by M. M. Kaye
All that day while the shadows of the peepul tree and the cistern crawled across the paving-stones and the quiet dead, a shifting, peering crowd pressed ten deep about the courtyard, gaping and whispering. And towards evening half a dozen mehtars, men of low caste who act as sweepers and disposers of filth, heaped the stiffened, mangled bodies onto carts which dragged them to the bank of the placid Jumna, and flung them one by one into the river. Food for the crocodiles and the mud-turtles, the jackals and the scavenger birds: and a sign and a warning to a hundred villages as the bodies drifted down with the slow stream to be stranded on sand bars and burning-ghats and fish traps, or caught in the eddies that washed the walls of fortified towns.
Alex walked back to his bungalow in the sweltering heat and thought about the city and the district. There was no point in thinking about the sepoys; he could do nothing there, but as long as they remained quiet there were still things he could do among the uneasy, frightened, rumour-ridden population. Things that would have to be done on his own responsibility. ‘I shall have to have his authority, or they will stop me,’ thought Alex; and returned to his bungalow to make plans.
‘Niaz, are there any among the pultons who will stand by their salt?’
‘None that I would gamble a single pice of my pay on with any certainty of return,’ said Niaz flippantly. ‘But the Sikhs be the least unstable. They have no love for us Mussulmans and little liking for the Hindus. They strike always for themselves.’
‘And the Mussulmans?’
‘We strike for the Faith,’ said Niaz with a grin, ‘- save for such renegades as myself!’
‘Give me the names of a dozen Sikhs from the pultons. Those who be the least disloyal,’ said Alex, and returned to the Residency.
He found no difficulty in assisting the Commissioner to reach that state of intoxication where he would sign a paper without reading it - he signed many such. And on the following day, backed by the authority of a dozen mounted men (there was no cavalry in Lunjore but the cantonment was plentifully supplied with horses) he had ridden thirty miles to arrest an influential talukdar whose treasonable activities had been interesting him for some time past. Habib Ullah Khan had been taken by surprise, and a search of his house and his person had produced a remarkable quantity of ammunition and documentary information. His armed retainers had numbered some forty in all, and Alex had given them five minutes in which to lay down their arms. They had been three to one - nearer ten to one, if one counted the swarm of relatives, servants and villagers - but the sight of Alex sitting his horse in grim silence, watch in hand and counting the minutes, proved too much for them, and sullenly they threw down their arms.
There were too many weapons to allow for them to be taken away, and Alex watched while the growing heap of swords, muskets and jezails mounted to sizable proportions, with the addition of the very considerable quantity of arms taken from the house itself or discovered in the course of a ruthless search of the village. When the tally was complete he had ordered wood and dry grass heaped upon them and oil poured upon the pyre. It burned merrily, and the exploding cartridges provided a pyrotechnic display that enthralled the villagers.
Alex waited until he was sure that nothing but melted and twisted metal could be salvaged, and then rode back to the cantonments at a speed that left the majority of his escort toiling far behind him. The documentary evidence found in Habib Ullah Khan’s house and on his person, together with certain unguarded statements made by Habib Ullah Khan himself - now lodged in the jail - carried conviction even to the brandy-sodden intelligence of the Commissioner of Lunjore.
‘The head of the whole trouble in the city is Maulvi Amanullah of the Moti Masjid, and Abdul Majid, the Talukdar’s nephew. If we can get those two, the city will be left with only petty agitators, but no real leaders,’ said Alex. ‘But if we try to take them openly we shall have a first-class riot on our hands, and I do not think that the—’ He checked abruptly and then put what he had been about to say into different words: ‘I think it would be putting too much strain on the loyalty of the sepoys to ask them to fight a street action at this point. But if you will hold a Durbar, I think we can manage it. Call a conference of all the influential men in the city. The larger shopkeepers included. It’s the only hope.’
It had taken an hour and the best part of a bottle of brandy to persuade the Commissioner, and it had proved harder still to persuade the Military that the risk was worth taking, but the battle had been won by Colonel Moulson’s dislike of Alex, and Alex’s deliberate suggestion that Colonel Moulson did not trust his Regiment.
A stately conference had been held under the sweltering shade of a vast shamianah erected in the coolest part of the Residency grounds, and there were speeches and expressions of loyalty: genuine enough at the moment of their making, thought Alex wryly, remembering that ten minutes’ conversation with an agitator could swing the pendulum as far East as it was now West. Views were canvassed and listened to with respect, and the guests withdrew as the sun began to set. All except two of them. Maulvi Amanullah and Abdul Majid Khan, wealthy nephew of the Talukdar, were delayed in conversation, and when they would have left, were detained.
There was considerable uneasiness in the city that night. The patrolling Magistrate, who had been covertly assisting the work of spreading disaffection, found himself arrested, and the following morning a proclamation was issued calling upon all inhabitants of the city to give up their arms within twenty-four hours; followed by another, imposing a curfew. It was backed by the appearance of four heavy guns that were plainly to be seen in position commanding the Rohilkhand Gate and the main road to the city.
Deprived of its leaders the city capitulated, and the arms were collected - but not destroyed. ‘For God’s sake,’ begged Alex, ‘burn ’em. Blow ’em up! There’s enough stuff there to fit out an army. Now that we’ve got it, don’t let’s take any chances of it falling into their hands again.’
‘It could be in no safer place than in the care of the Military Police,’ snapped Colonel Moulson.
Alex bit back the retort he had almost made, and was silent. For the moment at least the danger was averted. The villages and the city would stay quiet - for just as long as the sepoys stayed quiet. ‘The thirty-first of May’ … Ten more days. If they would only disarm them now!
There had been no reply to the message he had dispatched to Suthragunj to be telegraphed to the Governor-General in Calcutta, and he did not know that it had never reached Lord Canning, but was gathering dust in a pigeon-hole while the junior official who had received it occupied himself with panic-stricken plans for evacuating his wife and family on the first ship to sail for Europe.
Calcutta was filled with panic in these days, as telegram after telegram, message after message, brought news of disaster. Delhi snatched from the hands of the British in an hour! Meerut, with one of the strongest British garrisons in India, bewildered and helpless and apparently unable to do more than protect itself from a peril that had passed from it to spread out like a forest fire over half India. A hundred pleas a day poured in upon Canning begging for troops - for British troops. ‘We cannot hold out without troops. Send us help.’ ‘The sepoys have mutinied. Send us troops.’
He did what he could, but it was little. Help would be slow in coming. They must fend for themselves yet awhile.
Lottie had arrived in Lunjore at last. Lottie and Mr Dacosta and Mrs Holly - that same Mrs Holly who had embarked on the steamship Sirius and had nursed Mrs Abuthnot and her daughters through a bout of seasickness.
Stout, cheerful, sensible Mrs Holly was considerably less stout and no longer cheerful. Her clothes hung in folds and her round pleasant face sagged in deep harsh lines; for she had seen her husband’s head struck from his body with a single swing of a sharpened tulwar in the blazing charnel house of Duryagunj, and only the sudden collapse of a burning roof-beam had saved her from a similar fate. Somehow - she could not remember how - she and Mr Dacosta had escaped from the car
nage and reached the Main Guard at the Kashmir Gate, where they had witnessed the final tragedy and escaped over the battlements. But although her stoutness and her cheerfulness had gone, her placid good sense remained. She had taken Lottie and Mr Dacosta under her wing and it was she who had cajoled the driver of the ekka into taking them up, and so brought them at last to Lunjore.
Mr Dacosta was an olive-skinned, middle-aged Eurasian, a clerk in a Government department. He had been wounded by a sword-cut and badly burned, but he had struggled on valiantly and had not complained. Mrs Holly had bound up his wounds and taken charge of him as she had of Lottie: ‘You know, ma’am,’ she explained to Winter, ‘it was just as well, them being sick. It give me something to do, and something else to think about than - than the things I seen that day. It was Miss Lottie ‘oo said you was ‘ere when that ekka-wallah says as ‘e was goin’ to Lunjore. She would ‘ave it that we must come ‘ere, an’ I don’t know but what she wasn’t right. We ‘ad no place special to go to, you see. She said - she said as you’d invited ‘er for a visit, pore young thing.’
‘Mrs Holly,’ said Winter unhappily, ‘do you - do you think she will remember?’
‘Some day,’ said Mrs Holly. ‘It’ll be a pity when she does, for she’s better off this way, and that’s the truth.’
For Lottie had been delighted to see Winter, and she had forgotten Delhi. She wondered sometimes, a little hazily, why it was that she should suddenly have decided to come to Lunjore. Something had happened, surely? But then she had always meant to visit Winter one day, and Edward— Why had she allowed Edward to send her on a visit just now? She had told him that she would not think of leaving him. Edward must have insisted. It was odd that she could not remember. Perhaps it was something to do with having a baby that made thinking an effort? It was easier not to think - so much easier. Thinking made her head ache, and with that ache fear would well up inside her like ice-cold water bubbling up out of an unseen spring, and her heart would begin to hammer and her breath come short. Yet there was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Winter was here. She was only paying a visit to Winter, and soon she would go back to her pretty bungalow in Meerut and be with Edward again. She must not think. It made her feel ill, and that was bad for the child. ‘You must not think of yourself, Lottie; think of the child’ … ‘You must rest more, Lottie; think of the child’ … ‘You do not eat enough, Lottie; think of the child.’ Edward and Mama and Mama’s friends had said such things so often, and they were right. She must think of the child. Edward’s child—
‘Edward wants a girl, you know,’ she confided to Winter, ‘but I want the first one to be a boy and just like Edward. He is to be christened Edward - I have quite made up my mind. But he will have to be Teddy, because we cannot have two Edwards. I am sure that Teddy will be exactly like his papa. Edward says that red hair is very catching!’
‘Alex,’ said Winter desperately, ‘do you think she will ever remember?’
‘One day,’ said Alex, and added as Mrs Holly had done: ‘She’s better off as she is at the moment. When is that baby due?’ He had frowned at the sight of the sudden colour that burned in Winter’s cheeks and had said impatiently: ‘You don’t really suppose that hitching a hoop higher and carrying round a shawl disguises a thing like that, do you?’
Winter had been taught that babies, until they were born, were an unmentionable subject in the presence of gentlemen, but the impatience in Alex’s voice made her ashamed of the blush. She said with as much composure as she could muster: ‘I think she expects it in about two months’ time. But Mrs Holly says one can never be sure with a first child, and that it may not be born until—’
She stopped abruptly and put her hands up to her hot cheeks. It was one thing to answer a direct question, but one did not - one could not - discuss such things with a man!
A corner of Alex’s mouth curved in the shadow of a grin and he said: ‘Don’t be missish, Mrs Barton. It’s a perfectly natural function. How soon can you leave?’
‘Leave? I can’t leave now! Lottie can’t go any further. Not after what she has been through. Dr O’Dwyer says that she must not be moved, but have complete quiet. He says that she could not support any further journeyings in this heat, and that he cannot understand why she has not had - a - a—’
‘A miscarriage,’ finished Alex with curt impatience. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of those too. Then you will not be leaving either?’
‘How could I?’
‘No,’ said Alex bleakly, ‘you could not. And I think in any case it is too late.’
For Alex had talked to Mr Dacosta - Mrs Holly avoided questions - and had heard the first true account of that last day of the British rule in Delhi. The ease with which Delhi had been captured had horrified him; as had the news that although young Willoughby had blown up the Magazine in the city rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the rabble, the far larger Magazine near the river above Metcalf House had apparently not been similarly destroyed, which meant that an ample supply of ammunition of every description would by now be at the disposal of the mutineers.
‘We looked all day for thee troops from Meerut,’ whispered Mr Dacosta, hoarse with weakness and fever, ‘but they did not come. If only twenty British troops had appeared before thee gates that morning, those men would have run away. They were veree fearful. Oah yess, they feared pursuit. But it is all lost - all lost. My whole family - Mama-ji and Clara and the butchas. Twelve we had, though five died when they were onlee small. My Clara, she cried for them. She would not have cried if she had known how she and thee others would die. It is not right that I should see that and still live. I was in thee office, Mister Randall, and when I heard that there was some juggra in thee city, I did not believe that it would be veree bad. I laughed at young Pereira and said, “Nonsense, man! It is nothing,” and I stayed at my desk. That is right, is it not, Mister Randall? One must stay by thee work and set an example when others are fearful. We cannot run away and leave thee work. But if I had run then, I might have saved them! No, no - that is not true. But I would have died with them. My poor Clara! She was veree jolly always. Always laughing and joking. Later - later I ran back through the streets and searched my house and saw - and saw … Mister Randall, they were all dead! Even Chiri, thee little one. She was onlee two, you know. Her they had … No, it is not good to have seen what I have seen and still live. It is not right!’
Two days later he had died, and Mrs Holly, who had been unable to weep for her Alfred, had wept for frail, middle-aged, sallow-skinned Mr Dacosta, who had conceived it his duty to stay at his work and set an example of courage.
Almost every night now there were mysterious fires in the cantonments, and though extra guards patrolled the area, they never made any arrests. The Police Lines burned down one night and then the Post Office, and the following night the bungalow of Lieutenant Dewar, whose wife and young family were only saved with difficulty, for they had been sleeping on the roof on account of the heat, and the fire, which broke out in the living-room, had taken firm hold before they were aroused.
It was difficult to allay panic among the families of the officers who lived in bungalows surrounded by large gardens where trees and shrubs provided cover for lurking incendiarists, and few women slept at night, while parents of children lay awake, starting in terror at every night noise.
Only the children showed no signs of strain. They grew pallid from the heat and the enforced inactivity in shuttered rooms during the day-time, but the children had always been favourites with the servants in the bungalows and the sepoys in the lines. They loved them, trusted them, spoke their language with far more fluency than their mother-tongue, bullied them and ordered them about, and ran to them with their woes. The Indians - any Indians - were their friends and allies and playmates, and they would no more have conceived of receiving harm at their hands than at the hands of their own parents. Less! for parents could be stern at times and administer punishment and rebuke, but Mali-ji and Ayah-ji, and Mak
han Khan and Piari Lal and Sobra Singh, Havildar Jewrakun Tewary and Sepoy Dhoolee Sookul, the dhobi, the dazi, the sweetmeat-seller and old Khundoo the chowkidar - never! From all these and a hundred more the children had never received anything but kindness and petting. But their mothers grew thin-faced with fear and their fathers walked with neck and shoulder muscles taut with strained alertness.
The three commanding officers still refused even to consider disarming their men, although now, when it was too late, they would have sent the women away - and dared not do so, because each day new reports of disaffection and murder came in. Lunjore was still quiet, with the tensed, twitching quietness of a cat at a mousehole, but it was not so with the districts that surrounded it. ‘They are safer here,’ said Colonel Gardener-Smith, whom the past ten days appeared to have aged by as many years. And even those who had previously made arrangements to send their families to the hills, cancelled them.
The Commissioner did not appear to notice that his wife had put off her departure. He noticed little in these days, and that little through an alcoholic haze. The whole situation was beyond him. He was afraid, and his fear drove him to his familiar refuge, the bottle. Even Yasmin had forsaken him. She had packed her clothes and her jewels and everything else she could manage to lay her hands on, and had slipped away one night with her three fat, half-caste children, her relations and her servants and Nilam, the blue macaw, and had not come back. Her defection had frightened the Commissioner far more than the nightly fires, the news from Delhi, the inaction of the Meerut Brigade or the endless tales of murder and massacre that trickled in daily from the outside world.
‘Rats leavin’ the sinkin’ ship!’ whispered the Commissioner hoarsely, staring into space with eyes that did not see the sly, inscrutable face of Iman Bux who had broken the news. ‘That’s what it is. They know. The rats know! We’re sinking. She knew it, and she’s gone - the lying, cheating black bitch!’