The Weeping Ash Read online

  “I most certainly shall not,” replied Thomas glacially. “I should be greatly obliged if your Lordship would take immediate steps to have the passage closed off.”

  “Very well, very well! And I will bid you good day,” said Lord Egremont, sighing a little. He now appeared resigned to the fact that his new neighbor did not intend to reciprocate his friendly overtures in any way. Indeed it seemed to Fanny that his glance at her contained some commiseration as he bowed and remarked, “Good afternoon, ladies. I trust that you will be very happy during your stay in the Hermitage.”

  Thomas removed his own hat and bowed stiffly; then stood waiting, holding his horse, until Lord Egremont should have passed out of the lane. But the latter turned to say, on an afterthought:

  “By the by—who is the new gardener that you have hired?”

  “His name is Goble—Henry Goble,” replied Paget repressively, as much as to say, What business is that of yours? “He is a native of Petworth, I understand, but recently returned from long service in the navy.”

  “Goble? Goble? Great heavens, yes—I well remember the poor fellow. Worked for me at one time—excellent gardener—snatched off by the press gang when my back was turned. Now there’s a piece of irony for you,” remarked Lord Egremont, his customary good humor apparently restored by this item of news. “Pressed off to sea for dear knows how many years—come back—and goes to work for a regulating officer! Well, you certainly have a capable gardener there—yes, yes—you can’t go wrong with Goble—and I have Talgarth back—so perhaps it is all for the best.”

  And, chuckling, he called his dogs to heel and walked off up the lane.

  Two

  The twins had quarreled on the evening of their birthday. Not seriously—their disagreements never went deep; Scylla had raised objections when she found that Carloman had accepted an invitation to spend the evening at the palace with the young Maharajah.

  “You know perfectly well what will happen if you go,” she complained. “You will stay up there till two or three in the morning—drinking wine and smoking water pipes, and, for all I know, taking opium—”

  “Only the prince, my dear; you know I never touch it—”

  “And he will lose more and more money to you, so that he will want to go on playing longer and longer to win back his losses—How much does he owe you now?”

  “I think it’s about twenty thousand rupees,” replied her brother cheerfully.

  “Yes, and if he ever does pay you, which I daresay he never will, it would very likely be in shawls. Of what use would that be?”

  “We could hire an elephant and dispose of them to the nearest East India Company factory. Stop scolding, Scylla, my dear! You know it would be foolish to offend Mihal. We shall not have a debauch, I promise you. I am going to read him some of my poems. Why don’t you come up to the palace with me? You could pay a call on poor Mahtab Kour.”

  “Thank you, dearest Cal, I spend enough time in the purdah quarters as it is! And you can read your poetry to me at home, after all. Does Mihal understand it, may I ask?”

  “He likes to think he does. And that puts him in a good humor. So it is really a piece of practical diplomacy to visit him.”

  “Oh, undoubtedly!” she said, laughing. “Well—pray try to come back before midnight! It is our birthday tomorrow, after all. And you did promise that we should ride to the Great King’s tomb—”

  “Did I?” He sounded taken aback. “All the way to the Great King’s tomb?”

  “Which means starting early, as soon as the boys have done their lessons, before it becomes too hot—”

  “I must have been mad to promise,” grumbled Cal. “It is quite twenty miles away.”

  “Miss Musson has offered to pack us a nuncheon. And, remember, the hot weather is almost here—if we don’t go soon, we shall have to wait until after the rains,” pleaded Scylla.

  “Oh, very well!” Cal was really fond of his sister and generally prepared to indulge her if it did not mean a great deal of trouble for himself. “I promise that I will come away as early as I can.”

  “That’s my dear brother!”

  “Do I look presentable?”

  “Correct to a shade! Except for your hair—come here—”

  They were of equal height, both medium-sized and slender, so that she, for a girl, seemed tall, and he, for a man, just below average height. While she smoothed back the fine, soft, dark hair, which would fall forward in streaks over his brow, he stood placidly accepting her ministrations, then let her help him into a fresh white linen coat.

  “Now you are as fine as fivepence!” she teased. “Dress you up in uniform and you would be the spit image of that dashing young French general Buonaparte—whose picture was in the Gazette—except that your face is thinner—”

  “Wear uniform? Thank heaven I don’t have to,” yawned her brother. “That’s one advantage of being cast off by our dear father. No obligation to go into some terrible cavalry regiment where they all look and sound like horses—including the horses themselves…” And he adjusted a pith helmet carefully over his interesting profile and walked out onto the veranda, shouting for the syce.

  Next moment she heard the sound of his horse’s hoofs cantering up the sandy causeway toward the great gate of Ziatur.

  * * *

  Naturally—in spite of his promise—Cal did stay late at the palace. She had known that he would. It was hard to resist Prince Mihal’s pleadings. “My dear Padg-ett—it is so deucedly boring here. Just one more game! What difference can the time make to you?”

  When Scylla woke next morning, to the usual sound of crows bickering on the town ramparts up above, there was dead silence from her brother’s part of the bungalow. She could tell, because even the punkah was silent.

  Throwing aside festoons of mosquito netting, she pulled on a voluminous cotton wrapper and walked out onto the veranda. There the punkah wallah, whose duty it was to keep moving the long pole with a deep frill of material fastened along its length, was lying fast asleep.

  Scylla gave him a prod.

  “Wake up, Ram! What time did my brother come home last night?”

  “Cal Sahib did not return until the third hour, mem,” he answered, hastily beginning to pull on the punkah rope, which was attached to his big toe and ran through a hole in the wall. “The sahib was very weary and gave orders not to be called till noon.”

  “Oh, he did, did he? The wretch!”

  Scylla grimaced to herself as she returned to her own room and splashed her face and arms with water, which was already lukewarm, from the big earthenware jar. Then, sighing with her usual irritation, she struggled into the muslin chemise and petticoats which Miss Musson considered essential for a European young lady to wear among the heathen. If only I could wear a sari or perjamas, how cool and practical it would be, how much less notice it would excite, thought Scylla, as she had so many times before. But Miss Musson was positive that her ward’s adoption of native dress would be the first step in a downward progression that would inevitably terminate in slavery, degradation, and death. “It is all very well for me, my dear Priscilla, to wear Pahari trousers, because I am aged and hideous and nobody takes me for anything but what I am, an eccentric old lady from Boston who chooses to try and teach ways of cleanliness and godliness to the idolaters. But you are so pretty that it would give rise to immediate misapprehension. No, no, you are best as you are.”

  If only she knew how often I had worn a sari before I came here, thought Scylla crossly, pulling on a blue calico riding dress with a full skirt and gathered high to the neck. The material was already faded almost white along the tops of the gathers from the Indian sun, and showed stains under the armpits in spite of frequent ferocious scrubbings by the dhobi. At least, however, Miss Musson had relented about Scylla’s hair; it would have been senseless folly to attempt in Ziatur the fashionable hig
h-piled style which was still worn by ladies in Calcutta long after it had vanished from Paris and London. Scylla’s hair had been shorn when she had fever at the age of twelve, and it had never grown very long since then; now her soft, silver-pale curls clustered in comfortable disorder above her brow and ears; half a dozen strokes with a brush, and her toilet was complete.

  “How—with your coloring so different—you and that brother of yours can be twins—” Miss Musson often said at first.

  “We are not identical twins, ma’am,” Carloman had pointed out. “The nonidentical ones are frequently quite different, I understand; and how lucky for me! Who would wish to look like Miss Monkey Face there?”

  “Carloman! You should not speak so of your sister!”

  But Scylla only laughed. She did not, in fact, resemble a monkey so much as a charming little pug dog; her nose was exceedingly short and straight, with a slight upward tilt to the nostrils; her soft pink mouth was triangular, with dimples at each corner; and a pair of huge guileless gray-blue eyes gazed trustfully out at the world from under level brows which were rather darker than her silvery curls.

  “It’s those eyes of yours that really gull people,” Cal said admiringly. “They make you look such an innocent! Father was the only one who knew you thoroughly, apart from me.”

  “He knew you too—wretch!”

  “I am quite aware of that!”

  In fact the nabob, casting a jaundiced eye over his infant progeny, as they kicked and waved their tiny arms in a silk-lined basket in the house at Umballa which he had hired for their mother, recoiled from the spectacle and exclaimed:

  “Good God! Caliban and Sycorax! What have I ever done to be saddled with such a pair?”

  The nabob was not philoprogenitive and had been far from delighted to have the lazy and lighthearted relationship with his charming Goanese lady complicated by the advent of the twins. Caliban and Sycorax they remained, so far as he was concerned—or Scylla and Charybdis, if he were in a classic humor—until a protesting Portuguese priest insisted on equipping them with a more Christian pair of names, picking the closest that he could find to their heathen designations, as their languid mother showed little interest in the matter. But Cal and Scylla were the names they continued to use for each other, and so, in the end, did most of the people who had to do with them. Cal and Scylla they remained.

  Glancing past the curtain into her brother’s darkened room, Scylla observed that he still slept, flung out motionless as a corpse under his mosquito nets. No doubt he would continue to sleep for hours…

  Well, he would just have to wait for his birthday gift until evening. And as for the Great King’s tomb… She tossed an exasperated kiss in his direction and went on her way.

  Breakfast was already waiting for her in the veranda on the other side of the house; the sharp-eared servants had heard her moving about her chamber and gauged her progress to a nicety. The day was warm already, and she had little appetite but had learned from experience that the sights and sounds of Ziatur palace had less power to disturb or nauseate her after a sensible meal, so she resolutely forced herself to swallow hot tea, crisp thin flaps of wheat bread fried in butter, and a slice of melon. Miss Musson, who ate like an anchorite, had already sipped a cup of tea and was making her preparations to leave for the hospital.

  “Good morning, my dear. A happy birthday to you!” the older woman said. Miss Amanda Musson was not a lady given to effusiveness or sentimental gush. So large a part of her life had been devoted to punishingly hard work in what seemed like an almost hopeless cause that she never permitted herself to expend energy upon lesser objects in her scheme of priorities. She did not therefore kiss her young protégée now but gave her a very affectionate smile as she handed Scylla a tiny package, adding in a dry tone:

  “Seventeen! My, what an advanced age!”

  “It seems so, certainly, ma’am.”

  “To think that you have been here five years. Indeed my brother often said that he regarded you quite as his own children—if he had ever had any.”

  “He was a great deal kinder to us than our own father ever was—dear Uncle Winthrop,” Scylla said warmly. “I still miss him as if he had died yesterday—and what you must feel—”

  “Oh well, child, when you reach my age, you at least have the comfort of knowing it won’t be long before you are reunited with your dear ones,” Miss Musson replied briskly. “But open the package—I must be off.”

  “Oh, ma’am—” Looking inside the little box, Scylla found a small plain silver brooch—not Indian silver, this was heavier and darker in color, with scrollwork surrounding the word “Mizpah.” “Your own brooch you are giving me!”

  “Psha, child, don’t take on! The—the person who gave it me has been dead for thirty years—I am sure he would raise no objection at my passing it on to somebody of whom I was fond.” Benignly, she watched Scylla fasten the brooch into the collar of her blue dress. When Miss Musson smiled, the pale brown skin that was stretched so tightly over the bony structure of her face broke into countless wrinkles; seeing this phenomenon for the first time at the age of twelve, Scylla had thought it impossible that her face could ever straighten out again without the skin cracking into shreds, it seemed so dry and parchmentlike. Indeed, with her deep-sunk eyes and snowy knot of hair, Miss Musson strongly resembled Time’s elder sister. Exactly how old she was the twins had never discovered, though they guessed that she must be well into her seventies. She could remember the Afghan invasion in 1748. She seemed indestructible, impervious to the passing of years. She wore the loose woolen trousers and black vest of a mountain woman, covered by a burqa, and a huge leather hat, also from the mountains, over which she now draped a voluminous muslin veil. She was an impressive figure as she hopped onto the small pony that the waiting syce held for her and was borne away, riding sidesaddle, toward her hospital; women in the street dropped to their knees and bent their heads to the ground in reverence as she rode by.

  Scylla herself followed, ten minutes later. On three mornings a week she helped Miss Musson at the tiny hospital; on the other three she taught reading, writing, geography, English, and French to Amur and Ranji, two of the princes in the palace who were still young enough to reside mainly in the purdah quarters; and she also gave basic lessons in what Miss Musson called common sense and elementary hygiene to any of the Maharajah’s ladies who cared to attend.

  Pulling on her own hat and veil, Scylla accordingly set out, accompanied by Abdul the gardener. Already, at six in the morning, the narrow, camel-trampled streets of the town below the citadel exuded the heat of a brick-lined oven. Patches of dung and dead dogs were smothered in flies. Stifling odors of mutton fat, spices, rotting vegetables, sweet-scented flowers, and urine issued in almost visible clouds from the open doors and windows of the little flat-roofed houses which were crammed together at all different levels below the palace on its red rock. Picking her way among the dried turds, Scylla called after Abdul to moderate his pace; she wanted to conserve her energy for the last punishingly steep climb, a causeway constructed over ribs of warm, polished rock up to the great gate.

  “Wait a minute, Abdul! I wish to look back!”

  Immediately below, the congested streets were full of people—women in saris of pink, saffron, turquoise, vermilion, or indigo, carrying children on their hips or baskets on their heads; men driving bullock carts; children scurrying everywhere. Sweetmeat sellers shrieked their wares. Humpbacked Brahman bulls with brilliantly painted horns puffed their way among the crowds, snatching fruit and vegetables from market stalls. Loaded camels slouched and grunted and snarled.

  But outside the town—which ended very abruptly, one bowshot from the palace walls—the endless plain stretched far into the distance, a featureless, dun waste of sand, cactus, a few prickly bushes, with only an occasional banyan or mango tree casting its tiny shadow under the huge sun. Southward the plain appe
ared to continue forever; but, looking northwest, Scylla could just make out, through the heat haze, the distant blue line of the Sangur Hills, which were foothills of the faraway Hindu Kush. Among these foothills lay the ancient tomb which she was curious to visit, four or five hours’ ride to the north, in a deep gully full of jungle grass. It was just the kind of place, she had thought, to stimulate Cal’s enthusiasm and perhaps inspire one of his poems—but if the wretched boy were not interested, let him sleep all day! She would visit the tomb by herself.

  This resolve formed, she moved on to join the impatient Abdul.

  The wooden palace gate, between high crenellated red rock towers, was massively reinforced with iron bolts and bars, also with ferocious-looking spikes, a defense against elephants and battering rams; this was the only way into the citadel, which otherwise overhung a semicircular precipice. The town of Ziatur occupied its own little outcrop of hill, a toe that had become separated from the northern foothills and had, in many Muslim wars, served as an outpost and advanced warning station against invasion from the south. Now, with the Sikh states on the point of confederation, nearly all in subsidiary alliance with Britain, the threat of Muslim attack had receded, but never entirely. In this slow-moving land memories were long, the atrocities perpetuated by Jehangir and Aurangzeb seemed no longer ago than yesterday. The hinges of the gate were kept oiled and the spikes sharpened. Besides, what if the British were driven out in their turn?

  Today all was peaceful. A magician with an earthenware teapot was demonstrating his magic in the gateway, passing a stick through the spout of the pot so that both ends remained visible; and a fortune-teller with a large cage containing a parrot and a sparrow was urging the passers-by to spend five annas and discover the future.

  Resisting these temptations, Scylla passed through. “Sat Sri Akal [God is truth],” she greeted Saroop Singh, the gatekeeper, whom she knew well. He, replying in kind, greeted her with a flood of local information; some travelers had arrived, Feringi, though not Angrezi or Yagistani; and they were even now with the young Maharajah. No, not with the old one; the latter was not well, not well at all, his despondency of the spirit had come on him once again. He would probably be pleased to see the Mem Periseela, who always cheered him up.