White Mughals (61 page)

A copy of the letter was sent by Robinson to Petrie, who wrote by express to James advising him not to delay. This, he implied, was James’s big chance. Petrie had, he said, given Lord Cornwallis all his ‘confidential notes and memorandums which I have taken over the last 3 years … In that detailed narrative you are particularly mentioned … The Marquis at this interview more particularly than before, desired that you would come to Calcutta and [said that] if he had left the place that you should follow him up the country … in great confidence I give you my opinion that there will be great changes... ’
⁶⁹

James was still very ill, and Dr Kennedy
^hh
advised him to stay in bed. But it was clear to James that his duty, both political and paternal, lay in getting to Madras as quickly as possible. His last piece of work before he left Hyderabad was to patch up some sort of peace with Mir Alam. The conciliatory letter he wrote has disappeared, but the Mir’s reply of 20 August acknowledges that James had supported him ‘on all occasions, in time of adversity, and in the hour of distress’. Because of this, Mir Alam gave his word that ‘I bind myself … to maintain and evince, during the remainder of my life, both in your presence, and in your absence … a regard to the claims of your amicable aid and assistance … I will never adopt any measure which may be inconsistent with the relations of friendship and attachment; or incompatible with your wishes.’
⁷⁰
The Mir also asked James a favour: that while he was in Madras he should help him purchase a property belonging to the Nawab of Arcot that he, Mir Alam, wanted for his personal use. James agreed to do so.

A week later James kissed goodbye to his Begum and, gathering his strength, galloped off from Hyderabad at speed, hoping above hope that it might still be possible to get to Madras before his children set sail.

The road from Hyderabad to the port of Masulipatam was one of the most beautiful in the Deccan.

From the Residency it wound up past the great rounded boulders of the Banjara hills towards the tent lines of the Subsidiary Force cantonments. There it snaked alongside the gleaming new obelisks and pyramids of the Parade Ground Cemetery, where Kirkpatrick had buried his friend James Dalrymple five years earlier.

From there the land started to fall, and the road followed the Musi—in August a great, brown, churning torrent newly filled with monsoon rain—steadily down towards the coast, out of the dusty cottonfields around Hyderabad, towards the wetter, greener, muggier expanses of paddy that girded the coast. It was a strange, unearthly landscape that linked the two, the Deccan plateau with the Coromandel coast. At first James passed through flat, newly harvested cotton-scrub dotted with coconut and toddy palms, where the land would erupt suddenly and without warning into low ridges of rock, great spines of tumbled boulders rising like the humps of a camel out of the planisphere plains.

Early in the morning after a night of rain, the scent of flowering
champa
wafting from a roadside tree, James would find that a thin haze veiled the ground like a fine dupatta, blotting out the muddy road ahead but leaving a strangely disembodied forest of palm trunks rising out of the mist, silhouetting the half-naked toddy-tappers shinning up their trunks to harvest their gourds. Roadside caravanserais—strikingly solid and monumental after the floating world of the palms—lay empty but for colonies of monkeys scampering in from the road.

James had not been out of Hyderabad for nearly three years, and as he galloped on towards the coast his eyes and ears would have been sensitive to the contrast with the urban and predominantly Muslim world he had inhabited for so long. Here and there, beside lakes choked with the blossom of kingfisher-blue lotus flowers, he would see the canopy of a
chattri
, or the crumbling
sati
monument marking the burning-place of the wife of some long-dead Hoysala warrior. Occasionally he would pass a Hindu woman with a flower in her hair, or a crocodile of dark-skinned villagers with their short
lungis
tucked up above the knee, all a reminder of just how fragile and isolated an Islamic island the city of Hyderabad really was. For this was Telengana, a fragment of the rural Hindu world that existed before the Muslim invasions, and which, in these more remote outposts, seemed unchanged and untouched by five hundred years of Muslim rule.

At first, despite the rains and the muddy roads, the journey went well. The Krishna was the first major obstacle, for during the monsoon a crossing could sometimes be perilous; but James made it over without mishap. On 9 September, a week after James had set off, Henry Russell—left in charge at the Residency in his absence—picked up his pen to report the news from Hyderabad. He wrote:

This was the last communication that would ever take place between James and his Begum. It is unclear exactly what happened after he crossed the Krishna, but he arrived in Madras much later than expected with his health in tatters, having missed the fleet by three days. When the town finally hove into view on 12 September, there was none of the hoped-for thicket of tall masts rising over the walls of the fort and the spire of St Mary’s church. The
Lord Hawkesbury
had set sail for England, with the rest of the convoy, on 9 September. On board, according to the passenger list published a week later in the
Calcutta Gazette
, were Mrs Ure and Master John Ure, Miss Katherine Kirkpatrick and Master William George Kirkpatrick. It was the first time that James’s children had been referred to by their new Christian names, names which they would bear for the rest of their lives. Never again would they be called Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum. The Lady of High Lineage and the little Lord of the World had shed their Muslim identities as finally and conclusively as a snake sheds its first skin.
⁷²

James had missed his beloved children, and his body was badly weakened by the exertion of rushing to try to catch them in time. He had simply left too late, and with the roads boggy, with the incessant late-monsoon rains and the Krishna swollen to its full size, he had missed the chance to say goodbye.

He spent two weeks in Madras trying to regain his strength, but without much success. As there seemed to be no point in waiting any longer, on 22 September he went over to see the Nawab of Arcot, and carried out Mir Alam’s errand as he had promised.
⁷³
Despite his fraying health, he then pressed on to Bengal and his appointment with Lord Cornwallis. On 25 September he caught the
Metcalfe
to Calcutta.
⁷⁴
By the time the ship docked to take on water at Masulipatam, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was very ill indeed.

And then, quite suddenly, nothing.

In a story powered by a succession of extraordinarily detailed and revealing sources—letters, diaries, reports, despatches—without warning the current that has supported this book suddenly flickers and fails. There are no more letters. The record goes dead, with James critically ill, delirious and feverish on the boat. The lights go out and we are left in darkness.

Now and again there is a tiny surge, and the bulb flickers briefly into life. A single item in a newspaper: according to the passenger list published in the
Calcutta Gazette
of 10 October, Dr Ure was with James on the boat. After saying goodbye to his own wife and children, he must have come across James in Madras, seen the state he was in, and offered to accompany him to Calcutta. Also on board, though probably less welcome, were Captain and Mrs Samuel Dalrymple: Sam was a cousin of Kirkpatrick’s late friend Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, and in the absence of a clergyman James had married the couple in Hyderabad four years earlier. But as a senior member of the Subsidiary Force, Captain Dalrymple was probably not that well disposed towards James, and his wife Margaret was renowned as one of the biggest shrews in Hyderabad: Mountstuart Elphinstone thought her ‘an affected, sour, supercilious woman’.
⁷⁵
But she was probably too busy nursing her husband to give much offence on this particular journey: Samuel Dalrymple was also ill, and like James was ‘proceeding to Bengal on a sick certificate’.
⁷⁶

The
Metcalfe
reached Calcutta on Monday evening, 7 October, and James was carried ashore, now clearly dying. He was taken to the house of his niece Isabella, whom he had probably never met before. The last-minute delay in Hyderabad meant that he had just missed not only his children’s departure but also Isabella’s grand wedding to Charles Buller, which had taken place in St John’s church shortly before.

Nursed by his niece and by Dr Ure, James clung on for another week—long enough to learn the bitter news that his last journey had been wasted: Cornwallis, pushing on into the interior of Bengal had also overdone it. He too had become critically ill, and died hours after meeting General Palmer, another loser in the great Indian lottery. As the General wrote to Warren Hastings:

By the time Palmer completed his letter on the following day, 5 October, Cornwallis was dead. James need never have bothered leaving Hyderabad; his whole journey had been in vain. On 14 October James recovered sufficiently to add a few codicils to his will, which, fearing the worst, he had secretly carried with him.
⁷⁸
That night he fell into a coma. He died the early the following morning, 15 October 1805. He was aged only forty-one.

That same evening, as was the custom in Bengal, where putrefaction sets in fast, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was laid to rest amid the obelisks and mausolea of Park Street Cemetery. It was a hurried but formal funeral, with full military honours. The coffin was escorted by His Majesty’s 67th Regiment, and Major General Sir Ewen Baillie read an oration recording James’s ‘meritorious public character’ and the ‘important services’ he rendered to the Honourable East India Company.

But it cannot have been a very emotional affair. For James had died among strangers, away from everyone he loved, and far from everyone who loved him. His beloved wife, his two little children, his brothers, his friends, and his father: as he was laid in the muddy monsoon ground, not one of them even knew that he was dead. In place of tears, there was a cold military salute. The coffin was lowered, and the mud of the grave was filled in.