Nightrunners of Bengal (36 page)

“There, there, sir. You was wonderful. Mind tha’ puddle, sir. You must of killed a ‘undred of them furching niggers yourself, sir, begging your par’n, sir. I’s all right, sir, i’s all right, don’t you worry. We’ll kill every nigger in the coun’ry, we know wo’ they done to you. Don’t you worry, sir….”

Piroo helped him at his other side.

Caroline waited upright and still in the door of the ground-floor room which they had made into a dressing-station. Shuffling across the courtyard, he saw she had been listening to the guns, and carried a pistol in a sash at her waist. Lips parted, she peered into the rain and, as he came closer, ran out, took his left hand, and stood a second touching him. Inside the building the darkness hid her and he could not stop crying. She led him to a pallet, whispered to him to lie down, and began to cut away his sleeve.

Sobbing, he stared up into the blackness and muttered, “It’s finished. We’ve won. We’ve won, and I wish I were dead.”

She knelt beside him and put her arm under his head; he turned and pressed his eyes against the swell of her breast. She ran her fingers slowly through his hair. Outside the rain drummed and hissed, drowning all other sounds.

It drowned at last his throbbing hurt and drowned physical pain, until he felt nothing but the touch of her fingertips and
a slow tide of love rising to fill him as the sea floods a scoured channel.

The surgeon came and bent over him. Caroline knelt at the head of the pallet, keeping her hand on his temple. Dimly he heard the surgeon say, “It’s not broken, Captain, but it is very extensively bruised. You must stay here; we’ll make up a bed for you inside.”

Caroline’s cool fingers rippled the love in him, and he dared not look away from her eyes. He said, “Not yet. Later.”

“While you are in my hospital you are under my orders, sir.”

The voice was from a long way off, and his own answering it. “I can’t help that. I’m sorry.”

A pause, a shuffle, feet moving away in the straw. His eyes saw a little depth in the dusk; three hand lanterns cast a feeble glow into the barren room and gleamed back yellow from instruments and bandages and sweating faces ranged on the straw round the walls.

“You should stay here.” Her voice was doubtful and wondering.

He put his hand over hers. “No, I shouldn’t. You mean—you want me to stay, don’t you? Let us always be accurate.”

He smiled up, mocking her old didacticism. Surely now there would be a tomorrow, and a time to savour each other. She hung her head lower and nodded, and he thought she blushed. She pulled her hand away; his happiness caressed him so that he laughed, stretched his legs, and said, still in caricature of the abruptness which had been her manner to the world, “Dress my wound. And be quick.”

Amelia Hatch’s anxious red face loomed over them, and he burst out giggling. She must have found a pot of henna in the night to re-dye her hair. In the tattered sari she looked indescribably raffish, like some kindly long-retired Bombay harlot. When she saw him laughing she leaned over, wagging her forefinger. “Ai’m ashamed of you, Captain Sevvidge, reely Ai am! And you, miss! A-’olding ’ands in ’ospital!”

Caroline worked quickly at the bandage, smiling to herself. Mrs. Hatch rattled stridently on, then suddenly bent and smacked a kiss on Rodney’s cheek. “There, ducks, don’t attend to me.”

He sniffed meaningly, and she drew herself up. “Not one drop, Capting—at least, h’only one!”

She turned away and swooped on the wounded soldiers. Their drawn faces lightened under the familiar flood of her cockney scolding. Caroline patted the knot of the sling. “There, that’s all right—if you insist on going out.”

“Thank you, Caroline. How’s Robin?”

“He’s upstairs with a badly wounded artilleryman. We doubt whether the man will live, but he wants Robin to stay with him. Would you like to see him?”

“Yes—no, I must go. I’ll be back soon, I expect. Piroo!”

“Sahib!”

“Come on.”

She followed him to the courtyard. He walked quickly on into the rain, without daring to look back, for what would show in his face.

Soldiers staggered by them through the deep puddles, carrying wounded men in litters improvised of bamboos and blankets. A couple of riderless troop-horses galloped side by side down the narrow lane, joyfully kicking up their heels and forcing everyone back against the houses. Behind the temple the horses of the gun teams waited patiently in tethered rows, their heads drooping. It was twenty degrees cooler, and the rain brought a rich smell out of the earth, not wholly pleasant but full and real.

Down a side turning he saw a group of English gunners bending over something green and dirty white. They were kicking it, and he saw it was a sepoy of the 13th. The man knelt in the mud. His coat was a rag, and his bowels hung out of his stomach, trailing on the earth. One gunner held his neck and tried to make him lick the ground; another jerked him back by his hair and rammed axle grease down his throat. His eyeballs were rolled up out of sight, and he
did not know what they were doing to him or who they were. Rodney ran forward, trying to shout, but no words would come through the tight contraction in his throat. As he came near, one of the gunners stood aside and said roughly, “’Ere, that’s enough. This barnshoot might ’ave a brother in them Lancers.”

The sepoy was dead. Rodney turned away, the gunners staring at him, their faces exultant, angry, and ashamed in the rain. With Piroo holding his good arm he went forward to his place.

They had cleared away the worst of the debris from the firing line. The rank of Fusiliers stood to their posts, soaked to the skin, and laughed as the water streamed off their shakos and ran down their noses into their mouths. The steady rain poured down on the foreshore, and on the corpses and wreckage there, and bounced on the river’s yellow surface. Two hundred yards out it became an impenetrable curtain, veiling the rest of the stream and the far bank.

Sir Hector stood a little apart, as always, balancing up and down on the tips of his toes, his beard pearled and his bald head ashimmer with raindrops. A trooper of the Lancers, holding a horse’s head, was talking to him. The trooper rocked on his feet, as if mesmerized into imitating the general’s habit. Rodney came up to hear the trooper saying, “
Huzoor sahib, gaonwala-ne khabbar liya kih
…”

When he had finished Rodney turned to the general. “He says, sir, that a villager has reported a small party of Indians—five or six—hiding in the charcoal burners’ huts at Harna, two miles up river on this bank. The villager didn’t know who they were, but thought they came over from the other side last night, in a boat.”

Sir Hector eyed the lancer, examining with care his torn tunic and the broken lance in his hand. He said, “They’re tired—exhausted—but it must be done. Captain, kindly take out a patrol of Lancers, about a dozen men, and see what there is. Your horse is behind the house still. Pray give my
compliments to Rissaldar Rikirao on your way, and ask if he can spare me five minutes.”

Twenty minutes later, with the weary file of troopers splashing behind him, Piroo loping at his stirrup, and the rain falling in sheets from the silent trees, Rodney came to Harna.

Wisps of smoke rose from two or three carefully stacked banks of wet wood, each the size of a small room. The smoke mingled with the rain and drifted in eddies across an open space full of tree stumps, where the charcoal burners had cut back from the river. In the centre stood a group of their huts, sketchy frameworks of split wood on which they had latched overlapping layers of brown leaves to form walls and roofs. The squad rode among the huts and stopped, facing all directions, in a tangle of pushing horses.

Striving one-handed to bring his horse round, while two others backed into it and all the troopers swore, Rodney saw the Rani of Kishanpur. She stood looking at him, bareheaded and alone, fifty yards away in the jungle beyond the edge of the clearing. Before he had thought what he was doing, he jerked his head in a sideways motion. She hesitated, then stepped behind a tree and out of sight.

Automatically he told the troopers to dismount and search the huts, and watched blank-faced while they did it. He could capture her easily now, and see her executed. Surely she deserved it? But when he opened his mouth it was to call out to the N.C.O., “Anything there, Daffadar?”

“Nothing, sahib. Someone’s been here recently though. I found this.”

He took the ruby ring from the man’s hand and absently pushed it on to the little finger of his left hand. So they’d found poor Prithvi, found the ring in the bushes and given it back to her, and she’d lost it again. Piroo had marked the unease of his manner and was looking at him intently; Piroo knew him through and through by this time. Suddenly he recalled the exact timbre of Caroline’s voice on the hill above Chalisgon. “Rodney, Rodney, you are so strong. But
nothing’s worth the loss of your humanity. Be stronger still.”

He said, “Very well, Daffadar. Go back at once and report that. I will follow slowly; my wound hurts.”

He flushed in saying it, for half of the dozen troopers were wounded at least as badly. The daffadar peered at him anxiously. “Are you sure you’re all right, sahib? We can easily come along with you. There’s no hurry now.”

“No, no, you may be needed. Piroo here will look after me.”

He walked his horse slowly after them until the little trotting column disappeared into the jungle, their backswept lances knocking showers of water from the lower branches. When the creak and jingle died he slid to the ground, gave Piroo the reins, and walked painfully back under the thunderous monotone of the rain towards the place where he had seen her.

She had moved forward to the edge of the trees, and he saw her there. An aching sadness checked his step; he had thought she was stronger than he, as strong as Caroline. He was wrong; a little pistol glinted in her hand and there was somebody with her, hidden in the bushes. He sighed and stood still, waiting for the bullet. Caroline would know.

The Twenty-seventh Rajah of Kishanpur, three years old, scrambled out of his hiding place and caught at Sumitra’s dress. Proud careful hands had made him a miniature replica of a great prince—embroidered slippers, tight white trousers, long primrose coat, black sail-like hat with egret plume and diamond ornaments, tiny jewelled sabre. But the rain had spoiled it all, so it was only a bedraggled, frightened child who stood beside his mother and stared at Rodney with solemn eyes.

The Rani said in a hard voice, “Do not be alarmed, Captain Savage. The pistol is for us, if you try to make us prisoners.”

The familiar blackness moved in her eyes; her soaking dress clung to the shape of her, moulding under her breasts
and between her thighs; a fallen leaf stuck to her shining black hair, and mud splashes streaked the sari’s hem,

He said slowly, “You saw the troopers go.”

“Oh, the great English sahib must have all the glory! He will not share it with any Indian—not even lickspittle swine of lancers—and then there will be a reward. Can I buy you off with a ruby ring?”

He flushed but did not answer, looking down at the child beside her. After half a minute he summoned a smile and said, “Highness, you are hungry? You are? Well, I have chupattis and coarse sugar on that horse. The little man will give you some.”

The boy licked his lips and stared from Piroo to his mother. The fire died from her eyes and tears started out; she said at last, looking still at Rodney, “Yes, go on.”

The boy ran off, stumbling over his toy sabre. Slowly the Rani bowed her head, put her joined hands to her forehead, and stooped to touch Rodney’s knee and foot. Her voice trembled. “My lord, you are hurt.”

He raised her up and said gently, “A little, Sumitra. But tell me what has happened. Why are you two here alone like this?”

The silent storm of her weeping had washed all passion out of her face. She spoke like a woman who reads from a long and dull document.

“We come over in a little boat last night—we two, the new captain of my Guard and the lieutenant, the head priest, my tire-woman, and another servant. Today is the hundredth anniversary of Plassey. There was a prophecy that English rule would last a hundred years and be broken on the field of battle. It is the first day of the new moon, which is auspicious. It is Vishnu’s Jattra. It is the first day of the rains. How could there be failure? We came across to give special honour to the regiments in Gondwara, for rising in rebellion and destroying the British soldiers in the night—they were going to bring elephants out here. He, the little one, would have been the first to enter the
town, escorted by them. At noon he would have been enthroned King of Kishanpur, King of Gondwara, Viceroy of the Nerbudda, Prince of the Sindhya Hills, Lord of the Waters of the Kishan and the Ken and the Betwa—all our old lands.”

The rain spread kohl and mascara in streaks across her face. The mud squelched in over her thin slippers as she shifted her feet.

“When the others saw what happened in the battle just now they took the boat and rowed away without telling me. They knew I would not turn back. Treason, double treason—the regiments fought against us. We knew we could not force the ford. It was to be given up to us.”

“The two Bengal infantry regiments did not fight on either side, Sumitra. They were disarmed last night, and Girdhari Lall blown from a cannon’s mouth.”

She shivered. “You again, and the pale girl. Only you could have known enough. The Lancers——?”

“Were true to their salt.”

“True to their treachery!”

“True to themselves! It doesn’t matter now. Sumitra, give yourself up. Your army has been smashed——”

“I can raise another!”

“Only to make more widows. Lalkot will desert you now; the other princes will never come in. The Sikhs won’t, even if they ever intended to. Everything depended on this—they must have told you that at the tiger hunt—and you’ve lost. Your own people don’t want you. They’re helping us all they can. How do you think I and two women and a child ever reached Gondwara, through a hundred miles of your territory, helpless, starving, sick, penniless, beaten? There’s been too much blood. I don’t know now what’s right for India—I thought I did once. I don’t know who should decide—there are too many different voices. The poor people speak from ignorance and poverty; you speak from jealousy; we—I don’t know. I only know that you and your bloody intrigues which can start a thing like this must go. You have
destroyed your army; you’ve massacred my regiment. I’ll make you come and look at them——”