Bugles at Dawn

by Charles Whiting

  ‘Oh, if that were only true, John — that you will be famous — ’

  ‘I will be,’ he broke in savagely. ‘I shall make it happen, you wait and see. I — ’ He felt a hard tap on his shoulder and turned round startled, breaking his step.

  It was Major Rathbone, who said icily, ‘I see Miss Lanham is slightly indisposed. Do you not think it better she leaves the floor now, Lieutenant Bold?’

  The emphasis on the rank was clear enough, and John’s face flushed even more angrily. ‘If you say so, sir!’ he snapped. ‘Naturally, sir!’

  Now it was Rathbone’s turn to flush as the three of them left the floor, followed by curious stares. But he maintained his calm, though he was notorious among his cronies for the shortness of his fuse. In silence they gained the outer room, where it was somewhat quieter, Georgina dabbing softly at her eyes while the two men flanked her, their faces hard and set.

  Major Rathbone could not hide a telltale ticking of his jaw muscle — always a sign that he was very angry. Indeed that muscular twitching had been one of the last things that a good half dozen of his opponents had had time to note about him before he had shot them dead in one of his clandestine duels.

  They halted out of earshot of the other guests and Rathbone, the sword scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his chin suddenly livid, growled, ‘I am not pleased by your conduct, sir.’

  ‘And what does not please you about my conduct, sir?’

  ‘Your behaviour to Miss Lanham, sir!’

  John controlled himself. He was not afraid of the Major, but at this moment he did not want to jeopardize his new career by being involved in some scandal, perhaps even a duel, which would only reflect badly on Georgina. ‘And what is wrong with my behaviour?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘Miss Lanham has been brought to cry in her own house, sir,’ Rathbone replied, eyeing Bold carefully and realizing that this was not one of those cowards who would back down at the first sign of a threat. ‘That is not conduct becoming to an officer and gentleman.’

  John measured him from foot to face, taking his time about it, knowing that now he would fight — and damn the consequences! Rathbone’s intentions were obvious. If he frightened John off, he would take and use Georgina as he wished. Some women were impressed by the physical threat that men could present, and Georgina was one of them.

  ‘With all due respect, sir,’ he said coldly, ‘I submit that Miss Lanham herself is the best judge of my conduct, not you, sir. If she wishes to criticize my behaviour, I think it is up to her, don’t you, sir?’

  Rathbone flushed crimson. ‘Why, you damned impertinent puppy!’ he hissed, hand falling automatically to where his sword normally dangled from his belt, ‘How dare a griff like you talk in such a way to me. Why, I should have you whipped by my bullies.’

  John faced him calmly. ‘Out here, sir, there is no questions of bullies.’

  Georgina looked from one flushed, hard male face to the other and breathed, ‘But gentlemen!’ Yet to John it was clear she didn’t really mean it. There was a sudden thrill in her green eyes which told him that she was enjoying this clash — a clash that was really about her and who should have her! The danger and tension brought excitement into the boredom of her recent life as the Collector’s daughter.

  ‘There may be no bullies, Bold,’ Rathbone hissed softly, voice full of naked malice, eyes fixed on John’s face. ‘But there are other ways in which a gentleman can find satisfaction.’

  ‘You mean the field of honour, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I do — if you are not afraid of naked steel, sir,’ Rathbone added with a sneer.

  ‘I am not afraid of steel — or powder, sir, for that matter,’ John answered, meeting that dark, threatening gaze evenly. ‘It is up to you, sir, to make the arrangements, if you so desire.’

  But there would be no duel in Musulipatan this day, or many days afterwards for that matter. By the time that John would be in a position to meet Major Rathbone on the ‘field of honour’, the latter would be long dead, a Mahratta spear skewered through his reckless philanderer’s heart. For in the very moment that Rathbone drew back his right hand to slap the young man across the face and issue his challenge, the Collector’s big black butler announced, ‘Lieutenant Bold, sahib. Man at the door for you, sahib ... Say orders for you ... from Lord Hastings sahib himself ... !’

  Rathbone said something under his breath and dropped his hand hastily. Georgina breathed out hard, as if she might have been holding her breath.

  John hesitated, wondering what he should do.

  ‘Very important, sahib,’ the butler said urgently. ‘Very important indeedy ... Lord Hastings sahib!’ He rolled his dark eyes.

  That did it. He turned and hurried after the butler, conscious of the eyes boring into his back. There would be plenty of gossip and backbiting at the Collector’s dinner table this night, he thought sardonically.

  Even before the butler flung open the door John could hear the drunken mumbling: ‘Righteousness ... exalted a nation ... but sin is a reproach to any ... people ... ’

  The door opened and there was Jones, swaying wildly, his stock ripped open, his turban replaced by a bright scarlet garter with a cupid’s arrow bearing the legend ‘amour’.

  John pushed the pop-eyed butler aside. ‘Now, Jones, what is this?’

  ‘Let he that is without sin among ye,’ Jones quavered thickly, ‘let him first cast a stone ... ’

  ‘Jones!’ John thundered, though he was tempted to burst out laughing. Sergeant Jones was living up to his reputation. ‘Make your report, man — at once!’

  With an effort the NCO pulled himself together. ‘From Major Tomkins, straight from Me Lord Hastings,’ he slurred, ‘one hour ago.’ His eyes went suddenly blank.

  ‘Go on, man!’

  ‘There is trouble ... at Nagpore, sir,’ Jones stuttered. ‘We march ... at ... dawn ... ’ Slowly, very slowly, Rum and Fornication Jones sank to the ground, out to the world ...

  FOUR

  At dawn on 26 December 1815, Bold’s Horse set off on the long march north. The half squadron left without ceremony. No bugles sounded farewell. India, or most of it, was still fast asleep. Even the sentries at the fort’s great gate were drowsy as John commanded, ‘Right wheel — trot!’ and his riders dug in their stirrups and took the wide, unmetalled road to Nagpore.

  If his sowars were still drowsy, being barked at now and again by the rissaldar to keep alert and watch their dressing, John was wide awake, his mind buzzing with the details of his unexpected mission.

  Mr Jenkins, the Resident in Nagpore, had drawn his six battalions of the Company’s native infantry to a high ridge on the Nag River, opposite the capital. The Rajah of Berar, Apa Sahib, had begun making warlike noises, assembling a huge force of Arab mercenaries in the capital, only two miles from the place where Jenkins had positioned his own forces, which were clearly outnumbered.

  According to a wounded galloper from Nagpore, who had brought Jenkins’ urgent message, the Resident was expecting an all-out attack momentarily. He needed cavalry urgently to ascertain the whereabouts of twenty white women and children seized during Jenkins’ hurried evacuation of Nagpore. He feared a second Black Hole of Calcutta, which had so inflamed opinion in London a century before. The East India Company did not want adverse publicity back home; it was bad for their shares.

  Once the hostages were liberated — If! a little hard voice at the back of John’s mind challenged — he was ordered to continue his original mission into Burrapore to obtain the intelligence Lord Hastings needed before he commenced his large-scale campaign against the Mahratta princes.

  It was a tall order, and John knew it. Even the Collector had shaken his hand and wished him good luck the previous evening, and Georgina had actually embraced him in full view of everyone, including a glowering Major Rathbone. That had pleased him, but not the Collector. Now the memory of that embrace warmed him and made his mission seem less hazardous. ‘I’ll come back, Georgina
,’ he had whispered into her ear. ‘Don’t fret, my sweet. I will come back!’

  For a moment, in the manner of young men eager for some desperate glory, he savoured the prospect of returning to his beloved — a hero! Then he dismissed the little bit of self-indulgence and turned to Sergeant Jones, who was riding in morose silence, his face wan and his head under the turban wrapped in a large handkerchief soaked in vinegar — his cure for a severe headache.

  ‘Well, Jones, can you talk to me now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes sir, just,’ Jones answered a little weakly. ‘Oh in the Lord’s good name why did I look upon the wine when it was red?’

  John smirked. ‘And several other things as well. There has been comment about two dusky maidens seen leaving your quarters, stark naked.’

  ‘Please, please, sir, you shame me! In what deep pit of iniquity have I fallen! What a weak vessel I am!’

  John’s grin disappeared. ‘Now Jones,’ he said briskly, ‘you know I’m a griff out here, and I haven’t much time to find out things which I urgently need to know.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘You were once in Berar, is that correct?’

  ‘Yessir, with the Company’s expedition of ninety-five, sir. The Residency, sir,’ Jones commenced, ‘is located to the south of the River Nag. It’s on the ridge above Nagpore — built down in the swampy area. Them heathens ain’t got the sense they was born with.

  ‘The Residency ain’t exactly a fortress, sir, just an ordinary big heathen house, but it does have a good field of fire.’

  ‘What about the roads leading north, Jones? My guess is that this Apa Sahib fellow might have them moved north, to prevent their recapture.’

  Jones considered for a moment. ‘I recollect of only one road, if you could call it a road, heading north to Burrapore. If that’s what you was thinking of, sir?’

  John nodded his thanks. Apa Sahib would need transport to move white women and children, who wouldn’t be able to go far on foot in this terrible heat — and transport needed roads. He licked his dry lips and began to lay his plans.

  At midday he called a halt and while the men warmed their chapattis, he, the rissaldar and Jones, who was still suffering from last night’s debauch, enjoyed ‘sudden death’, the usual fare of travellers in that region. A wretched skinny chicken, bought by the rissaldar in the last village for a few pice, was now decapitated, gutted and grilled over the fire within twenty minutes, whereupon the rissaldar poured a stingingly sharp curry sauce over the meat. Jones looked at the steaming yellow mix, clutched his skinny vitals, and declined. He could barely find the strength to say the grace for John — something which he did even when they were faced with nothing more than hardtack.

  John laughed and winked at the grave-faced rissaldar who, surprisingly for such a serious man, grown old and white in the John Company’s service, winked back. Chewing a scrawny chicken leg, John felt happy to be with such men. Major Tomkins’ fears had been groundless. With such as these under his command, he had nothing to fear ...

  Days passed on that long ride in the blazing sun, the maddening song of the brainfever birds — reputed to turn men crazy with their persistent, high-pitched chirping — accompanying them interminably. But the men stood the strain well. They rode without complaint about the heat, the dust, the poor food, like seasoned soldiers, though the rissaldar chided them for slackness, calling them yotis, which Jones translated circumspectly as ‘the thing with which the ladies make water’.

  As they approached the Company’s border with Berar, the villages they encountered had been hurriedly evacuated. In some cases the villagers’ poor food was still on the crude bamboo tables and the chickens in their roosts.

  As they finally crossed into Berar itself, John was assailed by the uncanny feeling of being watched.

  Sergeant Jones confirmed his suspicions. ‘They’re out there all right, sir. I know a Hindoo by his smell, whether I can see ‘im or not.’

  The weary troopers of Bold’s Horse, their mounts lathered in dust and sweat, rode into the lines held by the Company’s native infantry above the River Nag on the morning of 7 January 1816.

  *

  Vultures circled above the dead who sprawled everywhere on the ridge slopes. It was obvious that the Resident had already beaten off several attacks from the direction of Nagpore.

  There was death, too, on the ridge itself: death of a horrible kind that John Bold would become all too familiar with in India. For it was the traditional punishment for those natives whom the Company felt had betrayed it. Prisoners, barefoot for the most part, their clothes in rags and stained with blood, were being led to a central place, shuffling along wearily, resigned to their fate. The feringhees’ savage retribution had been going on for three days now, ever since the defenders of the ridge had begun taking prisoners.

  Suddenly there was a muffled boom of a cannon firing close by. As one, the brow-beaten prisoners jerked up their heads. John gasped with horror. To his right there was a star of exploding blood and flesh. Ragged bits and pieces of a shattered body flew through the air. For a moment it seemed to rain blood, the ground all about them was splattered red.

  In a solemn voice, Jones intoned, ‘May their God rest their poor souls!’ while the prisoners who had seemed so resigned to their fate began to wail and moan piteously, going on their knees and raising up their thin chained hands in the classic pose of supplication.

  ‘My God, what happened?’ John cried as a round ball of flesh, once a human head, rolled to a stop only yards away.

  ‘They’re blowing the heathen off the end of a cannon, sir,’ Jones said tonelessly. ‘Breaks ‘em up altogether ... then they can’t go to their niggah heaven, see.’

  John did. He told himself that Britain had brought civilization to these poor benighted natives, but the price their white masters exacted when they felt betrayed was exceedingly high. They went on their way thoughtfully.

  Mr Jenkins was being bled by his surgeon and assistant when John was ushered into the room which served as his HQ. The fat, tall Resident, with the red choleric face that all these old Company officials seemed to have, was clad only in his trousers, his white breasts like those of a woman dangling down his naked chest. Impatiently he held up his right arm to the harassed surgeon and snapped, ‘Hurry up, man, I haven’t all the time in the world. I want to see some more of those damned insurgents blown to kingdom come.’

  The surgeon was obviously finding it difficult to discover an area of the Resident’s skin not already scarred by regular bleedings, hovering over the arm with the new-fangled scarification-box. Finally he found a relatively clear spot. He pressed a catch and a series of gleaming razor-sharp blades sprang into view.

  Jenkins looked exceedingly pleased at the sight and snapped at John, standing at the door rigidly to attention, ‘Do you bleed, sir?’

  ‘No sir,’ John replied as the surgeon retracted the blades before placing the box on Jenkins’ arm and pressing the catch. Jenkins gave a little intake of breath as the bright blood started to trickle down the white skin to where the surgeon’s black assistant waited with an enamel kidney dish to catch it.

  ‘You should, young man,’ Jenkins said. ‘Relieves the strains and pressures of life. After this morning’s attack by that traitor over there’ — with a nod he indicated Nagpore on the other side of the river — ‘I feel the need to indulge myself a little.’ He beamed with pleasure as more of his blood trickled down his arm into the dish.

  ‘Now, sir’ — he raised his voice above the shrieks of yet another victim and the boom of the cannon — ‘to business. The hostages those damned rebels have seized are not really important people, Lieutenant Bold. Counter-jumpers for the most part. Wives of clerks and NCOs, though I do believe there is the wife of a schoolmaster among them — and oh, yes, that of an officer. No account people on the whole. But they are white, mark you ... and under no circumstances can we allow white women and children to remain in the hands of black heathens. No telli
ng what those niggahs might do to the women, doesn’t bear thinking about. You understand?’

  ‘Yessir, I understand,’ John answered, telling himself that with children the pace of the kidnappers would probably be even slower.

  ‘Now — oh, all right, Surgeon, that’ll do. Stop the bleeding now and let me get dressed. I feel considerably lightened.’

  While the surgeon and his assistant went to work with towels and ointment, the Resident continued, ‘They are clearly taking those wretches north by now and it is your task to apprehend the abductors, punish them and free their captives. If you don’t, we’ll have the devil’s own job, not only dealing with the Rajah of Berar, but with the Pindarees and that trollop up in Burrapore.’

  ‘You mean the Ranee, sir?’ John queried.

  ‘Yes, exactly. I met her once. A cunning jade with more tricks up her sleeve than a dozen monkeys. She’s more than a match for most men, I can tell you.’ He shook his head, as if in admiration.

  John absorbed the information. Once again this mysterious woman in her remote mountain fortress had been praised for her deviousness and cunning by a high-ranking Company official.

  Now sir,’ Jenkins went on, ‘we have intelligence that Apa Sahib’s Arabs will attack at noon tomorrow. He thinks he knows our habits and that we’ll be resting during the heat of the day.’ He grinned maliciously. ‘He will be mistaken! We’ll be waiting for him, ready to give him a taste of fine English steel. Now, sir, while the battle rages, you will take your cavalry through the usual confusion, ford the River Nag, skirt the city and take the road north with all urgency. You understand that I want the captives returned to our lines as speedily as possible. Their return will strengthen my hand considerably. When the time comes to deal with that princely niggah,’ he sneered, ‘I need not then make any concessions.’ He brushed by John and stared out to where the cannon glowed dull red and smoking, the paint on its barrel blistered. Still the executions had not finished and the sweating white gunners were lashing another screaming wretch to the muzzle.