Free Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald Page B

firm hand. But people like Roberts can’t be made to see that. Always talking—and writing, mind you. Damned fellow prints articles in the newspapers—about the awakening of the Indian mind, the necessity for justice and seeing the native’s point of view. Tosh! The chap’s a Radical! A Liberal!’
    Here Mr Chalmers subsided into his meal, first bellowing to one of the khitmagars to bring him more rice and be pretty damned quick about it.
    Not for the first time I wished that someone had persuaded me in my impressionable years that young females should learn to hold their tongues. Not content with having brought one hornet’s nest about my head, I had actually invited a second. I should have realized from Mrs Chalmers’s manner to Mr Roberts that morning that he, poor man, was somehow persona non grata with the house of Chalmers. And yet I had dragged him into the conversation.
    ‘I am relieved to have your opinion,’ Charles was saying. ‘I must certainly visit Lucknow; I promised my mother to do as much, but if I felt there was really trouble on the way I would leave my wife and Miss Hewitt in Calcutta naturally.’
    ‘No need for that,’ assured Mr Chalmers. ‘None at all. Fine place, Lucknow, most enjoyable to visit, so long as you keep out of the native quarter. Never could understand these people who had to make much of the wretched Nawab and his relatives though. Of course you wouldn’t be drawn into all that now that he’s been deposed and lives down here.’
    ‘No indeed. We intend to stay with Emily’s cousin and her husband. He is in the Army.’
    ‘Oh, Will,’ exclaimed Mrs Chalmers to her husband, ‘I knew there was something I had to tell you! Just fancy, but I heard this morning from that Mr Roberts of all people that our young Mr Flood is half-brother to no less a person than Mr Oliver Erskine. You remember the Erskines? From Oudh?’
    ‘That so?’ Mr Chalmers was obviously impressed, but turned to Charles for confirmation of the intelligence.
    ‘Yes, that is true. But I am not yet acquainted with my brother.’
    ‘I see,’ said Mr Chalmers, who obviously did not.
    ‘I hope to meet him when we reach Lucknow of course, and perhaps visit him on his estate for a short time before going on to Delhi. However, though my mother has informed him of our visit to India, we have as yet received no letter from him, much less an invitation.’
    ‘And that doesn’t surprise me,’ Mr Chalmers said, between bites on a large and luscious mango. ‘A very … er … eccentric gentleman, Mr Erskine, so they tell me. Not much given to company. Now, when his grandfather was alive, that huge place of theirs was always full of people. Capital shooting parties, tiger-hunts, expeditions into the terai to round up elephant—everyone tried to cadge an Erskine invitation. And great parties and balls and levées, even though it was next door to nowhere and halfway back again! Remember ’em well, the old people, I mean. Always made a splash when they came to Calcutta to shop each year, my wife will tell you that, a real splash! But this young feller’s a different story, so I hear. Three generations after all! They all go to seed a bit after a time, get too fond of the black fellers, y’know … to say nothing of the black ladies, ha! ha!’
    Mrs Chalmers clucked and said ‘Will!’ reprovingly.
    ‘Oh, sorry, sorry! But it’s true, m’dear, as you very well know. Look around you today, after all. How many of the old guard are there, people like Skinner and Hearsey, Wheeler—oh, dozens more—who have got themselves fixed up with a local lady, one way or the other? And it’s always the ones who have been out here too long, or whose fathers were here, y’know. Now that won’t do. Won’t do at all.’
    Charles, after a quizzical glance at me, said, ‘Well then, I must hope I reach my poor expatriated brother in time. Perhaps I can persuade him to return to the land of his fathers and so save