The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [207]
As the camp crawled southward across Rajputana like a vast and colourful circus procession (or, as it often seemed to Ash, an insatiable horde of locusts) the weather became warmer and he realized that the time would soon come when it would be too hot to march when the sun was high. But there was no need to start planning for that yet, as the temperature was still tolerable even at noon, and the nights remained mild.
The days slid into weeks almost without his noticing it, and he enjoyed every one of them: though it was far from being an idle time, for each day brought its own crop of difficulties, ranging from the routine ones of provisioning (which included dealing with claims for damages to crops and grazing-grounds by irate village headmen) to arbitrating in a wide variety of disputes within the camp, and, on more than one occasion, helping to beat off an attack by armed raiders. These and a hundred other matters kept him fully occupied. But he would not have changed places with anyone in the world, for he found the constant and varying demands upon him stimulating, while the fact that there had been a serious attempt to murder young Jhoti – and would probably be others – added a spice of danger to the journey that offset any element of tedium. And at the end of each day there was always Juli, and riding beside her in the quiet hour before sunset he could relax and forget his responsibilities to the camp and to Jhoti, and become Ashok again instead of ‘Pelham-Sahib’.
It was on one of these evenings – a hot, still evening at the end of an even hotter day – that he heard for the first time the story of how Hira Lal had accompanied Lalji and the old Rajah to Calcutta, and had vanished from his tent one night and never been seen again taken, it was said, by a tigress, a notorious man-eater who was known to roam the district and had already accounted for more than a dozen villagers. The proof of this had been a fragment of Hira Lal's blood-stained clothing, found among the bushes. But there had been no pug-marks and no trace of the drag, and a local shikari (game hunter) had tactlessly insisted that he did not believe that this was the work of the man-eater – an opinion that was later borne out by the news that the tigress had killed a herdsman near a village some twenty-five miles away on the very night that Hira Lal disappeared…
‘No one in the Hawa Mahal believed it either,’ said Anjuli, ‘and there were many who said he had been made away with by order of the Rani – though they did not say it out loud, but only in a whisper: very small whispers. I think, myself, that they were right; everyone knew that she had been enraged when she learned that my father had decided to take Lalji with him when he travelled to Calcutta to lay claim before the Viceroy to the throne of Karidarra, and it was no secret that it was Hira Lal who had persuaded him to do so – perhaps because he did not trust her not to bring about Lalji's death as soon as my father's back was turned. She was always jealous of Lalji.’
‘And I imagine she made away with him in the end,’ observed Ash grimly. ‘ Lalji and Hira Lal both. It almost makes one hope that there may be a hell after all; with a special section reserved for people like Janoo-Rani who do their murdering at second-hand.’
‘Don't!’ said Anjuli in a low voice, and shivered. ‘You do not have to wish for that. The gods are just, and I think she paid in this life for all the evil she did – and more. Much more, for she did not die an easy death, and towards the end she shrieked out that it was Nandu himself who had poisoned her, though that is something I will not believe; no son could have done such a thing. Yet if she believed it, how