The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

a pretence of purpose.

      When Bella turned round, Emily was in the room. Instead of removing the tea-things, she was hovering over the sofa.

      ‘The gentleman—’ she said, almost nervously.

      ‘Yes, Emily?’ Bella said, turning back to the sight, once so ordinary, of Hanover Square without an Alexander Burnes in it. ‘Yes, what is it?’

      ‘The gentleman forgot his gloves, miss,’ Emily said. She was holding up a pair of pale blue gloves. That was what it had been; Burnes had left his gloves there, and only realized once he had left the house. Casting a glance back at the door of the Garraways’ house, he had found that too difficult a challenge; the man who had confronted the Amirs of Bokhara now, apparently, had found some timidity in him which made him shrink from returning to claim his gloves.

      ‘That won’t – no—’ Bella said, almost snatching the gloves back from Emily. ‘—no, they are my father’s gloves, not Mr Burnes’s. Give them to me – I was on the point of taking them up to him. I need to talk with my father, in any case.’

      Emily was clearly doubtful. ‘I think he’s asleep presently, miss,’ she said. ‘I can take them up later with the six o’clock tray.’

      Like an invalid, Colonel Garraway had a tray at set times; his six o’clock tray bore what had proved the efficacious restorative of half a pint of dry sherry and some ship’s biscuits. Bella was firm, not permitting herself to wonder what Emily and the massively multiplying dependants below stairs would be saying in half an hour about her theft of Burnes’s pale blue gloves. Bella, suddenly, simply didn’t care. ‘I’ll take them up now,’ she said, almost furiously, and, walking across the room and snatching the gloves up, almost ran up the stairs with them.

      It was only when she was in her room, the door safely shut behind her, that Bella could think of what she had done, and why she had done it. She stood, holding his gloves, and it seemed to her that somewhere, deep in the house, carpets were being beaten; a great regular dull thud, making the walls vibrate and the windows ring. She listened, and it was no noise, but only her heart, the betrayer, rousing the house to her strange desire. She held the gloves to her, and the sound would not stop. The Garraways were so respectable they would never surprise anyone, never disappoint or astonish anyone with their perfect breeding. Now something had come to astonish, to overthrow, to bowl over a Garraway, and she listened to her beating heart with an emotion not far from bewilderment.

      In her room, in her bureau, in the third drawer from the top, Bella kept a box of tokens. Tokens of her past life, which no one had seen, or would see. It was this she now reached for, in which she placed Burnes’s purloined gloves. A clockwork toy, twenty years old, no longer working; who, now, could say what that meant to Bella? Or a playbill, smudged with a masculine thumb, eloquent only to its collector, and to us, who observe her at this most private juncture, quite silent? A handkerchief, embroidered by hand – not very well, as if by a child, and marked with a D – we would venture so far as to guess that this belonged, once, to Bella’s mother, whose name in this house is so sadly neglected, that it is the handkerchief clutched by her mother as she died. Precious things; most precious things. It was here she placed Burnes’s gloves, not quite knowing why, but hearing some imperative voice, which she obeyed.

      5.

      Burnes’s book, that summer, was read everywhere. The King did not read it, true. But yet even he had granted the author an audience, had graciously accepted a copy, and had listened, nodding from time to time, while Lady Porchester took it upon herself to describe Burnes’s adventures at length to Queen Adelaide. So – since he had never been known to take down any book but the Navy Regulations – even he could, loosely, be said to have read it. All London read it. The hostesses and their daughters read it to each other in the course of their long afternoons. In the city, the busy traders took time from making money to wonder at Burnes’s daring, the odd folk he had met, whose existence had never, until that year, been remotely suspected by people whose cellars were filled with the substantial tributes of the far-flung world. Boys at Westminster read it surreptitiously, their eyes shining, and that year, half the poems written for the Prize turned out to be Afghan pastorals, in which a shepherd of the neighbourhood of Herat, longing for his lost herd of fat-tailed sheep (Pothon platykerkous oies), came upon a dusky shepherdess. Most people who read Burnes’s famous account of his famous travels saw romance in it, and were satisfied to hear of another man’s colourful adventures and miserable minor discomforts. Bella, for instance, like a thousand other very similar young ladies between the Park and the Palace, enjoyed it as she might have enjoyed a fancy-dress ball. All these young ladies wondered only at the soft, rather irresolute man who hovered so in drawing rooms, at his having carried out such a mission. The young ladies, like Bella, looked at his white freckled skin and his thin floppy hair, the lightest possible shade of ginger, and wondered.

      If many of Burnes’s readers, that summer, were taken with a sense of romance, there were others who read his book and found something worth consideration; or rather, there were those who, in reading Burnes’s book, felt their own sense of romance quite distinct from that of the herd. Burnes’s book recounting his travels to Kabul and beyond ought to have been a simple fact, on which London could agree. There it was, in three volumes, rather large type – it had been written in such a great hurry, so as to meet the public curiosity, that it had altogether been touch and go whether the bookseller could make it stretch to three volumes at all. It ought to have been a simple fact, on which London could agree, like St James’s Palace, or the Strand, or the milkmaid in the Park. But they would not behave like that, these three quite slender volumes. They seemed much more like living beings, or, better, a contagion which takes different forms in each body it attaches itself to. A contagion may not be altogether a bad thing; it may, for instance, form an inoculation, preventing something far worse. And Burnes’s books spread from reader to reader. In some of its hosts, its effect was mild; a new curiosity in an unfamiliar part of the world, a burst of romantic enthusiasm. In others it induced a grand desire to change the globe. That, let it be said, was Burnes’s intention.

      The Prime Minister read it, and wondered why he had never thought about the state of Kabul before; the political classes read it, and often wondered what consequences would flow from our regarding these strange and backward states as mere curiosities. Fat clergymen read it, having little else to do with their time, and badgered anyone who cared to listen on the plain Christian duty to bring the boundaries of Christendom a little wider, to extend our Indian missions westward. Few people took the opinions of clergymen entirely seriously, but they were saying, imperfectly, what their more intelligent elder brothers were starting to feel. These places were, or ought to be, our business, and if we did not acquiesce in our plain duty, there were others who would make it their business.

      ‘The Russians, sir, the Russians,’ the Duchesse de Neaud said to anyone who would listen – in this case, at the opera, her fervour was being directed at a young protégé of hers, a genius of political economy, a gentleman called Chapman. The old Duchesse, quite uncommonly fervid, was beating him on the breast with her fan as she made her point – an awkward backhanded manoeuvre, since he was sitting behind her in her box. ‘The Russians – mark my word, sir – are strong, and in want of an empire. No nonsense about Reform there, no worry about the abolition of slavery – nothing, sir, nothing – and Russia would march into India as soon as our backs are turned. I assure you, sir—’

      ‘I hardly think, ma’am, they are in a position—’ Chapman began, weakly; the Duchesse’s transformation into an observer of the movements of nations had occurred so suddenly, the terrain had abruptly altered, without warning, and the Duchesse’s interlocutors felt their way slowly, not entirely sure when they were treading on solid ground.

      ‘Precisely, sir, precisely my point,’ the Duchesse went on. ‘It is as in a game of cards. If you sit on what you have won, you quickly see it diminish by the depredations of others. Am I not right, sir?’

      Lord Palmerston, who had been attempting to attend to the opera, now gave up with a small inner gesture of regret at the rising shriek of the Duchesse’s theorizing. He turned with a tight ready