Beloved Exile

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Victorian Romance

Synopsis

Iestyn Mortymer, captured during the chartist Rebellion, is tried at the Monmouth Assizes and sentenced to twenty-one years transportation for crimes against Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria. Torn from his young wife Mari, he is exiled to Afghanistan - a country as violated and outraged as his native Wales. On all sides Iestyn witnesses signs of increasing hostility towards the English, and of the crumbling edifice of the Empire. Involved in the appalling 'Afghan Promenade' that cost the British army 17,000 lives, caught up by intrigue, murder and deadly deception, he cannot escape the fact that this is a time when every white face in the country is dubbed an Unbeliever, every redcoat a potential target of violence. Yet, despite everything, there is another escape that he is determined to make. Back to Wales... An epic blend of history and fiction, a swirling canvas of politics, war, servitude and passion, BELOVED EXILE marks the glorious culmination of Alexander Cordell's Welsh sagas.

Release date: September 4, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

The Indus River

The chunk-chunking of the paddle steamer beat in my head within a crucifixion by heat; it was mid-summer and the north-west frontier was coming up on the port side.

Through the smudged glass of the chain-locker porthole I saw the bright Indus River, its rippling wastes a quicksilver of astonishing brilliance; refracted light glowed and fired a scintillating brightness; the purple ranges of the surrounding country shimmered in lambent flame.

Big Rhys stretched his body beside me and rattled his chains. ‘What the hell we’re doing here, lestyn, I don’t know,’ said he. ‘If this is transportation, give me Botany Bay.’

Earlier, loaded to the gunwales with the paraphernalia of war, the rearguard of the Forty-Fourth Regiment of Foot had left Karachi some four hundred miles away and begun the eight-hundred-mile journey up the Indus River in support of the main army stationed in Kabul; yet another jewel in Victoria’s crown acquired by political bribery.

With a minimum of bloodshed, the fierce tribesmen of Afghan – the Alfredis, Ghilzais, Durranis, Pathans and half a dozen more – had been cajoled and threatened into passive acceptance of a puppet king, and watched their true ruler, Dost Mohammed Khan, sent by Britain into exile.

Now the gates of their ancient kingdom had been thrown open to British trade on British terms: soon the primitive Afghan homesteads and bazaars with their embroidered silks and leatherwork would be flourishing with imports, from Welsh coal to Lancashire cotton. All political enemies had been silenced: never again, said the counting houses of London, would the Russian bear roam the steppes of the ancient silk route through the Khyber Pass to Persia.

Where foreign arms had been rendered impotent by the courage of its patriots, Afghanistan had lost the war of diplomatic guile.

‘I tell you what,’ grumbled Big Rhys, ‘we’re England’s last hope, the broken rubbish of the Chartist cause.’

‘Ay, ay,’ replied Owen Howells, ‘and it’s folk like that old John Frost who’s landed me in this chain-locker. I’d give me soul to be cuddling up me missus back in Nantyglo, instead of sweating cobs in this bloody place.’

‘Count yourself lucky,’ I said. ‘They could have hanged us.’

‘Ach, forget it,’ retorted Big Rhys, sitting up. ‘Next stop could be the harem.’

‘Kabul, here I come, girls,’ added Owen.

They talked more, but I did not really hear them above the thumping of the paddle wheels, for I was up on the mountain at the Garndyrus furnaces, watching the iron coming out; and kissing Mari in the heather on Easter Sunday.

Two days later we were clear of Sukkur and the sacrificial glow of funeral pyres, where, they told us, widows cast themselves into the flames of their husbands’ bodies: on past loading bays where the main army of the Indus – some forty thousand men – Ghurkas, cavalry, infantry of the line and a dozen other units from Bombay Horse to Indian Sepoys, had months earlier left for the seven-hundred-mile march to Kabul via Kandahar … while we, chained as convicts, fumed and sweated in the stifling chain-locker amid stinks of curry, burned maize and dead animals.

The steamer, now motionless, was misted on the vaporous river; an open sewer that drained the onion-gold roofs of fabulous minarets … where tortuous alleys wriggled like amputated earthworms through the slums of India’s terrifying poverty.

After taking water aboard near Peshawar, the General Officer commanding the rearguard decided that he wanted to interview us.

‘Iestyn Mortymer?’ cried a voice, and sunlight shafted the locker.

‘Here,’ I said, and rose on the hay-strewn floor.

‘Rhys Jenkins, Owen Howells!’

Both, drenched with sweat, shambled to their feet.

Big, bull-chested, the Sergeant of the Guard barred the entrance and, indicating me, barked, ‘Follow me, Mortymer,’ and I did so along the heat-scalded deck, aware of the eyes of the civilian passengers.

Elegant women, the wives of military officers joining their husbands in Kabul, shrank away as I passed; children stared at me with unfeigned curiosity, babies were snatched aside. Now we climbed companionway steps to an elegant stateroom of silver and gold decoration: here sat an epauletted general surrounded by aides in their braided panoply of rank.

‘Sit,’ said someone, and I sat upon a form placed before the general’s table. Rustling papers with a professional flourish, he raised a thin, ascetic face, saying:

‘Convict Mortymer?’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant.

‘Yes, sir,’ I repeated.

The eyes before me, cold in a flushed red face clearly new to the tropics, burned their steely grey into mine. He read from a paper:

‘Sentenced to twenty-one years’ transportation at Monmouth Assizes for rebellion against Her Imperial Majesty the Queen. Is that correct?’

I nodded.

‘In that you, on the night of the fourth of November in the year 1839, did assemble with divers others armed with weapons of a dangerous description in order to take possession of the town of Newport, in the County of Monmouthshire, in an attempt to supercede the lawful authority of the Queen as a preliminary step to a more general insurrection throughout the kingdom …’ His voice droned on, dead upon his lips in the stifling atmosphere of the room; the steamer rolled gently, creaking to an incoming swell.

The General asked, ‘To this you pleaded guilty?’

I nodded assent, and he fixed his gaze upon me.

‘Answer me when I ask you a question!’

‘I pleaded guilty.’

‘And presumably – for I happen to know you damned Chartists – you have not yet repented your abject disloyalty?’ His voice rose shrilly.

‘I have not repented.’

‘Indeed, given a similar opportunity you would doubtless behave in the same manner!’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sighing at the ceiling, the General rose with the apathy of a wounded stag. ‘Merely another camp follower, Gentlemen; the rubbish being inflicted upon us in the name of technicians; a typical example, I may say, of the lower orders with which we are going to be burdened.’ Raising a weary hand, he added, ‘When you reach Kabul, Mortymer, you will report directly to the residence of the Assistant Envoy, whose office will attach you to the civilian department of a Mr Caleb Benedict …’ A hint of merriment entered his cold eyes, and he added, ‘In passing, I trust you find our Envoy less accommodating than the army, which has had the unfortunate duty of transporting you this far.’ Rising, he stalked out, followed by his aides.

One officer remained, a peak-faced lieutenant who took the vacated seat; he said, his eyes expressionless, ‘You are aware of your purpose in Afghanistan?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then I will tell you so you can pass on the information to your two companions.

‘The Army of the Indus, having conquered Afghanistan and sent Dost Mohammed Khan into exile, has appointed Shah Shuja as its new king; he now reigns in Kabul, and it is to him that you owe your freedom.’

I nodded, and he continued, ‘Since you are ironworkers and your trade is needed by the Shah, you are to work for him instead of being in a chain-gang, which is what would have happened if I’d had a hand in it. You follow me?’

‘Perfectly.’

His vacant eyes wandered the empty room. Then:

‘You will disembark when we reach Peshawar in three days’ time, and continue the journey to Kabul on foot: on the march you will be attached to the army for rations and discipline; you will march unchained, since it is not desirable for British personnel to be seen manacled. But, attempt to escape and you will be flogged on a gun wheel, if the Afghans don’t get you first, which I would find acceptable. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

He rose from the table. ‘Now get back to your confederates and acquaint them with these facts, and God help you if you come up before me for the slightest indiscipline.’

The guard called me to order and marched me back to the chain-locker.

It was on my way there, along the steamer’s slanting deck, that I first saw Durrani, the child princess. Earlier, we had learned that she was aboard.

She was standing by the starboard rail: tall, dignified in her silken robes of green and black and gold, there was little to distinguish her from the retinue of attendants about her, save that the colour of her skin was considerably lighter than theirs. I judged her age at fifteen, but a female’s age is difficult to assess in the East. As I clanked by, preceded by the guard, she lifted her face.

It was her eyes that held me, and always will; there was about them a lustrous sadness; then the vision passed, and the door of the chain-locker clanged behind me.

‘What happened?’ Big Rhys and Owen were instantly upon their feet, clamouring in their chains, but I did not immediately reply; I was still seeing the sad eyes of the young princess. Those few days before we reached Peshawar will stay forever in my mind; the sweating pain of being cooped up in the steaming chain-locker; fried all day by the refracted rays of an incinerating sun, shivering all night in an almost arctic cold.

At midnight on the last day on the river we had a visitor.

I was nodding in the vacuum of approaching sleep when a shadow fell across the bars of our prison.

‘English, please …?’ whispered a voice.

A native lad was crouched outside the bars of the door. His eyes, their whites like bedsheets, rolled in his dusky face. I moved closer.

‘What do you want?’

For reply he gave me a note.

Unfolding it, I turned it to the light of the moon, and read:

I, the Princess Durrani, granddaughter of Dost Mohammed Khan, the true king, am being taken from England to Kabul. Soon, says my grandfather, Akbar Khan, my uncle, will come and drive the Franks back to India, killing all but one, and take the throne.

Only a prisoner will help a prisoner, says my grandfather in Ludhiana, and great wealth will be yours if you help Durrani. Tell the Kohistani, yes or no, immediately.

‘What the hell’s happenin’?’ demanded Big Rhys.

‘We’ve got a visitor,’ I whispered. ‘He has brought a note.’

‘At this time of night? Who from?’

‘Listen,’ and I read the note to him.

Rhys stared at me, his eyes great pools of shadow in the light of the moon. ‘What you going to do?’

‘What can we do?’

‘In or out of here – nothing. Ain’t we in trouble enough, as it is? It’s politics. Get mixed up with her and you’ll wish you’d never been born,’ and he leaned over, reached through the bars, shook the lad’s sleeve, and said:

‘Hop it, you savvy? Hop it!’

‘Wait,’ I said, restraining the lad. ‘You talkee English?’

‘I speak English excellently,’ came the gentle reply.

‘Then go back to your mistress and tell her I will help her, if I can,’ and if anyone had asked me why I’d sent such a reply, I could not have given a reason.

‘You want your head read,’ said Rhys, after the boy had gone, at which Owen sat up, scratching.

‘What’s on?’

‘Nothing,’ said Rhys. ‘Just somebody gone off his nut. Go back to sleep.’

I did not know that my decision to help would cause his death.

Kabul (The Army of Occupation)

The residency of Sir Alexander Burnes was worthy of his station. ‘One thing’s sure,’ exclaimed Big Rhys, ‘these buggers do ’emselves well.’

It was an understatement.

This, a typical colonial mansion of the period, looked more like the habitat of a Sultan’s zenana than the abode of a civil servant: its ostentatious white-walled arches vied for beauty with an oriental harem.

Here bloomed midsummer flowers – gardens of riotous colour and perfume; its patio tiling traversed by a dozen scurrying servants, each apparently bent on reaching somewhere regardless of obstacle.

The walled vegetable garden through which we passed was laden with cabbages of giant proportions; turnips, radishes and potato plants flowered in abundance; cauliflowers from England bloomed their white roses as happily as in Kent.

Entering a door garlanded with sweetpea and geraniums, it was difficult for me to believe that I wasn’t in Wales.

A white-gowned man approached, one Mohun Lal, the Hindu assistant to the Envoy.

‘Whom do you seek?’ he asked in English.

I replied, ‘We seek a Caleb Benedict.’

Somebody at my elbow said, ‘What do you want with Benedict?’ and I turned to a distinguished-looking, plump little man in riding-habit.

‘We were told to report to him,’ I replied.

‘Were you, indeed! And who the devil might you be, for God’s sake?’ He looked my fatigue uniform up and down with undisguised disdain.

I judged his age at thirty; of aristocratic appearance and air, he was slapping his riding-crop impatiently against his leg.

Rhys said, ‘Sir, we are attached to the Forty-Fourth regiment …’

‘Ah yes, the Chartist prisoners!’

His brown eyes, flickering with hostility, looked us over.

‘Captain Broadfoot mentioned you. It isn’t enough, apparently, to be saddled with internecine war – we’re to harbour criminal elements to assist the process of political dissent. What happened? Didn’t they want you in Van Diemen’s Land?’

I repeated, ‘We are to report to Mr Benedict.’

‘Really! Well, it so happens that you’ve bumped into the Elchi, and it is I who will decide your future here, not a junior officer.’ He turned away.

Owen began, ‘Beggin’ ye pardon …’

‘Silence!’ Burnes snapped his fingers, and a passing servant leaped to his side. ‘Take these three over to Havildar at the racecourse and put them on the big roller. Obtain a signature for them, and bring it here to me.’ He moved closer to Owen, glaring up into his face. ‘Address me again without my permission and I will have you flogged, you damned anarchist. Now move!’

‘Jesus,’ whispered Owen.

Momentarily, I met the man’s cold stare: he smiled, but not with his mouth.

‘You, your name?’ His tongue moved over his lips. Handsome beggar, give him credit.

‘Iestyn Mortymer.’

‘Repeat it.’

I did so.

The eyes shifted in assessment.

‘A Chartist, eh?’

I did not answer; strangely he did not appear to expect one, but I knew that a pact of hostility had already been forged between us.

A word about Sir Alexander Burnes.

In his diary, it was discovered after his death, were expressive descriptions of the life he led in Kabul.

‘I am now a highly paid idler,’ he wrote to a relative, ‘being paid 3500 rupees a month as Resident, and for which I give paper opinions. I lead, in fact, a very pleasant life, and if rotundity be proof of health, I have it.’

It is to be hoped that he enjoyed it while he was able; his life of luxury was not to last long.

A decade earlier Alexander Burnes was a cavalry officer in the Bombay Horse, an unknown lieutenant in the East India Company.

By lucky circumstance he was appointed to deliver political bribes to local chiefs, in return for commercial British expansion. In so doing he appreciated the growing threat to British interests posed by the Russians, and expressed this forcibly in Whitehall circles.

Recently knighted for his services in replacing Dost Mohammed Khan, the King of Afghanistan, by the puppet Shah Shuja (one who more readily agreed to British exploitation of his country), Burnes had his future as an Eastern potentate assured.

Now, at the age of thirty-five, he had been installed as an’ Elchi, Assistant Envoy, in Kabul: only Sir William MacNaghten was his superior in rank and power … he who also was soon to die.

On our way out of the Residence we passed through long chains of hanging flower-baskets of every hue and perfume: convolvulus and clematis competed for beauty in a man-made paradise of wealth and privilege, yet its loveliness stank: it brought to me a presentiment of disaster; as if the future had been suddenly hauled back into the present … painting a fleeting vision of the deaths of thousands.

‘Did ye see those dusky beauties looking out of the upstairs windows?’ asked Owen.

‘Trust you!’

‘Ye know somethin’? I reckon that lad’s got a harem goin’ … the young sod!’

‘If they’re Afghan beauties, he’ll catch it,’ Big Rhys said, voicing my thoughts.

In the event, he did.

Now under the ministrations of the gigantic Keeper of the Racecourse (one Havildar, an overseer who worked the local bad hats), we were to know a month of unremitting labour under the sun of Kabul’s blazing June … pulling a two-ton grass roller – work usually done by donkeys.

It gave me time to reflect upon an unequal contest – Chartist agitators incurring the displeasure of the British Raj … through a political representative who was the lion of the day.

We could not have fallen foul of a more important person.

Meanwhile Havildar, once the King’s Master Cannoner, but fallen from grace after an affair with a harem lady at Court, had a magnificent chip upon his shoulder, and was giving us a bad time.

‘In the name of God,’ shouted a voice, ‘why are ye heaving that bloody great thing around?’

Rhys, Owen and I straightened on the towing harness: the big roller came to a stop.

The man before us had an alcoholic nose; was as fat as he was tall and as be whiskered as a stage Irishman; he bowed, his top hat, battered by years, at a cocky angle.

‘Are you the Chartist criminals, then?’

We said we were, and he pulled out a snuff-box, took a pinch, sniffed it, coughed himself blue in the face, patted his chest and cried, ‘Jesus, I’ve been lookin’ all over Afghanistan for ye, so I have. I’m Caleb Benedict,’ and he offered his hand.

I unstrapped the pulling harness, saying, ‘We’re the three you’re lookin’ for, Mr Benedict, and we’ve been here weeks.’

‘At the pleasure o’ that young upstart, Burnes, they’re telling me!’

‘He fixed us proper,’ said Rhys.

‘Do ye always do everything you’re told? Sure to God, if you’d mentioned me name to that wee numbskull, he’d ’ave run a bloody mile.’

Havildar, our outsize Sikh gaoler, approached with fawning servility, saying, ‘I greet you, Mr Benedict, sir,’ and touched his breast and forehead. ‘How is your health?’

‘When I know meself you’ll be the last to hear it, ye big oaf. Have ye nothin’ between your ears? There’s me waitin’ for me Celtic furnacemen, and you’ve got ’em on a bloody roller!’ And the other answered, bowing low:

‘It was at the command of Sir Alexander, the Assistant Elchi.’

‘Is that so? Well, this is at the command of Sir Caleb bloody Benedict, so get the harness off those fellas and hand ’em over, or ye’ll never hear the end of it.’ He came to us. ‘Are you all in one piece, my lovelies?’

‘Now you’ve come,’ said I.

‘Are ye Irish?’

‘Welsh.’

‘Ah well, we can’t have everything. Do you know why you’re here?’

We shook our heads.

‘That makes four of us,’ said Caleb. ‘But I tell ye this free – it won’t be long before they’ll be bootin’ us out o’ the beloved country entirely, so make the best of it. Have you heard about the need for iron on the Frontier?’

We said we hadn’t.

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said Caleb. ‘The first idea was to hammer swords into ploughshares, but the locals got other ideas, so you’re here to make iron for war – plates for fortifications, a narrow-gauge railway, iron for repairing gun-limbers – and it’s all got to come out of Caleb’s wee furnace. Have you heard of that even?’

I shook my head.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Didn’t they tell you anything?’

‘Only that we had to report to you.’

‘If you’re tradesmen, gents, welcome aboard!’

Preceded by his little fat stomach, he led the way.

The Caleb Furnace, about a quarter of the size of those we’d worked back home in Blaenafon, stood in a tiny furnace compound near the Kabul Gate. As old as Methuselah with its ancient pig moulds, it used a stone in its bung to halt the molten flow.

‘But it works,’ cried Caleb, tipping up a flask, and he drank deep and gasped, ‘Sure to God, there’s no finer iron cast in the Orient. Are ye listenin’?’

We said we were.

‘Now I’ll take you to Captain Broadfoot.’

Broadfoot, a Royal Engineer officer in charge of the Shah’s sappers and miners, looked us over. Red-haired, silent, dressed in fatigue uniform like us, he was possessed of that commanding dignity that raised him above the herd of regimental officers abounding in Kabul.

‘Your names?’ he asked, and noted them on a pad. ‘All puddlers?’

Big Rhys answered, ‘Me and Mortymer, sir.’

‘I’m a firer,’ said Owen.

‘Right, we can do with you, for things are starting to move. You’ve seen Caleb’s furnace?’

I nodded.

‘And you’ve no political bees in your bonnets?’

‘Not these days.’

‘Keep it that way.’ His bright blue eyes drifted over us. ‘We’ve enough local discontent here to suffice us all, otherwise what you do in your private time is nothing to do with me. You’ll mess with the Other Ranks and as far as I’m concerned have the run of the place. But step out of line and I’m your boy, so remember it. Stand by me, behave yourselves, and I’ll see you right, understand?’

We said we did.

‘What about the Envoy?’

‘Burnes? Forget him. Just do your job and leave him to me. You got that, Caleb?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Oh, one last thing,’ said Broadfoot. ‘We’ll be working up in the Bala Hissar, the fort. Keep away from the women or you’ll be confronted by eunuchs with knives. Emasculation is their stock-in-trade, so keep it in your trousers.

‘Meanwhile, Caleb will find you a tent and work out your shifts – you’ve got only six labourers and they’re all Hindus – never mix them up with the Afghans. Racial prejudice. Any questions?’

He spoke more, and I took good note of him. I speak of him now mainly because he is worth it, though we didn’t even have him with us on the Retreat from Kabul.

Surviving this, he was killed at Ferozepore, living a little longer than his brother William, who was soon to be assassinated.

The parents of the Broadfoot brothers, gentle vicarage people back in rural England, gave three fine sons to Asia, the first to be sacrificed being James, who had already died under knives in the valley of Purwandurrah.

Some men are worth more than a passing mention: one was Captain Broadfoot.

On the day we officially started work up in the Bala Hissar I began to keep a diary.

Now the autumn broke in fiery splendour: mists of morning barged across the gullies of the sky from Beymaroo to Seeah Sung and northwards, beyond the barrier of the Hindu Kush, the Country of Light; here the Russians lay, seething at the stolen prize.

In colder sunlight, the fortress of Bala Hissar, the barbarian of the centuries, glared down upon our military cantonment, the invading British cancer laid out far below it.

The cantonment had not been the same for us since Captain Broadfoot had left us for a military foray with General Sale: he alone, it appeared, understood the workings of the Other Ranks’ mind; we missed his fine authority.

But his place had been taken by another of the same ilk – a Captain Sturt, and he took up our work programme where Broadfoot had left off. The continuity was essential; that autumn proved a testing time for the cantonment’s defences.

Under Sturt’s supervision we made shell-proof the many isolated forts around the perimeter of the military cantonment; labouring bare-backed in the searing heat, propping and reinforcing what was now called Sturt’s Bridge over the Kabul River (later to prove a focal point in our defences) and we even fortified the ruins of Sergeant Deane’s House and the Orchard Magazine. Around us chuprassies (messengers) on horseback came and went; drill squad sergeants barked at raw recruits, and the military band of the ‘Little Fighting Fours’ (the 44th Queen’s) marched past us up and down the square, blasting martial music.

Along the cantonment lines black-faced Indian Sepoys sat bootless in the sun, braces down, contemplating ease; the guard blancoed and polished for yet another Afghan day of leisurely pursuit: all appeared well with our particular world.

The white façades of the administrative buildings glittered in that eerie, translucent light that spells an Asian morning; strange smells arose and perfumed the wind; the stink of camel dung (later we used it as an antiseptic for wounds) clashed with the scent of flowering convolvulus; from the cavalry lines came the hammering of farriers shoeing the sturdy little yaboos, hitherto wild Afghan ponies. The morning was filled with the shrieked protests of overburdened camels being prodded down the military lines, from dragging earthwork carts to hauling six-pounder gun-limbers.

Freed from regimental duties now that the political climate had settled into dull routine, the officers of the Army of Occupation lazed in the sun, played polo and drank gin and bitters before tiffin; made assignations with local Afghan maidens for the next night of debauchery, and commended the assiduity of Assistant Political Envoys like Burnes who had presented them with such congenial opportunities.

Meanwhile, these same officers were being aped and ridiculed by the beggars of Kabul, and their wives were threatened and insulted.

Our political people were also being warned by pro-British factions that an uprising was about to take place out of hatred for the puppet King, Shah Shuja.

Violence was growing too. Tit for tat vendettas ensued, as in the case of Private Collins of the 13th Light Infantry – ‘a gallant soldier but a great ruffian’ as the inquest put it.

Collins, recognizing a ‘harmless’ beggar as one who privately cut British throats, seized the man by the scruff of his neck and, holding him face down in a rain puddle, ‘drowned him like a dog’. The guard was called upon finding the body, but apparently, ‘didn’t see anything, sir …’

Despite warning signs (the Commander-in-Chief made light of them), the Afghan tribes, it was said, had an i. . .