The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [29]
Once again there had been feasting and fireworks in the city. But this time it had been in celebration of the birth of a boy to Janoo-Bai the Rani – some-time dancing-girl, and now virtual ruler of Gulkote, in that she ruled the Rajah to the point where her smallest wish must be gratified.
The Rajah's subjects had been commanded to celebrate and they had done so, though without much enthusiasm; the Nautch-girl was not popular with the citizens, and the prospect of a prince of her breeding was displeasing to them. Not that he was the heir, for the Rajah's first wife, who had died in child-birth, had left her lord a son: Lalji, ‘the beloved’ – the eight-year-old Yuveraj, apple of his father's eye and pride of all Gulkote. But life was uncertain in India and who could say if the boy would live to be a man? His mother, in fifteen years of marriage, had given birth to no less than nine children, all of whom, with the exception of Lalji (and the last – a still-born daughter), had died in infancy. She herself had not survived that last confinement, and her husband had soon married again, taking as his wife the daughter of a foreign mercenary, a young and lovely girl who became known in Gulkote as the ‘Feringhi-Rani' – the foreign queen.
The Feringhi-Rani's father had been a Russian adventurer who had taken service in the armies of various warring Indian princes. Under the last of these, Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of the Punjab’, he had risen to considerable heights; and on the ‘Lion's’ death, had prudently retired to end his days in the remote and sovereign state of Gulkote. It was rumoured that he had once been an officer of the Cossacks who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for some misdemeanour, but had escaped from his gaolers and found his way to India through the passes of the north. He had certainly shown no desire to return to his native land when Ranjit's death had put an end to his employment in the Punjab, but had lived in comfortable retirement on the accumulated riches of ten years of power, together with a bevy of concubines and his Indian wife, Kumaridevi, the daughter of a Rajput prince whom he had defeated in battle, and whom he had demanded of her father as part of a conqueror's loot – they having seen each other in the sack of the city, and straightway fallen in love.
The Feringhi-Rani was this lady's last and only surviving child; born at the cost of her mother's life, since by then the once beautiful princess had been middle-aged and worn out by miscarriages and still-births that were due, in a large part, to the rigours of following her husband on many campaigns. Her daughter had been brought up with a brood of illegitimate half-brothers and sisters, all of whom had considered it a triumph when reports of her beauty had reached the ears of the Rajah of Gulkote, and he had asked for her hand in marriage, knowing that no lesser alliance would have been considered, as on her mother's side her lineage was more royal than his own.
For a time the Feringhi-Rani had been happy; none of her half-brothers and sisters or their various mothers had been particularly kind to her, and she had been glad to leave her home for the raffish splendours of the ‘Palace of the Winds’. The enmity of the women in the Hawa Mahal had not troubled her over-much, for she was used to the intrigues in Zenanas, and the Rajah was infatuated with her and could refuse her nothing. Nor was she unduly grieved when her father died a year after her marriage, for he had never paid much attention to his numerous offspring. If she had any regrets they were solely on account of her childlessness, though she did not desire children with the single-minded fervour of purely Eastern women, and was in any case sure that it was only a matter of time before they appeared. But the avid interest, jealousy and triumph of the other women over this sore subject (together with their gloating hints that she – ‘the half-caste’ – was barren) piqued her, and she began to worry over it and be impatient for the day when she too