The Lion in Winter? (4)

The Wazir made his move eleven days later, and it was, of course, not a move at all. It was a kindness.

Raja Dhian Singh did not threaten people. Threatening was for men who lacked the patience to arrange things so that the threat made itself. He came to Nau Nihal in the gallery, the way he had come for years, unhurried, already there, and he was warm, and he was grave, and he expressed, beautifully, his concern.

“These are hard days for the family, Kanwar Sahib,” he said. “The Sarkar mends slowly, Waheguru be thanked, but slowly. And in such days a young prince of your quality should be at the centre of things, here, in Lahore, seen, where the household and the army can take comfort from the sight of the blood of Ranjit Singh standing firm.” A pause, judged to the half-second. “Not away. Not shut up in the hills with the door closed, where men who do not know you, and you would be amazed, Kanwar Sahib, how many men do not know you, might wonder what a prince finds to do behind a wall that he cannot do in the open, in the daylight, among his grandfather’s people.”

The true thing lay on the floor between them now, gleaming: I know there is a wall, and I know there is a door in it, and I have decided, now that the Lion is down, to start asking, gently, in front of witnesses, what is behind it.

‘And he’s good,’ Angrez thought, with the cold professional admiration he could never fully suppress for the man who was going to help murder his entire family. ‘Listen to it. He hasn’t accused me of anything. He’s worried about me. He’s worried that other people might wonder. He’s offering to protect my reputation by suggesting I dismantle the one thing that matters. If I refuse, I look like a boy with something to hide. If I agree, I lose Mirpur. And he gets to do it all while the Sarkar is too sick to be appealed to. He has been waiting two years for the Sarkar to be too sick to be appealed to.’

So Nau Nihal did the thing he had been building himself, on a hill, for two years, into the kind of person who could do.

He did not defend the wall. He gave it away.

---

“You are right, Wazir Sahib,” he said, with a boy’s open relief, as if a weight had been lifted. “I have been hiding in the hills. It was selfish of me. My grandfather is ill and I have been playing at soldiers up a mountain when I should have been here.” He let himself look young and chastened and entirely transparent. “Will you help me put it right? I should like to open the estate. Properly. I should like the Sarkar’s own officers to come up and inspect it, the whole of it, the school and the armoury and the stores, and report to the darbar what a prince does with his days, so that no one need ever wonder again. Would you send men you trust? I would be grateful. I would be ashamed for it to look like a secret a day longer.”

And he watched Raja Dhian Singh, for the first time in their long quiet war, be wrong-footed.

Because the offer was real, and that was what the Wazir could not immediately price. A guilty boy clutched his secret. An innocent boy threw the doors open. Nau Nihal was throwing the doors open, eagerly, asking for the inspection, naming the school and the armoury and the stores, and the Wazir’s own men would go up, and they would find a school, and an armoury, and stores, exactly as named, and a great deal of cold air and adolescent sweat, and they would find, behind the second wall, which Nau Nihal would show them himself with a boy’s pride, a prince’s untidy library and his queer expensive philosophy: glassware, and crucibles, and a workshop where the Kanwar tinkered at clocks and powders and the kind of harmless mechanical nonsense that ran in the family, everyone knew, ever since the Sword of the State had got his hooks into the boy.

They would not find two hundred identical copper caps, because Lahna Singh had a week’s warning and the deep good sense of a man who had grown up inside this court, and what an inspection finds is precisely what was there to be found on the morning it arrives.

‘You taught me this, Wazir Sahib,’ Angrez thought, watching the beautiful face recalculate. ‘You taught me that the strongest place to hide a thing is in the open, with the lamps lit and the doors wide and a transparent harmless reason for all of it. I learned it off you the way I learned the gun off the Ustad, watching the muscles in your face for two years. The hill is going to pass your inspection, and it is going to keep passing it, forever, because from now on it is the most thoroughly inspected, most boringly documented, most officially nothing-to-see royal hobby in the Punjab. You came to flush a secret. You are going to leave having personally certified that there isn’t one.’

“That is very wise, Kanwar Sahib,” said Raja Dhian Singh at last, and inclined his head, and his composure was back, seamless, but they both knew that something had happened in the gallery that had not happened before, which was that the boy had met the move and turned it, cleanly, and they were not, any more, a great man and a clever child. They were two players, and the Wazir had just been shown it, and Nau Nihal understood, walking away with his heart going hard, that he had bought the hill’s safety at the price of the last of his disguise. Dhian Singh would never again make the mistake of thinking him paste.

‘Well,’ he thought. ‘That cover lasted thirteen years. Better than I had any right to. Now he knows what I am, or near enough, and the game gets faster, and more honest, and far more dangerous, and I have a sick grandfather and a soft father and exactly one ally I trust, and she runs the women’s quarters. Carefully, then. Carefully. The way you carry a tray of caps.’

---

He rode up to the hill with a plan, and the hill had a better one.

His plan was the plan of a frightened boy who had read too many histories. The caps would be buried, in a lead-lined box, under the floor of the deer-keeper’s hut. The little press that stamped them would be broken up and the pieces burned in the forge. He laid it out on the bench in the inner shed, and Lahna Singh heard him to the end, because he always did, and then shook his head.

“Nothing is buried on this hill,” said the Sword of the State. “You have twelve boys, putt, and a deer-keeper, and the deer-keeper has dogs. There is no square yard of this rakh that something does not dig in. The caps go down the valley tonight to Kotli Loharan, in a load of the Ustad’s barrel-blanks, on my mules, under my mark. My father governed the Kangra hills and so do I, and the iron of Mandi has gone down to the Sialkot smiths on Majithia mules since before you were born. It is your carts they are counting in the sarais, putt. Nobody has yet thought to count mine. The nephew takes them. He does not know what he makes. He will not know what he carries.”

“And the press,” said Nau Nihal. “The press at least we burn.”

Ustad Ilahi Bakhsh had been filing a breech-plug throughout, and did not stop.

“You do not burn a tool,” he said. “A tool has done nothing wrong. You give it other work.”

‘I did say, know what to burn.’

“Ustad ji, if one man who has seen a mint looks at that press,” said Nau Nihal, and got no further.

“Then he will see a press, stamping buttons.” The file went on. “Your boys’ coats have horn buttons, and they crack in the cold, and I have been ashamed of them for two winters. Brass buttons, with a little lion on them. A prince would think of that. A die is a morning’s work. The Wazir’s men will stand and watch it stamp, and it is a marvel, and they will each want a button to take home.”

Lahna Singh looked at the press, and then at the old man, with the face of an inventor who has been beaten to an invention.

“That is very good,” he said. “That is better than mine.”

“It is not clever, Sardar ji. It is housekeeping. Also, I am leaving a bad barrel on my bench.”

“You are not.”

“One. The one that shot wide, from before the gauges were right. A soldier who sees a workshop with no failure in it knows that the workshop has been tidied for him. He sees one bad barrel and an old man ashamed of it, and he trusts the rest.”

“Every barrel on this hill passes the gauge,” said Lahna Singh. “I will not have them think otherwise.”

“They are my gauges,” said the Ustad, with great courtesy, “and it is my bench.”

They argued it for most of an hour, the man who loved a rule and the man who had put fifty years into one and was still paying for it, and neither of them at any point turned to ask the Kanwar. The barrel stayed on the bench. By the end of the week Nau Nihal owned four hundred brass buttons with a lion on them that he had not known he wanted, and would now have to go on making.

The cadets watched the sweeping and the whitewash, and the veterans oiling things that had been oiled, and came to the only conclusion their lives had fitted them for: that a great lady was coming up to look the school over. Nothing else, in their experience, had ever made men sweep. Two of them had their hair washed.

Notes

1. The meeting in the gallery and the inspection of Mirpur are the novel’s invention; there was no Mirpur works and so no inspection of it. Raja Dhian Singh’s manner, the courtesy that never threatens, is drawn from the general agreement of the sources that he was the ablest and most polished man at the court. The protagonist’s reading of his motives is the historian’s hindsight.

2. The week at Mirpur is the novel’s invention, press, buttons, bad barrel and all. Sardar Lahna Singh Majithia did succeed his father Desa Singh as governor of the Kangra hills (Gupta, Vol. 5, which gives the succession but not the year; 1832 is as in the Note to Book Two (3)); Kotli Loharan drew its iron from Mandi, in that government (Gupta); and Gupta calls him “a great mechanic and inventor” who made a clock showing the hour, the day and the month.