The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [148]
‘No need to have sent so many. Bit of swank – that's all,’ whispered the District Officer hoarsely. ‘But then he's only a boy still. Not seventeen yet… H.H., I mean. Father died a few years ago, and this… this is his chance to show off to the others – fellow princes. And to us, of course. Waste of money, but no arguing with him. Difficult young man… tricky…’
It appeared that the young Maharajah had escorted his sisters as far as the border of his state, and then turned back to go hunting, leaving the cumbersome camp in charge of the District Officer, whose orders were to accompany it as far as Deenagunj, where he would hand it over to Captain Pelham-Martyn of the Guides Cavalry. But neither His Excellency the Governor of the Punjab nor the military authorities at Rawalpindi had realized how large that camp would be. Nor had they known that there would be a last-minute addition to the party in the person of His Highness's ten-year-old brother, Jhoti.
‘Don't know why they sent him. Though I can guess,’ mumbled the District Officer. ‘Nuisance, though… didn't even know he was here until last night… More responsibility. Oh well – your pigeon now, thank God! Sorry for you…’
There were a good many other formalities that had to be completed, and by the time these had been dealt with the day was far advanced. But the sick man insisted upon leaving, not only because he craved for quiet and for clean air to breathe, but because he recognized the pitfalls of divided authority. The camp was no longer ‘his pigeon' and therefore the sooner he left it the better. His servants transferred him to a waiting palanquin and jogged away into the dusty glow of the late afternoon, and Ash went out to take over control of his command.
That first evening had been a chaotic one. No sooner had the District Officer's palanquin disappeared from sight than a clamouring horde converged upon his successor with demands for payment of bills, accusations of theft, brutality and other forms of zulum (oppression), and loud-voiced complaints on a score of matters ranging from inadequate accommodation to a dispute between the camel-drivers and the mahouts from the elephant lines over an allocation of fodder. Their behaviour was understandable, for the age and rank of the new Sahib who had taken over from ‘Carter-Sahib’ presupposed inexperience, and judging solely by this yardstick, it seemed to the camp (and also to the city-fathers) that the Sirkar had sent an almost insultingly inadequate representative to act as ‘sheep-dog, supply-officer and nursemaid’. They therefore reacted to this belief in a predictable manner, and discovered their mistake in something under five minutes.
‘I addressed them,’ wrote Ash, describing the scene in a letter to Wally, ‘and after that we managed to get things straightened out all right.’ Which is probably as good a description as any, though it hardly conveyed the impact that his words and personality had on the noisy gathering in the Karidkote camp. No Sahib of their acquaintance had ever possessed such a fluent and picturesque command of their language as this young Sahib – or been able to compress so much authority and sound commonsense into half-a-dozen trenchantly phrased sentences. The few Angrezi-log whom they had previously come across were either polite officials, earnestly striving to understand a point of view that was alien to them, or, on occasions, some less polite Sahib on survey or shikar, who lost his temper