Free Lance Page 7

  A smile belied the severity of his hawk-nosed florid face. Marriott took heart, and said, ‘I had small choice, sir. I recollect my consent was neither sought nor given.’

  ‘Umph! So, indeed, I have been told. I think you must be pardoned.’ Surprisingly he chuckled. ‘That young lady’s wiles have defeated harder men than you! Mr Marriott, you must dine with us - and learn to steel yourself against the weapons in her armoury!’

  ‘I shall be honoured, sir - though I fear Miss Wrangham will pierce my defences.’ He hesitated, and said, ‘May I present Captain Amaury, of the 7th Madras Cavalry?’

  The smile left the general’s lips. He said stonily, ‘I prefer to remain unacquainted with a gentleman who so misbehaves himself in a public place as to disgrace the uniform he wears! In His Majesty’s Service such obnoxious conduct would never be borne!’

  Amaury looked bored. ‘Then, sir, I am fortunate to serve the Company.’ He sipped his negus, met the general’s angry eyes across the cup, and said coolly, ‘This arrogant intolerance which King’s officers display towards their comrades in the Company cankers our interests in India. I had thought, sir, you might set a better example.’

  Wrangham’s face went scarlet. He straightened his shoulders; though a small, slight man he owned a commanding presence that made his stature taller. ‘I have no prejudice against Company officers - only against drunken rakehells, whatever insignia they wear!’ He turned to his wife, who listened to the exchange with mild distress. ‘Come, my dear, we must compliment Lord Clive upon his excellent hospitality.’

  Amaury watched them go, his countenance impassive. ‘A very good sort of man, I believe, but cursedly lacking in humour. Has the fellow never been drunk in his life? Well, Charles, he has declared war - perhaps I can turn his flank.’ He cocked an ear to the doorway. ‘A cotillon’s opening bars - let us make an eight in Caroline’s company!’

  Amaury chose his moment and deftly inserted himself. Marriott retreated to a wall and watched. Within seconds the dance’s measures brought Amaury facing his quarry. Caroline’s eyes widened, disapproval clamped her mouth; she paced the required movements and looked hugely relieved when the pattern circled her away. She smiled on other partners and merrily answered their quips; to Amaury she accorded a still countenance, a frozen stare, and never a word. Marriott stifled a grin.

  When the music ended Amaury rejoined him. ‘The breach is not yet practicable,’ he said wryly. ‘Her walls are granite adorned by chevaux-de-frise! I must advance my parallels closer and bring heavier batteries to bear - this wears all the marks of a lengthy siege! Engage yourself on my behalf, Charles: beg a minuet and plead my cause.’

  ‘If any cause is to be advanced,’ Marriott returned dryly, ‘it will be my own.’ He waited through a country dance, a reel and another cotillon - Amaury danced them all - and joined the throng of eager young men surrounding Caroline. Diffidently he asked to lead her out; the warmth of his reception elated and surprised him. Radiantly she greeted him, and smilingly refused the disappointed gallants who clamoured for her hand. Treading the minuet’s cadence she said, ‘I trust, Mr Marriott, you have suffered no recriminations from my father for bringing me ashore?’

  ‘I believe I am forgiven. The general has engaged me to dine with him: a pleasure that, believe me, I anticipate most keenly.’ Marriott guided her around a grease patch spilled from a chandelier, and added shyly, ‘Should you ride out at sunrise or at evening, Miss Wrangham, may I have the honour of escorting you?’

  ‘Indeed you may. However, sir, I fear we shall not be alone.’ Her lips crinkled at the comers. The idea has also occurred to several other gentlemen, and I find myself accompanied by quite a troop! Should you be passing Powney’s monument a half-hour after gunfire you may join the cavalcade.’

  Caroline paused in her dancing, flicked open a silk and ivory fan. Auburn curls clung damply to her temples, tiny beads of moisture glistened on her forehead. ‘ ‘Tis monstrously hot!’ she complained. Marriott agreed; sweat ran down his arms and dripped from the ends of his fingers. The room was packed, a pageantry of colour that dipped and swayed to the violin’s plaintive melody. Chandeliers blazed light and heat, heavily coated gentlemen exuded heat like warming-pans, the night’s sweltering oppressiveness cascaded through open windows. Caroline delicately dabbed her face, tucked the linen scrap in her reticule and viewed with chilly displeasure a couple who danced near by. Amaury supported on his arm a voluptuous dark-haired lady and frankly mopped her streaming cheeks with an expansive lace-edged handkerchief. ‘I vow I can endure the heat no longer!’ they heard her gasp. ‘Pray escort me, Captain Amaury, to my palankeen.’

  Caroline eyed their progress through the dancers, and said tartly, ‘Mrs Delderfield - ten fanams in the pagoda a Portuguese! Major Delderfield, I am informed, has gone to quell a fracas at Tiroopattee. I doubt, sir, you will see your friend again tonight!’

  Marriott said uncertainly, ‘Perhaps an over-hasty condemnation, Miss Wrangham. I am surprised, after only two months in Madras, that you should so rapidly have mastered our local idioms. But I beg you beware the expression “Portuguese”, which might well be taken amiss. On Coromandel it is vulgarly used to describe persons of mixed European and native blood.’

  ‘Of that I am sufficiently aware.’ The music ended, and Caroline curtsied. ‘Pray accept my compliments on your dancing, sir. I am extremely thirsty - shall we seek refreshment?’

  In the supper-room a bevy of gallants instantly encircled her. Caroline parried their appeals to lead her out, and beckoned Marriott to an alcove by a window. She gazed across the darkened plain to the Black Town’s clustered lights, and said thoughtfully, ‘This is an extraordinary society, Mr Marriott. I have discovered, in a short time, much about it - not a difficult feat, surrounded as I am by gossips male and female. You yourself’ - she sent him a sidelong glance, and Marriott’s heart lurched like a ship run hard aground - have not been exempt from my inquiries. Mr Harley holds you in high esteem, and I have found no reason to contradict his judgement.’

  Marriott looked at her profile, the slightly tilted nose, wide mobile mouth and slanting, long-lashed eyes. Too vibrantly alive for pure classical beauty, lacking that statuesque stillness the poets so admired. To hell with Mr Pope, the devil burn John Dryden! Impulsively he took her hand.

  ‘I shall try with all my being,’ he said fervently, ‘to prove worthy of the place I hold in your regard!’

  The fingers he held slid gently away. ‘Look, there is a shooting star! What an exquisite curving streak!’ She leaned from the window to follow the meteor’s course, and added softly, ‘You may call me Caroline when we are alone . . . Charles. There, it has gone! Now pray take me to my parents. Shall I see you at the monument tomorrow?’

  ‘You will indeed?’

  She put finger to lip and regarded him pensively. ‘I like you, Charles - but I can’t approve of all your friends: one gentleman in particular. You will not, I trust, bring Captain Amaury?’

  ‘Certainly not! In the event he is prohibited, being engaged on drill parades from six o’clock till nine.’

  ‘So? Then at least he merits respect for attention to his duties - the officers who escort me are apparently less zealous. I can discover no other admirable quality in Captain Amaury.’

  Marriott gulped. ‘If you so strongly disapprove ... if you dislike ... would you prefer I severed my connection?’

  Consternation widened Caroline’s eyes. ‘On no account!’ She added primly, ‘Females should not interfere in gentlemen’s affairs, and never in their friendships, however unworthy. I am no reforming puritan, Mr Mar... Charles!’

  Marriott tried to hide his disappointment.

  He was early at Powney’s monument, but seven young men were already waiting: sepoy ensigns and light dragoons, two Junior Merchants and Mr Fane. Cheerful salutations greeted Caroline’s arrival, accompanied by Anstruther and a pair of mounted sices. She looked adorable in a gold-frogged emerald habit exactly matching
her eyes; a velvet tricorne crowned the chestnut curls. She bridled a grey Arabian, encouraged the mare’s restiveness by a secret touch of the spur and gentled its curvetting with sympathetic hands.

  She rode astride.

  The habit, ankle-length, was slit before and behind, and revealed enticing glimpses of slender thighs in clinging buckskin breeches. Marriott hastily averted his gaze, and glowered at Fane whose bulging eyes reflected all too obviously a lively appreciation. He wondered why her irascible parent countenanced such boldness; and remembered Caroline’s assertion that Sir John could deny her nothing - his daughter’s shocking appearance certified its truth.

  The cavalcade followed the foreshore, jostling for the privilege of riding by her side. Anstruther surrendered his place, reined alongside Marriott and gestured with his whip. ‘An outlook wonderfully different from Hyde Park!’

  The sea, flat-calm beyond the triple crests of surf, was brassy in the sunrise. Ahead stretched a humpy plain, the yellow sandy soil stippled by sun-parched grass, scattered palms and brittle bushes heavily coated in dust. A land breeze, warm and sour, set the palms rasping and rattling, blew dead leaves in gusty spirals and lifted from the beach a smell of excrement and rotting fish and carrion: the foreshore was the fishermen’s burying ground, latrine and refuse dump. Behind the boats and decomposing mounds lurked packs of savage dogs; no one dismounted from carriage or horse to take a stroll on the sands.

  Marriott flicked his whip at a snarling cur which snapped at his gelding’s heels. ‘The monsoon will break within a week. I can promise you little relief from the heat - only a different texture - but the arid scene around us will grow green as an English lawn in spring.’

  ‘A veritable arcady, no doubt,’ Anstruther said lightly. He discussed local trivialities: a play promised at the theatre - ‘The Provoked Husband: I am engaged to play a female part’ - loo at a private house where an officer within an hour lost two hundred pagodas - ‘the stakes were fanams unlimited: the stupid ass had not understood the currency!’ - and books come lately to the public library - ‘Gibbon’s Roman Empire: deucedly tedious, I assure you.’ Anstruther had shed his supercilious manner; possibly, Marriott considered, the recent duel had planed his fine conceit. He expressed dissatisfaction with his post as aide-de-camp - ‘employment for a coxcomb, not a soldier’ - and hoped for a timely exchange to the 19th Light Dragoons.

  Cornet Richard Anstruther, in short, was developing into a very personable young man.

  A decomposing bullock voided on the breeze a nauseating stench; Caroline wrinkled her nose, turned from the foreshore and rode across the plain to the racecourse which curved in a mile-long arc beyond the Assembly Rooms. On the course’s smooth green turf - watered every week and rolled by teams of camels - she kicked the Arab to a canter. Her retinue ranged alongside; Caroline, eyes impishly alight, glanced along the line of plunging horses. ‘A race, sirs, to the post - and a kiss rewards the winner!’

  She dropped her hands; the mare shot away like a small grey comet.

  Confound the little hussy! said Marriott to himself; not a word has she said to me since I touched my hat in greeting. I will win that kiss or break my neck in trying!

  They drummed whooping after the bright green habit, saw the space behind their quarry widen at every stride, and settled down to energetic riding. Marriott’s chestnut gelding, Arabian bred from an English dam and purchased from an officer crippled by wounds, had won races on this course within the year. He closed his legs and felt the bit; the chestnut dropped his head and stretched to a raking gallop. Anstruther thundered behind, flailing his whip and singing: an ensign cursed his horse’s lumbering gait. The tricorne whipped from Caroline’s head, her hair streamed loose like a rippling flame. She looked across her shoulder, met Marriott’s eyes - the chestnut’s head was level with her knee - and laughed aloud. The winning-post was thirty yards away. The Arab seemed to falter in her stride; Marriott shot ahead and won by half a neck.

  They pulled up, panting and laughing. Caroline, thighs disgracefully exposed, rearranged her habit. ‘By Gad, sir,’ puffed the ensign, ‘that is a handsome quad you ride! I could not bring him back to me if it were ever so! What will you take for him?’

  ‘After winning such a transcendental stake I could not consider selling. He may, if I am fortunate, win the like again!’

  ‘Ah,’ said Fane, his round red face aglow, ‘but when will you be paid?’

  ‘All bets,’ said Anstruther gravely, ‘must be settled on the course. ‘Tis the race club’s paramount rule.’

  Caroline peeped at the victor. Her face was flushed, her eyes were dancing. She crooked a finger. ‘Come closer, Mr Marriott - I never throw my kisses.’ Marriott sidled his horse alongside, removed his hat and offered a cheek. A softness brushed his lips, gentle as a butterfly’s alighting. ‘In truth you were beat,’ she whispered.

  The young men cheered.

  ‘And when, Charles, will you provide yourself with a woman?’ Amaury inquired.

  They strolled the compound of Moubray’s Gardens, a seven-acre hexagon girdled by high mud walls, a waste of bushes and grass, rubbish dumped in comers and little mounds of stones. In coach-houses and stables - low brick buildings steeply thatched - sices wisped whickering horses picketed in rows, and a coachman sluiced a curricle. Against an opposite wall were servants’ quarters, a huddle of flat-roofed whitewashed hovels. A more pretentious building nestled beneath a banyan tree: a single-storied house embellished by verandas, a balustrade and trellis. Amaury pointed.

  ‘The bibee-house, with two quarters still unoccupied. My delectable Kiraun - an alien from Hyderabad - complains that she is lonely, for the Madrassee hags who wait on her speak a different dialect. Won’t you provide her with company?’

  ‘I have never kept a woman. My quarters in Fort St George lacked the accommodation.’

  Amaury stared at him, concerned. ‘I cannot believe you continent for two long burning years!’

  ‘Is it likely? I used to visit Mrs Bradly.’

  Amaury knew Mrs Amelia Bradly: a piece of human flotsam which the storms of stress and misery washed on Coromandel’s shore. Of respectable family, her father a naval captain, she had been seduced at a tender age by a dissolute cavalry cornet, and accompanied her lover when his regiment of dragoons was posted to Madras. Her protector died in the Mysore wars; the girl, impoverished and unknown, found lodgings in the Black Town at a tavern keeper’s house. To pay for rent and food she adopted the courtesan’s trade; the taverner pimped for customers. Mrs Bradly was more particular than others in the Town: she favoured none but Europeans, kept her quarters clean and neat, and served her clients tolerable wine.

  ‘Used to, Charles? Why have you ceased to wait upon the lady? Are you so completely moonstruck by the beautiful Miss Wrangham?’

  ‘You are funning, Hugo,’ said Marriott.

  He leaned on a wattle fence and scratched the back of a calf which, with other livestock - deer, kids, ducks and geese - was corralled in a quarter of the compound: most Garden Houses kept private menageries they fattened for the table. ‘No - I promised Harley to forswear the Black Town. Visiting a Cyprian there would hardly fit my oath.’

  ‘You have come to an abominable pass!’ said Amaury seriously. ‘We must quickly discover a remedy, or your health will suffer.’ He thought for a moment, swung on his heel and bellowed orders. ‘We shall harness a gig and call on Mrs Bradly,’ he announced. ‘If you cannot visit her, she must be persuaded to live at Moubray’s Gardens. The very thing!’

  ‘Hugo, for the love of God--!’

  Amaury hustled him into the gig and spanked towards the Black Town. They lurched through narrow, potholed streets and halted at a seedy building flanked by shops and godowns; whitewash flaked from the walls, exposing bare brown patches like ringworm-eaten skin. A doorkeeper in grubby livery opened rusted gates and led them through a frowsty hall, redolent of cooking fat and curry, to an inner room where Amelia Bradly rose from a divan and
dropped a flustered curtsey.

  ‘Upon my soul, I am famously honoured! Pray forgive my deshabille - I had not expected company.’ She fluttered her fingers at a scowling ill-dressed man who had failed to stand at their entrance. ‘May I present...’

  Amaury nodded briefly to the stubbled mahogany face: a mariner by appearance, maybe master of a trading schooner anchored in the roads. ‘Your servant, sir. A word in private, by your leave, with Mrs Bradly.’

  The man frowned, started to speak, met Amaury’s eyes and stopped. He mumbled beneath his breath and shuffled out. Marriott kicked the door shut behind him.

  ‘Now, Amelia,’ said Amaury gaily, ‘I bring a proposition which will transfigure your condition. You deserve far better lodging than these pestilent apartments.’ His gaze wandered round the room: faded curtains, threadbare druggets, heavy ancient furniture of a fashion dating back to the Company’s earliest factory at Madras. All were scrupulously clean, and infinitely shabby. ‘In short, my dear, would you consider placing yourself in Charles Marriott’s sole protection, and taking up your quarters at Moubray’s Gardens?’

  Amelia gasped and opened wide blue eyes. She was a pretty, gold-haired creature, hardly twenty, with a rosy clear complexion not yet coarsened by the climate and the rigours of her life. Her diaphanous muslin gown displayed a deliciously rounded figure; a kerchief scarcely concealed a full white bosom. Marriott surveyed the curves and swells. Hugo’s idea was after all eminently sensible!

  ‘I vow, Amelia,’ he said ardently, ‘you shall lack for nothing!’

  ‘But how may I quit this lodging? The landlord holds my note of hand for two months’ rent... I have no decent apparel... a gentleman is promised for the evening...’