The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [472]
‘She told me that I must pretend to be gravely displeased with her,’ said Anjuli, ‘and to let it be known that I would not speak to her or have any dealings with her, so that afterwards no one could say that we had plotted together. She warned me also that I must never touch anything that my sister was given to eat or drink, and I obeyed her, for by this time I too had learned to be afraid.’
For her own protection, Geeta refused to make use of any herbs or drugs from her own store of medicaments, but demanded fresh ones and saw to it that these were pounded and prepared by other women; and always in full view of the Zenana. But it did her no good.
As she had foreseen, there was a second miscarriage. And as before, Shushila raved and wept and cast about for someone to blame, while the Bhithori women, looking for a scapegoat, talked of poison and the Evil-eye. But though they would probably have liked to accuse ‘the half-caste’ and thereby curry favour with the Rana by giving him an excuse to be rid of her, Geeta and Anjuli had played their part too well for that. Their enmity had been accepted as truth and sniggered over too often for any volte face to be possible now. Therefore only Geeta was blamed.
Despite all her precautions, the old dai had been accused of causing this second miscarriage by the use of the potions she had prescribed, and that night she had been killed by Promila Devi and one of the eunuchs, and her frail body taken up to a rooftop overlooking one of the flagged court-yards and thrown down so it would appear that she had fallen to her death by accident. ‘Though this I did not learn until much later,’ said Anjuli. ‘At the time, I heard only that she had fallen, and that it was an accident. And I believed it, for even Promila said so…’
On the following morning ‘the half-caste’ had been sent away again: ostensibly at her own request. She was told that ‘permission had been granted for her to retire for a time to the Pearl Palace’, and she had in fact been taken there – but to what amounted to solitary confinement in a single underground room.
‘I was there for almost a year,’ whispered Anjuli, ‘and in all that time I only saw two persons: the woman Promila, who was my gaoler, and a mehtarani (female sweeper and disposer of filth) who was forbidden to speak to me. Nor did I see the sunlight or the sky, or have enough to eat. I was always hungry – so hungry that I would eat every crumb of the food that was given me, even when it was so rancid and foul that it made me ill. And for all those months I was forced to wear the same clothes that I had been wearing when I was taken from the Zenana, because I was given no others; and no water in which I might wash the ones I wore, which became ragged, and stank… as did my hair also, and my whole body. Only when the rains broke was I able to clean myself a little, for then the gutters overflowed and flooded the courtyards, and the water came into my cell and lay inches deep on the floor, so that I was able to bathe in it. But when the rains ended it dried up; and – and the winter was very cold…’
She shivered violently, as though she were still cold, and Ash heard her teeth chatter.
By the beginning of February, Anjuli had lost all count of time; and now at last she began to give up hope, and for the first time to have doubts about Shushila and to wonder if her half-sister had forgotten her or preferred not to know what had become of her. Surely she could have done something to help? But then there was bad blood in Shu-shu: her mother had contrived the deaths of her own husband and a co-wife, his fourth bride, while her brother Nandu had been guilty of matricide. Was it possible that Shushila too was capable of evil? Anjuli could