Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  ‘Has anyone been hurt by the firing, Charles?’ Emily asked hesitantly.

  ‘Not yet,’ her husband answered, stuffing a handful of biscuits into his pocket. ‘Or rather, not badly. But as I was coming back I heard that they have begun to loophole the houses near the perimeter, so I expect the pandies are stepping things up. I must go. Don’t know when I’ll be back, so eat when you want to.’

  ‘Oh, Charles, don’t be long … please!’ Emily looked as though she would cry again given half a chance, but one look at Kate, frowning from a corner, made her think better of it.

  Sometime too, during that first long hour of fire, though we were not aware of it, Sir Henry Lawrence galloped into the enclosure with the bitter intelligence that the battle of Chinhat had been lost.

  Instead of the few hundred mutinous sepoys from Cawnpore he had expected to encounter, he was met by a force of six thousand men, well-mounted, well-armed and excellently disciplined, and the battle had fast degenerated into a rout. News of our defeat soon reached the city; the populace, wild with excitement, hurried to throw in its lot with the sepoys, and even as Charles stood in our kitchen talking to us, our men fought their way through the now openly hostile streets, back to the Residency.

  We women had received strict orders to remain under cover and, in truth, we had no desire to venture out, so were spared the pain of witnessing the return of the brave little army we had watched setting out in the bright morning light.

  All that evening and through the night they limped in, exhausted, bewildered, dejected, carrying the dead and the dying and the many who had fallen victims to the sun. No one knew that night how many men had been lost, but the Howitzer had been taken, and four of the other guns.

  The entrenchment rang with stories of how the defeat had happened, as the men who had been left behind hurried to their wives and friends with the stories, often conflicting, of the men who had gone out. Rumours, suppositions, garbled versions of the truth, we heard them all with equal alarm and pity. Some said that the mutinous sepoys, armed with six fine guns, had fought with courage and cunning worthy of their erstwhile officers; that the native artillery, and a large number of the Sikh cavalry, seeing the steady white turbanned tide of the mutineers cresting the brow of an incline, had overturned the guns and galloped their steeds over to the enemy without firing a shot; that our men were exhausted by a hard day’s work and a hard night’s drinking before they set out, hungry and thirsty; that the muskets of the 32nd, so long unused, were clogged and could not be fired. On two points only were all the accounts agreed: we were outnumbered six to one, and the day’s most potent enemy had been the sun.

  Kate remained with us through the night. It was impossible to sleep, and we sat on the hard wooden chairs in the shifting light of our lantern dozing, waiting, straining our ears to try and make out what was happening outside. The small room was stifling and stale in the heat; the oily smell of the lantern was almost unendurable, but none of us had the courage to put it out. After a time, Charles stretched out on one of the beds in the other room, where Pearl in her box slept quietly.

  The firing that had been sporadic during the afternoon increased in intensity as the night wore on and our attackers were joined by the mutineers whom we had so signally failed to deter at Chinhat. All the buildings around the perimeter were now loopholed for rifles, and heavy guns mounted on roofs and upper storeys were brought into play. Many of our own men snatched only a couple of hours’ rest on reaching the enclosure, before relieving others at the defences.

  It must have been about three o’clock in the morning when Wallace Avery and Captain Fanning knocked on the door in search of Kate, to tell her that George was dead. They had come upon his body as they stopped for a short rest at the Machi Bhawan, a fort some five miles away along the side of the river, and that was all they knew.

  It was almost as though Kate had expected their news. She nodded two or three times as they spoke—her bright, lined face suddenly very old—and, when they had finished, sat for a moment in silence looking at her hands holding her blue rosary beads. Then she put the rosary in her pocket and stood up.

  ‘Thank you, Wally,’ she said. ‘You were very thoughtful to come to me directly. I could have been waiting such a long time. I … I think I would like to go back to my own quarters now.’ She picked up her bonnet, Emily and I kissed her wordlessly, then Captain Fanning and Charles took her over to the King’s Hospital. A burst of noise entered the room as the door was unbarred briefly to allow them to leave, and then Emily and I were left facing Wallace alone.

  He had a handkerchief twisted round his forehead, and a mass of congealed blood stained his cheek. He shrugged as the door closed, then sat down wearily on the stool.

  ‘God, what a blasted awful day!’ he said thickly, drawing a dirty hand across his eyes. ‘What a bloody mess! You’d think my luck would have changed, wouldn’t you? All those poor devils dropping around me like duck on a jheel, and all I manage to pick up is a scratch on the forehead and a pair of blistered feet. Oh, my God, what a pitiful, bloody awful mess … and I’m still alive at the end of it!’

  ‘You’re being saved for the gallows,’ I said witheringly, and set about making some tea. At that hour of the morning, I had scant patience with Wallace Avery, particularly in view of the news he had just broken.

  ‘You didn’t see George until …’ asked Emily hesitantly.

  ‘No. Not a sight all day. Then Fanning came upon his body on the back of a cart. Both legs had gone. I expect he died at once. God, I hope so! There were dozens of others in the Machi Bhawan, dead and wounded, but mostly dead. We wanted to bring him back, but there was nothing to carry him on, and anyway we couldn’t have managed it. Done up, you know. Poor old George. Decent chap. Dearden, he’s gone too. You remember him? A bullet got him straight in the gullet, not two yards away from me. He was alive, so we put him on a limber, and later on, when I had time, I went to look at him. Dead. The sun, I suppose, as much as the bullet. Look, I even lost my helmet when I was hit, but the sun wasn’t enough to do for me—not lucky Wallace! Saved for the gallows is right. No thanks, no tea for me, I’m in search of something stronger.’ We made no move to stop him; and he lurched to his feet and staggered into the noisy dark.

  George Barry, comfortable, quiet George Barry, lay somewhere on a bloody limber with both legs shot off, dead. We made tea and drank it gratefully, making no attempt at realization.

  Kate was denied even the scant comfort of a funeral.

  The next day, the remnants of the force from the Machi Bhawan were brought into the Residency and the fort was blown up. Sir Henry Lawrence had intended to keep it garrisoned to act as a threat to the country people, in the same way that he had hoped the Residency would deter the city, but the losses at Chinhat forced him to abandon this scheme. Every man alive was needed now at the Residency, and sooner than have the great supply of ammunition stored at the Machi Bhawan fall into the mutineers’ hands, the place was destroyed.

  Charles, I remember, had just come in and was lighting his pipe when a thunderous report and a shock like an earthquake caused him to drop the match and burn a hole in his breeches. The lantern jerked off the hook that held it over the table and was extinguished. In the darkness Emily screamed; I leapt up, knocking over my chair, and Pearl, woken from sleep, began to wail in protest at the prevailing confusion. Toddy-Bob had been sitting in the shelter of a pillar on the verandah, whittling and whistling, when the twenty thousand pounds of powder and a vast amount of musket shot went up with one tremendous roar. His knife slipped, cutting his forefinger, but he was so astounded by the display of pyrotechnics suddenly enlivening the dark sky that he forgot to staunch the blood, which then dripped down his clothing for some moments unsuspected, and next morning produced many exclamations of commiseration from the ladies of the Gaol, with most of whom Toddy was already on easy terms.

  Shortly afterwards, the great wooden doors of the Baillie Guard were drawn to and barricad
ed with earth, sandbags and baulks of timber. Guns were mounted to command the approaches to the gate. No one now could enter or leave the enclosure, and we were truly in a state of siege.

  There had been no word of Oliver Erskine.

  CHAPTER 6

  Our world now shrank to the confines of the enclosure and became, as the days passed in heat, noise, smells and suffering, as close an approximation to hell as any of us were capable of imagining. The daily battle for survival, the almost hourly search for ways and means to continue a rudimentary and unrewarding form of existence, served in those first days to deflect our minds from the grosser evils around us. Not that we were insulated from the realities of cruel death and crippling injury; not that we were unaware of what our men faced; not that we lacked imagination or feeling, or even information. But for most of us women, cooped up in tiny rooms like those in the Thug Gaol, or in underground cellars in other houses, the conditions in which we found ourselves were so far outside our experience that it took all the physical and mental energy we could muster to adjust ourselves to them.

  Very few of us had ever turned our hands to domestic matters—even a private’s wife in India has servants—and now we found ourselves without servants, without light and with the minimum of fuel or food to cook on it. The rations alone posed me a daily problem in ingenuity in making them edible. We received beef, rice, lentils, the coarse, stone-ground flour called atta and salt. No butter, no milk, no vegetables, and our private stock of tea, sugar and jam would last no great length of time. Moreover, the meat was always so tough it could only be stewed, and was often so largely bone that only a broth was possible. By the time we had worked ourselves into some sort of routine, by the time we had realized that no efforts of ours could produce a palatable meal, decrease the heat of our quarters or increase our physical comfort, we had also somehow learned to accept the more fearful implications of our state. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb—and many a delicate lady forced for the first time to cook on three bricks on the floor, cut up her meat with nail scissors, and deal unaided with mice, rats, cockroaches, ants and scorpions, had reason to be grateful for even such unpleasant aids to forgetfulness.

  There had been a short pause in the bombardment after the great explosion that sent the Machi Bhawan sky high—the pandies clearly were trying to decide what would happen next—but then they redoubled their fire and all through that night and the following day and night the guns never ceased.

  The Thug Gaol was in the second line of defence—in other words, there were buildings and entrenchments between us and the enemy. But, though we were relatively protected from rifle fire, round shot, shell and ball threatened us as much as anyone else. On that first night, exhausted by the day’s alarms, we managed to sleep in snatches, but woke often to the unremitting din of the guns, of exploding shells, of falling masonry, and once, most horribly, to the screams of a wounded horse.

  My string cot stood just across the little room from Emily’s, and we had placed Pearl in her packing case against the inner wall to protect her as much as possible. Happily innocent of our predicament, the child slept soundly through the noise.

  ‘Laura?’ It was the faintest whisper. Emily was learning consideration, but the noise the horse made in its agony, until someone expended a merciful bullet on it, had driven away any possibility of sleep.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Laura, aren’t you frightened?’

  ‘No. I’m terrified!’

  ‘How long will it go on?’

  ‘I don’t know. Days perhaps.’

  ‘I … I hate the noise, all the crashes and bangs and the horrid whiny bullets. I can’t think properly with it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you suppose … do you think we’ll ever really get out of this, Laura?’

  ‘I expect so. Sir Henry would have thought of something else if he had felt we wouldn’t be relieved—very soon too.’ What was the point of telling her that Sir Henry had had no alternative but to stay?

  ‘But could he have known it would be as bad as this?’

  ‘I imagine so, and we must face it, Emmie; it might even get worse before it’s finished.’

  ‘I … I still can’t believe it’s happening to us!’ she whispered unhappily. ‘To me. If Charles had been a soldier or something—but we are only visitors! We should be in Mount Bellew, not here. It’s summer there, Laura. The garden must be full of roses and delphiniums and lupins. And the apples will be ripening in the orchard. I can’t seem to realize that this is real. Why should it be us? How can it be us?’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said again, sighing. But my thoughts did not take me to Mount Bellew. I wondered how Hassanganj looked now, the house a burnt-out ruin, the gardens already running riot with weeds grown doubly fecund in the monsoon rain, the grass in the park waist high. I saw as clearly as though they were before my eyes the mountains rearing out of the dark belt of the terai, flushing pink at dawn, silver in the moonlight, and the long fields of canary mustard under the soft spring sky. I thought of Old Adam, all his labour, imagination and love reduced to mere memory in a few mortal minds. I thought, too, of Oliver. Where was he? Why had he not joined us? I believe I prayed for him.

  ‘Laura?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I might die!’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘Or you might.’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘But I might, I really might, and if I do and you don’t … I want you to know some things that I am thinking now … I want you to know I won’t mind about Charles … if you want to marry him, I mean.’

  ‘What?’ I sat up abruptly in the darkness. ‘Oh, Emmie, for heaven’s sake be sensible! You are not going to die and I am certainly not going to marry Charles. Turn over and go to sleep.’ It was ridiculous to think of marriage, any marriage, on such a night, and I must have giggled.

  ‘No, don’t laugh. It’s very difficult for me to say this, but I’ve had … so much on my conscience … and I’ve known, oh, for a long time, that he cared for you. I’m not being noble or anything. I don’t love him. You know that, so I’m not even jealous, not really, and if I … go, I’d sooner you had Pearl than anyone else. You’d be good to her for her own sake, as well as for Charles’s. I’ve made such a mess of everything. But I want you to know.’

  ‘Now, Emmie, you are being absurd. In a week or so we’ll be out of this and you’ll be sorry you ever spoke so. We are both tired and frightened, but there’s no point in allowing yourself to get morbid and say such silly things. Anyway, I could never marry Charles. I don’t love him.’

  ‘You don’t? Honestly?’

  ‘No, Emmie, I don’t!’

  ‘Oh dear! What a silly waste of time it all was then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was so sure you loved him, when we first knew him. And I thought he was beginning to look at you as though he might love you. That’s why I set my cap at him. I couldn’t have borne you to get married before me!’

  A sudden silence filled my mind, blotting out the noisy night.

  ‘And was that the only reason you married him?’ I asked very quietly.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I thought I was in love with him, for a time. But it didn’t last very long … and I’ve been very unhappy. Really unhappy.’

  ‘Yes. It was a very silly waste of time,’ was all I could say in my bitterness.

  ‘Of course, now that I have Pearl I can bear it better,’ she continued, unmindful of my tone. ‘She’s going to be such a comfort to me, and I’m going to see that she has everything, just everything that a girl can have. Always! If only, when this is all finished, I mean, if only Oliver would ask Charles to remain on in Hassanganj, for always. He is always so good to me, and I know I could be happy again there. And that’s another thing. If I should die, will you be sure and tell Oliver how grateful I was to him? For his kindness to me, his thoughtfulness. I’ve wished, so often you can’t imagine, that Charles
was a bit more like Oliver, but of course I know that’s impossible. But you will remember to tell Oliver how … how much he meant to me, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing, for the simple reason that I’ll have forgotten this absurd conversation long before we see him, and anyway, you’ll have every opportunity to tell him all you want to yourself. Thank heavens that poor horse has stopped. It’s nearly dawn. I’ll get up and make some tea. It’ll cheer us both up.’

  ‘But you said we must save what we have.’

  ‘It’s nearly breakfast-time, so I might as well get the fire going before the sun rises. Charles will be in soon, and I can keep the same tea warm.’

  While I wrestled with kindling and charcoal and put a pot of water on to boil, I meditated on our conversation and the ironies of fate. A month before, such frankness would have been as impossible to Emily as to me. And even a month ago, could I have told her with such conviction that I did not love her husband? I smiled wryly to myself as I realized how radically we had altered, Emily, I—even Charles. Not so long ago I would have been filled with confusion, guilt, and—who knows?—perhaps even a wild hope by Emily’s words. Now they had no importance. True, I had known a certain bitterness when she confessed that she had set herself to attract Charles just so that I would not ‘get’ him. But it had soon passed. Perhaps I had always known it, after all. Some time, perhaps, I would know a justifiable anger at the moment of thoughtless spite on Emily’s part which had led to so much unhappiness for all three of us. For I had been truly unhappy for a time, as I believed she was now and as I knew Charles was too. It was a matter, however, that would have to be faced and dealt with in the future, if we were to have a future. For the moment, remembering to be properly frugal with the tea leaves was of more importance.

  While I waited for the water to boil, I opened the door and looked out into the gathering light of the new day. It was like no other dawn I had ever seen, for the entrenchment had not slept and there was no sense of a gradual awakening after rest. Everywhere men were on the move, working as they had worked all through the hours of darkness, hauling guns to new positions, shoring up the defences damaged in the barrage, building screens of bamboo and sacking to cut off the view of lanes and open spaces from the enemy marksmen in houses outside the walls. Other fires than ours had already been lit and I could scent wood-smoke over the smells of dust, cordite and open drains, and the light, when it came, was of the same dead yellow as the dust that filled it.