The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [454]
Ash made a small involuntary movement, and she glanced back at him over her shoulder and said without surprise: ‘Yes, I should have known that you would hear that too,’ and turning her head away again said softly: ‘Even the Nautch-girl never called me that. She did not dare while my father lived, and when he died, and she taunted me with it, Nandu turned on her. I suppose because it touched his pride, he being my half-brother, and therefore he would not have it spoken of. But in Bhithor it was thrown in my teeth daily, and the priests would not permit me to enter the temple of Lakshmi that is in the gardens of the Queen's House, where the wives and women-folk of the Rana worship…’
Her voice died out on a whisper, and Ash said gently: ‘You don't have to trouble yourself about such things any longer, Larla. Put them away and forget them. All that is over and done with.’
‘Yes, it is over and done with; and being a half-caste there is no need for me to trouble myself as to what my people or my priests will do or say, since it seems that I have neither the one nor the other. Therefore from now on I will be a half-caste, and a woman of no family, from nowhere… one whose only god is her husband.’
‘Her wedded husband,’ persisted Ash obstinately.
Anjuli turned to look at him, her face dark against the sunset. ‘It may be… if you truly desire it, and if… But until you have seen those who are in authority over you and spoken with your priests, you cannot know if it is possible, so let us talk no more of it now. The sun is almost gone and I must go down and prepare food for us while it is still light enough to see.’
She slipped past him and went down the dark stairway, and Ash let her go without making any attempt to stop her. Instead he went to stand by the parapet, and leaning his arms on it, looked out towards the hills, as she had done, and reviewed all the difficulties that lay ahead.
45
‘I shall have to be careful,’ thought Ash. ‘Very careful.’
Last night after Bukta had left him he had contemplated flight. Juli and he must leave Gujerat at once, and on no account must he return to Ahmadabad. They could board the Bombay train at some small wayside station, and long before the Diwan's men could pick up their trail they would have left Central India and the Punjab behind them, crossed the Indus and be safely back in Mardan.
It had seemed the obvious thing to do. But then that was the trouble: it was too obvious. It was what he would be expected to do, and therefore he could not do it. He would have to be a lot cleverer than that – and pray that whatever decision he came to was the right one, for if it were not, neither Juli nor he would live long enough to regret it.
He had still not made up his mind when Anjuli called him down to eat. She had made a small fire in the corner of the tomb, and before it went out, Ash burned the packet of letters that he had written in the room above the charcoal-seller's shop in Bhithor, and that Sarji and Gobind had known they dared not keep, because had the Bhithoris found them they would have been evidence that would have betrayed him. He watched them shrivel and turn black, and later, when Anjuli was asleep, he went noiselessly out into the starlight to sit on a fallen block of stone near the entrance of the tomb, to think and plan…
He did not doubt that Bhithor and its Diwan would require vengeance for the lives of those who had died – and a lingering death for the widowed Rani, who would be blamed for everything. The hunt would be called against her, and it would not be abandoned until the hunters became convinced that she and her two remaining rescuers had lost their way among the trackless hills and died of thirst and starvation. Only then would Juli be safe. Juli and Bukta. And incidentally, he himself.
He had allowed Bukta to suppose that the Bhithoris would have no reason to connect an officer-Sahib from a cavalry regiment