by M. M. Kaye
Winter lay and listened to those sounds, and could not sleep. Once she thought that she heard whispering voices, and remembering the night that she had listened in the bathroom, she slipped noiselessly out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom door. But there were no voices. Only the dry whisper of dead and dying neem leaves that drifted down through the hot, windless air and came to rest on the parched stone of the roof or the dry, brittle grass.
‘There are no tom-toms in the city tonight,’ thought Winter, listening by her open window. ‘And no conches. This is the first night for almost ten nights that I have not heard them. Perhaps it is the heat. It has not been really hot until now—’
Somewhere in the dark recesses of the house a clock struck one. Three more hours before she could dress and go out to ride by the river. Would it be cooler by the river? It was so hot here, and so airless. Because the noise of the flapping punkah had irritated her she had sent the punkah-coolie away, saying that she could sleep better without it. But when he had gone she wished that she could call him back, for the sweltering, breathless stillness that had closed down upon the room with the cessation of the slow sway of the punkah had been worse than the nerve-racking monotony of that creak and flap.
‘I will go up to the roof,’ she thought, turning restlessly away from the window. ‘It will be cooler up there.’ She groped for her slippers in the darkness, shook them mechanically for fear they harboured centipedes or scorpions, donned them, and slipped her arms into the wide sleeves of the muslin wrap that lay at the foot of her bed. There was a dim light burning in the hall, and a slow regular snuffle and snore came from a corpse-like figure who lay rolled in a thin cotton chuddah near the front door. Winter walked softly past it, and lifting the chik went down the verandah and up the steep flight of stone steps to the first level of the flat-topped roof.
It was certainly cooler here, but the brickwork and the stone were still warm to the touch, and the wall supporting the second and higher-level roof gave off waves of stored heat. She made a half-circuit of the lower level and came to where six stone steps led up to the larger area that covered the high main rooms of the Residency.
A shadow moved on the stonework and she looked up, startled, to see a small white figure standing above her by the narrow parapet that surrounded the upper roof. It was Zeb-un-Nissa.
Winter called up to her in a whisper, but the child did not answer or make any movement to show that she had heard. She was staring out across the garden and the distant bulk of the Residency gateway towards the south-west, and her face and body looked curiously rigid, as though she were straining to catch some far-away and almost inaudible sound.
‘I believe she’s sleep-walking,’ thought Winter, suddenly anxious. She waited for a moment or two, looking up at the child’s tense face, and then went up the steps very softly so as not to frighten her, for she had heard that it was harmful to waken a sleep-walker too suddenly. Zeb-un-Nissa did not move. Her eyes were wide and fixed, and standing beside her Winter could see that her small face was drawn with fear. She laid a gentle hand on the child’s thin arm and spoke softly: ‘Nissa—’
Zeb-un-Nissa did not start or turn, but she moved her head a little and looked at Winter as though she were perfectly aware of her; her eyes full of horror. ‘Hark!’ she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Dost thou not hear them?’ She began to shiver, and Winter put an arm about the frail little shoulders and drew the child against her: ‘What is it, piara? (darling) What is there to hear?’
The child pulled herself free and turned again to the parapet, clutching at the stone with small claw-like hands and listening to some sound that Winter could not hear.
‘It is the mem-log - the memsahibs. They are screaming. Canst thou not hear them scream? Surely thou canst hear them - there be children also … Listen! - Listen! They are killing the mem-log. Thou canst hear the sword cuts … and the flames. There! that was a child! - hark to its mother shriek! Ai! Ai!—’ She wailed aloud and put her hands over her ears, cowering down below the parapet and weeping. ‘I cannot bear to hear them scream! … They are killing the mem-log … they are killing the mem-log!’
Winter dropped to her knees and gathered the small wailing figure into her arms. ‘Nissa - Nissa! There is no one screaming. It is all quiet. Listen - there is no sound. It is only a dream, piara. Only a bad dream. There is no killing—’
She had heard no sound behind her, but a shadow fell across them, black in the moonlight, and she turned swiftly, her heart in her mouth, to see Akbar Khan, the gatekeeper, salaaming deferentially behind her. His face was dark against the moon and the night sky, but Winter could see the gleam of his teeth and the glitter of his eyes, and though her first momentary panic had died at sight of him, an odd flicker of fear went through her, making her pull the child closer.
‘Her mother missed the unworthy one from her bed,’ said Akbar Khan softly. ‘She has been sick with a fever these few days past and she must have left her bed while her mother slept. I am sorry that the child should have troubled the Lady-sahib.’
‘She has not troubled me,’ said Winter. ‘Let her be. She can sleep in my room for what is left of the night.’
‘Nay, nay!’ said Akbar Khan, shocked. ‘The Lady-sahib is the fount of all goodness, but it would not be seemly. And her mother is anxious, and sent me in search of her.’
Winter felt the frail body in her arms stiffen and writhe and become rigid, and then quite slowly it relaxed. Nissa sighed as her head nestled down against the shoulder that supported it, and looking down at the small face and feeling the shallow, even breathing, Winter realized that she had fallen asleep.
Akbar Khan reached down and took the child from her. ‘It was a fit,’ he said placidly. ‘She has always been a sickly child, and I fear that the time of her release is near. Her mother will grieve; but what is written is written.’ He cradled the thin body of his grandchild comfortably in his arms and said: ‘Her mother will be very honoured that the gracious Lady-sahib troubled herself with the child. Shall I call a servant to light the Lady-sahib back to her room?’
‘No,’ said Winter curtly. ‘I will remain here. Tell Zeb-un-Nissa’s mother that I will come tomorrow to see how the child fares.’
‘The Lady-sahib is my father and my mother,’ murmured Akbar Khan politely, and went away, his bare feet making no sound on the warm stone.
Winter watched him go and she shivered in the hot night air; a shiver that was not caused by cold but by uneasiness and foreboding. Akbar Khan had always been courteous and placid, and his greeting to her whenever she passed through the gateway contained no trace of the veiled insolence that she had sometimes detected in the manner of Conway’s other servants. But tonight there had been something in his manner that frightened her. No - not in his manner; there had been nothing wrong in that. In what then? In the fact that he himself had for some reason been afraid? In the glitter of the eyes in that shadowed, bearded face as they had stared down at the wailing, muttering figure of his little grand-daughter? No, she was being foolishly imaginative. But he had told a lie when he had said that Nissa had been sick for some days. That at least was not true, for she had seen Nissa daily at dawn.
What did the child think that she had heard? It was a dream, of course. She had been dreaming. And yet she had not behaved as Winter imagined that a sleep-walker would do. She had appeared to be aware of Winter, and awake; caught up in horror, but awake.
The servants said that Akbar Khan’s little grand-daughter had second sight, and they were afraid of her. And there had been that day when she had said - or seemed to say - that Alex would come to no harm; and he had come to no harm. But then she could not have known that he was in any danger. It had been a coincidence. ‘They are killing the mem-log, surely thou canst hear them scream?’ Surely, in this waiting stillness, the sound of a scream would carry from the cantonments beyond the trees? But there was no scream - no sound. Only silence.
Almost against her will Winter went to lean on th
e parapet as Nissa had done, and strained her ears to listen. But she could hear no sound in the silence; not even a jackal’s wail or the fall of a dead leaf. ‘She was dreaming!’ said Winter aloud and firmly. But she shivered again, and drawing her thin beruffled wrap tighter about her, she left the roof and returned to the hot, dark, silent rooms and her hot, tumbled bed.
Alex heard her running along the verandah of his bungalow at eleven o’clock on the following morning, and knew who it was even before the startled chupprassi lifted the chik and she was standing before him, tense and white-faced, her hands clutching at the edge of his desk.
There were five other men in the office, but she appeared to be oblivious of them. Alex stood up swiftly and dismissed them with a brief word, and they melted out into the sunlight. Winter did not see them go. She said in a hard, breathless voice that she fought to control: ‘Alex, do something! They’ve killed her! I know they’ve killed her! Conway won’t do anything. He says it’s all nonsense. It’s her grandfather - it’s Akbar Khan. He did it. I know he did it! Alex, you can’t let him do that and - and—’
Alex came round the desk and caught her by the shoulders and propelled her forcibly out of the office and into the living-room. He pushed her down into a chair, splashed a generous quantity of brandy into a glass and held it to her mouth while she drank it. Winter gasped and choked, but it took some of the shivering rigidity from her.
‘Now tell me.’
‘It’s Nissa,’ said Winter, tears standing in her eyes. ‘She - she had a nightmare last night. At least I think it was a nightmare. Akbar Khan said it was a fit—’ She described the happening on the roof: ‘Then he took her away, and I went to see her this morning and - and they said she was dead. They didn’t want me to see her, but I made them. Her mother was crying, and she tried to tell me something, but they pulled her away and said she was hysterical. I - I have never seen anyone dead before. Only Great-Grandfather, and he— But I don’t believe - I think they smothered her—’ Her voice broke suddenly on a shudder of horror.
Alex said quietly: ‘You can’t know that.’
‘No. They said she had had another fit, and— I don’t believe it! He heard what she said - Akbar Khan - and he was afraid. I know he was afraid. I knew it last night.’
Alex said: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He walked back with her in the full glare of the blazing morning and saw her go into the house, and an hour later he sent over a brief message asking if she would ride with him that evening.
Winter heard the wailing in the servants’ quarters for half that hot afternoon, and later a small wooden box was carried out by a side door in the wall to the Mohammedan burial ground outside the city; but she did not see it go.
‘There is nothing we can do,’ said Alex. ‘The child appears to have been subject to epileptic fits, and Dr O’Dwyer, whom I asked to look at the body, says that it is quite possible that she died as a result of one - with general debility and the heat as contributory causes. He was not prepared to take any further action on it. He said - and rightly - that there was enough tension in the place already without giving rise to any more alarm and excitement. I’m sorry, but that is all there is to it.’
Winter said in a small, hard voice: ‘And what do you think yourself?’
‘What I think has nothing whatever to do with it,’ said Alex at his curtest.
‘Then you won’t do anything?’
‘There is nothing I can do beyond what I have already done. The child was buried at four o’clock. Ab khutam hogai.’ (Now it is finished.) He turned his head and looked at the set white face beside him and said after a moment: ‘I’m sorry, Winter.’
She did not look at him and her own hurt made her desire to hurt him also. ‘No, you’re not. You didn’t know her. To you and Conway she was only another Indian child. A “native”; what does she matter? You would both of you have made more fuss over a dog, and a great deal more over a horse. Do you mind if we do not discuss it any more?’
Alex gave a slight shrug of his shoulders and said nothing further. He did not wish to discuss it himself. He knew something of Zeb-un-Nissa and her reputation. Epileptics were often regarded in India as being possessed of devils or favoured by God, and he had seen himself the power that the child had over wild creatures, though he had attributed it to the simple fact, unusual in a child, that she possessed infinite patience, never made any movement that was not slow and unhurried, and could sit motionless for hours at a time. But Winter’s account of what the child had said last night disturbed him.
It was not that he believed Zeb-un-Nissa to have had second sight, but it seemed to him quite likely that she was repeating something, or dreaming of something, that she had heard discussed. If so, that would account for Winter’s conviction that Akbar Khan had been afraid. If Akbar Khan had imagined the child to be talking of something she had overheard, she might well have been assisted to die. However, as O’Dwyer had not been prepared to interfere, there was nothing further that could be done about it. But the words that the child had said repeated themselves again and again in his brain as they had repeated themselves in Winter’s last night - ‘They are killing the mem-log! - they are killing the mem-log! …’
Perhaps it was just as well that Zeb-un-Nissa was dead, and that there had been no one to call out during that long, burning day that they could hear the mem-log screaming.
Delhi was far away, hidden behind the dust and the dancing heat-haze and the parched, blazing plains, and Mrs Abuthnot had not screamed as she died in the hot sunlight within the Kashmir Gate where so short a time before the officers from the cantonments by the Ridge had held that gay moonlight picnic. But little Miss Jennings, the Chaplain’s daughter, and young Miss Clifford, who had sung ‘Where are the flowers?’ to the accompaniment of her mandolin and Captain Larrabie’s guitar, had screamed and shrieked as the clawing, blood-stained hands snatched at them and the reddened sabres cut and slashed. And all through that long hot day the shrieks of women and the terrified screaming of children, the crackle of flames and the howl of the mob, had risen from Duryagunj - that once quiet quarter of Delhi where the European and Eurasian clerks and pensioners and Indian Christians had lived and were now dying in terror and agony in the blinding, merciless sunlight.
All through that long hot day frantic officers in Meerut - where the terror had broken out and from where the mutineers, after a night of murder, had ridden for Delhi - ground their teeth and waited, or pleaded for permission to ride after them. There were more British troops in Meerut than in almost any other garrison in India, and not all the native regiments had revolted; only let them follow up the mutineers and save Delhi before it was too late - or at least send warning! But General Hewitt was old and fat and infirm. The magnitude of the crisis had left him too bewildered to take any decisive action, and Brigadier Wilson, left to take the initiative, hesitated and was lost: ‘We cannot spare any men: we have to think of the women and children,’ said Brigadier Wilson uneasily. ‘We cannot risk a repetition of last night’s massacres. We must protect the remaining women and children.’ He would not sanction any pursuit …
All through that long hot day the Delhi garrison waited and hoped, watching the Meerut road for the help that they could not believe would fail them. And every moment that the help delayed, the mutineers of the 3rd Cavalry and those who had joined them grew bolder, and more and more of the city rabble gathered before the Palace where the tatterdemalion court of the aged King of Delhi grew hourly more confident.
‘It is true - it is true!’ urged Zeenut Mahal, the scheming favourite of old Bahadur Shah. ‘They say that they have killed every feringhi in Meerut; men, women, and children also. It must be true, for see - there is no dust cloud on the Meerut road. If any remained alive, think you they would not ride with all speed for Delhi to take vengeance? They are dead. They must all be dead. Let us kill all the feringhis in Delhi also, and then thou wilt be King indeed!’
‘It is true
- it must be true,’ said the scum of the city, sharpening swords and knives for the slaughter. ‘They have killed every feringhi in Meerut! Let us do the like here.’
‘It is true!’ yelled the men of the 3rd Cavalry, who had fled to Delhi in dread of pursuit and the vengeance that they had imagined to be on their heels and who now saw, with incredulity, that none pursued. ‘Did we not tell you that we have slain them all? The King! The King of Delhi! Help us, O King! Deen! Deen! Maro! Maro!’
Lottie had seen her father cut down by his own men, an expression of utter disbelief upon his rubicund, cherubic face, as though he could not and would not believe, even in the moment of his death, that this thing was possible. She had made no sound, because she herself did not believe what she had seen. Standing with her mother and a dozen other women and their children who had taken refuge at the Main Guard within the Kashmir Gate, she had seen him ride up to the gate with his men; placid and confident, but hurrying them forward so that this preposterous situation, the details of which he could not believe to have been correctly reported, should be put to an end at once. She had heard his fussy, fatherly voice - this pleasant, kindly little man of whom she knew so little - raised in expostulation when his men had checked before the gate. And a minute later she had seen him dragged from his horse and three bayonets plunged into his body.
His Subadar-Major and his Indian orderly had fired on the murderers and been themselves cut down, and Lottie, looking down dazedly from the rose-red walls where she had picnicked and walked in the peaceful autumn days of the vanished year, had thought how red and bright the blood looked on the hot white dust.