Far Pavilions (129 page)

He found the stairway in the wall, and climbing it, joined her on the flat strip of roof that circled the ruined dome. Below them the thorn trees and thickets and the tall grass that had grown up around the tomb were full of shadows and the tomb itself was very dark, but up here the evening sun was bright among the tree-tops and the countryside basked in the dusty golden light of an Indian evening. Out on the plain every stick and stone and blade of grass threw a long blue shadow on the ground, and soon the parrots and the pigeons would be returning to their nests and dusk would sweep down, bringing the stars and another night. And tomorrow – tomorrow or the next day – Bukta would return; and after that the lying would begin…

Anjuli had returned to her silent contemplation of the hills along the far horizon, and when at length Ash reached out and touched her, she flinched and took a swift step backward, putting up her hands as though to fend him off. His hand dropped and his brows drew together as he stared at her, frowning, and said harshly: ‘What did you think I meant to do? You can't think that I would harm you. Or… or is it that you no longer love me? No, don't turn away.’ He reached out again and caught her wrists in a grasp that she could not break. ‘Look at me, Juli! Now tell me the truth. Is it that you've stopped loving me?’

‘I have tried to,’ whispered Anjuli bleakly. ‘But… but it seems – that I cannot help myself…’ There was such despair in her voice that she might have been admitting to some physical disability like blindness, an affliction that could neither be cured nor ignored and that she must learn to accept and to live with. But Ash was not chilled by it for her mood matched his own.

He knew that though their love for each other had endured and would always endure, it had been temporarily submerged by a smothering weight of guilt and horror, and that until they had struggled free and could breathe again they had no desire for any active demonstration of it. That would return. But for the moment they were both in some way strangers to each other, because it was not only Anjuli who had changed. So much water had flowed under the bridges since they parted that even if they had met again under far happier circumstances it would have been surprising if they had found themselves able to pick up the threads again at the point where they had been cut off. But time was on their side – all the time in the world. They had come through the worst and were together again… the rest could wait.

He raised Anjuli's wrists and dropped a light kiss on each, and releasing her said: ‘That's all I wanted to know; and now that I know it I know too that as long as we are together nothing can really harm us again. You must believe that. Once you are my wife -’

‘Your
wife
–?’

‘What else? You can't think that I would lose you a second time.’

‘They will never permit you to marry me,’ said Anjuli with tired conviction.

‘The Bhithoris? They won't dare open their mouths!’

‘No, your people; and mine also, who will be of the same mind.’

‘You mean they will try and prevent it. But it's no business of theirs. This is our affair: yours and mine. Besides, didn't your own grandfather marry a princess of Hind, though he was a foreigner and not of her faith?’

Anjuli sighed and shook her head again. ‘True. But that was in the days before your Raj had come to its full power. There was still a Mogul on the throne in Delhi and Ranjit-Singh held sway over the Punjab; and my grandfather was a great war-lord who took my grandmother as the spoils of war without asking any man's leave, having defeated the army of my grandmother's father in battle. I have been told that she went willingly, for they loved each other greatly. But the times have changed and that could not happen now.’

‘It's going to happen now, Heart's-dearest. There is no one who can forbid you to marry me. You're no longer a maid and therefore a chattel to be disposed of to the best advantage. Nor can anyone forbid me to marry you.’

But Anjuli remained unconvinced. She could see no possibility of any marriage, based on religion, between two persons of widely differing faiths; and in their own case, no reason for it either. Or for any legal tie, as for her part she was more than content to spend the rest of her life with Ashok for love's sake, and no ceremony involving words spoken by a priest or magistrate, complete with documents in proof that it had taken place, would ever make any difference to that. She had already taken part in one such ceremony, yet it had not made her a wife in any sense except a purely legal one: a chattel of the Rana's – a despised chattel on whom, after those ceremonies, he had never again deigned to lay eyes. Had it not been for Ashok she would still be a maiden, and he was already the husband of her body as well as of her heart and spirit… his to do as he liked with. So what need had they for empty phrases that to one or other of them would mean nothing? or scraps of paper that she herself could not read? Besides –

She turned from him to watch the setting sun that was painting the tree-tops below her bright gold, and said in an undertone as though she were speaking to herself rather than to him: ‘They had a name for me in Bhithor. They called me… “the half-caste”.’

Ash made a small involuntary movement, and she glanced back at him over her shoulder and said without surprise: ‘Yes, I should have known that you would hear that too,’ and turning her head away again said softly: ‘Even the
Nautch
-girl never called me that. She did not dare while my father lived, and when he died, and she taunted me with it, Nandu turned on her. I suppose because it touched his pride, he being my half-brother, and therefore he would not have it spoken of. But in Bhithor it was thrown in my teeth daily, and the priests would not permit me to enter the temple of Lakshmi that is in the gardens of the Queen's House, where the wives and women-folk of the Rana worship…’

Her voice died out on a whisper, and Ash said gently: ‘You don't have to trouble yourself about such things any longer, Larla. Put them away and forget them. All that is over and done with.’

‘Yes, it is over and done with; and being a half-caste there is no need for me to trouble myself as to what my people or my priests will do or say, since it seems that I have neither the one nor the other. Therefore from now on I will be a half-caste, and a woman of no family, from nowhere… one whose only god is her husband.’

‘Her
wedded
husband,’ persisted Ash obstinately.

Anjuli turned to look at him, her face dark against the sunset. ‘It may be… if you truly desire it, and if… But until you have seen those who are in authority over you and spoken with your priests, you cannot know if it is possible, so let us talk no more of it now. The sun is almost gone and I must go down and prepare food for us while it is still light enough to see.’

She slipped past him and went down the dark stairway, and Ash let her go without making any attempt to stop her. Instead he went to stand by the parapet, and leaning his arms on it, looked out towards the hills, as she had done, and reviewed all the difficulties that lay ahead.

45

‘I shall have to be careful,’ thought Ash. ‘Very careful.’

Last night after Bukta had left him he had contemplated flight. Juli and he must leave Gujerat at once, and on no account must he return to Ahmadabad. They could board the Bombay train at some small wayside station, and long before the Diwan's men could pick up their trail they would have left Central India and the Punjab behind them, crossed the Indus and be safely back in Mardan.

It had seemed the obvious thing to do. But then that was the trouble: it was too obvious. It was what he would be expected to do, and therefore he could not do it. He would have to be a lot cleverer than that – and pray that whatever decision he came to was the right one, for if it were not, neither Juli nor he would live long enough to regret it.

He had still not made up his mind when Anjuli called him down to eat. She had made a small fire in the corner of the tomb, and before it went out, Ash burned the packet of letters that he had written in the room above the charcoal-seller's shop in Bhithor, and that Sarji and Gobind had known they dared not keep, because had the Bhithoris found them they would have been evidence that would have betrayed him. He watched them shrivel and turn black, and later, when Anjuli was asleep, he went noiselessly out into the starlight to sit on a fallen block of stone near the entrance of the tomb, to think and plan…

He did not doubt that Bhithor and its Diwan would require vengeance for the lives of those who had died – and a lingering death for the widowed Rani, who would be blamed for everything. The hunt would be called against her, and it would not be abandoned until the hunters became convinced that she and her two remaining rescuers had lost their way among the trackless hills and died of thirst and starvation. Only then would Juli be safe. Juli and Bukta. And incidentally, he himself.

He had allowed Bukta to suppose that the Bhithoris would have no reason to connect an officer-Sahib from a cavalry regiment in Ahmadabad with the disappearance of one of the late Rana's widows. But that was not so, since was it not a Captain-Sahib, one Pelham-Martyn of the Guides, who had escorted the Ranis to their wedding and outwitted the Rana and his councillors in the matter of the bride-price and dowries? And had not an officer of the same name recently warned certain British officials in Ahmadabad that if and when the Rana died his widows would burn? – and sent off several strongly worded telegrams to that effect?

Besides, as it was already known in Bhithor that the Hakim-Sahib had arrived there by way of Ahmadabad, and that his servant Manilal had subsequently visited that city on two separate occasions in order to purchase medicines, the Bhithoris would certainly not neglect to send spies there in search of the missing Rani. In fact it was only too likely to be among the first places they would think of; and once there, decided Ash grimly, they would find abundant evidence that he had interested himself in the widows, and almost certainly discover that both Gobind and Manilal had stayed at his bungalow. That last would be the vital link, and unless he was much mistaken, from there it would be only a short step to murder: his own as well as Juli's. And probably Bukta's too.

The odds were frightening, because the one thing he could be certain of was that Bhithor would move quickly. The Diwan could not afford to be dilatory, and search parties would already be hurrying to cover every possible escape route to Karidkote, while others would soon be on their way to Gujerat. Yet after careful consideration Ash came to the conclusion that the best thing he could do – in fact the only thing – was to return to his bungalow and brazen it out.

Juli would have to go on ahead with Gul Baz, while he followed a few days later with Bukta, arriving as though from the direction of Kathiawar in the southern half of the peninsula, instead of from the northern districts that bordered on Rajputana – and with a different lie to account for Sarji's death and the loss of the horses.

They must say that they had changed their plans and gone south together, and that Sarji and the horses had been drowned while crossing a tidal river, the bodies being swept out to sea and lost in the waters of the Gulf of Kutch. His own grief at the loss of his friend (genuine enough, God knew), not to mention the loss of a much-valued horse, would more than account for his showing no further interest in the fate of the Ranis of Bhithor.

He still had a good deal of leave at his disposal: those weeks that he had planned to spend with Wally on trek through the high country beyond the Rotang Pass. The trek would have to be cancelled, for he must spend the next week or so idling about cantonments, disposing of unwanted property and making leisurely arrangements for the homeward journey to Mardan, in order to demonstrate to any who might be interested that he had nothing to hide and was in no particular hurry to leave the station.

The presence of an additional woman in the servants' quarters was unlikely to arouse much interest (even if it were noticed) for who would expect to find a high-born lady, daughter of a Maharajah and widow of a Rana of Bhithor, agreeing to live in seclusion among the Sahib's Mohammedan servants, in the guise of his bearer's wife? Such a thing would be unthinkable, and even those Bhithoris who had termed her ‘the half-caste’ would not credit it. They would probably watch him for several days, taking careful notes of his behaviour and his every move, and in the end they would come to the conclusion that he could have taken no part in the escape, but had lost interest in the Ranis after sending off those telegrams, and did not intend to do anything more on their behalf. They would return to Bhithor and report as much to the Diwan, who would turn his attention elsewhere. And Juli would be safe.

It was a pity about that trek; Wally was going to be disappointed. But he would understand that it could not be helped, and they could always go another year. There was plenty of time…

His mind made up, Ash lay down across the entrance to the tomb so that no human or animal could pass in without waking him, and was asleep before the moon rose. But though tonight his sleep was untroubled by dreams, it was not so with Anjuli, for three times that night she cried out in the grip of a nightmare.