Nightrunners of Bengal

by John Masters

  Joanna purred, “She’s a dear sweet girl, but so--intense. She really ought to get married, Isobel, don’t you think?”

  “I must apologize, Joanna--and to you too, Rodney. She’s been like this--hard, almost harsh--since she came back from working with Miss Nightingale in the Crimea. You don’t see the true Caroline until something very bad happens. Soldiers back from Scutari came to our house in London, where she was living then, just to thank her. And when I broke my thigh and everything went wrong, and they thought I was going to die, Caroline hardly left me for six months.”

  Joanna’s face showed that praise of Caroline Langford could not hold her interest. She nodded her head as Lady Isobel finished speaking, and said, “How good and kind.”

  She lowered her voice. “I think we have a very suitable husband for her here in Bhowani.” She gestured slightly with her fan.

  From the corner of his eye Rodney saw Swithin de Forrest, Victoria’s father, walk by, dabbing at his lips with a white handkerchief. God, Joanna was a cat sometimes. De Forrest had a thin nose and flat bloodless face, the skin shaped close on the bone structure; he was dead, inside and out, like a stick of cankered wood. Caroline Langford might be a nuisance, but she was too young and alive to associate with de Forrest’s total disillusionment.

  Joanna was pleased with herself and caressed him with warm eyes. There was something of champagne there, and something of triumph. What victory did she think she’d won, and in what war? Yet her full beauty, smiling and golden-crowned, hit him with physical force and made him catch his breath; she was his wife. Tonight she’d forget; tonight after all these months they could start again, find again a lost path. Tonight there would be no excuses.

  He jumped up. “I must go and get some sleep. Are you coming, Joanna?”

  He asked the question shyly, but surely he didn’t have to; surely her eyes meant what they said?

  She leaned back in her chair. “I think I’ll stay on, Rodney, if Isobel does not mind an extra lady in her party. Geoffrey can escort me home. Is Mr. Dellamain going to Kishanpur?”

  The others talked aimlessly among themselves, pretending not to overhear. The light shone on Geoffrey’s sandy hair and long horse face. The blood mounted in Rodney’s neck and he answered curtly, “Yes, but he won’t leave the ball just yet. You may get your last dance. Good night. Good night, everybody.”

  He did not wake when Joanna came in, but she was there beside him when Lachman’s repeated pulling at his foot aroused him. A lamp burned with a yellow light, the low voice droned on ”Huzoor, huzior,sarhe panchh baje sarhe panchh baje, huzoor . . .”

  He sat up slowly, rubbed his eyes, and looked at his half-hunter on the bedside table. Half-past five o’clock it was. He stirred the tea in a cup on the table and yawned. The company would be on parade in an hour. He dressed quickly while the feet of many servants padded about the house. He leaned over Joanna; she was warm and animal with the smell of sleep, and he could not be angry with her. He kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear, “Good-bye, darling. I hope I’ll be back soon.”

  She stirred and spoke, her voice blurred in the pillow. “G’bye--don’ be long--don’ li’ being lef here ‘lone.”

  She subsided back into sleep, and Rodney tiptoed along to the dining-room. Two beef chops were swimming in congealed gravy on a cold plate. That fool of a cook must have got up and prepared them at three a.m. He couldn’t face them, forced down a thick slice of bread, drank some more tea, and went out into the open.

  A sharp cold edged the morning, and the three servants, perched on top of the load in the bullock cart, had muffled themselves in blankets. He mounted Boomerang and rode down the drive, the groom at his stirrup, the cart lagging behind.

  A mist carpet lay low over the river, and tendrils of mist entwined the trees and shops of the Little Bazaar. The Silver Guru sat under his peepul, his eyes open and fixed into the north. Rodney made to pull up and ask him what he meant by yesterday’s words to the crows--but it wouldn’t be any use; besides, he would feel such a fool. He wondered what the Commissioner had said to Miss Langford.

  The company stood lined up at attention on the parade ground, awaiting his arrival. He gave the order to stand easy and called out the two Native Officers--Subadar Narain Pande, who was his second-in-command, and Jemadar Godse.

  “Ram ram, sidar log! Is everything ready, Subadar-sahib?”

  Narain was a big man, with sternly accentuated frontal bone and cheekbones, and drooping grey moustaches. Promotion did not come quickly in the Bengal Army; age had bowed his shoulders. He saluted.

  “Yes, sahib. Two sepoys are sick, but otherwise we are full strength.”

  “And the baggage train? Rations for fourteen days? Ammunition? A hundred rounds a man in reserve in the train? Good! Fall in, please.”

  The Native Officers saluted, turned right, and marched to their places. Rodney raised his voice. “Stand to your front! Number Three--Company! Form--fours! Left! Right wheel, quick march! By the left--left wheel, forward.”

  He led them north again up the Pike, passed the Little Bazaar and the motionless Guru, and turned right along the main Bhowani-Kishanpur road. The wide unmetalled surface, deeply rutted, grass-verged, and lined like the Pike with a double avenue of bulky dark trees, ran due east past the northern outskirts of Bhowani City, and on out into cultivated land. The column of men marched, silent and sleepy, behind him. A skein of wild duck clattered overhead and swirled up river. Yesterday’s rain had laid the dust, and the road stretched brown and red ahead. The marching sepoys began to wake up as the sun swung higher above the Sindhya Hills; the blue smoke of morning fires rose from the huts they passed among the fields.

  An old man peeped out of a clean white house, shaded his eyes, popped back inside, and scurried out to stand at last on the side of the road, holding up a sword in his two hands. Rodney leaned down to touch it as he passed, and smiled, and said, “Ram ram, Father. Be of good health!” Everyone in Bhowani knew the rheumy old fellow. He was said to be over ninety, and it was probably true, for as a sepoy in the 24th B.N.I, he had helped to capture a French colour at Cuddalore in 1783. After reaching the highest of the three ranks of Native Officer, subadar-major, he had retired from the service--and that was long since. He shuffled out to greet every body of troops that passed his land, and if given half a chance would quaver on happily for hours about Wellesley, Lake, Combermere--all the shot-silk fabric of the past. It troubled Rodney, as he looked back along the column, to see the old man bending in salaam to the Native Officers. It should have been the other way round, for they were younger, of lower rank; he was loaded with years and battles --and he had been a subadar-major of Bengal Native Infantry. Of course, they were high-caste. The old man would be low, as most of them were in those old days. That explained it. Just the same, Rodney did not like it.

  The sun was well up now. Ahead, a thirty-mile-wide tongue of the Sindhya Hills separated the valleys of the Kishan and the Cheetah. Where the road entered the hills, the jungle began. There would be parrots, green pigeon, and troops of swinging monkeys; men working in tiny cultivated strips cut out among the trees; little villages with bright, shy women at the well; water wheels creaking as the oxen turned them; perhaps the garish music of a wedding procession. He’d take out his shotgun when they reached the day’s stage at Adhirasta and try for jungle fowl. He swung up with an imaginary gun at another skein of duck and whistled with cheerful tunelessness in time to the plod of Boomerang’s hoofs.

  It was a lustrous and silver-gilt morning; he was riding away from Bhowani, and the tea parties, and the whist parties, and the bezique parties, and the interminable talk of sepoys’ boots, officers’ pay, and ladies’ virtue. Caversham’s tremulous tenor dropped back with the furlong stones, and Bulstrode’s bass grunts, and McCardle’s dour Calvinism, and Geoghegan’s Catholic humour. He liked these things; they were Bhowani, Anglo-India. Yet--another India lay ahead and waited for him, a princely, Indian India. Caroline Langford’s
metaphor came to him; now, unless he deliberately shut his eyes, he would see into another room of the palace.

  4

  Shortly after noon on the next day, January the second, the jungle fell back on either hand, and he rode out into the open. Ragged fields sloped gently down to a curtain of trees. The trees grew along the bank of the Kishan River, and the grass under them was dotted with flat stones, black and grey piles of wood ash, and dustings of straw; here generations of travellers had rested and fed themselves and their animals before crossing the river. A clumsy barge floated at the edge of the water; in it the three ferrymen squatted round a hookah with a cheap pottery bowl and a hollow bamboo stem.

  A troop horse, saddled and heel-picketed, cropped the grass; a trooper of the 60th stood by its head, scanning the oncoming infantry. He stepped forward as Rodney trotted up, and gave him an envelope. Rodney read, while the trooper shouted to the ferrymen to make ready.

  Capt. R. Savage, 13th Rif., B.N.I.

  Sir:--The Commissioner has arranged accn. for your coy. in the fort. My troop arrived midday yesterday and is quartered in the Kishanpur Cavalry barracks outside the city. I am in fort. The Commissioner has intelligence from Dewan that there will be a riot tonight in the city, and urges that you make all speed. I do not consider situation serious.

  I have the honour to be, Sir,

  Yr m.o. servant

  W. P. Mervuglio, Cornet, 60th B.L.C.

  11 o’clock a.m. January 2nd, 1857, at Kishnapur Fort.

  Rodney folded the message away in his sabretache, dismounted, and ordered embarkation to begin at once. It would take three trips to get the company over; he’d better cross with the first party, ride straight to the fort, and find out how frightened the Commissioner really was.

  Grunt by grunt the ferryman poled the barge out into the stream. Rodney stood in the bow, between the horses’ heads, and in mid-channel passed from the direct power of the Honourable East India Company into the dominion of the Rajah of Kishanpur. Trees on the far bank hid the city, which the trooper had told him lay straight ahead. Half a mile upstream, to his right, the river curved. There the red stone blocks of the Rawan family’s fortress-palace frowned down on the reach of smiling water. The high walls slid sheer from the battlements into the river, and the sky behind, a towering range of white cumulus cloud, emphasized the palace’s angularity and dramatic bulk.

  They were approaching the east bank ferryhead, and he saw that two roads led off from the crude ramp and landing platform--one straight on through the belt of trees, presumably to the city; the other right, and along the bank. He ran ashore with a light heart and a few minutes later, the trooper trotting a little behind him, he came to the fort. They skirted the shadowed north wall, seventy feet high, and rode round to the main gate in the east wall, the side away from the river. The double doors of iron stood open; two yellow-coated Kishanpur soldiers came clumsily to the Present, and they clattered past into the dim tunnel of the entry port. The port turned twice at sharp angles, then they rode out into a sunny courtyard.

  Cloistered passageways surrounded it, and a fountain played in the middle. Julio’ sat on the balustrade of the fountain, pointing with his finger at a book open on his knee. The Indian beside him was bigger than the Dewan, and wore the same sort of primrose coat and black hat; he looked bored and puzzled, and Rodney knew that Julio, who was an amateur ornithologist, had been asking him whether he’d seen such-and-such a bird here. He wanted to smile, but this was business. He composed his face and walked Boomerang slowly up to them.

  Julio dropped the book, jammed his cap hurriedly on his head, and saluted. “Good morning--I mean good afternoon, sir. I’m glad you have arrived--er, this is Prithvi Chand, the Captain of the Rajah’s Bodyguard.”

  “Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Captain.” Rodney looked down from the saddle. “Mr. Mervuglio, why have Kishanpur troops been left on main gatehouse guard if there is any doubt of their loyalty? Where is my company supposed to go?”

  A woebegone expression settled on Julio’s face. The captain made to interrupt. Rodney raised his hand. “I will speak to you later, Captain. Well?”

  Julio explained, waving his hands. “I didn’t like it, sir, but the Dewan told Mr. Dellamain that they’re less likely to make trouble if no sign is given that they’re distrusted. The Dewan has allotted your company several rooms over there.” He pointed to the south cloister, where doors could be seen, and a dark passage.

  “Who the devil is the Dewan to order Bengal troops about! Oh, it’s not your fault, don’t look so worried--and anyway we’ll make short work of these people”--he glowered at the captain--”if they start trouble. But I wish the civil would keep their long noses out of military matters. Where is Mr. Dellamain? All right, I’ll report to him when I’ve had a look round.” He eased his chin chain, turned to Prithvi Chand, and said sternly, “Please show me the fort now, Captain.”

  He asked first to see the quarters allotted to his sepoys. They were dark cells, but clean and high-vaulted and certainly no worse than the ancient buildings of the Bhowani lines; they’d do. Then Prithvi Chand called for a torch, and ran himself to fetch it when one didn’t immediately materialize. They traversed the fort from bottom to top.

  The lower passages were an unlighted damp maze. At the end of one there had long ago been a water gate and a portcullis, but now the portcullis hung rusted in its slide and the passage ended against a stone wall where the gate had been removed and built over. Down there too, in the immense thickness of the west wall, were the cells and oubliettes. Tens of thousands of bats inhabited the darkness and crawled over one another on the ceilings; the dank air was acid with the taint of their droppings. And it was cold; even in the heat of May it would have been cold.

  Higher up, the passages bent and turned, sometimes running along the courtyard side of the rooms, sometimes in the outer wall. At one place, on the highest of the four stories, a gold curtain hung across the passage. A sentry of the Bodyguard stood there, leaning on a rusty old Tower musket. The captain explained nervously that this was the entrance to the zenana and the Rani’s rooms, where no adult male was permitted. Rodney hesitated--he’d want to know the geography there, in case of serious trouble; but Prithvi Chand had contracted a violent fit of the trembles and seemed about to burst into tears, so he turned away; it could wait. After a glance round the broad walk which circled the roof behind the crenellated stones of the breastwork, he asked to be shown to the Commissioner’s quarters on the fourth floor. At the door he dismissed the captain with a word of thanks, knocked, and entered.

  The Commissioner sat at an ormolu-encrusted table in the right-hand of the room’s three wide windows, writing with a quill pen. Isfahan rugs covered the floor, and a large divan stood under the centre window. It was a light and luxurious apartment, obviously decorated and furnished for the use of British visitors. From the window the Commissioner could look out across the river into British territory. The door at the left must lead to a bathroom cell.

  Mr. Dellamain greeted him with a friendly wave and, as Rodney began to make his report, swung round to listen. Rodney did not like him, and outside the door had summoned up reserves of aversion in order to fight the more forcefully for his views. But here in this cool sunny place, alone at his work, the Commissioner was not a man to be disliked. He was a middle-aged, cultured, intelligent gentleman; Rodney felt his resolve weakening. He tried to hold his ground--in vain: Dellamain discussed the problem of the gatehouse guard with such good humour and good sense that Rodney at last gave in cheerfully and told himself he’d been a fool.

  After they had talked, almost like friends, about the march and the investigation of the fort, Rodney said, “Do you think there is going to be a riot, sir?”

  The Commissioner leaned back and rubbed his chin. When he answered he spoke simply and without the usual fruity overtones in his voice. Rodney decided, with a small recurrence of malice, that one military officer was not a sufficient audience to warr
ant the Commissioner’s vox humana stop.

  “I fear so, Savage. The Rani is sure of it.”

  “I’ll stand by, then. May I go out now in daylight to reconnoitre the streets?”

  “Better not. It might precipitate trouble. The Rani tells me that the city’s in a very uncertain mood. The Dewan or Prithvi Chand will accompany you if you have to go. We’ll hope for the best. May I know your plan?”

  Rodney had thought it over during the afternoon and replied at once. “If you send me out I’ll leave my quarter guard in the fort, sir, and take the rest. I’ll order Mervuglio’s troop to stand by in their barracks, but won’t call on them unless it becomes clear they’ll be needed.”

  Dellamain nodded and looked out of the window. Sitting in a chair opposite, Rodney saw him three-quarter front; the light fell diagonally, and suddenly, as one sees a face in a fire, he was looking at a frightened young man with a weak mouth. He started involuntarily; the heavy jowl, the massive port were nature’s shields shaped by the years to replace youth’s vanishing resilience. Behind the barricades there lived a pleasant, pliable, clever, but perpetually fearful human being. He wondered, now, that he could ever have thought otherwise; the flecked soft eyes ought to have told him. He said gently, “You may rely on me, sir.”

  Outside the door he realized he had never used such a theatrical phrase in his life before. He shook his head and hurried down to the courtyard.

  At midnight, sitting on the camp bed in his ground-floor room, he found that he could not concentrate on the adventures of Marco Polo. He shut the book with a snap and began to stride up and down the floor, his spurs jingling. The company had settled in by two o’clock that afternoon, and were sleeping under arms in their quarters across the courtyard. Through the evening the tension in the fort had mounted, while yellow-coated officials scurried in and out with messages and orders. Crowds were reported gathering here, there, and everywhere, and the Dewan had worked himself into a frenzy; but when Rodney climbed up to look from the battlements the white city a few hundred yards to the north-east seemed quiet. He wanted to go and see for himself.