Nizams Daughters mh-2

by Allan Mallinson

‘Very well,’ said Hervey, ‘but let us take the knife to these abscesses instead, since it’s they which appear to be the point of contagion. Those that have died — what was the manner of their dying?’

  Alter Fritz said their breathing became laboured, that they no longer had the strength to draw in breath.

  ‘When did the last one succumb?’

  ‘A little before you arrived — a mare.’

  They went to find her. She was not yet consigned to the pyre since Alter Fritz expected there would be two more by the end of the day. She lay covered in marigolds (the sowars’ customary mark of respect), and by a mound of brushwood that would later be torched. Hervey could not help but think it curious that, in a land where life seemed to be held so cheap, one troop-horse should be accorded such honour. In England it would be the limepit — or hound trenchers — and no ceremony.

  The angle of the mare’s jaw was sorely swollen but rigor mortis had not yet set in. He asked for a knife, and one of the farriers gave him his razor.

  ‘What will you do?’ asked Alter Fritz.

  ‘I want to see if the abscesses have taken hold within,’ he replied. But first he asked that the horse’s mouth be opened as far as possible so that he could probe inside. Sowars crowded round to help or watch. He slipped his hand into her mouth, probing with a finger. ‘The soft palate’s compressed; she simply couldn’t breathe.’

  ‘Why is it swollen, think you, Hervey?’ asked Alter Fritz, holding a handkerchief to his nose.

  ‘Not swollen, compressed. I’m pretty sure it’s the abscesses about the jaw and neck which cause the compression.’ He pointed to the swellings, none of which showed signs of having discharged. And then, with the razor, he incised two of them and squeezed until pus spurted.

  ‘Ach, das ist schlimm!’ spat Alter Fritz.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hervey, his German unconsciously assuming the emphatic inflections of Alter Fritz’s, ‘very nasty indeed. I think it’s a case of — I don’t know how you say it in German — strangles.’

  Alter Fritz looked puzzled.

  Hervey put his hands to his neck: ‘Strangle — erdrosseln?’

  He understood. But he had not seen a case either, nor did he know anything about it.

  ‘If it is strangles,’ continued Hervey, shaking his head, ‘we must try to bring the abscesses to a head and then lance them to take the pressure off the pharynx. Never have I seen sores so big. Everything in this country seems to grow to twice the size of what it would be in England.’ He wiped his hands on some cotton waste and stepped back from the carcass. ‘Tell your sowars to make poultices for their horses, and to keep cleaning the nostrils. Make up soft feeds which can be swallowed easily. Add syrup to make it appealing. And everything which comes into contact with any discharge must be burned, and the sowars must wash their hands before they attend to any horse that doesn’t already show the symptoms. I’m sure the contagion is in the body fluids.’

  Alter Fritz acknowledged the instructions. ‘And you believe, Hervey, that we might save a few?’

  ‘I see no reason why we should not. Except that — as I understand it — there’s a complication to the disease known as bastard strangles, where the abscesses spread to the thorax and abdomen — and when they burst there’s such corruption that the horse dies no matter what is done. I was inclined to cut her open to search for such signs, but the pharynx is so compressed that there’s little purpose.’

  Alter Fritz had begun to look more confident, but he now lowered his voice and screwed up his face. ‘Hervey, there’s one horse in particular you should see.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The raj kumari’s mare shows these symptoms too. It has been here with the rissalahs this month past.’

  ‘Oh,’ he groaned. Why were there always complications? ‘I’d better take a look at her at once.’

  The little flea-bitten grey stood downcast in her stall on the other side of the maidan, separate from the main lines. Her head stayed still as they came in, her flanks were wet and her breathing shallow.

  ‘How long has she been this way?’ asked Hervey.

  ‘About a week.’

  He felt about her lower jaw and neck. There were the tell-tale swellings. ‘Inform her syce that he must poultice at least three times a day to draw the poison to the surface. There’s little more we can do. She’ll be at her worst in another three days or so.’

  He stayed with her until he was satisfied the syce could do the job properly, and then spent the remainder of the afternoon supervising the others to see they kept the discipline of burning the used wadding. Alter Fritz asked if strangles could pass from horse to man, to which Hervey replied that he did not know, but that he supposed it less likely if the men did as he bid in respect of vigorous hand-washing. And so all afternoon Hervey and the old German worked side by side — encouraging, demonstrating, upbraiding, labouring, consoling. Then, as the sun was beginning its descent over the forest towards Chintalpore, they retired to the officers’ quarters for restorative measures of whiskey and seltzer, and the prospect of a good supper. Bearers brought bowls of hot water, clean shirts and hose, fresh decanters and bottles. In a quarter of an hour they were sunk into deep leather chairs, exhausted but still hopeful. Alter Fritz closed his eyes briefly, allowing Hervey to search his face for what signs of perfidy might be etched in those sunweathered features. He saw none. Indeed, he saw nothing but the bluff openness of an old quartermaster — wily, perhaps, but never a deceiver.

  But then the prospect of their good supper was rudely dispelled by the arrival of the last person they would have wished to see in the circumstances. The raj kumari came in without ceremony, though, her anxiety quite evident. Hervey sat her down and called for the khitmagar. Dust fell from her shoulders still, and the same long breeches she had worn for the hunt clung to her with the sweat of the fleet young Arab she had galloped from Chintalpore. He offered her seltzer, which she accepted with the addition of the whiskey. She had come at once, she explained, for Gita was the issue of her own mother’s mare. Hervey told her what he had found, and what they were doing. She seemed thankful, but asked if a sadhu had attended. When she learned not, she gave instructions for one to be brought without delay to say prayers and perform his rituals. A naik was despatched to the bazaar, and he returned within the hour.

  The holy man was but skin and bone, and covered in white ash. His hair was thickly matted, he carried a begging bowl and flute, and he made repeated namaste to the raj kumari. They took him to her mare, and he stood contemplating in silence for several minutes. At length he breathed into her nostrils, sat down crosslegged in front of her and began a sing-song mantra, shaking violently all the while. Hervey watched from the corner of the stable, glad of the excuse for respite. The raj kumari stood close by, swaying to the sadhu’s mantra as she had that day in the forest. After five minutes the holy man stopped abruptly, rose and bowed deeply to the little mare. Then he turned to the raj kumari and spoke to her in Telugu. He explained that the horse was very small and there was much poison in her. He might revive her for a short while, but he could not thwart the will of Shiva. He had done his best to draw out the malignant spirit of the poison, but…

  With great composure, the raj kumari thanked him and placed a purse of silver in his begging bowl, asking him to visit each of the sick horses in turn. The sadhu returned her thanks, bowed low again, and shuffled off with the naik in the direction of the other lines. ‘He does not expect her to live,’ she said as he left. ‘He says there is too much poison in her body — too much poison.’

  Hervey measured his response carefully. There could not, to his mind, be the slightest possibility that the sadhu’s ministrations could have any effect on the outcome of the sickness. He did not even know whether or not the raj kumari herself believed that they would. But evidently she believed that they might. He had a strong desire to dissuade her from her superstition, yet he had already known her antagonism, and he did not wish it greater now. ‘Y
our Highness, do you wish me to continue with my treatment? I am merely trying to draw out the poison to which the sadhu refers.’

  His sensibility did him credit. She smiled at him for the first time in many days and nodded her assent. There was moisture in her eyes, though she was trying hard to hide it.

  For three days the raj kumari tended her little mare herself, allowing the syce only to clean the stable of the few droppings the horse managed. She used sponges to cool her, she wiped the discharge from her nostrils with cotton waste, she applied poultices to the swellings, she coaxed her to eat — handful by handful of bran and crushed barley, sweetened with syrup. And she slept for the most part in the stable, with her chowkidar as sentinel and only a zenana to attend her. When all was done each day, she would cross the maidan and tend the others. Half the horses were now showing symptoms of the plague, and since her arrival a dozen more had breathed their last. Hervey visited her mare as many as a dozen times each day, but the fever was not abating. Nor were the swellings coming to any head.

  ‘It is as the sadhu said: the poison in her is too great,’ said the raj kumari on the fourth morning.

  Hervey had not supposed her capable of the devotion she had shown these past days. Even the sowars remarked on it: a princess who would do the work of a sweeper, who would sleep in a stable. More than once he had felt a powerful urge to encourage her by an embrace, but after the forest there could be no question of it. And as to any notion of her implication in the affair of the batta, he could no more contemplate it now than he could of Alter Fritz, for her honest affection for these men was plain to see.

  But this morning it looked as if the sadhu’s prophecy had been right, for as they stood trying to coax Gita to a barley sweet she suddenly fell to the ground, struggling violently to draw breath. The raj kumari began to sob quietly. Hervey was only grateful the mare’s ordeal — and hers — was coming to an end. But there was one last effort, he knew. If, that is, the raj kumari could bear it. He had never before done it; nor even had he seen it done. Long ago, Daniel Coates had shown him the point at which he must make such an incision, and he had never forgotten — as he had never forgotten a single thing that Daniel Coates had told him, for such were that veteran’s years of experience.

  He took out the farrier’s razor and began to feel along the mare’s throat for the point to cut.

  ‘What do you do?’ exclaimed the raj kumari, seizing his hand. ‘You would not slaughter her in the fashion of the nizam’s people?’

  ‘I am going to open her windpipe,’ he said, indicating its line, ‘so that she can breathe in air from beyond the obstruction at the back of her mouth.’ The raj kumari did not grasp the principle and seized his hand again, but Hervey persisted gently. ‘The horse breathes through its mouth, not with it,’ he explained. He pointed to the heave line: ‘See, the muscles are trying to draw in air, but can’t because of the obstruent in the mouth. If I make a hole in the windpipe, air can be drawn in directly. It will relieve her for the moment.’

  ‘But she will bleed to death!’ protested the raj kumari.

  Hervey was only too aware she might be right. ‘She need not,’ was all he would allow himself.

  ‘Make the hole then,’ said the raj kumari resolutely.

  He took a deep breath and tried to locate — to avoid — the jugular groove. At last he felt sufficiently confident, and in went the point of the razor about half an inch. There was no blood — a trickle only. That was encouraging, not to say a relief. He used the blade’s edge to elongate the incision, and there was a loud sucking noise, at first alarming but then reassuring as he realized it was the sound of success — of air being drawn down towards the lungs. He held wide the hole with his fingers and told the orderly-dafadar to bring him some cartridges.

  ‘How many, sahib?’ he asked in Urdu.

  ‘Just a handful.’

  The dafadar looked puzzled, but he doubled away nevertheless, soon returning with a half-dozen carbine cartridges.

  The raj kumari asked him what was their purpose, and Hervey explained that he needed something to keep the incision open, for Gita would have to breathe this way for several days. He told the dafadar to remove the bullet from the paper cartridge, and to shake out the powder and open the closed end. Then he pushed the makeshift breathing tube gently but firmly into the windpipe and turned to the raj kumari with a smile of satisfaction. ‘It will do until I can find something more apt — a reed, or bamboo perhaps.’

  She could say nothing, tears running freely.

  Once the mare was comfortable he left the raj kumari with her and went to find Alter Fritz. The old German looked exhausted as he laboured with a dozen sowars to free a big gelding cast in its stall. ‘Rittmeister Bauer,’ said Hervey, with considerable resignation in his voice, ‘I believe we are losing the battle. We have to take drastic measures. I want you to set up lines the other side of the river, the horses with at least ten lengths between them, and I want you to put a torch to these stables.’

  Hervey expected him to protest, as would any quartermaster, but the old German simply looked at him and nodded.

  It took all day to move camp. The sowars had the running-ropes up quickly on the other side of the river (they were, after all, well practised in bivouacking), but it took time to ferry the animals across. Three horses that could not rise were put down where they lay, and for a while Hervey thought they would have to do the same with Gita, but towards evening she was coaxed to her feet, and she even managed a small feed before being led, unsteadily, to the ferry. Once night was come, and the worst of the heat gone, so that the thatch on the rest of the cantonment buildings was not so tinder-like, Alter Fritz and the officers of the infantry posted a line of fire pickets, and the torch was put to the rissalah stables. By dawn, all that was left was blackened walls. Everywhere smoke drifted upwards.

  Hervey was standing contemplating his destruction — the razing of some of the best stables he had ever seen — when a voice broke the silence. ‘He maketh wars to cease in all the world: he breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, and burneth the chariots in the fire.’

  He looked round. ‘Selden! I am very glad indeed to see you!’

  ‘I thought the burial service apt,’ he smiled. ‘It’s the only scripture I’ve heard these past five years.’

  Hervey had no wish to contemplate the Prayer Book at this moment. ‘You are restored, then?’

  ‘Ay: quinquina spooned to me by a faithful Bengali — which is more than I could have expected in England. Now, tell me: what exactly have you been doing — other than making work for Chintal’s builders?’

  Hervey recounted the tribulations of the past week, Selden nodding his approval at both diagnosis and treatment. And of the burning of the horse lines he seemed positively admiring. ‘No doubt you superintended the conflagration like King Charles at the Great Fire — astride your charger?’

  ‘The fire did burn out the plague from the City, as I recall,’ replied Hervey in mitigation.

  ‘Of course, of course!’ said Selden, smiling even wider. ‘A refiner’s fire!’

  He was able to laugh for the first time in days. He had had doubts about every action he had ordered. The only thing of which he was certain was the need to take action. Selden’s presence was, indeed, a great comfort. As they walked about the new lines, the sowars greeted the salutri’s arrival as a sign that their trial was at an end.

  And so it proved. In the next twenty-four hours only six horses developed the strangles’ symptoms, and on the fourth day there were no new cases at all. Gita’s abscesses were lanced the day after she crossed the river, having come rapidly to a head with poulticing, and her breathing returned to normal soon afterwards, allowing Selden to remove the bamboo tube and sew up the incision. There was a great roast of pig to celebrate the passing of the contagion, the sowars dancing and carousing until dark, and the sadhu filling anew his bowl with silver. When Hervey retired that night, he felt more content than he h
ad been in many months, for he had been — as it were — on campaign with his troopers, and they had triumphed. This, he knew, was his proper calling; not the affairs of the staff, with their errands, diplomacy and deception. He was sure he must return to it as soon as he decently might.

  XVI. WEAKLY TO A WOMAN

  Chintalpore, 3 April

  Pleasure, though intense in India, seemed fated to be brief. Hervey was in his quarters with pen and paper once more, about to write to the collector to hasten both the subsidiary force and, in his view just as important, the officer who was to win the rajah’s approval and thence take command. Since returning from Jhansikote three days ago, he had heard of so many causes for alarm that he was now certain that Chintal faced the most pressing danger. He had written on the first evening to Guntoor to urge the collector to send, in advance of the subsidiary force, any troops he could spare, for a mood of deep foreboding seemed to have settled on Chintalpore — on merchants, beggars and courtiers alike. Rumours abounded and there had been signs in the heavens. Shiva himself had been incarnated several times, had murdered good and bad alike and ravished many virgins. There was, as yet, no riot, no general hysteric passion, but Hervey did not imagine such seething would end in ought else. His chief alarm, however, lay in what was reported to him by Locke (who was increasingly privy to the gossip of the bazaars), that there was a widespread supposition that Chintal was soon to be attacked by a confederacy of Haidarabad and Calcutta, and that the European officers were the harbingers of this aggression. It troubled him principally because, until the Company officer arrived to take command, he considered himself obliged to the rajah; yet any order he gave would be questioned, especially if its purpose were equivocal — in which case attempts at deception would carry grave dangers.

  It did not help that the demeanour of the rajah himself was daily more unfathomable. He neglected the usual formalities of the court, would receive no-one without their absolute insistence, and remained for the most part in his quarters, forsaking his menagerie even. All this Hervey had laid before the collector in the first letter, and he repeated it now — together with further intelligence of the nizam’s malevolent intent (so alarming, indeed, was the intelligence that on receiving it this very morning the rajah’s first minister had fled the city). Officials in the west of Chintal had reported movement of Haidarabad’s sepoys all along the border, and — worse — cannon. Even more alarming, and more perplexing, were similar reports from the other side of the country, where the nizam’s territories reached over the Eastern Ghats and abutted Chintal on the plains of the lower Godavari. Hervey could divine no purpose in these movements, except the crudest attempts to overawe, and he asked for the collector’s assessment. Next he gave his estimate of the fighting power of the rajah’s army in the light of the recent depredations. It was not encouraging. At his instigation, since the mutiny, the rajah had removed those officers who he considered had shown insufficient discernment when trouble was fomenting, or who had shown particular vindictiveness when rebellion actually came. Locke had urged Hervey to dismiss all of them — indeed, to blow them from the mouths of the galloper guns in front of the rest. But Hervey had resisted: he could not, in one sweep, remove all the facility for order and fighting. Instead, he had urged the rajah to keep a core of the most junior officers (no-one above the rank of jemadar, except the Rajpoot and Maratha subedars) and to make each of them swear, at the oxbow durbar, by all that was sacred to their faiths, their unquestioning loyalty to him personally. He had had the rajah promote several of the Rajpoots — paragons, he was now convinced, of the martial spirit. But in all, he wrote, the rajah could muster only one battalion of fewer than a thousand sepoys. The reduction of his cavalry was, however, Hervey’s gravest concern. Alter Fritz could mount, serviceably, fewer than a hundred sowars, for the horses that had survived the strangles were in so poor a condition that it would be at least a month (perhaps more in this oppressive heat) before they were fit for service. He had sent to Nagpore for remounts, but anything that the collector could arrange, begged Hervey, would be of inestimable value, for there were no means to patrol the border with Haidarabad while at the same time keeping any sort of handy reserve in Chintalpore and Jhansikote for interior security. He implored the collector to send him a full troop of Madrasi cavalry at once.