Nizams Daughters

him closer. He searched the sullen eyes for their secrets, but they yielded none. They never had. The same mastering urge as at the slaughter swelled again, a lust he would later revile just as much. He let go, turned about and walked away without looking back. Had he done so he would have seen her look of defiance turn to one of despair.

He saw the squatting shape as he turned the corner to his quarters. It was too early for a chowkidar to have taken post, and his senses returned with the recognition of danger. The figure rose in one easy movement and made namaste. The long black hair, falling loosely about the shoulders, the gaudy saree, the earrings, the bangles, the fat necklace hiding the Adam’s apple — the creature’s profession was unmistakable.

The hijda looked him up and down insolently. Hervey was close to scourging him. ‘May I speak with you, Captain Hervey?’ The English was heavily accented but confident, the voice that of neither a woman nor a man — and without the deferential ‘sahib’.

‘Of course you may speak,’ replied Hervey warily; ‘about what?’

The hijda looked at him as if to say he would not tell while they stood outside.

‘Come, man!’ snapped Hervey, only then realizing the incongruity of calling him thus.

‘Mr Selden,’ replied the hijda.

Instinct made him look about, but there was no-one to overhear. ‘Come,’ he said, opening the big teak doors.

Inside, the hijda glanced here and there in a sort of sneering approval, before pouting in the way the troupe had done that first night at the rajah’s banquet.

‘Well, come to it!’ demanded Hervey testily.

‘Mr Selden is most sick of the fever which comes and then goes again.’ The English was delivered in a modulating half-strangled alto.

‘Where is he?’

‘At our hijron. He is better cared for there than he would be here,’ he sang defiantly.

‘Why do you come here then?’

‘Because Selden-sahib wants very much to speak with you. He is too ill to come himself. I will take you to him.’

‘Very well — but not now. Be at the palace gates at three,’ he snapped, intending to keep him at a full arm’s length.

The hijda made namaste as if playing to a fuller stage, took a peach from a bowl and bit into it suggestively. Hervey cursed him roundly, making him cackle like a bazaar harlot as he fled the room.

When the hijda was gone, Hervey lay with his arms outstretched on the great bed. A pair of collared doves outside his window were enjoying a vocal courtship. Before the female had finished answering the male, he was asleep.

He was awakened soon after midday by a bearer who shook him with all the resolve he would a sleeping leopard. ‘What in heaven’s name—’ He felt blindly for the sword that was not there.

The bearer was saying something but the Telugu made no sense.

‘He says that I would have words with you, Captain Hervey,’ came a voice from near the door.

Hervey got to his feet, as full awake now as he had been before he closed his eyes. ‘Miss Lucie!’ he exclaimed, blinking. ‘I had thought you were gone to Guntoor.’

‘No, indeed: it seemed to me the very best time to be in Chintalpore!’

Outside, the usual silence of the afternoon was broken only by a peacock calling from the menagerie, for all the world as if Chintal was a place of profound peace.

‘How may I help, madam?’ he tried.

Emma Lucie came to the middle of the room as the bearer left. ‘Soon after you were gone last night a hircarrah arrived from Calcutta with this letter.’ She held out a wax-paper package. ‘His orders were that he should deliver it only into English hands.’

‘And yours were the only ones to be found?’ asked Hervey, taking it.

‘As you see,’ she smiled.

‘You will excuse me?’ He broke the seal and took out the letter.

She showed no inclination to leave. He read the copperplate with dismay, until his anxiety became evident to her.

‘It is ill news, I take it?’

He nodded. ‘It is very late news, madam. A letter from the agent of the Company — my facilitation — who died before I was able to meet with him.’

She smiled. It was the sort of knowing smile that only increased his discomfort. ‘And it reminds you of the need to do things which are quite contrary to those you do now?’

‘Just so, madam.’

She smiled again. ‘I can scarcely give an indifferent opinion since my own brother’s view I would know perfectly well. The treaty between the Company and the rajah is of the first importance. But you may know something that they do not, and if your Duke of Wellington troubled to send you here it must be with good reason.’

He could not but concede both points. And he would have wished to share more with her, but that would have been indulgent. ‘What shall you do now?’ he essayed airily. ‘I myself have an assignation with Mr Selden somewhere in the city. It seems he has something of moment he must tell me.’

‘And I fancy that, in general terms, I may know of what he will speak,’ she replied, and none too cheerily.

‘Oh?’ he said. Was there no end to her discernment?

‘Mr Selden asked me to assist him in examining what pass for the accounts in the rajah’s treasury. They are ill-kept but conceal nothing — now that they are at hand, for certain of them came to light only when the babus fled three days ago.’

Hervey made as if to speak, but she held up a hand.

‘Two and a half lakhs, approximating to the batta which had not been paid to the sepoys, was sequestered. It is evident that Kunal Verma did this, but other entries referred — I’m very much afraid — to payments to the “gora log”. There are no white people in Chintal other than the European officers, are there?’

Hervey could scarce make himself believe it.

‘You had better believe it, I think, Captain Hervey, for there is the very canker which has need of a knife!’

He knew it well enough, but it was for the rajah to dispose of the corruption, he said. ‘And he is as like to go into a faint as soon as he hears of it!’

‘Then perhaps you might leave that to me?’ she said resolutely. ‘Yours, I think, is a more pressing duty down the Godavari.’

That much he was more than happy to leave to her. How favoured he felt himself, for he doubted that wiser or more resolute counsel would have come from her own brother, or even the collector. ‘Is there any other account on which Selden must see me? Does he have more especial intelligence?’

‘I don’t know, but I should be surprised if he did not, for I believe the company he keeps is — how shall we say? — fertile.’

Hervey looked astonished. How had she learned so much?

‘Merely by observation. And, I might add, an ear for the native languages — which all who wish to make their fortune here would do well to acquire. But one thing I must tell you, Captain Hervey, for earlier I sowed seeds of doubt in your mind about Mr Selden — so that even now you may think him not without a hand in this. To me, however, it is quite inconceivable that Mr Selden had any part in the business, or even that he knew of its occurrence.’

He was more glad to hear this than anything: ‘I had begun to doubt whether anyone might be trusted in this country.’

The hijron lay in one of the quieter parts of Chintalpore. Hervey had expected — inasmuch as he had given it any thought — quite the opposite, that the hijron would be in a place of some bustle and squalor. But instead it was a pleasant-looking haveli, a sizeable single-storey building with well-pointed brickwork, a good tiled roof, a courtyard swept clean and full of sweet-scented mimosa in pots, and an air of calm not unlike that he had known in