Not Quite a Husband (19 page)

How ironic that had they been rained in one day earlier, she’d have been secretly overjoyed that nature had stepped in to extend their time together. But now she only wanted to finish the rest of their travels
this
minute, to not remain a second longer than necessary in the company of a man who was as determined to remove her from his existence as a dedicated butler going after the tarnish on the silver in his keeping.

The rain finally stopped in the middle of the afternoon. Bryony was ready to depart immediately. But Leo insisted on first sending the guides ahead to check the condition of the road.

“The tree cover on the slope is insufficient. There is a possibility of substantial debris swept down in a storm like this,” he explained.

She nodded and turned to go back to her room.

“Bryony.”

She stopped, but did not turn around. “Yes?”

He was silent for several seconds. “No, it was nothing. Please don’t mind me.”

A blistering sun emerged as the clouds dissipated. Faint curls of steam rose from the ground. The guides returned far sooner than Leo had anticipated and brought with them a group of travelers—not Dir levies, but sepoy messengers from the Malakand garrison, carrying sacks of letters and dispatches for the Chitral garrison. Leo offered them tea and probed them for news.

The Malakand garrison, located eight miles southwest of Chakdarra, with a strength of three thousand men, held both the Malakand Pass and the bridge across Swat River at Chakdarra.

In recent days the bazaar at Malakand had been wild with rumors. But as the sepoys were Sikhs, the traditional adversaries of Muslims, their attitude toward the Mad Fakir and his followers was one of disdain rather than fascination.

“Let the Swatis march on Malakand,” said the oldest of the sepoys. “The Indian army will destroy them. And then we will have peace for a generation.”

“Are the officers aware of the problem?” Leo asked.

They were, the sepoys acknowledged. The political officer at Malakand had issued a warning two days ago on the twenty-third of July. The troops had rehearsed alarm drills. But no one believed anything would really come to pass, and even the warning
only stated that an attack was possible, but not probable.

The Swatis invited the English to settle their disputes. They were happy about the services the small civil hospital at Chakdarra provided. And their valley was a green sward of prosperity, everyone’s coffer fattened by feeding and otherwise supplying the garrison. Why should they be so foolish as to throw it all away on the advice of someone who was very likely insane?

Leo nodded his head, happy to have the frothing rumors put in such rational and blunt light—even if the Sikh sepoys’ opinions were biased, they were still based on information obtained much closer to the source.

And then the sepoys went on to describe just how unconcerned the camps as a whole were about the prospect of an uprising. Apparently, alarm drills aside, the daily routine for the soldiers had not changed at all. Officers from Chakdarra Fort and the Malakand garrison played polo every evening on an open field miles away from the protection of their cantonment, armed with nothing but unloaded pistols.

The sepoys related this last with nods of approval at their British officers’ sangfroid, not noticing that the smile had started to fade from Leo’s face. They
spoke briefly of the condition of the road—which after the storm was something between an inconvenience and an annoyance. Their tea finished, the sepoys thanked Leo and resumed their journey.

The entire conversation had taken place on the veranda outside Bryony’s room, so she could hear their discussion via shutters kept ajar. Now her shutters opened fully.

“Shall we get going then?” she said, her impatience barely contained. “The sepoys managed the road without any problem. Surely we can muddle through too.”

“It’s late in the day, Bryony.”

“Nonsense,” she retorted. “We can get in a good four hours. That’s at least one march.”

She rarely spoke in such a strong tone. In fact, he’d never seen her in a fractious mood. But she was now. She had no desire to cooperate with him. She wanted to leave. And she wanted to leave this moment.

In which case, she would
not
like what he was about to say to her.

“I don’t think we should go on.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”

He took a deep breath. “Have you ever read any accounts of the Great Mutiny?”

“Of course. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Because I’m reminded of it. It wasn’t that we had no warnings as the mutiny approached; it was that the people in power refused to believe that such a thing could be possible, that those they considered happy lackeys could rise up against their sage masters. As it turned out, the masters weren’t so sage and the lackeys not so happy.”

“That was forty years ago. There’s nothing comparable here,” she said.

“There was fighting in Malakand around the time of the Siege of Chitral. The Malakand garrison was established only after that, to hold open the road to Chitral. It is highly improbable that in two years’ time, the Swatis would have forgotten their former hostility altogether.”

“So you are criticizing the professional opinions of the officers at Malakand and Chakdarra?” she asked pointedly.

“I know it sounds presumptuous, but I think their daily polo games send a signal not of confidence, but of complacency. Were I a native with rebellion in my heart, I would be encouraged that my enemy is asleep at the post.”

She was silent. He pushed on. “Let’s stay here, where it’s safe and more or less comfortable, and
wait until the next set of messengers come up from Malakand with news.”

“But that could easily mean we’d be stuck here a whole week.”

“A week isn’t so much delay when you consider that we are facing an unknown danger that could easily escalate out of control.”

“No.” Her hand gripped the edge of a shutter, her knuckles white. “I cannot disagree more. If there is to be danger, we are much better off behind the front lines. Once we are south of Malakand, whatever the tribes of Upper Swat Valley decide will be of little importance to us.”

“That is assuming we can make it behind the front lines in time. It would be safer to remain in a neutral territory, rather than risk being caught in the crossfire.”

“If there is to be such a thing as a crossfire, as the officers at Malakand evidently do not believe, I’m hardly confident of Dir’s neutrality.”

“The Khan of Dir receives sixty thousand rupees a year from us. He would be a fool to take part in any sort of sedition that might impoverish his treasury so much.”

“I don’t doubt that the Khan, in his infinite wisdom, thinks first and foremost of his treasury.
But the fakir aims only to fan the passions of the common man. Who is to say that in staying here, we wouldn’t make ourselves an easy target for hotheaded young men from nearby villages?”

He cursed the unfortunate timing of things. “If this is about last night,” he said wearily, “then I take back everything I said. At this moment there is nothing more important to me than your safety. Stay and you can have whatever you want with me.”

As soon as he said it he knew it was the wrong thing to say. She flushed, turned even paler than before, and took a step back from the window. “How noble of you, to sacrifice your virtue to my unforgiving rapacity. No, thank you, I don’t want anything to do with you. And you are wrong. There is no more danger ahead of us than behind us or all around us.”

He sighed. Further arguments served no purpose—her mind was already made up. He had two choices: Either he could take the autocratic route and remind her that she could not advance a step without him, or somehow he must find a way to massage her into compliance without stripping away all her dignity in the matter.

If only he’d kept his mouth shut before offering to prostitute himself for her acquiescence, he could
have used seduction as a tool. Now the only thing he could think of was firearms.

“All right, let’s settle this at twenty paces.”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

But he’d already walked away. A moment later, she heard him coming into the dak bungalow. She stepped into the vestibule. “What did you say again?”

He didn’t answer. He went into his room and came out with a rifle slung over one shoulder, a steel mug in his hand, and the handle of a pistol sticking out of his coat pocket. “Come with me.”

They walked out of the dak bungalow, to curious looks from the coolies, and marched for nearly a quarter of a mile before he stopped and tied the steel mug from the branch of a small tree. Then he walked away from it.

“That’s more than twenty paces,” she said when he stopped.

“Forty, since the tree can’t move twenty paces on its own,” he said.

With that, he loaded the rifle from the breech, raised it, fired, and hit the mug with a loud metalic clang.

“Your turn.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you insist on meeting danger head-on, show me you can protect yourself. I’ll give you three chances. You hit the mug, I’ll make arrangements to get us to Malakand as swiftly as possible. You fail, we venture no further south until either the trouble clears or it becomes evident that there will be no trouble. Choose your weapon, rifle or pistol.”

“This is ridiculous. I’m not a crack shot.”

“No, what is ridiculous is that I’m giving you a chance—any chance—to dictate the course of our action. If I’m wrong and nothing happens in Swat Valley, we lose a week of our life to boredom. If you are wrong and things go awry, we lose our lives. Full stop.”

“Balderdash. Our soldiers in the Swat Valley were there for the previous campaign. They know the local population far better than we do. It is their professional judgment that they have nothing to fear. I prefer to put my stock in their expertise, rather than your intuition.”

“Then let’s shoot for it. Here’s your pistol.”

And it
was
her pistol, a double-barrel Remington derringer. She’d forgotten altogether that she had one. He must have kept it with him when he and the coolies packed her things before they left Rumbur Valley.

She grabbed the pistol. In a righteous huff, she
took aim and pulled the trigger. The pistol jumped in her grip, the noise startling her, but there was no echoing clank against the steel mug, only a dull thud somewhere.

She fired again. Again, nothing.

As she extended her hand for one more cartridge, he said, “May I remind you that this is binding? You accepted the challenge, you accepted the terms.”

She pivoted the barrels upward and reloaded. “Is it as binding on you as it is on me?”

“Of course,” he said.

Bastard. This was no contest. It was a trick to get her to accede to his wishes, while making it appear as if she’d been given a fair shake at
her
wishes.

No, I will not remain here with you
.

It was hot. She perspired under the rear flap of her hat. She took it off and felt the sun beating down against her unprotected nape. The river was wide and swift here. A single rope hung over it. A man in a chair suspended from the rope was crossing the river toward their side. He stared at Bryony in astonishment.

She raised the pistol slowly and sighted the mug. She must succeed. And she would. She wanted to leave far more than he wanted to stay. If there was to be no new beginning for them, then their story had
ended three years ago, and their epilogue ended the night before. It was time to close the book.

She pulled the trigger. And saw the jerky swing of the steel mug before she heard the jarring hit. She dropped her arm to her side and stood a moment, breathing hard.

Deliverance
.

She turned toward him. He was still staring at the mug in disbelief.

“Did you say ’as swiftly as possible?” she asked brightly.