David Shaw - Snakepit

"This weather is getting unbearable. Are we never to go up to the hills?" Carol Carnac-Smyth drawled.

The other five women lying in the shallow pool of water were all of the same opinion. The searing Punjabi sun beating down on the wooden roof above their heads was far too hot for comfort, especially when the baking summer winds blew in from the arid plains which surrounded Gazepore. There were many delightful places in colonial India in which wives of British officers might live their lives. Gazepore was not one of them. A small and isolated garrison town, its only amenities for Europeans were a social club and a cinema with walls and roof of corrugated iron. And, perhaps best of all, the railhead station, which at least promised some chance of eventually leaving the dismal place.

It had been an unlucky day for the 17th Sikh Rifles when they were assigned the barracks in unlovely and unhealthy Gazepore as their regimental home.

In fact the officers' wives should have left the town already for their yearly migration at the start of the hot weather, a longed for trip up to the hill stations on the lower ranges of the Himalayas, where it was always cool and green below the eternal snow line.

Unfortunately the arrangements for their departure had been disrupted when the regiment had been ordered post haste to the North West Frontier, where the Pathans had begun raiding out of the hills again.

The Pathans and their Afghan cousins lived for fighting and plundering, being experts at both. They traversed rough terrain like mountain goats, they shot as accurately as trained snipers, they waited in ambush positions for days without a cough or a whisper, then struck with total ferocity in a whirl of knife blades. They also dyed their hair with henna, frequently made love to young boys and used handfuls of sharp stones in lieu of toilet paper. The British Army had fought everywhere and everybody in its time and, man for man, the Pathans were the toughest opponents it had ever encountered. So it was never any great surprise for any of the border regiments when they were called out to repel yet another round of raids from the tribal areas.

In fact the Sikh enlisted men and their white officers rather enjoyed the challenge of pitting their professional skills against the Pathans. The wives of the Sikh soldiers were at least left living in their own country and their own territory. It was the British wives abandoned to the heat and dust of Gazepore who found time hanging heavily on their hands. Especially with the advancing summer weather bearing down on them ever more oppressively. In faraway cities like Calcutta and Bombay there was electricity, and fans and refrigerators – but no such modern comforts were available in Gazepore. The old ways were still the only ways, and an old remedy against the heat was still the only remedy.

Many years before a Colonel's wife had discovered a small spring on the outskirts of the Regiment's cantonment, a spring which provided a trickle of wonderfully cool water from some subterranean source, even when the rocks around it were too hot to touch with a bare hand. Being a lady of enterprise and determination, the Mem-sahib had arranged for a wooden hut to be erected at the spring and a bathing pool to be made inside it. A small pool to retain the freshness of the spring water, round, twelve feet across, with a two foot high retaining wall. The spring rose in the center and an overflow pipe took away the excess water, the pool thus staying cool enough to provide a wonderful refuge from the otherwise inescapable heat.

The Colonel's lady had provided pots of ferns, tables for magazines and newspapers, even a spring driven gramophone, and then laid unmistakable claim to the hut by calling it the Moorghi-Khana, the Hen's Room. And so it had remained, a place used only by the British wives and their attendant ayahs, their maids. The ayahs were presently sitting cross legged on mats against the wall of the hut, watching the white women relaxing in the pool and ready to attend when called. One of the odd things about the Moorghi-Khana was that both types of women were wearing Indian saris wrapped about them. Normal dress for the Indian women, naturally, but only worn by the European wives when bathing in the pool. It would, of course, be unthinkable for native girls to be allowed to see white women naked – just as offensive as it would be for the British wives to see each other unclothed. Queen Victoria had been dead for a long time but her spirit still lived on in Gazepore.

Jean Ellington shook her head in disbelief at the picture in a copy of the "Tatler" she was carefully holding above the water. The magazine was the most recent copy available, having arrived on the dawn mail train only two months after being published in London.

"Have you seen these pictures from Germany? Von Hindenburg with that upstart Adolph Hitler. A Field Marshal shaking hands with a scruffy ex-corporal! It's beyond belief. Surely the Germans are never going to give any real power to a raving lunatic with a silly little mustache?"

"Don't be so naive, Jean," Camilla Hartley-Dexter said. "Hindenburg is just using Hitler's gang to get rid of the communists. As soon as that dirty job is done the Germany Army will toss Herr Hitler back into jail and throw away the key."

"Maybe," Mrs Ellington said, rather doubtfully. "But one can never tell with the Germans, can one? And the little corporal seems awfully bellicose. There couldn't be another war, could there?"

All the other women shook their heads, some a little wistfully. A war with Germany would mean a huge expansion of the Army, rapid promotion for their husbands and all the advantages which went with it – such as saying goodbye to Gazepore for ever. But there was never going to be another big war, and certainly not one in Europe.

"Never mind, darlings," Amanda Priller said lightly. "If the worst comes to the worst, we've always got the Maharajah's Own to protect us." There was an outburst of giggles around the pool.

The Maharajah that Amanda was talking about was the Maharajah of Kultoon. Kultoon was one of the small semi-independent states which were dotted about India, most of them ruled as an absolute monarchy by a hereditary Maharajah. None of these petty kingdoms were important enough to be a threat to British rule over the the sub-continent so the rulers were allowed to do pretty well what they liked inside their own territory. The Marajah of Kultoon's principal occupation, despite his age, was fornication. Both in legal wedlock and out of it no ruler had more right to be called the father of his nation.

His Highness was also a strict observer of his faith. He absolutely refused to consider having a railway built across his state less some infidel should consume pork in the dining car of a train whilst travelling through Kultooni territory. The Maharajah always had excellent reasons for resisting anything which might change his country in any way. A position strongly buttressed by the fact that the royal family of Kultoon happened to be incredibly wealthy because of several rich diamond mines inside their small country.

Not that these matters would normally have been a matter of any interest in distant Gazepore, far from Kultoon's borders. It was one of the Maharajah's increasingly erratic whims of his old age which had made the difference. For the Maharajah of Kultoon had his own army -or, to be precise, a regiment of cavalry. Outfitted in expensive uniforms, riding the best horseflesh money could buy, and well drilled in all kinds of parade ground maneuvers. The regiment was also a standing joke throughout all of India because of its title: "The Maharajah of Kultoon's Own Irregular Lancers".

To begin to understand the joke it was only necessary to take a look at its officers. Every single one of them had been fathered by the Maharajah – and they were just the legitimate tip of the iceberg. A further glance along the enlisted ranks of the Maharajah's Own Irregulars showed a further number of facial similarities clearly conceived by the Maharajah's own irregular liaisons: an astonishing number of them. The Kultooni cavalry was indeed a band of brothers -or half brothers, at any rate. And most of them had inherited in full the Maharajah's handsome good looks and strapping vitality. Which he in turn was reputed to have acquired from his own mother's indiscretion with a unscrupulous English cavalry officer called Flashman.