So tonight briskly he swung back one half of the heavy gate, briskly he put his hand to his forelock and said, ‘Good evening, sir’ before, in the darkness, he was aware of the empty saddle. He said later that it made him feel no end of a fool. He also said he noticed how profusely the horse was sweating; a bit more than you’d expect it to even after a sharp gallop, the night being so chilly.
Bobby, according to custom and drawn by his stable, went smartly through the gate and was out of reach along the avenue before Jarvey had fully taken stock of the situation and realised that he must do something. He must get up to the house and tell Sir Edward Follesmark and the rector; they were there, Bessie had let them in just before she sat down. They’d know what to do. ‘Bugger Bobby, going by me like that,’ he muttered. ‘Now I must tramp it. I could have rode.’
They found Sir Charles sprawled in the road, halfway between the opening of the Lady’s Ride and the gateway of Wood Farm. The way his head lolled indicated that his neck was broken. Fuller was obscurely relieved to think that this must have happened before he confided in the bullock, choosing to forget that all through the late afternoon he had been wishing ill to his landlord. They took Rout’s gate from the post and used it as a stretcher upon which to carry the body home. They mentioned Richard in muted voices; they remembered many things; they speculated about the future.
Only one thing was sure. The old man, now dead, had in his fashion ‘kept the faith and finished the course. Nothing would ever be the same again.
CHAPTER TWO
On the afternoon of the third Saturday of October in the year 1795, but making due allowance for the longitudinal variation in time which those who mastered the subject at school will understand and those who did not be content to ignore, Mrs Richard Shelmadine set out on what she knew would be her last ride through the city of Kilapore.
The Rajah had sent the message in the morning. It was couched in the usual arrogant terms—His Highness would be prepared to take leave of them on this day, an hour before sunset.
Richard had described exactly the various horrible things which he was prepared to see happen to the Rajah, and to himself, before he intended to comply with this command, and so long as he confined his curses to English Linda had made no protest; but when he changed, with that astonishing facility of his, and began a tirade in the native language of the grave-faced servant who stood awaiting an answer she said, ‘Richard, please. Ask the man to wait outside, I have thought of something—‘He did as she asked, not because he was amenable to her wishes but because he had a well-founded respect for her quick-wittedness; many a time during their wandering exiled years she had found a way to turn an uncompromising situation to their advantage.
As soon as they were alone she said:
‘No one could expect you to go. But perhaps I should. He rather likes me, you know. He might give me something.’
Something more like a snarl than a grin crossed Richard’s face.
‘I’ve noticed His Highness’s partiality! If I’d had any sense I should have let you negotiate. Still, it is a notion. Being impotent as a mule, he can’t give you what he would like to—so you may come back with one of the bright buttons with which he decorates his fat belly I’
She gave a little laugh—one of the tinkling, mirthless, brittle laughs which she learned long ago to be the best way of parrying the thrusts which aimed to hurt.
‘One of the emerald set! Well, that would be very acceptable.”
‘Go then, and get away with all you can. All I ask is that you make no civil excuses for me. Tell him I didn’t come because I couldn’t trust myself not to kick his teeth in.’
As often before, having won her point, she was ashamed of the duplicity which had gained her the victory. But to have spoken truthfully, to have said, ‘One of us should go; Surunda has been very kind to us; and though he decided against making the concessions he never led you to expect anything else’—that would merely have led to Richard ordering her not to go.
A half-remembered Biblical phrase drifted through her mind, something about being wily as a serpent and harmless as a dove; it brought with it the memory of English Sunday evenings, with the scent of hay and honeysuckle drifting in at the open door, of sunset brightening the stained glass of the windows and her father’s voice thrown back from the sounding-board of the high pulpit. But these were things better forgotten; the days of the dove were over, it had been sacrificed long ago—even the serpent had found survival difficult enough of late.
She dressed for the visit with scrupulous care utterly divorced from vanity. She had never been very pretty, just young and fresh and lively-looking, and five years in India had ruined what looks she ever had; the smooth pink-tinted oval cheeks were bleached to the yellowish
ivory of elderflower, and there were hollows in them, and at the temples and about the eyes. Her hair, once the prettiest thing about her, shining golden and very curly, had also bleached and faded to a dullish primrose colour and was almost as straight as an Indian woman’s. And she was so thin that her neck was stringy. Cousin Maud had been right when she had warned her that India was no place for a white woman. ‘In a year you’ll be a scarecrow and in two you’ll be dead,’ she had said. Well, it was jive years and a few months, and tomorrow she would be on her way back to Fort St George; and within a fortnight, with any luck, on her way back to England. The assignment to Kilapore had been Richard’s last chance; the Company had finished with him now. And though there were white men—quite a number of them—who had come out to work for the Company and then been dismissed, or had left it to launch out on their own, and, many of them, made a living and, some of them, a fortune, Richard was not of their stamp. It took energy and enterprise and industry and ruthlessness to make a way in India, and of all these qualities Richard possessed only ruthlessness.
She put on the lavender-coloured silk dress which, earlier in the day, as soon as the servant had gone off with the message, she had taken out and shaken. It was the last of four similar dresses presented to her as a parting present by Cousin Maud, whose generosity had exceeded her knowledge of what was suitable wear in India. She had known enough to say that India was no place for a white woman, but she had not known that it was equally no place for stiff silk, tightly waisted dresses with heavy panniers. Linda had soon removed the panniers and let out the seams of all four gowns. But in no time the silk had rotted and split; for in India one sweated—there was no other word for it—sweated like a coach-horse, and in the rainy season mould grew on one’s dresses and shoes overnight. When the rose-pink, the blue-green, the yellow and the lavender gowns had all shown signs of immediate dissolution Linda had selected the lavender one, the most
modest and practical-coloured of the four, and laid it away. When the others fell to pieces she had bought lengths of cheap flimsy cotton stuff in the bazaars and made herself some loose cool garments of curious style—a cross between the ‘morning’ prints she had worn at home, before she went to London to act as Cousin Maud’s companion and amanuensis, and the clothes worn by Indian women.
The dress gave one or two ominous little creaks as she lifted it over her head, and more as she strained back her arms to manage the fastening; but as the long gleaming folds fell to her feet and the lace-lined sleeves covered her sharp elbows she knew a moment of rehabilitation. It was a dignified dress, a proper English dress, and she regretted that the amethyst necklace, Cousin Maud’s wedding-present, had had to be sold. It would have done much to conceal the painful scragginess of her neck and collarbones. Poor Maud—she had herself made an amazingly advantageous marriage, and in dear little Linda’s capture of Richard Shelmadine—such a charming man, and heir to a baronetcy—she had seen her own worldly success repeated, with additions; for Maud’s own husband had been elderly, middle-class, invalidish and—to say the least of it—grumpy. Richard Shelmadine was only thirty— just the right age for an innocent, unworldly girl of eighteen; and though he was wild, had indeed quite a bad reputation, everyone knew that a reformed rake made the best husband. Maud had done, had given everything that could possibly make the match start off well.