The Great Game

While the rest of India lay helpless and beaten on the anvil of the sun, waiting only for the monsoon to roll like hot wet clay across the land, the British hill station of Simla readied itself for the season’s Great Game. 

The previous year had seen the rise to prominence of Mrs Forsyth, a war-galleon of a woman, thick of arm and proud of bearing, with a spider’s mind and an appetite for complex but complete destruction of her enemies.  

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Her final coup-de-grace had been the reduction of that year’s other prime competitor, the elderly champion Mrs Derbyshire, to a drivelling wreck, driven back to Delhi early, her reputation and sanity in tatters.  There were others damaged of course, Mrs Derbyshire’s coterie of gossipers and ill-wishers had been steadily picked off, one by one until the Queen lay exposed and ready for ruin.

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Such breathless excitement!  Such an annihilation! Word of Mrs Forsyth’s victory travelled through the drawing rooms and verandas of the Raj over the year, and everyone admitted that it had been the most entertaining season ever.  That Mrs Forsyth, the wife of the buffoonish and harmless General Forsyth, took her champion status in her ample stride as if the fact were never in question, made contenders for the eighteen eighty-four Great Game thin on the ground.  In fact as the players assembled at the start of the hot season, taking up their positions in the bungalows, the cantonment, and in the vice-regal lodge itself, it was doubtful that any challenger would emerge.

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The season got underway, with the usual nominal distractions of the Light Opera Society, Polo matches and interminable games of whist and it seemed that there would be no real action at all.  Whilst the men busied themselves with billiards, hunting in the foothills, drinking and governing a billion people, the memsahibs of Simla bided their time, waiting for a challenger to appear.  All the time Mrs Forsyth, her icy gaze throwing down the gauntlet to all but the most unctuous of toadies in her entourage, ruled supreme.  Her strident voice could be heard echoing its pronouncements across the town.  In the end, inevitably when no challenger arose, she selected her own.

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Young Mrs Wilberforce was the widow of a well respected Captain who had succumbed to a fever following a diplomatic mission to a princely state somewhere in Rajputna.  Mrs Wilberforce, though desperately grieved, was perhaps the most beautiful woman in Simla that year.  Bereavement suited her well and black had always been her colour.   Men had been known to murmur “Christina Rossetti” to each other and wink knowingly over a cigar on the veranda. 

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No one expected the young widow to be unmarried for long.  For the women she invoked a queer blend of sympathy and mild jealousy.

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But when Mrs Wilberforce refused to be subjected to the oleaginous pities of the other memsahibs, preferring instead to engage the men in surprisingly astute conversations about politics and the challenges of crop rotation in hot climes, mild jealousies became boiling resentments.  And when Mrs Wilberforce held a long discussion during a dinner with General Forsyth which had left him pink faced, moist eyed and drunkenly reciting Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’ to a loose lipped cotton baron visiting from Calcutta that her fate as the next victim of Mrs Forsyth became sealed.

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Mrs Forsyth made her customary opening move, avoiding open gossip, but instead making a series of facial reactions whenever Mrs Wilberforce’s name arose in conversation.  Looks that implied that she held an opinion but for the sake of the poor widow, would keep it to herself.  It was an invitation to draw her out.  She continued with pregnant pauses, leading to lip biting all of which tantalised the women of Simla who wondered what terrible secrets she could be hiding about this woman.  This tactic in itself built something of a head of steam among the other minor players, a vacuum of information which they did not hesitate to start filling with their own imaginings and insecurities.  Paranoia about this young, attractive and unattached widow spread through the town, and when Mrs Forsyth issued the devastating but reluctant pronouncement that Mrs Wilberforce had been heard to be having an inappropriately close relationship with one of the officers, a married officer, but refused to be drawn on that officer’s identity, the match to the forest fire was lit.

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Inevitably Mrs Wilberforce came to hear of this through a well meaning friend who scurried back to Mrs Forsyth’s entourage to tell what her reaction had been.  She had NOT denied it.  In fact she had merely grown quiet and even more withdrawn and was UNRECEPTIVE to her well meaning advice.  This was seen as PROOF.

Word even made it to the normally thick skulled men, the officers, officials and businessmen of the hill-station who wistfully speculated as to the ‘dreadful blighter’s’ identity with more than a hint of lustful jealousy.

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Big ugly vultures circled over the town, the natives kept a silent enigmatic watch on proceedings and the season wore on.

Mrs Wilberforce did not react or deny the accusations.  There was no protestation of innocence or retreat from the field.  She seemed to care little for the stares, the whispers and exclusions that she suffered.  Her own reputation was beyond repair now, she understood this, and calmly, sanely plotted how she could be rid of the woman who sat at the centre of all this bile.

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Her moment came at a dinner to which she had been invited by the spectacularly unaware Mrs Smythe who had just arrived ignorant and innocent from Delhi to join her husband, a regional Collector.  In a dreadful error of table planning she positioned Mrs Wilberforce next to General Forsyth himself, and directly opposite Mrs Forsyth.  The rest of the table spent the first course shuffling uncomfortably, maintaining half hearted conversation while slyly watching proceedings further down the table.  Mrs Smythe, quietly devastated at the appalling atmosphere around the table, and still unaware of the situation she had created, made a secret pledge to fire her cook.

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Mrs Forsyth and Mrs Wilberforce did not engage in conversation.  Instead, as usual, Mrs Wilberforce turned her attentions to the men on either side of her, regaling them with witty, insightful views on the political situation with Russia, and how the Great Game made pawns of them all.  The metaphor was not lost on Mrs Forsyth whose vain attempts to take hold of the conversation at the table began to feel forced, overt and frankly slightly vulgar.  Her voice, already strident, began to rise further causing the more sensitive around the table to wince.  Her opinions, while issued with a low cunning, were uninformed and mildly embarrassing when positioned next to those of the intelligent and beautiful Mrs Wilberforce.  General Forsyth himself, having already worked his way through a bottle of claret by the main course, was rapt.

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In the end it was Mrs Wilberforce, almost unconsciously touching the General’s hand with her own, that finished the match.  

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Everyone at the table saw it, everyone mentioned it the next day, and those people in turn mentioned it later that day.  By midnight the following day the Great Game of eighteen eighty four was over.  Mrs Forsyth, disgraced by her husband’s apparent affair, an affair which only existed in nameless speculation and innuendo that she herself had created, returned, ruined to Delhi.

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As for Mrs Wilberforce, she had no reputation to maintain or care about.  She enjoyed the rest of the season and read widely and quietly in her bungalow, enjoying the cool breezes wafting down from the high Himalaya, the stirring of the spruce trees and the ever present vultures circling above the Viceregal lodge.