‘Don’t be fixing your bayonets, any of you.’ Morgan made sure that the Bombay men all got an eyeful of his ribbons. ‘At Sevastopol we found it a mite disconcerting to be pushed onto one of our own men’s spikes.’ It was worth playing the veteran, Morgan thought; he’d never even seen a scaling ladder before, let alone climbed one, but he could remember reading something about officers falling onto their own men’s steel during one of the Peninsular sieges.
‘Don’t you worry yourself, sir,’ a strange, grinding Lancashire accent came from the dark. ‘You’re with the Third Bombay now; we was stuffing Sikhs long before you got a sniff of a Russian. We’ll have that rag off its stick sooner than you’ll know, and a-hangin’ in the Lord Canning’s quarters.’ There was a ripple of, ‘ooh, clemency, clemency, please,’ and a general laugh of approval at this retort, which immediately made Morgan feel more comfortable with these roughnecks.
‘I hope you’ve got plenty of shot to hand, lads?’ Morgan looked at his fellow stormers in their khaki linen trousers and tops. Their shirts had obviously been run up by a local contractor; they were light and comfortable with generous pockets on the chests, which the men now patted.
‘Aye, sir, an’ our pouches are brimfull, too,’ the leader of the group, who wore no badges of rank, Morgan noticed, answered.
‘Good men. Water bottles full?’ Morgan had used this device before on the verge of action: distract the men – and himself – with petty checks and questions; anything to stop people from pondering their fates too deeply.
‘Sir, will you stop mithering us – we’re not children.’ The non-commissioned officer – for that’s what Morgan guessed he was – would have continued had not three red rockets sprung into the air from over to their left. ‘Eh-up, there’s the signal, c’mon, boys,’ and with no more reference to the officer the whole gang of assault men and covering party set off at the best gallop they could up the steep glacis below the fortress’s walls.
‘Get going then, Corp’l Pegg,’ yelled Morgan, embarrassed at being caught unprepared. Pegg, however, had taken his officer’s hesitation as just the sign he wanted, and hung back behind the cover of a particularly solid piece of masonry. As Morgan drew his sword and dashed forward, though, Pegg saw that it was useless to resist and, shoulders hunched like a man stepping out into a storm of hail, he left the protection of the building and trotted reluctantly after the attackers.
The walls spurted flame and lead, flashes coming from loopholes and embrasures, bricks, stones and hunks of wood studded with nails showering down on the men’s heads and shoulders like lethal sleet. Then it was all: ‘Don’t let the ladder drop, boys,’ and, ‘Pete, get ’ere, Taff’s down…’ mixed with cheers, shouts and cries of pain as their boots dug into the slope and the missiles swept down upon them.
With no burden and no rifle, Morgan was soon at the head of the rushing crowd, mouth as dry as his arse was tight, shoulders pulled as high as nature would allow, dreading the next boulder or ball. As he looked to the ladder party, the long spokes were parallel to the ground as the men sweated and grunted it up the slope; then it dropped, the feet digging themselves into the soil as the front man buckled and fell silently in the dark.
‘Get on, lads, get on.’ Morgan dashed to the front of the party, pulled the arms of its wounded leader out of the rungs and stuck a wooden leg squarely on his shoulder. ‘Just a few more paces, come on.’
As they scrabbled up to the foot of the walls, Morgan could see how the rubble caused by the gunfire both helped and hindered them. No proper breaches had been punched through which the attackers might pour – there simply hadn’t been time for the guns to concentrate their fire against the fortress in the running fight for Jhansi, which was now in its fourth day. The artillery had mauled the walls badly but not fatally, the piles of broken masonry making an uneven platform at the top of the glacis upon which they could lodge their ladders, yet the heaps of spoil meant that there was no cover from the defenders above.
‘Here, just here…’ Morgan thumped both timber feet into a heap of brick and broken stone work a yard or so from the base of the fractured wall, ‘…heave, get your shoulders behind it…’ and the wobbling bamboo fingers reached six yards up into the night sky. ‘…bed it in…’ Morgan could picture how the window cleaners at home would settle their ladders and make sure that the tops were firm against the walls of the house – but no lead or iron flew there.
This is like something out of the Dark Ages, he thought. Now I see why Hume said I was off playing Richard the Lionheart. Indeed, he caught sight of a flash of steel and swirling robes on the battlements above that would not have looked out of place in the Crusades.
‘Corp’l Pegg…’ Morgan had one foot and hand on the ladder’s crosspieces, hoping that his weight would drive the legs more firmly into the rubble, ‘…Corp’l Pegg, where in God’s name are you?’ Morgan yelled in competition with all the crashes and bangs around him.
Curse the little sod, he thought. Just when I need him in the same fighting trim that he was at Rowa, he bloody well disappears.
But at the third time of asking, Pegg’s pale, sweaty face peeped round a file of the protection party.
‘Get behind me, Pegg, and keep close. Don’t fire whilst you’re climbing up.’ Morgan looked at Pegg’s long Enfield rifle and realised how unlikely that was anyway. ‘I’ll clear any badmashes with my pistol, but I’ll need you ready to shoot as soon as we’re on the parapet; got it?’
Pegg gulped and nodded unhappily.
‘Right, no more than four on the woodwork at any one time, and you men,’ Morgan turned to the squad who were snapping rounds at the top of the wall whilst doing their best to avoid the shower of rocks and bricks that were being thrown blindly from inside the fort, ‘hold your fire. Give me a volley just as I get to the top, understand?’ But before they could reply, Morgan was hard at the rungs, climbing as if he were born to it, sword dangling from its knot on his right wrist, his pistol clenched between his teeth.
I must look like some bloody pirate, he thought as he scrambled on, remembering how his father had always insisted that they were descended from another Captain Morgan altogether, but I’m all but defenceless now unless I spit this Tranter at them.
The wood bowed below his and the other men’s weight, the tops of the tines scraping up and down against the gritty stone of the walls, but on he climbed, hand over hand, the whole structure yawing despite the men below trying to hold it steady. Then he was suddenly aware that more was going on outside the bubble of his own fear and excitement. Morgan had heard another splintering crash against the brickwork ten paces off to his left, but all his attention had been focused on the enemies above his own stretch of wall.
Then he heard a bellow: ‘Remember Cawnpore! No mercy, my boys!’ and Kemp, like a great khaki ape, was swarming up the rungs, two pistols dangling round his neck from a single lanyard. But even as he stared at Kemp, he sensed a dark figure leaning far out of a shell-cracked fissure just above the highest reaches of his ladder. Something sang and flickered in the dark – a tulwar blade had come within a shave of the top of his head, cleaving the air but nothing else. Morgan trembled and clung to the ladder, even as the blade was swung again; it missed, but it forced him to duck and slip back down a rung. There was little that he could do now except hope for a bullet from the covering party to clear the way. But even as he dithered, Corporal Pegg below him gave the most ghastly shriek.
‘Sir…sir, for pity’s sake.’ The yells pierced even the booms of gun and musketry, Pegg hanging, dying horribly and slowly, Morgan had no doubt, from some hideous wound. ‘Oh Jesus, sir…’ the cries redoubled, ‘…you’re standing on me ’and.’
Then came the volley. Bullets chipped and whined around him, throwing up a cloud of dust from the bricks, a rifle ball hurling the defender back from the gap, allowing Morgan to leap forward and on to the firestep beyond the parapet, sword in one hand, his pistol, slimy with spit, in the other.
> Even as he was taking his revolver from his mouth, trying to find his footing on the broken slabs deep in shadow behind the parapet, he heard a shout and drumming feet. Looking towards the towering flagstaff that lay further along the breastwork to his right, he could see wounded and dead lying in twisted heaps – victims of the artillery shells. But over them came a slight, fleet figure, running hard, robes streaming out behind, a glittering blade high above his greasy head, his mouth twisted into a mask of hate.
Then every fencing lesson that Morgan had had as a boy asserted itself, for he reached for his sword rather than his pistol and flicked his blade in a high, protective curve over his head, dropping to one knee as he did so. The tulwar scythed down.
Don’t snap now, you useless bit of cutlery, thought Morgan as the Indian’s sword clanged against his own. He’d always mistrusted the standard infantry officer’s weapon, but this time it stood the test, his opponent slewing past him, staggering over the broken floor. He twisted round, pulled his own sabre back to deliver ‘cut four’ and struck.
‘Ow…you bastard. Ow!’ Morgan found himself shouting as he swiped hard enough at the back of the man’s shoulder to sever his arm, yet merely bounced off his victim, jarring his hand and wrist painfully. There was a similar yelp from his target, but the blade failed to bite.
‘Stand clear, sir.’ Pegg barged his officer to one side: steel flickered and the native sprawled on his face, with the NCO’s bayonet – which he must have fixed at lightning speed – dug fatally deep into the man’s spine.
‘I’m obliged to you, Corp’l Pegg – once again.’ Pegg could be an awful shirker sometimes, Morgan thought as he fought for breath, but he was good in a roughhouse. ‘But did you see that: my blade didn’t even touch the sod.’
‘Sir, I did. But look at this.’ As Pegg pulled the bayonet from the dead man’s back, so a span of tight, metal links came with it, showing through the rift in the native’s jerkin. ‘chain mail, sir, crafty heathens. You won’t cut through that, but a good poke with a bit of Birmingham’s best will do the job.’
I was right, I am back in the Dark Ages, thought Morgan as he looked at something that he’d last seen in a London museum.
‘Come on, you two, stop fannying about.’ Kemp with Rissaldar Batuk at his side, swept past them, just as a great gang of the Europeans came barrelling along the walkway in their wake, shouting and yelling at the tops of their voices. Morgan sprinted to overtake them; if they were going to haul down the Rhani’s colours, he wanted to be there.
‘Follow me, boys.’ Now the troops were panting to keep up with Morgan. ‘Leave the dead; they’ll do you no harm.’ Morgan wanted the trophy, but the 3rd Bombay Europeans had very different ideas. Not a body or wounded man was left unturned, each corpse being expertly rifled, purses found in cummerbunds, mohurs in turbans and the linings of skull caps. As he reached the shot-splintered flagstaff and began to fumble with the halliard, the crowd just carried on going, tumbling down a flight of steps that led from the walls into the depths of the town.
‘Stand firm, you men,’ Morgan shouted after the disappearing forms; he and Kemp needed some form of protection from the bodyguard that the Rhani was bound to have with her – if she could be found.
‘You stand fucking firm, mate.’ And the pride of Bombay hooted off into the shadows, smoke and flames of Jhansi.
‘Don’t waste your breath, lad.’ Kemp stood next to Morgan at the pole, scanning a pile of corpses at its base, his revolver hovering, ready. ‘Those boys are after grog and gold; they won’t be listening to you or any other officer. Leave them. And stop buggering about with that rag…’ the big flag now lay in a pile at Morgan’s feet, ‘…there’s a better prize for the taking.’
Morgan looked at Kemp. The bulky, wheezy old warrior had gone; there stood a man twenty years younger, every fibre of him alive with what the popular newspapers called ‘the joy of battle’ (though Morgan had yet to experience such a thing), his eyes alight, his body just an extension of the pistol in his hand.
‘Namskaar…kahaang hai Lakshmi Bai?’ Kemp spoke clearly and firmly as a tattered native rose from the pile of dead men, grinned and made namasti.
‘Jesus, sir, it’s a bleedin’ ghost.’ Pegg pulled his rifle into the shoulder and aimed directly at the native’s belly, but Kemp beckoned for him to lower the weapon as he and Rissaldar Batuk poured out more questions and instructions. Another ripple of musketry lit the night as a further storming party straddled the battlements, but the Indian continued to grin and bob. Finally, Kemp reached into his shirt, pulled out a small cloth bag, heavy with gold and threw it across to the man; he caught it neatly and with no more ado, scampered off down the same steps that the Europeans had found, signalling for Kemp and the others to follow.
‘Sorry about the delay, gentlemen.’ The commandant turned on the steps and ducked as a shell burst to their front. ‘Spot of haggling to be done. The Rhani’s people don’t come cheap. Just keep up with our friend here; he says he knows where the bitch is. But don’t go picking any fights, we ain’t got the muscle.’ Pegg looked relieved at this last instruction as he stuffed the flag that Captain Morgan had told him to carry into his haversack.
The five men picked their way cautiously down a darkened alley, hearing the shouts and fire of what they could only guess was the Europeans’ progress some way to their left, but paying it no attention. They rounded a corner; light from a burning building showed a junction ahead that led into some sort of open area or square, their guide flattening his palms in the universal sign for caution.
‘Stay here, you three.’ Even one of Kemp’s whispers demanded instant obedience. ‘I’ll go on with this bucko for a look-see.’ The two figures, one stick-thin and stealthy, the other stout but nimble as a leopard, crept forward, eventually lowering themselves onto the gritty earth and peeping round the corner of the alley just inches off the ground.
All Morgan could see was the two men lying side by side and watching something beyond them that was lit by the flames. Then the guide pointed slowly, tensely, before he put his lips close to Kemp’s ear and murmured, Kemp almost immediately signalling the others to join him.
‘Come on, stealthy now.’ Morgan had already sheathed his sword, but he checked his pistol, making sure that none of the six percussion caps had fallen from their nipples. ‘Crawl the last few paces.’ The rissaldar and Pegg nodded their understanding and in minutes the three of them were creeping their way up to the junction.
A poky square no more than fifty paces across lay before them, three sides of which were dominated by high merchants’ houses – one blazing fiercely – whilst the fourth consisted of the wall of the fortress, pierced by several embrasures. In the middle of the open ground stood a dozen or so nervous, shifting horses, some with riders, others being held by a variety of native troops. The firelight reflected off scabbards and carbine barrels, off long-rowelled spurs and polished metal helmets.
‘Look there, Morgan.’ Kemp had taken off his topee; now his long hair hung down over his brow as he mouthed, ‘What do you make of that?’
A handful of darkly robed men were in the saddle, others stood by their horses’ heads, but in their middle was one mounted, helmeted figure who was obviously giving orders. On a pony to the rear of the group seemed to be two children astride the same saddle and, close to them, half obscured by the other riders, a fair-skinned, willowy figure.
‘I think there’s a memsahib there, Commandant…’ Morgan felt as if the breath had been knocked out of him by the sight, ‘…at the back of the gang…look; and there’s two boys on that pony, ain’t there?’ The blood thundered through Morgan’s head. After all this time, all these dangers, there was his woman and the son he’d never seen, just yards from him.
‘No, damn them. That’s the little bint I’m interested in, there in the centre, giving voice – just as you’d expect.’ Kemp pointed to the person in the midst of the group whose face was obscured by the metal of a nose-piece and
a curtain of chain mail. ‘Pegg, I’d be grateful if you’d pass me your rifle. Is it primed?’
‘It’s Corporal Pegg, if you don’t mind, sir.’ Pegg checked that the hammer was at half cock as he passed the weapon forward. ‘An’ of course it’s ready. I’m not some bloody crow, you know, sir,’ he bristled.
‘Aye, well, an Enfield ball should cool her ardour.’ Kemp moved carefully into the kneeling position, pulled the long rifle into his shoulder and thumbed the hammer back in one smooth movement.
As he curled his finger round the trigger and squinted at the easy target, there was a lull in the artillery fire, a sudden quiet, in which the Rhani’s high, commanding voice was clearly audible. Those should have been the last words she ever said, but as the hammer came down there was just the pop of the cap’s detonation. The rifle had misfired.
‘Devil take it. Use your pistols, for Christ’s sake.’ And in an instant Kemp had let the weapon drop and was on his feet firing his revolver, with Morgan hastily doing the same whilst the rissaldar, smooth as silk, snapped a shot off from his carbine.
Only Rissaldar Batuk’s round found a mark, wounding one of the escort whose yelp ripped the night. But the other bullets did no damage at the forty or so yards from which they fired, except to frighten the horses. A few balls came in reply, flying equally wide, but by the time the powder smoke had cleared, all Morgan could see were frightened faces and sparking hoofs as the knot of cavalry spurred towards the far wall. In the middle of the group rode the other woman. She was doing her best to keep up with a bearded mutineer, still in his John Company coat, and on a big chestnut, who was dragging the pony and its cargo along with him by a leading rein.
Dust and Steel Page 26