In the centre of the courtyard stood a tree. The upper branches had been shot away and, since none lay below it, I could guess that they had been gathered for fuel almost as they fell. The leaves had withered and most had fallen, killed by the drought perhaps, or more probably by the fumes of cordite and gunpowder, and the tree stood bare and broken, raising truncated limbs to the bloodshot sky. I could not make out from what remained what type of tree it was. Yet squirrels still inhabited it, the small grey squirrels that are an integral part of any Indian garden. Fascinated by this mercurial, chattering life sustained by the dying tree, I watched them flick their bushy tails over the three black fingermarks that Rama’s blessing had left on their neat little bodies, beady eyes bright, small claws twinkling up and down and along the branches, noisy and aggressive, screaming imprecations at imagined insults, then stopping suddenly to wash a face or scratch behind an ear with total concentration. They were alive. Each small body was filled with all the life it could hold or, for the moment, needed. Perhaps they were hungry, for who could spare them a crumb? But they knew no fear, no foreboding, no loss, no recognition of mortality. They did not even know they were alive—as I now knew I was alive.
And I was alive. Still alive.
My head ached, my eyes burned, my throat was scorched and my feet hurt. I was tired to a point beyond exhaustion. My clothes were adequate only to cover my nakedness. My body smelled and my hands were filthy. My hair, long unwashed and soggy with sweat, had not been combed in a day and a night. I hated the feeling of my own unkemptness and cringed at the picture I must present. I feared the present, saw no hope in the future, could not endure the thought of the past—but for all that I was alive.
Soon it was too dark for me to see the squirrels in the ruined tree. The children were called indoors to eat and the wounded man hoisted himself to his feet with the aid of his rifle and limped away. One of the women on the verandah doused the little fire with a cup of water, while the other carried a pan of food into their room. A comparative silence fell with the darkness. Only the guns remained and I no longer heard them; for, sitting alone in the dark heat of that unhappy night, I formed a fierce determination to stay alive. It was more than a determination. It was a presentiment, a foreknowledge that I would survive. I could not have analysed how I arrived at this resolve, this certainty, but I remember hugging it to myself, exultant in the midst of grief and shock and loneliness. ‘I will live!’ I kept saying to myself, half as statement, half as resolution. ‘I will live! I will live!’ I would meet whatever came—sickness, injury, anguish. I would meet it and endure it and vanquish it. And I would live actively, meeting my days with open eyes and a pliable mind, in the knowledge that I was living the only life I would have to live. I would adopt no acceptable role of patient endurance; I would wear no admired mask of resigned suffering. Acceptance, I suddenly realized, was the virtue of the inert. But I was alive … and I would fight my life in order to live it.
Over the past weeks I had become an unwilling intimate of death. I had seen it come to the young and the old in horrible forms, had witnessed the dissolution of healthy bodies, and every nauseating breath I took reminded me of what lay in wait for my own tired bones and aching limbs should I succumb. But I would not succumb. I could not succumb.
For another voice I now remembered with the clarity of life spoke to me, with other words—words which forbade me the ease of death. As I remembered, I spoke them over softly to myself, knowing them to be a true memory and no fancied whisper from beyond the grave.
‘I will come to you—for you!’
His tone, as always, had been cool and unemotional. He had stated a matter of fact, and that fact I now believed in as surely as I had learned to believe in my own survival. He would come and I must be ready and waiting for him. That was why I must live, why I would live.
At last I stood up wearily to go indoors. The fire had fallen to a heap of white ashes and glowing sparks, all that was left of the earthly remnants of my cousin Emily.
Before I turned away from the fire and the night, I shut my eyes and prayed aloud, ‘Oh, God, please let him come as he said he would. Oh, God! Please let him come soon. Soon!’
CHAPTER 9
The rains broke in earnest at last, and within hours the entrenchment had become a morass of mud and evil-smelling slush. While the rain fell, we could rejoice honestly in the sound of the solid drumming on the flat roof of the Gaol; even the sight of small runnels of water seeping over the lintel of our doorway and entering the kitchen was almost welcome. The smell, that had so distressed us, abated, and for a short time we were refreshed and invigorated by the downpour. But then, when it stopped, the sun came out in strength, the ground steamed and bodies streamed with perspiration in the sweltering heat.
This pattern was to repeat itself day after day for two and a half months. Nothing and no one was ever truly dry, whether because of the rain or the sweat that followed it. Charles had but two shirts to his back, and, though I did my best to keep one clean and dry, such was the dampness of the atmosphere that he often changed from a shirt that was dirty and wet to one that, though clean, was almost as wet as that he had discarded. Fever flourished then; rheumatism became rampant, and often men manning the guns shivered so with the ague they could not touch the port-fire to the breach. Anything left on the floor or hanging against a wall became green with mildew in a few hours. Our dark rooms were horrid with the pursy bodies of large black spiders; at night monsoon toads sat in the puddles and croaked in shattering unison; fat, armoured beetles hurled themselves into whatever little pools of lamplight still remained, and minute mango flies, silent and almost invisible, added their quota of stings to flesh already raw with mosquito bites.
The day following Emily’s death found Kate moving her possessions into our rooms. Two rooms, however small, were considered too much for one baby and a woman (for Charles was now expected to sleep at Fayrer’s post), and had she not done so I would have been afflicted with a stranger’s constant presence. The arrangement suited us both: we were company for each other, understood each other’s tempers pretty well, and I was glad to have Kate’s assistance in dealing with the baby. We both dissolved in laughter the first time we tried to wash Pearl’s small slippery body in the inadequate tin bowl. One childless widow and one spinster between them made a poor showing at motherhood. And the baby and I were a comfort to Kate, too, whose loss was so recent and who, I knew, grieved deeply, though in silence.
Of Charles we saw less than ever. Once a day he came to the Gaol for something to eat and hung dutifully over his daughter for a moment or so. But he had little to say to anyone, seemed relieved when he left us, and I knew was volunteering for every possible extra duty that would keep him at his post. In my heart I was grateful to be allowed to forget him for long passages of time. Toddy-Bob found time each day to milk the goat, whom we had named Cassandra, and often Mr Roberts dropped in to see how we were getting on. Occasionally Wallace Avery came too, but he was becoming increasingly incoherent and, selfishly, we were always glad to see him depart.
Our few visitors were almost the only break in the routine of our day. Mrs Bonner, indeed, would have been very willing to spend the best part of her waking hours informing us of her past grandeurs as the ‘First Lady’ of her husband’s station, but we soon learned that it was very easy to dampen her social enthusiasm by complaining of some slight indisposition, preferably of the baby’s, since Pearl could not be asked suspicious questions. The word ‘contagion’ bore an even more terrifying connotation in Mrs Bonner’s mind than did ‘pandy’. For the rest, with too little work to do and too many hours to do it in, the irritation born of boredom was difficult to control, and it was always with relief that, as soon as the sun set, we ate our meal and made our sketchy preparations for bed.
There was no more oil for the lantern and our few candles were too precious to be wasted; they must be kept for a crisis, or perhaps a celebration, for day by day we hoped to hear
of the approach of the relief. Then one day we realized gratefully that Mr Roberts’s estimate of our food stores must have been wrong. We had been besieged for a full three weeks and there was no indication that we were running out of supplies.
On the morning of the 20th of July we awoke to absolute quiet and the strange knowledge that for several hours we had slept undisturbed by gunfire. Charles took advantage of the fact to come in for breakfast; he said the pandies had not fired a gun since midnight. It was not known what had deflected their attention from us, and a few hopeful souls considered that they might have got wind of a force coming to our aid and withdrawn to meet it. I put some of the previous night’s chapattis on the table for Charles and a jug of warmed-up tea, but before we could start eating, the familiar shout of ‘Stand to your arms!’ caused him to raise his eyebrows resignedly, shrug, shoulder his rifle and go out without haste or alarm.
Everything remained quiet, however, while Kate and I swallowed our unappetising meal and for some time afterwards. Then Toddy-Bob arrived to milk the goat. From the studied innocence of his expression, I knew he was somehow breaching discipline—no doubt there were strict orders for every man to remain at his post during this abnormal quiet—but the milk was vital to Pearl, so I made no comment but poured him out the last of the tea and gave him a few chapattis to pass on to Charles. It would take Toddy out of his way, but I was anxious that Charles should eat. Toddy had just trotted off with his odd bowlegged run, when the entire room rocked, and a roar, submerged but deafening, filled the air.
A moment of complete silence followed as the garrison reacted to the shattering blast. Then there were frenzied shouts of: ‘A mine! A mine!’ ‘By God, we’ve been breached!’ ‘Stand to your arms! To arms!’ Women along the Gaol verandah shrieked and cried out for their husbands, and men, heedless of everything but the desperate urgency of the moment, ran headlong for their posts. I rushed out on to the verandah.
A great cloud of dust-filled smoke was billowing up over the river side of the entrenchment. Just as I gained the verandah steps, searching for someone who would pause long enough to answer my anguished questions, the great guns of the Redan Battery which overlooked the river belched into action. A few seconds more and I was coughing and spluttering as the dense yellow smoke engulfed me, and above the guns came the terrifying, open-throated roar as the invisible pandies surged into the charge, yelling their war-cry of ‘Din! Din! Din!’ in answer to the bugle’s shrill exhortation to battle.
I retreated to the kitchen, none the wiser as to what had actually happened, and found Kate, chalk-white and trembling as she knelt, saying her rosary, the blue beads held to her lips with shaking fingers.
‘This is the end, woman dear,’ she whispered with closed eyes, pausing in her ‘Hail Marys’ as I entered. ‘This must be the end. I had prayed that it wouldn’t be this way for you … oh, I had prayed!’
By now I was sufficiently versed in the ‘arts’ of war to know that if our defences had been breached by the mine and the assault that must follow succeeded we would not see the sunset.
For a moment I could not but share in Kate’s uncharacteristic certainty of our doom, for in the name of holy common sense how could our men, decimated as they were by casualties and sickness and weakened by fatigue and hunger, hope to stand out against even a moderate-numbered but determined force? The long silence, that grateful quiet to which we had wakened, had been no more than a final respite before the end. In my mind I saw the fatal gap in our ridiculous stockade, saw the pandies bring up their guns, their elephants and their cavalry, then the assault force swarm through the breach and overcome the defenders. And then—what then? Then it would be our turn. My stomach lurched in fear, my hands grew cold and my mouth was so dry I could not speak. There would be a carnage then, a dreadful letting of blood, a massacre! I would be part of it, and Kate and oh, God, no—Pearl.
I went to the baby’s box and picked her up. The explosion had wakened her but she was not crying. As I raised her in my arms, she chortled and made a grab for my hair. I buried my face in her soft neck and, doing so, remembered the odd certainty of survival that had overwhelmed me on the night that Emily was buried. I felt it still. I knew it was irrational, childish, probably silly too, but I was absolutely certain that whatever I need fear it was not death. Not now, at any rate.
Curiously comforted by this inner assurance, I went to Kate with the baby in my arms.
‘It’s all right, Kate,’ I said, as her sad blue eyes regarded me over the blue beads. ‘Truly. I don’t know how I know it, but we will be all right. Believe me. You mustn’t give way now, my dear. They’ll never get at us, Kate; our men won’t let them. So come now, we’ll go into the bedroom, shut the door and windows and wait until it’s over.’
‘You don’t understand, Laura dear. You don’t understand,’ she said tearfully as she got to her feet. ‘If we are breached …’
‘But I do understand, and a mine exploding does not necessarily mean a breach. At least, we can hope that it does not, can’t we?’
‘But there is no way our poor men could fight them off, don’t you see? There are too few of us … and I … I don’t want you to be … !’
‘I am not going to be ravished, raped or slaughtered—or if I am, I refuse to think about it beforehand! Now come, Kate darling, pull yourself together. It is just not like you to give way so. Let’s go and sit on the beds and make ourselves comfortable.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry. I’m just a stupid old woman, but I’m so frightened for you and … and the baby, poor mite!’
I do not know what crazy reasoning prompted me to take Kate into the inner room. Only a cotton curtain, hung from a bamboo pole, separated it from the kitchen. Kate, however, seemed to derive some obscure comfort from the move, and settled down on her string cot while I put Pearl back into her box.
I made sure the single barred window was fastened, then returned to the kitchen and secured the two rickety doors that led on to the front and courtyard verandahs; but before doing so, took a quick peep outside. There was nothing to be seen. A thick fog of smoke and dust obscured everything and our long verandah was totally deserted.
The rest of the day is in one sense a blur and in another sense the most vivid memory I have to carry me through old age.
It was too dark in the little room for me to do anything but sit with folded hands on my bed, listening to Kate’s endlessly repeated prayer and the soft click of the blue beads passing through her thin mottled hands. Pearl, most amiable of infants, slept quietly until, at midday, I roused myself to give her milk. We had no heart for food ourselves. Mrs MacGregor had not called in for her milk that morning, and I wondered how the day was going with her and with sick little Jamie in the fetid darkness of the cellars beneath the Resident’s House—the tykhana.
Outside, the noise of battle increased and it was soon apparent that our assailants had encircled the entire entrenchment. The din became deafening, even in the small, shuttered room, as explosions shook the plaster from the ceiling, rattled the wooden doors in their frames and, on one occasion, forced the window inward against the bar that fastened it so fiercely that it never again closed completely. A concentrated and vicious cannonade, such as we had not before experienced, screamed and shattered into the shaky buildings surrounded by their ephemeral protection of mud, bamboo and sacking. Ball, shell, grape, canister, rifle and musket, the enemy used them all. Our building was hit several times. Just after I had fed Pearl, an eighteen-pounder dropped through the roof of the verandah and landed with a great thud on the stone not far from our rooms, then rolled harmlessly into the mud, where later we discovered it. Not long afterwards a shell burst in the inner courtyard, and only a few moments later another exploded in front of the Gaol, showering our doors and shuttered window with shrapnel. For six long hours we crouched in the dark trying to make out from the sound only which way the battle went; twice during those hours, the thunder of the guns was rivalled by the shrill note of
bugles, of drum beats mounting to a crescendo, the frenetic skirl of fifes and the pandies’ menacing roar of ‘Din! Din! Din!’ Each time Kate murmured grimly, ‘That’s another force they’re bringing up!’ Then the firing would grow stronger until the martial music was drowned by the yells of the attackers, the shouted commands of our own men and the screams of the wounded.
‘Hail Mary … Our Father … Glory be. … Amen!’
Kate prayed, sometimes with closed eyes, sometimes aloud, but unflaggingly.
I listened to her. I believe I tried to unite myself to the intention of her prayer, but prayer in such moments avails me little and I did not follow her example. The breathless heat in the small room sometimes weighed me down into a doze from which I would waken gasping, half smothered by my own sweat. I fetched a pitcher of water and a rag with which I tried to cool Pearl’s body and refresh my own face. For the most part, however, I had only my thoughts, my memories and half-forgotten hopes to help me through the long succession of apprehensive hours.
Where was Oliver Erskine? Where could he be? A prisoner of the Nana in some noisome prison in Cawnpore, or safe with Moti’s family, sleeping away the afternoon of this fevered day under a tree in some pleasant courtyard? Could he have tried to return to Hassanganj, be living in some shed or storeroom in the park, trying to gather his people around him and rebuild already what had so recently been destroyed? Or could he, after all, have escaped downriver from Cawnpore to Calcutta, there to constitute himself a thorn in the flesh of every complacent civil servant unlucky enough to run across him? I had no way of knowing, or even guessing, and shortly memory and imagination took the place of conjecture in my mind.
Now that I knew the reason why he had left us at the outskirts of Lucknow, it had become difficult to think of this ‘desertion’ with anger. It was a foolish, quixotic thing he had decided to do, yet I was glad he had done it. To be more accurate, I was glad that he had thought it necessary to do it. That single act indicated a sensitivity to the needs of others which, though I had discerned it in his character before, I had not fully appreciated.
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