The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [460]
Now that he was no longer under surveillance, there was no reason to linger in Ahmadabad a moment longer than necessary. But it was not possible to leave immediately, because two of the three dates proffered by the station master on which he could guarantee accommodation on the train to Bombay with a through booking to Delhi and Lahore had already been lost. The remaining one entailed a further delay of several days, but now Ash closed with it and told Gul Baz to see to all the necessary arrangements for the move, he himself having other things to occupy him.
Despite the anxieties that bedevilled the tense days that followed upon his return to cantonments, the need to engage in trivial pursuits had proved a blessing, for together with the long hours of enforced idleness and the longer nights it had provided him with ample time in which to sort out the problems of the future. Yet the major one still remained unsolved: what to do about Juli?
It had all seemed so simple once; if only she were free he could marry her. Well she was free now, free from both the Rana and Shushila, and there should have been nothing to prevent him doing so. But the trouble lay in the fact that the gap between day-dreaming about remote possibilities and dealing with the reality was so wide as to be almost unbridgeable…
The same could be said of his feeling for the Corps of Guides, for at one stage of the unforgettable journey with the bridal camp he had actually considered deserting – leaving India, with Juli, to take refuge in another country and never see Mardan or Wally or Zarin again. It astonished him now that even in the first fever of his passion for Juli he could ever have contemplated such a thing: except that he had been in disgrace at the time, banished from the Regiment and the Frontier, and with no idea how long his exile would last – or any certainty that some future Commandant would not decide that it would be better not to have him back at all. But things were different now… he had been recalled to Mardan to take up the duties he had abandoned when he joined the hunt for Dilasah Khan and the stolen carbines, and there was no question of his refusing to return. The ties that bound him to the Guides stretched too far back into the past and were too strong to be easily broken; and even for Juli's sake he would not – could not – bring himself to sever them and lose both Wally and Zarin. Nor was there any point in doing so, when even if he could persuade someone to marry him to Juli, he would never be able to claim her openly as his wife.
‘The problem is this –’ explained Ash, discussing the matter with Mrs Viccary, who, besides being the only person in Gujerat whom he felt able to tell the story to, could be trusted not to let it go any further and to listen to it without being swayed by any prejudice on the score of Juli's ancestry or his own.
It was not advice that he needed (being well aware that if it ran contrary to his own wishes he would not take it) but someone to talk to. Someone sensible and sympathetic who loved India as he did and with whom he could discuss this whole situation, and by doing so get it straightened out in his own mind. And Mrs Viccary had not failed him: she had neither blamed nor praised, or been shocked by his desire to marry a Hindu widow, or by Anjuli's view that no legal marriage was necessary.
‘You see,’ said Ash, ‘once it was known that we were married she wouldn't be safe.’
‘Or you either,’ observed Edith Viccary. ‘People would talk, and news travels fast in this country.’
That of course was the point; and Ash was inexpressibly grateful to her for seeing it at once instead of bringing up all the more obvious arguments against such a marriage – beginning with the fact that, until he reached