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By Root 2763 0

that by doing so he had done young George an excellent turn and started him on what might one day prove to be a profitable career in the wine business. Unfortunately, the news had been anything but welcome to George, who left to himself would never have returned to India, but he lacked both the courage and the means to refuse such an offer. When he had served his apprenticeship and was eventually ordered to Peshawar, the only bright spot on his horizon was the fact that close on four hundred miles separated Peshawar from Bareilly, and that he would not, in any case, be expected to visit Mr and Mrs Mullens; for barely a month before his departure he heard that Mr Mullens had died of enteric and his brokenhearted widow had sold the store and sailed for Rangoon, where her son-in-law was doing well in the teak trade.

Mr Mullens, charitable to the last, had left George fifty pounds and a gold watch, and George spent the money on clothes and told his landlady that the watch had been his grandfather's. His Irish grandfather – the O'Garforth of Castle Garforth…

‘I didn't think they would ever find out,’ confessed George miserably. ‘But Mrs Gidney has a friend whose husband is in the teak trade and knows old man Mullens's son-in-law, and it seems that the friend met Mrs Mullens one day and they began talking about the Mutiny and all that, and Mrs Mullens told her about me and how her husband paid for my schooling and got me this job, and how well I was doing, and – Well, just about everything. She even had a photograph of me. I'd forgotten that. I sent it to them my last term at school. I used to write to them, you know. And then this friend wrote to Mrs Gidney…’

Mrs Gidney had apparently conceived it her duty to ‘warn’ her dear friend Mrs Harlowe, and Mrs Harlowe, greatly upset by George's duplicity, had somewhat naturally told her daughter. But where the two older ladies had merely been shocked, Belinda had been outraged, not so much because she had been lied to, but because she considered that she had been made to look foolish. After all it was she and her mother who had, in effect, sponsored George and helped to launch him on Peshawar society, because although his looks alone would have attracted a certain amount of attention, they would never have obtained for him the social recognition that Mrs Harlowe's partiality and her daughter's friendship for him had bestowed on him from the start. Besides, Belinda had more than half believed that romantic tale of a liaison between his mythical great-grandmother and Lord Byron (though to give George his due, this was one rumour for which he was not responsible), but though she had found nothing shocking in an illegitimate grandmama born of such exalted parents – in fact, quite the reverse – the bastard daughter of a colour-sergeant and a low-caste Hindu woman was a very different affair, and sordid in the extreme. Why, George's mother was nothing more than a half-caste – an illegitimate Eurasian who had married a corporal in a line regiment – and George himself had more than a ‘touch of the tar-brush’, for he was one quarter Indian; and low-caste Indian at that. This – this was the man that she, Belinda, had helped to foist onto Peshawar society and had danced and dined with and bestowed her smiles on. Now all the other girls were going to laugh at her, and she would never live it down. Never.

‘She was so angry,’ whispered George. ‘She said such terrible things – that all half-castes told lies and she never wanted to see me again, and… and if I ever spoke to her again she'd c-cut me d-dead. I didn't know anyone could be so cruel. She didn't even look p-pretty any more… she looked ugly. And her voice… Her mother k-kept saying “You don't mean that, dear. You can't mean that.” But she did. And now she's started t-telling people. I know she has, because they look at me as though I was s-some sort of insect and… What am I going to do, Ash? I'd k-kill myself if I could, but I haven't got the g-guts to do it. Not even when I'm drunk. But I can't stay here any longer. I can't! D-do you think