by M. M. Kaye
When the sun had set Alex would go off to set fishing-lines and traps while the three women bathed in the river, returning to eat the evening meal; and because he had taken to wearing nothing but a loin-cloth these days, his body was burnt as brown as his face and he could have passed anywhere for a Pathan. He had been out less for news than for food of late, and but for the relentless, exhausting heat the days passed peacefully enough.
Alex, like Winter, found the heat unpleasant but bearable. But to Lou, and more especially to Lottie, it was an interminable torture. They watched the skies daily for signs of the monsoon, and longed for rain; but though clouds would sometimes gather and they would hear thunder rumble along the horizon and see the heat-lightning flicker, no rain fell to temper the intolerable heat, and they lived for the early mornings and the late evenings when they could lie and soak in the coolness of the river.
Alex became afraid of the river, and he drove in stakes about the narrow curve of the little beach where they bathed, in case their continued use of it might attract the attention of a mugger, and that one day one of them might be dragged down by yellow-toothed jaws into deep water. But there was too much food in the river these days for the muggers to bother with live prey. The bodies of the British came down on the current, bloated and bobbing to the undertow, and once one had stranded by the little beach: a woman whose long hair had caught in the tree-roots so that her mangled corpse swung gently to and fro in the ripple as though she were swimming - or struggling.
Alex had sawn through her hair with his knife and pushed her off into the current, and the others, arriving five minutes later, had wondered why he was looking so unusually grim. He had not looked like that for some time past; he had looked relaxed and almost contented, and had taken to humming under his breath as he set fishing-lines or devised further methods of keeping the temperature of the Hirren Minar within bearable limits. But that night he had gone to the city again, and when he had returned at dawn his eyes were once again hot with restlessness. For it seemed that the tide was turning at last.
The British whom the boasters in Lunjore had declared were all dead or swept into the sea were encamped once more upon the Ridge before Delhi. The Guides had marched from Mardan and were now with the Delhi force, and Hodson Sahib, the ‘Burra Lerai-wallah’ (great in battle), was also there, commanding a regiment of horse that he had raised.
They would of course be defeated - annihilated! - it was only a matter of time: but all the same there was a noticeable breath of uneasiness in the bazaars. It was disconcerting to find that the sahib-log were not all dead. And it was said, whispered one man to an awed group in the Sudder Bazaar, that Nikal Seyn himself was riding for Delhi! Nikal Seyn, the sound of whose horse’s hooves could be heard, so men said, from Attock to the Khyber, and whom many declared to be a god, and no man. The speaker had shivered and thrown a quick backward look over his shoulder as he spoke.
‘It won’t be long now,’ said Alex, his eyes blazing in the grey dawn light. ‘We shall have to stick it out here a little longer, but the monsoon must break soon, and then it will be cooler. And when Delhi is taken we’ll be able to get away. A good many of the waverers will come over to us then, and we shall be able to get help on the road.’
Another ten days; perhaps a fortnight - or a month. But what did it matter now that the end was in sight? They could afford to wait a week or two more.
‘I suppose so,’ said Lou, wiping the pouring perspiration from her face with the back of her hand. ‘We shall have to wait. I see that. We’ve been lucky - luckier than so many others. Perhaps the luck will hold.’
But it did not hold.
That same evening Lottie had strayed away to pick jungle berries, not twenty yards from the river bank, and she had heard someone moving through the bushes and had turned, expecting Lou who had been fetching water.
But it was not Lou. It was a bearded turbanless native in torn and soiled clothing, who carried a heavy bundle upon one shoulder and bore on wrist and ankle the marks that are made by iron fetters.
She was not to know that this was one of the criminals who had been released by the mob from the city jail, or that he had subsequently murdered a Hindu merchant and his family, and escaped with the loot to the jungle. But Lottie was under no illusions as to his intentions.
He had stared at her unbelievingly, and then his lips had stretched into an evil grin. A memsahib - a feringhi! His eyes glittered and he dropped the bundle he carried and drew a stained sword from its sheath. He moved towards her quite slowly, crouching a little, the dry jungle grass rustling and crackling about him, and Lottie’s mouth opened in a soundless scream. She made no attempt to turn and run, but stood frozen and still like a trapped rabbit, and she did not hear Lou coming up from the river. Neither did Bishul Singh, dacoit, for he could see nothing but the petrified face of the white woman before him and hear only the crackling of the undergrowth as he crept towards her.
Lou never moved from the Hirren Minar without a revolver, and she dropped the chatti, and as the man looked round, checked by the sudden sound, she pulled the gun from the sling she had made for it, and fired. The man jerked upright and his eyes and his mouth opened in a look of incredulous astonishment, and then he swayed, coughed, crumpled at the knees and fell sideways with blood pouring from his mouth.
‘No!’ screamed Lottie. ‘No! No! No—!’
Alex had been reinforcing a bamboo ladder that he had made to replace the rope one that Lottie found it difficult to climb, and he had heard the shot and the screams, and dropped it and ran. He had taken one look at the man on the ground and at Lou who was holding the screaming Lottie, and said: ‘Where’s Winter?’ And then Winter had run through the bushes, white-faced and panting, and he had gripped Lou’s shoulders and shaken her and said: ‘Were there any others?’
‘No. I don’t know,’ said Lou jerkily. ‘He was coming for Lottie with a sword. I shot him. Lottie - Lottie! - it’s all right, dear, it’s all right.’
Alex said: ‘Get on, get back - all of you. He may not have been alone.’
But Lottie would not go. She had struggled and screamed, and Alex had turned and taken her from Lou and carried her back to the Hirren Minar, holding her with her face pressed hard against his shoulder to muffle her screams. He had put her on her feet for one moment at the foot of the ladder, and she had turned and fled back, and when he caught her she had fought him, writhing and twisting and clawing at him, her thin distorted body suddenly possessed of surprising strength, so that it had been all he could do to get her back into the upper room.
Alex said: ‘Pull up the ladder, Winter. And close the entrance. Lou, give me the opium - and the brandy. It’s all right, Lottie dear, you’re safe now.’
But Lottie had screamed and shrieked and fought as she had screamed and fought at the Kashmir Gate at Delhi when she had seen a grinning bearded man leap at Edward with a sword, and had seen her husband fall, spurting blood from that terrible wound, and had been dragged away to be lowered over the battlements and fall into the dry ditch below. ‘Let me go! - let me go! They’re killing him! Edward - Edward!’ screamed Lottie. And then quite suddenly she had gone slack in Alex’s arms and they saw with unutterable relief that she had fainted.
Alex laid her down on the narrow camp bed, and letting down the rope ladder, ordered Winter to pull it up after him and went out into the twilight jungle.
He turned the dead man over, and recognizing him realized that he was probably on the run, and straightening up he stood still, listening for a long time, but could hear no sounds that suggested anyone moving through the jungle. Presently he made a cautious circuit of the immediate area but found no one, and returning to the corpse he dragged it to the river bank and pushed it off into deep water.
The bundle the man had dropped proved to be full of valuables. Silver coin, a large quantity of Indian jewellery, an assortment of bric-à-brac that could only have come from the looted bungalow of some European, and one object tha
t told its own story: a woman’s hand that had been hacked off for the sake of the rings it bore and which had presumably proved difficult to remove. Alex disposed of that gruesome and decomposed relic and carried the bundle back to the Hirren Minar. The money would come in very useful and he could only hope that Bishul Singh had not made an assignation with anyone to meet him on or near this spot. Judging from the value of the loot he thought it unlikely: it seemed more probable that the man had intended to keep it to himself.
There was an appalling smell of burnt feathers in the upper room of the Hirren Minar, and Alex climbed the ladder to find Lottie still unconscious and Lou and Winter, their faces no more than white blurs in the dusk, making desperate efforts to revive her.
‘Leave her alone,’ advised Alex. ‘If she has remembered Delhi she is better off like that. We’d better light the lamp.’
They used the lamp as little as possible, partly to conserve their scanty stock of oil, but mostly because it necessitated covering the open archways with solid screens that Alex had made from bamboo canes, roots and dry grass, so that the light would not show. In the day-time, when the hot wind blew, they poured water on those screens, which helped to cool the room, but after sunset when the wind dropped the screens made it unbearably hot, and there was no breath of wind blowing tonight.
Winter went below to prepare the evening meal and Alex handed her a revolver without comment. He was still not entirely sure that the dead dacoit had been alone, and he did not know how far the sound of that shot and Lottie’s screams would have carried.
Lou lit the small oil-lamp while Alex mixed brandy and opium with water. ‘It may keep her quiet for a bit when she comes round,’ he said, and pushed the brandy bottle at Lou: ‘You’d better have some of that yourself. You look as though you need it.’ They had been as sparing with the brandy as they had been with the oil, but Lou drank and felt grateful for the fiery liquid.
Lottie had not recovered consciousness for another hour, and when at last she had moaned and stirred they had been able to make her drink the opium brew without much difficulty. She had sat up, propped against Lou Cottar’s shoulder, and had stared up at Lou’s face and at Alex and Winter, with eyes that had lost the dazed sweetness that they had worn for so long.
She said at last: ‘Edward is dead, isn’t he? They killed him. I - I remember now. And they shot Mama - and - and Papa. Where is Sophie?’
‘Sophie is safe, darling,’ said Winter. ‘She is in Cawnpore.’
‘They killed Edward,’ whispered Lottie. ‘They - they cut him with their swords, and there was a man with a knife who’—’
Winter said: ‘Don’t think of it, darling - don’t.’
‘How can you stop yourself thinking of a thing like that? I should have stayed with him but they wouldn’t let me. I should have stayed with him—’ She turned her head against Lou Cottar’s shoulder and wept, and Alex got up and went out.
He had slept in the jungle that night, in the grass before the entrance of the Hirren Minar; but he had lain awake for a long time listening to the night noises and straining his ears for any sound that might be made by men. He could hear, intermittently, a murmur of voices from the upper chamber of the ruined building behind him, but it came at longer and longer intervals and at last there was silence.
There were clouds in the sky that night, but they held no promise of rain; only of hot winds and dust, and it seemed as though they intensified the heat, pressing it down onto the gasping earth so that it could not escape, as though they were a lid on a gigantic cauldron. They were gone when Alex awoke with the first light of dawn, and the sky was clear again. Clear with the hazy clearness that promised a day of grinding heat.
Alex went down to the river and lay in the water on the narrow ledge below the bank, watching the sky turn from pale green to saffron while the birds awoke in the thickets above him and a troop of monkeys came down to drink. He lay there for a long time, until the sun leapt from below the horizon and the burning day was in full flood across the pitiless sky and the parched jungle. It was only then, when the sun flared in the tree-tops, that he realized that none of the three women had come down to the river that morning. They were usually there well before sunrise, and he would leave the small beach to them and return to the Hirren Minar. But today they had not come.
He left the water reluctantly and felt it dry on his back almost before he had reached the top of the bank. Between the tree shadows the sun was like a raw flame on his shoulders as he walked back to the Hirren Minar, and he had reached the entrance when he heard that agonized moaning, and stopped.
He stood quite still for perhaps five minutes, knowing with despair and anger and pity what it meant. Then he turned away and sat down in a patch of shadow on a fallen block of stone that fronted the low stone ledge before the Hirren Minar. This at least was not his affair. There were two women with her.
Listening to the moans he wondered why the Almighty had thought fit to inflict on womankind such a lengthy and agonizing method of populating the earth. And why, in the name of Allah the Merciful and Compassionate, had this got to happen now?
He leaned back on the warm, time-worn stone and wondered just how much difference this was going to make to all of them. The problem of this unborn child had been hanging over them all ever since the day of their escape from the Residency: marching remorselessly towards them; unavoidable and inescapable. Wars and riots and mutinies, famine, disaster and the crash of dynasties - the processes of birth stopped for none of these things. Lottie would have to bear this child even though her husband, mother, father and half her friends were dead, and India awash with blood and anarchy. Except by dying, she could not escape it.
Probably just as well to get it over, thought Alex. After all it was a perfectly natural process. Nothing to make a fuss about. Happened half a million times a day and was a simpler matter than one would suppose. He had assisted at the arrival of Chytuc and helped a bitch who was in difficulties to produce her litter, and once he had sat up all night reading by the light of an oil-lamp a manual on midwifery, and receiving terse instructions from a doctor who had crippled himself in a fall from his horse while riding fifty miles to attend the wife of a typhoid-stricken surveyor in a lonely forest camp, who was about to give birth to her first child. It had proved a slow but comparatively simple affair. But the woman had been wide-hipped and healthy and not in any way comparable to the childish smallness and fragility of Lottie.
‘What are those women doing to her?’ thought Alex impatiently. He could hear Winter’s voice and Lou’s, and Lottie’s agonizing moans going on and on. The moans rose to a scream that was more fear than pain, and suddenly he could bear it no longer. He leapt the stone ledge and was up the ladder and in the comparative coolness of the upper room.
Lottie was lying on the camp bed, fully dressed and clutching at the sides of it; her eyes wide with terror. Winter knelt beside her and Lou Cottar leant over her with a tin mug in her hand. They turned their heads towards him and on both their white faces was the same terror of the unknown that was on Lottie’s, and Alex, seeing it, realized in that moment that not one of them had the least idea of the mechanics of birth.
The suffocating prudery of the age saw to it that the majority of young women were kept in complete ignorance of such matters, and neither Winter nor Lottie had even seen a cat having kittens, while Lou Cottar, who could certainly not be classed as either young or an innocent, had never had any children of her own and was entirely uninterested in the conversation and gossip of those who had. All three of them had only the haziest idea of what happened when a child was born, for the whole affair was shrouded in the deepest mystery and only referred to in whispers. It was, moreover, considered by many that the less a young mother knew about childbirth the less likely she would be to panic about it in advance, while once the birth had begun - well, there was nothing for it then but to endure it.
Alex could see all these things written clearly in the desperate, te
rrified faces of the three women, and a sudden fury of exasperation took him by the throat. He thrust Winter and Lou aside and said savagely: ‘What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing? Come on - get her out of those clothes!’ And saw again the same expression reflected on three faces. Even in this extremity they could feel it to be unspeakably shocking to remove Lottie’s dress in his presence, and his exasperation mounted. He bent over Lottie and took her hands, feeling them turn and clutch frantically at his, and said: ‘Listen to me, Lottie. You’ve got to think of your baby now and not of anything else. Forget that I’m a man - or anyone you know. Just try and do what I say. Will you do that?’
Lottie nodded, clinging to his hands, and he released them with difficulty and said shortly to Lou: ‘Pull that fan and keep the flies off her. Have we got enough water in the place?’
‘I - I think so,’ said Lou. Her face was quite white and her assurance had suddenly forsaken her. Lou would have faced a howling mob with calm and courage, and she had not flinched in the face of danger. But Lottie’s pain and fear were something that she could do nothing to relieve, and it left her feeling sickened and helpless.
‘Well, make sure. And if we haven’t, get it.’ He turned to Winter, who had removed Lottie’s clothing, and said: ‘Get down there and heat some water. And here—’ He reached for a clasp knife from the stone ledge and handed it to her. ‘Boil that in some water - let it boil for five or ten minutes and then take it off and leave it in there.’
She turned without a word and descended the ladder and Lou said: ‘The smoke—’
‘We shall have to chance it.’ He heard Lottie’s moans rise once more to a scream and went to her swiftly, taking her hands again, and Winter heard him talking as she fetched wood and dry grass and lit the fire that they had never yet lit by day. He was telling Lottie about the child. What it was doing, and what her own body was doing to help it in its struggle for release, and what she must do to help them both. It sounded, suddenly, entirely natural and reasonable, and no longer some dark and mysterious and inexplicable process fraught with terror and uncertainty. His words evidently carried the same reassurance to Lottie, for her agonized moaning ceased.