Kitabı oxu: «The Faraway Drums»

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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First published by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1981

Copyright © Jon Cleary 1981

Jon Cleary asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint extracts from:

Woman Correspondent by Bridget O’Brady Farnol

(New York, 1966: William Morrow and Co. Inc.)

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780006167112

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007569007

Version: 2015-06-01

Dedication

For Alberto and Jorge

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE
1

It was a beautifully clear day for an ambush. Clive Farnol was working his way up from the Satluj River towards the Tibet Road, climbing a steep rocky ridge, when it happened. The first bullet hit one of the four Paharee porters, tumbling him backwards down the slope, and the next three shots sent chips flying from a rock right beside Farnol.

He heard Karim Singh swear and the three surviving porters cry out in fear. Then he swore himself as another bullet whined away off the rock only inches from his face, flicking grit into his face. He tried to roll himself into a ball behind the rock, no easy task for a man as tall as himself, and squinted over his shoulder at Karim. The Sikh was equally tall and he looked awkward and embarrassed as he tried to make himself as small a target as possible. The three porters, all small men, were already sliding back down the ridge, their packs abandoned, their swiftly retreating backs declaring neutrality.

‘Coward buggers,’ said Karim, spitting down the ridge.

Farnol felt he couldn’t blame the porters; it wasn’t in their contract that they should die for five annas a day. The shooting had stopped, but he knew that it was not finished. The ambushers, whoever they were, were probably working their way to better positions to pick off him and Karim. But who were they? Why had they chosen to shoot at this small party of travellers? He and Karim were both in hillmen’s dress: baggy breeches, faded shirts, goatskin vests and turbans. True, they both carried Lee-Enfield rifles, but the chances were that the rifles firing on them were also Lee-Enfields; stolen British Army weapons were a mark of honour amongst the hillmen, a sort of self-conferred, lethal Order of the Indian Empire. But why waste bullets on what, from a distance, would have looked like nothing more than a small party of villagers moving down from the high mountains to Simla? Any ordinary band of dacoits would have waited till the party had climbed up to the road, then set on them, cut their throats with kris and taken what loot they wanted from the packs carried by the porters. And, of course, taken the two rifles.

Farnol suddenly rose up, scrambled up the hill and fell into a depression behind a larger rock; bullets chased him but missed. Karim remained where he was, now lying flat on his back behind a thin spine of rock; he had worked out that the shots were all coming from one direction, a ridge above them and to their left. He was an old hand at ambushes, having seen them from both sides.

Farnol looked around him. In the far distance, whence they had come, he could see the Eternal Snows, the last barrier of the Himalayas; the morning sky was absolutely cloudless and the mountains had the sharp-edged look of white glass. Nearer, the hills fell away as steep ridges, some of them patterned with the corduroy of terraces; he could see the tiny figures of peasants tilling the rocky ground, sowing the wheat that would turn the terraces into bright strips of green in late March. On a ridge up near the road a man and a woman were digging stones and rocks from a new terrace and carting them up to the roadway where they would be used as fill: the ridges were harvested for everything that would bring in a few annas. Still nearer, on a ridge across a deep ravine, Farnol could see a goat-herd and his herd moving, like a small cloud-shadow, up towards the road. The goat-herd had stopped and was looking Farnol’s way, a disinterested spectator of the ambush: he looked at the distance as if 1 e were as unconcerned as his goats.

A flash of movement tugged at Farnol’s eye: a man ran down from the road to an outcrop of rock high to the left. Farnol turned his head and looked at the ridge on his right. A thick cloak of silver fir that ran up its spine was broken for a few yards by a gully, then continued across to cover the top of the ridge on which he lay.

‘I’m going up to the road, Karim.’

‘If you say so, sahib.’ Karim Singh was that rarity, a cautious Sikh who always weighed discretion against valour; he was no coward but he always thought twice before attempting to be a hero. He would deride others for their instant cowardice, as he just had the porters, but they were Paharees and, being a Sikh, he could not think of them with anything but derision.

‘When I reach there, you follow me.’

‘If you say so, sahib. But wouldn’t it be better to wait till nightfall?’

‘Karim, that won’t be for another eight hours!’ Then Farnol sighed. ‘I don’t know why I bother to keep you with me.’

‘You have become accustomed to me, sahib.’

True, Farnol thought. A man’s loyalty was worth more than his bravery. But he wished he had been fortunate enough to have found a legendary Sikh, one of those black-bearded heroes whom Rudyard Kipling was always writing about. Mr Kipling should be here now . . . Another shot rang out, the bullet whining away once more off the rock above Farnol.

‘I want you up there on the road five minutes after I get there. Five minutes, less if you can make it. Understand?’

He didn’t wait for Karim’s usual answer – ‘If you say so, sahib’ – but all at once rose up and flung himself down the side slope of the ridge. He heard another bullet ricochet away above him, but he kept hurtling down the slope, a tall two-legged mountain goat that, like its four-legged brethren, managed by some miracle to stay on its feet. He reached the bottom of a gully, crossed it and scrambled up to the protecting shadows of the firs. He kept moving, his lungs beginning to ache through moving so quickly in the thin air. Then something hit him and he fell sideways into a tree, all the air going out of him in a great painful gasp. For an instant he wondered why it had not occurred to him that there might be more ambushers here amongst the trees.

Then he saw the big sambhar stag go plunging down through the trees, its head twisting as its antlers struck a tree-trunk, its panic evident in the reckless way it skidded and slid and jumped down the steep slope. Farnol stood up, felt for broken bones, decided there was none and moved on, stiffly now, up through the trees. He had been shooting sambhar for ten years, but he had never been closer than a hundred yards to them. It would be something to tell in the mess, if ever he got back to the mess, that he had been knocked down by a stag as big as a small elephant. Or so it had seemed.

He worked his way up the ridge, stopping only once, to catch his breath and to check he had a full magazine in his rifle. He wore a bandolier of ammunition, but he did not want to get into a protracted battle with the ambushers. He had no idea how many were in the band of dacoits, but he guessed there were no more than three or four.

He came to the edge of the trees, and saw the road running slightly downhill to his left. That meant, with luck, he should be above the enemy, a golden rule amongst hillmen. He had been born in these hills; he had been sent to England, to Wellington and Sandhurst, to be educated; his real education, that needed for survival here, had been bred into him at birth. Four generations of Farnols had fought in India and three of them had been born here; there were instincts inherent in him that still prevailed under the varnish that the years in England had applied. He understood as well as anyone that the tribesmen of these hills, from Afghanistan as far east as Nagaland, knew as much about fighting as any graduate of Sandhurst, probably a great deal more.

He crossed the road at a run, made it to the forest of firs that continued up the slope. He moved swiftly, his experience showing in the way he made use of his cover: like Karim Singh, he was a veteran of ambushes. But on those other occasions he had half-expected them, had known the reason for them.

He came to the spot where, on the opposite side of the road, there was a cairn of stones with a pole of prayer-flags fluttering above it. Pious travellers had built the cairn over the years, each adding a stone to it as he passed; Farnol offered his own prayer of thanks to the religious who had built such a fine redoubt for him. He ran across the road again, took cover behind the big pile of stones and looked down the slope below him. Above him the prayer-flags fluttered like live birds tied by their feet to the pole.

He saw the three men, each crouched behind his own rock, all three of them armed with long-barrelled rifles; he had been wrong about their having Lee-Enfields and he wondered what sort of guns they were. He looked around for a fourth man, one who should have been left up here on the higher ground as a look-out; but he could see no one. These men below him were either amateurs, new to the ambush game, or they were drugged with hashish, had thrown caution to the mountain wind in the excitement of killing. So far, however, they were not excited or crazed enough to stand up and charge down on where Karim still lay behind his low rock.

Farnol took aim. The men were less than a hundred yards below him, easy targets. He felt no compunction about killing in cold blood; he had learned long ago that one didn’t survive if one waited to be hot-blooded about it. Killing was not like making love: one did not work up to it.

He squeezed the trigger, saw one of the men slump down as if all his bones had suddenly melted. He jerked back the bolt, ejected the cartridge, slammed the bolt home again, took aim, fired. A second man, spinning round to face up the slope, stood as if he had been pulled up by a rope, then fell backwards over the rim of a ledge. Farnol aimed the Lee-Enfield a third time, but the third man had slid down below the rock in front of him, got a shot off up the slope as Farnol switched his aim.

Farnol knew at once that he was not going to be able to draw a bead on the man in his new position. He hesitated, scanning the slope; above him the prayer-flags cracked in the rising wind. On the next ridge the goat-herd still stood looking at this duel that was no business of his; Farnol silently cursed him for his disinterest. He was like the bloody villagers who stood on the sidelines of the polo matches down on the plains, careless of who won or lost, showing approval only if one of the players toppled from his pony and broke his leg or neck. That was India: four hundred million bystanders.

He straightened up, sped down the slope, slipping and sliding, heading for a large rock that would give him all the shelter he would need. Then, while he was in full flight, going too fast to drop down, he saw the man rise up, his rifle at his shoulder. Farnol knew he was going to die. A hillman like this one would have spent his life aiming at moving targets: sambhar, gooral sheep, pheasants and men. But the enemy bullet, if it was fired at all, came nowhere near Farnol. As he hit the ground, hurling himself forward to slide down towards the big rock, he caught a lopsided glimpse of the rifleman falling forward, losing his rifle as he did so.

Farnol lay a moment, getting his breath, waiting for the man to reach for his rifle. But he lay still, one arm flung out towards the gun. Farnol got to his feet, aching from the crash of his body against the rocky ground, gravel rash scorching him like sunburn, blood running from a cut above his eye. Moving cautiously, rifle at the ready, he went down towards the hillman. He saw Karim standing up on the next ridge, but he made no sign towards the Sikh; there would be time later to thank Karim for the shot that had saved his life. He paused about ten feet from the ambusher, tensed as the man’s arm quivered, trying to grab the rifle just beyond the reach of the weakly clawing hand. Then he moved down, put his foot on the rifle. He recognized it: a Krenk, a very old one, a Russian weapon.

He looked down at the dying man, said in Hindi, ‘Why did you try to kill me?’

The man stared up at him out of fierce eyes that were already glazing with death. The rattle was in his throat as he whispered, ‘Raj – will die!’

2

Karim Singh came scrambling across from the other ridge. ‘Sahib, that was a damned close thing! If it were not for my marvellous accuracy, you would be dead!’

‘I am grateful for your marvellous accuracy.’ One could hardly tick off a man for his conceit, not when he’d just saved your life. ‘Take a look at the other two.’

Karim went across to inspect the other two hillmen, came back to report they were both dead. ‘You too, sahib, are marvellously accurate. But haven’t I always said so? Such marvellous shots, we are. Our skill leaves me speechless!’

Farnol, deaf to the speechless Karim, was examining the dead man. He pulled his turban down over the cut above his eye and for a moment the flow of blood was staunched. He still felt sore and stiff from his plunge down the slope, but his mind was alert with questions. He went through the man’s pockets, but there was nothing in them to identify him. Some dried apricots, a string of prayer-beads: the sustenance of the traveller in these hills. Farnol himself carried apricots in his pocket, but he had never felt the need of prayer-beads.

He lifted the man’s arm to lay it by his side; he was a neat man who liked to see even the dead laid out neatly. The ragged sleeve fell back and he saw the marking on the inside of the arm at the bend of the elbow. It was smudged, not a very good tattoo; it looked like a dagger standing in the middle of a jagged circle. He stood up, went down to the other bodies, looked at the right arms: the same marking was there just inside the elbow. One of the tattoos was clearer than the others and he recognized it now for what it was meant to be: a dagger driven into the centre of a crown.

He got slowly to his feet, not wanting to believe the thought crystallizing in his mind. Raj – will die! He had taken it as a threat against himself, taking it for granted that the ambushers had somehow known who he was: a political agent, a representative of the British Raj. But the man had meant someone much higher than himself, someone for whom he had no other name but Raj. The word could mean kingdom, a ruler or a great ruler.

Or The Great Ruler: George the Fifth, King of England, already down in Bombay and on his way to Delhi where he was to be crowned Emperor of India.

3

‘You must remember, Major Farnol, you cannot rule this part of the world forever.’

‘We have no intention ever of trying to rule Tibet.’ The lama had given himself no name and Farnol knew better than to ask. He knew the etiquette and protocol of these mountains as well as he did those of the messes, the stations and the government offices down on the plains; he took care to respect these customs more than he did those of his own kind. ‘Other people covet your country more than we do.’

He was not convinced that what he said was true. Eight years ago Francis Younghusband had led a British expedition up through the passes east of Lue and on to Lhasa; Curzon, the then Viceroy, had dreamed of Britain ruling the Roof of the World as well as the Indian sub-continent. The British influence had declined after Younghusband and Curzon both retired from the imperial service, but Farnol knew there were still men in India and Whitehall who dreamed of enlarging the Empire.

‘I am not concerned for my country.’ The lama was no more than skin and bone, a shrivelled gourd for the inner peace that kept him alive. Unafraid of death, he waited patiently for its arrival like a passenger at a wayside station waiting for a train that ran to no schedule. ‘I speak of India. Time is running out for the English.’

‘Perhaps. But it won’t run out in my lifetime.’ But there were doubts nibbling like mice at all he had been brought up to believe in. ‘Not even if I live to your great and honourable age.’

The lama’s withered gums did not make an attractive smile; the warm humour was in the faded eyes peering out from its veil of wrinkles. ‘I hope you live so long, Major Farnol. But I warn you – there are men in the hills south of here who are plotting to drive the English out of India.’

‘Where can I find them?’

But the lama waved a vague hand; it looked to Farnol like a floating leaf. They were seated cross-legged on the terrace that ran along below the southern wall of the monastery; there was no fence to the edge of the terrace and below them there was a cliff that fell sheer for at least two thousand feet. Across the deep valley, an arm’s length away on the thin shining air, was the lowest range of the Eternal Snows; Farnol would have to cross it on his way back into India. He had crossed the frontier marked by the cartographers, but it was not marked on the mountains and he knew he would never be asked for a visa.

‘Somewhere. Who knows?’ The mountains were gods to the people who lived amongst them and the lama would not betray the plotters the gods had chosen to hide. Such a betrayal would need a sign from the gods themselves.

Farnol bit into one of the small Lachen apples that one of the younger monks had brought him and the lama. He had also brought some small barley cakes, an urn of tea and a bowl of yak butter. Farnol had already eaten one of the cakes and taken a sip of the buttered tea; but in all his time in these mountains he had never learned to like the taste of either. The Lachen apple, tart as the small Christmas apples he had once eaten in England, cleansed his mouth.

‘Should I fear for my own life going back through the mountains?’

The lama’s bones creaked with his shrug; the eighty-one beads of his rosary click-clicked their way between the dry twigs of his fingers. ‘Are you afraid of death?’

‘Yes.’ When you are thirty-two years did, your health is good and your prostate gland is something you don’t know you possess, why should one be unafraid of death?

The lama’s smile was all gums and wrinkles. ‘You should spend more time here with us.’

At the far corner of the terrace where it turned round the monastery wall, a man was seated facing north and east. Farnol guessed the direction of his gaze, towards Kailas, the holiest of all the holy mountains. It was there amidst the Eternal Snows, lying not only in heaven and earth but in the hearts of believers. Farnol could imagine the meditation of the unmoving man at the far end of the terrace, the trancelike contemplation which could make him part of the mountains and the mountains part of him, one with the gods. He himself had always felt the mysticism of these high places, but scepticism had always denied him the transcendental feeling that the true believer could achieve.

The lama saw Farnol looking at the man. ‘A seeker after the truth – he comes from the south. He is not one of us but he seeks the same truth.’

‘Do many come here from the outside?’

‘Not many, but some. We always make them welcome. We should make you welcome if you wished to stay.’

‘I must leave for Simla tomorrow.’ He smiled. ‘But not to seek the truth, not there.’ Not amongst the little tin gods.

‘As a young man I worked as a bearer in Simla. Are you Church of England?’

‘Occasionally.’ At Christmas, Easter and on compulsory church parades back at the regiment.

‘The Church of England doesn’t understand contemplation.’ He remembered the vicar’s wife for whom he had worked, who had always tried to tell him that cleanliness was next to godliness. He now hadn’t had a bath in sixty years and he was sure he was as close to God as any shiny-skinned Christian. ‘But then neither does the Englishman, does he? I watched him in Simla. When he was not working he was playing polo or that strange game, cricket –’

‘There’s time for contemplation there. The spectators often go into trances.’

But the lama, a wise man but unlearned in the wisdom of the west, missed the joke. Or perhaps, Farnol thought, the English sense of humour doesn’t translate well into Tibetan. He spoke five languages besides English, but humour was always the note that slipped on the tongue.

‘Take care, Major Farnol. Do not spend so much time on the playing fields. I hear whispers –’ Again the leaf of his hand floated in the air. ‘The caravans coming back bring us rumours of men in certain villages who will soon be going south to start their work.’

‘Tibetans or Indians?’ Farnol saw the lama’s hesitation and pressed the question: ‘You can tell me without offending the gods. You don’t want our soldiers coming so far north to seek them out, not again.’

‘All I can say is that they are not our people,’ said the lama and Farnol knew he would tell only the truth. ‘They are Indian. But I can tell you no more than that. The gods will tell you if they wish to.’

The man at the end of the terrace stood up. Farnol, his attention distracted for a moment from the lama, watched fascinated as the mystic, wrapped in a long brown robe, seemed to move in a trance towards the very edge of the terrace, as if he were going to step out on to the clear shining air. Farnol stopped himself from crying out; he knew better than to interfere. He knew how some of these men could put themselves into a state where they achieved the seemingly impossible: to walk through fire and come out unharmed, to sit naked amongst the ice of the highest places and be unaffected. But men did not walk on the air above a valley two thousand feet deep. Christ may have walked on the water but even He had never shown that He could walk on air.

The man abruptly stopped; Farnol guessed that his toes must be curled over the very edge of the tremendous drop. He stood there poised, unmoving, seemingly leaning on the breeze that blew up from the valley; Farnol waited for him to plunge off into the void. Then he turned round; Farnol would swear that for a moment the man actually stepped off the terrace edge, stood on the air. Then he walked back across the terrace, gliding in the long brown robe. As he disappeared past the corner of the monastery wall he looked towards Farnol and the lama. Farnol caught a glimpse of a black beard, a hooked nose and dark deep-set eyes that he was sure saw neither himself nor the lama.

‘Were the gods protecting that man when he stood there on the edge?’

‘Who knows? We can only put our trust in them. You should put your trust in them, too.’

‘I only wish I could.’ But that was not the truth: he had the sceptic’s false faith in himself.

All that had been a month ago and since then, journeying slowly back through the high passes, working the villages for information like an insurance salesman looking for new clients, he had learned nothing from the gods or any less exalted source. He had heard a rumour or two, but they had been only echoes; nobody knew, or would tell, where the gossip had begun. Once, in a village, a man had pointed a finger, but when Farnol had looked round the man the finger had been pointed at had disappeared; when he turned back the would-be informer had also disappeared. It had always been like that here in the Himalayas: mystery and magic were part of the atmosphere, conjurers, mesmerists and the occasional charlatan were as native to the mountains as the gooral sheep and the snow leopard. The only defence was never to show your bewilderment.

So he had slowly come down from the high places till he found himself on the Tibet Road above the Satluj River and there been ambushed.

He and Karim buried the three ambushers and the dead porter under cairns of stones, mindful that they would wish their own bodies to be treated that way, safe from the jaws of jackals. Then Karim had shouted at the top of his large voice, a trumpet call for the cowardly, despicable, thieving porter-buggers to come back up the ridge and pick up their packs. The porters, who had not yet been paid, a shrewd yoke that generally kept them from running too far, came back, suffered a lash or two from Karim’s lathi cane, picked up their loads and fell in behind Farnol and Karim. That night and the next Farnol and Karim took turns in keeping guard when they camped, but nobody had appeared to disturb or attack them. Yet Farnol had felt every step back along the Road, through Narkanda, Theog and Fagu, that he was being watched. But whenever he looked back, no matter how quickly, he saw no one.

On the third day after the ambush, in the late afternoon, Farnol walked into Simla. Smoke came up the steep slopes of the narrow ridge on which the town seemed to be plastered rather than built. Down in the bazaar and in the houses where the native population lived on the south side of the ridge, cooking fires had been lit and the smoke rose like an evening mist, drifting into the rear of the Europeans’ bungalows built on the upper roads. Maids came hurrying to close the windows, shouting abuse down at the lower life who dared cause this inconvenience. The lower life replied with abuse as thick and pungent as the smoke. It was an evening ritual that each level would miss if ever it were discontinued.

Farnol walked along the road just below the Mall. Indians were not allowed to walk on the Mall, the road that ran along the top of the ridge; that hand-swept, spotless roadway was reserved strictly for Europeans and the Indian nobles. Even they, too, were restricted in that they could not ride in a carriage or motor car; that privilege was reserved for the Viceroy, who, when in residence at the Lodge, would drive the length of the ridge every Sunday morning to church while lesser souls tested their faith with their feet or rode amongst the fleas in a rickshaw.

Farnol, still dressed as a hillman, did not want any run-in with the police till he reached the Viceregal Lodge. Several of the better-class Indians, out for their evening promenade, necks held stiff in their Celluloid collars, looked contemptuously at him, Karim and the three porters; but there was something about the bearing of the tall bearded hillman that stopped them from telling him to get down to one of the even lower roads. Farnol smiled to himself, knowing their thoughts: there was no one more jealous of his station than the Indian who worked for the Indian Civil Service. But then there was no one more class conscious than the English Brahmins of the ICS.

‘Snob buggers,’ said Karim Singh, who had his own contempt for office wallahs. ‘When do we go down to Delhi, sahib?’

‘Tomorrow, perhaps the day after. It will depend on Colonel Lathrop.’

A lot would depend on George Lathrop. It was he who had recruited Farnol from Farnol’s Horse and, three years ago, sent him into the North-West Frontier as a political agent. Since then there had been other excursions, all of them dangerous, not all of them rewarding; Farnol, a man ambitious for a certain degree of comfort, had had moments when he had wondered why he agreed to work for Lathrop. He had been born in India of a family that had first come here in 1750 to work for the East India Company; his great-great-grandfather had formed Farnol’s Horse, a Company regiment, in 1776 and the eldest son or only son of each succeeding generation had been expected to join the regiment. After his education in England Clive had returned to join the Horse, to find his place in the circumscribed life that was the way of the Indian Army. Even if all the blood in him was English, he had been infected by Indian ways: he saw the sybaritic life that the princes lived and he had longed for the opportunity to fall prey to such corruption. He had slept with the daughters of princes and with the wives of several; had he been caught his pure English blood would have run very freely out of his slit throat and down his dress uniform, for princes had a proper sense of occasion even for executions and would not have allowed him to die in regimental undress. But his success with the ladies, by their being clandestine, had not led to any invitations to join the luxury life in the palaces. In the end, bored by life in the regiment, he had instead accepted Lathrop’s invitation to be seconded to the Political Service. He had also come to realize that if some prince did offer his daughter in marriage, he would probably back out. He was the sort of man who wished to be corrupted only at a distance or, if closer, then only occasionally.

Three months ago, at the beginning of September, Lathrop had sent him up the Tibet Road to the mythical frontier only believed in by statesmen and cartographers. The word had gone out earlier in the year that on the 12th day of December in this year of grace 1911, George the Fifth of Great Britain and his consort Queen Mary were coming to Delhi to be crowned, at a Great Durbar, Emperor and Empress of India. Farnol had been instructed to find out if the hill tribes were excited by the news, troubled by it or if, indeed, they cared at all. The general attitude, he had found, had been one of bemused puzzlement: King Who? In a region so remote that some villages did not know the name of the headman of the next village fifty miles away on the other side of a mountain, there was little cause for the clapping of hands and shouts of Hats off, the King! when someone produced a piece of paper and read to them the news that a Great Raj from over Le sea (‘What is a sea, sahib?’) was coming to let them crown him their Emperor. Farnol knew it would have been different in the Afghan hills where the tribesmen had a political sense that kept their knives sharp and their guns hot. But in the mountain fastnesses kings had held no sway: a man lived and died subject only to his father, his village chief and the gods who ruled them all.

At the gates to the curving drive leading up to the Viceregal Lodge Farnol and his entourage were halted by two guards. The two soldiers prodded the tall dirty hillman and told him to clear out.

‘Nickle-jao! Piss off!’

‘I shall not piss off. I am Major Farnol, of Farnol’s Horse, reporting to Colonel Lathrop. Take that bayonet out of my belly.’

The soldiers peered at him, then one said to the other, ‘Escort him up to the house, Mick. Let them make up their mind who he is. Give him a poke up the arse if he tries anything. I’ll keep this lot down here.’

Farnol walked up the long sloping drive, the guard right behind him with his bayonet at the ready. He did not blame the soldiers for their attitude; one rarely found rankers who were happy in their work these days. A shilling and fourpence a day and a seven-year contract did nothing to make India an attractive tour of duty. Their devotion to duty had not been improved by the policies of the previous Viceroy, Lord Curzon, who had favoured more freedom and rights for the natives; nor had Lady Curzon, an American lady, fired them with enthusiasm when she had said that the two ugliest creatures in India were the water-buffalo and the British private soldier. A poke up the arse with a bayonet was something a man who looked like an Indian and claimed to be a British officer should not find unexpected or even unreasonable.

They came to the junction in the drive where one arm led to the rear of the huge house and the other to the portico over the front entrance. Farnol looked up at the mansion towering against the pale pink of the western clouds. Each time he came here he was amused by the extravagance of it, the incongruity of this massive country house that paid no respects to its foreign location. But it had the most magnificent site in Simla and he always enjoyed walking in its gardens. Ten years ago, when he had been a very junior aide on the staff of Lord Curzon, he had been standing on the south lawn when the Viceroy had come and stood beside him.

‘Have you a liking for vistas, Farnol? Are you long-sighted?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He knew that the Viceroy liked to think he had a poetic imagination.

‘I sit here and imagine I can see all of India all the way south to the Coromandel Coast.’ Tall though Farnol was, he always felt that the Viceroy was just that much taller. Curzon held his long narrow head in such a way that he always seemed to be looking down on people. It was partly his natural arrogance, but he also had back trouble which forced him to stand very upright: so can minor afflictions set one’s image for history. One of the last great imperialists, though neither he nor virtually anyone else saw it that way, he looked upon India as his own domain; he would not have been embarrassed by any modesty if it had been suggested that he should be crowned Emperor. ‘And I rule it all in the King’s name.’

A mere subaltern didn’t query such illusions of grandeur. ‘A great responsibility, sir.’

Then Curzon smiled, showing the sense of humour that was rarely seen. Or was it something else, a sense of irony at his claim to being long-sighted? ‘It is all just in one’s imagination.’

Then he had nodded abruptly and gone back to the house and Farnol had been left wondering. A breeze suddenly blew up, whispering through the deodars, and he had shivered, felt the chill of the unknown years ahead.

The bayonet poked him in the buttock. ‘Turn right, matey. We’re going in the back way.’

‘We’re going in the front way. Stick me in the arse again with that bayonet and I’ll shove it down your throat. What’s your name?’

The soldier lowered his rifle, shook his head, then snapped to attention. ‘You got to be an officer. No coolie would talk to me like that. Sorry, sir. Can’t be too careful.’

‘I said, what’s your name?’

‘Mick Ahearn, sir. Private Ahearn.’

‘Irish, eh? Are you with the Connaughts?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Farnol knew of the Connaught Rangers’ contempt for Indians; their unofficial motto was that those who had been conquered by the sword must be kept by the sword. Since swords were not standard issue, they settled for a jab with a bayonet or a boot up the behind of the conquered. ‘In future, Private Ahearn, make sure you have the right coolie before you start blunting your bayonet on him.’

Ahearn followed Farnol up to the big portico and waited while Farnol went up the steps and rang the bell beside the wide front doors. The Indian butler who answered the bell was even more brusque than the soldier had been in dismissing the dirty, ragged hillman. But Farnol pushed him aside, strode into the huge high-ceilinged entrance hall and demanded to see Colonel Lathrop. At that moment a man appeared on one of the galleries that ran around the upper floors of the hall.

‘What’s going on down there? Who’s that ruffian? Have him thrown out!’

Farnol looked up and recognized the man on the gallery. Oh God, he thought, not him! But he bounded up the wide stairs, came out on to the gallery and advanced on Major Rupert Savanna, who was slapping his pockets as if looking for a gun.

‘Savanna, old chap, how are you? I know you think I’m a ruffian, but you don’t have to spread it around amongst the servants. Where’s Lathrop?’

Savanna was an unfortunate man. He was plain to the point of anonymity; he would have been more identifiable had he been ugly. Everyone tended to overlook him and so he had made himself more unfortunate: he had become aggressive to be recognized and only succeeded in antagonizing everyone he met. He hated India and everyone on the whole sub-continent; but he knew that if he went back to England he would be even more anonymous and overlooked. He was hard-working, a rare quality amongst the British officers in India, and his diligence, if nothing else, had raised him to a senior staff position in the Political Service, the diplomatic corps of the Viceroy. It was said that he had been promoted on the assumption that a man so disliked would not have any friends to whom he might leak a confidence.

‘Farnol? Good God, man, do you have to come up here looking like that? Couldn’t you have spruced yourself up?’

‘I’ll do that later. Where am I staying – down at Squire’s Hall?’

‘Afraid not – the painters are in there. You’ll have to stay here.’ Savanna looked as if he were offering a pi-dog a room for the night. ‘We’re all staying here. Got permission from His Excellency, just for the two nights. The Durbar Train leaves tomorrow. I presume you’ll be coming down to Delhi?’

‘Of course. Where’s George?’

‘Afraid he’s not here. Went back to Delhi yesterday, got tired of waiting for you. You were due here a week ago.’

‘Blast!’ Farnol leaned against the balustrade, restrained himself from spitting down into the well of the entrance hall. He looked sideways at the portly little man with the very pale blue eyes and the blank face behind the ginger moustache. ‘I was held up by a landslide the other side of the Satluj, I had to make a detour. I was ambushed, too.’

‘I say! Lose any bearers?’ Savanna dreamed of being a hero but was glad he was a desk-wallah. Dreams were safer than deeds and he feared the day when he would have to act. ‘Better put that in your report to me.’

‘To you?’

Savanna flushed. ‘Of course. I’m your superior officer, am I not? George Lathrop asked me to stay on here and bring your report down with me when I go.’

‘What I have to report will need to get to him quicker than that. I’ll encode it and you can put it on the telegraph line to him tonight.’

‘I shall want to know what’s in the report before you encode it. I can’t authorize its despatch if I don’t know what’s in it.’

Farnol sighed, scratched himself through his rags. It was always the same when he came back from the hills: as soon as he was within smell of hot water and soap he began to itch. The same irritation affected him whenever he was within smell of a desk-wallah. ‘Righto, whatever you say. I’ll put it all down in clear first. The gist of it is that I think there is a plot to assassinate the King.’

Savanna gave a half-cough, half-laugh. ‘Oh, I say! You expect me to put something like that on the telegraph to Delhi? They’d laugh their heads off. What proof have you?’

Farnol sighed again, scratched himself once more: Savanna, more than any of the other desk-wallahs, always did get under his skin more than the dirt and the lice. ‘None. Just suspicions.’ He quickly recounted the story of the ambush. ‘It ties in with what I heard further up in the hills.’

‘What did you hear? Rumours?’ Savanna shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, old chap. I can’t put that sort of clap-trap on the telegraph. It would be one thing to mention it personally to Lathrop, one can bandy suspicions back and forth all day across a desk. But to put it in code on the telegraph –’ He shook his head again, adamantly this time: after all, he was the senior officer, even if their ranks were the same. ‘Can’t be done. There have been plots and rumours of plots ever since the days of John Company. There’s sure to be one about His Majesty – what better way to create a little mischief? You know what these Indians are. But no one down in Delhi would believe it was anything more than a rumour. They’re all too busy getting spruced up for the Durbar.’

Farnol knew that plots to kill the British, or their leaders, were not new. Ever since the East India Company, John Company as it was called, built its first trading post in 1640, there had been resistance to the British presence in India and the neighbouring countries. The Indian Mutiny of sixty years ago had not blown up on the spur of the moment; the Afghan Wars had not been riots of sudden bad temper. Conspiracies for independence had been uncovered; one or two princes had rebelled and been firmly put back in their place. But no Viceroy, the King’s representative, had died from an assassin’s bullet or knife. They had died from cholera or malaria or boredom, but that had been only the climate of the country and not the climate of the population demanding its wage or revenge. Savanna was right: now, especially now, no one would take any notice of a rumour that hadn’t a shred of concrete evidence to back it. Farnol had been at the Great Durbar, Curzon’s durbar of 1903, and he remembered how for a month before it no one had had any thought for anything but the social events that accompanied it. With the King and Queen due within the week he could imagine the pushing and jostling, like beggars scrambling for coins in a bazaar, that would be going on down in the new capital.

‘All right, I’ll hold the report till we get down to Delhi.’

Savanna stiffened with six years’ seniority. ‘You can still write it in clear and give it to me.’

‘I’ll write it on the train going down.’ Farnol straightened up, daring Savanna to command him to write the report immediately. But the other knew his limitations, knew when he sounded petulant rather than commanding. He stayed silent and after a moment Farnol said, ‘Do I have to dress for dinner? Are there only you and I?’

‘Of course you’ll dress! The Ranee of Serog is coming to dinner and also the Nawab of Kalanpur – you know Bertie, a very decent chap. And there will be Baron von Albern and Lady Westbrook.’

‘Damn! I think I’ll dine in my room.’ Then he looked down and saw the girl in bowler hat and riding habit come into the hall below. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Miss O’Brady. An American gel. Evidently she met His Excellency and Lady Hardinge down in Delhi, told them she was coming up here and they invited her to stay at the Lodge. Can’t understand why. She’s not only American, she’s also one of those damned newspaper reporters.’

CHAPTER TWO
1

Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:

I have been to several memorable dinner parties in the course of a long and, forgive my smugness, very rewarding life. Once, when he and his wife had had a falling-out, Richard Harding Davis, that most handsome and dashing of foreign correspondents, took me to dinner at the White House; President Taft himself had to rescue me from the attentions and intentions of the French Ambassador, who had had a falling-out with his wife. On another occasion Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, known to everyone as Honey Fitz, called me up, knowing I was in New York for the night, and asked me to dinner with him at Rector’s with some friends from Tammany Hall. There amidst the cigar smoke, the bubbles of champagne and the giggles of the girls from the Music Hall chorus, I learned more about how a democracy is run than in several months of covering City Hall for the Boston Globe. I sometimes feel that one’s education can be improved more over the right dinner table than anywhere else, with the possible exception of under the counterpane. I speak, of course, as a lady of mature years whose education in both spheres was completed some time ago.

The most fateful dinner party, in personal terms, that I ever attended was at Viceregal Lodge in Simla in India in December 1911. The guests were as varied as one can only find in outposts of Empire; or could find, since empires, if they still exist, are no longer admitted. The acting host was a dull little man named Savanna, but everyone else at the long table in the huge panelled dining-room seemed to me to be an original, even the Nawab of Kalanpur, who did his best to be an imitation Englishman. But the most striking one there in my eyes, even though he may not have been strikingly original, was Major Clive Farnol.

He sat next to me as my partner and through most of dinner I saw little more of him than his profile. He told me later he had only that evening shaved off his beard; that accounted for the paler skin of his lower cheeks and jaw against the mahogany of the rest of his face. He had a good nose, deep-set blue eyes; but his face was too bony to be strictly handsome. He also had a nice touch of arrogance, an air I have always admired in the male sex. Humble men usually finish up carrying banners for women’s organizations.

‘You are writing the story of Lola Montez, Miss O’Brady?’ The Ranee of Serog was dressed as if for a State dinner or a trade exhibition of jewels. Of the upper part of her body only her elbows and armpits seemed undecorated with sparklers; she looked like Tiffany and Co. gone vulgar. She was a walking fortune, several million dollars on the hoof, as they say in the Chicago stockyards. She was dressed in a rich blue silk sari and once one became accustomed to the glare of her one could see that she was a beautiful woman. She was about forty which, from the youth of my then twenty-five years, seemed rather close to the grave. Now I am rather close to it myself I smile at the myopia of youth.

‘My grandfather knew her when she was Mrs James, a very young bride here in Simla,’ the Ranee said.

‘My father always boasted he was one of her first lovers.’ Lady Westbrook was an elderly woman of that rather dowdy elegance that the English achieve absent-mindedly, as if fashion was something that occurred to them only periodically like childbirth or an imperial decoration. But, I learned later, she drank her wine and port with the best of the men and smoked a cheroot in an ivory holder. ‘But that was only after he learned she finished up as the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria. I suppose all men would like to think they shared a woman with a king.’

‘Not with King George,’ said the Nawab of Kalanpur and spilled his wine as he laughed. ‘I understand the Queen sends a company of Coldstream Guards with him every time he goes out alone. She’s rather a battle-axe when it comes to morality.’

‘I say, Bertie, that’s going too far.’ Major Savanna was a stuffed shirt such as I had only hitherto seen on Beacon Hill in Boston; I suppose one finds them all over the world, a breed hidebound by what they think is correct behaviour. ‘I hope you won’t put any of this conversation into your newspaper articles, Miss O’Brady?’

I had come to India to cover the Great Durbar in Delhi, one of the few women correspondents granted such permission. Females were still considered lesser beings in those days, even in the so-called enlightened offices of newspapers; some of the most bigoted male chauvinists I have met in a lifetime of such encounters have been newspaper editors. But I had been taken on as a cub reporter by the editor of the Boston Globe who owed a favour to someone who owed a favour to Mayor Honey Fitz, for whom my father worked as a ward boss. I had managed not to blot my notebook and gradually had been given assignments that had, after several years and with great reluctance on the part of the paper’s male management, resulted in my being granted a by-line. I had covered stories spread over a great deal of the United States and had attained a certain fame; or in certain circles where anyone who worked for a newspaper, regardless of their sex, was looked upon as a whore, a certain notoriety. Disgusted at the growing cost of Presidential inaugurations, the editor had decided to send me to India to see how the British Empire spent money on crowning an Emperor. It was I who had suggested that I should also do a story on Lola Montez, the Irish-born courtesan who had begun her career in Simla as a 15-year-old bride of a British officer. The editor, thinking of syndication, had readily agreed. There were probably fifty million housewives throughout the United States who were dreaming of being courtesans.

‘Quote every word, Miss O’Brady.’ Major Farnol up till then had offered only a few words, the crumbs of politeness that gentlemen offer to ladies in whom they are not particularly interested. But now he looked at me full face and I saw his gaze run quickly up from my bosom, over my shoulders and throat and up to my face and hair. I learned later that he was famous for swift appraisals of the landscape and was known amongst the Pathan tribesmen of Afghanistan as Old Hawkeye. ‘We must keep on with the good work done by the late King Edward, making our royalty appear human. We have suffered too long from Victorian stuffiness.’

‘Oh, I say!’ said the stuffed shirt at the top of the table.

‘Ach, no.’ The one-armed German Consul-General, Baron Kurt von Albern, leaned to one side while a servant took away his plate. He leaned stiffly and with his head seemingly cocked to balance the weight of his one arm; he looked rigid and very Prussian, though he was riot a Prussian. He had close-cropped grey hair, a thick grey moustache, wore gold-rimmed spectacles with a silk cord running down to his lapel and looked like Teddy Roosevelt without the bombast. ‘Kings should never appear human. They should always suggest a little mystery.’

‘Is there any mystery about the Kaiser?’ said Major Farnol. ‘Other than whether or not he wants to go to war with us?’

The Baron shook his great head sadly. ‘Always talk of war. The English and the Germans will never fight. Your own King is almost more German than he is English.’

‘More’s the pity,’ said Lady Westbrook. ‘Can’t understand why we ever let the Tudors go.’

‘Our King is beloved just as he is.’ Major Savanna seemed to have had a little too much to drink. He glared down the table in my direction and for a moment I wondered what America had done recently to bring on this aggression. Then I realized he was looking at Major Farnol. ‘That correct, Major?’

‘Perhaps in England. Here in India no one knows him.’

The King, as Prince of Wales, had visited India in 1905, but he had seen, and been seen by, very few more than the British civil and military brass and the Indian princes. Though England had ruled India for almost two centuries, no reigning monarch had ever set foot in the country. The monarch’s surrogates had been the real rulers, the Governors-General and the Viceroys who had had all the trappings of a king and almost as much power, possibly even more. The armorial bearings of all those surrogates hung from the walls above our heads, from the first of them, Warren Hastings, to the present one, Hardinge. Pictures of the monarch might hang in offices and railway stations and jungle bungalows, but everyone knew who was the actual British Raj of the moment.

‘I met him once at Lord’s,’ said the Nawab. ‘Came to see the Second Test against the Australians, looked bored stiff. Bally undiplomatic of him, I thought. That’s the German in him, I suppose.’

‘Being undiplomatic or being bored by cricket?’ said the Baron.

The Nawab laughed, a high giggle that didn’t go at all well with his appearance. He was rather saturnine, a look that went against the mould of the imitation Englishman he tried to be; when his face was in repose he looked slightly sinister, an image the English have washed from their countenances if not from their hearts.

‘Touché, Baron. It’s a pity you didn’t go to Harrow, as I did. With your physique they’d have made a jolly good fast bowler of you.’

‘It sounds a dreadful fate,’ said the Baron.

‘I don’t think the King should have come out here.’ The Ranee dismissed His Majesty with a wave of her hand, an explosion of diamond lights. ‘Anything could happen to him. He could be trodden on by an elephant, killed by a tiger. Accidents happen in this country.’

‘Planned accidents?’ said Major Farnol.

Perhaps I was too quick for an outsider; but what should a newspaperwoman be if not quick? ‘You mean an assassination?’

I saw Farnol and Savanna exchange glances. The Ranee also saw it: ‘What’s going on, gentlemen? Have you heard something?’

There was silence for a moment and it was obvious that the two majors were each waiting for the other to reply. Then Major Farnol said, ‘No, nothing.’

‘Of course not!’ But Savanna’s voice was not so loud from drink alone; he was far too emphatic. ‘Ridiculous! Their Majesties will be as safe here in India as in Buckingham Palace. Correct, Farnol?’

I saw Farnol’s jaw stiffen, but he nodded. ‘Of course.’

Then dinner was finished and the ladies rose to be banished as we always were. The port and the cigars were already being produced, but as we went out the door Lady Westbrook turned to one of the servants. ‘I’ll have a large port in the drawing-room. Better bring a small decanter.’

I sat with Lady Westbrook and the Ranee for half an hour, then I excused myself and went up to bed. I had been riding that afternoon and was genuinely tired. As I reached the gallery that led to the bedrooms I pulled up startled. Major Farnol sat in the shadows, in a large chair against the wall of the corridor.

‘Oh! I thought you were still downstairs with the other gentlemen.’

‘I just wanted to say goodnight, Miss O’Brady.’ He stood up, towering over me. He wore a tail-coat, the dinner jacket had not become universal with gentlemen, but the suit looked as if he had had it a long time; it was shiny and tight and he looked, well, caged in it. ‘Will you be going down with us on the Durbar Train? May I have the pleasure of escorting you?’

‘Only if you will tell me if you think King George is in danger of being assassinated.’ I’m afraid I was rather a direct person in those days. Perhaps I still am.

‘I thought you were interested only in Lola Montez?’

‘I have all the material I need on her. I’m a newspaper-woman, Major Farnol. A plot to assassinate a king is a story I’d give my right arm for.’

‘Both arms?’

We did not use the word corny in those days. ‘Major Farnol, I expected better than that of you. I’m not some high school girl panting to be taken.’

He smiled, then abruptly sobered. ‘All right, no flirting. No, Miss O’Brady, I know nothing about any assassination plot.’

‘I think you are a liar, Major.’ I gave him what I hoped was a sweet smile.

‘All the time.’

‘Goodnight, Major.’

I left him then, but I knew we were going to be talking to each other a lot over the next few days, whether he was a liar or not. In the course of her life a woman will meet a man, or several men if she is fortunate, with whom she feels an instant current of attraction. I had felt that way about Richard Harding Davis, but he was already married; I had also been strongly attracted to a well-known matinée idol, but he was in love with himself at the time and no woman can compete with that. I didn’t think Major Farnol would ever be in love with himself but he did strike me as being very self-contained, with few doubts about himself or anyone else, which can be just as frustrating for a woman. My trouble was that, being Boston Irish, I had such little mystery about me that might raise a doubt or two in his or any other man’s mind. A woman who loves love as much as I did, and still do, can be too honest for her own good.

But I was not thinking about love that night. I undressed in the big bedroom I’d been given and was brushing my hair when I heard voices in the corridor outside. Moments earlier I had heard voices down at the front of the house; that would have been the Ranee, Lady Westbrook and the Nawab and the Baron going home. Then the big house had been suddenly silent till I heard the raised voices out in the corridor.

I opened my door an inch and peered out. It was not a lady-like thing to do, but a newspaperwoman was not expected to be a lady; it was an implied contradiction in terms. Major Savanna, looking very much the worse for drink, was standing arguing with Major Farnol, whom I could not see.

‘You will not mention this ridiculous theory of yours again till we get down to Delhi! There you can do what you damn well please!’

‘Keep your voice down, Savanna. This isn’t a polo field.’

‘Don’t tell me – ! You’re absolutely insufferable, Farnol, insufferable! You keep your voice down – not another word about these rumours, you understand! That’s an order!’

He took a sudden step backwards and I realized that Farnol had abruptly shut the door of his room in his face. Savanna raised a fist as if he were about to batter down the door, then suddenly he went marching down the hall towards his own bedroom. Marching: it struck me that for a man who a moment ago had sounded drunk he was remarkably steady on his feet.

I closed the door, finished my toilette and got into bed. But I couldn’t sleep; I could smell a story like a magnetic perfume, ink brewed by M. Coty. I tossed and turned for an hour, then I made my decision. I got out of bed and put on my red velvet peignoir. It had been bought for Miss Toodles Ryan, the girl friend of Mayor Honey Fitz, but Toodles was annoyed with Hizzoner for some reason and she had given me the gown. Each time I put it on I felt the delicious thrill of being a kept woman, if only by proxy: the safest and least demanding way. Only a year before he was assassinated I mentioned Toodles Ryan to President Kennedy and he, Boston Irish and a ladies’ man, winked and smiled. Honey Fitz’s hormones were still alive and well in 1962.

I looked at my hair in the mirror, saw that my tossing and turning had made it into a fright wig. I hastily pushed it up, looked around for something to hold it in place, saw the derby, the bowler hat I had worn that day while riding and shoved it on my head. I remembered one of the few pieces of advice my mother had given me when I told her I was determined to go out into the sinful Protestant world and make my own way: ‘Always wear a hat, sweetheart. That way you’ll always be thought of as a lady, if only from the neck up.’

Clasping my notebook and pencil I opened my door, crossed the corridor and tapped gently on Major Farnol’s door. Then I opened it and stepped inside. And felt the pistol pressing against the back of my neck.

The electric light was switched on. Major Farnol was dressed in pale blue silk pyjamas and looked absolutely gorgeous.

‘They’re not mine – I found them in a drawer. I think they belong to one of the A.D.C.s. Heaven knows what sort of chap wears things like these.’

‘You’re wearing them.’

‘Just as well, if a half-naked woman calls on me in the middle of the night. Do you usually wear a bowler when you go prowling bedrooms?’