The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [407]
He was still singing as he mounted the rickety stairs and flung open the door of the rented room. But at the sight of Ash the song stopped short and the singer's eyebrows rose in surprise.
Ash was sitting cross-legged in front of a make-shift desk formed by Dagobaz's saddle, and he was writing a letter – the last of several it seemed, for at least five neatly folded squares of paper lay on the floor beside him. He was using ink and a reed pen that he must have borrowed from the shop below, and writing on pages torn from a cheap loose-leaf notebook; and there would have been nothing surprising about it, except that he was writing in English.
‘Who is that for?’ demanded Sarji, coming to peer over Ash's shoulder. ‘If it is for some Sahib in Ajmer, you will not find a messenger to take it. Not at this hour, or for the next few days either. Have you forgotten that no one may leave the state?’
‘No,’ said Ash, continuing to write. He finished the letter, and having run his eye over it and made one or two minor corrections, signed his name at the bottom of the paper and handed the pen to Sarji. ‘Will you write your name there, below mine? Your full name. It is only to show that you are a witness that I myself wrote this letter, and that this is my signature.’
Sarji stared at him for a moment under frowning brows, and then squatted down and added his name to the paper, the neat, stylized script in strange contrast to the careless Western scrawl above it. He blew on the wet ink to dry it, and returning the letter said: ‘Now tell me what all this is about?’
‘Later. Let us eat first and talk afterwards. What kept you? You must have been away for hours, and my stomach is as empty as a dry gourd.’
They ate in companionable silence, and when they had finished, Ash strewed the remains of his meal on the window-sill for the crows and sparrows to dispose of in the morning; but when Sarji would have followed suit, he said quickly: ‘No, don't do that. No need to waste good food. Wrap it up and put it away in one of the saddle-bags. You may have need of it, for if the crowds are as thick tomorrow as they were tonight, you may find it difficult to buy more before you leave, and it is certain that Bukta will have none to spare by now.’
Sarji stood rigid, his hand still outstretched and his startled gaze asking the question that he could not force his tongue to utter. But Ash answered it as though it had been spoken aloud: ‘No, I shall not be coming with you. There is something I have to do here.’
‘But – but you said…’
‘That I had given up. So I have. I have had to give up all hope of rescuing her. It cannot be done. I can see that now. But I can at least save her from being burned alive.’
‘Her?’ repeated Sarji, as he had done earlier that day in Gobind's house when Ash had unconsciously used the singular instead of the plural. But he had not used it so now: he had used it deliberately, because there was no longer any point in concealment. The time for that had gone – together with the need to keep silent.
‘Her,’ said Ash softly. ‘Anjuli-Bai, the Junior Rani.’
‘No,’ breathed Sarji, the barely audible syllable as eloquent of horror as though he had screamed it.
Ash did not misunderstand him, and his smile was rueful and a little bitter. ‘That shocks you, doesn't it? But they have a saying in Belait that “a cat may look at a king”; and even a casteless Angrezi can lose his head and his heart to a princess of Hind, and be unable to regain them. I'm sorry, Sarji. If I had known that it would end like this I would have told you before. But then I never dreamed that