The Far Pavilions (42 page)

Ash laughed and made her a half bow. ‘I am greatly honoured, Your Highness. But is this wise? As you see I am not dressed to receive visitors; and were you to be found here at such an hour it would cause great trouble for us both. Besides, you should not go unattended through the camp. It is too dangerous. You would have done better to send me one of your women. Let me advise you to return quickly before they awake and rouse the guard when they find you gone.’

‘If it is for yourself that you are afraid,’ said Anjuli sweetly, ‘you have no cause to be, for I sleep alone and therefore no one will miss me. And if I feared for myself, I would not be here.’

Her voice was still barely more than a whisper, but there was so much scorn in it that the blood came up into Ash's face and for a fraction of a second his fingers tightened cruelly about her wrist.

‘Why, you little bitch,’ said Ash softly and in English. He laughed, and releasing her, stepped back and said: ‘Yes, I am afraid. And if Your Highness is not, I can only say that you should be. Myself, I cannot believe that your brothers or your uncle would treat such an escapade lightly; or your bridegroom, either. They might consider that it in some way touches your honour, and as I confess I have no wish to get a knife between my ribs one of these nights, I would urge you again, with all respect, to go quickly.’

‘Not until you tell me what I wish to know,’ said Anjuli stubbornly. ‘I will stay here until you do, though as you well know, if I am found here it will go hard with me. Even my worst enemy could not wish me so much ill, and you have already saved my life. Only tell me what I ask and I will trouble you no more. I swear it.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because the thing you gave me tonight is the half of a luck-charm that once, very long ago, I myself gave to a friend; and when I saw it I –’ A movement behind her made her spin round: a patter and a rustle in the stillness. ‘There is someone there –!’

‘It is only a
lakar bagha
(hyena)’, said Ash.

The grotesque, shadowy creature that had been scavenging in the camp scuttled past and loped away across the plain, and the girl drew a deep, shuddering breath of relief and said haltingly: ‘I thought it was… I thought I had – been followed.’

‘So you
are
afraid after all,’ said Ash unkindly. ‘Well, if you wish to talk you had better come inside. It cannot be more dangerous than standing out here where anyone might see us.’

He stood back to let her enter the tent, and after a moment's hesitation she went in past him, and Ash closed the tent-flap and said: ‘Don't move. I'll light a lamp.’

She heard him groping in the darkness and then a match flared, and when the wick of the hurricane lamp was burning steadily, he pulled up a canvas chair for her and, without waiting to see if she took it, turned away to put on his dressing gown and slippers. ‘If we are going to be caught talking together at this hour of night,’ observed Ash, tying the cord about his waist, ‘it will look better if I am wearing a few more clothes. Won't you sit down? No? Then you won't mind if I do.’ He seated himself on the end of the camp bed and looked up at her, waiting.

The carriage-clock on the table behind him ticked audibly in a silence that he made no attempt to break, and a moth that had found its way in from the night began to flutter around and around the lamp, throwing whirling, wavering shadows across the walls of the tent.

‘I…’ began Anjuli, and paused, biting her lip in a way that was suddenly and sharply familiar to Ash. It was a trick she had as a child and his mother used to scold her for it, saying that it would spoil the shape of her mouth.

‘Go on,’ said Ash unhelpfully.

‘But I have already told you: I gave that charm to a friend many years ago, and I wish to know how you came by it because because I would like to know what became of my friend and his mother, and where they are now. Is that so hard to understand?’

‘No. But it is not enough. There must be more than that, or you would never have risked coming here. I want to know the whole. Also, before I answer your questions, I want to know whom you would tell.’

‘Whom I would tell? I do not understand.’

‘Don't you? Think – are there no others besides yourself who might also wish to know where this friend of yours is?’

Anjuli shook her head. ‘Not now. Once, perhaps; for there was an evil woman who wished him ill and would have killed him if she could. But she is dead now and cannot harm him; and I think she had forgotten about him long ago. As for his friends, except for myself they left Gulkote, and I do not know where they are, or if they know where he is or what became of him. It may be that they too are dead. Or that they have forgotten him as everyone else has.’

‘Except yourself,’ said Ash slowly.

‘Except myself. But then, you see… he was a brother to me – a true brother, as my own were not – and I do not remember my mother. She fell into disfavour before she died, and afterwards my father's new wife saw to it that I was kept out of his sight, so that he became a stranger to me. Even the servants knew that they need not treat me well, and only two were kind to me: one of my serving-women, and her son Ashok, a boy some few years older than myself who was in the service of my half-brother, the Yuveraj. Had it not been for Ashok and his mother I should have been friendless indeed, and you cannot know what their kindness meant to the child that I was…’

Her voice wavered uncertainly and Ash looked away from her, for there were tears in her eyes and once again he was ashamed because he had allowed himself to forget a little girl who had loved his mother and looked up to him as a friend and a hero, and whom he had left behind, friendless, in Gulkote and never thought of again…

‘You see,’ explained Anjuli, ‘I had no one else to love, and when they went away I thought that I should die of grief and loneliness. They had no choice but to go… But I will not tell you that tale, for it is one I think you must know, or how else would you have known who had the other half of the luck-piece? I will only say that when we parted I gave the charm to Ashok for a keepsake, and he broke it in two and gave half back to me, promising that he would surely return one day and then – then we would join the two pieces together again. But I never learned what had become of him or even if he and his mother had escaped to safety, and there were times when I feared that they were both dead, for I could not believe that they would send me no word, or that Ashok would not come back. You see – had promised. And then… and then tonight, when I saw that what you had given me was not my own half of the charm, but his, I knew that he was alive and that he must have asked you to give it to me. So I waited until all the camp was asleep, and came here to ask for news of him.’

The moth had fallen down the chimney of the oil lamp and set the wick flaring, and another clumsy night-flying insect was battering itself against the glass, making a monotonous sound that now Anjuli was no longer speaking seemed as loud as the beat of a drum in the silence. Ash rose abruptly and went over to trim the wick, standing with his back to her and apparently giving his whole attention to the task. He had not made any comment, and as the silence lengthened and he still did not speak, she said with a catch in her voice:

‘Are they dead, then?’

Ash spoke without turning: ‘His mother died many years ago. Not long after they left Gulkote.’

‘And Ashok?’ She had to repeat the question.

‘He is here,’ said Ash at last; and turned towards her, the light at his back falling full on her face and leaving his own in shadow.

‘You mean – here in the camp?’ Anjuli's voice was a startled whisper. ‘Then why did he not… Where is he? What is he doing? Tell him –’

Ash said: ‘Don't you know me, Juli?’

‘Know you?’ repeated Juli bewildered. ‘Ah, do not make game of me, Sahib. It is not kind.’

She wrung her hands together in a gesture of despair and Ash said: ‘I am not making game of you. Look at me, Juli –’ he reached for the lamp and lifting it, held it so that the light fell on his face. ‘Look carefully. Have I changed so much? Do you really not know me?’

Anjuli backed away from him, staring and whispering, ‘No! no, no, no –’ under her breath.

‘Yes, you do. I can't have changed as much as all that: I was eleven. It was different with you. You were only a baby of six, or was it seven? I would never have recognized you if I hadn't known. But you still have the scar where the monkey bit you. Do you remember how my mother washed the bite and tied it up for you, and told you the story of Rama and Sita and how Hanuman and his monkeys helped them? And afterwards I took you to Hanuman's temple near the elephant lines? Have you forgotten the day that Lalji's marmoset ran away and we followed it into the
Mor Minar
, and found the Queen's balcony?’

‘No,’ breathed Anjuli, her eyes wide and enormous. ‘No, it cannot be true. I do not believe it. It is a trick.’

‘Why should I trick you? Ask me anything; something that only Ashok could know. And if I cannot answer –’

‘He could have told you,’ interrupted Anjuli breathlessly. ‘You could be repeating things that you learned from him. Yes, that is it!’

‘Is it? But why? There is nothing to be gained. Why should I trouble to tell you this if it were not true?’

‘But – but you are a Sahib. An
Angrezi
Sahib. How can you be Ashok? I knew his mother. He was the son of my waiting-woman, Sita.’

Ash put the lamp back on the table and sat down again on the camp bed. He said slowly: ‘So he always thought. But it was not so. And when she came to die, she told him that the woman who bore him was an
Angrezi
and the wife of an
Angrezi
, and that she, Sita, whose husband was his father's head syce, had been his foster-mother – his own having died at his birth. It was something that he – that I – did not wish to learn, for she had been, in every way but one, my real mother. But that did not make it any the less true, and truth is truth. I was, I am, Ashok. If you do not believe me you have only to send word to Koda Dad Khan, who lives now in his own village in the country of the Yusufzais, and whom you must surely remember. Or to his son, Zarin, who is a Jemadar of the Guides, in Mardan. They will tell you that what I say is true.’

‘Oh, no!’ whispered Anjuli. Her voice failed, and turning from him she leaned her head against the tent pole and wept as though her heart would break.

It was, perhaps, the one reaction he was not prepared for, and it not only disconcerted him but left him feeling embarrassed and helpless, and more than a little indignant.

What on earth had she to cry about?
Girls!
thought Ash – not for the first time – and began to wish that he had kept his mouth shut. He had meant to do so; though admittedly only after it had occurred to him that others besides Anjuli-Bai might be interested in the fate of Ashok, and that it had probably been a grave mistake to resurrect the memory of that long-forgotten little boy. But the fact that Juli had remembered him and his mother with so much affection for so many years had melted his resolution, and it had suddenly seemed cruel not to tell her the truth, and allow her to believe, if it was any comfort to her, that he had kept a promise that, to be honest, he had forgotten all about until now. He had presumed that she would be pleased. Or at least excited. Not appalled and tearful.

What did she expect? thought Ash resentfully. What else could he have done? Fobbed her off with some cock-and-bull story of a stranger who had given him that piece of pearl-shell? Or refused to tell her anything and sent her away with a flea in her ear – which is what she deserved for behaving in this embarrassing manner. He scowled at the haze of insects that by now were circling the lamp and tried to shut his ears to the sound of that stifled sobbing.

The clock on the table by his bed struck three, and the small, brisk chimes made him start violently, not because they reminded him of the lateness of the hour, but because, subconsciously, his nerves were on the stretch. He had not realized until then just how apprehensive he was, but that involuntary spasm of alarm was a reminder of the dangers of the present situation and the horrifying risk that Juli had taken in coming to see him. She had brushed it away lightly enough, but that did not make it any the less real; if she were missed, and found here, the consequences for them both did not bear thinking of.

For the second time that night Ash found himself thinking how easily he could be murdered (and Juli too, for that matter!) without anyone ever knowing, and his exasperation mounted. How like a woman to compromise them both and then, having landed them in this dangerous and ridiculous position, make matters worse by collapsing into floods of tears. He would like to shake her. Didn't she realize –?

He turned his head to look at her, still scowling, and his mood changed abruptly; for she was crying very quietly and there was something in her pose that reminded him vividly of the last time he had seen her cry. Even then it had been on his account – because he was in danger and was going away – and not because she herself would be left alone and friendless. And now once again he had made her cry. Poor Juli – poor little Kairi-Bai! He stood up and came to stand beside her, and after a moment or two said awkwardly: ‘Don't cry, Juli. There isn't anything to cry about.’

She did not reply, but she shook her head in a helpless gesture that might have been either agreement or dissent, and for some reason that small, despairing gesture cut him to the heart and he put his arms about her and held her close, whispering foolish words of comfort and saying over and over again: ‘Don't cry, Juli. Please don't cry. It's all right now. I'm here. I've come back. There isn't anything to cry about:…’

For a minute or so the slender, shuddering body made no resistance. Her head lay passively against his shoulder and he could feel her tears soaking through the thin silk of his dressing-gown. Then all at once she stiffened in his arms and tore herself free. Her face was no longer beautiful: the lamplight showed it blurred and distorted with grief, and her lovely eyes were red and swollen. She did not speak; she merely looked at him. It was a chill and contemptuous look, as wounding as the lash of the whip, and turning from him, she ripped back the tent-flap and ran out into the night, and was swallowed up by the moonlight and the chequered shadows.