breeches she had worn for the hunt clung to her with the sweat of the fleet young Arab she had galloped from Chintalpore. He offered her seltzer, which she accepted with the addition of the whiskey. She had come at once, she explained, for Gita was the issue of her own mother’s mare. Hervey told her what he had found, and what they were doing. She seemed thankful, but asked if a sadhu had attended. When she learned not, she gave instructions for one to be brought without delay to say prayers and perform his rituals. A naik was despatched to the bazaar, and he returned within the hour.
The holy man was but skin and bone, and covered in white ash. His hair was thickly matted, he carried a begging bowl and flute, and he made repeated namaste to the raj kumari. They took him to her mare, and he stood contemplating in silence for several minutes. At length he breathed into her nostrils, sat down crosslegged in front of her and began a sing-song mantra, shaking violently all the while. Hervey watched from the corner of the stable, glad of the excuse for respite. The raj kumari stood close by, swaying to the sadhu’s mantra as she had that day in the forest. After five minutes the holy man stopped abruptly, rose and bowed deeply to the little mare. Then he turned to the raj kumari and spoke to her in Telugu. He explained that the horse was very small and there was much poison in her. He might revive her for a short while, but he could not thwart the will of Shiva. He had done his best to draw out the malignant spirit of the poison, but…
With great composure, the raj kumari thanked him and placed a purse of silver in his begging bowl, asking him to visit each of the sick horses in turn. The sadhu returned her thanks, bowed low again, and shuffled off with the naik in the direction of the other lines. ‘He does not expect her to live,’ she said as he left. ‘He says there is too much poison in her body — too much poison.’
Hervey measured his response carefully. There could not, to his mind, be the slightest possibility that the sadhu’s ministrations could have any effect on the outcome of the sickness. He did not even know whether or not the raj kumari herself believed that they would. But evidently she believed that they might. He had a strong desire to dissuade her from her superstition, yet he had already known her antagonism, and he did not wish it greater now. ‘Your Highness, do you wish me to continue with my treatment? I am merely trying to draw out the poison to which the sadhu refers.’
His sensibility did him credit. She smiled at him for the first time in many days and nodded her assent. There was moisture in her eyes, though she was trying hard to hide it.
For three days the raj kumari tended her little mare herself, allowing the syce only to clean the stable of the few droppings the horse managed. She used sponges to cool her, she wiped the discharge from her nostrils with cotton waste, she applied poultices to the swellings, she coaxed her to eat — handful by handful of bran and crushed barley, sweetened with syrup. And she slept for the most part in the stable, with her chowkidar as sentinel and only a zenana to attend her. When all was done each day, she would cross the maidan and tend the others. Half the horses were now showing symptoms of the plague, and since her arrival a dozen more had breathed their last. Hervey visited her mare as many as a dozen times each day, but the fever was not abating. Nor were the swellings coming to any head.
‘It is as the sadhu said: the poison in her is too great,’ said the raj kumari on the fourth morning.
Hervey had not supposed her capable of the devotion she had shown these past days. Even the sowars remarked on it: a princess who would do the work of a sweeper, who would sleep in a stable. More than once he had felt a powerful urge to encourage her by an embrace, but after the forest there could be no question of it. And as to any notion of her implication in the affair of the batta, he could no more contemplate it now than he could of Alter Fritz, for her honest affection for these men was plain to see.
But this morning it looked as if the sadhu’s prophecy had been right, for as they stood trying to coax Gita to a barley sweet she suddenly fell to the ground, struggling violently to draw breath. The raj kumari began to sob quietly. Hervey was only grateful the mare’s ordeal — and hers — was coming to an end. But there was one last effort, he knew. If, that is, the raj kumari could bear it. He had never before done it; nor even had he seen it done. Long ago, Daniel Coates had shown him the point at which he must make such an incision, and he had never forgotten — as he had never forgotten a single thing that Daniel Coates had told him, for such were that veteran’s years of experience.
He took out the farrier’s razor and began to feel along the mare’s throat for the point to cut.
‘What do you do?’ exclaimed the raj kumari, seizing his hand. ‘You would not slaughter her in the fashion of the nizam’s people?’
‘I am going to open her windpipe,’ he said, indicating its line, ‘so that she can breathe in air from beyond the obstruction at the back of her mouth.’ The raj kumari did not grasp the principle and seized his hand again, but Hervey persisted gently. ‘The horse breathes
‘But she will bleed to death!’ protested the raj kumari.
Hervey was only too aware she might be right. ‘She need not,’ was all he would allow himself.
‘Make the hole then,’ said the raj kumari resolutely.
He took a deep breath and tried to locate — to avoid — the jugular groove. At last he felt sufficiently confident, and in went the point of the razor about half an inch. There was no blood — a trickle only. That was encouraging, not to say a relief. He used the blade’s edge to elongate the incision, and there was a loud sucking noise, at first alarming but then reassuring as he realized it was the sound of success — of air being drawn down towards the lungs. He held wide the hole with his fingers and told the orderly-dafadar to bring him some cartridges.
‘How many, sahib?’ he asked in Urdu.
‘Just a handful.’
The dafadar looked puzzled, but he doubled away nevertheless, soon returning with a half-dozen carbine cartridges.
The raj kumari asked him what was their purpose, and Hervey explained that he needed something to keep the incision open, for Gita would have to breathe this way for several days. He told the dafadar to remove the bullet from the paper cartridge, and to shake out the powder and open the closed end. Then he pushed the makeshift breathing tube gently but firmly into the windpipe and turned to the raj kumari with a smile of satisfaction. ‘It will do until I can find something more apt — a reed, or bamboo perhaps.’
She could say nothing, tears running freely.
Once the mare was comfortable he left the raj kumari with her and went to find Alter Fritz. The old German looked exhausted as he laboured with a dozen sowars to free a big gelding cast in its stall. ‘Rittmeister Bauer,’ said Hervey, with considerable resignation in his voice, ‘I believe we are losing the battle. We have to take drastic measures. I want you to set up lines the other side of the river, the horses with at least ten lengths between them, and I want you to put a torch to these stables.’
Hervey expected him to protest, as would any quartermaster, but the old German simply looked at him and nodded.
It took all day to move camp. The sowars had the running-ropes up quickly on the other side of the river (they were, after all, well practised in bivouacking), but it took time to ferry the animals across. Three horses that could not rise were put down where they lay, and for a while Hervey thought they would have to do the same with Gita, but towards evening she was coaxed to her feet, and she even managed a small feed before being led, unsteadily, to the ferry. Once night was come, and the worst of the heat gone, so that the thatch on the rest of the cantonment buildings was not so tinder-like, Alter Fritz and the officers of the infantry posted a line of fire pickets, and the torch was put to the rissalah stables. By dawn, all that was left was blackened walls. Everywhere smoke drifted upwards.
Hervey was standing contemplating his destruction — the razing of some of the best stables he had ever seen — when a voice broke the silence. ‘He maketh wars to cease in all the world: he breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, and burneth the chariots in the fire.’
He looked round. ‘Selden! I am
‘I thought the burial service apt,’ he smiled. ‘It’s the only scripture I’ve heard these past five years.’
Hervey had no wish to contemplate the Prayer Book at this moment. ‘You are restored, then?’
‘Ay: quinquina spooned to me by a faithful Bengali — which is more than I could have expected in England. Now, tell me: what exactly have you been doing — other than making work for Chintal’s builders?’
Hervey recounted the tribulations of the past week, Selden nodding his approval at both diagnosis and
