Rogue Officer (11 page)

The Dutchman was a handsome dark-haired man of about thirty-five years. He had a two-inch scar on his right cheek-bone. Serious brown eyes regarded Jack. They were the eyes of an actor. They changed expression by the second.

‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘You have to believe that, don’t you? If I didn’t I would fall into a melancholic state and be good for nothing. Hey, how did you like my performance? What? It keeps them guessing, you see, if you pretend you’re half-mad. They don’t know what to do with me. It worries them to have this creature whose moods jump back and forth. You don’t have a smoke on you, do you? I would kill for a cigar or a pipeful of tobacco. I’ll pay you back later, once we’ve killed this rabble . . .’

Jack shook his head. Perhaps his Dutch companion
was
half-mad. Jack could not help but admire his effervescent nature.

He then asked Hilversum, ‘How is it you speak good English?’

The Dutchman snorted. ‘English isn’t a difficult language. You should try Finnish. Or Cantonese. Do you know each word in Cantonese has nine meanings, all very different? Chinese dialects are tonal languages. You have to say the word in the right tone, or it means something completely different. The word
tong
for instance, when pronounced in a high falling pitch means “soup”, but in a low falling pitch means “sugar”. On the other hand, in Cantonese there are no tenses, no plurals and no articles. “Me go ship yesterday” is exactly what a Cantonese speaker would say in his own tongue. Who are you, by the way?’

Jack had almost fallen asleep. ‘Lieutenant Jack Crossman, of the 88th Foot, a regiment raised in Connaught in Ireland.’ He had told the truth, not necessarily the right thing to do in such circumstances, but inventiveness had failed him.

‘I thought you Catholic Irish didn’t like the Protestant English?’

‘I’m not Irish. In any case, you can’t blame an entire nation for the actions of a few. There are those in England – and Scotland – who deserve to be hated by the Irish, but not the majority of the population. There are Catholics in England and Protestants in Ireland too.’

‘Well,’ said the other, ‘are you an Honourable East India Company man? Are you one of those warrior-clerks?’

‘No, I’m Queen’s Army, not Indian Army.’

‘You won’t get rich that way. It’s better to be a John Company man, then you rise quickly, fleece the natives, and build yourself an empire out here. Then you can go home when you’re fed up and buy a huge estate in the country, a townhouse in London and live like a king. I know a man who was just a Company writer ten years ago and now he’s a resident. Led a few border skirmishes, squeezed revenues from some unwilling tribes, rose from lieutenant to colonel in a few months. That’s the sort of career you should be chasing, not this Queen’s Army stuff. Have you no ambition?’

Jack gritted his teeth. He was beginning to become exasperated with this Dutchman who ran off at the mouth all the time.

‘Not that kind of ambition. I’ll have you know I’m a baronet’s son and have no need of such an unsavoury career.’

‘Younger son, I’ll wager.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Ha, I thought so. Choice of two careers only. Army and Church. Too restless to be a pasty-faced pastor, so the only thing left open was to purchase a commission in the army. Did Daddy put up the money?’

‘I’ll have you know,’ spluttered Jack, ‘that I joined as a private and worked my way up through the ranks.’

‘And Daddy’s peerage rank had nothing to do with it?’

‘Not in the slightest. In fact my father tried to block my promotion. He did not approve, you see, of a son with an iron will of his own.’

‘I don’t blame him. I’d have cut you off without a penny. What nonsense. Who gave you these idiotic principles? A mother, I suppose? They’re a woman’s work, principles like those.’

‘I swear if I ever get out of this,’ growled Jack, ‘I’ll plant you a facer so hard you’ll need a new nose.’

‘It’s no use getting frustrated with me,’ protested the indignant Dutchman, ‘it’s your mother you should be angry with.’

At that moment one of the sepoy sentries came over and demanded that they stop talking. Both captors sat fuming silently until the rest of the rebels woke. Then they were on their way again. Towards the evening they approached a village. The rebels, with one or two badmashes amongst them, were heavily armed. Jack heard them talking in Hindi about raiding the village for supplies. One or two said they ought to kill any men they saw, but leave the women and children alone. The havildar who had first spoken to Jack was against any killing, he said, while he was in charge.

‘Why are you the leader?’ asked a scruffy-looking fellow with one eye and a hawkish nose. ‘There is no rank here now. You are not in the army any more.’

‘I am the leader because I am the most senior and also the most intelligent,’ replied the havildar, ‘which was why I was given my chevrons in the first place.’ He took a pistol from his belt. ‘Also I will punish you badly if you defy my authority. I have around me men from my regiment who are loyal to me. You are new to our company and I forgive you for not knowing this, but if you speak to me again like that I shall surely shoot out your one good eye and leave you either dead or blind.’

The objector looked around him and saw that several of the sepoys were glaring at him. His head went down and he mumbled that he was sorry for his indiscretion and begged them to pardon his ignorance. However, if they were to eat they would have to raid the village, that much had to be true, and if the village defended itself, they would need to kill.

‘Five of us will go down,’ said the havildar, ‘and the rest stay here.’

He and four others then took their weapons and walked down towards the village. Thankfully, from Jack’s point of view, there was no shooting and the group returned a short while later with food and drink. It was survival of the best armed, whether with weapons of war or with the laws of the country.

Once the five had left for the village, the Dutchman had immediately begun working on the badmash who had stood up to the havildar.

‘You would be wise to let us go,’ he said quietly to the fellow, ‘for if you are caught abducting two Europeans, they will hang you for sure.’

‘They will hang me anyway, for fighting the
firinghis.’

‘No, for I will speak in your favour. I will tell the authorities how you were forced to join these rebellious sepoys at gunpoint. I saw how that pompous havildar spoke to you. Do you deserve such treatment? No. A man of your fine character must be thoroughly insulted by such words. It must grieve you indeed to put up with this kind of behaviour from a mere havildar in a foreign army. Did you join the English, when they came? No, you stood back, proud of your heritage, and spat at their feet. While that fellow grovelled, took their
annas
and became one of them.’

‘Ha!’ said the badmash. ‘You must speak Hindi?’

‘Indeed I do,’ replied the Dutchman. ‘A little.’

Jack groaned, knowing this advantage had now been thrown to the winds.

The Dutchman was oblivious to his error and continued to try to befriend the one-eyed man. ‘I do not need to speak the language to see how arrogantly that havildar spoke to you, and how angry you were at his words. It was written all over your noble face. You are surely the descendant of a rajah, are you not? You have in your features the very image of the Rajah of Jodhpur. Are you sure you’re not related to him? He has a nose the very likeness of yours. A very aristocratic nose handed down to him by his early ancestors, conquerors every one of them. I have seen a statue of the great Iskander: your nose copies his to the very curve at the end. How does a royal personage such as yourself, a man with such rich blood in his veins, find himself in these low and uncomfortable circumstances? Surely you have been a most unlucky man?’

All the while the Dutchman was speaking the badmash was running his fingers down the slope of his nose, looking thoughtful.

‘Oh, sir,’ he said, ‘you would be amazed by my poor luck. All my life I have been the victim of bad fortune.’ He struck his own head with the heel of his hand. ‘The gods have not seen fit to show favour to me. Each time I lift myself up from the dirt, I am thrust back down again. It is a source of great anguish to me, that through no fault of my own, I am reduced to such circumstances as you see me in now.’

Jack sat and watched these exchanges in amazement at the Dutchman’s silver tongue. Surely the badmash was not falling for such drivel. The flattery Hilversum was spilling out was so obvious a child could have seen through it. At every moment Jack was expecting the badmash to burst out laughing and tell the Dutchman he knew exactly was he was doing. It was so transparent it was indeed laughable. Yet the fellow was lapping it up like milk.

It was at this point that the five sepoys had arrived back from the village, carrying food and drink, and the conversation between Hilversum and the badmash had ceased.

The exchange between the pair had not gone entirely unnoticed amongst the remaining rebels, though it did not seem as though they had heard exactly what had passed between the Dutchman and the badmash. Jack noticed, while the group was eating, one of the sepoys walk over to the havildar and whisper in his ear. The havildar stared hard at the badmash, who was at that time tearing some bread apart with his filthy fingers. A little later the havildar got up, drifted up behind the badmash, then struck the man a deadly blow with his musket butt while he was eating. The badmash fell forward, a bolt of food dropping from his mouth. One of the other sepoys lifted his head by the hair and looked into his face.

‘He is dead,’ announced the sepoy. ‘You have killed him.’

‘This man was betraying us,’ said the havildar to the rest of his men, ‘with that
firinghi.’
He pointed to Hilversum. ‘He was trash. We take these fellows from the sewers and expect them to act like men, but they are nothing but trouble.’

There were, amongst the sepoys and sowars, three more of the kind of man that now lay dead in the dust. They shifted uneasily, looking at each other, then at the rebels. One of them finally spoke.

‘We are not like him,’ he said. ‘He was a Goojur from Dum-Dum, of no account, a worthless individual. He had no honour. We are men of higher regard, with a sense of loyalty to our kind.’

‘This I understand,’ replied the havildar, no doubt satisfied that he had made his point by executing the badmash. ‘We will say no more.’

The three civilians looked relieved. Jack realized they would have stood no chance against the rebel sepoys and sowars, and would have been cut down to a man. However, the havildar would know that he needed all the men he could muster. These were unhappy times which tried men to the limit. Many souls had been thrown into jeopardy.

Unwisely though, the rebels stayed the night where they were, being fatigued by their march. In the early hours they were attacked by angry villagers throwing rocks out of the darkness. No one was seriously hurt but rest was interrupted. Jack himself was struck on the shoulder by a stone, which left his joint sore. In the morning the havildar resisted the impulse to burn the village and moved on before the day became too hot.

On the march Jack spoke to the Dutchman.

‘You got a man killed back there.’

Hilversum shrugged. ‘What do you care? He was gutter trash. And I might remind you he was the enemy. If I had a gun now I would shoot the lot of them down like dogs.’

‘You be careful you don’t talk yourself into your grave.’

They spoke no more, since one of the rebels came back and remonstrated with them, telling them to keep up.

If the gods had not been with the dead man, they were not with his murderers either. At noon on the fourth day of the march they came to a narrow pass, a gorge between two sets of high sheer-faced cliffs. There was no other way through into the valley beyond. However, stuck fast in the alley-thin pass was the body of a dead elephant. Someone had tried to lead the elephant through and it had become jammed in the gorge.

One could not climb over the rancid carcass because the pass narrowed above to the width of a man’s thigh for at least twenty yards. The only possible answer was to cut the elephant out of the way, an unpleasant and difficult task. Since its death, its body had swollen, bloated with foul gases, which served to wedge it even more solidly into the gap.

The rebels hacked at the corpse with swords and knives, but the work was slow. While the innards of the dead elephant had turned to putrid matter, the skin had dried in the sun and was like armour. All afternoon they chopped and cut at the beast, blunting their swords, cursing and swearing at the man who had thought he could get his animal through such a narrow opening. The sweat rolled from their bodies, even though they were now at a higher elevation and in cooler air. When holes were finally cut, hot fetid gases flared out on the sepoys, causing them to choke in disgust.

The Dutchman was most amused and almost earned himself the same fate as the badmash, when he cried out in Hindi, ‘You see, even Ganesh is against you!’ What he did get as punishment for the remark, and Jack alongside him, was the pleasure of raking out the stinking rotten guts of the beast with his bare hands once the sepoys had cut a huge hole in the cadaver’s hide. He and Jack were forced to crawl inside the creature’s backside to scrape out the innards, the rebels hoping that the beast would collapse once it had been partially emptied of flesh. They clawed with their hands at the yellow-grey sludge, slopping it out of the man-sized opening in the elephant’s arse, almost fainting with the stench. Jack had a more difficult time of it, being only one handed, but it was a ghastly business for both men.

‘Bloody pachyderms,’ Hilversum said under his breath in his native Dutch. ‘What God made such creatures for is beyond me.’

When evening came they were still no nearer to opening the pass wide enough for a man to squeeze through. The corpse had indeed partially collapsed, but the bones were jammed hard and formed a cage door to keep them out. Men were sent out to find wood to make a bonfire under the remains, to try to burn them out of the way, but there were few trees in the region. Those they found were weak and spindly, offering very little fuel. When the fire was eventually started, just before dawn, the stink was unbelievable and forced them all back to a quarter of a mile from the opening. Finally they decided to approach the spot again and found the bones brittle and blackened but still in place.