Nizams Daughters

Her master pulled a face, but the collector beckoned him towards the further stalls, where his own mares stood.

‘Arabs!’ exclaimed Hervey. ‘I have never seen them this close before.’ And both mares flattened their ears and flared their nostrils, intending that he should get no closer.

The collector smiled. ‘I prefer to call them Kehilans — the Arabic for thoroughbred.’

‘More literally, “of noble descent”, I think,’ said Emma Lucie.

‘Just so, madam,’ replied the collector, surprised. ‘I defer to your uncommon facility with languages!’

‘No,’ she laughed, ‘merely a good memory. I was once shown the Kehilan in Newmarket. I wanted to see what was your facility.’

‘Oh,’ he replied absently, ‘just the here and now.’

Lucie would not hear of this modesty. ‘Somervile has studied at the university in Fes, Hervey. The languages of the Orient are his passion.’

‘And horses, evidently,’ replied Hervey, who had coaxed one of the mares forward to take candy from his hand.

‘Indeed yes,’ replied the collector; ‘a measure of a civilization may be largely had from its horses. You will never comprehend, say, a Bedouin unless you acquaint yourself with that which he holds above even his most favoured wife.’

‘And rather more prosaically,’ said Lucie, ‘Somervile takes from us a prodigious number of rupees each time he brings his horses here to race!’

The collector smiled, with satisfaction. ‘Tomorrow they return with me to Guntoor. Why don’t you do the same?’ he said to Hervey. ‘You would see more of India than hereabouts. In Madras you may as well be in Brighton. There is a brig leaving tomorrow. And you, too, Miss Lucie. You were saying only yesterday that you had calls in Rajahmundry which were overdue. It is a short distance only, and a good time of the year to be travelling.’

With the knowledge that Nisus would remain in the roads for at least five more days, it was, said Hervey, a capital invitation. ‘Might you extend it to my friend Mr Locke?’

Somervile seemed content.

The invitation held its appeal for Emma Lucie too. ‘There is also a ship leaving for England tomorrow, Captain Hervey. It will take letters of ours; do you wish it to take any of yours?’

Indeed he did. And he would write an additional one to Henrietta to tell her of this fortuitous meeting. ‘In her letter to you, madam, was there anything that I might know?’ he added cautiously.

Emma Lucie considered a while. ‘Not really, sir. Henrietta merely says that you are to come to India on affairs of the Duke of Wellington. She asks that we receive you, if it is expedient — for she knows you are bound for Calcutta rather than here. She says that she hopes herself to make the journey here soon.’

‘Oh?’ said Hervey, quickened — though he had said in his letter that he thought it better he should first return.

‘That is to say, perhaps,’ added Emma promptly, ‘after you are married? For her letter bore the marks of being written in some haste, and her meaning was not altogether clear in that respect. I shall, of course, write to her and say she is welcome here at any time — subject, of course, to your wishes.’

Hervey seemed confused. ‘I don’t know what is best. I am under orders, and cannot therefore vouch for my movements at this time. She may come here and we never see each other!’

‘Then I think it best if that is said. Henrietta will make up her own mind — as she always has.’

Hervey agreed somewhat ruefully. ‘How long shall this ship take to reach England?’

Emma Lucie turned to her brother, who was still engrossed in contemplation of Somervile’s champion Kehilans. ‘How long shall our letters take home, Philip?’

‘It is one of our fast pinnaces with despatches for Leadenhall Street: two months.’

‘Only two months? Nisus took the best part of—’

‘The pinnace goes to Egypt,’ explained Lucie, ‘and then the despatches are taken overland and by the Mediterranean: two months, at most, this time of year. That is the way your affianced’s express came.’

VI. LICENCE TO PLUNDER

Guntoor, 23 February — two weeks later

No pleasanter beginning to the month of purification could Hervey remember. Candlemas, which had come as Nisus had only lately recrossed the Equator, had been so warm that he could scarcely comprehend that this same day in Horningsham might be chill enough to freeze his father’s breath as he said the offices in church, and numb his fingers so much that turning each page of the prayer book became a labour. The nights were a little cold in Guntoor, perhaps, but each morning came as the one before, and the days followed the same course — a warming which progressed precisely by the clock, and with it the lives of the people who depended so much on its regularity. ‘Brighton’, the collector had called Madras, and Hervey might have believed it when he attended morning prayer in St Mary’s church the following day. But now he was seeing India beyond the Company pale. The strangeness of its gods, its beliefs and superstitions, the dangers which attended routine things, the revolting deformities, the sensual possibilities in the dirtiest of corners — it was a heady, elemental place as alien and fearful as the pagan lands of the Old Testament. But it was beginning its work with him as surely as it had with the collector and thousands before him, for none but the most desiccated could be untouched by the promise of so much. Not that Guntoor was Babylon, or even Gaza.

Hervey, Emma Lucie and Henry Locke (to whom Peto had seemed relieved to grant arrears of furlough) had spent a week in the collector’s company, a week equally pleasing to each, for Mr Eyre Somervile was generous, cultivated and sporting to an uncommon degree. Dinner had just finished, Emma Lucie had retired to her quarters, and Locke had repaired once again to the bazaar, whose unselfconscious delights had instantly captivated him. Hervey had accepted the collector’s invitation to a final brandy and seltzer, and they were sitting in the comfortable leather armchairs of his drawing room, wondering which of two brightly spotted geckoes would reach the ceiling first. ‘They are singularly lazy beggars,’ opined Somervile after a while. ‘The house snake will have them by morning if they don’t look sharp.’

‘House snake?’ said Hervey, suddenly alarmed.

‘House snakes, I should say, for there are two,’ replied the collector casually.

‘Oh! I am very unpartial to snakes,’ confessed Hervey, lifting his feet and looking all about him. ‘What kind are they?’

‘One is a wolf snake, the other a cat — both female, I reckon. And there is a big male rat snake which comes in from the garden from time to time.’

Hervey was now certain he had been living within an ace of death these past seven days. ‘Are they very venomous?’ he asked, shuddering.

‘Venomous?’ said the collector, incredulously — but thoroughly warmed to his teasing. ‘Not in the least, though a rat snake killed one of the writers at Fort George last year!’

‘How so then?’ asked Hervey, quite horrified.

‘It looks somewhat like the cobra, but it has a more pointed head — and bigger eyes. And it doesn’t spread a hood, of course. But to a writer not long from England it can look like a cobra — or several if you’ve taken too much whiskey. As it seems had Mr Fotheringham when he fell headlong down the residency steps in his fright.’

Hervey frowned at Somervile’s wry smile, recovering his composure somewhat.

The smaller of the geckoes had finally reached the top of the wall when one of the collector’s babus entered with a despatch. ‘Read it for me, if you will, Mohan: I have left my eyeglass in my dressing room.’

The babu put on his own spectacles, and lifted the paper to the light of a wall sconce. ‘Sahib, it is from the deputy collector in Tiruvoor subdistrict. He writes: “A body of Pindarees, by estimates one thousand strong, entered the Circars three days ago from Nagpore and have laid waste villages along the Tiruvoor. There is much destruction of property and life, and the horde proceeds unchecked.” ’