The Strangler Vine (26 page)

‘There were rumours in the bazaar that someone had tried to kill you,’ said Blake, ‘and others that you’d slipped out of Jubbulpore in secret. The matchmaker Maa Amala said she had arranged a guide for you. She also said that you enraged the Major by trying to seduce Mrs Sleeman.’

‘Good God, never!’ Mountstuart said. ‘She was far too virtuous for me.’

‘You called your monkey Auckland?’ I said, dazedly. I puzzled for a moment, then light dawned. ‘After the Governor General?’

‘I saw some similarities.’

‘I cannot accept that Major Sleeman would countenance murder,’ I said.

‘That attack outside Doora. Do you think that was an accident too?’ said Blake.

I shook my head. ‘It is too much,’ I said.

But then I thought of what I had said to Sleeman about Blake that day we had left Jubbulpore.
If it is true
, I thought,
then I brought Sleeman upon us
.

‘Why after all this you actually chose to go looking for Thugs,’ Blake said, ‘I cannot think. It didn’t seem – rash?’

‘Why should it? These gangs did not have the reputation of murdering Europeans. I have encountered plenty of brigands before – we both have. And I am, after all, the king of the poets. I believed them to be the last true Thug gang, the Kitree band. You may have heard of them at Jubbulpore.’

‘We heard of them.’

‘At first I assumed they had escaped capture by keeping to themselves, and I wanted an untutored native account of Sleeman’s campaign. I was sure they would confirm my conclusions. I planned to meet with them, return to Doora, and make my way down to Calcutta to present my report to the Governor General. Unfortunately, they have proved all too susceptible to my charms and will not let me go.’

‘Did it occur to you that that book of yours might have used up a little of your credit with the Governor General?’

‘Jeremiah, how very trite of you to say so.’

‘And I suppose the Board didn’t know about it?’

I sighed with frustration. ‘Perhaps we might talk about what we are to do, how we might escape?’ I said.

A murmur of echoing voices, one overlaying the other, began to come from the caves to our right. We listened, each tense, as the exchanges grew closer and closer.

The man I knew as Gulab came into the cave. He carried a lamp in a bowl of ghee like our own, and an unsheathed sword.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Mountstuart, ‘I think you may have met our host. He goes by many names: Gulab, Chotee the singer, Salman, but he is most often known as Rada Kishin.’

He was followed by a native I did not know, who was also armed. Two more men followed, carrying bowls which they placed on the ground. There was a plate of bread and a bowl of curry and small blocks of something crystalline and hard.

Gulab, or Rada Kishin, spoke. His black eyes shone. He gestured at the food. Blake answered. Rada Kishin laughed. Blake said something about Mir Aziz. Rada Kishin shook his head. For a moment he looked solemn. He lifted the scabbard he had fastened to his belt. It
was black and intricately decorated with silver wire. Mir Aziz’s scabbard.

‘Sar,’ he said, breaking into English, ‘he is dead. It is our way. We can do no other.’

‘Why not us?’

Rada Kishin smiled and spoke softly in Hindoostanee. Then he inclined his head to Mountstuart, and then to Blake and then finally to me. We listened to their footsteps echo through the caves and out into the open air. I thought of the last moment I had seen Mir Aziz and how he had tried to calm and prepare me, though he must have known our likely fate.

‘“The wounded snake can kill as long as life remains,”’ said Mountstuart. ‘Gentlemen, we do not have long.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It is what Rada Kishin said to me,’ said Blake. ‘He means they cannot allow us to live and will kill us in the morning. For one Englishman they were willing to postpone sentence; three are too dangerous to them. They will decide how best to dispose of our bodies and then they will kill us.’

‘We cannot rush them,’ said Mountstuart, ‘we have not a hope.’

Blake began to search among the sacks.

‘I do, however,’ Mountstuart went on, nonchalently, ‘have the whisper – the suspicion – the seed – of an escape. That said, I have not been able to prepare as much I would have liked, as I have not spent much time in here recently.’

‘Xavier!’ Blake said impatiently.

‘If you must have the prosaic version. I had a good deal of time here alone at first, and I explored the caves behind us. It seemed all to come to dead ends. One, however, does not. It is stoppered with earth and grit. I managed to excavate a hole large enough to crawl through. On the other side there is another sequence of caves. One leads to a rockfall. There is a hill of shale and stones, and at the top there is a small hole through which one can see daylight. I had been slowly enlarging it towards the day when I had presumed I must eventually escape, but I had not expected my departure would be so imminent.’

‘Where does it comes out?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘We’ll burn through these ropes.’ Blake raised his hands. ‘We’ll eat, then we will inspect your hole. If we work through the night, will it be enough?’

With a large and theatrical gesture Mountstuart turned his arms outward as if he himself were posing a grand question to which he did not have the answer. Blake ripped off a piece of a hemp sack and twisted it into a spill, which he lit with the lighted wick. He applied it to the rope about my wrists, encouraging me to work at the fibres until they parted. I did the same for him. He told me to eat, and I readily acquiesced. Mountstuart hardly touched a mouthful, but
Blake, like some clucking mother hen, pressed it upon him. There was bread and
goor
– the sugar that Sleeman said the Thugs ate when they entered the cult. It was sinfully delicious: sweet, hard, with a taste that reminded me of burnt toffee. Blake scavenged the cave for useful things: Mountstuart’s tinderbox, two blankets, a water skin that leaked a little, a sealed pot of ghee, the remnants of our meal. Everything he did with a sense of intense purpose, never hinting in any way that he might consider our plight hopeless, and his conviction propelled us on.

We set off, Mountstuart – who, it transpired, was rather shorter than I had expected – holding our fragile light in its bowl of ghee, and, in a leather pocket that he hung about his neck, the report he had written for the Governor General. Blake had the tinderbox, the spare pot of ghee, wicks and blankets, and I the water skin. We limped through one shadowy cave to another, until at length we arrived at Mountstuart’s earth bank. The way through was like nothing so much as a rabbit hole. Mountstuart took off his blanket, thrust the light and his hands into the hole, following with his head, and forced his way through. Blake came next, pushing the blankets and ghee ahead of him, and I last. The hole was tight, and the process of stuffing in one’s shoulders and feeling them lodge tight, extremely unpleasant. But we got through at last, and Mountstuart led us another few hundred yards to a high cavern where a steep hill of stone, shale and rubble stretched from floor to roof. ‘At the top, I have made a small hole. I do not know where it emerges,’ Mountstuart explained. ‘And there is space only for one to work at a time.’

It was Blake who edged up the hill of stones first. His ascent was slow. He had very little light, having declined to carry the lamp for fear he might drop it and cast us all into darkness, and every too-robust footfall caused the surface to slide. But eventually he gained the summit. I could just make him out kneeling at the top.

I closed my eyes. I longed only for oblivion. But what I saw was the afternoon that I had gone to tell Major Sleeman about Blake.

At the Thuggee bureau I had asked for Hogwood or the Major, wondering if I should at last be permitted to enter its portals. It was the former who had arrived. Without a word, he had ushered me in. In the first room, half a dozen inscrutable native clerks sat at desks poring over piles of paper, and a vast
punkah
moved back and forth overhead. It was quiet, cool and exceedingly orderly. Two walls were fitted with deep glass cabinets which were packed to overflowing with despatch boxes and papers tied with different coloured ribbons. A third was covered with large maps and pencil sketches of natives’ faces and heads drawn from different angles, some even from the back of the head. We walked through a door that swung energetically on its hinges afterwards. No one looked up.

With each step I was more and more discomfited. Hogwood gave me an encouraging pat and walked me to the Major’s study. The Major was sitting at his desk, and had just set aside his morning huqqa. I hesitated in the doorway. The room was crammed with papers, books, stones, artefacts and sketches, much of it locked in glass cabinets or stuffed on to shelves.

Hogwood said, ‘I took the liberty of bringing the Lieutenant in to see you.’

The Major looked up and frowned. ‘Lieutenant Avery, is there something I can do for you?’

‘I am so sorry, sir, if it is an awkward moment. I will return at your convenience.’ I suddenly felt I had made a mistake. ‘It is a most awkward matter, one I would much rather not raise …’

‘I see,’ said the Major.

‘I shall remove myself,’ said Hogwood. I had hoped he would stay, but he edged out of the room, walking down the corridor to his study, where I heard him issuing directions to an unseen clerk. Then the door shut.

‘Well, Lieutenant, say what it is that troubles you so.’ He had not invited me to sit, and so I remained standing.

‘Major Sleeman, when I was in Calcutta, when I received my orders to accompany Mr Blake, Colonel Patrick Buchanan—’

‘Patrick Buchanan, the Chief Military Secretary?’

‘That is him, sir.’

The Major looked mildly surprised but shrugged. ‘Continue.’

‘Colonel Buchanan told me that one of my tasks was to … to … well, sir, it is a very delicate matter and an unpleasant one.’

The Major folded his arms.

‘He told me that though Mr Blake was extremely good at his job, he was not always the most … the most reliable of men.’

The room, the entire bureau for that matter, seemed extraordinarily silent.

I lowered my voice. ‘By that I do not think he meant that he was cracked in the head or anything of that sort, but that he could be’ – with every word I felt increasingly uneasy – ‘erratic, and held some unusual opinions. He said that I should observe Mr Blake, and that if I noticed anything that might be described as “untoward behaviour”, that seemed to suggest that he might be straying from his duty in searching for Mr Mountstuart, that I should consider taking the matter – that is, reporting his behaviour – to a senior officer. He mentioned you, Major Sleeman, as someone I might approach, if I had to.’

‘Go on.’

‘This is not something I wish to do, sir. Mr Blake has many impressive qualities.’

There was a flicker of impatience. ‘I can see that this is causing you some discomfort, Mr Avery, but it is time to come to the point,’ he said.

‘Of course, sir.’ My voice was a little shaky. ‘Major Sleeman, you should know that I am most concerned that Mr Blake may have lost his way with this investigation. You will have noticed that he seems quite obsessed by Thuggee. Believe me, it is just the same if not worse when I am alone with him. He seems to have almost forgotten that his task is to find Mountstuart. I know that he makes repeated visits to the native parts of town, I am not sure what for – he refuses to apprise me of his suspicions. He also disappears at night. I know that he has made a number of clandestine visits to the prison, indeed that he has actually broken into it. I do not believe he has any hare-brained notion to free the prisoners or
anything of the sort, but that he goes to speak to them, and I suspect he is preoccupied by some thought that there is something here – something he judges not right – that he must discover or expose.’

Major Sleeman looked quite bewildered. He leant his elbow on his desk and rested his chin in the arch of his finger and thumb.

‘Well, Mr Avery. You have done the right thing, even if you have left it exceedingly late. I understand how distasteful this must have been for you. But I am glad that you have come to me. I may do little more than write to Calcutta to let them know what a potentially dangerous individual they have on their hands. I shall certainly let the Governor General’s office know that you did not spare yourself in the pursuit of your duty, that your loyalty has been tested and not found wanting.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I could, I suppose, detain Mr Blake.’

I paled. ‘I thought perhaps it would be enough simply to tell you.’

‘Actions like these have consequences, Mr Avery. To be honest, though he is plainly a most unusual individual, it is evident Mr Blake is also an erratic and angry man and possessed of some dangerous opinions. The Thuggee Department, on the other hand, has nothing of which to be ashamed. We have consistently seen off our detractors, of which he is evidently one.’

He thought for a moment. ‘May I count on your discretion? I would rather that you said nothing about our talk for now; I imagine you, too, would rather it remain confidential.’

‘Yes, Major Sleeman.’

Pebbles and rocks were skittering down the sides of the mound. Blake had come down. His hands were bleeding. He announced he had cleared a space large enough for two to sit. He insisted Mountstuart and I bind our hands in strips of blanket. We took our positions at the top of the great stone mound, our backs bent, our arms stretched ahead of us. My fingertips could feel the edge of the top of an opening blocked by the stone pile itself, and from it there issued a whisper of warm air and a darkness that seemed not quite so deep.
We set to, scooping away rocks and pebbles, attempting to move the shale as fast as we could without dislodging the stones beneath us and precipitating our own fall. Within minutes my fingers were torn. From time to time, the strangeness of my situation presented itself to me afresh: sitting next to my hero in a dark cave in darkest India, too tired and preoccupied to speak of my admiration.

The hours passed and we laboured in turns. The dust made Mountstuart wheeze and his whole frame shook. Watching him ascend the mound was almost painful. For myself, I became light-headed with the effort, my bruises sang with pain and my back ached. Our fingers bled. Only Blake seemed indefatigable, tirelessly taking his turn when we slid exhausted down the shale slope. The hole, meanwhile, became larger, but still we could not see what was on the other side, and when Blake dropped a stone through it we could not hear it hit the ground.

The light on the other side began to turn from deep black to slightly lighter purple. Dawn was approaching. The hole was almost deep and wide enough for one to slide through. Blake tore one of the blankets into strips and then Mountstuart tied them together for a makeshift rope. It was so much like some escape from Sir Walter Scott, I almost laughed. Mountstuart elected to go through first, as the lightest, with the makeshift rope about his chest in a knot that he said could be easily loosened, and some of our meagre baggage. I volunteered to take his weight as the tallest and heaviest. He wedged himself through until his head, arms and upper body filled the hole and all I could see was the dim outline of his hair and beard.

‘Dear young man, could you impel me through the aperture? It is rather snug, but I will manage with a little more force behind me.’

I took hold of his shoulders and gave as great a thrust as I could. He uttered a sudden ‘Oh!’ and his upper half slid through. Just in time, my hands closed on the cotton rope which I had wound about my leg and sat upon. I struggled to keep my balance and not let go. We had agreed to communicate in signs as far as possible for fear of being heard. For some minutes I simply paid out the rope. Then I jerked upon it as hard as I could.

‘Let the rope down,’ he rasped. I paid out the cloth as far as I dared, gritting my teeth: my hands – already raw from the rocks – cried out when the cloth dragged.

‘Can you see the bottom? Can you find footholds?’ I whispered as loudly as I could. Just as the weight became insupportable, it was abruptly relieved of its burden and I pulled it up. There was a whisper from the ground.

‘I am down.’ I heard no more.

The light was brighter now. Blake was climbing up the mound behind me with our few stores. ‘I will hold the rope for you,’ I said. There was nothing to attach the rope to; whoever was last would have to navigate their way out and down without help.

‘You do not need to.’

‘I am younger than you and have a better chance of climbing down. You must go with Mountstuart to confirm his report.’ I had words prepared. ‘I am not necessary. I—’

‘Get through that hole. Don’t worry on my account, I can climb almost anything. You can catch me if need be.’

‘Blake, listen to me. In Calcutta Buchanan told me that my task was to watch you. He said that you might not be altogether reliable and might go astray and that if you did I should report you to a senior officer. That day before we left Jubbulpore, your questions were so erratic and you had made Major Sleeman so angry, and I could not see how it had anything to do with Mountstuart, and I was so worried about the gaol. I went to see him about you. I told him about your night visits. He asked me to keep silent about what I had said. I betrayed you.’

For a moment I thought Blake looked quite shocked. He collected himself almost immediately. ‘Don’t torment yourself, Avery. You obeyed your orders. Besides, we are here not because of anything you did in Jubbulpore, but because I insisted on following Xavier.’

I did not move.

‘Now, Avery,’ he said. ‘You’ve read too many of Xavier’s books. If you don’t go through, you’ll delay us.’ He forced the rope under my arms. ‘This end releases the knot,’ he said.

I put both feet into the hole and he pushed me through. The air on the other side was noticeably warmer. I kicked my legs against the rock on the other side and wrenched my arms through, and as I swung back to the rock my head struck an outcrop of rock. Half-stunned, I could just make out Mountstuart some forty feet below me on a dirt floor. There was light behind me. The rock wall was puckered and dented, and I felt for handholds to see if one might indeed climb down it. But my fingers could attach to nothing substantial and so I allowed the rope to lower me down, coming to a halt with my heels some ten feet above the ground. I pulled at the knot, felt the rope slip from me and fell to the ground. I grimaced.