The Rape of Venice (38 page)

If, after several weeks, Roger did not return, and when Gunston did but without Clarissa, Hickey's curiosity would naturally be aroused. Then, because he was representing Mr. and Mrs. Brook in the case against Winters, if for no other reason, he would set active enquiries on foot; but, by that time, Roger had good reason to suppose he, and probably Clarissa as well, would be beyond human aid.

That left only Gunston, who, presumably, was still encamped with his miniature army some twenty or thirty miles to the south, in Orissa. By this time he would have reported to Sir John Shore his failure to extract the twelve lakhs of rupees from the Rajah of Bahna; and Sir John might have sent him
fresh instructions. Being so well aware of the Governor's pacifist policy, Roger could pin no hope of these being an order to attack the city. At best, Gunston might be ordered to request the Rajah to receive him again so that they might discuss matters further. And if he did arrive on a second visit, that would be of no help, because it was quite certain that no one would tell him that two English people were being held prisoners there.

Thinking of Gunston caused Roger to feel a little guilty about the intense, and quite unjustified, hatred he had been stoking up against his old enemy during the past few days. It was abundantly clear now that Gunston was in no way responsible for Clarissa's abduction. All the same, Roger was inclined to excuse his injustice on the grounds that Gunston
had
pursued Clarissa and a firm belief that, had he had the wit and opportunity, and had she been a weaker, vainer woman than she was, he would have carried her off, if only to score for once off her husband, who had so often got the better of him.

Time drifted by while a series of ghastly images chased one another through Roger's tired brain. Clarissa innocently shooting at a paper target forming the centre of an apparently solid six feet square of covered straw in which, after being gagged, he had been embedded; the arrows penetrating the taut muscles of his behind; Clarissa naked on a stone slab in some heathen temple; the blood streaming from his torn face as Malderini ripped it with a piece of jagged glass; Clarissa screaming and struggling vainly in the grip of a great gibbering baboon; the young, hook-nosed, sensual-mouth Rajah looking on with gloating pleasure at these sadistic acts conjured up by the evil mind of the Venetian.

These tormenting pictures flickered in turn like the steps of a treadmill, each of which kept coming to the surface in swift rotation, across his distraught imagination. So obsessed, in fact, had his mind become with these threatened horrors that the sounds of a struggle outside the dungeon did not consciously penetrate it. Not until the door was flung open and two men ran down the steps towards him did he rouse up with a sudden start.

One held a lamp. He was a smallish man and wore a red jacket with gilt buttons. His teeth gleamed very white under a thin moustache that had long drooping ends. Evidently he was the leader as he stood by while the other, who was robed in plain white, used the jailer's hammer to knock out the bolts
that secured the shackle round Roger's ankle.

The moment he was free, the man in the red jacket grabbed him by the arm, pulled him to his feet and hurried him towards the door. Outside it a ghoulish scene was taking place. The big jailer lay sprawled on his back, his own knife protruding from his chest. He was near naked, as he had already been stripped of his robe, and a third man knelt above him swiftly unwinding the turban from his head. Snatching up the jailer's blood-stained robe, the leader of the party thrust it at Roger, signing to him to put it on over his clothes.

Roger needed no second bidding. The sight of the dead jailer had told him only a moment before that he was not being fetched to provide fiendish sport for Malderini, but was being rescued. Almost choking with excitement, he bent his head so that the greasy turban could be bound about it. Out of the corner of his eyes he glimpsed the jailer's body being thrown down the steps into the dungeon, and suppressed a semi-hysterical laugh. By using the man's own knife to kill him, taking his clothes and leaving his body within a few feet of where his prisoner had been chained to the wall, it was being made to appear as though Roger had actually carried out the plan that he had contemplated, and had abandoned only because he could see no hope of getting away from the city unaided.

The man in the red jacket sent one of his minions up the steep stairs, evidently to see that the coast was clear, as it was not until a low whistle sounded from above that he followed with Roger; the third man brought up the rear. On reaching the ground floor of the palace, they followed their advance guard at about twenty paces down a dim corridor, then through a doorway that gave onto a starlit court. The man who had gone ahead was waiting there and signed to them to halt. For two tense minutes they crouched in the shadow of the arched doorway, holding their breath, as they listened to the heavy tread of guards making a round some fifty paces distant.

When the sound had ceased, they went on again in the same order as before, slipping swiftly along one wall of the court, then half way down another and in through another door. They were now in a pillared hall and, having crossed it, turned right into a broad passage. Next moment a door in it opened and a man came out. He paused to stare at them. Without a second's hesitation, all three of Roger's companions flung themselves upon him. Before he had time to shout, a hand
was clapped over his mouth and he was borne to the ground. With swift, terrifying efficiency they strangled him.

The ruthless act confirmed Roger's belief that, whatever the cost, his rescuers meant to cover their tracks and leave it to be supposed that he had managed to escape unaided.

Leaving the body where it lay, they hurried on, and went through another doorway that led into a large wailed garden. From somewhere in the distance there came the sound of plaintive Eastern music, then of a woman's laughter. High above the walls the fronds of tall palm trees whispered in a gentle breeze. But as they crossed the garden Roger saw that its lily ponds were sheltered, so that their waters remained unruffled and mirrored the bright stars above. A heady scent filled the air from big banks of moonflowers, and from one of these against the far wall a hugely fat figure silently emerged. In a little piping voice that proclaimed him to be a eunuch, he said something to the man in the red jacket. There came the clink of coin as a small bag changed hands, then the eunuch turned and led the way to a low door in the wall. Its well-oiled bolts were pulled back and a moment later Roger and his rescuers were out in a dark street.

Quickly they made their way along it, and through others, some of which were so narrow that the jutting balconies of the houses in them were not much more than a yard apart, and almost shut out the stars. Occasionally a figure shuffled past or, vaguely seen, stirred in the shadow of a doorway. Now and then a dog barked, and once they had to step aside into the mouth of an alley to let a closely curtained palanquin pass. Here and there chinks of light gleamed between shutters or threw up the criss-cross woodwork fencing in the balconies overhead so that, although there was so little movement to be seen, there was a mysterious sense of wakeful life still pulsing behind the dark façades of many of the houses.

It was this which told Roger that it could not be as late as he had thought. He knew that it must have been about nine o'clock when he had been brought before the Rajah, but after that he had lost all sense of time. Although the agony he had endured in the dungeon had seemed interminable, he thought now that he had probably not been down there for much more than two hours; and as his rescue had obviously been carefully planned, it seemed probable that it would have been timed for the hour at which most of the inmates of the palace were settling down for the night, rather than later when any sound
of movement would have attracted attention from the guards.

After ten minutes' walk the party pulled up half way along a high wall, above which the tops of trees could be vaguely seen. The leader rapped in a pattern of knocks on a door in it, and at this signal the door was opened. They crossed a small garden and entered the house by a fretwork swing gate, which gave directly onto a room with silk-covered walls. In it an elderly woman was seated behind a low table sorting out a quantity of seed-pearls and beads of different shapes and colours. The sari she wore was quite plain but of dark rich material. She had a hook nose and fine eyes which showed that when younger she must have been very handsome; age had given her a downy moustache.

The man in the red jacket went down on his knees before her and touched the ground with his forehead. Roger had already realised that she must be someone of importance and made her a low bow. His other two rescuers had disappeared. The old lady stood up and said something to their leader that caused him to open his mouth in a laugh, which suddenly revealed that he was a tongueless mute. With a wave of her hand she then dismissed him and turning to Roger, said in Persian:

‘Leave that blood-stained garment on the floor and come with me.'

Already agog with curiosity to learn who these people were, and why they should have gone to such lengths to save him, Roger threw off the jailer's robe and followed her through a curtained doorway into a larger and more richly furnished room. At one side of it a man was sitting cross-legged on a divan. He had on a pale blue robe patterned with gold thread, and a very large flat turban, and was smoking a hookah. It was not until Roger had bowed and looked up again that he recognised him, by his fine grey upturned moustache as the nobleman who had been seated on a stool in front of the young Rajah's throne. At these much closer quarters it was also apparent that he was afflicted with an appalling squint.

Speaking as quickly as his Persian permitted, Roger at once began to express his unbounded gratitude, but his saviour cut him short by holding up his hand, waving him to be seated on a big leather pouf and saying in the same language:

‘Know Brook Sahib that I am the Wazier Rai-ul-daula, and that I have saved your life because I have hopes that you can save mine. But time is precious. Tell me what you know of
Bahna and the wizard, Malderini, who bears you so great a hatred?'

‘Of Bahna I know little, Excellency,' Roger replied; ‘only that the old Rajah died about a year ago, and that the young one defies the Company. The Venetian I met while he was in England on a mission for his Government, and I inflicted serious injury on him in a duel. He was married to an Indian Princess, but I had not the remotest idea that he was in India or what had brought him here.'

‘You know no more of him than that?'

‘No; except that, although he wields hypnotic power through his eyes, he is not a true magician. My duel with him was owing to his being caught out as a fraud.'

‘Yet, through his eyes his power is great. I am one of the very few immune from it; and only because of this.' The Wazier made a gesture towards his own eyes, and Roger realised that, on account of their terrible squint, Malderini would not be able to focus his directly on them.

‘I must, then, tell you of Bahna,' Rai-ul-daula went on. ‘The late Rajah was my brother and, at the time of which I shall first speak, I was his ambassador to the court of Delhi; so of these events I was not a witness, but I received entirely reliable accounts of them afterwards. It was fourteen years ago that the Malderinis came to India. While they traded for jewels they studied the arts of the fakirs, and by the time they reached Bahna they had mastered many of the hidden mysteries.'

‘They?' Roger repeated. ‘Does your Excellency mean that Malderini had with him a wife?'

‘No, no; the woman was his sister—a twin sister. They are said to have been so remarkably alike that but for their clothes they could hardly be told apart, and both of them possessed the power to mesmerise. Very soon the woman had gained a great influence over the ladies of the harem, and she used it to get them to persuade my brother to give the man for a wife the little Princess Sirisha. She was my brother's only child by his first wife; so a fine marriage portion went with her, and she was heiress on my brother's death to a far greater sum.

‘Naturally, he was averse to such a match. For one thing he did not wish to see her fortune going to a foreigner instead of to a Prince of some other reigning house, an alliance with which would have been of value to Bahna. For another, the Princess was only nine years old; so over young to marry. But the ladies were set upon it and made his life a misery; the man
Malderini promised by secret arts both to increase his wealth and restore his failing virility, and the question of the child's age was overcome by an undertaking that she should remain in charge of the women until she was thirteen.

‘At length my poor brother gave way and the ceremony of marriage was performed. By mesmerising him Malderini did, for a time, increase his potency, but said that he could obtain riches for him only by making a journey to the far mountains of the north, and that he must take his young wife and sister with him. In due course, with numerous attendants, they set off. What happened later we can only guess from hearsay—the garbled versions of some of the bearers who returned weeks later.

‘The sister was much the stronger personality of the two; and it may be that her brother had for long secretly resented her dominance over him. Be that as it may, after a night when the cavalcade had camped in desolate country, he suddenly announced that she was ill of fever. For two days he would allow no one except himself to tend her or enter her tent in which she lay. Two mornings later he declared her dead and that, the fever having been a form of plague, her body must be disposed of at once. He had himself already sewn it up in a sheet, and he had it thrown over a precipice.'

The Wazier paused, then went on impressively, ‘Yet the bearers who returned say that the body in the sheet had already the stench of decay. And more, more; on the first morning the vultures gathered overhead. Carrion birds have an awareness of death which brings them from afar. She must have been dead then, and Malderini's pretence that she was ill of a fever a cloak to conceal that he had murdered her.'