The Tigress of Mysore Read online

  Besides, as the hour approached eight (which he knew because not only was it darkling, but also, unlike any other of his acquaintance who was not Angreze, he carried a watch – a most handsome gold watch with a sentiment engraved on the inside of the cover, given him ten years ago by a general no less, in gratitude for his teaching), the khansamah brought him a washing bowl, and Bunda Ali turned instead to the Maghrib, the sunset prayer.

  His wife and daughter had already retired. They shared the best of the tents, where they could eat in proper seclusion. He himself would take his khana later, in the great peace of the day when the cicadas and the crickets had at last hushed; and afterwards perhaps he would have one of his men play and sing a little, for he liked the sound of the sitar at evening. Meanwhile, the voices drifting from the soldiers’ camp would please him.

  After Bunda Ali had said his prayers and settled himself among cushions outside his tent, some of his new travelling companions joined him – Ghufoor Khan and three or four others who had paid him respects during the day, two of them with sitars. Their playing proved a little too unruly for his liking – his own people made sweeter music – but he would not object to it; not when they’d been so obliging as to let him accompany them on the road (indeed, he thought his bullock cart must have slowed them considerably). It certainly seemed to please Ghufoor Khan’s party, for soon there were two dozen of them gathered by the tent, clapping in time with the increasingly erratic strumming. A dozen more strolled down towards the stream, where Bunda Ali’s grooms would spend the night with the horses. And in the gathering darkness on the edge of the grove stood Essuree, the officer of the magistrate’s court, watching, not pleased enough with the music perhaps to venture any closer.

  In a quarter of an hour more it was black night, and Bunda Ali had become uneasy. These men could not be dacoits – surely? – for they’d had ample opportunity to rob him and be off … And yet they were crowding in a little too much for his comfort – and he could no longer see his own servants.

  He felt for the sword, which he’d laid among the cushions at his feet – the sword his father had given him on reaching baaligh, the age of maturity.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Two of the Khan’s men had picked it up and were loudly admiring its workmanship – the jade on the pommel and the amber peen, the skin of the shark that bound the grip, the chasing on the blade …

  Now alarmed, Bunda Ali stumbled to his feet and called for his servants. Someone shouted ‘Tumbakoo lao’ (‘Bring tobacco’) – the signal.

  At the stream it was all confusion: Essuree had loosed the horses.

  Bunda Ali felt the scarf brush his forehead. He grasped at it and tried to turn as Bhawanee, the ‘jemadar’, the leader, yanked it tight round his throat, but a second gripped his arms from behind, while yet another kicked his legs from under him.

  Bunda Ali was a big man; he fell heavily as the roomal, the scarf, gouged into his throat. The ‘jemadar’ crouched over him with one knee in the small of his back, gripping the two ends of the killing cloth, hands crossed. ‘Accha,’ he hissed, jerking them apart with all the strength of the lohaar (blacksmith) that was his other trade.

  Legs and arms flailed, then twitched feebly, and then fell still as Bunda Ali gave up the ghost.

  The commotion brought the moonshee’s wife to the flap of her tent, child in arms. She saw, cried out and turned, but the ‘jemadar’ was too quick. The same yellow scarf that had sent her husband to his maker was round her neck in a trice, and she too was sent to eternity – and the infant into the hands of the jemadar’s second.

  Another, Bazeed, lean and hungry looking, pushed past to finish the work. The promised bride was already on her feet, woken by her mother’s cry. He seized her nightgown at the neck, rending the silk with such force that she fell back, exposed as never before to any man.

  The back of the jemadar’s hand struck Bazeed’s cheek hard. ‘No time!’

  Bazeed staggered, then threw himself at the terrified girl as she tried to cover herself, fastened his hands on her throat and squeezed the life from her.

  At the running-line Bunda Ali’s syces, who seconds before had been squatting on their haunches, chewing betel nut and sharing thoughts of the day, looked up to see faces hitherto friendly but now homicidal. Two were dead before they could rise, but a third sprang free, making for the river, crying blue murder. Others of Essuree’s who’d loosed the horses made greater racket, however. The plaintive cry of a single syce amid the stampede was not going to bring the soldiers running. Besides, he too was soon pulled down and the life squeezed out of him.

  Murder, fast and efficient, and with a relish that was more than necessity – pure evil to any who could have observed. Eight men, a nursing mother and a girl who might still be thought a child had died like hens in a coop when the fox breaks in.

  Then silently in the darkness, the jemadar’s men searched the bodies. Those of the servants and syces returned just a few silver rupees, but Bunda Ali’s yielded gold and the fine watch given him by the general at Fort St George, while his wife and daughter had about them jewelled bangles and rings. Their baggage of course would render much more.

  Then the jemadar’s men stripped the bodies. It would make it all the more difficult to recognize them if – Allah and all the gods of the Hindoos forbid – the bodies were ever found. The silks and satins would all bring coin at the bazaar, too; and even the coarsest dhoti was worth something as shoddy. Then they dragged them through the thicket to the long grass where that afternoon Ghufoor Khan’s lughaees had dug two pits, practised as they were in judging precisely how deep and wide was wanted. They broke the joints of every one of them, and then out came the knives to slice through the sinews, all the better to pack the corpses into their secret tomb; and then as if this desecration weren’t enough, they plunged the blades into the belly of each – even the wife and daughter – so that bloating would not displace the earth and reveal the murderous deeds.

  Ghubbil Khan, the jemadar’s second, who had plucked the child from its mother’s arms as she lay choking, stood to one side with his mewling prize.

  The jemadar gestured sharply.

  ‘She is mine,’ Ghubbil Khan protested; ‘I shall raise her by my own hand, and she will marry my son!’

  The jemadar cuffed him hard. ‘She is not a peasant child. She will be recognized, and we discovered.’

  So Ghubbil Khan tossed the child disconsolately into the pit, and the others shovelled in earth until the pitiful crying was no more. They trod the soil and then tamped it with the spade until there was no sign that the ground had ever been disturbed. Then they returned to the campfire to drink bhang thandai. In the small hours they took down the moonshee’s tents, packed his belongings and stowed it all neatly on the bullock cart. An hour before dawn – before even the soldiers had risen – they left the bamboo grove with not a sign that Bunda Ali, his servants, his cherished wife, his fair bridal daughter or his nursling infant had ever been there.

  II

  Words of Command

  Fort St George, Madras, Tuesday, 7 October 1834

  ‘That’s right, Miss Hervey: arm extended, locked at the elbow and wrist. Lower the piece onto the target, eye running the length of arm and barrel to the centre of the observable mass …’

  Serjeant Acton could but instruct in the same language he would use with a recruit, if markedly less severe in tone. He supposed his commanding officer’s daughter to have rather more education than the usual dragoon, even at the tender age of sixteen, and undoubtedly more sensibility. That said, a cavalry pistol was still a cavalry pistol … ‘and firm but even pressure in the trigger …’

  It kicked hard, and her hand would have shot upwards if he hadn’t instantly closed his on hers.

  He knew it would kick. The recoil could take the sturdiest dragoon by surprise first time, which was why his right hand had guided hers ever so gently into the aim, and his left had hovered ready to grasp her shoulder t
o steady her.

  No man had ever held her so – except of course her father (but that was different) – and she thought she coloured a little with the intimacy. Perhaps it didn’t show; perhaps, anyway, it was just the heat and the pistol’s loud crack that made her redden – if redden she did. She certainly hoped she didn’t; she’d no wish to discomfit Serjeant Acton, so fine a man said her father (said everyone): ‘ein treue husar’. And so he was, she’d decided – all that a serjeant of dragoons should look like (and be).

  ‘A hit, Serjeant Acton?’

  ‘A hit, Miss Hervey. High and to the right.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It would have stopped the man,’ said Acton encouragingly, if not altogether certain. ‘Not that it’ll ever be necessary, Miss, with a whole regiment of dragoons at your father’s command.’

  Georgiana smiled obligingly, for she knew he meant well; but it hadn’t saved her mother. Although then, of course, her father had been a mere captain. Serjeant Armstrong – now the regimental serjeant-major – had been left for dead in his attempt to rescue her, but the Shawanese Indians had their method: they not so much left Henrietta for dead as to die, killing her horse and leaving her to the snow and ice. Georgiana had been in swaddling clothes still, with her wet-nurse, and her father had been with his dragoons and the Americans trying to intercept the migrating tribes; it had gone very ill with him indeed, his not being there when the Shawanese struck – Elizabeth, her aunt, had told her of his sending in his papers and the year and more trying to be a civilian – but it had been an age ago, now, and Kezia was his wife, and her step-mother; and she was come at last to live with them.

  The straw round stood at just twelve paces, but Acton said that no dragoon under discipline would ever chance a shot at any greater range.

  ‘Again, then, Miss.’

  Acton gave her a percussion cap. Georgiana cocked the pistol, placed the cap on the nipple and eased the hammer down slowly again. He took a cartridge from his pouch, bit off the ball and gave the case to her. (She’d done it once; there was no need to blacken her lips any more than they were.)

  Georgiana took it confidently – they’d practised ‘dry’ for half an hour before Acton would trust her with real cartridge – poured powder down the barrel, let him drop in the ball, pushed in the cartridge paper for wadding and tamped it firm with the swivel rod.

  She fired, this time the ball striking a little nearer the mark. Three more followed – one closer in, two rather wider. She shook her head when they examined the round and chalked the holes.

  ‘Those are nothing to be dismayed about, Miss Hervey,’ said Acton. ‘Accurate’s not the same as being a marksman. Accurate’s about getting them shots all close together. A marksman, though, hits his target when he’s required to.’

  Georgiana seemed reassured.

  ‘Now, Miss Gildea, your turn if you please.’

  Acton was being particularly correct in front of the daughter of his commanding officer, whose coverman he was, the most honoured position for any serjeant of the regiment. He’d first known Annie when she was a chambermaid at the Berkeley Arms at Hounslow, where Colonel Hervey had put up for several months before taking the lease on the former colonel’s house at Heston, and Annie had gone to Heston too as housekeeper’s assistant. She’d always been obliging to him – and to any other dragoon who’d come to the Berkeley: she’d come out with coffee and nice cuts on cold mornings, and then at Heston in the servants’ hall if ever he’d had to wait. There’d been ‘talk’ in the canteen about her going to Heston, how as Mrs Hervey wasn’t there – and why indeed wasn’t the colonel’s lady by his side? – and that Annie must be ‘standing in for her’; but he didn’t reckon it himself. Mind, she was a fine-looking girl. And then, after all, the colonel had asked her to come to India with them …

  Well, it may have been the other way round. Annie had a brother who was a soldier, and he’d been posted to Bengal, and she’d thought she’d be able to see a bit more of him here, not really knowing how far distant Bengal was from Madras. In any case, Mrs Hervey had come to India too, so that was that. And Mrs Hervey must have thought highly of Annie, as when young Miss Allegra’s governess said she wanted to go back home, Mrs Hervey promoted Annie in her place, which was why she had to be called ‘Miss Gildea’ now. And Annie was different now, too – not haughty or anything, just … well, quite the lady. (As he supposed she had to be, of course.) She spoke like a lady almost; and she dressed special. A lot of the NCOs were disappointed, naturally. They’d fancied their chances with Annie (he himself had), but it was different now she was ‘Miss Gildea’; even some of the officers – not the Sixth’s, of course, but some of the Foot regiments and the native ones – paid her attention after church parades and the like. To an NCO, he reckoned, she was probably now out of range.

  However, Annie was not as naturally disposed to becoming a marksman as Serjeant Acton’s other pupil, her additional charge, was. Colonel Hervey – or more precisely, Colonel Hervey and his wife (she wasn’t exactly sure who’d spoken the words first) – had asked her to take on the care of Georgiana when they’d received word that she was at last bound for India, but not with a governess; with a chaperone only as far as Madras. And as both Colonel Hervey and his daughter were strongly of the mind that a lady abroad should be able to fire a pistol, she found herself here at the butts. Besides, since the affair of the snake she’d discovered in the stillroom, she had herself come to the conclusion that India was indeed a perilous place. (She hadn’t heard Serjeant Stray say ‘Colonel, that lass – Annie: as brave as a lion’, but Mrs Hervey had given her a pearl necklace and said that nothing could truly express her thanks for saving her daughter; and the Colonel himself had left no doubt about his regard.)

  Not that she would be elsewhere. She’d never thought meanly of herself for being in service; but to be a governess was the occupation of respectable people, and she cherished her new-found respectability. Besides, although it was early days still, she found Georgiana most amenable. Indeed, she was certain that she herself learned more from her charge than the other way round. For what, in truth, could she, Annie Gildea, whose father had kept the tolbooth in Hounslow, impart to Miss Hervey, whose late mother had been ‘Lady Henrietta’, and whose paternal aunt, who’d raised her after her sad death, was lately married to a baron (and a German baron at that)?

  Annie, too, had practised dry. She took up the pistol determinedly from the table and fixed on a percussion cap, Serjeant Acton handed her a cartridge and she bit off the end, trying not to grimace at the taste of the tallow as she took the ball between her teeth. She poured in the powder, spat in the ball and pushed in the wadding confidently enough, tamped it not too gingerly (she couldn’t let Georgiana see a moment’s hesitation – and she certainly wasn’t going to give Acton the satisfaction), then extended her arm in the prescribed manner.

  ‘I shall be well, Serjeant Acton,’ she said equally determinedly as he moved to support her. (It seemed unnecessary that he should take hold as if they were dancing.)

  ‘As you wish, Miss Gildea. In your own time, then; fire.’

  The ball nicked the edge of the round, tell-tale bits of straw adding to Annie’s dismay. But she’d been ready for the recoil at least, and her feet remained as they were.

  ‘A little gentler with the trigger, Miss, and arm locked. That’s all.’

  ‘Another cartridge then, please, Serjeant Acton.’

  He made to bite off the end.

  ‘No, I must do it for myself.’

  She bit off the cartridge with every impression of meaning business, and loaded deftly (she’d long observed how a woman’s fingers were nimbler than a man’s, and told herself there was no reason it shouldn’t be so with powder and ball).

  This time her arm was ramrod straight. She lowered the pistol and squeezed the trigger in one movement.

  The ball was so close to the centre mark that even Acton couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘A fine shot, Miss. You
need do no more.’

  But Annie thought she must – at least as many as Georgiana had. Besides, she was not at all sure that her fine shot hadn’t been a chance one.

  Three more were enough to demonstrate Acton’s pronouncement that accuracy was not the same as marksmanship – spread left and right of the centre mark – but both she and her charge could now leave the butts contented.

  ‘Thank you, Serjeant Acton,’ said Georgiana, smiling as winningly as ever her mother had, with the confidence of her station and the innocence of her years.

  ‘An honour, Miss.’

  ‘Thank you, too,’ said Annie, though careful not to smile quite so much as she would have done before she became ‘Miss Gildea’. She’d always found Acton the most decent of men – like Corporal Johnson and Serjeant Stray – and she wished to keep it that way. She’d been trusted beyond her station in being made a governess, and she’d no wish to let down Colonel Hervey – or indeed Mrs Hervey. What other secrets of her heart there were must bide their time, even if an eternity.

  * * *

  The regimental serjeant-major closed his order book. ‘With your leave, then, Colonel.’

  Hervey nodded. Not a bad orderly room today: no defaulters to speak of, and barely a dozen sick – and the new medals, for long service and good conduct, just arrived, a handsome idea of the King’s, though why the infantry would have it after twenty-one years and the cavalry twenty-four puzzled them. Nevertheless, it was a fine pretext for a parade, and he’d get Somervile to present them – a dozen and more by the paymaster’s reckoning.