Flood of Fire

Nine

Although Kesri had spent a fair amount of time in Calcutta over the course of his career he had never before been quartered inside the walls of Fort William, the citadel that kept watch upon the city across the treeless expanse of the Maidan. Sepoys were rarely billeted within the fort, which was garrisoned mainly by white soldiers. Indian troops were usually quartered in the Sepoy Lines, an area that was separated from the fort by a wide stretch of empty ground.

On his previous postings to Calcutta, Kesri too had stayed in the Sepoy Lines, where the conditions were similar to those of other bases and cantonments, with the sepoys being responsible for their own food and housing — the army provided neither barracks nor messes. Rank-and-file jawans either built their own huts or pooled their money to rent them, and their food was prepared by shared servants. Havildars and other senior NCOs usually hired individual hutments and were looked after by their personal attendants.

But Calcutta’s sepoy encampment was special in one important respect: it was far bigger than most others. The bazar that was attached to it was a vast, permanent establishment, a town in itself — its offerings were so varied that a young jawan could spend months there without wishing to venture out.

Left to himself, Kesri would have liked to return to the bazar at the Sepoy Lines, but it was out of the question this time, for he was under strict orders not to step out of Fort William. The formation of the expeditionary force was still a secret because no formal orders had yet been received from London: to keep word from leaking out, it had been decided that the volunteers would be confined to the precincts of the fort.

Kesri had grumbled when he was first told that he could not leave Fort William. But once installed in his new lodgings he found the confinement less irksome than he had expected. His quarters were in a barracks, which was itself a new experience, and being among the first to move in, he was able to commandeer one of the best rooms for himself. It occupied a corner of the building and had big windows on two sides; it was also on the third floor which added to the novelty, for Kesri had never before lived so high off the ground or enjoyed such a good view of his surroundings.

On the other hand it was burdensome to be constantly on duty. In most bases and cantonments there was a comfortable division between the sepoys’ military duties and their living arrangements: at the end of the day, when they returned to their living quarters, they would change into dhotis and vests. At Fort William, by contrast, sepoys had to be in uniform all through the day, just like every English swaddy, and this took some getting used to. But still, these arrangements were not without their advantages: it was good to be spared the trouble and expense of dealing with a servant and managing a household.

The barracks that had been allotted to the Bengal Volunteers were in a secluded corner of the fort. Only a small part of the building had been set aside for them since their unit was to be a ‘battalion’ only in name. Even at full strength their numbers would be less than half that of a regular paltan: it would consist of two companies, each of about a hundred men.

That the unit would be a small one was welcome news to Kesri: he had expected to have jemadars, and perhaps even a subedar, sitting on top of him, poking their noses into everything. He was delighted to find that he was to be the highest ranking NCO in B Company. Equally pleasing was the discovery that the commander of the battalion, one Major Bolton, was a kind of supernumerary officer who was likely to be appointed to the staff of the expedition’s commanding officer. This meant that the battalion’s two companies would effectively function as independent units, which was exactly as Kesri would have wished it to be, since it meant that he and Captain Mee would be left largely to themselves in dealing with their men. There was of course the minor matter of some half-dozen subalterns to consider, but Kesri did not doubt that Captain Mee would be able to keep these young English officers from making nuisances of themselves.

It turned out that Captain Mee’s counterpart, the commander of A Company, was not a particularly energetic or forceful officer. The advantages of this became obvious when it came time to pick out the junior NCOs: with Captain Mee’s help, Kesri was able to get exactly the men he wanted as his naiks and lance-naiks.

When the first groups of rank-and-file sepoys began to trickle in, they too exceeded Kesri’s expectations. He knew from experience that soldiers who were allowed to ‘volunteer’ for overseas service were often rejects of one sort or another — misfits, shirkers, layabouts and drunks — men that any unit would be glad to get rid of. But these balamteers were not quite as bad as Kesri had feared: many of them were ambitious young jawans who wanted to see the world and get ahead, just as he once had himself, many years before.

Still, there was no getting around the fact that the volunteers were young and inexperienced soldiers, drawn from regiments of uneven standard. Kesri knew that it would be no easy task to mould this rag-tag bunch into a coherent fighting unit.

But once drills began in earnest, Kesri discovered that there were some advantages to working with a motley crowd of bala-mteers: since these men were not related to each other, as in a regular sepoy battalion, there were no meddlesome cousins and uncles to be taken into account. They could be harassed, ghabraoed and punished at will, without having to answer to their relatives. It was exhilarating to taste the power that came with this — it was as if Kesri had become a zamindar and a subedar all at once.

In the past Kesri had often been awed by the iron discipline of European regiments. He had wondered what it was that enabled their NCOs to mould their men into machines. He understood now that the first step in building units of that kind was to strip the men of their links to the world beyond. In the regular Bengal Native Infantry it was impossible to do this; the ties between the men and their communities were just too strong.

It was a help also that here they were all living in unfamiliar conditions. None of the sepoys had ever been quartered in barracks before, and Kesri was much struck by the difference. He himself was now sharing a room with four naiks, and within a week he felt he knew them better than he had ever known his subordinates. They were from different places — Awadh, Mithila, Bhojpur and the mountains — and of different castes as well: Brahmin, Rajput, Aheer, Kurmi and a few others. At the start some of them grumbled about eating together, but Kesri was quick to dhamkao the complaints out of them. Didn’t they know that they would have to travel on transport ships? Didn’t they understand that on ships it was impossible to carry on as if they were back in a village? And so on. It wasn’t long before they forgot about their complaints and this had a salutary effect also on the jawans, who became much more amenable to messing together when they saw that the NCOs were doing it too.

For a while things went better than Kesri had expected but he knew it wouldn’t last — and indeed it didn’t. Soon enough, the enforced isolation began to take a toll. The men were unused to being cooped up in a place where they had no access to the varied amenities of a camp-followers’ bazar. Living with strangers, in barracks’ rooms, and being constantly in uniform made them uneasy as well.

Matters took a turn for the worse when the second lot of bala-mteers was sent in, to make up the company’s numbers. Almost to a man they were ‘undesirables’, who had been induced to volunteer because their parent units wanted to be rid of them — either because they were physically unfit or because they were incorrigible troublemakers.

Soon nerves began to fray and since there were no cousins and uncles around to intervene before quarrels got out of hand, petty disagreements frequently escalated into fights. On two successive weeks a man was stabbed to death, which meant that the company lost a total of nine men altogether, because the killers’ accomplices had to be dismissed as well.

As the weeks went by Kesri began to see more and more signs of faltering morale: dishevelled uniforms, disorderly drills and many instances of mute, mulish insubordination of the kind that could not be remedied with ordinary punishments. To keep the men in hand became a constant struggle: for the first time in his career Kesri began to regret that flogging had been abolished in the Bengal Native Infantry.

At length Kesri hit upon the idea of setting up a wrestling pit. This was a common feature in the sepoy lines of military depots and cantonments, many of which organized regular tournaments, within and between battalions. Kesri had himself continued to wrestle throughout his military career; for a few years he had even reigned as the champion of the Pacheesi. He knew that the sport helped to strengthen bonds within units and his youthful memories of the akhara told him that it was especially likely to do so in a situation where the participants were strangers to each other. He did not expect that Captain Mee would object — he was one of the few British officers who himself entered the pit from time to time — and he was right. The captain declared the project to be a whizzing idea and obtained the necessary permissions within a week.

To dig a more or less satisfactory pit took only a day or two, and then Kesri himself took on the role of guru for the first volunteers. The effect was exactly as he had hoped: the men joined in enthusiastically, glad of the distraction, and there was a sudden rise in spirits. Soon the whole company was seized by a wrestling mustee and each platoon began to field teams to compete against each other.

Despite these heartening signs, one basic problem remained unchanged, which was that the volunteers still had no idea where they were going. This gave rise to all kinds of unsettling rumours: they would have to fight savages who ate human flesh; they were to be sent into a waterless desert; and so on. To combat the speculation Kesri began to talk to the NCOs about what seemed to him like possible destinations: Lanka, Java, Singapore, Bencoolen and Prince of Wales Island in Malaya. Sepoys had campaigned in all of these theatres and Kesri had heard innumerable stories about them from his seniors. But when Maha-Chin — China — cropped up he derided the suggestion: who had ever heard of sepoys going to China? That country lay far afield of the ring of territories where sepoys had been deployed in the past. The very name Maha-Chin suggested a realm that was unfathomably remote: what little he knew of it came from wandering pirs and sadhus who spoke of crossing snow-clad mountains and freezing deserts. The idea of a seaborne campaign being launched against that land seemed utterly absurd.

*

December was Calcutta’s social season, and thanks to the Doughties Zachary received a fair number of invitations to Christmas celebrations, and even more for the arrival of the New Year — 1840. Mrs Burnham was also present at some of these events and when they happened to come face to face they would exchange perfunctory greetings, barely acknowledging one another.

But her presence always kept Zachary on his toes: he knew that she would be watching him covertly and that there would be a detailed post-mortem later, in which he would be taken to task if he had lapsed in any way from the best standards of sahib-dom in clothes, manners or deportment. Sometimes, rarely, she would offer a few words of praise and he would lap them up eagerly. Every word of approbation made him hungry for more; nor did it diminish his appetite that he could never be sure whether she was teasing or in earnest.

On New Year’s Day their paths crossed briefly at a tiffin and that night, in the boudoir, Mrs Burnham said with a laugh: ‘Oh Mr Reid! You’re becoming quite the sahib, aren’t you? Soon you’re going to be so perfectly pucka you’ll turn into a brick. That cravat! The fob!’

‘And the suit?’ he said eagerly. ‘What did you think of it?’

Somewhat to his chagrin, this made her giggle. ‘Oh my dear, dear mystery,’ she said, cradling his face in her palms, ‘there is not a suit in the world to match the one you were born with. And now that I have it in my hands, I’d like to slip into it myself …’

As a prominent hostess Mrs Burnham herself entertained regularly at home, but it was made clear to Zachary that he could not expect to be invited and would do well to stay out of sight. When forewarned he would usually go into town or make other arrangements. But sometimes he would get busy with his work and forget: thus it came about one day that he was laying down some deckplanks when he noticed a long line of gharries and buggies rolling up the driveway. Only then did he remember that Mrs Burnham was holding a levée that afternoon.

It happened that he was working in a part of the budgerow that was hidden from the house so he decided that there was no need to retreat to the interior of the vessel as he sometimes did when Mrs Burnham was entertaining. He stayed where he was, doubled up on his knees, hammer in hand.

He was hard at work, with his back to the vessel’s prow, when he heard a voice behind him: ‘Hello there!’

Leaping to his feet, he turned around to find himself facing a flaxen-haired girl, of about seventeen or eighteen.

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr Reid?’ she said, with a shy smile. ‘I’m Jenny Mandeville: we danced at the Harbourmaster’s Ball — a quadrille, I think. You said to call you Zachary.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’ He glanced down at his soiled work-clothes — scuffed breeches and a sweat-soaked shirt — and made a gesture of embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not dressed for company.’

She gave a tinkling laugh: ‘Oh I don’t mind in the least! What you’re doing looks most diverting. Can I try?’

‘Why yes, of course. Here.’

She gave a little cry as he handed her the hammer. ‘Ooh! It’s heavy!’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not if you hold it right. Here — let me show you.’

He took hold of her palm and closed her fingers around the hammer’s wooden handle.

Their hands were still joined when another voice cut in: ‘Ah! There you are, Jenny! The mystery of the missing missy-mem is solved at last!’

They looked towards the foredeck and found a glowering Mrs Burnham standing there, with her fists resting on her hips; despite her dread of sunlight, she was, for once, devoid of either a hat or a parasol.

The girl snatched her hand guiltily away. ‘Oh Mrs Burnham!’ she cried. ‘I was just looking …’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs Burnham tartly, ‘I can see what you were looking at. But it’s time for you to be off now — your parents are already in their carriage.’

Without a word to Zachary, both women hurried off, leaving him standing foolishly in the gangway, hammer in hand.

It had been arranged between Zachary and Mrs Burnham that he would come to the boudoir that night — she liked to have him visit on nights when she had been entertaining — but he was so upset by the brusqueness of her manner that he decided not to go. He went to bed early and was sleeping soundly, sheltered by his mosquito net, when the door of his stateroom flew suddenly open. He woke with a start to find Mrs Burnham standing in the doorway, lamp in hand: her expression was like none he had ever seen before — her face was contorted with anger and her eyes were ablaze.

‘You blackguard!’ she hissed at him. ‘You vile chute-looter of a luckerbaug! How dare you? How dare you?’

Leaping out of bed, Zachary pushed the door shut. In the light of the lamp he saw that she had not changed after her levée and was still wearing the same dress he’d seen her in earlier.

‘You filthy cheating ganderoo …!’

‘Mrs Burnham — calm down.’ Taking the lamp from her hands he led her towards the bed. ‘And please! Lower your voice.’

‘Oh how dare you?’ she cried. ‘First you flirt with that slam-merkin of a girl, and then you keep me waiting? How dare you?’

He had never before seen her in such a fury: he kept his own voice down so as not to further incense her. ‘I wasn’t flirting with her,’ he said. ‘It was she who came looking for me.’

‘You’re lying!’ she said. ‘You’ve been seeing her behind my back. I know you have!’

‘That’s not true, Mrs Burnham,’ he said. ‘This is the first time I’ve spoken to her since the Harbourmaster’s Ball.’

‘Then why’s she always asking about you? Why is it always Zachary this, Zachary that whenever I see her?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Zachary. ‘Don’t know nothin bout that.’

This seemed to calm her a little, so Zachary took hold of her elbow and led her to the bed. Parting the mosquito net he said: ‘You’d better get in, Mrs Burnham, or you’ll be eaten alive.’

She shrugged his hand off but allowed herself to be ushered inside the net. Blowing out the lamp, he climbed in beside her, to discover that her rage had now turned into a flood of tears.

‘Why didn’t you come?’ she said, between sobs. ‘I waited and waited.’

‘Mrs Burnham,’ he said quietly, ‘I don’t know if this has occurred to you, but I’m not just a mystery, you know: I’m also a human being, and it hurts me when you treat me like a stray dog as you did this afternoon.’

‘What the devil do you mean?’ she retorted. ‘Do you expect me to shower choomers on you in public? You know perfectly well I can’t be familiar with you in front of people.’

‘Lookit, Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary patiently, ‘I understand that you’re a memsahib and I’m a mystery and we have to act a certain way to keep up appearances. But do you always have to be so rude to me in company? Why, there’s not a servant in the house you treat so badly. Even the way you look at me — it’s like I was a chigger or something.’

Her hands flew to her face and she shook her head convulsively from side to side. ‘Oh what a fool you are, Mr Reid!’ she said, swallowing her sobs. ‘You’re no mystery — what you are is an absolute and complete gudda.’

‘And how do you figure that?’

‘Oh Mr Reid,’ she said, ‘do you not understand? The reason I cannot bear to look at you in company is that I am gubbrowed half to death.’

‘Why?’

‘I am stricken with terror that my face will give away the goll-maul that wells up in me at the very sight of you!’

Zachary reached for her hand, in the dark, and found that it was shaking. ‘But it isn’t only in public that you’re hard on me, you know,’ he said. ‘Even when we’re alone, you have no praise for anyone but “our little sepoy” as you call him.’

She wrenched her hand defiantly from his grasp: ‘Look — if you want miss-ish sighs and swoonings and protestations of love, you would do well, Mr Reid, to seek out the Jenny Mandevilles of this world. You certainly won’t get them from me. I have long outgrown such girlish fancies.’

‘But you too were a girl once, Mrs Burnham — were you never in love then?’

Hearing a sharp intake of breath, Zachary steeled himself for a rebuff. But when she spoke again it was in a tremulous whisper: ‘Yes, I was in love once.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It was a long time ago and I was no older than that silly minx, Jenny. I had just returned from England, where I’d been sent for my schooling. He was a subaltern in my father’s regiment, fresh from England — only a year older than me. He was a little wild, as ensigns should be, and very handsome, in a dark-haired way. Almost from the moment I set eyes on him, I was lost — completely, utterly in love, as only a girl of seventeen can be. Your little Miss Mandeville has yet to feel a tenth part of the passions that agitated me then.’

‘And he?’

‘He too. We were both besotted.’

‘Why did you not marry him then?’

‘It was impossible. My parents would not have allowed it — he was utterly unsuitable in their eyes. His father was a greengrocer in Fulham, and it was said that his mother was a Levantine Jew. The rumour was that he had got his officer’s commission through blackmail: his mother had been the mistress of a member of the Board of the East India Company and she had forced her lover to use his influence. And it wasn’t as if he could have afforded a wife anyway. He was never one to play cards for craven-stakes — he had not a groat to his name.’

‘So what became of him?’

‘I cannot tell you — I have neither seen nor heard from him since the day we were torn apart, eighteen years ago.’ Her voice began to tremble again and she paused until she had regained control of it. ‘That summer my father’s regiment was quartered in Ranchi, which is a town in the hills. It was winter, and the station was very gay, with many parties, picnics and tumashers. One day we were at a picnic, in a forest — there are lovely woodlands in those hills — and we slipped away for a walk. We got a little lost, the two of us, and I did not object when he put his arm around me; nor did I resist when he put his lips on mine. Indeed I would not have resisted if he had done more than that — we were burning for each other.’

‘But he did not?’

‘No. We heard his orderly’s voice, shouting for us: we hurried back and told my parents that we’d lost our way. But there must have been something in my expression to arouse my mother’s suspicions for when we got back to our bungalow she went to speak to my father. The next day I was whisked off to Calcutta to avert a scandal: my mother was terrified that people would think that I had been compromised so she decided to marry me off as quickly as possible. In those days Mr Burnham was dancing attendance on my father in the hope of securing a contract to provide supplies for a military expedition. One day I was told that Mr Burnham had offered for my hand. My mother said I could not hope for a better match.’

‘And the ensign? What became of him?’

‘He is still with his regiment, I expect. No doubt married, with a paltan of children swarming around his feet.’

‘Do you still think of him?’

‘Oh don’t! … it is too cruel.’ She turned her face away but he could tell that she was trying to stem a fresh flow of tears.

Never before had Mrs Burnham evinced so much emotion in front of Zachary: it was clear to him that the emotions the lieutenant had stirred in her were of a singular intensity, surpassing by far anything that she had ever felt for him. Certainly she had never shown signs of such passion with him; indeed he hadn’t thought her capable of it. A burst of vexation flashed through him and somewhere inside his chest a cinder of jealousy began to glow: who was this man, this lieutenant, whose memory could reach out to her through such a long tunnel of time, making her seem a stranger to him while she was in his own bed?

‘I’ll ask no more questions,’ he said, ‘but only if you answer one more.’

Having said this, he stumbled, for his query was strangely difficult to put into words. At last, lamely, he said: ‘Tell me: the lieutenant — was he …? Am I …? Are we … at all alike?’

At this she gave him a wan smile. ‘Oh no, my dear dear. You are as unlike each other as two men could possibly be — toolsmith and warrior, Eros and Mars.’

Zachary winced: who exactly she was referring to he did not know but he had the impression that the comparison was not, in any case, flattering to him: it was as if she had said, in so many words, that she would never love him, or anyone else, as much as she had loved her lost lieutenant; that he would be forever the captain of her heart.

Slowly, with much help from Rosa and Vico, Shireen was able to convince Shernaz and Behroze that there was no great danger in her travelling to China and that the voyage would be in their common interest. The next step was to carry the fight to her brothers and for this part of the campaign Shireen enlisted the help of her daughters. They arranged to meet with their uncles, hoping to test the waters on her behalf.

The meeting did not go well. The girls came back in tears, to report that their uncles had berated them for falling in with Shireen’s plan: if she went to China a terrible scandal was sure to ensue, they had said, and the whole family’s reputation would be endangered. The seths had accused their two nieces of being unfeeling, shameless and undutiful, to their mother and to their relatives.

All kinds of unfamiliar emotions surged up in Shireen as she listened to Shernaz and Behroze. Usually anger had an enervating effect on her, making her weary and listless, but in this instance she was roused to a fury. After the girls had left, she found that she could not sit still: as if girding for battle, she changed into a fresh sadra vest and a plain white sari. Then she marched downstairs and stormed into her brothers’ shared daftar, disregarding the protests of their shroffs and munshis. Standing in front of them, with her hands on her hips, she demanded to know if they really thought that it was in their power to keep her from visiting her husband’s grave?

Shireen’s brothers were younger than her and as children they had always been a little scared of her. The passage of time, and the reverses that Shireen had suffered over the years, had diluted their childhood fear but a trace of it surfaced again now. Other than a few evasive mumbles they could offer no answers to her questions.

Seizing upon their confusion, Shireen declared that the matter was not in their hands anyway; it was up to her to make up her mind, and she had already done so — neither they nor their wives, nor even her own daughters could prevail on her to give up her plan. It only remained for them to choose what kind of scandal they wanted to deal with. Did they want a public rift within the family? Or would they prefer to stand beside her, as their father and mother would surely have wanted them to? Did they not see that it was to their benefit to tell the world that their sister was doing what any grieving and dutiful widow would want to do? Didn’t they understand that if the family presented a united front to the world then the prestige of the Mestrie name would swing the balance and everyone would surely come around?

They started to fidget now and Shireen sensed that they were wavering. Planting herself in a chair she looked them directly in the eyes.

So tell me then, she demanded. How shall we go about this? What shall we tell people?

Instead of answering her questions they made a feeble attempt to reason with her.

Hong Kong was a long way away, they said. Getting there would entail a voyage of many weeks and she, with her uncertain health, would find it difficult to be at sea for such a length of time.

Shireen laughed. She was just as hardy as either of them, she said — and as proof of this she reminded them that her ‘sea legs’ had always been better than theirs. As children, when they went on sailing trips with their parents, she was the only one among the siblings who had never suffered from sea-sickness; the two of them had scarcely been able to step on deck without heaving up their insides.

Their faces reddened and they quickly changed tack. What about the costs? they said. The journey would be expensive — where was the money to come from?

This aspect of the plan had so occupied Shireen’s thoughts that she knew the numbers by heart: reaching for a quill she jotted down some figures on a sheet of paper and pushed it across the table.

Leh, she said. There — have a look.

Frowns appeared on the seths’ faces as they went through the numbers. Their disapproval was focused on one particular figure, which they underlined and thrust back at her.

The price of the passage had been greatly underestimated, they told her. The voyage would cost much more than she had allowed for.

This was exactly the opening Shireen had been waiting for.

I have been offered a special price, she said, by Mr Benjamin Burnham, who was my husband’s colleague on the Select Committee at Canton. He will provide me with a fine cabin on one of his ships, the Hind, which will be arriving soon in Bombay. She will sail at the end of March, going from here to Colombo and then Calcutta, where she will pick up some troops for the eastern expedition.

She paused: So you see — it will be a very safe and economical way to travel.

Her brothers looked at each other and shrugged. Their expressions were such that Shireen knew that she had carried the day even before they said: tho pachi theek che, all right then; do what you want.

January 14, 1840

Honam

I have been very, very fortunate in chancing upon my lodgings in Baburao’s houseboat. I’ll warrant that nobody in Canton has a better view of this vast city than I do. A fortnight ago the residents of the American Factory put on a fireworks display in the foreign enclave, to celebrate the arrival of the year 1840, of the Christian era. I watched it from my terrace and it was as if the show had been put on expressly for my benefit; where others saw only the display in the sky, I saw it replicated also in the water, on the surface of the Pearl River and White Swan Lake.

Later, Zhong Lou-si interrogated me at length about calendars and was very curious to know which are in use in India and why. Often, when he questions me I am reminded of the tutors of my childhood, the learned pundits who schooled me in Nyaya, logic, and Sanskrit grammar. Like them Zhong Lou-si has an inexhaustible fund of patience, a tenacious memory and an unerring eye for inconsistencies and contradictions. With him too I have to be very careful in choosing my words — he examines everything I say and if I were to make extravagant claims I know I would be quickly taken to task.

In Lou-si’s demeanour too there is something that reminds me of my old punditjis: like them he sometimes lapses into woolly distractedness and sometimes bristles with irascibility. Yet there is one great difference: unlike the pundits of my childhood, Zhong Lou-si has no taste for abstractions or philosophical speculation. He is interested only in ‘useful knowledge’ — chih hsueh — which includes a great variety of things, mainly pertaining to the world beyond. In months past he would sit with me for hours, asking questions about one subject after another: were the people who Tibetans and Gurkhas call ‘borgis’ the same as the ‘Marathas’? What was the date of the Battle of Assaye by the Chinese calendar? Was Sir Arthur Wellesley the same man as the Duke of Wellington? I am sure Zhong Lou-si knows the answers to many of these questions — he asks them either for confirmation or to check my own reliability. He treats every statement critically; to him the provenance of what is said is just as important as its content: how did I know that the British expedition to Burma had come close to defeat in 1825? Was it just hearsay? What were my sources?

But since the disaster at Humen there has been a marked change in the direction of his inquiries. He no longer seems to be so interested in history and geography: his questions now are mainly about military and naval matters.

One day he questioned me at length about paddle-wheel steamers. I told him that I well remembered the day, fourteen years ago, when a steamer called Enterprize had steamed up to Calcutta, having come all the way from London: this was the first steamer ever to be seen in the Indian Ocean and she had won a prize of twenty thousand pounds for her feat. Being young at that time I had expected that Enterprize would be a huge, towering vessel: I was astonished to find that she was a small, ungainly-looking craft. But when the Enterprize began to move my disappointment had turned to wonder: without a breath of wind stirring, she had gone up and down the Calcutta waterfront, manoeuvring dexterously between throngs of boats and ships.

I told Zhong Lou-si that the arrival of the Enterprize had set off a great race amongst the shipowners of Calcutta. Within a few years the New Howrah Dockyards had built the Forbes, a teak paddle-wheeler fitted with two sixty-horsepower engines. This had inspired my own father to enter the race: he had invested five thousand rupees in a company launched by the city’s most eminent Bengali entrepreneur, Dwarkanath Tagore: it was called the Calcutta Steam Tug Association, and it was soon in possession of two steamers. I told Zhong Lou-si that steamers and steam-tugs are a familiar sight on the Hooghly now; people have grown accustomed to seeing them on the river, churning purposefully through the water and exhaling long trails of smoke, soot and cinders.

Zhong Lou-si remarked that if steamers had been built in Calcutta then surely it should be possible to build one in Guangzhou as well, me aa?

Gang hai Lou-si! Yes, of course.

I told him that I did not see why not: it all depended on the engine. The engines for the Calcutta steamers had come from England, as I remember, but I have heard that a Parsi shipbuilder has built similar engines in Bombay. If it could be done in Bombay then there is no reason why it should not be possible in Guangzhou.

From the drift of these questions I realized that there was a plan afoot to bring steamers to China. Later Compton told me that a steamer had already visited Canton some years before — he confided also that a local shipyard is now experimenting with a prototype.

From this, and from some other tasks that we’d been set, it became clear to me that the lessons of the disastrous naval engagement at Humen have not been lost on Commissioner Lin and his entourage: they have realized that China’s war-junks are antiquated and are making every effort to acquire some modern sailing vessels of the Western type.

A while ago Zhong Lou-si had asked us to look out for notices of sale for Western-built ships. As luck would have it, I soon came upon one. It was in one of the journals that Lou-si’s agents procure for us — the Canton Press.

The notice was for a ship called Cambridge; she had been put up for sale by her owner, an Englishman by the name of Captain Douglas. The notice said that she was a Liverpool-built merchantman of 1,080 tons, armed with thirty-six guns — perfect in every way from Lou-si’s point of view. But would Mr Douglas sell to a Chinese buyer? Would Captain Elliot allow him to make such a sale?

I doubted it, but still, I showed the notice to Compton who gave a triumphant shout — Dak jo! — and went racing off to Zhong Lou-si. I heard nothing more about it until today, when Compton made a triumphant announcement: Ah Neel! We have got that ship — the Cambridge!

This is how it happened: apparently the owner of the Cambridge, Captain Douglas, is well-known to the officials of Guangdong Province — he is a notorious troublemaker and has for months been disrupting the traffic on the Pearl River, sailing up and down the estuary, firing at will on fishermen and trading junks. The local authorities had even put a price on his head, of a thousand silver dollars.

These being the circumstances, Zhong Lou-si had guessed that Captain Douglas would not willingly sell the Cambridge to a Chinese buyer. To get around this problem he had enlisted the help of a wealthy Co-Hong merchant, Chunqua. He in turn had persuaded his American partner, Mr Delano, to buy the ship. Mr Delano’s bid had been accepted and the Cambridge had been duly handed over to him. After waiting a few days Mr Delano had sold the ship to Chunqua, who had then presented her to Commissioner Lin, as a gift! The Cambridge is now in the possession of the Chinese authorities who are planning to equip her with a new set of guns.

The deftly handled acquisition has been hailed as a triumph for Zhong Lou-si, said Compton, and my small part in it had not gone unrecognized either. Zhong Lou-si had sent a fine bottle of mao-tai to thank me for having brought the notice to his attention.

It is heartening — and rather surprising! — to see that a high official, and an elderly one at that, can be so nimble in his thinking and so far-sighted.

Zachary was hard at work on the budgerow one morning when he heard a khidmatgar’s voice: Mistri-sah’b! Chitthi!’

The man had brought over an envelope that Zachary knew, at a glance, was from Mrs Burnham.

January 30, 1840

Dear Mr Reid

I need to see you immediately. Please come to my sewing room at once. I’ve told the nokar-logue that I need your advice on some new pelmets so be sure to bring your tape-measure.

C.B.

Within minutes Zachary was at the sewing room door. ‘Madam? Mrs Burnham?’

He heard her voice on the other side of the door, speaking to a maid, as unruffled as ever: ‘Oh, is it the mystery? Let him in. Chullo!’

The maid opened the door and hurried away. Zachary stepped in to find Mrs Burnham sitting at her sewing table, looking perfectly composed, with her embroidery in her hands.

But the moment the door closed she dropped the frame.

‘Oh Mr Reid!’ she cried, jumping to her feet: ‘Everything has been turned on its ears!’

‘What do you mean, Mrs Burnham?’

‘He is here, Mr Reid! My husband — Mr Burnham! He has returned from China with two ships — the Ibis and another vessel that he has recently acquired, the Anahita. They are anchored at the Narrows, which is some twenty miles away. He has sent a chitty with a sowar — he will be here this evening.’

Zachary stared at her, aghast: ‘Were you expecting him?’

‘No! I had no conception!’ She pressed a fluttering hand to her throat. ‘Oh Mr Reid — and that’s the least of it.’

‘What else then?’

‘You will not credit it — my husband has decided that we must move to China!’

‘To China!’ said Zachary. ‘But why?’

‘He says that a new free port is soon to be created on the China coast. A decision to that effect has already been taken in London. He says that great new opportunities will open up and he must be there to make the best of them.’

‘And your daughter?’

‘She is to remain with her grandparents for the time being.’

Zachary’s head was spinning now. ‘So what does this mean for you and me? Will we not be able to meet after this?’

‘Absolutely not!’ she cried. ‘We can never again meet as we used to. You must not allow that thought to so much as cross your mind. Mr Burnham is fiendishly clever and it is not in your power, or mine, to deceive him while he is here.’

‘So this is it? The end?’

‘Well, Mr Reid, we knew, didn’t we, that it would have to end one day? Apparently that day has come and we must accept it.’

A lump rose to Zachary’s throat.

‘But you promised, Mrs Burnham, that when the time came we would end it properly.’

‘Well it is impossible now, don’t you see? He will be here this evening.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘Look, Mr Reid — it is as hard for me as it is for you. No — truth to tell, it is much harder for me. I have only my old life to go back to — levées, church, improving causes and laudanum to put me to sleep at night. But you are young, you have your life ahead. You will go on to find happiness with Paulette, or someone else.’

‘Paulette be damned!’ snapped Zachary.

Over the last few months, as his intimacy with Mrs Burnham had deepened, so had Zachary’s feelings towards Paulette grown increasingly rancorous: what was most vexing to him was that she should put it about that he had seduced her, whereas the truth was that his behaviour towards her had never been anything other than honourable. Why, he had even proposed marriage once, only to be rudely rebuffed! If such were the wages of righteousness then he could scarcely be blamed for having turned to adultery.

‘I don’t give a fig for Paulette!’

‘No! Do not say that! Paulette may have made mistakes but she is a good girl — I am convinced of it. She would make a good wife for you.’

Zachary had to fight back an urge to stamp his feet, like a petulant child.

‘I don’t want to marry her! I don’t want to marry anyone.’ A look of concern came over Mrs Burnham’s face. ‘Oh but Mr Reid, of course you must marry, and soon at that, or else your old ailment may again claim you. If any good has come of our connection, it is surely that that chapter is closed. Now that you have cured yourself you must not, on any account, allow yourself to relapse. All the most enlightened men are agreed on this subject — better the bordello than the indulgence of selfish, solitary pleasures.’

‘Surely, Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary, ‘you are not urging me to resort to knocking-shops and bawdykens?

‘By no means,’ said Mrs Burnham. ‘What I am urging you to do is to conquer the primitive who lurks inside you. We are in an age of progress and in order to belong to it you must destroy everything that is backward in yourself. And I am convinced that if you set your mind to it you will not find it difficult. With hard work, prayer, regular exercise, a soothing diet and cold baths you can surely vanquish the affliction. You must become a man of the times, Mr Reid — you must change yourself. If you succeed the whole world will be at your feet! It is what I expect of you; it is what you deserve.’

‘It’s all very well for you to say so, Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary. ‘But what I really deserve is for you to make good on the promise you had made to me — about how our connection would end.’

‘Now, now, Mr Reid.’ Her tone had changed now; there was a note of command in it that he had not heard in a while. ‘You’re not a child; you mustn’t make a tumasher of it.’

With a wave of a handkerchief she ushered him towards the door. ‘You must be off before the harry-maids come back.’

For a moment Zachary stood his ground, in mulish defiance, so she leant closer and whispered into his ear: ‘Remember, Mr Reid — if my husband should have the faintest suspicion he will destroy us both. So please, you must get ahold of yourself.’

Slowly Zachary’s feet began to move. On reaching the door he turned to her again: ‘Goodbye, Mrs Burnham.’

She was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

‘Goodbye, Mr Reid.’

He opened the door and stepped out.

*

It wasn’t till the end of January that Kesri learnt where the Bengal Volunteers were going. It was Captain Mee who told him: ‘Havildar, I have some important news. The Burra Laat, Lord Auckland, and the Jangi Laat, General Sir Hugh Gough, have received formal instructions from London. Our orders are to proceed to southern China.’

This stunned Kesri. China had seemed to him so unlikely a destination that he had discounted all the rumours. But when Captain Mee asked if he wanted to reconsider his decision to volunteer he answered without hesitation. ‘No, Mee-sahib. I’ve given my word and I will go. But about others I don’t know.’

‘You think we’ll lose a lot of men?’

‘Let’s see, sir,’ said Kesri. ‘Some we are better without.’

Kesri mustered the company the next day and Captain Mee made the announcement in his usual businesslike way, speaking through an interpreter. He ended by telling the sepoys that if they wanted to change their minds they had three days to do so. Later, when it was Kesri’s turn to speak to the company, he elaborated on this a little, explaining that anyone who wanted to withdraw from the unit would have to return the travel battas and other emoluments they had received for volunteering. This too would have to be done within three days; after that no withdrawals would be permitted: anyone who developed second thoughts would be treated as a malingerer.

Kesri knew that the prospect of having to return battas and emoluments would be a deterrent to most of the sepoys. He did not expect many withdrawals — but in this he was wrong. Nine men, almost a tenth of the company, came to see him and asked to be sent back to their units. He released them immediately and had them removed under escort, so that they would have no further contact with the company: better to be rid of them now than to have them lingering and spreading their poison.

After the third day had passed, Kesri reminded the company that the time for withdrawals was over. From then on he kept the men under even closer watch. Mutiny or disaffection was not what he was afraid of — in the enclosed circumstances of Fort William signs of recalcitrance would be easy to detect and quell. What worried him more was another possibility: desertion. Now that the eastern expedition was public knowledge, the men were free to apply for permission to leave the fort for short periods. Kesri knew that in the company’s present state of morale, a few desertions were inevitable and resigned himself to dealing with them when they came.

But the disclosure of the expedition’s destination did have one fortunate consequence: Kesri was free at last to visit the paltani-bazars and Sepoy Lines, to make a start on something that he had had to postpone all this while: the business of putting together the company’s contingent of camp-followers — a body that would exceed the fighting men in number when all the necessary dhobis, darzies, cobblers, bhistis, bhandari-walas, porters and baggage handlers had been recruited. On top of that there were the auxiliaries and daftardars to be considered, which would consist of another sizeable contingent, including medical attendants, clerks, interpreters, accountants, gun-lascars, golondauzes, fifers, drummers and the like.

Recruiting the camp-followers was a tedious business but it was not without its rewards. The followers were usually provided by sirdars, ghat-serangs and other labour contractors, many of whom made handsome profits from the army’s contracts and were willing to pay good dastoories in order to secure them. The officers generally left this matter to the senior NCOs and clerical staff who were often able to collect quite substantial sums from the contractors. This was an accepted perquisite and Kesri knew that he could count on it to bring in a tidy little sum.

There were no such benefits attached to the choice of auxiliaries, who were all employees of the military establishment. But in this matter too Kesri was able, with Captain Mee’s support, to pick and choose his men. He was particularly careful when it came to choosing the drummers and fifers, who were provided by the army’s Boy Establishment. These youngsters, some of whom were as young as ten or eleven, were mainly Eurasians. Some were the illegitimate sons of British soldiers and came from orphanages; some were descended from the legendary ‘topaz’ corps — the Goan and Portuguese artillerymen who had served the British during their early conquests in India.

Although the ‘banjee-boys’, as they were known, were relatively few in number, Kesri knew that they played a disproportionate role in keeping up morale. They often became mascots for their units, and the sepoys sometimes grew so attached to them that they treated them like their own sons.

Kesri insisted on auditioning the boys himself, calling on them to step out of line, one by one, when they mustered for inspection. During one audition a boy accidentally dropped his fife; he was eleven or twelve but tall for his age, with amber eyes, brown hair and a snub nose. He carried on bravely, but at the end of the performance his lower lip began to quiver. Kesri understood that he was afraid that he would not be picked so he beckoned to him to step forward.

Naam kya hai tera? What’s your name?

Dicky Miller, havildar-sah’b.

Do you know where the expedition is going?

Ji, sir. China.

And you’re not scared?

The boy’s amber eyes suddenly brightened. No, sir! he replied, puffing out his chest: Main to koi bhi cheez se nahin darta! I’m not scared of anything!

His eagerness drew a laugh from Kesri and he made sure that the boy was included in the company’s contingent of fifers and drummers. And when the fifers made their first appearance at the parade ground he knew he had made a good choice: with his bright eyes and jaunty step young Dicky Miller was just the kind of lad who was likely to keep up the unit’s spirits.

*

After his abrupt dismissal from Mrs Burnham’s sewing room, Zachary walked back to the budgerow with his head a-whirl, hardly aware of what he was doing. He had known all along, of course, that his visits to the boudoir would end one day, but he could never have imagined that it would happen so suddenly — and now that it had, he realized that a proper period of preparation would have diminished his pain and bewilderment only by a very small measure, which was that he would not have had to cope also with the bitterness of being denied the last night of leave-taking that he had been promised.

The truth was that despite all of Mrs Burnham’s warnings he had never abandoned the hope that their liaison would somehow continue, in secret: it had never crossed his mind that he might one day be thrown overboard without a plank or raft to hold on to. But along with anger, bitterness, grief and jealousy, he was aware also of a powerful sense of gratitude towards Mrs Burnham for all that she had given him, money being the least of it; nor was his admiration of her in any way diminished by his abrupt discharge.

This too served to deepen his confusion, making him wonder about the nature of their connection: what exactly was it that had come into being between them? It was not love, surely, for that word had never been used by either of them; nor was it only lust, for her voice, her words and the things she talked about were at least as bewitching to him as her body. She had opened a window into a world of wealth and luxury where the finest and most voluptuous pleasures were those that were stolen — and it was that very act of thievery, as when he was in her bed, that made them so delectable, so intoxicating. It was as though she had placed his feet on the threshold of this world: all that remained was for him to make his way in — and he was determined to do it, if only to prove to her that he was capable of it.

But how?

Defeated by the question, he went off to a bowsing-ken in Kidderpore and did not return till late at night.

On waking the next day he realized that it behooved him to go to the big house to pay his respects to the Burra Sahib. But he kept putting it off, unsure of whether he would be able to maintain a normal demeanour, fearing that he would betray himself with some chance word or gesture.

But as the hours went by it became ever clearer that it was by staying away that he was most likely to draw suspicion to himself. So in the late afternoon he screwed up his courage and walked over to the mansion to ask for Mr Burnham.

A khidmatgar led him to a withdrawing room, where the Burra Sahib was conferring with an important-looking gent. As Zachary stood waiting, hat in hand, the force of the tycoon’s presence began to work on him like a spell: Mr Burnham’s commanding stature, his wide, masterful chest, his shining beard, and even the swell of his belly helped to create an aura such that to gain his good opinion seemed a prize worth striving for.

Nor, somewhat to his own surprise, was Zachary beset by pangs of guilt or jealousy as he had feared he might be. To the contrary he was aware instead of a peculiar kind of sympathy, a sense of kinship even, born of the knowledge that neither he nor Mr Burnham would ever be able to lay full claim to his wife’s heart, which had perhaps forever been lost to her first love.

When at last Mr Burnham turned to him, Zachary shook his hand with unfeigned warmth.

‘I’m very glad to see you, sir.’

‘I’m glad to see you too, Reid. Are you finished with the budgerow yet?’

‘Not quite, sir, but I will be very soon.’

‘Good! I’m glad to hear it. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll come by to take a look.’

With that Mr Burnham turned on his heel and disappeared into his daftar.

This exchange, brief though it was, was hugely energizing for Zachary; he began to work harder than ever before, polishing, hammering, carving, holystoning. Sometimes, when he stopped to rest, his mind would wander, and then it would seem to him that the last few months had passed in a kind of delirium in which nothing had been real except the feverish voluptuousness of his nights with Mrs Burnham: whether he was with her or not, her voice had always been in his head; even when he was in his own unkempt bed, he had felt himself to be cradled in her satiny sheets.

Had his memories of those nights been a matter of the mind alone then he would have been able to deal with them without too much difficulty. But his body too had acquired a great trove of memories, and having grown accustomed to the fleshly pleasures of the boudoir, it often cried out insistently for release. But in this matter he was unyielding. Mrs Burnham’s words on the subject were loud in his ears and following her advice he began to eat judiciously, subsisting largely on crackers and bland, unspiced foods. He started to exercise vigorously, with dumb-bells and weights, and after rousing his body to a great heat he would shock it with a long, cold bath. At night, when the fear of lapsing became especially powerful, he would tie his hands to the bedstead, to prevent them from straying, as recommended by Dr Tissot. One evening he even attended a prayer meeting in the city, and for the first time in his life he understood what the preacher was talking about, what he really meant when he talked about Man’s fallen nature, and the devil that lurked in every heart; he too was among the worshippers who left the meeting armed with a precious trove of fear and dread.

And sure enough, just as Mrs Burnham had predicted, his mounting fears and anxieties began to work a slow but steady change in him; he started to see why it was more important to hoard than to waste, he understood why accumulating was more important than spending, and slowly he came to be filled with a great disgust for the life he had led before — a life of profligacy and poverty, in which he had wasted his mind and body in pointless pursuits. He longed to leave that life behind him — and again arose that confounded question: but how?

One day he saw the Burnham carriage rolling by, with both master and mistress seated within, and he yearned to prove to both of them that he was not ‘just a mystery’; that he too could be a Burra Sahib with a mansion, a carriage and ships to his name.

But how?

He could think of no answer. After many hours of fruitlessly racking his brain he went off to Kidderpore and bought himself a bottle of rum.