by M. M. Kaye
‘Among the sepoys?’
‘Good God, no! Among the ladies. They look upon him as a saintly man and a shining example to the less devout - such as Moulson!’
‘Moulson’s too much of a martinet,’ said Major Maynard gloomily. ‘Seems to be no happy medium! There’s old Gardener pottering around with his watering-can, cherishin’ his fellows as though they were tender plants, and Packer looking upon his as erring sheep to be gathered into the fold, while Moulson goes to the other extreme and slings his sepoys into irons if they so much as blink on parade. He’ll go too far one day, but there’s no denying that his lot are the best disciplined of the bunch. I’d say there was a lot less chance of them cracking than of Packer’s strayed lambs.’
‘Or your own?’ inquired Alex.
‘Oh, they’re all right,’ said Major Maynard easily. ‘But I’ll bear in mind what you say and keep a sharp eye on ’em. Personally, I’m inclined to think that the worst is past. I hear they hanged that Jack who touched off the Barrackpore business - Mangal Pandy? And the jemadar as well. That ought to stop the rot.’
‘I envy you your optimism,’ said Alex drily, and rode back slowly to his bungalow through the blinding sunlight and the hot shadows of the wide cantonment road.
36
The telegraph did not as yet operate in Lunjore, and so it was not until two days later that the news trickled over the border from Oudh that on Sunday, May 3rd, the 7th Regiment of Oudh Irregulars had refused to accept their cartridges, and had mutinied. Sir Henry Lawrence had apparently acted with great promptness and succeeded in disarming the Regiment - a good many of whom had absconded - and fifty of the ringleaders had been seized.
“‘It is too soon,”’ said Alex, rereading that laconic dispatch. “‘Be patient and await the auspicious day.”’ He crumpled up the tiny scrap of paper and flung it from him in sudden rage, and rode out in the heat of the day to visit one of the influential landowners in his district.
It was that night that Niaz woke him at one o’clock in the morning.
Alex slept out in the open in the hot weather, and had, in other years, slept in the garden. But this year his bed had been carried up nightly to the flat roof of his bungalow, and Alam Din slept across the stair that led up to it. Alex was a light sleeper at the best of times, and the whispers woke him. There was a quality of urgency about them that sent him out of bed and across the roof within less than ten seconds of his waking.
‘Kaun hai?’ (Who is it?)
‘Come down, Huzoor,’ whispered Alam Din. ‘It is Niaz, and I think he is sorely hurt.’
Alex ran down the stairs and his bare foot slid on something wet. He knew the feel of that sticky wetness of old, and caught the dark figure that sagged against the bottom of the stair, and said sharply to Alam Din: ‘Take his feet.’
‘No,’ gasped Niaz with an attempt at a laugh. ‘I can walk. Give me thy shoulder, brother.’
Alex thrust Alam Din ahead of him: ‘Light a lamp in my room - quickly! Where art thou hurt?’
‘In the back, to the left. But it has missed its mark. Do not fear.’
Alex pulled Niaz’s right arm about his shoulder and half-carried him to the bedroom, where he could see the flicker of a light as Alam Din lit the oil-lamp and drew the curtains. He could feel the warm wetness that soaked Niaz’s clothing, and in spite of the heat of the May night he found that his hands were cold with rage. The wound was an unpleasant one, but as Niaz had said, it had missed its mark, for it had been deflected by the shoulder-blade and Niaz was suffering more from loss of blood than from anything else. He had walked a mile or more after he had been knifed.
‘It was in the lines,’ said Niaz. ‘I had—’
‘Quiet,’ said Alex curtly. ‘Tell me later. We will bind thee first.’ He cut away the blood-soaked clothing, and with Alam Din’s assistance washed and bound up the wound and sent him off to brew strong tea.
‘I can go no more to the lines,’ said Niaz ruefully. ‘It is finished. For long they have not trusted me, and I too have carried a knife for fear of this thing. And then to be caught off guard like a fledgling! Pah!’ He grimaced with pain and drank the hot, sweet liquid thirstily.
‘Who was it?’
‘I do not know. I went to talk with those whom I thought to be friends of mine in the lines of the 93rd, and to listen. But tonight they would not talk, and they looked at me out of their eyes, sideways, and there was a constraint upon them. There was a bairagi in the lines - a sadhu. I saw him standing in the shadows of a hut. He stayed silent and did not move as I passed, and I made as though I had not seen him. When I came away I looked to see if he was still there, but he had gone, and I put my hand upon my knife and walked as a cat walks in an alley full of dogs.’
Niaz grinned to hide another spasm of pain and drank again, his teeth chattering on the rim of the mug. ‘There is a lamp by the peepul tree at the turn of the lines, by the bunnia’s shop,’ he said between mouthfuls, ‘and there was a gun lying in the dust … A revolver such as the sahibs carry. A child’s trick that should not have deceived a babe, yet I stooped for it. I heard the step but I could not avoid the blow. Had I not heard it, that knife would have struck true.’
Alex said: ‘Was there nothing to tell who it was?’
‘I did not see. I fell, and turned as I fell, but he had gone like a shadow, and I did not wait. But I think it was the sadhu.’
‘Why?’
Niaz wrinkled his nose expressively and Alex nodded. He too knew the characteristic smell of the ash-smeared, unwashed ascetics of India.
Niaz had a touch of fever the next day, but the ugly wound had bled itself clean, and he suffered remarkably few ill-effects from it. The weather continued unusually mild, and all over India women who had intended to leave for the hills delayed and put off the day of departure while the nights remained cool, and the Commissioner of Lunjore informed his wife that he could not arrange for her to leave for the hills before the twenty-second of the month. It seemed that Mrs Gardener-Smith and Delia, Mrs Hossack and her four children, and a Captain and Mrs Batterslea and their young family were all leaving on that date, and therefore it would be more convenient if she were to travel with them, since Captain Batterslea’s presence would save him from having to arrange for an escort for her.
Winter acquiesced without interest. She would have gone willingly enough if Lottie or Sophie and Mrs Abuthnot had gone with her, because she would then at least have been more assured as to their safety, but she could not feel disturbed as to her own. She still rode every morning before sunrise and again in the cool of the evening, but she saw nothing of Alex for several days and heard nothing of him until Colonel Moulson remarked in her hearing one evening that he understood that Captain Randall had taken shooting-leave.
‘So much for all this hot air he has been talking,’ said Colonel Moulson with scorn. ‘Shows how much he believes in it if he can chuck his responsibilities and go off after jungle-cock. Tried to set us all by the ears, and when he found he couldn’t panic us, goes off and sulks in the terai. I wonder you let him go, Con. I’m damned if I’d have done so! What that cub needs is five years of regimental soldiering under a CO. who’d knock the conceit out of him. Wish I had him under my command!’
‘You have got your knife into him, haven’t you, Fred?’ said Mrs Cottar pleasantly. ‘Now I wonder why? Did he snap some lovely creature from under your nose? Con used to feel quite kindly towards him until the Aurora Borealis preferred him to his Excellency the Commissioner - didn’t you, Con? But ever since then he’s gone sour on him too - just like you. How vain you men are!’
The Commissioner cast her a glance of dislike and said sourly: ‘I don’t know why I put up with you, Lou. As for you, Fred, to hear you talk anyone ‘ud think I’d given the man a month’s leave instead of three days.’
‘You can give him three years for all I care,’ said Colonel Moulson. ‘Place is a sight better off without him. Your deal—’
Alex re
sented the lost days considerably more than Colonel Moulson, but there were certain preparations that he thought it necessary to make, and they could not be made in a night. Niaz, he considered, could hardly have selected a worse moment to be laid up with a knife wound, but time was too short to wait until he had recovered. Niaz himself had angrily asserted that he had taken no harm, and had begged to go with him, but Alex had been adamant. He would take Alam Din and, for the look of the thing, his shikari, Kashmera; those two could do all that was necessary, and he would need Niaz later on.
A thin-shanked, grizzled little man, wearing a vast dust-coloured puggari and a tattered coat ornamented with the tarnished buttons of a long-forgotten regiment of Indian Cavalry, arrived at Alex’s bungalow in the dark hour before dawn, and Alam Din coughed discreetly outside the bedroom door and murmured: ‘Huzoor, the shikari has come and the trap is at the door.’ Kashmera knew more about game, both furred and feathered, and more about the dense miles of jungle, than any other man in the district, and he had often accompanied Alex and Niaz on shooting camps. He and Alam Din loaded the trap by the light of an oil-lamp with a variety of packages and several guns.
‘Let be!’ said Alex sharply to Niaz, who had heard the sound of the wheels as the trap was brought round from the stables and had come out to lend a hand. He took a small square box quickly from Niaz’s hands: ‘Thy time will come. There is the road to be thought of, and thou art of no use to me maimed. Keep to thy bed while I am gone.’
Niaz jerked his head at the shikari and said in an undertone: ‘Does he know?’
‘Not yet. But he will see that we do not bring back what we take out, and so I must tell him something … though not all. We will go upriver and make camp beyond Bardari as though we would shoot kala hirren, and Alam Din and I will come down by boat and at night, which will be easy. It is the getting back that will be hard, because the stream will be against us. See that no bairagis visit thee while I am gone!’
Three days later they returned after dark, with the horns of a blackbuck and a dozen partridges on the floorboards of the trap. Kashmera had been driving, for both Alex and Alam Din were sound asleep: they had had little sleep, and then only in the day-time, during the last three days.
‘How is the wound?’ inquired Alex on the following morning.
‘It is healed,’ said Niaz impatiently. ‘It was but a flesh wound. How much longer do I stay here?’
‘For another week, I think,’ said Alex. He smiled a little grimly at Niaz’s face of disgust and said softly: ‘It is in my mind that thou wert so sorely wounded that I must ride abroad with a syce for some days yet, so that all will know that thou art still a sick man and unable to go about.’
‘Aah!’ said Niaz, and smiled. ‘What now?’
Alex explained. ‘… and if thou and one other go, on foot and by night, and while it is known that thou art sick, I think that the thing may be done.’
‘So do I also,’ said Niaz. ‘Give out that I am like to die. That should please those dogs in the lines! Who goes with me? Yusaf?’
Alex considered the matter, frowning, and after a moment or two said curtly: ‘It will have to be.’
He found Winter sitting under the punkah of the small drawing-room on the following morning, writing a letter to Lottie. It was Sunday, and she had just returned from church. Her formal dress of grey, white-spotted mousseline de chine looked fresh and cool, and her discarded bonnet lay on the sofa. She looked up in surprise when he entered and he saw her cheeks flush with sudden colour. She seemed to be aware of this herself, for she stood up rather quickly and turned so that her back was to the light.
‘I came to ask if I might borrow Yusaf for a few days,’ said Alex, dispensing with formalities. ‘Niaz is sick and there is a certain amount of work I need done that I think Yusaf could do for me. It will only be for a few days. Can you spare him?’
‘Yes, of course. But—’
‘Thank you. It will mean that you will have to take one of the Commissioner’s syces with you when you ride. Don’t go too far afield, and stay away from the city. I’ll send him back as soon as I can.’
He turned to leave and Winter said: ‘I heard that you had taken shooting-leave. When did you get back?’
‘Last night,’ said Alex uncommunicatively, and left.
The door closed behind him and Winter regarded it with a smouldering eye. ‘There are times,’ she said aloud and deliberately, ‘when I am almost glad that I once hit you!’
She returned to her desk and the sheet of letter-paper that so far bore only the address, and picking up her pen, dipped it in the standish. But she did not write. She sat nibbling the end of it thoughtfully while the minutes ticked by and the ink dried on the nib.
The punkah creaked and flapped gently and monotonously overhead and a pair of gecko lizards on the wall behind the desk chirruped a small, shrill accompaniment. In the garden outside, a köil, ‘the brain-fever bird’, was singing its maddening hot-weather song on a long, rising scale: brain fever … brain fever … brain fever! sang the köil, finishing at the top of the scale and starting all over again at the bottom, as tirelessly monotonous as the creaking of the punkah. It was hot today. Hotter than it had been for many days, and in every room the doors and windows had been closed before sunrise to keep in the cooler air of the night and exclude the burning heat of May. ‘There will be no more cool nights now until the bursat (the rains),’ Iman Bux had said that morning.
‘I was a fool not to have sent in m’ papers before,’ grumbled the Commissioner, mopping at the sweat that trickled down his thick neck. ‘I don’t believe that dam’ man Canning is coming on tour this year after all. Pretty fool I shall look if he don’t - stewing through another hot weather for nothing! Should have gone a month ago. No - take that damned coffee away and give me a cold drink. Hair of the dog!’
He mixed champagne and brandy and started the day with a ‘Raja’s peg’.
Alex sat at his desk in the room that he used as an office, and listened with only half his attention to the droning voice of the head clerk who was reading out a lengthy and involved petition. ‘We have only one chance,’ thought Alex, ‘and that is that the ringleaders will not be able to hold ’em until the day they have set. They’re too worked up. Some ass will put his foot in it somewhere, and there will be a premature explosion which will sound the alarm. But if it does go off on time, and all over India, they can write our obituaries now …’
In far-away Calcutta a senior Member of the Supreme Council finished reading Sir Henry Lawrence’s telegraphed report on the mutinous behaviour of the Oudh Irregulars, and picked up his pen. ‘The sooner this epidemic of mutiny is put a stop to, the better,’ wrote the Member of the Supreme Council. ‘Mild measures won’t do. A severe example is needed … I am convinced that timely severity will be leniency in the long run …’
In a large bungalow in the Cantonment of Meerut, forty miles to the north-east of Delhi, Colonel Carmichael Smyth, the commanding officer of the 3rd Light Cavalry, sat at breakfast. ‘The sentence was entirely just!’ said Colonel Smyth. The Colonel was a man whose views were identical with those expressed by the senior Member of Council, and hurrying back from leave to set an example, he had ordered that fifteen picked men from each troop were to parade on the following morning to learn to use the new cartridges. ‘I’m not standing any dam’ silly nonsense from my men!’ said Colonel Smyth.
The ninety men were duly paraded - and eighty-five of them had refused to handle the caste-breaking cartridges. They were immediately tried by court-martial and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, and a parade of all troops had been ordered by the aged divisional commander, Major-General Hewitt, to watch the sentence put into execution. For hour after hour, in the broiling sun on the Meerut parade-ground, the regiments stood in stony-faced silence to watch eighty-five picked men of a picked regiment stripped of their uniforms and fettered one by one with the iron fetters that they would drag with them through ten dreary yea
rs of captivity; and when at long last the ordeal was over, the terrible, clanking file of manacled men were marched away in the bright merciless sunlight, calling and crying to their comrades: ‘Is this justice? Because we will not lose our caste so that none of our own will speak with us or eat with us, must we suffer this fate? Is there no justice? Help us, brothers! Help us!’
‘Entirely just!’ snapped Colonel Smyth, helping himself to scrambled eggs. ‘Harsh? Nonsense! These mutinous fools need a sharp lesson. This will serve to stop the rot.’
‘Wait, brothers! Wait … wait. Have patience. Remember the auspicious day! It is too soon!’ urged the agents of Ahmed Ullah the Maulvi of Faizabad; of Dundu Pant the Nana of Bithaur; of Kishan Prasad …
‘Art thou of the rissala?’ shrilled a harpy in the Street-of-the-Harlots in Meerut city to a group of prospective clients as night fell. ‘The 3rd Rissala, sayest thou? Then thou canst not enter here. Out - out! We do not lie with cowards! Where are thy comrades who eat dirt and walk in chains? They were men! But thou—! Chicken-hearts - children - cowards all! Pah!’ She spat in derision, and a chorus of jeering painted faces applauded her from a dozen latticed windows and balconies, screaming like peacocks: ‘Out! Out! - we lie with no cowards! If ye indeed be men and not the boneless babes we take you for, release your brothers from bondage!’
Their taunts and jeers pursued the men of the 3rd Cavalry through the hot, crowded, snarling bazaars of Meerut city, driving them from rage to a murderous frenzy.
Winter dipped her pen once more into the standish and added a date below the address that she had already written at the top of the blank sheet of letter-paper: ‘Sunday, May 10th 1857. Dear Lottie …’
37
The night was hot and very still. So still that every small sound of all the small sounds that go to make up silence separated itself from its fellows, and emphasized that stillness. The cheep of a musk-rat; the dry scrape of a scorpion crawling up the wall; the flitter of a bat’s wings in the dark verandah; the drone of the mosquitoes and, from very far away, the echo of a jackal-pack which howled on the plains beyond the river.