Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  Here a group of civilians drilled under the supervision of a perspiring, red-coated sergeant; there a party of soldiers stacked up kegs and cases of stores and quickly thatched the completed piles; white men in shirtsleeves and brown men in loincloths worked side by side fortifying buildings with sandbags and banks of earth, while strings of skinny-legged coolies bobbed past carrying baskets of earth on their head with which to strengthen the glacis; and through the hurrying labouring throng gun bullocks pulled guns to new emplacements, and mules, their harnesses jingling, drew loads of ammunition to places of safety. Under the purplish light of the banking clouds, the scene was weird and threatening. I could make nothing of it; I could not see the purpose that underlay the confusion. Yet it was clear that, although so many worked with desperate concentration, although the air rang with shouts and orders and neighing of horses, camel bells and the trumpeting of elephants, there was over all that chaotic scene a sense of suspended animation, as though everyone and everything, men, beasts, the buildings themselves, were waiting.

  The soldiers who had accompanied us in were soon swallowed up in the throng, and for a time we wandered hesitantly around, jostled, shoved but otherwise ignored, looking for a familiar face, or someone of recognizable authority to whom we could turn for advice. Two or three times Charles stopped men hurrying by and asked for Major Barry, but each time an unknowing shake of the head was the only reply. I scanned every group we came to, looked eagerly into each abstracted face, hoping beyond hope to find the one countenance that I knew must come to our aid. Toddy-Bob and Ishmial too, I noticed, were searching for that one particular face and, despite myself, hope grew in me that perhaps Oliver was already here, among all these strangers, all these busy, preoccupied men, and that soon we would come upon him. It was a foolish hope. If he had returned to Lucknow, he would surely have come to the house of Wajid Khan before the Residency? So much that was improbable, impossible, had happened over the last weeks, that it was difficult for me now to order my mind to only reasonable expectation, and I followed Charles and Emily with an almost eager hope.

  Then Charles spoke to a grimy, shirtsleeved soldier, pausing for a moment on his spade, who, having heard our predicament, took us over to a middle-aged officer.

  ‘So, just got in, have you?’ said the officer, looking with an unsurprised eye at Emily and me in our burqhas. ‘Had some trouble, I see. And with a baby too! Well, you are lucky to be here; another day or so and you’d have found yourselves shut out. We expect the attack any time now; the devils have closed in all around us. Can’t think myself what they are waiting for; not that we haven’t had a few skirmishes already of course, but nothing to what they are preparing to mount.’

  ‘Do you mean there is going to be a … a battle, sir?’ Emily anticipated my question, alarm in her tired blue eyes.

  ‘No, madam,’ answered the officer, a kindly man with a round red face and sandy whiskers. ‘No battle. A leaguer. We are about to be besieged.’

  ‘Oh!’ The martial terms meant little to Emily and not much more to me. However, with the evidence before me, I was prepared to believe that a siege was liable to be as alarming as a battle, especially when I recalled the account I had read of the siege of Sevastopol, of the suffering and privation, sickness and starvation endured by the troops in the Crimea. But I was too tired to feel added alarm, too sure it was better to meet whatever might come in the company of our fellow countrymen than be forced to endure alone, so I followed the officer in stoical silence as he wound his way through the crowds.

  ‘Don’t know where we can quarter you,’ he said. ‘Place is bursting at the seams as it is. Parties have been coming in every day from stations in the mofussil, some of ’em in a really bad way. But the first thing to do is to see that you are down on the quartermaster’s list so that you can draw rations. We might be holed up here for some time, you see, so we have to be careful of what food we have. Have you any firearms?’

  Charles replied that he and Toddy-Bob had pistols, but made no mention of mine, so neither did I.

  ‘Well, that’s better than nothing,’ the officer commented. ‘You and your man will be issued with muskets in the morning. And, er, the black gentleman is trustworthy, I presume?’ He nodded towards Ishmial.

  ‘Eminently,’ returned Charles shortly. ‘It is largely due to him that we are alive.’

  ‘Quite so. Well, we shall issue him with a musket too then. Believe me, we are going to need every man that can hold a gun, black, white or brindle.’

  He was not much interested in where we had come from, or how we had arrived, once he had assured himself that Charles was not a military man, nor yet in the service of the Government.

  ‘Hm, just visitors, are you? Well, your stay in India is going to turn out livelier than you expected!’

  Later, when we had heard the stories of some of our fellow escapers, we understood this lack of interest. Our adventures were in no way noteworthy, for few had entered the Residency during the past month whose stories were any less remarkable than ours; many had met with greater terrors, and some with tragedy.

  We had stood to one side to allow a gun to rattle past, when I caught sight of a familiar black bonnet bobbing towards me.

  ‘Kate! Oh look, there’s Kate! Kate! Kate!’ I cried and, as soon as the passage of the gun allowed me to, darted across the path to Kate, who had stopped and was peering through the dimness in an effort to make out who had called her.

  ‘Oh, Kate! Thank heavens we have found someone we know!’ And I hugged her so hard that she squealed, looking up at me with her bonnet awry and tears in her bright periwinkle eyes.

  ‘Laura! Oh, my dear, you here too! And I was so sure that nothing could ever happen to you in Hassanganj.’ And then as the others joined us, ‘Emmie dear, Charles—and, oh, Toddy! And Ishmial!’ She kissed Emily and Charles, and nodded, smiling through tears, at the other two, patting each of them on an arm so that they would not feel left out of her welcome.

  ‘It’s good to see you, indeed, but so sad as well. So Hassanganj has gone too?’ She blew her nose in a large man-sized pocket handkerchief as she took us in: Charles in dirty shirt and breeches, Emily and I with our burqhas thrown back over our shoulders to reveal grimy dresses, Toddy-Bob with the sowar’s breeches wrinkling round his ankles, and the sowar’s bullet- and blood-scarred jacket over his shoulder. Only Ishmial in his stiffly starched turban, his red velvet waistcoat and crossed bandoliers, with his tulwar stuck in his cummerbund, must have looked to her much as he had always done.

  ‘Yes. Hassanganj has gone, but we are safe at last, Kate. Quite safe.’

  ‘Thank God in his goodness for that! But where,’ and she looked around, ‘where is Oliver? Why isn’t he with you? Surely he came?’

  ‘He isn’t here then?’ I asked in a small voice, though Kate’s surprise at seeing us had been sufficient indication that he was not. ‘We … I … thought he might have arrived by now. He brought us as far as the outskirts of the city, and then went back to … to attend to something in Hassanganj. We have been in Wajid Khan’s house for three weeks, and I felt sure he must have come straight here, thinking we would be here before him.’

  ‘Wajid Khan’s house for three weeks? How extraordinary! But no, I’ve seen no sign of Oliver and I’m sure I should have done if he had arrived. But don’t worry about him, m’dears. He’ll turn up like a bad penny, never fear. Though he had better hurry or he’ll find himself on the wrong side of the fence for sure!’

  The sandy officer, who had become restive at the delay, caught her attention.

  ‘These are friends of mine, Will,’ she said. ‘I know you are busy and I suppose you are trying to house the poor creatures, so shall I take them over and find them quarters?’

  ‘Bless you, Kate—if you would? You’ll see them stowed away more comfortably than I could anyway. She has pull!’ he informed us with a wink. ‘See that they are put down for rations, and scrounge as much else as you can too, with my bles
sing; blankets and mattresses are going to be in short supply once the hospital fills up, so get all you need now.’ With which cheering advice he left us, saluting smartly though he wore no jacket or cap.

  As he walked away a party of ladies emerged from a long, low, barrack-like building and stood on the wide verandah just near us, laughing and talking. They were very correctly dressed in light gowns of muslin and poplin, amply frilled over wide hoops. They wore bonnets and in their white-gloved hands carried prayer books and hymnals. I realized it must be Sunday; the days of the week had had no significance for us for nearly a month, and what struck me was the ordinariness, and expectedness of the ladies’ attire. I could not take my eyes from the sight of so many neat gowns, polished slippers and pretty bonnets; they were all so clean, spruce and well cared for. Among the ladies were a few with whom we were acquainted, but we did not draw attention to ourselves. We were about to move away, when a number of officers in full uniform came on to the verandah, hovering around a thin, stooped man with sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones and a wisp of grey beard.

  ‘Sir Henry,’ Kate whispered to Charles, as the gentleman came down the verandah steps and passed by us. ‘Sir Henry Lawrence. Poor man, he’s not at all well.’ She tapped her chest significantly. ‘When you are settled in, I must introduce you to him. I don’t believe he had arrived before you left Lucknow, had he?’

  ‘No,’ answered Charles, ‘but we know something of him; Oliver has a great regard for his judgement and knowledge of the country.’

  ‘And he, believe it or not, has a great regard for Oliver.’

  I wondered how Kate had discovered this, and whether it was generally known that Oliver Erskine had been in communication with Sir Henry Lawrence since the latter’s arrival in Lucknow. Probably; so few things are ever secret in India.

  My eyes followed the frail figure curiously as it passed out of sight. He had looked sad, almost bitter; and, though he had attended politely to the men with him, he had not smiled. Gossip said that his wife’s death three years earlier had left him a broken man; that his disagreements on policy with his disputatious brother John, now provincial commissioner of the Punjab, had embittered him; that the lung disease from which he suffered would have killed him but for the steely will that had made him accept the administration of Oudh, where he hoped to prove his own way right in opposition to his brother’s harsher theories of government. Gossip called him a sage—or a dreamer; a scholar and a soldier; a saint, sometimes a fanatic. To me he had looked a sick, tired and comfortless man. But it was to him we owed whatever measure of safety we enjoyed in the Residency.

  As the last of the congregation came out from the room in the Thug Gaol that did duty as a church, the heavens at last opened. A tremendous clap of thunder followed streak lightning that split the purple clouds, and a second later a few enormous drops of rain cratered the powdery dust at our feet and we ran for shelter. Tired and depressed as I was, I had to laugh at the elegant ladies putting up diminutive parasols to shield themselves from the breaking of the monsoon. Later, much later, I was often to remember that futile gesture as a true symbol of our human situation during the terrible months that followed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Much later that evening, when the first frenzied cloudburst had abated to a steady downpour that drummed on the roofs and turned the thick dust into a morass of yellow mud and washed the last of the light from the angry sky, we found ourselves housed in two small cells of that same building, the Thug Gaol, outside which I had caught my first glimpse of Sir Henry Lawrence. By then, with our bundles stowed on the two string beds which were all the furniture the cells boasted, we had learned to consider ourselves lucky to have even so inadequate a refuge.

  What a comedy that hunt for accommodation proved, and how pointed was the lesson it taught me: namely, that for all our superior talk of Christian culture, political democracy and Western civilization, the British system of caste is as tenacious an evil and as impervious to the onslaughts of disaster and crisis as is that of the Hindus whose prejudices we so complacently condemn!

  The trouble was that we could not be tidily pigeon-holed into any of the accepted strata or sub-strata of local society. We were manifestly not military; neither were we administrative, covenanted or non-covenanted civilians; we had no claim on the professional men of Lucknow, nor on the tradesmen. We were merely the guests of a remote and unpopular zemindar and planter, and this fact precluded us from all but the least salubrious accommodation.

  Perhaps I am being too sweeping; certainly every building in the enclosure was packed to capacity, but nevertheless I had the feeling that we were turned away from most of them more because of our social ambivalence than their lack of space. The best houses, those in which resided the permanent civilian administrative staff of the Residency, the houses of Mr Gubbins, Mr Ommaney and Dr Fayrer, had taken in the wives and families from cantonments when Sir Henry Lawrence had ordered them into the Residency five weeks earlier. The wives and families of the officers, that is; the families of the men of the 32nd Foot had been housed in the tykhanas and subterranean rooms of the Residency itself. We were latecomers and could not be housed with our social peers; neither could we hope to move in with the rankers’ families since we were civilians, even could our social superiority have been overlooked. Of the other buildings not devoted exclusively to officers or men, one housed the schoolboys and masters of the Martinière School, one was full of unaccompanied women and children from the mofussil, others had been taken over for the families of covenanted officials, clerks and writers, and one, which was practically empty, was considered too dangerous a place for women, for its defences were still non-existent and it was near the enemy lines. It began to look as though we must share the restless fate of the Wandering Jew.

  As a last resort, Kate decided to throw us on the mercy of Mrs Gubbins herself. Mr Gubbins, though contentious, overbearing and unpopular, was of a generous disposition, but when we arrived at his house wet and muddy, it was to be informed by the Gubbins’s starched and starchy maid that her mistress was ‘not at home’.

  ‘Stupid females!’ stormed Kate, as we walked into the rain again. ‘They pay morning calls, leave cards on each other and gossip away their days as though they’d never left their dreary villas in Surbiton or Bournemouth—or seen their bungalows in cantonments go up in flames either. Most of them arrived here with so much baggage and furniture, birds and pets—Mrs Germon even brought her piano—you’d think they were settling down for a protracted holiday, instead of making ready for a siege!’

  In the end, it was the sandy officer who had first befriended us who took us to the Gaol and installed us in the two small whitewashed rooms, while Kate regaled him with a spirited and not entirely accurate account of the reception we had received at the various houses, and Toddy-Bob and Ishmial, still homeless, stood on the verandah with the rain gusting over them, looking bewildered and depressed.

  ‘Sorry about it, Mrs B,’ apologized Captain Emerson. ‘But we can’t force ’em to take your friends in, you know; they are still private houses! I thought they’d be more hospitable, though, which was why I let you take them over. However, this place is at least weatherproof and in the second line of defence, so they’ll probably be safer here than in the Doctor’s place, or Mr Gubbins’s come to that.’

  ‘Oh quite, quite, Will! No one’s blaming you, dear boy! But now we must have some more furniture, and you must find a billet for Ishmial. Toddy will have to sleep in the kitchen with you, Charles, for the moment.’ We had already termed the larger and lighter of the two cells the kitchen, since there was a primitive fireplace in one corner.

  ‘I’ll go and see about the blankets and so on now, and your man there will be billeted quite snugly down in the native lines.’

  Captain Emerson took Toddy-Bob and Ishmial with him when he went, and after a time they returned laden with four bedding rolls, such as are issued to the troops, together with a tin mug and plate for each of u
s. Another expedition saw them return with a rickety table, two kitchen chairs, a stool and two thin mattresses. Somewhere along the route Toddy-Bob had also managed to ‘collect’ a wooden packing case, fitted, illegally we felt sure, with a pillow of real down; Pearl was thus provided with a cot.

  When everything was in place and we had eaten the sketchy meal which was all we had the energy to prepare, Emily and I lay down gratefully on our string beds while the men spread their mattresses on the floor of the other room, all of us beyond caring that previous occupants of our quarters had been mass-murderers awaiting the scaffold! The Thugs for whom the Gaol had been built were members of an Indian religious society who earned merit for themselves by strangling unsuspecting travellers with a knotted handkerchief. Their secrets had been discovered and their activities suppressed within recent years by Colonel John Sleeman, a former Resident at the court of Oudh. I thought of Colonel Sleeman with the deepest gratitude that night. And of Oliver Erskine with anxiety …

  There were two or three shops in the enclosure, still fairly well stocked, and on the following morning, the rain having cleared away, we purchased some further small comforts for our rooms: cooking pots, a lantern, an enamel bowl for washing, cutlery, and various other useful articles, as well as food to supplement our rations.

  It was as well we did, for on that day Sir Henry Lawrence summoned into the enclosure the remainder of the troops from Mariaon Cantonments, and with their coming our situation would become more crowded and correspondingly less productive of comforts.

  Now that I was adequately rested and fed, I began to react in a less supine manner to the circumstances in which I found myself, and with Kate’s help came to a better understanding of all that had happened while we had been in the house of Wajid Khan. No reliable information had penetrated to us there, not even rumour—bar the manifestly biased stories recounted by the girl Ajeeba—and even when we had left Hassanganj the situation had been so confused and reports so contradictory that we had no true idea of what we could expect in Lucknow or what would happen in the foreseeable future.