Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran

I glanced at Arjun. “I thought Your Highness was upset because you’d heard about Sundari.”

  “That I’d heard what about Sundari?”

  I whispered, “Kahini shot and killed her.”

  The rani buried her head in her hands and Kashi sobbed aloud. Then the rani looked up and gestured to a pile of opened letters. “Some of them are for you,” she said. “Gopal was hiding them.”

  I started digging madly through the pile. One, two, three letters from Ishan, my sister’s husband. One from Shivaji. Three from my father. All of them dated within the past four months. I unfolded a letter from my father first.

  You are needed in Barwa Sagar, Sita. Please come at once, and bring soldiers with you from the rani’s court. The British are arresting the most beautiful women in the village and they have taken your sister. . . .

  I could barely breathe.

  Shivaji:

  Sita, they’ve taken Anu to a house of prostitution and are refusing to let her go. The gods only know what they’re doing to her and we’re hoping force or money will persuade them. Sita, please . . .

  I pressed my hand to my forehead to make the words stop moving. Arjun read them as I put them down. Note after note imploring me to come. To bring money or men or both.

  My son says he will still accept her as his wife, but what will he be accepting back if we don’t rescue her now? Imagine what they are doing? I can’t think you are getting these letters or you would have been here by now.

  I pushed the rest of the letters away. Whatever fate lay ahead of Kahini, I felt strongly that it would not be terrible enough.

  “As soon as we can, I’ll send money and men,” the rani swore.

  But who knew when that would be? If I died in Jhansi, my sister would remain enslaved in a British brothel. The thought was enough to make me understand what had driven Azimullah Khan. I could understand the rage. Now, I really could.

  “What about Gopal?” Arjun asked.

  “He admitted that what Sita suspected was true.” The rani’s voice was empty. “She promised to make him her lover if he would help put her and Sadashiv on the throne.”

  Arjun swore, “Sita, when this is over, we’ll ride straight to Barwa Sagar.” Then he turned to the rani. “Our men are still fighting.”

  The rani stood. “Let’s drive the British from Jhansi,” she vowed, “and from this entire continent.”

  She summoned Mandar, Priyala, and Jhalkari. Then the five of us made for the ramparts. As we reached the walls, General Raghunath Singh descended the stairs to give us a report.

  “The fort’s water supply has been sabotaged,” he said. “It will only last two more days.”

  The gunfire was ceaseless, and we had to shout over the noise.

  “Tatya Tope?” the rani asked. “Is he fighting effectively?”

  “There is news he has fled to Charkhari, Your Highness. The rebel forces are without a leader. The British have moved a twenty-four pound Howitzer into place. When it fires, the walls of Jhansi will crumble.”

  The six of us stood in a circle. A soft breeze brushed against my neck. It was April. Somewhere in India, a woman was braiding her long hair with jasmine blossoms.

  “The rebels are regrouping in Kalpi,” General Singh continued. “My advice is to find a way to escape Jhansi. Take your son and head to Kalpi so that you may save yourself and fight again.”

  We made our way back to the Panch Mahal, listening to the shrieks of women in the streets who were pleading with the rani to save them. Inside the palace, the chaos was even greater. People were running through the halls, screaming. As soon as we reached the rani’s bedchamber, Jhalkari asked to speak with the rani alone. So we waited in the hall. Every few moments, a woman with a child came up, begging us to help her escape. “I know the rani will leave with the rajkumar, and you will go with her. Take my son,” one woman pleaded hysterically. “Please.”

  “Shrimati-ji, we can’t,” Priyala said gently. “We don’t have any way of leaving the city.”

  “Then what hope is there for me? Or him?” She held up her son. He looked to be six months old, with big eyes and dimpled cheeks. “He won’t be any trouble. He’s a happy child.”

  “Shrimati-ji,” Priyala whispered, “I’m sorry. We’ll pray for you.”

  “Please!” the woman begged. “He doesn’t need much milk. He eats food—”

  Priyala began weeping openly, and Arjun looked away. I knew he felt as useless as I did.

  When the rani opened the door, she and Jhalkari both had red eyes. “Arjun, Sita. I wish to see the two of you alone,” the rani said.

  Jhalkari smiled sadly at me as we passed.

  For several moments the rani didn’t speak. When she did, her voice was rough, as if she’d been talking very loudly for many hours. “We are leaving Jhansi tonight through the Bhandir Gate. My father and four hundred of his men will be with me. Anand, Kashi, Mandar, and Priyala will be with me as well. And all of Arjun’s guards. We’re going to wait until the British have entered Jhansi and chaos reigns. Then we’ll dress as soldiers from Orchha,” she said.

  It was a very clever ruse, since the kingdom of Orchha had sent soldiers to help the British, and they would look exactly like any of the rani’s men.

  The rani gave a blue velvet satchel to Arjun. “I want you to take this,” she said. “It will be enough to free Sita’s sister from the British. Neither of you are coming with me to Kalpi.”

  We both raised our voices to protest, but the rani cut us off with a firm shake of her head.

  “Choose ten men to take with you, and when she’s free, find me if you can. If not, use whatever remains in this bag and flee. Find a city far away from here and marry. Have children. And never let the British find you.”

  She waved us away before we could say anything, and for the next hour, she called on the people who were most important to her, so that she could make her good-byes.

  Arjun and I sat in the hall with Jhalkari and waited to be called on. No one said anything. When I tried to make conversation with Jhalkari, to ask her what sort of diversion she planned and how she would still make it to Kalpi, she rebuffed my attempts. I didn’t understand why she was being so stubborn. Did she not trust me anymore? I kept stealing glances in her direction, hoping she’d change her mind, but her face remained a locked box. She was planning something and didn’t want me to be a part of it.

  By midnight, we had all dressed ourselves as soldiers from Orchha, putting on loose churidars and dirty kurtas. From the look and smell of our garments, I guessed they came from the bodies of dead men. The rani carried a long cloth and all of her weapons, but nothing else. If she had jewels hidden under her kurta, I didn’t see them. Outside, our horses waited, with none of their usual tack. The queen’s mare, Sarangi, had been stripped of her finery. An old cloth had replaced her saddle. Kashi brought Anand, and the rani tied him tightly behind her, then covered him with her woolen cloak. He didn’t speak a word, either to complain or cry, and I wondered what he would be like as an adult if he survived this.

  I patted Sher’s flank. The constant sound of gunfire made him skittish. He pawed at the ground, eager to be gone. Kashi, Mandar, and Priyala fell into formation behind the rani. Then Jhalkari appeared. As soon as I saw her, I understood what she meant to do.

  “Jhalkari, you have a husband!” I cried. “What are you doing?”

  She was dressed in a blue angarkha, with pearls around her neck and a ruby ring in her nose. Only someone who truly knew Lakshmibai would be able to say it wasn’t her. She was going to create a distraction at another gate and pretend to be the rani. But as soon as they discovered the ruse, the British would have her executed.

  I started weeping. Jhalkari wrapped her arms around me, and I cried into her chest. “Why are you doing this?”

  “So the rani can fight again at Kalpi. Can you th
ink of another way?”

  But in my heart, I couldn’t. I separated myself from Jhalkari and had to look away.

  Arjun mounted his horse and I mounted Sher. Then we rode toward Bhandir Gate. My heart ached. At the gate soldiers stopped us. “We’re the troops from Orchha,” General Singh said. He used a Bundelkhandi accent.

  An Englishman looked directly at the rani, and saw only an exhausted soldier. “Move on then!”

  We rode out of Jhansi as quickly as we could.

  When I looked back, the entire city was on fire.

  We hadn’t ridden for long when word that we were being pursued made it to the front of our procession. We stopped on the side of a farmer’s field. “We must split up,” Arjun persuaded the rani. “Our group is too slow. You ride ahead; take only my guards and the Durgavasi. You’ll make it to Kalpi faster.”

  “The soldiers know she is in military clothes. We must change,” I said. “We could pass as peasants.”

  We could hear the sound of distant gunfire; Arjun looked skeptical.

  “In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus returned home after an absence of twenty years and wasn’t sure whom he could trust. So he successfully disguised himself as a beggar,” I insisted.

  The rani ordered Mandar and Priyala to buy clothes from the farmer who owned the field. When they returned, the rani and I headed to a small hut to change. We removed our clothes in silence, and when we emerged, the queen looked for all the world like a peasant. Before we remounted and rode on, she took my hand.

  “Thank you.” She didn’t say what for, but I squeezed her hand and hoped she knew how much she meant to me. “Let’s ride.”

  At a fork in the road, Arjun and I headed to Barwa Sagar. To the north, the rani and her group rode hard toward Kalpi.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It was eight hours before we reached Barwa Sagar. We stopped only to rest the horses and give them water. Most of the villages we passed were peaceful; they had offered no resistance. Their women were taken to British whorehouses, their crops would be taken as a form of taxation.

  As dawn quickened, casting a rosy glow across the village, no one came out to see us as we rode through. There were no boys tending to buffalo in the fields; all windows remained shuttered. Did they think we were part of the British army?

  When we reached my family’s house, the plants in the courtyard had withered and there was no smoke coming from the kitchen. “Pita-ji?” I called, and nobody answered. We dismounted and entered the house; it was dark. We checked the rooms, and memories came rushing back to me: my sister curling up next to me on my charpai. The wooden chest where I had kept my favorite things, like the wooden block my father had carved into a bear for me. But nobody had been inside for some time.

  “Maybe they fled,” Arjun said.

  But that was impossible. Fled where? With whom?

  I hurried back through the courtyard, and while the other guards waited, Arjun followed me to Shivaji’s house. There were voices. I could hear them, as low and faint as a slow trickle of water, coming from inside.

  “Shivaji!” I pounded on the door. “Shivaji!”

  Ishan answered. “My father isn’t here.”

  Then his brothers appeared.

  “Sita,” the eldest said. I remembered meeting him once with his father. His name was Deepan. “You should come into the kitchen.” Deepan led us inside and asked, “What do you know?”

  “My father sent a letter saying that Anu was taken.” My voice was shaking. “He told us to bring money and help. We have both.”

  “With the rani’s blessing,” Arjun added.

  “That was in February,” Deepan said. He lowered his gaze to his lap. “Sita . . .”

  “Just say it!” I cried.

  “Your father is dead. The local Kutwal arrived and said he had orders to find the most beautiful women in Barwa Sagar. Someone had told him about Anu, and when they saw her, they arrested her at once. They had guns. It happened so fast. When she was gone, your father asked Shivaji to help him.”

  I felt as if someone had robbed me of my breath.

  “Their plan was to buy her back, Sita, but when they reached the chakla the British wouldn’t hear why they had come. So your father and Shivaji returned with more men. They shot them both,” Deepan said. “Your father died immediately. My father lingered for three days.”

  Father. My father was dead. Shivaji was gone.

  “We can take you to the chakla, Sita, but they won’t release her.”

  “What about Avani?” I whispered. “And Dadi-ji?”

  “Your father’s wife committed sati,” Deepan explained. “No one could stop her.”

  I covered my mouth with my hands. Avani had not been able to envision a life in which she had been made a widow twice. Was she afraid that no one would take care of her? Had she asked someone to write to me and gotten no response?

  “Your grandmother fell ill and died within the month.”

  Regret, as hot and searing as fire, burned through my body. When I had first arrived at Jhansi, Jhalkari had warned me not to send my letters through Gopal. But I had wanted to save money. My act of thrift had cost me everything.

  If someone had told me that my acceptance in the Durga Dal would come at the cost of my family, I can say with certainty I would never have continued. Whatever my fate might have been, I would not have risked my father’s life, or the lives of Anu or Avani, to save myself from the Temple of Annapurna.

  “We are bringing my sister back,” I said.

  But Deepan glanced behind him. “Sita, she has been gone for four months.”

  I knew what he meant. Ishan didn’t want her anymore. “Is it true?” I turned to him. I wanted to hear it from his lips. “Are you casting her off?”

  He looked away.

  “Say it!” I screamed.

  He began to cry.

  Arjun took my arm. “Sita, let’s find her. Lead us to the chakla,” he said. “How many soldiers are there?”

  The second brother guessed, “Maybe fifty. The British posted them in any village large enough to cause trouble.”

  “And how many women do fifty men need?” I wanted to know.

  Deepan flinched. I’m sure my bluntness offended him. The women in his house didn’t stand in the company of men, wearing pistols on their hips and quivers of arrows on their backs. They were quiet and demure. Two months ago, my sister had been one of these women.

  “Ten,” he said quietly. “They took ten girls.”

  “I can’t just save Anu,” I said to Arjun.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  Deepan led the way while the rest of us rode. The sun was up, but the village was silent. It was harvest time. The fields should have been teeming with people harvesting barley, wheat, peas, and mustard. But unlike the burned fields surrounding Jhansi, these fields had been abandoned.

  “When we reach the chakla,” Arjun told his guards, “no one fires. If British soldiers are killed, the entire village will pay. I will buy the women out of servitude. Then we’ll return them to their homes.”

  “And if their families don’t want them?” one of the guards asked.

  “Then we will use what the rani so generously gave to us to buy them a home where they can live together.”

  The chakla turned out to be a small house built next to the Temple of Durga.

  “Stay here,” Arjun said to me when we arrived. “We’re supposed to be men from this village. If they recognize you as a woman, they’re going to wonder where we have come from.”

  I remained with the others while Arjun dismounted and walked with Deepan to the wooden door. An officer answered and they were taken inside. A hundred terrible scenarios passed through my mind. What if the British killed them? What if they refused to let Anu go?

  But in the end, gold was mor
e tempting than flesh.

  Deepan came out first. He was followed by nine girls, and finally Arjun. It took me a long moment to recognize her. She was thinner, with dark hollows under her eyes. But it was the roundness of her belly that made my breath catch in my throat. I dismounted as swiftly as I could and ran toward her. I didn’t care that there were officers watching us from the windows.

  “Anu!” I said. “Anu, it’s Sita!”

  “I know who you are.”

  It wasn’t her voice. It was the voice of someone distant and hard.

  Arjun said, “Go with Deepan and take her to your house. I’ll meet you there once we’ve delivered the rest of these women to their homes.”

  “No. I’m not going back there,” Anu said, and I could hear the torment of the past four months in her voice. Then she shrieked, “I want Ishan!”

  I glanced at Deepan. She was pregnant with another man’s child. A British child. Not even the most understanding husband would take back a wife in such condition.

  “Take me back!” she screamed. “Take me back to my home!”

  She was like someone possessed. But none of the other women appeared surprised. I looked at Deepan, since it was his decision.

  “Yes. Let’s go to our house right now,” he said.

  I put her in front of me on the horse, but she sat as far forward as she could. She didn’t want to feel my touch. When we reached Shivaji’s home, the knot in my stomach had grown so tight that I’m sure I could have pressed my hand there and felt it.

  I helped her down, and Deepan slowly opened the door. The other women rushed forward, but as soon as they saw my sister, they drew back. One of them covered her face with her hands and began to weep. But it was Ishan’s reaction that broke her.

  “That isn’t my wife.”

  “Sita, you should take her,” Deepan began, but my sister pushed her way inside the house. “Ishan,” she begged.

  “You aren’t my wife.”

  “Ishan!” She clung to his legs, forcing him to push her away. “Ishan!” She sounded like a wounded animal.

  I stepped forward to take Anu in my arms but she resisted. “You’re not my sister! You’re not my family. This is my family!”