The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [194]
Anjuli rose swiftly and moved to the doorway, blotting out the stars. ‘I'm coming, Geeta. Goodnight, my brother. Sleep well.’
‘But you will come again, won't you?’
‘If it is possible. But even if not, we shall see each other often in the durbar tent.’
‘What is the good of that? I can't talk to you there.’
‘Oh yes you can. As we used to do in the old days, and as you did tonight. It is late, brother. I must go.’
‘Juli, wait –’ His hand went out in the darkness, but she had moved out of reach, and a moment later he could see the stars again and though he had heard no sound he knew that she had gone.
20
Ash leaned back against the pillows and stared out at the night sky, brooding with dismay on that word ‘brother’. Was that really how she thought of him? He supposed that she must. And if that was why she felt free to visit him, he ought not to complain. But he did not think of her as a sister – though honesty compelled him to admit that he had certainly treated her as one, both in his neglect for her feelings and his forgetfulness of her existence. Yet the last thing he wanted from her now was sisterly affection, even though he realized that as long as she thought of him as a brother they were comparatively safe, while should their relationship change to anything deeper, the dangers ahead were incalculable.
He lay awake for a long time, making plans and discarding them, but when at last he fell asleep, only one thing was still clear to him: the need for caution. He would have to be very careful – for Juli's sake more than his own, though he was well aware of the peril in which he would lie should anyone suspect that his feelings towards one of the brides whom he had been charged with conveying to their wedding were far from detached.
He had not needed Mulraj to point out to him how easy it would be for young Jhoti to die on the march – ostensibly from an accident – without any inquiry being made by the British authorities; and he knew that it would be equally easy for his own death to be arranged. There were so many ways in which a man could die in India, and provided he were to do so at some stage in the journey where the camp was conveniently out of reach of an English doctor or anyone else capable of giving a professional opinion on his corpse before heat, vultures and jackals had effectively disposed of it, his murderers would run no risk of being found out. Nor would his death be a lingering one, as for their own sakes they would kill him quickly. But it would be otherwise with Juli.
Ash remembered the tale of the cheetah that Nandu had burned alive because it had lost him a wager, and he shivered at the thought of what might be done to Juli. Whatever happened, she must not risk coming to his tent again. They would have to find some other way of meeting – for if she imagined for a moment that he would be content to see her only in the presence of her relations and her women in the durbar tent, she was very much mistaken. Nevertheless, they must be careful…
On that decision, Ash fell asleep. And waking in the cheerful sunlight of another idle, cloudless morning, straightway abandoned it. The dangers that had been so easy to visualize in the darkness seemed far less menacing by daylight, and by the time he was carried to the evening meeting in the durbar tent and saw her smile at him as she sketched the familiar gesture of greeting, he had forgotten his good resolutions and decided that she must come just once more, if only so that he could explain to her why she must never come again, which was something that he found too difficult to convey to her by oblique and roundabout methods.
Three hours later she was seated on the end of his camp bed while