Zemindar (95 page)

‘Poor little Emily!’ he exclaimed when I described to him the manner of my cousin’s death. ‘Poor little thing. She wanted so little, yet it was so much more than she ever received. Nineteen years old and dead! Still, she could have met her end in a more … more dreadful way. That’s one thing to be grateful for. And Charles? How did he take it—with relief?’

‘He takes great comfort in his religion now and, well, frankly we have all had so much to think of that I have never discussed things with him. We have endured; I suppose he has had to do the same. That’s about all I know. He doesn’t live here with us. He’s at Dr Fayrer’s post and only visits us when he can get away in the evenings. Often we don’t see him for two or three days at a time, if he gets off too late at night or when things are very bad.’

‘Good.’

‘Oh, Oliver!’

‘Don’t pretend annoyance. You know damned well I could never be quite sure of how you felt about him, whether you had really got over him as you once assured me you had. Worse, I was certain of how he felt for you, Emily or not. Just as well I did not know of her death; my time in Cawnpore would have been even less comfortable than it was.’

His own mention of the place disturbed him. His eyes became abstracted and he sighed, his hand stroking his moustache nervously in a gesture that was new but often repeated.

‘It must have been terrible; don’t think of it, Oliver.’

I moved to the bed, sat down and kissed him on the brow, removing his hand from his moustache and holding it closely. The expression on his face, full of remembered pain and disgust and fear, wrung my heart. I needed to comfort him, to reassure him. In the past I had often felt that I disliked the assurance amounting to arrogance in his face, yet now I would have given much to see it replace the look of inner and inescapable suffering upon his features.

‘I cannot help but think of it. It never altogether leaves me, even yet. I was there all through, you see, all through.’

‘But why? Why did you stay?’

‘For the best of reasons—the only reason. I couldn’t get away.’

‘Little Yasmina … she wasn’t there too, was she?’

He looked at me with suspicion and annoyance.

‘How did you know?’

‘Toddy. He told me you were going back to Hassanganj to take her to her grandparents, but I never guessed at the time that you would stay in Cawnpore.’

‘Blast him for a blab-mouthed fool!’

‘But was she with you?’

‘No, thank God, she wasn’t. She was safe in her mother’s home. Still is, I hope. I got there, oh blazes! I can’t remember when exactly. Early in June, anyway. It was, now let me think, yes, the day after old Wheeler ordered all the Europeans, Eurasians and the loyal sepoys into his crazy “Fort”, as they chose to call it.’

‘Do you want to speak of it now? Perhaps later …?’

‘God, I want a smoke now! A fat black cheroot …’

‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I can ask Toddy to try and come by some. He did once before …’

‘Doesn’t matter. Just thought of it on the spur of the moment. Shows I’m better, doesn’t it? First time I’ve yearned for tobacco.’

He paused, his eyes still far away, then went on.

‘Do I want to talk of it? No. Nor remember it, nor ever think of it again, nor hear it mentioned. But I cannot escape it. I cannot. In my dreams; waking; when you are talking to me, sitting close beside me; even when I have the comfort of your hand in mine, like this, I see things, remember scenes, hear sounds. I have no control over them. They just swim up out of my memory and I see them as clearly as I see you, hear those … those dreadful sounds as distinctly and actually as you hear that gun being hauled over the rubble outside and the strain of the bullocks against the yoke and the crack of that whip. No, I don’t want to talk of it, yet … will you let me tell you? Some of it? Not all. Some is … some must remain in my mind, only in my mind. I do not want you to know all of it. Ever!’

‘As you wish. If it will help you, but don’t distress yourself.’

He laughed softly, with bitterness. ‘I don’t need to distress myself, woman dear. It has been done for me. All done for me.’

He hauled himself up against the folded cloaks, wincing slightly as he moved his damaged arm, and sighed deeply.

‘Why was I there, you ask? Why indeed? I delivered the child to her grandparents, made what explanations and … and apologies I could, fixed up the money end of things and so on, and then intended to come on here, to Lucknow. There was no point in my returning to Hassanganj. When I returned for the child, I found the place a desert, everyone had gone back to their villages or joined the pandies; not a servant visible, not a horse or a cow or an elephant. The factory lay empty, the indigo rotting in the vats and stinking to high heaven. Everything around the house had been—devastated; the house itself, of course, just a shell, but they’d stripped the vegetable gardens and the orchards, ruined the machinery of the wells, burned the stabling and quarters, wrecked the contents of the carpenter’s shop and the tinsmith’s and the blacksmith’s. Or stolen the stuff, I suppose. There was nothing left. I spent a rather curious hour wandering among the blackened bones of the Erskine pride. Very odd thing to have to do, you know. Very odd!

‘Anyway, Moti’s people told me that the road to Lucknow was still open, there were troops coming and going, and apparently Wheeler, mistaken as always, had despatched reinforcements from the 84th to Lawrence here just a couple of days before, and that decided me on Lucknow, even if Hassanganj had been practicable. Not, you understand, that I had gained in heroism or martial aptitude since leaving you, but, well—you were in Lucknow, so that was where I wished to be too.

‘I mounted up early that morning and set off. Passing through the outskirts of Cawnpore, firing broke out. Not the first I’d heard, either. The rebel sepoys, aided by the local
badmashes
and town bullyboys were on the rampage, looting and burning everything remotely connected with the whites, rushing in bands through the streets, shouting, screaming and firing their guns into the air or at any hapless bystander in their way. I was going carefully, taking every precaution to keep out of their sight, when a couple of Eurasian women rushed out of a dilapidated bungalow and called to me. They thought I was a Pathan and, therefore, unimplicated, and offered to pay me well if I would accompany them to Wheeler’s entrenchment. They were too frightened to move without a male of some sort in attendance, poor creatures. All they wanted was to remain in their home and so had decided to ignore the orders of the previous day, but the rowdies convinced them of their mistake. I spoke to them in English, and they nearly wept with relief, I can tell you! So, I found myself, shortly thereafter, helping to pile them, their baggage and their poor old mother (she was blind and nearly crippled) into a cart and harnessing up their broken-winded nag, and away we went.

‘Fortunately we did not have far to go. I thought I’d do my part by them, see them safe and set off at once. We arrived at the entrenchment about nine in the morning, I suppose. God, what a morning, hot as hell’s blazes! I rode in with them to help them get settled. Had to carry the old woman in to one of the buildings, then fetch some of their stuff while they disappeared, the two young ones, to look for stabling for the horse.

‘And that was my undoing. I believe they must have led my horse away with theirs. Probably didn’t believe I wanted to trust myself to the populace and leave the safety of that blasted Fort. Hell! The irony of it … I’d told them I was moving on to Lucknow. Or perhaps the damned animal bolted; it had reason enough. I don’t know.’

How often I had lain in bed at night shivering with fear as I envisioned the ridiculous insufficiency of our fortifications— the sacking, bamboo screens and firewood that in many places were all that protected us from the enemy. Now, however, as Oliver described to me what he had found in Cawnpore on that first morning, our stockade seemed in comparison almost invulnerable. The Residency did at least enjoy the slight advantage of being placed on an eminence.

General Wheeler had chosen as his strongpoint a level plain, several acres in extent, close to the sepoy lines and a mile or more from the river. In the centre of this plain stood two long barrack buildings, high-ceilinged and wide-verandahed, that had once formed part of a hospital. The buildings were of masonry but one, the larger, was roofed with thatch. These were the nuclei of the fortification, and around them a wall had been thrown up, a wall of earth four feet high and two feet wide at the top, forming a parallelogram around the barracks and a well, and within this tawdry protection had gathered by that first morning about a thousand men, women and children. Outside the walls the plain stretched flat and open to the enemy on all sides, except for the ruins of some buildings that the General had paid a fortune to have demolished and which now provided the pandies with excellent cover. Outside the enclosure, to the west, were several half-completed brick buildings, which became outposts and had to be maintained at all costs through the entire siege. The single well within the enclosure, the only source of water through three long weeks in the hottest part of the Indian summer, was totally exposed to the enemy.

‘Mud walls four feet high and nowhere impregnable to a bullet,’ said Oliver with a bitter smile. ‘The excuse was that after seven rainless months the ground was too hard to work; true enough no doubt, but there were no proper emplacements for the guns—not so much as a pile of sandbags between the others’ artillery and our own. God, when I think of it! Wheeler could have chosen the Magazine to go to earth in. A good site, easily strengthened, well protected. Or any of a dozen other places along the river. But that billiard table of a place, not a tree for shade, entirely indefensible, he chose that! Well, he’s dead now, poor devil, and his wife and son; they say his daughter was dragged off by the pandies at the river …

‘Of course, I didn’t take it all in at the time. Couldn’t see a thing for the crowds clamouring for living space. I got the old lady settled in one of the barracks that was already so packed with women, children and servants, all squabbling and crying to each other, I was damned glad to get out of it again. Just in time to hear old Wheeler announce to some of his officers that he had received a message from the Nana Sahib saying he was about to attack. So I thought to myself, “Well, Oliver m’lad, this is where you get going,” and I looked around for my horse. It had gone; nowhere to be found. Word got around immediately of the attack, and panic took over.

‘Most unpleasant thing, panic, Laura. Women screamed, children cried, husbands yelled orders to their families, and every coolie,
ayah
and servant in the place, and there were scores, added to the uproar. Fright. Plain blue funk. Not at all a nice thing to see happen to anyone. I managed to get hold of a young officer, explained I had lost my nag and asked whether there was anywhere I could buy or borrow one. He just laughed in a singularly ugly manner and informed me with some heat, justifiable under the circumstances, I suppose, that now even cowardly wogs like me would have to stay where I was, since, whatever about the horses, no one could leave the Fort. Had I been lucky enough to find an animal I would have proved him wrong by jumping it over that damn-fool wall. However, we’d hardly finished our little exchange when we heard a bugle call and at almost the same moment the first roundshot whistled over our heads and smashed into the barrack behind us, maiming a native woman. They kept that average up pretty consistently too; one shot, one life—or at least a limb!’

For the first few days provisions had been ample, even luxurious, and everyone had fed on sealed salmon, asparagus, tongue and wine. But soon the rations comprised a handful of parched gram, lentils and rum, sometimes supplemented by soup made from horsemeat, and later from pariah dogs. The Nana Sahib’s blockade was total.

The well in the centre of the compound was a deathtrap; early in the siege the machinery had been shot away and man after man, day after day, died drawing the leather bucket up by hand for all its sixty feet. There was no equitable system of apportioning the water. Those among the women who had friends prepared to risk themselves, or who could pay a private soldier for a mug full, were the lucky ones. The rest sucked on leather straps, went thirsty for hours and days in heat of over 130º, and died for the want of it. Heat-stroke killed half a dozen men in one day alone, a day so scorching that muskets exploded in the hands that held them.

The stench in the enclosure was appalling: no sanitary arrangements whatever existed and in the barracks women and children soiled themselves in their clothes sooner than leave their negligible shelter. Cholera, dysentery and gangrene took their toll and added to the odour. Each evening the day’s quota of dead was lowered down a dry well just outside the walls, where in the terrible heat the bodies soon putrefied, adding their stench to the rest.

The noise was, if possible, more dreadful than the heat or the smell, the noise made by hundreds of wounded, ill and despairing human beings, meeting their own deaths and combating the frightful witnessing of their friends’ deaths in the only way open to them, screams, shrieks and sobs of terrified sorrow. And minute by minute, the guns of the enemy shattered the two poor shelters, flattened the walls and decimated the huddled inmates, never stopping, hardly ever lessening.

Oliver’s thin brown hand moved hesitantly over the straggly moustache.

‘I have always considered it an unpardonable impudence to believe the Deity small enough to have thought of Hell,’ he said after a thoughtful pause. ‘Those three weeks convinced me I was right. The Almighty knows well enough He has no need to provide a facility that His creatures can devise so excellently well without his help.’

Kate and Jessie had both come into the bedroom and were listening silently as he spoke, sitting on the unoccupied bed in the gloom.

‘But what possessed poor Wheeler?’ Kate wondered. ‘Surely he must have known what to expect?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he thought, like a lot of others, that his
Baba-log
would never turn on him. After all, he had an Indian wife, had spent his entire life with the sepoys; he must have thought he knew them well enough to have confidence in them. But that ridiculous position, Kate, and then to try to hold it against such odds—in June, without water, shade or food! Without guns either. We had eight nine-pounders. The others’— I noticed he never spoke of the ‘enemy’, always the ‘others’— ‘had everything you could think of from twenty-four pounders down to six-pounders. And God alone knows how many men. And yet Wheeler … History will try to make him out a hero, I suppose, canonize his efforts. Yet the whole damned business was an act of criminal folly compounded by indecision, a dire misreading of the signs and times, and unbelievable lack of plain common sense.