Marcus Hale

Role Cavalry officer, Bengal Army Nationality British Status alive Age 33

Description

Thirty-three. Cavalry. Widowed eighteen months ago when his wife died in childbirth. The child survived, a daughter, with the ayah.

Handsome in a worn way. Drinks too steadily and rides too hard. Women at every event watch him with the particular concern reserved for attractive men determined to destroy themselves.

Background

Cavalry patrols out of Calcutta have given him a working knowledge of the country for thirty miles in every direction, including the river villages and the roads north.

He can barely look at his daughter.

What Meg Says

Marcus Hale is drinking himself to death at a socially acceptable pace. Every woman in Calcutta wants to save him, which is exactly the wrong instinct. He doesn’t want saving.

Connections

• Colonel Arthur Blackwood — his commanding officer
• Charles Ashworth — who invites him and worries about him
• Ashworth Dinner Garden Reach

In Play

Chapter 4, Session 9 (9 October 1814) — met at Garden Reach, drinking steadily. He stood alone near the drinks through the cocktail hour and worked through them at a grim pace. At table he was fatalistic about his coming deployment to the Nepal campaign.

Katherine, seated beside him, drew him out on the deployment. Freddy asked him how assignments at Fort William get influenced.

His night lights at Baranagar have not come up. He has ridden past the temple at night and seen it lit when it should stand empty, and he does not know it matters. Still available in the remaining courses.

Chapter 4, Session 10 (9–10 October 1814) — the night lights, unprompted. He drank steadily and silently through the third course, and when the temple at Baranagar came up he spoke without being asked: flickering lights, strange colours, and chanting seen from his night patrols (ten at night to six in the morning) almost every time he passed. He offered no theory, grunted, and went back to his glass. The beat has fired; the party holds it.

Appearances