Zemindar (100 page)

I was frightened. It had never occurred to me since his arrival in Lucknow that Oliver would expect me to make my home in India. Before the fire and the flight from Hassanganj, I would have known there was no alternative for him, and it would have been acceptable to me. But before the fire I had not realized I loved him, and the dream of the future he had shared with me on the road to Lucknow could not now come true.

Since then more than my feelings for him had changed, and at last, the ‘real India’ I had wished so much to discover had shown itself to me completely—as my personal gateway to purgatory.

‘He cannot in conscience expect me to stay out here now,’ I told myself. ‘He loves me. I know it. He would never expect me to remain in India.’

As I sat dissecting my reaction to Jessie’s simple words, I came to realize that never since the day of the first assault had I envisaged anything but that our unquiet courtship would somehow end in a long and argumentative married life in England. Always England. When, in those first few days of my acknowledged love, I had fed my passion with sweet imaginings of future bliss, the leafy lanes we’d walked had all been English lanes; the morning downs we’d galloped over, all English downs; the view from the windows of our imagined home, all English views, serene, domestic, familiar. Even then Hassanganj in my mind had been dealt its death blow.

Could he truly be foolish enough to expect a phoenix from such ashes?

The golden radiance of the morning seemed to dim as I cudgelled my brain for answers to questions not yet posed, tried to read my own intentions, determine my own capacities in fairness both to myself and Oliver.

But then it occurred to me that perhaps my anxiety was premature, that perhaps Jessie had merely repeated some idle words of Oliver’s, spoken to fill a bored silence or to test Jessie’s devotion to Scotland, and that she had wrongly taken seriously. That must be it, I told myself. He was not serious. I hugged this hope to myself with all my energy, for I knew that, in the last analysis, if Oliver did intend to stay in India, then the final choice could only be made by me.

It was not a choice I ever wanted to make.

The garrison had been given the news of the British capture of Delhi on October 10th. Late the previous night, a messenger had stolen into the entrenchment with information for General Outram that the ancient capital of the Moguls was now in British hands, the Emperor and his
begum
had been taken prisoner, and that, despite heavy losses sustained during the battle, a column of the Delhi force was now hurrying to our aid.

‘How long will it take them to reach us?’ I asked Kate.

‘Well, the way the army moves, hardly less than a month.’

Our daily allowances were again cut, and now the six ounces of gun-bullock meat apportioned to each woman included bone. In fact, it was largely bone, so soup and
chapattis
were all we could look forward to twice a day. The cooler weather certainly increased our hunger. Sometimes, if we were very fortunate, we might receive a present of a stringy native fowl or a few vegetables from one or other of our masculine acquaintances who had been out on a foray, but such pleasures were few and far between. There were those among us who tried sparrow curry, and some pronounced it excellent, and Mr Gubbins, his wife and guests, so it was said, still enjoyed milk puddings, sherry and sauterne with their meals, but most of us grew thinner by the day.

The most tantalizing aspect of our situation was that in the Alum Bagh, not four miles distant, lay great stocks of food, clothing and medicines, destined for us but left behind in that palace by General Outram in the belief that it would be merely a few days before our garrison could issue out or the supplies be brought safely in.

Reminiscing with Kate and Jessie, I discovered that it was three full months since we had tasted eggs or milk and even longer since our last slice of white bread.

‘Well, it just shows how unnecessary most of the things we were accustomed to really are,’ I said, attempting philosophy.

‘Och aye!’ Jessie agreed over her eternally clicking needles. ‘But werena’ the unnecessary things of life the good ones!’

‘’Tis the lads that I pity,’ put in Kate. ‘God be between them and all harm, and they without tobacco or a sup of the hard stuff when they want it. ’Tis they who’ve borne the brunt of it all, and I’d dearly like to see them smoking, or even in their cups, come to that. ‘Twould be more natural.’

But that was a sober period in the entrenchment—too sober for some—and one day we learned that the bodies of half-a-dozen men who had made a private foray outside the perimeter in search of liquor had been found decapitated.

My return to the hospital after two cloistered weeks of nursing Oliver awakened me to many changes within the enclosure more subtle in effect and more difficult to define than the purely physical betterment effected under the energetic direction of General Outram. The atmosphere within the entrenchment had changed, and for the worse. The place simmered with hidden tensions.

The previous months had scarcely been pleasant, but before the 25th of September, whatever our personal shortcomings and collective miseries might have been, we had fought and endured in a single-minded unity of purpose. We had bickered among ourselves, of course, irritated each other and criticized our leaders, but never with acrimony. The Nawab of Oudh’s jewels might have been stolen, but seldom a comrade’s tobacco. Liquor had appeared on occasion like water from the Biblical rock, and then been shared among one’s peers; and if a woman lost her virtue to a soldier, difficult enough to do in those exhausting days, it was with her own consent.

Now division and dissension had appeared.

The ‘Old Garrison’, as we had come to be called, tended to hang together and delighted in making light of the privations their more recently arrived comrades grumbled at.

‘You should’ve been ’ere in July; then you’d ’ave known what’s what’; or ‘What are you squawkin’ about? So the meat ain’t enough, but it stays on the plate now, not like in August when you ’ad to put a bullet in it afore you could spear it with a fork!’ were among the remarks I overheard as I passed among the hospital beds. Not without reason, the new men felt aggrieved that their efforts to reach us were belittled, and there would be sharp reminders of the depredations from cholera they had suffered in Cawnpore, or the losses they had sustained in coming through Lucknow.

Such altercations were trivial, but an echo, perhaps, of the rivalries burgeoning among our superiors.

Our own Brigadier Inglis retained command of the 32nd Foot and the other combatants of the Old Garrison. General Havelock had been given command of the troops occupying the palaces in the extended perimeter, but passed his days in semiretirement in Mr Ommaney’s house, reading books from Old Buggins’s library. His health was certainly poor but the men felt that the cause of his malaise lay chiefly in the fact of his supersedence by General Outram. And General Outram himself was now in complete control of the entrenchment and all within it.

Both the generals became familiar figures in the hospital, which they visited with conscientious regularity every day. Out-ram, now the senior, but younger by eight years than Havelock, was a thick-set man with a ruddy, blue-veined complexion and penetrating eyes. Open and genial in manner, he was popular among the men, partly no doubt because of the freedom with which he handed out his cigars, though his interest in his troops was obviously humane and genuine. He was well known to the old inhabitants of Lucknow, for he had served a term as Chief Commissioner before going to Persia, from where both he and Havelock had hurried to India on the outbreak of the rebellion. He was possessed of a most delicate sense of fair play which forbade him to eat anything other than what his men ate, or to send a letter to his wife by a
cossid
going to Agra, since his officers were forbidden any private communications. When Outram entered the hospital, the sick became more animated and cheerful; when Havelock came in, they were inclined to shrink beneath their blankets and feign sleep.

Havelock was almost the direct contrary of Outram both in appearance and character. So upright he looked stiff, he was a small man, but slender and well-proportioned, with handsome sunburned features and hair already white. He appeared delicate and tired, and it was said that the diet of the siege, coming after three months of strenuous campaigning, had undermined his health. Kate couldn’t abide him, though she bobbed a pretty curtsey like the rest of us when he passed among the hospital beds.

‘Too pious—and a pedant to boot,’ she told me. ‘And you’ll not believe it, I know, but I’ve actually seen him wearing his sword and all his medals at a ball in Calcutta. Of all things! Probably wears ’em in his bath too, I wouldn’t wonder!’

Reserved, almost aloof with his equals, General Havelock was distant and cold with his men. They admired him as a soldier but disliked him as a man, and like Kate tended to deride his Bible reading and his proclivity for praying with the sick.

I began to understand what Oliver had meant about ‘two tails wagging one dog’. The tails were not even of the same breed. Watching the two gentlemen with interest, before long I came to the conclusion that behind the quiet, almost humble exterior of the Christian soldier, Havelock was self-concerned and prideful, while Outram, for all his suffused face, bellowing laugh and loud manner, was a truly brave and gentle man.

As was natural when so many human beings had so little to talk about, the entrenchment soon throbbed with rumours of acrimony among the three commanders. Outram still wanted to clear a route for the new relief that was coming from Delhi as far as the Alum Bagh, but would not trust either Havelock or Inglis to hold the Residency. Inglis was angry at the way his men of the 32nd were being used to lead the forays and sorties; and Havelock, immersed in his manuals of military history and his Bible, advocated a complete withdrawal of troops from Lucknow as soon as the new relief arrived—which, of course, the other two commanders would not hear of. How much truth there was in any or all of these rumours, we could not know. To their credit, in public the gentlemen concerned behaved with admirable grace towards each other.

Factionalism, having shown itself among the men, the usual grousing of the British private soldier now had an undercurrent of almost bitter resentment. The men of the relief were made to feel their failure as a personal slur, while the Old Garrison would have been saints indeed had they not vented their disappointment in twitting their would-be rescuers for that same failure. There were other evils, too: petty theft and fighting, bred of
ennui
, hunger, anxiety and the disquieting sense that, though our ordeal might be nearly over, its end remained as problematical as ever.

I was sitting one evening on the steps with Oliver, restraining myself from looking towards him too often and too feelingly, for Charles was beside me. Kate and Jessie sat on stools on the gravel path. Oliver was now ensconced in the Ferret Box, but wandered into the Gaol each afternoon as soon as he had finished his stint at the ammunition manufactory. The enclosure was quiet, everyone busy with the evening meal. On a raddled neem tree not far off, mynas scuffled in a scolding multitude for perches and, below the tree, grey-capped crows strode with fidgety pompousness, pecking hopefully in the dirt. A flight of starlings swept silently across the sky like a scatter of seeds arching from the sower’s hand, to fall to earth on some aptly furrowed but invisible field. On the roof above us, a covey of brown monkeys sported around a shattered chimney stack, the old ones, grave and cross, squatting obscenely at the base of the stack fleaing themselves, and baring yellow teeth in elderly irritation when the youth of the tribe gambolled too near.

‘The sooner we all get out of this the better,’ Oliver said after a pause while we watched the monkeys. ‘Another wretched girl was assaulted last night, I hear. Great to-do, everyone threatened with the “cat” and worse, but with 1,500 likely culprits, there is not much chance of finding the right one.’

Beside me I felt Charles wince and glance quickly at the females at this mention of the unmentionable in mixed society. Kate and Jessie, soldier’s wives both, were undisturbed, and Charles could not know how well I was accustomed to his brother’s freedom of speech.

‘Och aye! Poor laddies,’ said Jessie, busy turning a heel on her needles. ‘’Tis hard for them when they canna get to the bazaars.’

Charles shuffled his feet, Kate smiled appreciatively at Jessie’s uncondemning realism, and I began to see where lay the affinity between Jessie and Oliver Erskine.

The British Army in India marches with three times its own numbers by way of retinue. Hordes and thousands of coolies, water-carriers, grass-cutters, grooms, bullock drivers, elephant keepers, servants, cooks, artisans and tradesmen, and what are euphemistically termed ‘camp followers’. For perhaps the first time in the Army’s history, the quick dash of Generals Outram and Havelock through Lucknow, leaving their dependants and baggage train behind at the Alum Bagh, had deprived the common soldier of one of his few if illegitimate comforts. This was not the first time that the word ‘assault’, and uglier, had cropped up during the last few weeks. Kate and I generally waited for each other’s company now if we left the hospital late, and I found it ironical that we were probably in more personal danger from the men of our own race and allegiance than we had been when it was necessary to race through a hail of pandy bullets.

‘Dirty swine!’ Charles grated through his teeth, and against my will I found myself remembering vividly a night in the Chalmerses’ house in Calcutta and a cry from Emily that had cut the silence and my heart.

Oliver unfolded his long legs in their short trousers and stretched them down the steps beside me. ‘Hmph! Not necessarily,’ he objected. ‘Mere men, like the rest of us, after all.’

‘Aye! And who’s ever to ken if a lass is willin’ or no’,’ said Jess, ‘wi’out a grab in the dark forbye?’