A Beggar at the Gate (22 page)

D
ivorce? Her heart racing, Mariana stared after Hassan. Had he really expected to keep her as his wife even after he had massacred her people? If so, then for all his calm elegance, he must be mad.

She got up shakily and pushed her feet into her new leather slippers. She must escape to Shalimar and warn her uncle and the Vulture, but how? No one in this house would lend her a horse, and even if they did, how could she ride safely, alone and uncovered, through the crowded streets of this city? A palanquin would be better, but where would she find one? Who would be her bearers?

Someone spoke quietly in the passageway outside. Mariana stiffened. Who was there? Was it Safiya Sultana, whose calm presence and compelling storytelling had masked her cruelty, or was it the sly Akhtar, whose paints and unguents had prepared Mariana for Hassan's poisonous, stroking hands?

She crept to the doorway and peeped around the curtain. The corridor outside was empty, save for Akhtar, who hurried toward her.

“Peace, Bibi,” she offered, smiling. “Safiya Sultana is calling you. She wants to show you—”

“A burqa.” Mariana gripped Akhtar's arm and dragged her into the bedchamber. “I need to cover myself,” she whispered fiercely, remembering a rainy morning two years earlier, and herself shrouded in yards of dusty white cotton. “I must leave this house immediately. My uncle is ill,” she added, searching for a plausible excuse. “I must go to him at once.”

Akhtar stared. “But you must not leave now,” she protested. “You must stay here with the ladies. Hassan Sahib will be coming again tonight. Everyone is so happy now that you and he have—”

“Bring it
at once.
” Mariana dug her fingers into Akhtar's thin arm.

“I have no burqa,” Akhtar whispered tremulously, wincing at the pain. “I have only an old chador. It belongs to—”

“Bring it.”

Akhtar fled. The family ladies could not have been told the truth. Mariana imagined them all watching her now, shaking their heads at her fear and her fury, imagining she had gone mad. “What a pity,” they would cluck to each other. “Poor Hassan. He had been so patient, so good to her.”

Safiya Sultana and Hassan knew quite well that she was not insane. They also must have known all along how and when the English were to be butchered. After all, they had sought no information from Mariana. Instead, they had drawn her in slowly, firing her imagination with their stories, their kindness to strangers, their poetry and perfumes….

Why leave us at all?
Hassan had asked her.

She turned back into the bedroom, remembering the poem Akhtar had recited to her yesterday: one that Safiya had written when she was eleven years old.

Yesterday, that poem had seemed lovely and compelling. Today, with its reference to a hidden woman, it had a sinister tone. Mariana shivered. Safiya knew how to cure many illnesses with her potions and her amulets, if Akhtar was to be believed. But could she also destroy? If she chose to, could Safiya actually drive her mad?

The natives are not to be trusted at this perilous time.
Why had she not seen that Safiya, good as she was to her own people, had no compassion for or understanding of outsiders? How had she missed the hardness beneath Safiya's exterior? Why had she trusted her?

Trust had been Hassan's word.

Enough. She must stop thinking of herself and go to Shalimar. She might never recover from last night's terrible mistake, but for now she had vital work to do.

She crossed the room and opened her small trunk. There, neatly arranged, were her hairbrushes, her best set of stays, and her second-best gown. She must leave them all behind, but even if she took them with her, they would do her no good. Her appearance would never matter again.

Akhtar burst into the room, a stained cotton sheet the color of earth balled up in her hand. Mariana snatched it from her and cast it over her head. It smelled evil.

“There is no time to talk,” she said, fanning away the smell, “but before I leave,” she added, remembering, “what does
iddat
mean?”

Akhtar's sharp little chin had begun to wobble. “It is a woman's waiting time after her divorce. After she has been with her husband, she must let three monthly periods go by before she is allowed to marry again. But Bibi, please,” she pleaded, “do not think of—”

“And where would she spend those months?”

“Here, Bibi.” Akhtar wiped her cheeks with her fingers. “You would spend them here, at Qamar Haveli.”

“Never,” Mariana snapped before starting for the door.

Outside, two women sweepers moved crabwise across the floor, patiently gathering little heaps of dust, their soft grass brooms flicking along the wall and into corners. Mariana drew the chador over her nose and mouth, lowered her head, and hurried past them and down the back stairway. Once safely through the kitchen and across the servants’ courtyard, she would open the back gate and gain the narrow street that ran alongside the house. She would be anonymous there….

She had almost reached the kitchen when a deep, familiar voice issued from inside. “We are not so poor, Khadija,” the voice decreed, “that we must give our guests watery
aloo gosht.”

Her heart thundering, Mariana flattened herself against the wall, praying that Safiya had not finished ordering, that she would not emerge from the kitchen on her way upstairs.

“And I want you to add more chilies and salt to the lentils,” the voice continued, growing closer. “They were too bland yesterday.”

With no time for fear, Mariana sprinted back upstairs, the chador flying. Looking neither right nor left, she scurried past the room where she had spoken to Hassan, then hurtled down the spiral staircase and into the Shaikh's empty courtyard.

“Who are you?” One of the guards peered suspiciously at her a moment later, after she had made her breathless way past the busy stables. “Why do you want us to open the gate?”

“My name is Akhtar,” she lied. “I serve Safiya Bhaji and the other ladies. Please let me out. My uncle is ill.”

Her head bent, her face covered, Mariana tried to conceal her pale hands. She bent her knees to lengthen her chador, aware that the bright designs on her feet were barely concealed by her dainty leather slippers. Terrified that Akhtar had already told Safiya, that people had already begun to look for her, she forced herself not to look backward over her shoulder. “Please,” she begged.

“You say you are Akhtar, who works upstairs with old Firoz Bibi? The one whose husband burned her with—”

The first guard put up a hand for silence. “The next time you want to leave,” he said gruffly, as he tugged the bolt open on the great double doors, “go out through the kitchen.”

A quarter mile before she reached Shalimar, Mariana leaned against a dusty tree and pulled off one of her shoes. She had not dared to look at her feet during her three-mile walk in those inadequate slippers, but now she wanted to see the damage.

It was worse than she had imagined. Blood from her blisters had seeped into the slipper's thin leather sole. Grimacing, she forced it back onto her foot and continued her painful progress toward the English camp.

Her journey had been difficult, if uneventful. Once free of the haveli, she had started off as rapidly as she could along a narrow lane between tall, ramshackle brick houses and boarded shops. She had passed the Delhi Gate Bazaar with its shouting merchants and heaps of grains and spices, then joined the mass of people with bundles on their heads who hurried out through the heavy, pointed archway of the gate itself and into the heaving crowd of men and animals emerging from the great open caravanserai outside.

Afraid of being trampled, coughing at the clouds of dust, Mariana had tried to hug the worn brick wall opposite the great caravanserai gate, but had found it, with its squatting men, to be no safe place for her. Instead, clutching her chador with one hand, she had struggled along, buffeted by speeding donkey carts and pushed aside by groups of hurrying, barefoot men, until she had emerged at last, onto the road to Shalimar.

No one had tried to stop her on the way, although she had certainly been noticed. A merchant here, an old woman, a group of children there, had watched her pass, taking in the good cotton clothes that peeped from behind her chador, studying her hands, her feet. Word of the route she had taken would, she was sure, reach the Waliullahs within hours of her escape, perhaps sooner.

A mile from the city, the road had been less crowded, but still there had been donkeys, files of silent camels, creaking bullock carts as tall as ships, and gangs of turbaned horsemen, all, curiously enough, heading away from the city instead of toward it, but in all that crowd, there had been no lone woman. The only women visible on the road had been stuffed into the backs of carts with groups of children, or walking single file with huge bundles of straw on their heads, safe in each other's company. Hot under her chador, her feet blistering, aware of the stares of her fellow travelers, Mariana had longed to ask for a place in one of the carts, but with nothing to offer the driver and no man to protect her, she had kept to herself.

The sun had been overhead by the time the dusty walls of the garden had appeared in the distance.

At the gate, ignoring the row of beggars who pleaded for her attention, she lowered the chador from her face and breathed deeply. Once she was inside the garden, sounding the alarm would be easy. She had only to repeat what she had overheard from the verandah window, and the Vulture and Uncle Adrian would understand at once, and do everything necessary to thwart Hassan's plan. But what of her? How was she to forgive herself? How would she ever recover from her remorse at letting herself be fooled by the Waliullahs, deflowered by Hassan, ruined for life?

Throughout her year of gossip and ostracism in Calcutta, she had taken refuge in the knowledge that she was pure. Now even that small comfort was gone.

She must tell no one, not her mother in England, not her sister Charlotte. She could never marry. Even if she met Harry Fitzgerald again, even if he fell to his knees and begged for her hand, she must refuse. She would never have a single fair-haired baby of her own. She would never see Saboor again.

She had never even kissed him good-bye

Minutes later, red-eyed and bone-weary, she entered the gate and presented herself at the Vulture's tent.

“Political Agent Sahib is not here,” declared his head servant, a liveried fellow with a superior air. “He is sitting over there, with visitors.”

He pointed to a distant tree where the Vulture sat in an upright chair waving his arms at four armed men in coarse, Afghan clothing who stood in front of him, listening.

“Call him at once,” she ordered, tearing off her chador. “Tell him Miss Givens is here to see him.”

“Miss Givens! Good heavens, I hardly recognized you.” The Vulture looked her up and down a moment later, astonishment on his face. “How have you come? Is your divorce arranged? Why are you wearing native dress? Why are you so dirty?”

“I walked from the city, Mr. Clerk. I have something important—”

“Have you discovered the time and place of Sher Singh's assault on the city? Have you learned anything else I should know? Will the Rani accept his offer of safe passage, or will he launch an attack upon the Citadel?”

She paused, aware of the need for care in telling her story. If the Vulture thought she was hysterical, he might not believe her. “I have overheard a conversation between my husband and one of his friends,” she began, measuring her words. “They were speaking of an assassination in a garden.”

“Yes?” He leaned forward eagerly.

“My husband said there were to be shooters and victims. They mentioned a ‘center pavilion.’ They hate us all. I was shocked at the bitter, murderous way they spoke of us.” Mariana shivered. “As soon as I heard those words, I escaped the haveli in disguise and came to tell you.”

He flapped an impatient hand. “I am sorry to hear that, but what I want to know is the day and time of Sher Singh's attack.”

Why was the man so fixed upon Prince Sher Singh? “Mr. Clerk, I am trying to tell you that Hassan Ali Khan is sending Afghan marksmen to Shalimar with orders to enter the garden, station themselves near the center pavilion, and shoot all of you on sight—everyone: you, Lady Macnaghten, Mr. Mott, and my aunt and uncle.”

The Vulture drew himself up, his Adam's apple bobbing. “My dear young lady,” he inquired, his eyebrows raised in astonishment, “whatever has given you that idea?”

H
e was mad. They were all mad. Without another word, Mariana turned on her heel and limped away, leaving the Vulture gazing after her, his mouth ajar.

She had nearly reached her tent when someone called out to her. “Miss Givens,” he shouted, “I thought it was you!”

Mariana looked in the direction of the voice and saw Charles Mott galloping awkwardly toward her, his expensive frock coat flapping about him. “We must speak,” he panted, stopping short. “I have something—”

“Get out of my way,” she snapped. “I have nothing to say to you.”

Of all the people she did
not
wish to see…

“But, Miss Givens, I—”

“Memsahib?” Before Mott could say anything more, Dittoo appeared in the doorway of Mariana's tent, his eyes wide. “But how have you come here? Where is Saboor Baba? Why are you wearing that filthy chador?”

“I will explain later,” she replied, then hobbled into her tent and sank wearily onto her bed. “Bring me a bucket of hot water and a cup of salt,” she ordered as she peeled away her ruined slippers.

Before he shuffled off, Dittoo turned to her, his ugly face creased with worry. “You should know, Memsahib,” he said, “that your uncle is very ill.”

As the door blind fell into place, she bit back hot tears. With Uncle Adrian ill and the Vulture refusing to listen, there would be no one to help her. How, then, was she to save any of them?

Later, in the dining tent, she toyed with a plate of boiled chicken as the conversation rose and fell around her. Since her arrival at camp, nothing had gone as it should. After soaking her feet and bandaging them as best she could with several handkerchiefs, she had changed her clothes, forced on a pair of boots, and hurried to her uncle's tent, only to be shooed outside by an exhausted-looking Aunt Claire.

“He has finally fallen asleep,” she whispered, waving Mariana away from the entrance. “It is cholera, just as we thought. For several days he was unable to eat, and then he developed a pustule on his hand. The real illness set in yesterday afternoon. His purgings went on all night. They have ceased this morning, but that only makes me fear the worst.”

She stared briefly at Mariana. “Why do you look different, and why are you so dirty?” She sighed and pushed bedraggled hair from her face. “I do not suppose it matters now. I am quite at my rope's end. Will you sit with Adrian until dinner, while I lie down in your tent?”

Mariana nodded.

“Thank you, my dear. If his thirst should return, there is a jug of sweetened vinegar water beside the bed.” Aunt Claire gestured toward a grizzled old servant who stood anxiously by the doorway. “Adil will help you if you need anything.”

Uncle Adrian had curled his body so tightly under the sheets that Mariana could see only the bald top of his head and a fringe of gray hair. Perched stiffly on a chair beside him, she willed him to awaken, to hear her story, to tell her what to do.

It seemed like hours before he spoke. When he did, his voice sounded slurred and indistinct beneath the covers.

“It's Mariana,” she told him quietly, leaning over the bed. “What did you say, Uncle Adrian?”

“Clerk,” he said with an effort, “is up to no good.”

“Yes, you told me that in your letter.” He was clearly too ill to be told of the coming attack. She pressed a hand to her forehead, forcing herself to put aside her own desperation, to be patient with her uncle's irrelevant concerns.

“Mott will give you the details of Clerk's plan. I know you do not like Mott, but you must speak to him about this. You must try to stop them before—” He groaned.

“Of course I will, Uncle,” Mariana lied. As he began to thrash, throwing himself from side to side on the bed, she reached out, then pulled back her hand, unsure whether to touch him.

“What are you doing?” Aunt Claire burst through the doorway, a dripping cloth in one hand. “You are not to let him exhaust himself with speaking,” she snapped as she applied the wet cloth to her husband's shifting forehead. “Go to the dining tent and have your dinner. Tell them to send me a tray. And for goodness’ sake, wash your face before you go.”

But dinner had already begun. When Mariana rushed into the dining tent, she found everyone already sitting down. In his seat beside Lady Macnaghten, the Vulture was buttering a piece of bread. “It is a pleasure to be dining with you, Miss Givens,” he observed, nodding as Mariana took her seat, splaying his fingers on the butter knife, “although you certainly surprise me with your
extraordinary
appearance.”

His tone was especially unpleasant. Mariana glanced up to see Lady Macnaghten staring covertly at her face.

“Your face is dirty,” Lady Macnaghten hissed. “It is all smudged with dust.” She leaned across Uncle Adrian's empty place. “But your eyebrows are nicely done,” she added, offering Mariana a conspiratorial half-smile before straightening in her seat, “and I quite like your hair.”

“Miss Givens,” the Vulture interjected, “arrived precipitously this afternoon from the walled city. I am quite mystified as to why she has come. She has brought us no information of value, nor has she achieved her divorce.”

“You know exactly why I have come, Mr. Clerk.” Mariana did not bother to keep the anger from her voice. “I am here to inform you that sharpshooters are being sent from the walled city to kill us all.”

Lady Macnaghten gasped. Around the table, officers exchanged glances.

“You are quite wrong, Miss Givens,” drawled the Vulture. “Nothing of the sort is going to happen. You must pay no attention to her.” He inclined his head toward Lady Macnaghten. “We are perfectly safe here at Shalimar.”

“But how can you—”

“You, Miss Givens,” he said coldly, dropping one of his hands onto the table with a thump, “would have done well to have remained at Qamar Haveli. You should have made it your business to confirm necessary information, instead of rushing here with false intelligence and trying to frighten everyone.” He sniffed. “I certainly do not need advice from a young woman with a grimy face and a dirty black cord around her neck.”

At the end of the table, the senior baggage officer cleared his throat noisily, as if to drown out the Vulture's rudeness. The three other officers began to speak at once.

Charles Mott put down his napkin and leaned toward her. “I have been trying to tell you, Miss Givens,” he murmured, “that the sharpshooters you fear belong to Mr. Clerk, not the Punjabis. They are to assassinate not us, but Prince Sher Singh in the Hazuri Bagh while his troops are storming the Citadel.”

Mariana felt her face go pale. Before she had time to pull herself together and question him, Mott shook his head warningly

“I will tell you more after dinner,” he said quietly.

Later, after ushering a mystified Mariana from the tent, he glanced over his shoulder before speaking. “The Hazuri Bagh, the Garden of Nobles,” he said quietly, “lies between the Badshahi Mosque and the main Citadel gate. It is from there that Prince Sher Singh will blow open the gate and launch his attack on the Rani. Clerk's plan is to send sharpshooters into the Hazuri Bagh. They are to lie in wait near the center pavilion, and shoot Sher Singh during the battle.”

“The
Garden
of Nobles?” Mariana's mouth went dry. “A
center pavilion? Sharpshooters?
But why?”

“Clerk is ambitious, Miss Givens. He wants the Punjab annexed to British India whilst he is Political Agent. The simplest way is to make sure this country has no decent ruler, then to step in during the inevitable chaos. Sher Singh is too popular and too competent for Clerk's taste. Of course, in time the Sikhs may kill each other off without any interference from us, but Russell Clerk is not a patient—”

“Are you certain of this?” Mariana interrupted.

Mott mopped his forehead with a damp-looking handkerchief. “I know you think me a fool, Miss Givens,” he said bluntly, “and I have been one. But I also have a great deal of respect for your uncle since he—I do not suppose we should go into that. In any case, when your uncle suspected that Clerk was up to something, he asked me to discover what it was. As Clerk had taken me into his confidence, I was able to learn the details of his plan. I am an intelligence officer, after all,” he added with a sour smile.

“But now Mr. Lamb is ill,” he went on, “and I do not know what to do. We are, of course, forbidden to engage in any sort of intrigue with the natives, but Clerk is our senior-most officer here. There is no one for hundreds of miles with the authority to stop him.”

What had she done?

“Men in the city already know of the assassination plot,” Mariana croaked. “Let us pray they will know what to do,” she added as she started painfully for her tent.

LADY MACNAGHTEN had been quite correct about her face. As Mariana held up her looking glass and stared into it, she saw that her cheeks were smeared with the dust and tears of her journey. Pointlessly elegant brows now framed her face. Her skin, where it was clean, looked uselessly fresh and dewy.

On another day, Lady Macnaghten's friendly words would have given Mariana joy. Now that she had thrown away her chance at happiness, they only added to her misery.

Why had she not asked Hassan whose assassination he had been discussing as he stood with his friend under that open window? Why had she rushed so hastily to judgment against people who had offered her nothing but acceptance and love, who had only wanted to protect her from the Vulture's treachery?

I am keeping her here,
Hassan had said.
She is to know nothing about this.

She gulped back tears as she scrubbed the dirt from her face.

From the very beginning when she had accepted his proposal in front of the court, she had done everything wrong. Blinded by ignorance and her own stupid, headlong nature, she had behaved again and again like an ogre in a fairy story.

You shout, you fight, you interfere,
Hassan had told her, in that cold, implacable voice.

He had been right. She had done all those things. And worst of all, she had failed to trust him.

She must return at once to Qamar Haveli and throw herself upon his mercy, and the mercy of his family. Safiya had forgiven her before; perhaps she would again, but what of her tender, elegant Hassan? What of the heavy finality of his last speech to her? What if he refused to take her back, to let her be his wife, to let her be Saboor's mother?

If he would not, she would surely die.

But she could not leave for the city now, with her uncle so desperately ill. And even if he survived, she and Aunt Claire would face days and nights, perhaps weeks, of difficult nursing before he was fully recovered.

Whatever decision she made now, it would come with a terrible price. Whether she returned to the haveli or stayed at Shalimar, she stood to lose critical things—her uncle, Hassan, Saboor, Safiya, the possibility of happiness, her own self-regard.

Whatever her decision, its results would haunt her for the rest of her life.

But wait. She ceased drying her face and straightened, the damp towel dangling from her hand.

Who had told her that Safiya Sultana had a cure for cholera?

It had been the woman who had brought the young, despairing mother to be cured.
It is said that she can even cure cholera,
the woman had confided.

“NO, MARIANA, this is madness.” Aunt Claire drooped in the upright chair an hour later, her eyes large in her yellow face. “You must stop asking me. It is much too dangerous. I could not bear to lose both of you.”

“But it is his only chance.” With her uncle moaning on the bed beside them, Mariana summoned the last of her persuasive power and knelt beside her aunt's chair. “I shall ask Safiya Sultana to return here with me,” she insisted, gazing into her aunt's face. “She is a native, but she is renowned for her ability to heal. They would never have told me she had a cure for cholera if it were untrue.”

It was no use. As Mariana moved to stand, her strength very nearly exhausted, her aunt closed her eyes. “Very well,” she sighed. “You may go, but not until the morning. And after you do, you must return as quickly as you can.”