Neel bowed his head in apology. 'I understand, Mr Burnham.'
Mr Burnham took a cheroot from his waistcoat and tapped it on his thumb. 'But if you don't mind, Raja Neel Rattan, I would like to have a few words with you in private.'
Neel could think of no way to refuse this request. 'Certainly, Mr Burnham. Shall we proceed to the upper deck? There some privacy should certainly be available.'
Once they were on the top deck, Mr Burnham lit his cheroot and blew a plume of smoke into the night air. 'I am very glad to have this opportunity to speak with you,' he began. 'It is an unexpected pleasure.'
'Thank you,' said Neel warily, every defensive instinct on the alert.
'You will recall that I wrote to you recently,' Mr Burnham said. 'May I ask if you have been able to give some thought to my proposal?'
'Mr Burnham,' Neel said flatly, 'I regret that at the present time, I cannot restore to you the funds that are owed. You must understand that it is impossible for me to entertain your proposal.'
'And why so?'
Neel thought of his last visit to Raskhali and the public meetings where his tenants and managers had pleaded with him not to sell the zemindary and deprive them of the lands they had farmed for generations. He thought of his last visit to his family's temple, where the priest had fallen at his feet, begging him not to give away the temple where his forefathers had prayed.
'Mr Burnham,' Neel said, 'the zemindary of Raskhali has been in my family for two hundred years; nine generations of Halders have sat in its guddee. How can I give it away to settle my debts?'
'Times change, Raja Neel Rattan,' Mr Burnham said. 'And those who don't change with them, are swept away.'
'But I have a certain obligation to the people,' said Neel. 'You must try to understand – my family's temples are on that land. None of it is mine to sell or give away: it belongs also to my son and his yet unborn children. It is not possible for me to make it over to you.'
Mr Burnham blew out a mouthful of smoke. 'Let me be honest with you,' he said quietly. 'The truth is you have no option. Your debts to my company would not be covered even by the sale of the estate. I am afraid I cannot wait much longer.'
'Mr Burnham,' said Neel firmly, 'you must forget about your proposal. I will sell my houses, I will sell the budgerow, I will sell everything I can – but I cannot part with the Raskhali lands. I would rather declare bankruptcy than hand over my zemindary to you.'
'I see,' said Mr Burnham, not unpleasantly. 'Am I to take that as your final word?'
Neel nodded. 'Yes.'
'Well then,' said Mr Burnham, staring at the glowing tip of his cheroot. 'Let it be understood then, that whatever happens, you have only yourself to blame.'
Six
The candle in Paulette's window was the first to pierce the predawn darkness that surrounded Betheclass="underline" of all the residents of the house, master and servant alike, she was always up the earliest and her day usually began with the hiding of the sari she had slept in at night. It was only in the seclusion of her bedroom, sheltered from the prying gaze of the staff, that she dared wear a sari at alclass="underline" Paulette had discovered that at Bethel, the servants, no less than the masters, held strong views on what was appropriate for Europeans, especially memsahibs. The bearers and khidmutgars sneered when her clothing was not quite pucka, and they would often ignore her if she spoke to them in Bengali – or anything other than the kitchen-Hindusthani that was the language of command in the house. Now, on rising from her bed, she was quick to lock her sari in her trunk: this was the one place where it would be safe from discovery by the procession of servants who would file through to clean the bedroom later in the day – the bed-making bichawnadars, the floor-sweeping farrashes and the commode-cleaning matranees and harry-maids.
The apartment that Paulette had been assigned was on the uppermost floor of the mansion, and it consisted of a sizeable bedroom and a dressing room; more remarkably, it also had an adjoining water-closet. Mrs Burnham had made sure that her residence was among the first in the city to do away with outhouses. 'So tiresome to have to run outside,' she liked to say, 'every time you have to drop a chitty in the dawk.'
As with the rest of the mansion, Paulette's water-closet boasted of many of the latest English devices, among them a comfortable, wood-lidded commode, a painted porcelain basin and a small footbath made of tin. But from Paulette's point of view the water-closet lacked the most important amenity of all – it had no arrangements for bathing. Through years of habit, Paulette had grown accustomed to daily baths and frequent dips in the Hooghly: it was hard for her to get through a day without being refreshed at least once, by the touch of cool, fresh water. At Bethel a daily bath was permitted only to the Burra Sahib, when he returned, hot and dusty, from a day at the Dufter. Paulette had heard rumours that Mr Burnham had created a special contraption for the purpose of this daily wash: holes had been bored into the bottom of a common tin balty, and the bucket had been strung up in such a way as to permit it to be constantly filled by a bearer, while the sahib stood underneath, revelling in the flow. Dearly would Paulette have loved to make use of this device, but her one attempt to broach this subject had scandalized Mrs Burnham, who, with her usual indirection, had made puzzling reference to the many reasons why frequent cold baths were necessary for a man but unseemly, even perverse, in the gentler, less excitable sex; she had made it clear that, so far as she was concerned, a bathtub was the pucka amenity for a memsahib, to be used at decent intervals of every two or three days.
At Bethel there were two enormous goozle-connahs – bathrooms outfitted with cast-iron tubs, imported directly from Sheffield. But to have the tubs filled required at least half a day's advance notice to the ab-dars, and Paulette knew that if she were to issue this command more than twice a week, word would quickly get back to Mrs Burnham. In any event, to bathe in those tubs was not much to Paulette's taste: it gave her no pleasure to soak in a tepid pool of her own scum; nor did she relish the ministrations of the three female attendants – the 'cushy-girls' as Mrs Burnham liked to call them – who would fuss over her as she lay in the tub, soaping her back and scrubbing her thighs, tweezing wherever they saw fit, and all the while murmuring 'khushi-khushi?' as if there were some great joy in being pinched, prodded and rubbed all over one's body. When they reached for her most intimate recesses, she would fight them off, which always left them looking surprised and wounded, as if they had been prevented from properly performing their duties: this was a trial to Paulette, for she could not imagine what it was that they intended to do and wasn't inclined to find out.
Desperation had led Paulette to devise her own method of washing, inside her water-closet: standing in her tin footbath, she would reach carefully into a balty, with a mug, and then allow the water to trickle gently down her body. In the past she had always bathed in a sari, and to be wholly unclothed had made her uncomfortable at first, but after a week or two she had grown used to it. Inevitably, there was a certain amount of spillage and she always had to spend a good deal of time afterwards, in towelling the floor, to remove all trace of the rituaclass="underline" the servants were ever-curious about the doings of Bethel's inmates and Mrs Burnham, for all her vagueness, seemed to have an efficient way of extracting gossip from them. Despite her precautions, Paulette had reason to think that word of her surreptitious bathing had somehow trickled through to the mistress of the house: of late, Mrs Burnham had made several derisive remarks about the incessant bathing of the Gentoos and how they were always dipping their heads in the Ganges and muttering bobberies and baba-res.