Zemindar (73 page)

‘I … I still can’t believe it’s happening to
us
!’ she whispered unhappily. ‘To
me
. If Charles had been a soldier or something—but we are only visitors! We should be in Mount Bellew, not here. It’s summer there, Laura. The garden must be full of roses and delphiniums and lupins. And the apples will be ripening in the orchard. I can’t seem to realize that this is real. Why should it be us? How can it be us?’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said again, sighing. But my thoughts did not take me to Mount Bellew. I wondered how Hassanganj looked now, the house a burnt-out ruin, the gardens already running riot with weeds grown doubly fecund in the monsoon rain, the grass in the park waist high. I saw as clearly as though they were before my eyes the mountains rearing out of the dark belt of the
terai
, flushing pink at dawn, silver in the moonlight, and the long fields of canary mustard under the soft spring sky. I thought of Old Adam, all his labour, imagination and love reduced to mere memory in a few mortal minds. I thought, too, of Oliver. Where was he? Why had he not joined us? I believe I prayed for him.

‘Laura?’

‘Yes?’

‘I might die!’

‘Nonsense!’

‘Or you might.’

‘Certainly not!’

‘But I might, I really
might
, and if I do and you don’t … I want you to know some things that I am thinking now … I want you to know I won’t mind about Charles … if you want to marry him, I mean.’

‘What?’ I sat up abruptly in the darkness. ‘Oh, Emmie, for heaven’s sake be sensible! You are not going to die and I am certainly not going to marry Charles. Turn over and go to sleep.’ It was ridiculous to think of marriage, any marriage, on such a night, and I must have giggled.

‘No, don’t laugh. It’s very difficult for me to say this, but I’ve had … so much on my conscience … and I’ve known, oh, for a long time, that he cared for you. I’m not being noble or anything. I don’t love him. You know that, so I’m not even jealous, not really, and if I … go, I’d sooner you had Pearl than anyone else. You’d be good to her for her own sake, as well as for Charles’s. I’ve made such a mess of everything. But I want you to know.’

‘Now, Emmie, you are being absurd. In a week or so we’ll be out of this and you’ll be sorry you ever spoke so. We are both tired and frightened, but there’s no point in allowing yourself to get morbid and say such silly things. Anyway, I could never marry Charles. I don’t love him.’

‘You don’t? Honestly?’

‘No, Emmie, I don’t!’

‘Oh dear! What a silly waste of time it all was then.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was so sure you loved him, when we first knew him. And I thought he was beginning to look at you as though he might love you. That’s why I set my cap at him. I couldn’t have borne you to get married before me!’

A sudden silence filled my mind, blotting out the noisy night.

‘And was that the only reason you married him?’ I asked very quietly.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I thought I was in love with him, for a time. But it didn’t last very long … and I’ve been very unhappy. Really unhappy.’

‘Yes. It was a very silly waste of time,’ was all I could say in my bitterness.

‘Of course, now that I have Pearl I can bear it better,’ she continued, unmindful of my tone. ‘She’s going to be such a comfort to me, and I’m going to see that she has everything, just everything that a girl can have. Always! If only, when this is all finished, I mean, if only Oliver would ask Charles to remain on in Hassanganj, for always. He is always so good to me, and I know I could be happy again there. And that’s another thing. If I should die, will you be sure and tell Oliver how grateful I was to him? For his kindness to me, his thoughtfulness. I’ve wished, so often you can’t imagine, that Charles was a bit more like Oliver, but of course I know that’s impossible. But you will remember to tell Oliver how … how much he meant to me, won’t you?’

‘I’ll do no such thing, for the simple reason that I’ll have forgotten this absurd conversation long before we see him, and anyway, you’ll have every opportunity to tell him all you want to yourself. Thank heavens that poor horse has stopped. It’s nearly dawn. I’ll get up and make some tea. It’ll cheer us both up.’

‘But you said we must save what we have.’

‘It’s nearly breakfast-time, so I might as well get the fire going before the sun rises. Charles will be in soon, and I can keep the same tea warm.’

While I wrestled with kindling and charcoal and put a pot of water on to boil, I meditated on our conversation and the ironies of fate. A month before, such frankness would have been as impossible to Emily as to me. And even a month ago, could I have told her with such conviction that I did not love her husband? I smiled wryly to myself as I realized how radically we had altered, Emily, I—even Charles. Not so long ago I would have been filled with confusion, guilt, and—who knows?—perhaps even a wild hope by Emily’s words. Now they had no importance. True, I had known a certain bitterness when she confessed that she had set herself to attract Charles just so that I would not ‘get’ him. But it had soon passed. Perhaps I had always known it, after all. Some time, perhaps, I would know a justifiable anger at the moment of thoughtless spite on Emily’s part which had led to so much unhappiness for all three of us. For I had been truly unhappy for a time, as I believed she was now and as I knew Charles was too. It was a matter, however, that would have to be faced and dealt with in the future, if we were to have a future. For the moment, remembering to be properly frugal with the tea leaves was of more importance.

While I waited for the water to boil, I opened the door and looked out into the gathering light of the new day. It was like no other dawn I had ever seen, for the entrenchment had not slept and there was no sense of a gradual awakening after rest. Everywhere men were on the move, working as they had worked all through the hours of darkness, hauling guns to new positions, shoring up the defences damaged in the barrage, building screens of bamboo and sacking to cut off the view of lanes and open spaces from the enemy marksmen in houses outside the walls. Other fires than ours had already been lit and I could scent wood-smoke over the smells of dust, cordite and open drains, and the light, when it came, was of the same dead yellow as the dust that filled it.

‘Oh, Oliver, where the devil are you?’ I thought inelegantly to myself for the fiftieth time that night. ‘Where the devil are you?’

I kept the tea warm, but Charles did not come in until some hours later. He had spent the night on duty in Dr Fayrer’s garden, up near the Baillie Guard. The house was full of women and children, in spite of its exposed position, and a battery had been thrown up in the garden while the roof was used by riflemen. Charles was filthy, his face black with smoke and sweat, his eyes bloodshot, and his clothes smelt of gunpowder.

‘Bad news!’ he said as he entered and stood his rifle in a corner. ‘Sir Henry’s been wounded.’

Behind him Ishmial, who had constituted himself Charles’s orderly and seldom left his side, leaned dispiritedly on his musket.

‘Sir Henry! Oh, Charles, surely not?’

Emily stopped washing Pearl in the enamel basin and looked up aghast.

‘A shell got him, while he was resting in his upstairs room in the Resident’s House. He was going to move out of it this morning, they say, because it was too exposed to fire, but the shell came in through the window and burst in the room.’

‘But he’ll be all right; he’ll live, won’t he, Charles?’ asked Emily.

Charles shook his head. ‘The doctors can’t do anything for him. No hope. They have moved him across to Fayrer’s, but the pandies seem to have guessed what has happened and have turned all their fire on the very verandah he is lying on. Somebody here is informing them, blast ’em! Look, I must get back as soon as possible. Just wanted to see you were all right. Give me a bite of something to take away, if you have it.’

‘But, Charles, you’ve been up all night!’ expostulated Emily.

‘So has everyone else,’ returned her husband shortly. Emily compressed her lips and turned her attention to Pearl, while I reheated the tired tea and watched the two men gulp it, still standing.

That evening, when Charles at last returned to snatch some sleep, he was drained of all colour, and when we enquired about Sir Henry, he only shook his head and muttered, ‘Dreadful! Dreadful!’ He lay down fully clothed on Emily’s bed and turned his face to the wall, but I do not think he slept.

For two days Sir Henry lived on in an agony hardly ameliorated by the doctors’ chloroform, and his awful screams, clearly heard by all the men of Fayrer’s post, unnerved them far more than did the guns of the mutineers. It was Toddy who brought us the intelligence of his death, early on the morning of the 4th of July, the fourth day of the siege.

‘Proper blessin’ ’e’s gone,’ he announced solemnly. ‘Yelled like a stuck pig for two days. ’Orrid to ’ear ’im, it was—proper ’orrid.’ He meant no disrespect.

In moments of crisis, when many people are confronted with a single emotional reality, atmosphere becomes almost tangible. So it was with us that day, as we were overtaken by a collective anxiety that one could almost grasp. We had lost our leader. No doubt many of the garrison knew Sir Henry well enough to feel a personal grief, a private sense of loss, but for most of us his thin stooped figure had come to mean an embodiment of decision and of wisdom. Who could take his place? The fear we had begun to accustom ourselves to surged up into something like panic. All day the guns spat viciously, the bullets whined and buildings crumbled under the fire; but, for all the noise of war, the enclosure was quiet with a heavy, inward quiet as men reckoned their chances, eyes meeting eyes in silent question, and women sat in the smothering darkness of their quarters, trying to come to terms with terror.

‘A disaster, Miss Laura! I have no hesitation in expressing myself so strongly. A disaster! The worst that could befall us!’

Mr Roberts had called in on us soon after hearing the news. He carried a rifle, as did every other man but, unlike the other men, he managed to look neat and almost as clean as usual. Kate, too, for the first time in three days, was sharing the gloom and heat of our kitchen, and the four of us sat round the table talking.

‘What is to happen to us now I cannot think,’ went on Mr Roberts. ‘We may have days to wait before the relief arrives, and who is there among us who can take Sir Henry’s place?’

‘I believe Sir Henry himself had appointed Major Banks his successor, circumventing old Buggins, which I am sure old Buggins will not like,’ said Kate.

‘Ah! A successor is one thing, but Banks is not of the same calibre.’

‘No, but a good soldier and a good administrator. And then there is Jack Inglis. He’ll do too, Mr Roberts, he’ll do. They won’t replace Sir Henry, certainly, but one man’s death should not strip us of all hope, surely?’

‘What is the old saw about the hour producing the man?’ I asked.

‘We must hope so, Miss Laura. We must hope so. But when you reckon the odds against us … well, this is truly a blow!’ He mopped his forehead and then took off his spectacles and polished them. I had never seen him without them before and he looked bare and somehow lost as he screwed up his eyes to see what he was doing.

‘Why … why …’ He shook his head in unbelief and gestured with his spectacles. ‘Do you know that it is reckoned that the insurgents have something like forty thousand men to draw on? Forty thousand men well armed and well trained!’

‘Forty thousand!’ gasped Emily. ‘But that’s a terrible number. We can’t have anything like that on our side, can we?’

‘No, Mrs Flood, nothing like that. We have perhaps fourteen
hundred
dependable men within this stockade; that is without the Sikhs, of course, of whose loyalty much doubt is felt and not only by myself.’ Having made his point, Mr Roberts replaced his spectacles on his nose with an air of accomplishment.

‘Heavens! Then …’

‘Yes, my dear! We are in a very bad situation. Very bad. And now Sir Henry’s death has compounded it indeed.’ He had no idea of the effect his words were having on Emily, whose eyes had filled with frightened tears as she listened to him.

‘And now this news from Cawnpore …’ our visitor continued.

‘Cawnpore? What news is there from Cawnpore?’ Kate asked suspiciously.

‘You mean you have not heard?’

‘Only what everyone else has heard—that Wheeler has been forced to treat with the Nana Sahib.’

‘Ah, but there is more, I’m afraid. Mind you, it’s not official yet, but it is being said that Mr Gubbins has received information that there has been some further trouble in Cawnpore. Treachery on the part of the Nana, most probably, and that there are no survivors of the garrison. But, as I say, I have not heard this from any official source, and one must bear in mind the potency of rumour in a situation like the present one.’

‘No survivors? It can’t be, Mr Roberts. Surely it cannot be?’

‘So it is said, Miss Laura. Had you any friends in Cawnpore?’

‘No, that is, there is a possibility that Mr Erskine was there.’

‘Mr Erskine? But why should he be in Cawnpore, of all places? I can understand that if life in Hassanganj proved untenable he might want to reach Lucknow, but Cawnpore, after all, is quite out of his way.’

‘I hope you are right, but Toddy-Bob thinks he had some business to attend to there, and … and I know he had friends there about whom he was anxious.’

‘Well, that is unfortunate. If, of course, there is anything to this rumour, and there very well may not be. We must remember that.’

Kate caught my eye across the table and smiled to reassure me, then turned her attention to Mr Roberts.

‘This is not the time, Mr Roberts, as I thought you would have had the good sense to realize, to repeat rumours! And that is …’ But she was interrupted by Emily, who, though she had followed the conversation, was obviously not thinking of Cawnpore.

‘But Kate, is it true—are there really so many pandies against us? Because if there are, then we have no hope, have we? How can we possibly keep them off? Oh, Laura, we are all going to be killed, aren’t we?’ Emily began to weep.