by V. A. Stuart
“From General Wilson, sir,” the young officer told him. “He said you’d know for whom it’s intended.”
Rosser laughed aloud, as the A.D.C. cantered off.
“By heaven, he’s an opportunist, is he not? If you get through, he’ll take the credit for having sent you and if you don’t, then he can’t be blamed. There’s no address on it, is there, sir?”
Alex grinned. “None. However,” he tucked the despatch into his breast pocket, “I’ll do my best to deliver it. Au revoir, Rosser … and my thanks for your assistance.”
“I wish I were coming with you, Colonel Sheridan. Godspeed and a safe journey!” The Dragoon Guards officer saluted smartly and was gone, his troopers clattering after him, as Alex set his face in the opposite direction and spurred his own horse into a canter.
For the first hour and a half, he made good progress, keeping to the shadows at the road verge and heading steadily southwestward. He encountered few other travelers and those he did meet were on foot—country people for the most part, returning to their villages laden with the spoils of a night of looting—as anxious, on this account, to avoid him as he was to pass them by. He saw no sepoys, although some of the white-robed looters he passed might well have been mutineers, who had discarded their uniforms in order to seek a safe anonymity with those who had aided them in the sack of the Meerut cantonment. All were armed, one or two with firearms, the rest with clubs and spears, but none attempted to molest him and, satisfied that, at all events by moonlight, his disguise was effective, Alex rode on with increasing confidence, intent on putting as many miles as possible behind him before dawn.
After a while, however, he heard the rhythmic tramp of marching feet ahead of him and was compelled to leave the road and make a detour across cultivated fields. It was heavy going through shoulder-high sugar cane but he continued, pausing now and then to listen, only returning to the road when he had assured himself that he had out-distanced the marchers. They appeared, from the occasional glimpses he caught of them, to be a band of stragglers, in Native Infantry uniform, belatedly endeavouring to overtake their comrades. They were marching in a disciplined formation, with shouldered arms, to the beat of drums and fifes which, incongruously, were playing a British marching tune.
Once past them, the road was again virtually deserted for a further ten or twelve miles and he was able to increase his speed, halting at regular intervals to dismount, loosen his girths and give his horse a breather. The borrowed charger was fit and willing enough but with an iron-hard mouth and no manners, like the country-bred he had ridden for so many weary miles on his outward journey from Lucknow. The dragoon’s saddle, too, was less supple than his own and Alex himself was beginning to tire when, dismounting in order to stretch his legs and fight off an overwhelming desire for sleep, a sound was borne to him which swiftly banished all thought of sleep from his mind.
Faintly at first but quite unmistakable as it came nearer, he heard the thud of hooves and, judging this to herald the approach of a party of at least a dozen mounted men, he dragged his sweating chestnut back into the thin cover of the sugar canes and waited tensely for the horsemen to make their appearance. They did so, a few minutes later, and he counted fifteen of them, darkly silhouetted against the still reddish glow of the sky above Meerut. They were making a good deal of noise, shouting and laughing and seemingly in the best of spirits as, to Alex’s dismay, they jerked their lathered horses to a standstill only a few yards from him and, as he had done earlier, dismounted to loosen girths and permit their animals to drink from a small stream which flowed sluggishly near the road from an irrigation ditch among the canes.
He recognized them, without difficulty, as sowars of the 3rd Light Cavalry in white undress uniforms, armed with lances and sabres, and with carbines slung from their saddles. It was evident from their carefree attitude that they expected no pursuit and, in the absence of their officers, that all of them were reveling in their unaccustomed freedom from discipline, like children playing truant from school. But these were not children. Their uniforms were stained with blood and smoke, their saddles bore proof that they, like the goojur villagers, had been engaged in looting and worse. Alex, making strenuous efforts to calm his restive horse, knew that he could expect no mercy at their hands, if they discovered him here.
With infinite caution, he started to move away but their shouts and the milling horses had excited his borrowed mount, and when it reared and cannoned into him, he was knocked off balance, losing his hold on its rein. Compelled to let it go, he flung himself flat in the hope that the horse might distract their attention for long enough to enable him to find more adequate concealment in the ditch or further into the field, but this hope was short-lived. The dragoon horse, neighing shrilly, plunged into the road and then, eluding the hands stretched out to capture it, to Alex’s intense chagrin, it returned to him. He managed to scramble back into the saddle but the next moment the sowars were clustering round him and one of them grabbed his bridle, effectively preventing his escape. In the shadows, unable to make out the colour of his skin and seeing the chuddar and the turban wound, Moslem fashion, about his head, they took him at first for one of their own faith and jested with him good-humoredly.
“So thou hast stolen a lal-kote soldier’s horse? And killed its owner, doubtless?”
“Do not fear us, brother. We, too, have feringhi blood on our hands!”
“Art thou perchance a fugitive from the jail? Is that why thou seekest to hide from us? Shame on thee. It was we who brought about thy liberation! See …” A hand was thrust forward, so that he might observe the still raw galling of the fetters. “I still bear the mark on my arm. But we have thrown off our chains. The Company’s Raj is ended. Allah is good. We go to Delhi to fight for our Faith and the Shah Bahadur!”
Aware that his voice would betray him if he attempted to answer them, Alex muttered something and slumped in his saddle, keeping his head averted and praying that they would take him for a dim-witted peasant and let him go. They seemed on the point of doing so when one of them, his suspicions suddenly aroused, leaned forward and wrenched the chuddar roughly from his shoulders.
“This is no dumb ryot. He is a feringhi, my brothers! A sahib, see, wearing the uniform of our paltan!” the man exclaimed, jumping back as if he had inadvertently uncovered a venomous snake, and a chorus of shocked and angry shouts went up from the rest of the sowars. They had all dismounted and, in the brief panic which followed their discovery of his identity, Alex made a bid for escape. He spurred for the sugar canes, careless of which direction he took and seeking only to put as great a distance between himself and them as he could before they could remount their horses and come in pursuit of him.
He heard a spasmodic volley of musketry and several shots spattered the cane foliage ahead and on either side of him and then they were pounding after him, baying like a pack of hounds for his blood. If his horse had been fresh—or, he thought despairingly, if he had been on Sultan—he might have eluded them, but the animal he rode was tired and blown. It stumbled and almost precipitated him over its head, picked itself up and then, to his horror, he found himself clear of the canes and in an open field, crisscrossed by a maze of irrigation ditches and devoid of cover.
He jerked his horse’s head round and had come within ten yards of the cane field he had left when a single shot rang out and he felt his horse stagger, slither a few yards and then come crashing to the ground. He was leaning low over its neck and was flung clear but, having only one arm with which to try to break his fall, he landed heavily and rolled over, the breath temporarily driven from his lungs. As he lay helpless, struggling for breath, he saw his unfortunate horse drag itself up and, with a courage he had not expected of it, continue its flight across the open ground.
Seven or eight of the sowars broke cover and went after the wounded horse and he contrived to claw his way back into the canes before, realizing that their quarry was riderless, the men abandoned their chase and ca
me back to look for him. Alex, drawing air into his tortured lungs at last, took his pistol from his belt and, glimpsing a ditch to his right, lowered himself into it, resolved to sell his life dearly if they found him.
They were yelling advice and instructions to each other and threshing about in the canes, some with sabres drawn and others probing the undergrowth with their lances. He kept well down and three of them rode right over him, leaping their horses across the ditch and, by some miracle, failing to see him as he crouched in the damp mud beneath them. The pursuit did not slacken but it was moving farther afield and he was beginning to hope that he had managed to make good his escape when the sound of voices, coming from the direction of the road, effectively dashed his hopes.
Cursing under his breath, Alex raised himself cautiously, parted the leafy screen in front of him with the muzzle of his pistol and was just able to make out the dark figures of two sowars coming towards him across a patch of open ground to his right. They were evidently the men who had been firing at him, for they were on foot, he saw, their horses’ reins looped over their arms and their carbines at the ready. He aimed his pistol at the nearer of the two and waited for the range to shorten, uneasily conscious that once he opened fire on them, he could not afford to miss, since the sound of firing must inevitably bring the others back. But at least with only two of them, the odds were more even than they had been before.
“His horse fell here. He cannot have gone far,” he heard one of them say. “See, here are the tracks. Thy aim was true, daffadarji! Let us search the ditch; the accursed sahib may be hiding there.”
“Didst thou see who he was?” the second man asked.
“Nahin. I saw only that he was a feringhi.” The first speaker laughed derisively. “What matters it who he was?”
“He had one arm. The sahib who restored my medals to me had lost his sword arm—in the Crimea, they say, when the Queen’s Light Cavalry charged the Russian guns, in just such a charge as we made against the Sikh guns at Chillianwala.” Alex tensed, remembering the old daffadar whose plight had moved him to pity during the punishment parade, as the man added, a note of regret in his voice, “It was a kindly and noble thought that prompted him to bring me my medals, a soldier’s thought, Ramzan. I would not see that sahib dead.”
“All the sahib-log must die, Ghulam Rasul. Thou knowest in thy heart that it is so,” his companion reproached him. “He would not spare thy life, were thou to meet him now. And why does he ride to Delhi, if not to give warning of our approach, so that the sahibs there may meet us with cannon?” He kicked with a booted foot at the canes and spat his contempt of such manifest weakness. “If mine eyes have the good fortune to light on him, nothing shall stay my hand on the trigger!” His second kick came nearer and Alex, accepting his logic, depressed the trigger of the Adams.
The explosion sounded unnaturally loud and, for a moment, he feared that he had missed, for the sowar remained standing, a look of ludicrous surprise on his face. Then he fell forward without a sound and Alex, the smoking pistol still in his hand, found himself looking into the muzzle of the daffadar’s carbine, which pointed steadily at his heart. They faced each other for a long moment in silence; then the old daffadar said, almost apologetically, “The Sahib has not reloaded his pistol.”
“It has six bullets in it,” Alex told him. “Five are left, Ghulam Rasul.”
“And you would kill me, Sahib?”
“No, daffadar-ji. Not unless you prevent me from doing what is my duty. I need a horse—I must ride to Delhi.” Excited shouts were coming now from amongst the canes; in a matter of minutes, Alex knew, the rest of the men would return. They had heard the shot and would come to investigate and he had somehow to appeal to this old man’s dormant loyalty before his comrades could remind him of the new cause for which he must fight. “Daffadar-ji,” he began, “you—” The old man cut him short.
“Do you ride to Delhi in order to prepare cannon to receive us, Sahib?” he asked.
“I ride to warn my people, in order to avoid the shedding of innocent blood,” Alex answered and added, with bleak honesty, “If cannon are necessary to preserve the peace, then I will ask for them to be turned against you.”
“Take the horse, Sahib.” Ghulam Rasul offered him his rein. “But first put a pistol ball into me, for I break faith with my brothers.”
Alex shook his head. He thrust the pistol into his belt and vaulted into the saddle. He had covered a scant half of the distance separating him from the road when he heard the crack of a carbine and the horse he was riding emitted a high-pitched squeal and pitched forward on to its knees. This time he fell awkwardly sideways and the animal rolled on top of him, the whole weight of its now inert body on his legs, pinning him down. As he lay there, unable to free himself, he heard running footsteps and looked up to see a white-robed figure standing over him, the carbine gripped in both hands like a club.
Its butt descended and, in the instant before it smashed into his skull, he caught sight of two small circles of silver pinned to the chest of his assailant.
“You should have killed me, Sheridan Sahib,” daffadar Ghulam Rasul reproved him sadly, but Alex, sinking into a dark and bottomless pit, did not hear him and gave him no answer. The old cavalryman bent and dragged his victim from beneath the dead horse and, when the others galloped up, he called on them to aid him in concealing the sahib’s body. Two of them dismounted and did as he had asked and, when the dusty sugar canes had once again served as a hiding place, he urged them to delay no longer.
“We must go on to Delhi, brothers, and not draw rein until we see the face of Shah Bahadur, for who knows? We have stopped one messenger but there may be others. And with daylight the lal-kote paltans will be after us. On, on to Delhi!”
The sowars raised a cheer and spurred after him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NATIVE courier sent by Meerut’s civil authorities had left ahead of the mutineers and, by dint of hard riding and two fresh horses, he reached Delhi late on Sunday evening. Presenting himself at the residence of the commissioner, which was situated some distance outside the Kashmir Gate of the city, he handed his despatch to a servant with the statement that it was of extreme importance.
The commissioner, Simon Fraser, had fallen asleep in his chair and although his bearer, impressed by the messenger’s urgency, made strenuous efforts to waken him, when he finally did so, Fraser blinked at him uncomprehendingly and thrust the letter, unopened, into his pocket and resumed his interrupted slumbers. It was not until the following day that he remembered having received it and, when he had absorbed its contents, he at once ordered his carriage and drove the two miles to Brigadier-General Graves’ house, in the military cantonment, to pass on the warning. By the time he drew up outside, he found that other messengers had reported seeing the approach of a strong body of cavalry, already crossing by the Bridge of Boats over the Jumna from the Meerut road.
After requesting the general to send troops into the city in case of trouble, the commissioner despatched one of his staff to warn Lieutenant Willoughby, the officer in command of the Delhi magazine and, joined by the Collector Ross Harrison and Captain Douglas, the commandant of the king’s bodyguard, he hurried to the Calcutta Gate, which he ordered to be closed against the newly arrived cavalry sowars. An attempt to send a telegraphic enquiry to Meerut was met with the information that the line had been cut and, realizing from this that the situation was serious, the civil police were called out and Brigadier Graves sent for Colonel Ripley, of the 54th Native Infantry, and ordered him to take his regiment, with two guns, into the city at once.
Of the three regiments in the Delhi brigade, the least reliable and the one which had recently exhibited signs of disaffection was the 38th and, by ill-chance, all the guards—including that on the city magazine—had been supplied, according to the weekly roster, by the 38th. The Calcutta Gate guard obeyed the order to bar entry to the Meerut cavalry sullenly but there was another way into the Royal
Palace at the Selimgarh, to which access could be obtained by the simple expedient of riding along the dry river bed, and the sowars took it gleefully. All the one hundred and fifty men who formed the advance party of mutineers had changed into their French grey and silver uniforms and, with sabres drawn and in perfect order, they lined up outside the windows of the palace, the traditional place from which petitions were delivered, and called on the king for succor and protection.
The eighty-year-old Shah Bahadur, accompanied by the commander of his bodyguard, looked down on them apprehensively from a tower, the Musammun Burj, which jutted out over the river.
“We come to fight for thee, O King!” the sowars shouted. “Open the gates and let us in. We will restore thee to thy throne! For the Faith, we come to fight for the Faith!”
The old man, roused from his opium-inspired dreams and leaning heavily on the arm of his physician, flinched from these warlike cries and, turning to Captain Douglas, besought him to send them away. Hands cupped about his mouth, Douglas sternly bade them be gone, adding that they should present their petition to the king in the usual orderly manner, not with weapons in their hands.
For answer, one of the sowars unslung his carbine and fired a shot at him and instantly pandemonium broke out. A number of them forced their way in by a small, unguarded gateway in the palace wall and, augmented by another fifty or sixty men who had just crossed by the Bridge of Boats, they opened the Calcutta Gate without opposition from the sepoy guard. As more mutineers galloped across to the gate, they split up. One party made for the jail, where the guard and the convicts they released joined their ranks; another smaller party of native officers entered the palace and demanded immediate audience of the king. The main body, gathering support as they went, charged through the great bazaar in the center of the city, known as the Chandni Chouk, some screaming their bloodcurdling warcry “Deen! Deen! For the Faith!” and others claiming, at the pitch of their lungs, that the Company’s Raj was ended.