Jane Steele(105)

I swallowed bitter disgust, for this confirmed all my friends had told me—Company spies flattering the Sikhs whilst infiltrating their empire, Sikhs defying the Company whilst their leaders betrayed them.

Small wonder that Sardar Singh longed for vengeance.

“Anyhow, Karman wouldn’t have cared a fig about Lavell’s politics. It was, how shall I put this, a love match, Miss Stone,” Mr. Sack added in a greasy tenor. “Screaming fights, tender reconciliations—they burnt the candle at both ends.”

“What did she say when the theft was discovered?”

“Now mind, we never learnt who pilfered her treasure until I discovered Sahjara’s trunk,” Mr. Sack boasted with a hand over his breast. “But we all knew what happened after it went missing—Karman Kaur ordered a Khalsa cavalry uniform altered to fit her, sharpened her tulwar, saddled her best horse, and joined the army to seek a new fortune for herself and Lavell.”

I forced myself to relax clenched fists.

“She did not consult anyone over this step, I take it.”

“Not her!” He chuckled. “Magnificent, she was, Miss Stone, a stunner of the first water. So she had lost a tidy sum—why whinge when the Khalsa were poised to annihilate John Company in the name of the Guru? Lavell was called to Amritsar to negotiate, and Karman was off like a shot to Ferozepore after sending word to her brother to look after his niece. By the time Sardar Singh and Charles Thornfield discovered her plan, she had already joined a Sikh encampment, to the delight of all the men she met there. She distinguished herself in action at Ferozepore as well as at Aliwal and Sobraon.”

“The Khalsa did not win the Battle of Sobraon.”

“No, they were slaughtered,” Mr. Sack returned cheerily.

He moved to refill our wine; by the time he had passed the glass back to me, my spine tingled with horror. It did not matter that Karman Kaur may well have joined the ranks of the Khalsa anyhow; it did not matter that Mr. Singh did not think Mr. Thornfield a murderer. Mr. Thornfield saw every step leading to her decision like paces towards a gallows, saw the fateful instant when the loss of her treasure propelled her into a harrowing war, and he thought himself wholly responsible. It did not matter that I knew any woman would be lucky to be loved by him—would, as I had put it, be the happiest woman in the world.

The last one wasn’t, he had told me, for he had set her death in motion.

“The Battle of Sobraon was butchery at its most primitive,” the political continued almost gleefully. “It had been pouring rain for days, and the Sutlej River was as bloated as a pagan prince. The Khalsa had been pummelling our Bombay brigades with heavy artillery for hours when the order came to return the bombardment. When that failed, the Bengali troops as well as the King’s Light Dragoons launched counterattacks which the Khalsa repelled like true barbarians—hacking down the wounded, finishing the dying as if they were cattle in an abattoir. After confronting them from the west and the south and the east, the Sikh line began to collapse, which is when the true carnage began.”

“It sounds sufficiently apocalyptic already, Mr. Sack.”

Mr. Sack adopted an introspective look. “All those rains, Miss Stone—the surging of the Sutlej’s waters, the vulnerability of their position. One pontoon bridge linked the Khalsa back to the Punjab. Think about it—a single thread of boats leading to the only possible escape after the fords had flooded. The Company may have had . . . friends, let us say, on the Sikh side, friends who understood the value of this bridge. Or they may not, and God Himself may have weakened the moorings linking the line of ships—who can say for certain?”

My stomach turned over.

“Can you, Mr. Sack?”

“I, a mere diplomat? You compliment me extremely, Miss Stone.”

“Go on,” I urged.

“The bridge of boats collapsed and took the Khalsa with it,” he mused. “It was never a retreat, for they fought madly every second . . . but it was a reckoning. They had murdered our wounded, and the generals thought it best that an example be made.”

“What sort of example?”

Augustus Sack lifted his wineglass, swirling the liquid within as a gentle smile touched his lips. “I did not arrive until the Khalsa had been conquered, but this was the colour of the Sutlej when I saw it after the rout. We fired every weapon we had into that river. Ten thousand Khalsa men and one woman died that day, either drowned or shot whilst in the act of drowning.”

“That’s horrifying,” I breathed because I could not help myself.

“All the more so for Thornfield.” Mr. Sack sipped his vintage, clearly unperturbed by its shade. “The woman I refer to is Karman Kaur. Thornfield was in the thick of it and, in his later delirium, it became clear to my man Clements that upon spying Karman in the watery massacre, Thornfield tried to save her. The fool got sliced in the back for his trouble. He nearly drowned in blood and gore before he made it to Karman on a riverbank covered in corpses, but she was so full of holes that only meat remained of her. Head half blown off, body riddled with grapeshot. Pity. She was remarkable. He spent over twenty hours on that beach with her remains amidst the carnage, unable to move from blood loss. Oh. Have I delivered too graphic an account for your taste, Miss Stone? My apologies.”

In truth, I did feel faint—with rage, with grief. “Blood has always upset me, and imagining . . .”