Zemindar (81 page)

‘Not ill, miss,’ he managed to say huskily. ‘Bad news, miss!’

At once my mind went to Charles. He had been on guard all night, and in spite of the heavy rain, the pandies had been active.

‘Tell me,’ I whispered. ‘It’s … Mr Charles?’

A sharp look came into his cold black eyes, and his glance held a hint of contempt or resentment; I could not be sure.

Again he shook his head. ‘No, miss—not ’im.’ He swallowed again and, with his head lowered, said almost under his breath, ‘The Guv’nor, miss. He must be dead!’

‘No! Oh, no!’

For a moment I was too shocked to question his assertion, but stood still and watched with curious concentration the tears trickle down his cheeks and join the drops of rain on his wet face. He clenched and unclenched his hands convulsively on the patched serge of the dead
sowar’s
breeches.

‘’E must be, miss! ’E … ’e went in to General Wheeler’s entrenchment in Cawnpore!’

‘He joined General Wheeler? But that’s impossible. Why should he? And … and … anyway, how can you know, Toddy?’

I forced my mind to work, forced it to consider, to question so that I should not have to face the mental image that Toddy’s words immediately produced. I could see him so distinctly, grimy and unshaven, sitting on the edge of the palanquin that morning of our arrival in Lucknow, and heard the subtlest cadence in his voice as he said, ‘But I will come back. I’ll come to you—for you!’

‘Toddy, how can you know that he went to Wheeler?’ I demanded sharply, dropping to my knees beside him and shaking him to draw his attention. He was crying openly now, and gulped, watching my face, as I went on.

‘You know he’d never do a thing like that. Even if he was in Cawnpore, there was no necessity for him to join Wheeler. He was probably there no more than a day, only long enough to leave Yasmina in her mother’s home. He … he probably didn’t even know that Wheeler was being attacked, and if he did, why, you know, Toddy, how he felt about the military and … and …’

‘Miss! Miss! I just seen Ungud.’ Toddy halted my words with an upraised hand. ‘Ungud came in last night with a message. Dunno yet what it was, but I’ll find out. I saw him just as he was goin’ out again. Wanted him to come to you but he ’ad to get out while it was rainin’—not so much firin’, you see. He told me, he
told
me, miss, that ’e knew the Guv’nor had gone into the General’s entrenchment, an’ if ’e done that, ’e’s dead, miss. There’s none of ’em could have lived after what the Nana did to ’em. None of ’em, miss.’

‘The Nana. But, Toddy, we have only heard that he was treating with General Wheeler. Do you mean … ?’

‘’E done for ’em, miss, the lyin’, thievin’ bastard. ’E done for ’em all. They never ’ad no chance. Ungud says ’e ’eard from Moti’s family like, that the Guv’nor went into the old General’s entrenchment—an ’ospital it was—and no good to no one needin’ protection from a sparrow. They put up a fight, though, and then, after a bit of a
burra-bat
, the Nana agrees to let ’em go peaceful like, lays on elephants and
palkis
and boats for ’em to go downriver to Allahabad. So then, well ’e lets ’em out, like ’e says, lets ’em all climb into the boats—thatched boats they was, and in no way enough to carry ’em all, but all they ’ad. Lets the boats push off, but ’alf of ’em was grounded on the sandbanks, and then, when they was struggling to get into midstream, ’e ’as ’is blasted pandies open fire! The thatch caught immediate like. Oh, Gawd, miss! It must of been ’ell on earth with all them nippers and women … and the wounded. The men they slaughtered, and as many of the ladies and nippers as they could before the Nana sends to tell ’em to bring them ashore—but not the men. Ungud says ’e ’eard that one boat got away, but ’alf the men on it was dead or wounded and the pandies got it lower down. There ain’t no chance for ’im, miss. The Guv’nor must be dead.’

He bent his head and sobbed, holding his sleeve across his eyes and sniffling convulsively just like the Cockney urchin he had started life as.

‘No! No! Oh, my God, Toddy, it can’t be true!’

‘Yes, miss, it’s true enough! And it weren’t only the pandies on the shore; there was cavalry ’idden in the bushes on the river bank, and when the firin’ starts, the troopers charges down into the river on their ’orses and cuts down everythin’ before ’em with
tulwars
.’

‘Did Ungud see it then?’

No, not ’im. But ’e ’eard it all, from the pandy sepoys in Cawnpore. It ’appened near a month ago now, and it stands to reason, miss, if the Guv’nor ’adn’t been killed, ’e’d ’ave been ’ere by now. If ’e ’adn’t gone in with Wheeler, that is, because ’e was only a day’s ride from us, and if ’e ’adn’t gone in—well, ’e would have come straight ’ere, wouldn’t ’e? ’E’d ’ave been ’ere long afore us, miss. Oh, miss, ’e’s dead!’

‘How did Ungud know all this?’ The voice was Kate’s. She and Jessie had come in and listened silently as Toddy broke his news to me. ‘And who is Ungud anyway?’

‘He’s a pensioner from Hassanganj. He was one of the men who came in response to Sir Henry’s call at the end of May. Oliver used to employ him as a … a messenger.’

‘That’s right, miss,’ confirmed Toddy huskily. ‘’Twere Sir ’Enry as sent him out, before Chinhat, to keep a eye on the Nana, like. But the pandies pinched ’im and kept ’im in Cawnpore, near two weeks before they let ’im go. Suspicious they was, but they couldn’t fix anythin’ on ’im. ’E ’ears all the gossip, the
ba-t
. You don’t know what a bazaar is like, miss, nor native lines, you don’t. They sits around the fires in the evenings, the sepoys do, and they talks and tells tales, and they boast, and correct each other’s tales, ’cause they know ’em all so well. One of ’em, that Ungud ’eard yarnin’ with ’is pals, said as ’ow ’e’d seen a big Pathan with light eyes carryin’ a wounded woman to one of the boats and ’angin’ about in the water afterwards. ’E guesses the Pathan is a white man, you see, and watches ’im, like, for a while, and ’e tells ’is pals what ’e seen …’

‘But, Tod, that’s not enough to go on!’ I burst out desperately. ‘It need not have been Mr Erskine at all. It could have been some other man; after all, perhaps … I’m sure they must have been as short of clothing there as we are here, and would put on anything that covered them, and Mr Erskine would not have …’

Toddy shook his head and looked at me pityingly. ‘No, miss. Don’t think that, miss. It were ’im all right. You see, when the first man tells what ’e seen, another chimes in and says as ’ow ’e’d seen the big Pathan too, and it weren’t no Pathan but the Sirkar of ’Assanganj. So then they asks ’im ’ow ’e knows and ’e says ’e and ’is family were from ’Assanganj, one of the villages like, and that ’e knew the looks of
Lat-sahib
Erskine, turban or not, as well as ’e knew the looks of ’is own pa. It were the Guv’nor, all right, miss.’ He spoke with tired patience, and I realized he wanted to spare me the pain that must follow on unfounded hope.

I sat back on my heels and looked into his sorrowful face; perhaps my eyes spoke more eloquently than my lips could at that moment.

‘Poor miss,’ he whispered, and Kate crossed herself and said, ‘May the Lord have mercy on his soul.’

‘And Amen to a’ that!’ responded Jessie solemnly, having little idea of whom we were talking.

When Charles came in that night, I knew as he entered the room that he had seen Toddy-Bob.

‘You know?’ I asked, to break the silence.

He nodded.

‘Do you think it can be true, Charles? Would Oliver have gone to Wheeler?’

‘What else could have happened to him, Laura? He couldn’t stay in Hassanganj, and there was nowhere else for him to go if he didn’t come here.’

They all said that, so it must be true, but I still didn’t believe it. It was not that I didn’t want to believe it: I was incapable of having any views on the matter either way. If they all said it was so, then it must be so, but what they said meant nothing to me.

I must have behaved with a laudable and detached calm as we ate our meal, and sat for a little while trying to talk. No one could have guessed from my appearance or manner that I had a right to feel more than a decent amount of regret. Neither Charles nor Kate could guess at all that I knew of Oliver Erskine, let alone all I had learned to feel for him. And although then I felt nothing, part of my mind was already shrinking from the knowledge that I would have to bear my grief, when it came, without sharing or sympathy, and carry the burden of my loss in secret.

My life over the past months had been a series of avoidable, and now tragic, mistakes and it was the acute awareness of this that kept me from the realization of Oliver’s death. First, I had to come to terms with my own conscience, forgive my own stupidity; then, purified by compunction, I would learn to face his death with fortitude. But not yet. Not yet. For the present, I would live in a half world of overactivity numbing my mind with the effort of appearing normal—normally polite, normally interested, normally frightened, although I was none of these things.

The whitewashed rooms were never cleaner or neater than during the days that followed. Sometimes I washed the mud floors three times a day; I polished our cooking pots with wads of grass and wet ashes as the village women did; I mended every rag in our possession with beautiful, precise stitches, then washed them with suds made from boiled gram, our soap being hoarded for Pearl. When all other methods of occupying myself failed, I turned to wick-making—pulling threads from petticoats and plaiting them together until the strand assumed a sufficient thickness to glow without burning up when placed in an earthenware saucer of thick, smelly tallow. I think I would have sold my soul for a library, or even a single book. In the past, I had always managed to assuage my ills by reading, and very often had inadvertently come across some particular work that strengthened me to meet misfortune or explained to me the intricacies of whatever predicament I was facing, teaching me philosophy and bringing me courage. Now, I had only Emily’s small morocco-covered Bible, and the print was so close that even had I had the desire to read it, the darkness of our rooms would have made it impossible.

The long, hot nights were the worst to bear. The tallow for our saucer dips was hard come by, and since we had only two candle-ends remaining, we had formed the habit of retiring soon after our evening meal. The three of us would lie for hours awake, each feigning sleep to reassure the others, each unhappily occupied with sad memories and thoughts too heavy for expression. Sometimes it seemed to me that the accumulated regrets and fearfulness of we three bereft and lonely women weighed down upon us as near tangibly as the heavy, insect-loud darkness that pressed against our open eyes.

I would listen to the staccato crack of the Enfields, playing mental games to keep from thinking, counting the number of cracks between booms of the big guns, or between the explosions of one shell as they lit up the room briefly sometimes, and the next. I would listen to the toads croaking in the puddles and would try to fit the words of a poem to the broken rhythm—croak, craw craw craw, croak craw, croak—but the beat was never consistent. I would recite the poems to myself then, pages of Scott, Cowper and Wordsworth, and I found that I had picked up quite a lot of Mr Tennyson too, without knowing it. Every journal and newspaper in England had printed his poem on the Charge of the Light Brigade, and, though I had never learned it, preferring the lyric or sonnet form to the ballad, I had retained, as had the rest of England, those two lines that go:

Their’s not to reason why
,

Their’s but to do and die
.

I quoted them to myself with unrepentant bitterness, seeing in them now an allusion to our own situation, though not to my state of mind. The unthinking acquiescence that had made six hundred good men charge to certain death in the name of military discipline had never struck me as heroic. I saw no reason to admire them, or the system that had formed their mentality, though I never had the hardihood to say as much at home at the time! But still, it seemed now that ours
was
but to do and die, however little we liked it.

For one thing I was grateful: no one spoke much of Oliver. Living in the constant presence of death as we did, hearing day after day that some one or other of our comrades whom we had come to know, perhaps like, had died suddenly, horribly, a sense of self-preservation kept us from the sort of lugubrious reminiscence which can bring comfort to the bereaved in normal circumstances. Never did one hear, ‘poor so-and-so, do you remember how he used to do such-and-such?’ and similar remarks. We accepted the fact of death, then turned our minds consciously to living. It was the only way. We never mentioned Emily, either, or George, or Jessie’s husband and children. Our griefs we kept private for the common good. We had no need to bring ourselves to a realization of the transience and mutability of existence; rather we needed to escape that realization. So we accepted the passing of our friends and loved ones, and then sorrowed for them in silence.

Toddy-Bob had taken Ishmial away and told him his news in private, and we did not see either of them again for two days. I wondered uneasily whether they were absenting themselves from their posts as they were from our kitchen, but Charles reported having seen Ishmial at the most dangerous sector of the walls, where the enemy outposts were a mere dozen yards from our own, dancing like a dervish, brandishing his smoking musket and screaming abuse at his opposite number on the other side, who was responding in kind!

On the evening of the third day, Ishmial staggered on to the verandah carrying the limp form of Toddy-Bob on his back. He dropped the little man like a sack of flour on the kitchen floor, and stalked out again wordlessly.

Toddy-Bob was very drunk.

Red Jess, who by this time was in full charge of our establishment, cocked an experienced eye over the steel knitting needles on which she was manufacturing socks for Charles, and remarked resignedly, ‘I doubt he’ll no be sober till the morn.’ And laying aside her knitting she tidied him away in a corner of the kitchen, on a blanket fetched from her own bed, thoughtfully placing a bowl beside his head.