by M. M. Kaye
She slept only when exhaustion overtook her, and then with her hand on him so that she woke when he moved. She had never in all her short life seen an illness like this, or imagined it, and at times it seemed worse to her than the birth of Lottie’s baby had been. But Alex held onto life, and it was, in the end, Lou who had betrayed them.
Lou knew something of dysentery, having experienced a mild attack of it herself and seen Josh suffer a worse one. She told Winter all that she could remember of the course of the illness and its treatment, and she had looked at Alex and said: ‘I don’t think it’s only dysentery. I think he’s got some sort of fever on top of it. Josh wasn’t as bad as that. Unless - unless it’s cholera.’
She had kept away for fear of carrying the infection to the baby. But the pouring rain, and the sudden breaks when the rain would stop and the sodden jungle steamed under the molten heat of the sun, had not suited the baby as the dry heat of the Hirren Minar had done. The baby wailed endlessly and heartbreakingly, and vomited up the rice-water and the thin gruel that Lou made with flour and coarse country sugar. And the supplies of even those commodities were running low.
‘She will die without milk!’ said Lou, wild-eyed and desperate. ‘She must have proper food - she must!’ She had walked up and down, clutching the wailing infant to her breast and said passionately: ‘Why can’t I feed her myself? Why aren’t we made so that we could if we wanted to? She needs it, and I can’t give her anything - anything!’
Winter did not hear her. She had been watching Alex’s haggard burnt-out face and dry, cracked lips, and her mind and her heart were as desperate as Lou’s. She did not even notice when Lou went away, and it was only when she found that there was no fire lit - for Lou had been dealing with all the cooking - and no food prepared, that she found that Lou and the baby had gone. And even then she imagined that they could not be far away.
The rain had stopped and the jungle that had been so brown and brittle only a few days ago was now a hot, humid greenhouse in which new grass and leaves and creepers and every variety of growing thing had sprung up overnight in lush abandon. The damp heat was less bearable than the dry heat had been, and Alex seemed to struggle for every breath he drew.
The sound of his laboured breathing tore at Winter’s heart, and for the first time in the long weeks since she had run from the Lunjore Residency she turned her face away and wept: wept hopelessly and helplessly and silently; the hot tears running into the grass roots as swiftly as the raindrops that had poured down onto them the day before.
She did not know how long she lay there, face downwards on the steaming ground, and she did not hear Alex move; but his hand touched her and she lifted her head and saw that his eyes were open. There was a faint frown in them but they were entirely lucid and no longer clouded and unfocused or blind with pain. He spoke with a palpable effort and in a voice that was barely a whisper:
‘What’s the matter?’
Winter pushed back her hair and stared at him incredulously, the tears drying on her cheeks. He had not looked like that, or spoken sensibly, since the illness had struck him down. His frown deepened and he said: ‘Why are you crying?’ Winter brushed away the tears with the back of her hand and said unsteadily: ‘I’m not - not now.’
She rose to her feet and stumbled away to light the fire and boil water, because Lou was still not back. And it had been the first time for days that she had not left him expecting to find that he was dead when she returned. She had made a brew of flour and rice-water and sugar, and stirred brandy into it and taken it back to him; and his eyes were still lucid.
He drank the decoction because he was too weak to refuse it, and lay still afterwards looking ahead of him under half-lowered lids. Presently he said: ‘How long?’
‘I - I don’t know,’ said Winter with a break in her voice. ‘Days. Don’t talk.’
‘I shall be all right now,’ said Alex in the same difficult whisper, and he had closed his eyes and gone to sleep with his head in her lap.
Winter had slept too; her head thrown back against the tree-trunk behind her; and when she heard voices and someone had shaken her she had thought it was Lou.
But it was not Lou. It was a party of men armed with lathis and in charge of a man who wore a rusty sword and carried an old-fashioned musket.
‘These are not sahib-log!’ said one of the men scornfully. ‘They are but the nauker-log of the mem.’
But one of them had peered closer and said: ‘Nay, they have Angrezi blood in them at least. We will take them. Up, thou!’ The speaker stirred Alex with his foot and Winter had said furiously and in the vernacular: ‘Let be! Canst thou not see that he is sick?’
The tone and the quality of the Hindustani she used gave the men pause, and they looked at her doubtfully. It occurred to them suddenly that this might after all be an Indian lady of good family. Her fingers tightened imperatively on Alex’s shoulder, and he had obeyed the unspoken warning and remained silent. He could not have risen if he had tried. The man with the musket said uncertainly: ‘Of what city art thou?’
‘Of Lucknow,’ said Winter without hesitation. ‘Of the household of Ameera Begum, wife of Walayat Shah, who is my cousin and lives in the Gulab Mahal by the mosque of Sayid Hussain. This man is of Persia, and my - my husband.’
The men observed her owl-eyed and consulted in whispers, and Winter heard the leader say: ‘What matter? The order is for all to be sent to Pari. Send these also.’
They had rifled the contents of the shelter in which Lou and the baby had lived, removing the revolvers and the shotgun and anything else they could find, and ten minutes later they had moved off through the jungle taking Winter and Alex with them.
Alex, helped to his feet, had not been able to stand without support, let alone walk, and they had used the roof of the shelter to carry him on. It had taken them surprisingly little time to reach the road, and Winter realized that they must have been swept down by the current further than she had supposed on the night that they crossed the river. There had been a bullock-cart waiting on the road, and a curious crowd of villagers - and Lou Cottar. Lou, white-faced and haggard, and clutching the baby.
She had stared at Winter and Alex in horror and said hoarsely: ‘I didn’t mean … I didn’t know this would happen. I thought I might find a village where I could get milk. And - and they did help me. They were kind. I didn’t realize they would go back to see if there was anyone else. I only came by the sand because it was easier, and - and they followed the marks. I thought—’
Her voice choked and stopped and Winter said: ‘It’s all right, Lou.’ And then they were thrust into the cart and jolted away down the long uneven road towards Pari.
46
It had been dark by the time the captives reached the little walled town near the jheel; the town that Alex and Niaz had skirted on that autumn night when they had ridden from Khanwai and crossed the bridge of boats, hidden under the sacks and the sugar-cane in the bullock-carts.
The cart that now carried Alex, Winter, Lou and Amanda creaked to a halt beside a gateway in a mud wall, and they were taken out and hustled across a dark courtyard and into a long, low-ceilinged room lit by a single guttering cresset. The two men who had carried Alex laid him on the floor and the door banged behind them. An iron bar clanged into place, and someone at the far end of the room stood up in the shadows beyond the circle of light and said hoarsely and incredulously: ‘Winter!’
Winter was on her knees beside Alex, and she looked up, startled; blinking a little in the dim light that seemed dazzling after the darkness outside. A face moved into the range of the lamp and stared down at her wide-eyed: a strange, haggard face, dirty and unshaven and with a blood-stained bandage tied about its head. She looked up at it for a long moment, puzzled and uncertain, before she recognized it, and then at first she did not believe it. For it was, incredibly, Carlyon who stood there. Carlyon, whom she had last seen on the verandah of the little dâk-bungalow beyond the ford on the road
to Lunjore, and whom she had thought to be - if she had thought of him at all - several thousand miles away in England
There were other voices behind him, and other faces. Eight other faces; tired, worn, dirty … and British.
Carlyon said hoarsely: ‘Winter - it is Winter, isn’t it? What are you doing here? They said you’d all been killed.’ His voice was as raw-edged and ragged as his clothes, and other faces that Winter knew separated themselves from the shadows: Captain Garrowby - Dr O’Dwyer - Mrs Hossack—
Mrs Hossack clutched at Lou Cottar and wept, and Captain Garrowby said: ‘Mrs Barton! - Mrs Cottar! How did you … we thought you must all be dead. We thought that we were the only ones who had got away. Who is that with you?’ He lifted the lamp and said: ‘Good God, it’s Randall—!’
‘Only just,’ said Alex in a whisper. ‘Hullo, Garrowby. How did you … get out?’
There were charpoys in the room, six of them placed end to end along the walls, and Captain Garrowby and Carlyon had lifted Alex onto one of them, and he had lain there and listened to the story of another escape.
The Garrowbys, Dr O’Dwyer and his wife, and Mrs Hossack and her four children had not gone to the Residency, and so had escaped the massacre. Mrs Hossack had intended to go, but had been delayed because Dr O’Dwyer had been at her bungalow to see her eldest child, a seven-year-old girl, who had been suffering from hot-weather fever. Captain Hossack, of Colonel Packer’s Regiment, had been shot down on the parade-ground by his men, and his Indian orderly had ridden to warn Mrs Hossack to escape. The doctor, whose bungalow was next door, had run to fetch his wife and they had all entered the Hossacks’ waiting carriage, intending to take refuge at the Residency. But the Garrowbys had stopped them. Captain Garrowby of the 93rd had been warned by his men, and he had ridden for his bungalow and bundled his wife into the trap and rounding the corner into the Residency road had seen an obviously hostile crowd collecting before the gates. He had turned the trap, deciding to make for the river, and had met the Hossacks’ carriage. They had all made for the bridge and had crossed it at least two hours before Alex and Niaz had reached it.
Fearing to be stopped, they had said no word at the bridge of the panic in Lunjore. But at Pari they had been attacked by a mob which had included mutinous sepoys from the disbanded 7th Regiment. The coachman and Captain Garrowby’s syce, who had been with them, had stood off the mob for a few minutes and paid for their loyalty with their lives. But in those few minutes the party had turned and driven back furiously the way they had come, and abandoning the carriage and trap had taken to the jungle and hidden there.
One of the Hossack children had been killed and Captain Garrowby and Mrs O’Dwyer had been wounded in the firing. Mrs O’Dwyer had died two days later. The rest had wandered in the jungles, living on roots and berries and first one and then another of the two elder Hossack children had died, and later Mrs Garrowby too had died of heat-stroke and exhaustion. Captain Garrowby and the doctor, with Mrs Hossack and her remaining child - a baby of six months - had been driven to ask help at a village on the outskirts of Pari, and the villagers had taken them in and treated them kindly. But three days earlier they had been put into a covered cart and brought to this house - they did not know why, nor how long they would remain there. They had been given food, and had not been ill-used, but the atmosphere and the attitude of their jailers was not reassuring.
The four other captives had arrived on the following day: Lord Carlyon, The Reverend Chester Dobbie, Mr Climpson and Miss Keir - the sole survivors of a party of fifteen Europeans who had hoped to escape from Oudh and had been attacked and massacred at a village five miles away. They too had been fugitives for many days before being captured and brought here.
Winter had paid no attention to the recital of escape and misery, for her eyes had looked past Carlyon to Dr O’Dwyer, and she had run to him and pulled him across the room to Alex, and after that she had only watched his face and listened to what he said. ‘He’ll do,’ said Dr O’Dwyer reassuringly. And then a native woman had brought coarse food and a bowl of fresh milk, and Lou had fed the baby and told the story of the last weeks, and the voices and the faces and the heat of the low-ceilinged room had mixed and melted together and Winter had fallen asleep and had not stirred or wakened until the sun was high in the sky.
There was an enclosed courtyard on the far side of the room where the prisoners had spent the night, and the door leading out into it had been unlocked at sunrise.
The same native woman had brought food again for the captives, but she had refused to answer questions and had gone out to the far side of the courtyard to join a crowd of gapers who peered curiously at the feringhis, discussing them and speculating about them and chewing pan.
‘What do you suppose they mean to do with us?’ asked Lou uneasily, rocking the baby.
‘Keep us as hostages, I think,’ said the Reverend Dobbie, who thought no such thing but trusted that God would pardon him that comforting lie.
‘Hostages for what?’ inquired Lou.
Mr Climpson, a middle-aged Magistrate who had escaped from his burning bungalow with the assistance of a loyal servant, said: ‘The local Talukdar has been wavering for some time. He cannot decide which side is going to win, and he seems to have given orders that any Europeans found in these parts were to be taken prisoner but not harmed. I think he means well enough, but he is getting nervous. The whole of Oudh is now in revolt, and since the Chinut affair the British position looks bad. I think that is why he has had any of us known to be in the district brought here.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Dobbie, nodding reassuringly at the women. ‘I am sure that is right. He feels that we shall be safer here. That bar on the door may keep us in, but it also serves to keep others out.’
Carlyon, leaning against the jamb of the open door, surveyed him under drooping lids and wondered if the little man really believed that. Carlyon had heard the story of Jhansi and the public slaughter of the Europeans who had accepted the Rani’s terms of surrender. That hapless garrison had been roped in three lines - children, women, and men - and bound and helpless they had been butchered in that order, so that the women had been forced to see their children die before their eyes, and the men to see both die in turn before their own end came.
He had heard too - the news had been told to Mr Climpson by the headman of the village where they had lain hidden before being brought to Pari - of the massacre of the Cawnpore garrison who had accepted the offer of surrender and safe-conduct by Dundu Pant, the Nana Sahib. If Mr Climpson’s informant was to be believed, the exhausted survivors had been allowed to embark in boats that were to take them to Allahabad; but once the last man was on board the thatched roofs of the boats had been set alight by the boatmen, who then leapt out into the water as the watchers on the bank opened fire on the blazing, drifting targets. In this manner the last of the Cawnpore garrison had died, with the exception of some two hundred women and children - of whom there had been close on four hundred in the entrenchments on the fifth of June - who had struggled ashore and been taken captive.
In the light of these stories Carlyon was inclined to take a very different view of their situation from the ones advanced by either Mr Climpson or Mr Dobbie. It seemed to him far more likely that they were being kept alive in order to provide a Roman holiday for the mob when a suitable occasion should arise: the type of public spectacle that the hapless garrisons of Jhansi and Cawnpore had provided.
‘I should have gone home,’ thought Carlyon. ‘I must have been mad.’
He had meant to go. He had returned to Delhi, raging because Winter had escaped him, and had heard later, through friends of the Abuthnots, of her marriage. But he had not gone home, which would have been the sensible thing to do. He still wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, and he could not bring himself to admit defeat and return to England. As long as he was in the same country there might still be some chance for him, but once he left it there was none.
What did a few months, or a year, matter to him? He could afford to linger in India for as long as he chose, and he was convinced that a few months of marriage to this clod of a Commissioner would cure her of her romantic attachment. Then, when she moved to the hills (as she was sure to do) she would find Carlyon there ready to console her.
He knew in his more sober and reasonable moments that he was behaving in an un-adult and ridiculous manner. A manner which no one - least of all Lord Carlyon himself - would have thought Lord Carlyon capable of. Yet he had stayed. He had kept in touch with Mrs Gardener-Smith solely in order to obtain news of Winter, and on hearing that she intended to go to Simla in May he had arranged to spend the hot weather there, and had gone to Lucknow with the intention of travelling to Simla via Lunjore so that he could see this man Barton for himself. But while there he had been struck down by a severe attack of fever which had delayed him, and the tidal wave of the mutiny had swept him up into its hungry flood and brought him, after weeks of wandering and privation, to Pari - and to Winter.
Carlyon leant against the door and watched her now as she lay asleep. She must, he thought, have been very tired to sleep as deeply as that. Food had been brought hours ago and the courtyard was bright with sunlight. There was noise and talk and movement, but she had not stirred.