Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  ‘Miss Hewitt!’ I was interrupted. ‘I cannot think you are yourself when you speak in such a way of a senior officer of the Service. And a close friend of Major Bonner’s. Of course, I cannot pretend surprise at such opinions, or indeed of your manner of expressing them, seeing the sort of company you appear to prefer … but really, I am not used to such a way of speaking!’

  ‘My opinions, Mrs Bonner, and my manners, are very much my own, though allow me to inform you that this particular set of opinions is shared pretty generally by everyone in the garrison!’

  ‘Well!’ She drew herself up, bridling, her flaccid chins wobbling with wrath, while Minerva cringed visibly and Kate smiled approval at me.

  Unable to endure the mindless haverings of the woman any longer or my acute impatience to see Oliver again, without any excuse for my departure I grabbed my shawl and set off for the hospital.

  A scene of chaos met my eyes as I walked into the open air. Every clear space, every lane and roadway of the entrenchment was thronged with a moving mass of carts, carriages, guns, horses, bullocks, camels, soldiers, coolies and families, all in the throes of preparation for the evacuation. So dense was the crowd I had sometimes to force a way for myself along the familiar path to the Banqueting Hall, and over all the hurried comings and goings, the loading of coolies and packing of carts, surged the deafening noise that inevitably accompanies any form of common effort in India.

  As I struggled through the crowd I kept a sharp eye open for Toddy-Bob or Ishmial. Oliver, I knew, would have no reason to make part of this hysterical scene, but the other two might well have been impressed into duty on behalf of the families. The last of my pride had dissipated in the graveyard the night before, and I was determined now somehow to send a message to Oliver to come and see me.

  Arrived at last at the hospital, I found the two Birch girls still faithfully at their duties, but none of the other ladies. Dr Partridge was on the verandah talking to two strange officers; he nodded to me as I went in.

  The long room was oddly silent. An air of desolation pervaded it already, and I formed a vivid mental image of how it would appear in twenty-four hours’ time, when the last of the sick had followed us to the Dilkusha. Empty and quiet, the light from windows no one had thought to shut would fall directly on the dirty floor, littered with discarded pallets, blankets too threadbare for further use and, finally, abandoned piles of filthy bandages. There would be battered tin cups and plates lying around—I remembered the men throwing them to the ceiling in their joy at the first relief—leech trays still abominable with regurgitated blood, and a tattered shirt or two taken from the dead in more evil days. At the far end of the room, under the hanging brass lamp that had never shed sufficient light, the zinc-topped table on which so many had died so terribly would still preside from its fear-filled shadows over the strangely unpeopled space.

  Things. Merely things. Only things would be left behind.

  Yet could that room ever know true silence? Would not the shot-holed bricks and crumbling plaster hold for ever some ethereal echo of the groans, screams and curses of all the men who had lived and died in mortal agony within its walls? Would not the empty air, perhaps, in some far day of peace, when doves called in the neem trees and the shadows of quisqualis vines again stirred gently on the polished tiles of the verandah, would not that empty air give back to some yet unborn visitor, curious and concerned, a true intimation of the suffering and unmarked heroism with which it vibrated now for me? There would be voices always in this long room, waiting only the plucked chord of sympathy to be evoked in ghostly tones for those who had ears to hear.

  Melancholy invaded me, and I forgot, for the moment, my anxiety to see Oliver. I was saying forewell to more than the sick men lying so comfortlessly around me; I was taking leave of the girl I once had been and had grown out of in this room. Quietly, heavily, I moved among the figures, shaking hands, fetching a last drink of water, easing a final dressing.

  ‘Goodbye, miss.’ ‘God bless ye, ma’am.’ ‘God be with you, lady.’ ‘Thank ye, miss.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘Thank you.’

  They spoke in low voices, pressing my hand, some lifting their heads from their pallets to make their sincerity apparent. A hard lump formed in my throat. I hastened my goodbyes to waves and smiles and worked my way towards the door to escape from this useless grief. In a few hours they would start a further and more cruel purgatory, scores of broken bodies, wracked with pain and fever, thrust hastily on to bullock-wagons, litters and gun carriages; yet, many of them, most of them indeed, were unfit to travel in the most luxurious ease.

  I had almost gained the door when I was summoned by a hoarse and unexpected call of ‘Miss! Miss Hewitt … please …!’ The men seldom knew my name, nor bothered to discover it.

  I approached closer and looked down into a face I knew but could not place.

  ‘Dines, miss. ’Member? Me and Mr Miles … were with you … relief … after Cawnpore.’

  I knelt down swiftly to hear the gasped, disjointed words, remembering our guests of the night of the first relief and the account of the Bibighar in Cawnpore given us by this same young soldier.

  ‘Of course! Have you just come in? Is there something I can do for you?’

  He nodded his head, then lay still, gathering strength before continuing. He was very weak and badly injured, I surmised. ‘Mr Billy … Miles?’ It was a query, and I nodded to signify that I remembered the young officer. ‘Dead … yesterday … We was … together. Shell … him … me too.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, so very sorry,’ I said sincerely. I had often encountered the two young men, always in a hurry and always together.

  ‘Letter? My mother … please?’

  ‘Of course.’ I fumbled in my pocket for a small tablet and a stub of pencil that I usually carried with me to the hospital, though it was a long time since I had been requested to write a letter.

  Slowly Dines spelled out his mother’s address. While he was doing so, Apothecary Saunders came and stood beside us, looking down at the stricken white face of the boy with the resigned anxiety common to our medical men. Dines shut his eyes, and I thought he had slipped into unconsciousness. Saunders bent and felt his pulse.

  ‘Going fast,’ he whispered to me. ‘Stomach wound. Internal bleeding.’

  ‘Any chance?’ I asked softly.

  He shook his head. ‘Best that he goes before they try to move him, poor young devil.’ And he straightened up and moved away.

  ‘Tell them …’ The exhausted eyes were open again. ‘Tell them Albert … done what … ’e could, miss.’ His tongue moved over his cracked lips; I knew how much he wanted water but I knew that for injuries such as his I could give him none. ‘Say … say … I never … forgot Lucy … the baby, Eddie. Say … I made … the bastards … ’member Lucy too!’ The effort was too much for him. He closed his eyes and was silent for a long time, his face contorted in pain. I watched him, noting the almost imperceptible movement of the blanket over his chest, and the sweat that started in beads on his forehead as he clenched his teeth over his lips and shuddered. After some time I saw the taut limbs relax, and was sure that he had lost consciousness. Saunders hovered in the vicinity, and I was about to get up and leave, when the lad began to speak again with closed eyes.

  ‘Say … to mother … she’ll tell Mr Billy’s people.’ He paused, seemed to discover within himself some little excess of energy and went on in words clearer and more fluent.

  ‘Say, I made … sixteen of ’em remember our Lucy and the baby. Sixteen … There was seven pandies at different times, and … and two bunnias in a shop with a woman. An old man. ’E ’id be’ind ’is woman’s skirts, so I got ’er too … There were a boy … and then ’is dad come out to see, so I made ’im eat a “Cawnpore Dinner” as well. Then … then there was two others … at a well. Outside the Shah Najaf, just yesterday. I was glad it were near a well. I threw ’em in afore Mr Billy seen what I done, but one wasn’t … dead, and screamed, and
then Mr Billy took on at me ’bout it an’ all.’

  Horrified by what I heard, my pencil froze in my fingers. The bruised eyes opened and looked at me without seeing me. His voice, when he spoke again, had changed, and was the whine of a fretful child that finds itself in trouble.

  ‘We quarrelled, Ma. Imagine. Me and Billy. We ain’t never quarrelled afore. ’E said … ’e said ’e’d ’ave to put me on a charge! Ma, I told ’im … I told ’im—it were only right, for what they’d done to Lucy an’ all. Oh, Ma! Won’t I never forget that? Never? Only when I seen one of ’em dead and known I done it, then I forget awhile, but then I see them little shoes again, with the feet in, and the hair and … But, Ma, Billy ’ad no right to quarrel with me, ’ad ’e? I was only doin’ what was right. But ’e … then, Ma, ’e said ’e’d ’ave no more to do with me, just like that, like I was someone ’e ’adn’t knowed all ’is days. ’E … ’e said I was a bleedin’ murderer, not a soldier, an’ ’e went away on ’is own. ’E shouldn’t of done that, Ma. I caught up with ’im after a while, though, and I were just goin’ to speak to ’im, when … when the shell got ’im. An’ me, Ma—it got me too. I didn’t even ’ear it … just … just sees Mr Billy lyin’ on the ground and bloody, and then … then I sees me own guts, Ma … my own guts beginnin’ to ooze out of my belly …’

  Pain, or perhaps the horror of that shocking recollection, cut off his words in a high shrill scream. Saunders moved swiftly to Dines’s pallet and motioned me to move away as he pulled back the blanket. Sickened, I rose and walked quickly from the ward, the agonized screams echoing after me.

  When I could no longer hear them, I stopped and wiped away the tears of pity and repugnance I could not keep back as the boy talked. He had been killed, ruined and crazed by his own hatred. What was it Oliver had said once, when we had been talking of just this ‘Cawnpore Fever’ that had destroyed young Dines? ‘Hatred has a way of destroying the hater more surely than the hated.’ Trite, but true in a most terrible way.

  ‘What’s this now—not weeping surely? Come now, Miss Laura, no tears from you. This is a great moment!’

  Dr Partridge had walked round the corner and caught me blinking away my tears.

  ‘Not really weeping … just being foolish. That young boy, Dines … ?’

  ‘Yes? Stomach wound.’

  ‘He … he has killed sixteen people, because of what he saw in the Bibighar in Cawnpore. Sixteen people! I don’t think he can be twenty years old.’

  ‘Not the only one, either, my dear. Unfortunately. They’ve gone mad, some of them—out of control. But he’ll not last the day, you know.’

  ‘I know. A fresh-faced country boy, and he’s killed sixteen other human beings, very deliberately, and will be dead before nightfall. Doctor Partridge, what has been the point of it all? Is survival really so important?’

  ‘God only knows, lass; I certainly don’t. All I can do is my job—when they give me the tools to do it with—and all I can hope is that some day we will understand enough of what has happened to learn something from it. I don’t mind telling you, though, that when I think of what’s to come for those poor devils inside, the conditions we have to make ’em travel under, I wish I could pack up and join you ladies when you leave, abandon my responsibilities here for ever.’

  He fumbled for a stub of cheroot in his pocket. ‘Got to thank you,’ he said as he puffed it to a glow. ‘Good work you’ve done, and Mrs Barry and the Birch girls. Didn’t much like the idea of women around this place, but things would have been even worse without you. Got to admit that.’

  ‘I wish we could have done more.’

  ‘So do I, Miss Laura. Not much any of us could do. That’s the trouble with being a doctor; know what’s wrong, can’t put it right most often. At least, not here. But thank you for what you did.’

  We strolled together around the corner of the Banqueting Hall and looked out to the rough rectangle between ourselves, Dr Fayrer’s house and the Resident’s House, where the women and children were gathered and waiting to make their way down to the Baillie Guard.

  About five hundred of us were expected to move out that day. I had envisaged an orderly line of well-conducted females, something like a school ‘crocodile’, walking or, if they were lucky, riding or being carried, away from the entrenchment in a decorous and mournful procession.

  The reality of the evacuation bore no relation whatever to my polite imaginings.

  What I saw before me in the dusty morning sunlight was a tumultuous, milling confusion of natives, animals and vehicles, in the midst of which the women themselves were almost invisible. A ‘modicum of personal baggage’ was what we had been told we could take with us, and I had to laugh, despite my recent tears, at the ladies’ interpretation of the term.

  Here were bullock-carts piled feet high with boxes, bales, uniform chests and bulbous-topped sea-trunks; dilapidated carts and carriages stuffed to the windows with possessions; palanquins and litters, curtains bulging, their bearers groaning under the weight of packed and unpacked effects, while the ladies, for whom the conveyances had been procured with such effort, walked gaily beside them. Doolie men strained under the weight of whole families; and donkeys, horses, mules and even bullocks swayed by under double panniers loaded with bundles, a woman or child perched precariously atop each load. In amongst the wheels and hooves, spindle-shanked coolies threaded their way with mounds of boxes and bundles on their heads and crates of china, mirrors and ornaments of all sorts—spoils from the palaces—strapped to their sweating backs.

  Axles squeaked, donkeys brayed, horses whinnied and reared; children cried and women called to each other through the dust, now fast becoming a cloud, while distraught husbands, running alongside the cavalcade, shouted last-minute instructions, or thrust a final package on to an already swaying pile on some coolie’s bobbing head.

  ‘Well, they are really off at last, it seems,’ said Dr Partridge when we had watched the mêlée together for a few minutes, smiling at the pandemonium. ‘Don’t want to be left behind, do you? Better cut along now, missie.’

  ‘Do you know, Doctor,’ I answered slowly, my mind crowded with memories. ‘I don’t think I’d mind if I were left behind. So much of me will always be here.’

  ‘So it is with most of us, child. But you’re young. You’ll learn to forget whatever lad it was you gave your heart to here and in time you’ll find another.’

  He was wrong, but I shook his hand and wished him luck.

  ‘I’ll see you in Cawnpore, if not before. I’ll come looking for you—when we collect.’

  ‘God willing, missie. God willing.’

  Dr Darby, bluff, brusque Dr Darby, whose wife had borne a child to him behind a gun in Wheeler’s entrenchment in Cawnpore and then succumbed, with her baby, to a pandy bayonet at the river, Dr Darby had been wounded the day before. I would have liked to see him, but when I enquired, Dr Partridge shook his head. ‘He’s going, and he’ll be glad to go, Miss Laura. Don’t fret him with farewells.’ We shook hands again and went our different ways.

  ‘Don’t fret him with farewells.’ Was that what kept Oliver away from me, I wondered, as I walked back to the Gaol by a circuitous route in order to miss the crowds. Could it be that, feeling he had lost me to Charles, he preferred not to re-open old wounds? Did he really intend to keep away from me altogether? I had to find him before we left; I had to explain and, if that was what he wanted, apologize, give in. I had to make things right between us before we left, for what if the pandies, enraged by our safe departure, really launched the great attack against the Residency that had been threatened for days past?

  The breaching guns at the Kaiser Bagh, which were to cover our retreat, had been thundering all morning, but we had become so used to the sound of gunfire that I had not noticed them until Kate drew my attention to the noise.

  ‘Well, sure and I’m glad to see you! We thought you’d gone for good; wherever have you been? Those guns are driving me mad! Everything’
s ready but I don’t seem able to collect myself at all. Now what are you doing in that calm way, just sitting down as though you’ve all of time before you? We must be up and moving. See, Jessie and I have everything prepared.’

  ‘There is no point in hurrying,’ I told them. ‘You should see the press trying to get out of the Baillie Guard. We are to move off in small groups, it seems, a delay between each; so it will be hours before everyone is through.’

  ‘Och, but they’re away already!’ Kate nodded her head in the direction of the Bonners’ deserted rooms. ‘Such a to-do. The ayah, the sweeper and poor little Minnie all hung about with boxes and bundles, and herself seated in a doolie almost invisible among her possessions, and grumbling all the time, she was, at Sir Colin and his ill-bred lack of consideration for the necessities of the “genteel”. I’ll tell you and truly, woman dear, that ould besom has been more of a trial to me than all the pandies in Oudh put together!’

  ‘I saw them,’ I laughed, ‘and many others even more loaded down with worldly goods. Where has all the stuff come from? Maria Germon had to be helped on to her horse by two strong men; she has put on so many layers of clothing, every layer lined with pockets full of her treasures, that she is completely spherical, and on top of everything else she is wearing a worsted hat tied on with a woollen scarf. Such a sketch! Even her horse is alarmed by the sight she makes. But it will be hours before we can get away, so we might as well wait here as in the dust and the crowd.’

  ‘And we’re to be the last?’ Kate’s sharp eyes took in my anxious face.

  ‘No—not the last. But a little longer, Kate, please? A little longer?’

  ‘He’ll come by, your man, Miss Laura. We’ll bide a whiles and he’ll come by.’

  ‘I’ve never managed to hide anything from you two, have I?’ I smiled.

  ‘Not much, woman dear, not much. He’ll be no more happy at your going than you are. He’ll come, I’m sure of it.’