Nizams Daughters

treatment. And of the burning of the horse lines he seemed positively admiring. ‘No doubt you superintended the conflagration like King Charles at the Great Fire — astride your charger?’

‘The fire did burn out the plague from the City, as I recall,’ replied Hervey in mitigation.

‘Of course, of course!’ said Selden, smiling even wider. ‘A refiner’s fire!’

He was able to laugh for the first time in days. He had had doubts about every action he had ordered. The only thing of which he was certain was the need to take action. Selden’s presence was, indeed, a great comfort. As they walked about the new lines, the sowars greeted the salutri’s arrival as a sign that their trial was at an end.

And so it proved. In the next twenty-four hours only six horses developed the strangles’ symptoms, and on the fourth day there were no new cases at all. Gita’s abscesses were lanced the day after she crossed the river, having come rapidly to a head with poulticing, and her breathing returned to normal soon afterwards, allowing Selden to remove the bamboo tube and sew up the incision. There was a great roast of pig to celebrate the passing of the contagion, the sowars dancing and carousing until dark, and the sadhu filling anew his bowl with silver. When Hervey retired that night, he felt more content than he had been in many months, for he had been — as it were — on campaign with his troopers, and they had triumphed. This, he knew, was his proper calling; not the affairs of the staff, with their errands, diplomacy and deception. He was sure he must return to it as soon as he decently might.

XVI. WEAKLY TO A WOMAN

Chintalpore, 3 April

Pleasure, though intense in India, seemed fated to be brief. Hervey was in his quarters with pen and paper once more, about to write to the collector to hasten both the subsidiary force and, in his view just as important, the officer who was to win the rajah’s approval and thence take command. Since returning from Jhansikote three days ago, he had heard of so many causes for alarm that he was now certain that Chintal faced the most pressing danger. He had written on the first evening to Guntoor to urge the collector to send, in advance of the subsidiary force, any troops he could spare, for a mood of deep foreboding seemed to have settled on Chintalpore — on merchants, beggars and courtiers alike. Rumours abounded and there had been signs in the heavens. Shiva himself had been incarnated several times, had murdered good and bad alike and ravished many virgins. There was, as yet, no riot, no general hysteric passion, but Hervey did not imagine such seething would end in ought else. His chief alarm, however, lay in what was reported to him by Locke (who was increasingly privy to the gossip of the bazaars), that there was a widespread supposition that Chintal was soon to be attacked by a confederacy of Haidarabad and Calcutta, and that the European officers were the harbingers of this aggression. It troubled him principally because, until the Company officer arrived to take command, he considered himself obliged to the rajah; yet any order he gave would be questioned, especially if its purpose were equivocal — in which case attempts at deception would carry grave dangers.

It did not help that the demeanour of the rajah himself was daily more unfathomable. He neglected the usual formalities of the court, would receive no-one without their absolute insistence, and remained for the most part in his quarters, forsaking his menagerie even. All this Hervey had laid before the collector in the first letter, and he repeated it now — together with further intelligence of the nizam’s malevolent intent (so alarming, indeed, was the intelligence that on receiving it this very morning the rajah’s first minister had fled the city). Officials in the west of Chintal had reported movement of Haidarabad’s sepoys all along the border, and — worse — cannon. Even more alarming, and more perplexing, were similar reports from the other side of the country, where the nizam’s territories reached over the Eastern Ghats and abutted Chintal on the plains of the lower Godavari. Hervey could divine no purpose in these movements, except the crudest attempts to overawe, and he asked for the collector’s assessment. Next he gave his estimate of the fighting power of the rajah’s army in the light of the recent depredations. It was not encouraging. At his instigation, since the mutiny, the rajah had removed those officers who he considered had shown insufficient discernment when trouble was fomenting, or who had shown particular vindictiveness when rebellion actually came. Locke had urged Hervey to dismiss all of them — indeed, to blow them from the mouths of the galloper guns in front of the rest. But Hervey had resisted: he could not, in one sweep, remove all the facility for order and fighting. Instead, he had urged the rajah to keep a core of the most junior officers (no-one above the rank of jemadar, except the Rajpoot and Maratha subedars) and to make each of them swear, at the oxbow durbar, by all that was sacred to their faiths, their unquestioning loyalty to him personally. He had had the rajah promote several of the Rajpoots — paragons, he was now convinced, of the martial spirit. But in all, he wrote, the rajah could muster only one battalion of fewer than a thousand sepoys. The reduction of his cavalry was, however, Hervey’s gravest concern. Alter Fritz could mount, serviceably, fewer than a hundred sowars, for the horses that had survived the strangles were in so poor a condition that it would be at least a month (perhaps more in this oppressive heat) before they were fit for service. He had sent to Nagpore for remounts, but anything that the collector could arrange, begged Hervey, would be of inestimable value, for there were no means to patrol the border with Haidarabad while at the same time keeping any sort of handy reserve in Chintalpore and Jhansikote for interior security. He implored the collector to send him a full troop of Madrasi cavalry at once.

All this he read over a second and then a third time before attaching his signature and seal, hoping he had managed to convey the necessity for prompt action, yet without its appearing too importunate a plea, as if he were anxious at any price to leave the city. Yet leave was all he wished, profoundly, to do. Every day he delayed — every hour — lessened his chances of being received by the nizam, and therefore the success of his mission. The first part of that mission — the jagir deeds — was in any case still unfulfilled, for Selden had found nothing but confusion in the chancery since the death of Kunal Verma. Hervey knew he stood in default of reporting to Colonel Grant, for it had been many weeks since he had sent any despatch to Paris. But so damning a testimony to his own shortcomings would such a despatch be that he had put down his pen, dry, on every occasion he had attempted the task. This letter for Guntoor, however, ought to bring him the means of at least presenting himself to the nizam, and therefore of having something of substance he might relate to Paris. He would thus entrust it to Cornet Templer, who had arrived only the day before to assist with arrangements for the subsidiary force. He could ill spare him, but who else might he send? Without Johnson, who would have done it admirably, he was at a loss over so many things, and Locke’s standing with the sepoys might be invaluable: indeed, without him he was not sure they could be relied on.

Private Johnson was unconvinced by Hervey’s eloquence when he heard the contents of the despatch. As they watched the farrier hammering in the last nail of a new set of shoes, Jessye standing as patiently as if they were at the forge in Horningsham, he gave his candid opinion. ‘Tha’s not said owt about them Pindarees, and no matter ’ow quickly them Company troops comes they won’t ’ave big enough guns to take on them that you said t’nizam ’ad.’

Johnson’s dalliance with a daughter of the palace these past weeks had done nothing for his elocution or refinement, thought Hervey, but, as so often, he had addressed the material issue. ‘In truth,’ he replied, frowning, ‘I’d been calculating that the Pindarees would not trouble the rajah this year — not this side of the festival of Dasahara, at least. And I saw no reason for the nizam to bring his so-called daughters into the field. For since he knows that Chintal has no artillery he would manage perfectly well with smaller pieces — which we ought to be able to deal with by other means.’

Johnson snorted. ‘Tha always used to say that ’ope wasn’t a principle of war!’

And Hervey was inclined to concede the point, except that there was an entirely reasonable element of calculation: it was not strictly hopefulness that made him optimistic — if indeed that word could be used to describe his condition. Before he could get too far into a justification of his optimism, however, they were interrupted by a jemadar with an urgent summons to the rajah’s quarters. ‘What occasions this?’ asked Hervey cautiously, knowing how reclusive the rajah had become in recent days.

‘There has been fighting on the upper reaches of the Godavari, sahib,’ replied the jemadar, measuring his Urdu so that Hervey was able to grasp it first time.