The Faraway Drums

‘You shouldn’t have come down here!’ His voice was more curt than he intended, but he was concerned at how close she had come to being either murdered or kidnapped.

‘What’s the matter? I came down here to buy some last-minute things –’

He took her by the arm, more roughly than was necessary, pulled her behind him through the crowd as Karim, now dragging both horses, followed him. The crowd, sensing tension between the sahib and the memsahib, always glad of a free show, moved up the narrow road with them. He had always been at home with a bazaar crowd; all at once now he hated them and struck out with his free arm. The crowd fell back without resentment, or at least any show of it; they silently mocked the Europeans who always wanted space around them, as if they were some sort of holy men. When Farnol finally dragged Bridie into the clear he was more angry with himself than with the mob that had impeded him. He had once thought of himself as a champion of these people.

‘For Heaven’s sake – !’ Bridie, too, was angry with him. She straightened her hat and jerked down her sleeves. ‘What’s wrong with a little shopping? I was down here yesterday –’

‘Yesterday was yesterday,’ he said, sounding even in his own ears obvious and pedantic, as if he were talking to a child. ‘The man who tried to kill me last night was in that crowd. He was either going to harm you or kidnap you.’

The crowd now stood at a respectful distance, but still close enough to have their ears cocked. Voices were hissing for everyone to be quiet so that nothing would be missed of what the sahib and the memsahib said to each other. Farnol realized he had said too much and, once again angry at them, he turned on them and told them to clear off. Karim added his larger shout to that of his boss and the crowd reluctantly retreated.

Farnol and Bridie climbed the hill, with Karim bringing up the rear with the two horses. Bridie had regained her composure, though she was worried now rather than annoyed. ‘You really think he’d have kidnapped me? Or – ?’ She couldn’t bring herself to go on. She was not new to violence, she had reported on two murders and a strike battle; but she had always been at least one remove from it, a reporter and not a victim. She shied away from the thought of herself as a possible victim. ‘Why me?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps they wanted to trap me into coming after you.’

‘Would you?’ It was not coquetry: she suddenly felt alone and didn’t want to be. She looked back down the steep hill to the bazaar; backs were turned, the crowd was no longer interested in them, a living had to be made. But she saw the press of people, the river of bobbing heads between the banks of the ramshackle stores, and she saw the India in which one could so easily be lost.

‘Of course.’ He looked at her with sudden sympathy; and something more. ‘I say, I’m awfully sorry I was so rough with you. I tend to act a little quicker than I think.’

‘Trust to your reflexes.’ She managed a smile. ‘But I’ll know what to expect in future.’

‘How’s your head this morning?’

‘Just a small ache, not much. Have you been to see the Ranee? I asked for you at breakfast –’

They were walking along the road that led to the Lodge, under the overhang of the tall deodars. Far below he could see the train at the terminus, already being loaded for the afternoon’s journey down to Kalka. He counted eight carriages and twelve wagons; he couldn’t remember ever seeing such a long train and he wondered how it would handle the very narrow gauge track; it could be a long slow trip. Especially with the elephants, standing in the station yard, that would be later loaded on to the wagons. He guessed they would not be experienced train travellers and if the train got up too much speed, swaying on the numerous bends, they might go berserk.

‘The Ranee said she knew nothing about Major Savanna and that nobody could have heard her say that he was answerable to her.’

‘She’s a liar.’

He was not accustomed to women being so direct, not even the Ranee. ‘That’s what I think.’

‘Does she know it was me who overheard her?’

‘No, she thinks it was one of the servants. We’ll meet her again on the trip down, so watch you don’t give too much away.’

She paused and looked directly at him. ‘We’re in this together now, aren’t we?’

He hesitated, then with a mixture of apprehension and yet pleasure he said, ‘I’m afraid so, at least till we get to Delhi.’

Behind them Karim, ears as finely tuned as those of the bazaar crowd, twisted his mouth as if he had suddenly sucked on something sour. A woman’s place was not with men, they were nothing but trouble outside the bedroom or the kitchen. Was not the black deity of death a woman, Kali? He wondered if some poison had got into the sahib that he should show such weakness. He knew the sahib liked women and spent a lot of time in their bedrooms. But he looked and sounded different in his way with this American woman.

They came to the gates at the bottom of the Lodge drive. Half a dozen soldiers stood outside the guard-house, amongst them Captain Weyman, who looked distracted and angry.

‘What’s happening, you ask?’ he snapped at Farnol. ‘Everything, it seems. You tell me Major Savanna has disappeared. Now I’ve lost one of my men, just packed his kit and up and left.’

Farnol ran his eye over the soldiers, guessed who had deserted even before he asked, ‘Who’s gone?’

‘Chap named Ahearn, one of the detachment from the Connaughts. All the same, these damned Irishmen. Sorry, miss.’ He looked at Bridie twice, as if not appreciating her looks the first time.

In the background Farnol saw the soldiers, all Irishmen, look at each other as if they knew no apology would be handed to them.

‘There’s something else,’ said Weyman, peeved at the world, Irish or otherwise. ‘The telephone line and the telegraph wire down to Kalka have been cut.’

‘Cut? You mean someone actually cut the lines?’

‘Well, I don’t know if it’s actually that. Most likely a landslip somewhere has pushed some of the poles down a hill. I’ve sent a party down the lines to check. It’s a damned nuisance, though. Sorry, miss. But a day like this is enough to make any gentleman forget his manners.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’ But Bridie could see that Farnol was troubled by more than Captain Weyman’s lapse of manners.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_09e408e9-f6a5-53b5-9eb9-b7bafaf79ab6)

1

Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:

I had never seen such a train. I had travelled on campaign trains in the United States and they have a bizarre enough air to them, like a travelling fair, with political promises being sold like snake-oil and rhetoric streaming out from the rear platform thicker than the smoke from the locomotive up ahead. The Durbar Train made any campaign caravan look like a commuters’ drab streetcar. The carriages were festooned with ribbons and flags; that made them only imitations of American campaign cars. But no Presidential candidate had ever been trailed by wagon-loads of elephants, not even the Republicans in their wildest extravaganzas. There were twelve elephants, two to each of six wagons; there were two dozen horses, four to each of six wagons. And there were three flat-cars, two of them piled high with howdahs like wrecked fancy coracles, rolls of striped tents like rock candy, and a great sheaf of flags and pennants, the silver tips of their poles and lances glimmering in the afternoon sun. The third flat-car carried the Ranee of Serog’s state coach.

The British passengers on the train were sensibly dressed for the long dusty journey; there would be plenty of time down in Delhi for them to bring out their finery. But excitement and anticipation made their faces bright and I’d never heard such a chattering amongst a group of English; they sounded like the Italians I had heard down on Mulberry Street in New York, except for the vowel sounds. Their children, usually so well-behaved (whatever happened to well-behaved children? They now appear to be an extinct species), raced up and down without restraint. I wondered what the King, who was reputed to be a notoriously strict parent, would think of this wilfulness that his coronation had brought on. If Major Farnol thought there was still too much Victorian stuffiness prevailing, the Simla residents seemed determined to leave it behind them in the hills, at least for this journey.

The Ranee of Serog and the Nawab of Kalanpur, with their entourages, had arrived at the same moment, coming down opposite roads to meet at the junction just above the station in a traffic jam of rickshaws, tongas and doolies, those swaying contraptions carried by two or four bearers in which the passenger swung and bounced as on bumpy currents of air. Doolie passengers knew turbulence long before jet planes were invented. There were shouts and screams of argument between the drivers and bearers, then some British soldiers, who would be travelling on the train as an escort, rushed up and sorted out the jam, prodding beasts and humans alike with their bayonets. The colourful procession flowed like a slow rainbow-shot waterfall down the final incline to the station.

The Nawab, dressed for travelling but still looking like a peacock beside the sober English turkeys, came up to me, all charm and a mile-wide smile. ‘Where do you travel, Miss O’Brady, in which carriage?’

‘I don’t know. Wherever I can manage a seat, I suppose.’

‘Miss O’Brady! Don’t you know the precedence here in India? I am at the top, of course, being a prince. But the English have so many classes. Where will you fit in amongst them, a stranger and an American? Will you be with the pukka Brahmins of the ICS, the Indian Civil Service? Don’t you know Simla is known as the Heaven of the Little Tin Gods? Or will you be lower down the scale, with someone from the army perhaps? Or even further down, down there amongst the bally commercials, the bank managers and other low life? Travel with me in my carriage, Miss O’Brady. You need not sit with my wives but can keep me company. We’ll be jolly good company for each other.’

‘Your wives? Plural? You look like a bachelor if ever I saw one, Your Highness.’

He waved at his zenana of half a dozen wives. ‘What better way of being a bachelor than having more wives than one? I have more freedom than any bachelor who keeps a mistress. One woman is one too many, half a dozen is not enough. I should like several dozen, but the blighters cost money.’

He was laughable, a joke really; but something about him told me it would be dangerous to laugh at him. Perhaps he really did want to be English, but I found it hard to believe; he enjoyed being a prince too, even if only an Indian one. He would believe in precedence as much as any of the English he had just been maligning. Don’t we all? Hollywood didn’t invent the star system, it just followed historical custom.

Then there was a commotion some distance away and Lady Westbrook came sweeping down on to the platform. She was followed by a single servant toting a trunk and a suitcase, but she gave the impression that she was trailed by a whole retinue of bearers. She also gave the impression that she had decided to wear everything she hadn’t been able to pack into the trunk and suitcase. She was wearing two large-brimmed hats, one felt and the other straw, a tweed suit over which she had pulled on a long cardigan and an Inverness cape; over one arm she carried two more cardigans and round her neck was thrown a thick cashmere scarf. Nothing she wore matched anything else; she was a dazzling clash of colours. Everything about her suggested she had just come from a better sort of English bazaar. But she was a true eccentric, as distinct from today’s exhibitionists who try to pass as eccentric, and one knew she really had no idea how she looked nor did she care.

‘I am not sitting in there!’ she trumpeted at the station-master as he tried to usher her into the carriage immediately behind the engine. ‘You know blasted well where I’m entitled to sit! Give me my proper accommodation!’

The station-master, a mixed blood, a chee-chee as the English called them, was harassed and out of his depth. He tried to squeeze his painfully thin face in behind his toothbrush moustache. ‘Memsahib, all the other carriages are full –’

‘Then some people have seats to which they’re not entitled! Look at all those children! They should have been left at home with the cats and dogs – Ah, Bertie!’ She had sighted the Nawab, came barging along the platform like a runaway junk stall. ‘Do you have a spare seat in your carriage? Of course you must with all those wives. They can sit on each other’s laps. In there!’ She waved a hand to her servant and he struggled into the Nawab’s carriage with her trunk and suitcase. ‘Is Miss O’Brady travelling with us, Bertie?’

To my surprise the Nawab did not seem annoyed at Lady Westbrook’s intrusion. Instead he laughed and shook his head at me. ‘Ah, do you not love the English? They walk all over us and expect us to love them.’

‘Wrong, Bertie,’ said Lady Westbrook, taking out a cheroot and fitting it into her ivory holder. ‘We never look for love, that’s not an English need. What about you Americans, m’dear – do you look for love?’

‘All the time.’