A Christmas Garland Read Online Free PDF Page A

against. No one needed to tell him that attackinganother man would earn him no friends. Most of them had already suffered deeply, lost friends and, in some cases, wives they loved, seen horrors Narraway himself could only imagine. He had been in India a year but he was an outsider to Cawnpore, and no one would forget that.
    If his father had not insisted that the army would make a better man of him than a few years at university, Narraway would now be huddling beside a fire in some lodgings at Cambridge, worrying about cramming for an exam, and looking forward to going home for Christmas. His greatest discomfort would be trifling cold, the greatest danger not doing well enough and getting lower marks than he should have.
    He had not chosen this. He remembered his last evening at home before taking the train to Southampton and then boarding the ship for what had seemed an endless journey south, around the Cape of Good Hope, into the Indian Ocean. Weeks cooped up, nothing more than a tiny dot on a measureless expanse of water, everywhere he looked nothing but blue. They could have been the only men alive on the earth and there’d be no way of knowing. Even the burning, blazing white stars in thesky above him changed, especially around the southern tip of Africa, before they started north again and re-crossed the equator.
    That endless journey—for what? Some of the men he had come to know on that ship were already dead as a result of this savage mutiny—in so many cases, Indian against Indian. He had heard that there were only a little over twenty thousand Queen’s troops in India and, of course, far more East India Company men, with all their wives and children—as opposed to Indians numbering uncounted millions.
    Without realizing it, he was walking toward the river. Its swift, brown water was dangerous, full of snakes and other creatures, especially along the banks. But it still held a fascination for him: a sense of width and a freedom that the land did not.
    Was that a log floating half-submerged in the water? Or a crocodile? If he watched to see, what else would he miss? Crocodiles sometimes came out onto the banks. He had seen their teeth, like a double row of jagged nails, needle-sharp. They could take a man’s leg off in a single movement. He did not believe the stories that they were not aggressive and preferred to eat fish.
    As he stared at the water, he wondered whether he was Tallis’s best chance or his worst. There was only one possible end for Tallis, really—the gallows. The difference lay in whether it appeared that someone had fought for him, or not. Narraway himself was expendable. If everyone loathed him afterward and he went down in history as the man who had tried to excuse Tallis, that was the price of a swift and unquestioned execution, and the matter laid to rest before Christmas.
    And if John Tallis was innocent? Was that even possible?
    The log in the river moved and sank gracefully beneath the water, leaving a momentary wake behind it.
    Crocodile.
    The facts said that Tallis was the only one who could be guilty. And yet when Narraway pictured his face again, recalling it as vividly as if he had seen it just moments ago—the clear, burning blue eyes—doubts arose in his mind. Irrational, but undeniable, doubts.
    Then who could be guilty? Who was lying? He could not imagine that several men were all lying to save the man who had really murdered Chuttur Singh and letDhuleep go. And if they were, would they allow Tallis to be executed for it?
    Narraway could not get rid of the feeling that Tallis trusted him. All sorts of arguments came into his mind as to why it was not trust so much as hope, hope that Narraway could help. Or perhaps it was just a brilliant piece of acting. Or—and this was the easiest to understand—it was a denial to himself that he could have committed such a betrayal, a refusal to face the fact of his own guilt.
    But looking at Tallis, that was not what Narraway had