told her as they rode under the archway of the cantonment's main gate, “as we shall not be invited again to see the workings of the cantonment, I encourage you to examine it thoroughly. It
is
rather impressive, is it not?” He flushed happily beneath his top hat as he surveyed the huge, enclosed military compound.

Mariana smiled carefully, not wishing to disturb his expansive mood. Several times recently, she had caught her uncle staring into space, his face creased with worry. He never told her what information he had gained from his informants about the true state of Afghanistan, or whether Sir William Macnaghten had paid attention to his warnings. But whatever her uncle's concerns were on that score, she could see that he had every confidence in the safety of the cantonment.

This was no time to tell him how puzzling and unwise she found the location of the cantonment and Residence compounds, both overlooked by nearby hills and surrounded on every side by occupied forts.

Why on earth had Sir William Macnaghten so airily dismissed General Elphinstone's plan to buy and destroy those buildings?

Furthermore, the ground on which the cantonment and Residence stood seemed to have been chosen for its beauty rather than its utility, for it was wet orchard land, full of trees and covered like a checkerboard with deep irrigation ditches.

How did they expect to move heavy guns about on this sort of terrain?

She would also not mention that the very length of the cantonment's outer walls, enclosing an area nearly a thousand by six hundred yards, would make it extremely difficult to defend in the event of trouble.

She looked about her. To her left, past a small artillery park with thirteen guns of various sizes, an orchard had inexplicably been left standing, rendering the high rampart between the northern end of the cantonment and the Residence compound nearly invisible through the trees. To her right, neat rows of mud brick barracks and officers’ quarters occupied a large area. Behind them she glimpsed the walled compounds of the generals. Straight ahead of her on a large parade ground, groups of red-coated infantrymen wheeled to shouted orders. In the shade of the barracks, other soldiers sat in groups, cleaning weapons and polishing brass.

Pack mules filed past, their harnesses jingling, led by grooms in loose, native clothes. A troop of mustachioed cavalrymen trotted toward the parade ground on tall, handsome chargers. Camels strode through a side gate, carrying heavy sacks of foodstuffs.

“I shall ask our guide,” her uncle continued, in a businesslike tone, “to show you the full view from each corner bastion, and to give the measurements of the surrounding rampart wall and its parapets. You have already passed the commissariat fort between here and the city many times, of course, and you know that the fresh water supply comes from the irrigation canal outside our eastern wall.”

He looked about him. “I am certain we shall be allowed to watch the infantry drilling while we are here, but I doubt we shall see an artillery practice today, since no one seems to be anywhere near the guns. Even so,” he added happily, “that should be enough to satisfy you and the Would-Be-General.”

Lost in thought, Mariana nodded again.

She did not have to climb the cantonment's corner bastions to know the location of the several small forts that Macnaghten had taken so lightly at dinner. All were within a few hundred yards of the outer walls, one of them almost between the cantonment itself and the commissariat fort where all the food supplies had been stored.

“Here comes our guide.” Her uncle gestured toward the curly-haired youth who hurried toward them. “It is a pity Fitzgerald has left us for Kandahar. A horse gunner would do a better job of explaining our artillery than this poor little infantryman.”

Mariana sniffed to herself. Thirteen guns scarcely qualified as “our artillery.”

She returned the young officer's bow. She must stop worrying and pay attention. After all, Papa would like nothing better than a detailed account of the cantonment.

But as the young man began to speak, she did not hear what he was saying, for the vision she had seen all those weeks before at Butkhak returned without warning. It filled her mind's eye with mourning figures, and her heart with dread. She blinked, begging it to leave her, but it remained—the same black-clad funeral procession her munshi had refused to explain, marching somberly past her and across the empty parade ground, to the beat of invisible drums.

Her uncle silenced their guide with an upraised hand. “Is something wrong, my dear?” he asked her.

“Nothing, Uncle Adrian.” She pressed a damp hand to her forehead. “Nothing at all.”

He nudged his horse closer, his face full of concern, then signaled to their guide.

“Forgive us, Lieutenant Mathieson,” he said. “Miss Givens is not at all well. We must return to the Residence compound at once.”

“No, Uncle Adrian,” she objected. “I—”

“Nonsense,” he interrupted firmly. “You have gone quite white.”

As he led her slowly home, Mariana noticed her munshi walking in the lane, on the arm of their strange young visitor.

What did Munshi Sahib know? she wondered. And why had he given her that hollow look, his hand tightening on the Afghan boy's shoulder?

“I DO not like the boy,” Dittoo said firmly, as the English lady and her uncle rode toward the bungalow.

He spoke with the conviction of a man experienced with foreigners. “Bibi,” he declared, “knows nothing of these people. Without knowing it, she has let a thieving little dancing boy into this house. And I can tell you something else. Now that he is here, he will be difficult to get rid of.”

Having said his piece, he hawked and spat into the dust beneath the tree where he squatted with his two companions. Birds chattered above his head. A goat bleated in a neighbor's garden.

Ghulam Ali grimaced. “I would have told her not to take him in,” he pointed out, “but she sent me inside to fetch Munshi Sahib.”

“You should have said something, Yar Mohammad,” Dittoo added accusingly. “You had the opportunity, but you stood there and said nothing.”

“It was for Munshi Sahib to decide if the boy should stay.” The tall groom got to his feet, and turned far-seeing eyes upon the other two men. “It was not for us to offer our opinions,” he added, as he started away to take the lady's horse.

Dittoo clucked to himself as he hunched his way to Mariam Bibi's bedroom with a reviving cup of tea. Her munshi was a clever old gentleman, there was no doubt of that. But he was old, and old men made mistakes.

This was certainly a serious error. How would they manage, with a boy of ill repute in the house?

Nothing would upset Dittoo more than to see his unusual English lady hurt.

He had served her through many adventures over the past three years, but the first of these, her miraculous rescue of Saboor, had been the greatest.

He sighed, missing the child.

He would never forget the moment on a winter night in Lahore, when he entered her tent and found her sitting on her bed, a badly treated native baby in her arms.

In his twenty-five years of serving the British, Dittoo had never seen a European woman weep over one of his own people.

When it dawned on him that the child was Saboor, Maharajah Ranjit Singh's heavily guarded child hostage, whom the Maharajah believed had magical powers, his embarrassment at the lady's previous, unpredictable behavior had turned to admiration.

From that moment he had been convinced that she was a powerful sorceress, a modest one, to be sure, since she very rarely used her abilities, but a sorceress nonetheless.

He sniffed as he scuffed his shoes off outside her door. As for Yar Mohammad and his calm magnanimity, he would feel the boy's presence more than anyone. For all that he was a groom by trade, Yar Mohammad had loved and served Munshi Sahib faithfully for two years, bringing his tea, washing his clothes, and seeing to his food.

He, of all people, must have noticed how the boy had clung to Munshi Sahib from the moment he entered the gate.

Dittoo would have been willing to bet that Yar Mohammad had just lost his position.

September 20, 1841

A
ll summer in Kabul had been a delight. The days had been pleasantly hot, the evenings balmy, and the air so clear that one could almost read by the light of the moon. The cantonment had reveled in the city's apricots, its cherries, its great, purple mulberries and milky nuts.

Now that summer was ending, the days were cooler, and the markets were beginning to fill with fresh grapes and melons.

Sir William Macnaghten had arranged an excursion to the tomb of Babur Shah, the cultivated founder of the Mughal Empire, whose memorial garden stood on the western slope of the Sher Darwaza south of the city. After leaving the cantonment, a large, variously mounted party of officers and ladies had followed the Kabul River upstream, past formal gardens and orchards, then between the Sher Darwaza and Asmai heights, where the river emerged from the hills onto the flat Kabul plain. There, the party had crossed the river near a little painted shrine with pennants waving, and followed an uphill dirt track to the garden. Wild roses and jasmine covered the mountainside, perfuming the air and lifting the spirits. The usual grumbling and irritation of such a trip were absent. No one had complained— not Lady Macnaghten, who, for all her elegance, was a poor horsewoman; not Aunt Claire, whose palanquin bearers had patiently dragged her up the steep slope in an open sedan chair; not even the gout-ridden General Elphinstone, who had also been carried up, for it was hoped that the mountain air would do him good.

Now, after strolling in the tomb's terraced garden, with its elegant little mosque and cascading water, the party picnicked at folding tables beneath spreading plane trees, while bees buzzed around them and doves cooed in the branches overhead.

Mariana yawned behind her hand. If only she were here with someone she loved

“I hear we have put down another revolt in Kandahar,” Alexander Burnes said lazily, as he helped himself to the boiled mutton.

“We have indeed,” Sir William replied. “Some people have been saying that Afghanistan cannot be settled at the point of a bayonet, but I could not disagree more.” He signaled to a servant to pour the wine. “The situation in the south proves my point exactly. Since Shah Shuja came to the throne, his disappointed relatives have been pouting like spoiled children. They seem to think we should be giving
them
money, too. But it seems that as soon as we put one naughty boy in a corner, the rest become terrified.”

Lady Macnaghten's nephew cleared his throat. “Of course,” he put in hesitantly, “they are quite dangerous in their own—”

“Dangerous?”
General Sale stared at Charles Mott. “What do you mean? The Afghans are great braggarts, but they are cowards at heart, every last man of them.”

“Quite right,” agreed his wife, as Mott shrank into his beautiful riding coat.

“Did you say the revolt was in
Kandahar?”
Lady Macnaghten leaned forward eagerly.

“I did,” replied her husband.

At her significant glance, Aunt Claire nudged Mariana. “I hope your lieutenant is all right,” she whispered.

“Could someone,” General Elphinstone said faintly, “please take me away? I believe I must lie down.”

Brigadier Shelton looked up from cutting his chicken with one hand. “Man's an invalid,” he commented to no one in particular.

AN HOUR after the party had returned from its outing, three men stood at the foot of General Elphinstone's bed.

“I am done up, sir, done up in body and mind,” the old man announced mournfully. “As you have seen, one simple excursion has caused me a violent attack of gout and fever. I have no strength left, and my mental capacity is quite gone. Why, I can scarcely remember the names of my officers.”

His one-armed second-in-command snorted audibly. “I hope he remembers
mine”
he muttered.

“I have written once more to Calcutta,” the general added, “asking them to send me back to India. Perhaps this time the Governor-General will take pity on an old man and instruct General Nott to come up from Kandahar and replace me.”

“I quite understand, sir.” Sir William Macnaghten nodded as he drew a gold timepiece from his waistcoat pocket. “In my next communication with Lord Auckland, I shall add my own plea to yours. But let me reiterate, sir, that Afghanistan is at peace. We have no reason to anticipate any military action more than a foray or two, to keep the peace. In fact, it is so quiet that it has been suggested we send General Sale and his First Brigade back to India. And now, sir, we must leave you to rest.”

“I cannot understand why Elphinstone is so bothered,” Macnaghten confided to Brigadier Shelton as they descended the stairs. “He has practically nothing to do. Why does he not simply enjoy the lovely weather?”

“The man is a fool,” snapped Brigadier Shelton. “A hopeless, doddering fool.”

THE NEXT morning, Mariana sat in her room, Fitzgerald's latest letter in her hand.

Kandahar
, he had written,
is a desert wasteland. If it were not for our recent military success, I should be very glad to be gone. The whole landscape is parched and hostile. The walled, irrigated gardens northwest of here provide us with fresh fruit and vegetables, but they, too, are dusty and full of stones. Sometimes I like to imagine that a lush paradise lies beyond the spine of mountains I see from my window, but even if such an Eden did exist I would take little pleasure in it. What would be the worth of cool breezes or the scent of mint and lavender underfoot to a man with no other companions but his fellow officers?

Formal and distant at first, the lieutenant's letters had begun to show discomfiting signs of romantic longing. Mariana hoped no one else had seen this latest one arrive. Nothing would be more awful than to have Aunt Claire discover its existence and demand that it be read aloud.

She pictured Fitzgerald, powerful shoulders bent over a makeshift desk, choosing his words, imagining the moment when he saw her again. Whose fault was it that his letters had taken this new turn? Her own had given him no encouragement.

She folded the paper and shut it into her writing box. If Fitzgerald did love her, as her family in England and Aunt Claire had dreamed, it was dishonest to let him hope, but what else could she do?

She could not deny that his presence at Lady Macnaghten's party had given her reassurance. If she did marry him, she would somehow swallow her grief and make him happy. She would lay aside her memories of a gifted child and a graceful man with sharp-scented skin, and forget her dream of learning the Waliullah family's mystic secrets while her darling Saboor leaned against her knee and her own precious, dark-haired babies played at her feet.

If she did marry him, everyone but her would be relieved beyond measure.

She stood and walked to the window, imagining her mother in Sussex, speaking to a fellow parishioner after church. “Oh, yes,” Mama would say, her voice, so like Aunt Claire's, carrying all the way across the churchyard. “My daughter,
Mrs. Fitzgerald
, is
very
happy in India.”

To her mother, Fitzgerald must seem like the Archangel Gabriel.

Outside Mariana's window, a bowlegged water carrier crossed the garden, a full goatskin on his back, splashing the bare ground to quell the ever-present dust. Beyond the wall, past the Residence compound, the looming mountains, as always, stared her down.

She turned from the window, poured cold water into her basin, and splashed it onto her face. If Hassan did write to her after all, if he asked her to return to Lahore, her family would never understand the joy his invitation would give her.

A paper lay on her dressing table. She dried her face and glanced at it.

It was her translation of Jalaluddin Rumi, whose most famous verses she had quoted so dramatically in her letter to Hassan, thanking him for the gift of his gold medallion:

The agony of my love-desire.
She winced at the memory.

She had only one, faint hope for that humiliating letter—that it had been lost on its way to Lahore.

She sighed as she put her towel away. She needed distraction now, but never had her life felt so empty of adventure. Fitzgerald's letters complained of the dullness of Kandahar, but her life in Kabul was not much better.

Each morning, accompanied by Ghulam Ali and the silent Yar Mohammad, she rode out of the Residence compound and turned toward the great, fortified Bala Hisar, whose outstretched protecting wall climbed uphill and over the steep Sher Darwaza, and reached down to encircle the irregularly shaped walled city at its feet. Each day, instead of crossing the Kabul River and entering the city, she turned and rode toward the harsh mountains she had crossed the previous March.

“You must not enter Kabul proper without a European escort,” her uncle had warned her once again. “While I am certain the Afghans will treat you decently, I cannot afford to take that risk.”

A year earlier, Mariana would have ignored her uncle's instructions. On her very first day, she would have passed without hesitation through the nearest gate and into the fascinating fortified city that stood at the crossroads of the world. There, mingling with people from the far corners of Asia, she would have wandered its narrow lanes, its gardens and caravanserais, and admired its bazaars and their merchandise from China, Russia, Arabia, and India.

But this was different. This country had a faintly menacing flavor.

Each day she rode past the tempting city gates, with their throngs of laden porters and shouting sellers of grapes and watermelons. Each day she followed the dusty road along the river, past fruit gardens and the high, frowning bastions of the Bala Hisar, then between rows of poplar balsam trees toward the bare mountains.

After lunch, she wrote to her mother and sister of the picnics, amateur theatricals, and dinner parties she had attended with her aunt and uncle. To her father, she copied Fitzgerald's accounts of skirmishes with insurgents in Kandahar, and described the conversations she had overheard about fighting in the north.

To Fitzgerald, she wrote about nothing.

We have enjoyed one pleasant night after another
, she had written yesterday.
Last evening, we dined under a full moon in Lady Macnaghten's garden. Brightly colored Indian cloth lanterns glowed like jewels from every tree. It was quite lovely.

The garden
had
been lovely to look at, but the dinner conversation had revolved tediously around Sir William's recent appointment as Governor of Bombay, presumably to repay him for his work in Afghanistan. He and Lady Macnaghten were to leave within two months. Macnaghten's successor, Alexander Burnes, his face reddened from the wine, had prattled endlessly about the smoked salmon and cigars he ordered weekly from India for his parties in the city.

Burnes's neighbor, Captain Johnson, who had also drunk too much, had talked on about the wonders of living in Kabul without replying properly to any of Mariana's questions about the city.

“I can scarcely bear to leave town,” the captain had announced to the table at large, his pale face animated after she asked him to describe the city bazaars. “Now that I keep the cash for Shah Shuja's soldiers in my house, I hardly need to go anywhere.

“To me,” he had added rapturously, exchanging a glance with Alexander Burnes, “the beauties of the countryside are nothing compared to the pleasures of the city.”

As they walked home afterward, Uncle Adrian had shaken his head. “Johnson may enjoy living in the city, but he is a fool to keep Shah Shuja's cash there.”

In a moment the brass gong would sound, announcing lunch. Mariana straightened her back and returned to her desk. She snapped open her writing box and withdrew a letter she had written a week before.

It was probably full of mistakes, for she had not asked her teacher to correct it, but the time had come to send it on its way, and then to take the consequences.

I hope you have recovered fully from your wounds
, she had written.
I ask your forgiveness for my past mistakes. Nothing would make me happier than to know that there is still a place for me at Qamar Haveli.

I long to see you and your family once again, and to embrace my dear Saboor.

She had not had the courage to write more. With her first letter greeted by silence, she probably should not have written at all.

If it were meant for an English person, this letter would travel by official courier. Moving swiftly by relay in a pack of official dispatches, it would reach Lahore within ten days. But this letter, whose graceful, right-to-left Urdu script was intended only for native eyes, must be carried on foot.