My editor smelled a story when Prince Djamal announced his campaign to “repatriate” Lady Sale’s Bugle which was said to have been plundered when Britain “collected” half the world and mislaid its conscience. The bugle in question is a dented brass curl with a mouthpiece polished by many a little war and it lives in a mahogany case at the Sale family seat in Essex. My brief was simple: determine the truth and if necessary, chivvy a nation, or at least the Sale family, into giving back what it once took. So, I went to work in the archives of the British Museum’s library to see what I could find.
First, I searched the 1839-44 journal of Lady Harriet Sale and discovered these entries:
12th May, Chelmsford, Mr S. from the East India House has sent news of further disturbances along with a parcel. Its outer paper much travelled and inside: a bugle, bruised and bright where a thumb has persisted. There is the ghost of a tune in it I suppose. But when I put my mouth to the horn I could make nothing of it. On a folded sheet in Persian an unsteady hand had scrawled: “Forgive me.”
The bugle then enters the English record not as loot but as an apology, which was rather annoying because my inner activist was just itching for a righteous cause. But was the Bugle hers or an ancestor of Prince Djamal’s that had been lost, and now found?
Next, courtesy of the Museum’s new AI search function I gained access to a small vellum notebook labelled The Desertion Book. There was no record of how it was acquired but it smelled of camphor which I assume came from the chest it had once been stored in and it had this quote: “I am a Bugler of no honourable repute, for I have left the Company’s colours without leave. A poor trade, the blowing of other men’s courage. I was born with a tune, and the drum corps beat it out of me until only orders remained. The Emir’s man says I shall be useful if I do not ask questions. I ask them in my head instead and put the answers in the bugle where no man can find them.”
Apparently, the 1842 slaughter of the British in the retreat from Kabul was more complicated than I realised. I learned that many of the sepoys in the British East India Company army actually deserted during this retreat rather than died in dramatic last stands, and just as curiously, many were the off spring of Englishmen and local ladies! Subsequently, this deserter, goes on to describe the City of Bukhara where he found new employment and speaks of two English officers kept in a pit. “They are gentlemen and they look at me with the hurt surprise of men for whom the world has been kind. The Emir calls me Gaoler. I call myself lost.”
I assume these to be the British officers, Connolly and Stoddart. Connolly incidentally coined the phrase: The Great Game. And it appears that this is an eyewitness account of their execution which might be why the account was acquired, perhaps purchased, by later explorers in the region. The writer says: “The men will die. I climb the wall at night and blow a note inside my shirt so the sound cannot escape. It is a coward’s sacrament. I am made of cowardice and brass.”
The writer has a poetic turn which makes one wonder if this is an imaginary account rather than a genuine report! But it is a contemporary piece of writing and its scrawling handwriting was flagged by the Library’s AI Search engine as comparable to a note that, although not mentioned in the journal, had according to the present custodian, been folded within the belt of the Bugle saying: “To the English Lady who writes of travels and adversity, I send you a horn of shame. I carried orders once; I now carry the weight of disobedience in both hands. Two of your countrymen have gone to dust where my feet still pass. I could not prevent it though my heart became a rope and pulled. This horn has sounded the advance and the meal call and the retreat and the burial. Let it sound no more for war but for the reckoning of one man with his God. I am going to the House of God in the desert; perhaps there I will be shown where the tune began.”
I questioned Prince Djamal when he picked me up in his Land Rover to take me to see the bugle. I must say he looked less Arab and more English country gentleman. He said, “The bugle belonged to my great-great-grandfather either as property or as a burden. These family stories are like tents struck in the wind: they fly and snag on a tree, and you pluck them down and find someone else’s canvas. Objects are biographies that forgot to use words. Because every time I breathe, I hear someone else’s history in my chest. It is time to find my history!”
Listening to his way of speaking I wondered if it was just a shadow of the Persian literature that he read at Oxford, or that DNA encodes some unexpected traits.
I return to Lady Sale’s journal and she says this: Valentine’s Day: I have played the bugle badly, which is the only safe way for a woman to play it in Essex. A curiously intimate instrument, like pressing one’s mouth to a secret. I keep it in the hall beneath a portrait of an uncle nobody liked.”
I had to laugh when reading that. Valentine’s Day suggests that Lady Sale was perhaps alluding to something else? And looking at Prince Djamal and his features did make me wonder if there was a very different story being told here.
In the Desertion Book I found these snippets:
“Mecca: I walked until the soles of my feet were the colour of old paper and then I walked more. I said the words a thousand times and found that after a certain number, all words are equal, and the mouth is only a door for breath. I am forgiven by God, which is his business. Mine is to live.
Aden: I have found a small trade: counting sacks by the sea and sometimes advising men how to stand straighter when wearing their borrowed titles. A man may become a prince by doing favours to a prince who needs him. This is how money teaches history to sit up.”
Finally, I came to this: “I will not ask for the horn to be returned. I sent it away because my ears were full of it. Let the Englishwoman who wrote of the disasters keep it, and with it the knowledge that a man she did not know loved two strangers he could not save.
Now one side of me thinks this bugle, apparently manufactured in Sheffield, was given to Lady Sale out of contrition. Therefore, it belonged to her. But, then my desire to repair old imperial wrongs, makes me want to call the Desertion Book a forgery! The allusion to Lady Sale’s book about her capture in Kabul by Akbar Khan was too convenient.
When the Prince and I arrived at Sale Hall, we were graciously allowed by the present custodian to inspect the case in which the bugle is kept. It still stands on the sideboard in the living room, beneath the portrait of the uncle that nobody liked. It struck me that the portrait had a similarity to the Prince, but that could mean something or nothing.
“I claim it in the name of my ancestors,” says Prince Djamal, formally. “I claim it in the name of what was taken.”
“And I claim,” fearing he might suddenly grab the Bugle and run off with it, “a cup of tea!”
I showed him what I had found in the Desertion Book and the Prince was silent. Our host chatted away about the adventures of various English ladies in the harems of their captives in Afghanistan. Apparently, there was quite a lot of salacious literature at the time. I mentioned the Uncle’s looks, fishing a little.
Prince Djamal at last said: “What do we do with a gift that feels like a theft and a theft that may have been a gift stolen from the one who was giving it?”
There are answers I could give for the comfort of social media: Return it. Display it with context. Auction it for a school in Bukhara. But none of that addresses the strange clarity of the deserting bugler’s last note: Let the Englishwoman who wrote of the disasters keep it.
I mentioned it was probably a forgery as I settled into the passenger seat of Prince Djamal’s Land Rover. “The bugle or that damned book?” he muttered, as he drove me home. “Everything?” I suggested.