Nightrunners of Bengal (28 page)

Treacherous, murderous swine. The first and last task now was reconquest. The English were conquerors here, not friends, and it was a ghastly mistake ever to forget it. There must be no peace and no quarter until every last Indian grovelled, and stayed grovelling. A hundred years hence the inscriptions must be there to read on the memorials:
Here English children were burned alive in their cots, and
English women cut in pieces by these brown animals you see
around you.
DO NOT FORGET
. A hundred years would not be enough to repay the humiliation. That old devil Sher Dil was probably shot in a fight over loot; Lachman and the rest must have run away. How had he ever been fool enough
to waste a worry on them? There’d have to be Indian servants and Indian sepoys again, but by the Lord Jesus Christ there’d be a difference. The next few months would lay the new foundations, granite and rough and cold. There’d be British soldiers pouring in from overseas. They’d hear what had happened in Bhowani and Kishanpur, and they’d pay it back a thousand fold. Rodney would lead them. He’d find the words to tell them about Bhowani. He’d make them see the blood, hear the screams, feel the chilling horror of treachery.

He was a professional fighting man. It was no use letting the red rage blind his thinking. Victory first, then the long repayment; no victory, no repayment. If there were no foreign countries in the world, and England were left alone, she could crush these people however long it took. But there were other countries; France and Russia would be overjoyed, and could menace so much that England would not dare spare the troops for a complete reconquest.

Prithvi Chand had been speaking the truth; he knew that. If Gondwara had not gone yet, probably nothing south of Gondwara had gone. The Bombay and Madras armies must be waiting to see what happened in Bengal. Gondwara might be the key to India; if it held fast, the rest of India held, and the reconquest of Bengal would not take long. If it turned, the mutiny flooded the rest of India, and England might not be given time for the gigantic task of re-establishing herself. It wasn’t only Bombay and Madras, either; he did not know what had happened in the north—what the Sikhs had done, what Lalkot had done. There must be scores of princes sitting on the fence and waiting, and watching Gondwara.

He ran quickly over the British troops in the Gondwara garrison. They ought to be enough to hold it, providing the Bengal regiments were disarmed and all the sepoys shot. If the sepoys were allowed to keep their arms there would be a catastrophe which would destroy not only Gondwara but, in the end, all the little British communities in India. Sir
Hector was new to the country. He was a strange man; perhaps he’d be fool enough to trust the sepoys; perhaps he’d already blown them all from guns. One couldn’t tell, with him.

Rodney saw his own road clear in front of him. He had to bring his party to Gondwara, trusting nobody, unsleepingly cunning and ruthless, balking treachery with guile. When he got there he could tell Sir Hector the truth. He alone could do it; messages would be useless—they’d never be delivered, for one thing. And it was no use getting in a panic and killing himself by hurrying. He was weak and ill and had to get strong. It would take the Bhowani mutineers time to organize themselves, collect stores, join the Kishanpur Army, and move south. And there were so many British troops in Gondwara that the sepoys there would be lunatics to rise until the mutineers were at the gates.

Strategically, the enemy’s best plan would be to capture Gondwara at, or immediately after, the onset of the monsoon. The rains would effectively hinder British relief operations until sometime in September. By then the rebels could hope to have the whole of India in their hands. Armies could not march through the rains, but treason could, and the Native armies in Bombay and Madras outnumbered the British components nearly as heavily as they did in Bengal.

A picture of the Rani’s face came to him, and he was suddenly certain that the centenary of Plassey would mean a great deal to her. On June 23, 1757, India’s native rulers bowed to the English: on June 23, 1857, she would try to make the English bow in their turn. And the date fitted in with the strategic factor, unless the rains came early.

He’d see how long his party took to recover, and then he’d make out his plan in more detail. For the time being it was enough to know that there was no desperate urgency to move, while there was a desperate urgency to rest He’d have to pretend to trust Piroo and the peasants of Chalisgon.

He settled back, wishing Caroline could see that he was smiling at her across the darkness under the canvas. That
was silly; he wouldn’t dare to smile at her if he thought she could see. Her knee was touching his; perhaps she didn’t know whose knee it was in this welter. Mrs. Hatch was rocking with the motion of the cart and snoring heavily, pushing out her breath through fluttering lips.

Caroline he could worship. He would plan for her and protect her; he would kill for her, and never tell her. At the last, when they were safe, he’d tell her a little something of what he’d done, and she’d be proud of him. He couldn’t do anything of it, though, without her well of strength; he’d draw on that and bend his new fierce mind to use it in the right way, to kill others and save themselves. There were so many visions—of red flames and reeking flesh. If only God would keep away the other ones, of her body, and not confuse him. Surely he’d been through enough. That was the kind of thing that could drive him mad, The link between him and her was that between a sinner and a saint, not between a man and a woman. He would earn her sweet praise, one day, but this other was torture. He concentrated on thinking of her face as it had been when she carried Robin up the road into the fort, and at last went to sleep.

T
HE DOORS inside the headman’s house were open, and from where Rodney sat in the front room he could see into the little back room. There Robin sat on the floor, holding a wooden toy tiger a villager had carved for him, and played, with quick movements of hands and head. He was stronger in body now and his wound had healed over, but he hardly ever spoke, and he whimpered when Rodney came near him. If Rodney picked him up to caress
him, he hung stiff in his arms, with panic-stricken eyes. He liked to nestle against Caroline’s shoulder or on Amelia Hatch’s ample lap. Rodney’s lips hung down at the corners, and he turned back to look round the front room.

Mrs. Hatch sat on a low block of wood in the women’s corner by the empty hearth. She had recovered from the burns and bruises suffered in the chute—how many days ago? Thirteen; that had been the night of May the thirteenth. Each night at dark he carved a nick in the stock of his rifle—Shyamsingh’s rifle; today was May the twenty-sixth. Time had passed quickly while they dozed and ate and dozed again. Of the first week here he remembered nothing but sleep. He was sure there was not another firearm in the village or he couldn’t have closed his eyes. The villagers were a cowardly lot, afraid of his rifle, and obviously awaiting a chance to dispose of the English refugees without getting hurt themselves. So he ate, and found his strength again, and pretended to be weaker than he really was. In fact he felt well, strong and merciless and master of himself; soon he’d show these swine he was their master too. He knew where the strength came from which quivered in his waiting muscles, and enabled Robin to play with his toy tiger, and animated Amelia Hatch’s cockney jokes. They three had slept, but the fourth had not; warm milk held to his mouth, firm hands on his head when he awoke gasping with fright in the night, the eternal eyes. The three of them had sucked her dry, and she was grey-white, hollow-cheeked, and her eyes burned like lamps. He knew and would not forget. He would raise her on a plinth of ivory and worship her the rest of his life. He must not fail her.

Piroo too had been tireless, but of course Piroo had ends of his own for being so smarmy and helpful.

The headman’s front room was square and low. Plastered mud and cow dung made a smooth floor. Apart from Mrs. Hatch’s log seat and a stack of winking pans and jars in the hearth, there was no furniture. There was no furniture anywhere in the house except a large gimcrack wardrobe in his
own room and a few projecting shelves in the room where Robin and the two women lived. Here the floor and walls were bare; woodsmoke had blackened part of the ceiling—there was no chimney—and spidery shreds of soot clung to the rafters above the hearth. The room was full, as it had been nearly every evening at this hour when the village notables gathered to gossip and smoke. He knew them all by now, and ran his eye calculatingly over the two groups.

In the far corner were the women: Amelia Hatch, Caroline, and the headman’s wife—the last a brown version of Amelia, with the addition of a small gold nose ring and a caste mark. All three wore white saris. Mrs. Hatch’s dress had fallen to pieces days before and her black buttoned boots, prominently displayed, were wildly incongruous under the oriental flow of the sari.

The semicircle of men squatted barefoot on their hunkers round a smoky tallow lamp hung in a bracket on one wall. Rodney sat against the wall with the loaded and primed rifle across his knees. Next to him was the headman, a square youngish man with a heavy face and dark skin. Like the other village males, he wore only a white cloth tied loosely round his loins and up between his thighs, and fastened in front. Next came Karmadass, the village bannia—general merchant and moneylender—who was gross and greasy-skinned; he was the same stamp of man as that other Rodney had seen in Bhowani and Kishanpur, the one Sitapara thought was concerned in the mutiny; all of that trade were cast in one mould. Then the priest—bald, flap-eared, a white caste mark on his forehead and the sacred thread across his shoulder. Next, two wizened old men almost indistinguishable from each other, with bent backs and rheumy eyes; they were twins, and might from their appearance also have been Piroo’s elder brothers. Piroo was last, against the wall opposite Rodney; a corner of the black silk square peeped out of his loincloth.

A low murmur of conversation filled the room; when speaking among themselves the villagers used a local dialect
Rodney could scarcely follow, but they could also speak and understand a little Hindustani. It was very hot, and the door from the front courtyard was open; out there the headman’s animals breathed, champed, and stamped their hoofs, and seemed to be inside the house. The cheap hookah on the floor in the middle of the semicircle had a pottery bowl and a straight bamboo stem which each man swivelled round as his turn came to smoke. The water bubbled in it; Rodney exhaled and drew in his stomach muscles: he felt
much
better. It was time to be going.

He took another puff at the hookah, dragging the acrid smoke through his funnelled hands so that his lips would not defile the mouthpiece. He asked an idle question; the talkative member of the pair of twins replied. The fat bannia said pleasantly in halting English, “You are speaking werry good Hindustani, sahib-bahadur.”

He replied coldly in Hindustani. “As good as your English, I expect, babu-ji.”

Perhaps the fellow was only trying to make polite conversation, and show off his English. Perhaps, buried in these wilds, he didn’t even know that it was an insult to speak English to an Englishman unless the latter first used that language to him—for it implied that the Englishman was a newcomer to India, or had not troubled to learn Hindustani. It didn’t matter; the fat slug had better learn manners and might as well begin now. He looked intelligent in a crafty way. He was probably the one who’d sent that young fellow after him when he went out to kill a deer; the meals were endlessly the same—chupattis and curried lentils—so Rodney had taken the rifle and tried to get some venison. Someone must have told the young devil to go with him. It might have been the headman, looking so innocent there, or Piroo the cunning one, Piroo the thug. That didn’t matter either, because the young fellow was dead, bayoneted to death and buried under leaves in a bear’s cave up the valley. They’d never find him, never know what happened to him. He’d snivelled and begged for mercy, and said he’d only come
to point out the game trails—but he’d had an axe, and a nasty treacherous look.

Rodney rubbed his hands, remembering it with suppressed glee. How straight he’d kept his face when he told the headman that the young man had left him to come home, that he had no idea what had happened to him after that, or where he’d gone! “Perhaps a tiger got him,” he had added sympathetically, craftily.

The bannia flushed and stammered an apology. The headman said gently, “You are safe here in Chalisgon, sahib, absolutely safe, until you choose to go.”

Rodney did not reply. That was a favourite remark of Caroline’s, and the headman copied her, saying the same thing when it was quite uncalled for. It was very suspicious; that line of soft talk wouldn’t help the fellow when the time came to deal with him. With half an ear he listened to the subdued mutter from the women opposite, obscured as it was by the bubble of the water in the hookah. The headman’s wife was leaning back, cackling with soft laughter and holding her sides. He watched her lean forward with another of her eager questions—about English clothes, servants, food, perfumes, housekeeping expenses, feminine hygiene, obstetrics, care of children. The catechism had gone on for twelve days, and no end was in sight. She found a vast humour in every answer; probably she didn’t believe half of them, and laughed in admiration of the white women’s fabulous ingenuity. She understood Mrs. Hatch’s explanations better than Caroline’s, though Mrs. Hatch hardly spoke a word of Hindustani; Caroline’s English world was on another planet, while Mrs. Hatch’s differed only in degree. The headman’s wife was, besides, genuinely awed by Caroline and treated her as she would a visiting queen or an embodied goddess.

They were safe for the moment. He’d make an opportunity to get Caroline alone soon and tell her to be ready to move tomorrow night or the night after. She was looking desperately worried these days, and never let him out
of her sight until he was safely into his room and she in hers.

He’d better pump these people and see if he could find out the latest news before he made his plan. He said casually, “Does no one ever come to Chalisgon, headman? Travellers, tax collectors, agents of the Rani?”

“Sometimes—but we always know at least a day ahead because there’s only the one jungle trail. And the tax man has just been. He said it was a special levy and ruined us. There’s nothing more to be sucked from us now, so no one else will come till the cold weather.”

“We could all die here,” the bannia said, “and the Rani and the Dewan wouldn’t care—except that then there wouldn’t be any crops to confiscate.”

“There’s not much now after
you’ve
finished with us,” muttered one of the old gnomes, while his brother snickered. The bannia waved his hands and protested volubly. “I have to live, and feed my family, don’t I? My interest’s fair, isn’t it? There’s a lot of risk in lending money to idle drunken old men, like some I could name——”

The head man stopped him with a laugh. “All right, babu-ji, all right; he only meant it in fun. How could we afford to have proper weddings without you?”

The bannia grumbled into silence, and the priest said slowly, “I have heard something. The Rani’s army and the sepoys from Bhowani are gathering in Kishanpur. They will march for Gondwara in a week or two.”

A mosquito whined in Rodney’s ear. He slapped at it and pretended to look for the corpse in order to gain time and steady his voice. With careful nonchalance he asked, “Will they come through here, do you think?”

“I have heard so. This is the shortest route; the trail comes out on to the Deccan Pike this side of Gondwara. But have no fear, sahib; we will hide you well.”

Rodney was silent. He must not show anxiety, or the wretches might summon courage to murder them on the spot. He wondered why the priest had let out the rumour at all,
but saw on reflection that it was the safer course for a man posing as a friend. It would have been disastrous for his pretence if Rodney had overheard the news elsewhere in the village.

He decided to probe a little deeper, with care and cunning. He’d hardly mentioned the mutiny since arriving here, and the villagers had been careful to avoid the subject. Now he knew what they were waiting for and felt strong enough to risk it; there were things he ought to find out and tell the general. He noticed that the women had stopped talking to listen.

“Tell me, my friends, what do you hear of this mutiny? What do you think about it? Tell me honestly—for are you not the true people of India?”

That was good; his voice had been warm and solicitous, and they would like being called his friends. The headman and the bannia would certainly die the night that he left; perhaps the priest too—perhaps not.

The headman answered slowly. “We hear that the sepoys betrayed their salt and murdered many English everywhere, shamefully killing women and children. It was a curse on them. We saw the chupattis and the flesh pass, and talked about it many nights in this room. We did not know then for whom the curse was intended. Now we know; it was for the sepoys. We dare not think of the tortures they will suffer hereafter. But perhaps they will win in this life, because we hear there are hundreds of thousands of them and few English.”

Rodney scowled. “There are hundreds of thousands of English soldiers coming over the sea. There will be blood for blood, a gallon for a drop—and burning for burning, a tree for a twig.” But he saw in their faces that to them power had no existence unless it was present and effective. What could they know of the sea? He caught his breath and said quietly, “Do you want the sepoys to win? Do you think it is not right for the English to rule India?”

He used the word Hindustan for India because there was
no other in common use, and because among the educated it was a convention that it should have that meaning. He saw at once from their puzzled looks that here
Hindustan
carried its narrow, true meaning—the upper valley of the Ganges.

He thought the bannia knew what he had meant, but the headman said in a surprised voice, “Hindustan, sahib? Why should you not rule Hindustan, in particular? We hear there are many lands before you reach the Himalaya or the Black Water—Bengal, Sind, Punjab, Carnatic, Deccan, Konkan—we do not know all the names, or where they are. We hear they are all ruled by foreigners—English here, Mahrattas there, Afghan Mohammedans somewhere else. We do not know whether it is right, but that is how it is.”

The bannia took up the tale. “It is like this, sahib. Here we do not care who rules us as long as he rules well. All men are foreigners to Chalisgon except men born in Chalisgon, as all of us here were. We would like best to be left in peace, but that is not possible, because the world is full of tigers and we are poor starving goats. Someone must protect us and give us peace.”

The twins snorted in unison at the bannia’s description of himself as a starving goat. The talkative one continued in his vile accent. “Someone’s got to do it, and we pray it’ll be the English. The villages beyond the Kishan—only thirty miles away—they’re under the Commissioner-sahib at Bhowani. There a man can’t rob and murder as he likes even if his uncle’s cousin
is
a friend of the Dewan’s.”

“Death and taxes we cannot avoid,” said the priest, “but there the taxes are low and regular, and the clerks in Bhowani very reasonable in their extortions.”

Rodney nodded. “I understand. You of Chalisgon have been good to us. What can I tell the great ones that this village needs most? When we have deposed the Rani you too will be governed by a Commissioner-sahib.”

The headman swivelled the hookah round, drew tobacco smoke mixed with charcoal fumes into his lungs, and looked at
the ceiling. “Water—like the great Dellamain Commissioner-sahib of Bhowani promised the villages across the river. He has been killed, we hear. Who had not heard of him? Water for irrigation. There is a ruined dam and a silted lake five miles from here up our little stream.” He nodded towards the back of the house. “It is called Naital, and the old good rajahs built it—oh, two hundred years ago and more. They made irrigation channels for this village and the ones lower down, and many miles of thorn scrub were then crop land. Now it is in ruin, and we have no water when we need it. The Dewan will do nothing; our taxes go for other necessary things, he says—elephants and armies and the Rajah’s splendour in Kishanpur. It is just that a rajah should live in splendour, even as you sahibs do, with many servants—and it is just that we should have some water. Then we would be happy, most of all if the Commissioner-sahib came often to hunt here, or you officers came with your soldiers and made a great show. Then we could see the mighty ones enjoying the proper splendour, and so enjoy it with them. Then we would be happy.”