Havildar Pratap Singh
Chapter 4, Session 8 — Landfall
He was on the Strand before their boat touched the steps, and he did not go down to meet it. That is the whole of the method. A havildar of the 67th does not scramble at the waterline with the coolies and the budgerow crews, he waits at the top where the steps meet the road, uniform immaculate in a downpour that has ruined everything else on that riverfront, and lets the chaos deliver them to him. When the gap came he stepped forward, saluted, and presented the compliments of the District Magistrate. Palanquins already arranged. The right number of them.
Nobody asked him a hard question, which was a small disappointment, because he had answers for all of them and the answers are true. Havildar, 67th Bengal Native Infantry, eight months in the regiment, assigned this morning out of Mr Ashworth’s office as a courtesy to visiting Britons of standing. Instead they let him take the luggage, and the ladies into the palanquins, and by the time they reached the Cavendish gate he had made himself the man you ask rather than the man you watch. Mr Cavendish gave him two commissions before the first evening was out. Find an engineer called Renwick. Find out about a merchant called Surlish. He said he would see what could be done, which is what he says, and he will do both, thoroughly and fast, because that is what a useful man does.
The interesting thing happened on the steps and nobody European noticed it. Mrs Ashby said her family lived in Blacktown, and said it plainly, to a group of people who heard a street name. He heard fifteen years, an English father, a Bengali mother, and a woman coming home to a house she was taken out of as a child. He said nothing at all about it, then or since. There are courtesies that consist entirely of not speaking.
They put him in a cabin by the stables. Inside the wall, outside the houses, near enough to the family to hear the compound wake up. He has no complaint about it. He is arranging horses and a ride out on The Maidan to show them the city properly, and he is patient, and he is never in a hurry, and he is never late.
Chapter 4, Session 9 — The Magistrate’s Table
The sahibs went into the church and he waited outside with the carriages and the other men who were not going in, and that is where the work is. Ratan found him there, a bearer off the Pelham palanquin, whining about his wages inside a minute of introducing himself and asking whether the Company might have something for him. Pratap gave him the truth, which is usually cheapest. The Company pays its soldiers three times what any prince’s army pays, and that is precisely how the Company came to own India. He meant it as a door closing. He is not certain how it sounded.
Later the same man had the Pelham palanquin sitting exactly where the party’s carriages needed to be, and would not move it, and Pratap swung at him. In the open. In front of the servants of half the households in Calcutta. He missed, which is its own small humiliation, and Ratan looked around for the fly that had gone past his ear, and then took rupees to do the thing he was always going to do for rupees. A man who is never in a hurry and never late put his hand up before he put his money down. That is not the method. He should have opened with the coin.
Fort William was easier. The fort is full of men staging for the Nepal fight and nobody stops a havildar of the 67th walking into the Engineers Park with his uniform right and his face bored, so he read what he came to read. Major Renwick is eight miles north at Baranagar, throwing an embankment at the Hooghly, not yet posted to the Gurkha campaign and certain to be the moment the works are done. He carried it back to Mr Cavendish exactly as commissioned, watched the party absorb that the engineer and the temple sit in the same village, and said nothing to help them along. A good servant answers the question he was asked, and this one has never once volunteered a thought he was not paid for.
At Garden Reach he did not go in. He briefed them on the order of precedence before they left the compound, because eight Britons shuffling on a magistrate’s steps in front of Calcutta is an avoidable embarrassment and avoiding it is what he is for. Then he stood at the gate and let Bakar Ali take his measure over two questions and a cup of tea. Thirty years that man has run the Magistrate’s house. He knows which of the guests’ families are happy, which are frightened, which pay late, and he gave the whole assessment over freely, politely, thoroughly, and first, because that is how a khansama tells you the price. The price is questions about your own masters. Pratap answered some of them. The compound has decided, wrongly and very conveniently, that the havildar reports to Mr Ashworth, and he let that stand, because a man who is assumed to belong to somebody important is asked far fewer questions than a man who has to explain himself.
Chapter 4, Session 10 — The Third Course
They brought the thief to him because the whole compound had decided he was the Magistrate’s man, and he did not correct them. Two of Bakar Ali’s people with Ratan between them, feet dragging, and two crested teaspoons opened under the torch. Ratan said he had fallen and they had landed in his cummerbund. Then he offered the only thing he had, that the judge’s house burned the people’s petitions and paid nobody, and it was true and it was worth nothing to him in that moment. Pratap gave judgment the way a havildar gives it: beaten within an inch of his life, and back to his palanquin, and not a word carried inside. The khansama folded his arms at the edge of the light and approved. Ratan limped through the carriage brawl an hour later and will limp for a week, and he belongs to Pratap now, which is the same as belonging to nobody.
He served the port and the cigars and offered himself as taster, and Lady Anne’s ayah came to him in the anteroom and asked what family Mrs Ward had served before the Wentworths. He answered as an escort answers. At Hugh’s table afterward he sat through the newcomers fixing their week: Thursday at Baranagar, with a night’s lodging; the Vicomte on to Chandernagore for the Magistrate; a security detail on the compound within three days, which the sahib asked him to raise himself; and the suggestion, made to Hugh Cavendish across his own table, that he take his wife and child out of Calcutta before the twenty-fifth. All of it goes up the other channel tonight, and the men he picks for the gate will be his.
Monday he gave them the Maidan: sepoys from the fort to lay the fences and hang the rings, a canopy, the cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off, cavalry horses borrowed against his rank, and under a cloth a cave à liqueur no havildar could afford. All three sahibs fell off. Sophia Surlish rode up alone and he told her quietly that her husband might not care for it, and she looked at him with the ease of long practice and rode at the rings anyway. Wyndham won the brandy and opened it. The horses go back to the fort this afternoon.
Chapter 4, Session 11 — Red Tape and River Dolphins
He found a servant carrying the sisters’ shopping trip into the wrong ears within the hour, and he handled it the way he handles everything that needs handling quietly: coins first, then a hand on the man’s neck to make sure the coins had been understood correctly. The servant will list, for anyone who asks, every single thing he never saw.
Blacktown was different work. He hired a boy and a handful of others to clear the lane rather than trust a palanquin to get through it, and translated for the Vicomte at Miss Ashby’s mother’s door — every word of the reunion except the one about the killing, which he judged was not his to hand across the language for free. The mother relented. He left money behind for the family without telling the daughter who gave it, because a gift with her name still on it would have cost her something with people who have very little left to spend.
By evening he had gone back for the same boy and built him a small army: sixteen and eighteen sorted by age, clubs and farming tools sorted by whoever could be found holding one, lined up outside the gate for Mr Cavendish to inspect. It solves the problem he was given — a compound that needs watching for two weeks — and it also means that for the first time since Calcutta, the eyes on this family’s gate answer to him personally, chosen by him, paid by him, loyal to him before they are loyal to anyone else in that house. Nobody has asked him yet what that is worth, or to whom.
Chapter 4, Session 12 — The Governor’s Ball
He was already watching when the two men in wet white cloth came down the carriage line. A havildar of the 67th does not startle at strange things in the dark; he watched with the same stillness he brings to a parade ground while the horses screamed and Apoo, Abrar, and Asif fought to hold their animals and a half-dozen bodyguards drove the two figures off with sticks. When the men turned for the river and walked into it without a backward glance, Pratap tried to talk the carriage handlers into going after them before the water closed over the business for good. Nobody would go. He filed the failure and turned to the evening’s other work, which was considerable — a glass of arrack and easy company with Apoo, Abrar, and Asif by the carriages, and Lady Anne Pelham’s bearer offering himself as an informant, complete with two hand-written cards, before Pratap had asked him for anything.
The offer nearly cost him. He tried to hire Ratan outright to follow Surlish’s second carriage into the dark toward the river, fifty rupees on the table, and Lady Anne caught him at it before the coin changed hands. She dressed him down in Hindi as fluent as his own and promised to write to his commanding officer over it. Ratan apologised, took up his end of the palanquin, and the carriage disappeared toward the river untracked. Pratap had seen enough before that to know where it went — Surlish loaded his wife into the first carriage and sent her home alone, then climbed into the second himself — but the tail he wanted never left the ground.
He was at breakfast the next morning at the compound for all of it: the kedgeree and curried eggs, the Gazette’s report of a drowned man with the fingers of the left hand grown together as though webbed, and the difficult morning Freddy spent convincing his own family that the danger was real. On the carriage ride home the night before, Pratap had already made his case for upgrading the compound’s guard past the local boys he had hired — experienced men, properly armed, in place of teenagers with clubs — and the day’s errands gave him the chance to act on it. At Fort William he put the request to Captain Hector Dunmore, a genial, red-faced officer in a new coat he had not paid for, who agreed to spare two men on one condition: a dinner invitation to the Cavendish compound, to meet the eligible Wentworth sisters. Pratap gave his word on it and came away with Ram Adhin Tiwari, a grey-moustached Brahmin of twenty years’ service, and Ghulam Rasul, a young Bihari marksman the regiment rates its best. Two honest soldiers, properly assigned, standing a gate that had been watched by farm boys until that morning.
Chapter 4, Session 13 — Sundry Fittings
With the compound’s servants set to securing the grounds against the storm there was no coachman, and Pratap took the reins and drove the party down to the Strand himself. At the sale one of the Zorabs’ porters drew him aside and spoke to him in Hindustani: things walked on the rooftops at night, his old master’s hands had gone dead since the box came into the house, and there had been deaths.
On the Esplanade he stood up on the box of a carriage that was sliding sideways through standing water, drew his sword in the lightning and cut at the thing tearing through the roof. The lurch of the carriage turned the blade and it glanced off the shell. He tried again and the wet planks took his feet from under him. When the creature had fallen away he and Adrien brought the horses back in hand.
In Dr Venn’s house the buzzing held him motionless until Adrien pushed wax into his ears. He saw the study, the cylinder, what was done to Gregor Zorab and what was done afterwards to the doctor and his papers. Back at the Cavendish Compound the party put everything from the doctor’s cash box into his hands, all six gold mohurs and all 340 rupees, for his loyalty and his silence.
Chapter 4, Session 14 — A Morning of Manners and Monstrosities
He reached Meg Cavendish first, sword in hand, and while the house argued he took the yard in hand. He brought the two Cavendish servants to order and had a carpenter, an upholsterer and a painter working on the coach. He had the frightened horses seen to and replaced, and sent the whole bill to the East India Company. By the time he was done the yard was working again, and the household staff had begun to look at him differently.
He went upriver with the boat. In the last mile below Baranagar the water went pale and the globes rose out of it humming, and for a time he was not himself.
Chapter 4, Session 15 — The River of Rites and Ruin
A frightened sepoy wanted a word with him, and he drank a friend’s brandy under Ghosh’s roof.
At Renwick’s works a nervous young sepoy came to him quietly and asked for a private word and a moment of his help before the party left. The boat went on across the river before the word was had.
At Ghosh’s house he shared a room with Thomas, who produced a flask of French brandy. At dinner the servants seized the guests and held them while Kaunitz was unmade, and Ghosh told them what was coming on the night of Kali. Afterwards Pratap wrapped Georgiana’s hand to hide the scales and webbing, and walked with the party through the dark village to the Dak Bungalow.