The Deceivers Read Free Page A

crowd surged forward once more, grinning and chattering.
    ‘Your worship is a great king,’ the ferryman said, bowing briefly. ‘The quality of your honour’s magnificence is such as to dazzle the eye.’ He broke off to kick a young farmer out of the way.
    William handed Mary into the boat, and George followed. The grooms, who all day and every day ran unnoticed thirty paces behind the horses, led them up the ramp. William made way for George to stand in the very front of the boat.
    On the far bank Chandra Sen moved slowly down towards the river. A jumbled array of servants, coolies, and tenant farmers surrounded a palanquin among the trees. The members of a six-piece band marched into view, formed a rough circle, raised their instruments, and waited.
    Mary reached out her hand and twined her fingers in William’s. The brown women in the boat stared at her slim back and whispered excitedly to one another, nodding their heads so that their nose ornaments flashed in the sun and their gold necklaces jangled together.
    The boat grounded, grated forward under the thrust of the poles, and stopped. Mary made to move forward, but William held her back, while Mr George Angelsmith, the accredited representative of the Agent to the Governor-General of India, stepped down and stood alone on the bank, one foot slightly advanced, his head up and his left hand negligently on his sword hilt. The band struck up a loud cacophony. Chandra Sen bowed from the waist. The servants and farmers bowed. William saluted. From the barge a kid bleated for its mother’s milk, a long agonized maaa-a-a-a-ah! George Angelsmith touched the peak of his cap and stepped forward.
    William and Mary jumped down from the boat. A servant handed garlands of flowers one by one to Chandra Sen, and Chandra Sen lowered them in turn over George’s neck, then Mary’s, then William’s. At last he stepped back and stood with head bowed and hands joined in front of his face. He was tall, thin, and pale, dressed in white and wearing a white turban. A white caste mark was painted on his forehead. His face had a tired charm, and his large eyes were wide open, as if in perpetual mild surprise.
    The band made a deafening noise a few feet off. Mary shouted in English, laughing and blushing. ‘Thank you so much, Mr Chandra Sen.’ The patel bowed, took her by the hand, and led her to the palanquin. William saw that George, watching the easy swing of her riding habit, did not seem to notice the goats and children and women easing past him off the barge. Mary stooped and put her head through the curtains of the palanquin to talk to Chandra Sen’s wife, and George looked away.
    Chandra Sen returned, and William grasped his hand. ‘I’m glad to see you.’ Crinkles sprang up round the corners of the patel’s eyes. He replied, ‘And I am glad to see your memsahib. It was time you married -- past time. It is not rude of me, by your custom, to say she is beautiful? A princess!’
    George joined them, and they chatted idly. From the corner of his eye William watched the other ferry passengers group themselves and prepare to face the road. As a score of times before, it struck him that India was always moving, always going somewhere. Between Kashmir and Cape Comorin, how many hundreds of thousands of people daily faced the dangers, known and guessed and unguessed, of the road? In the sixty-year anarchy of the dying Mahratta power, how many had failed to reach the place they were going to? How many still died on the way and were not missed?
    Chandra Sen was talking, a little hurriedly, about a court case; telling him the ins and outs of the relationships involved; whose mother had quarrelled with whose great-aunt how many years ago; the exact amount paid by one ancestor for false title deeds in the time of the Saugor Pandits, and by another for later, falser deeds. William knew Chandra Sen well and thought he seemed to be about something. As for the court case, it was too