Flood of Fire (28 page)

Zachary's only consolation for the snub that he had been dealt at the Doughties' tiffin was his memory of the glance that Mrs Burnham had directed at him as he was leaving – if not for that fleeting look, he would have begun to believe that the tendernesses of his night in the boudoir were indeed imaginary; that he really was a ‘nobody, just a mystery'.

It was that memory too that made him suddenly alert when a khidmatgar came to the budgerow a few days later, bearing a tray of pale yellow sweets.

But what were they for?

A few questions were enough to establish that they had been sent to mark an important festival, in honour of which the mansion's staff had been given a special holiday, by the Burra Beebee herself.

The tray could not be refused of course, so Zachary accepted it and took it inside. Placing it on the dining table he stared at the sweets, which were covered in a layer of silver foil.

What did the gift mean? Was there a message encoded in it? The khidmatgar had not said explicitly that Mrs Burnham had sent it – but Zachary knew that nothing happened in that house without her being aware of it.

He went to his bed, lay down, and closed his eyes so that they would not stray towards the boudoir – on no account, none at all, could he allow his thoughts to wander in that direction. To relive the torments of the last few weeks was unthinkable; he knew he would not be able to endure it.

He lay on his back and tried to shut his ears to the sounds of the mansion's staff as they poured out of the compound.

Soon the grounds would be all but deserted …

The thought had no sooner occurred to him than he tried to erase it from his mind. When this proved impossible he decided that it would be best to leave the budgerow and go into town. Pocketing his last few coins, he walked all the way to Kidderpore where he stopped at a sailors' doasta-den, near the docks, and spent an anna on a dish of karibat and a glass of thin grog. Trying to draw out the hours, he struck up conversations with strangers, buying them watery drinks until his pockets were empty. He would have stayed till dawn, but, as luck would have it, the grog-shop shut its doors early, because of the festival, and he found himself back at the budgerow shortly before midnight.

The mansion was in darkness now and the staff seemed to have disappeared except for a couple of chowkidars, who were drowsing by the gate. Zachary was about to walk up the budgerow's gangplank when his eye was caught by a glimmer of light, somewhere in the distance. He looked again but saw nothing this time. It struck him that an intruder might have stolen into the Burnham compound and it seemed imperative that he go to investigate. Before he knew it his feet were taking him towards the house; he promised himself that he was only going to take a quick look, to make sure that all was well.

The route that he had staked out was still fresh in his memory; with practised stealth he slipped through the shadows and crept
up to the tree that faced the boudoir: a thin trickle of light was spilling out from the edges of the curtained window.

He saw no sign of an intruder but it struck him now that having come this far he might as well make sure that the servants' door, at the side of the house, was properly secured.

Tiptoeing over the gravel border he put a hand on the knob: the door swung open at the first touch. There was a candle inside, placed exactly where it had been the last time. He latched the door and picked up the candle.

It was too late to stop now. Stealing softly up the stairs, he paused to breathe the perfumed air of the powder room before stepping towards the luxuriant, golden glow that was spilling out of the boudoir.

She was standing on the far side of the bed, dressed in a simple white nightgown; her hair was untied, falling over her shoulders in chestnut curls; her arms were clasped across her breasts.

They stared at each other, and then, under her breath, she said: ‘Mr Reid … good evening.'

‘Good evening, Mrs Burnham,' he said, and added quickly, ‘I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right.'

‘That was very thoughtful of you.'

She stepped around the bed and came towards him. ‘Your shirt's torn, Mr Reid.'

He looked down and saw that the tip of her finger had vanished into a rent in his shirt. A moment later he felt her nail brushing lightly against his skin – and then, all of a sudden, their bodies collided and they tumbled into the luxurious embrace of the bed's satin sheets and feathery pillows.

Soon it was as if his night-time imaginings had sprung to life, becoming almost too real to be true: so intense was the pleasure that he almost forgot the fears that had tormented him these last many weeks. But those apprehensions would not be quelled; they broke upon him without warning, so that suddenly he heard her voice in his ear, exclaiming in dismay: ‘Oh but what's this? Why have you stopped? You have not spent yourself already, have you?'

‘No,' said Zachary hoarsely. ‘I cannot go on, I must not – it is too dangerous, the risks are too great. After the last time I was haunted by the fear that you were with child.'

She pulled his head down and kissed him. ‘You should not have worried,' she whispered in his ear. ‘It was perfectly safe.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Because of my monthlies.'

‘Oh thank heaven!' A great wave of relief swept through him.

‘And providentially, we are safe now too. You may spend when and where you will.'

‘No.' He grinned and shook his head. ‘Not till you do.'

After that it was a while before either of them had the breath to say another word – and it was only when she snuggled up to him afterwards, to whisper endearments into his ear, that he recalled the pain he had suffered these last many weeks.

‘You say all these fine things as we lie here now, Mrs Burnham,' he said abruptly. ‘And yet that day, at the Doughties', you pretended not to know me – he's just a mystery, you said, a nobody.'

Her head flew off the pillow and she cried out in protest: ‘Oh, you are too cruel, Mr Reid! Will you throw that in my face? You cannot have any conception of how hard it was for me to say what I did. Could you not see that I was terrified that I would betray myself – as I would certainly have done if I had acknowledged you? Augusta Swinhoe, who was sitting beside me, is the most notorious Shoe-goose of this city – nothing escapes her lynx-like eye. It was she who undid poor Amelia Middleton: a stray glance, at the dinner table, between memsahib and khid-matgar, and Augusta knew at once what was afoot. Within a fortnight poor Amelia was disowned by her husband and packed off to England. I'm told she ended her days in a Blackpool bawdy-house.'

A chill crept through Zachary. ‘So that is all we shall ever be then? Beebee and khidmatgar? Memsahib and mystery?'

‘Oh no, my dear,' she said with a smile. ‘We shall make a sahib of you soon enough. But the price of it is that no one can ever know, or we should both be ruined.'

He turned his head on the pillow, so he could look directly at her. ‘So do you want to be rid of me then?'

Her gaze did not falter. ‘Oh my dear, I think we both know, don't we, that neither of us is strong enough to be rid of the other? You have turned me into a weak, wayward gudda of a woman, Mr
Reid. The one thought that consoles me is that I am at least assisting you in overcoming your affliction.'

‘But then why not cure me forever? Why not run away with me?'

She laughed. ‘Oh Mr Reid! Now it is you who is being the gudda. Surely you can see that it would not suit me at all to be a mystery's mistress, living in some dank hovel? And if I were on your hands all day long, you too would quickly tire of me. In a week or two you would run off with some larkin of your own age and then what would become of me? I would end up as a buy-'em-dear, trawling for grapeshot on Grope-chute Lane.'

She ran her fingertips over his face. ‘No, my dear – soon enough a day will come when we will have to forsake each other forever. When it does we will meet one last time, for a night of delirious delight, and then we shall say goodbye and go our separate ways.'

‘You promise?'

‘Yes of course.'

Now, once again, they entwined their arms around each other and by the time they unclasped them it was almost dawn.

She climbed out of the bed as he was pulling on his breeches, and after he had slipped on his shirt she took hold of his hand and pressed something into it. He opened his palm to find himself looking at three large gold coins.

‘B'jilliber!' His fingers flew open, scattering the coins over the damp, crumpled sheets. ‘I can't take these from you.'

‘Why not?' She picked the coins off the bed and circled around him. Putting her arms around his waist, she pressed her stomach to his back. ‘If you are to be a sahib you must have some proper clothes, mustn't you?'

‘Yes, but this isn't how I should get them.'

‘Like this then?' She slipped a hand into the pocket of his breeches and let her fingers roam as the coins trickled out, one by one.

‘No – stop!' He tried to dig her hand out, but she had anchored her fingers in the fork of his legs and would not let go.

‘It's just a loan,' she whispered, flicking her tongue over his ear. ‘You'll pay me back one day, when you're a rich sahib.'

‘Shall I be a rich sahib?'

‘Yes of course you shall. Between the two of us we will contrive to make it so. You shall be the richest and most mysterious sahib there ever was.'

Her hand was now so busy in his pocket that he forgot about the coins. Turning around he picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed.

‘No!' she cried. ‘You must go now. There isn't time.'

‘You're right,' he said. ‘There isn't.'

But several minutes passed before he left and it was not till he was back on the budgerow that a metallic jingling reminded him that the coins were still in his pocket. Two of the guineas he put aside but the third he took into town the next day and ordered himself some fine new clothes.

Eight

T
he journey from Rangpur to Calcutta took Kesri and Captain Mee almost a fortnight, most of which was spent on a hired Brahmaputra river-boat.

For Kesri the journey was a time of recuperation. The boatmen did all the work, so he had plenty of leisure. The food was exceptionally good, being produced by a cook who fully lived up to the vaunted culinary reputation of Brahmaputra boatmen: he worked wonders with the freshly netted fish they bought on the way.

Captain Mee had brought along the normal officers' travelling rations of salted meats, biscuit and so on, and these were usually prepared for him by his own servant. But he soon tired of the sameness of the fare, and having long had a liking for karibat, he hinted to Kesri that he would not be averse to an occasional plateful. Had any other officers been on board it would have been difficult for the captain to share Kesri's food – but this was a fine opportunity to flout the rules of his caste and he did so not only in the matter of food but also drink: in the evenings, when the boat was moored and the crew had retired below deck, he and Kesri would share the occasional bottle of beer from his rations.

‘Only because we're in mufti, havildar – mind you, not a word to anyone!'

‘No, sir!'

Never once, in their conversations, did the subject of Kesri's shunning by the paltan arise; yet Kesri sometimes sensed that the captain was trying to express sympathy for his plight, although without speaking of it directly.

One evening they talked about London, where Captain Mee had grown up but which he had visited only once after moving to India. While reminiscing he made a disclosure that astonished
Kesri: he revealed that his father, now dead, had been a shopkeeper – ‘a banyan', he said, with a slightly embarrassed laugh.

Kesri understood immediately why he had never spoken of this before: the English officers, no less than the sepoys, were very particular about the castes of the men they admitted to their ranks. Most of the officers were from professional, landed or military backgrounds and it was through their family connections, Kesri knew, that they secured the recommendations and letters patent that enabled them to obtain their commissions. How a shopkeeper's son had managed to do this Kesri could not imagine, but the disclosure helped him make sense of some things that had always puzzled him about his former butcha.

He remembered one evening, many years before, when Mee-sahib had got very drunk at the officers' mess in Barrackpore. He was then a seventeen-year-old ensign and Kesri was his orderly; he had been summoned to the mess to take his butcha back to his rooms. On the way, Mee-sahib had drunkenly blurted out a garbled story about how he had wanted to join some club in Calcutta: all the other ensigns and second lieutenants had been admitted; he alone had been blackballed. That was when Kesri had understood that there was something about his butcha – perhaps to do with his parentage or caste – that set him apart from the other officers.