Zemindar (107 page)

I paused and shivered a little in the chill of those memories, and he drew me to him again.

‘Or was it perhaps really about me?’ I went on. ‘All about me? My own fear, my loneliness, my hurt? Perhaps it is really about my hunger, these dirty clothes I have worn so long, the heat and now the cold? Perhaps it is about the fact that I know I cannot live with the chance that any or all of these things might happen again; that I am a coward and tired—old in my soul and bleak in my heart. Perhaps it is because I cannot love your welfare … more than my own safety.’

He sighed, removed his arm from my shoulders and moved over to the balustrade, where he stood looking down at the almost invisible city.

‘Yes. I believe you are right, Laura. You love me—but not enough. If it were not so, you would not allow this … this episode to stand between us and happiness.’

‘You said yourself that I was realistic. I know that love will not always fill my life, or yours. However ecstatic our passion, there must come a time when … when equilibrium returns, when we will have learned to take each other as a matter of course; and then, well, you would have Hassanganj, your work, your accustomed life. I would have what? A half-suppressed fear, an enormous distrust of the people among whom I lived, and all the disillusionment that this has brought me.’

‘But in that time, as you have termed it, of “ecstatic passion”, is it not possible that you might have been cured of your fear? That I might have cured you? I would try.’

I shook my head.

‘It is too much. Oh, Oliver, my dear, it is too much!’

For a long time we stood together in silence at the balustrade. The night was almost quiet. When at last he spoke, there was finality in his tone and a note of something that might have been resignation.

‘I have said—more than once—that we are well-matched and equal, you and I, and it is so. Just now in anger, and in the fear you have yourself admitted, you rejected my wish to share my life with you as fully as I know how and in the only way I know how—in Hassanganj and India. It is not difficult to understand what you feel about India, and I do understand. But I have nothing else to offer you, Laura, particularly since I believe that you can change, and shall continue to hope that you will change.

‘Oh, Laura, I too have known days of fear, and many of them, when death would have come as a relief to me. I struggled to stay alive, and to believe in life, because once very briefly I had held you in my arms, and because in the worst of those moments I never ceased to hold you in my mind. So you must allow me to go on hoping—in my own way. I will not bother you further with plans for marriage or a life out here; I will not bother you at all. But I must believe, I will hope that, after a time, when you have been back to England and tried to take up the old life again, you will learn your mistake and let me know. You know that I love you; now believe that I will wait for you in patience and faithfully. But I will not bother you again. It is up to you now to tell me when you are ready to come to me. You must discover your own mind without my interference or aid, so that you will never say that I coerced you into a life not to your liking. Do you understand?’

I nodded, then laid my head back against his shoulder, indulging myself with a moment of sweet physical content. Then I turned and buried my face in his shoulder and felt his arm come around me. Perhaps I expected him to kiss me. It would have been natural.

‘I will not ask you again,’ he reiterated. ‘Now it is up to you, my darling. Oh, my darling!’ But though I closed my eyes in anticipation of his lips, I felt myself released, and opened them to find him walking slowly away from me into the cold night.

On the 130th day of the siege we received two welcome pieces of news: the Delhi Column was on its way to the Alum Bagh and Sir Colin Campbell, the Commander in Chief, had arrived in Cawnpore to direct the battle for our relief.

The semaphore stood ready on the tower of the Resident’s House, but no signal came from the Alum Bagh. It was surmised that the instructions sent there for the construction of the machine had gone astray, and once again a messenger set out with new plans and orders. The erection of the second semaphore was now a matter of urgency, since there could be no delay in our receiving information as to when Sir Colin actually arrived, or when his force was to march on to the Dilkusha Palace, which would be the last halt before the final thrust through the outskirts of Lucknow to the Residency.

Finally an answering signal was received from the distant palace, and then our anxiety switched to keeping our own machine in workable order, for the pandies took the greatest delight in trying to shoot it down, sometimes managing this feat and often damaging the semaphore.

‘Willing to bet the first damned message was safely received,’ Oliver said sourly when we heard of the message from the Alum Bagh. ‘They were probably just trying to decipher the mixture of schoolboy Greek and worse French in which the plans and instructions were sent, in case they fell into the pandies’ hands.’

‘What a pity you were not at the other end to lend the assistance of your excellent education,’ Charles answered caustically.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ his brother agreed, but before the contention could grow Kate broke in: ‘These messengers and spies wear so few clothes, it always astonishes me that they are able to conceal the messages they carry. Can’t think where they put ’em; it’s amazing any at all get through safely.’

‘Oh, not so difficult,’ Charles assured her. ‘They hollow out the soles of their shoes, or carry them in ready-cracked bamboo staves—so that if caught, y’see, the bamboo will break at an innocent section—and in their hair. Early on, a man got in with a message in his ear and it took the doctors more than an hour to extract it.’

‘Or placed in a quill and inserted in the rectum,’ Oliver added instructively, but solely to annoy his relative. Before Charles could remonstrate with him on his indelicacy, Jessie nodded over her knitting and said, ‘Aye! That would be the best place, no doubt!’ and even Charles had the grace to smile.

Our interview on the roof of Captain Germon’s post had not resulted in any alteration of Oliver’s usual habits. He was with us each evening for a time, but now we remained in the Gaol sooner than go for an intimate walk, for we had learned that privacy held greater dangers for us than any supposed impropriety. That day he had appeared with another gift, a tongue in a hermetically sealed tin.

‘Cow’s, not horse’s,’ he had said as he sat himself down on Charles’s chair, while Charles went on to the verandah to open the offering with a bayonet.

‘Dare we ask where it came from?’ said Kate.

‘Certainly not. That’s Toddy’s secret. Only hope it’s not flyblown.’

The meat looked and smelled fresh and, when Charles had resignedly seated himself on an upturned box, we each cut ourselves a small slice of the delicacy. Oliver put aside some for Toddy and Ishmial, and after some hesitation we allowed ourselves to be persuaded to finish what remained.

‘I was down the mines again today,’ Oliver said as we finished. ‘You were right, Laura. It is infinitely preferable to be shot at in the open air than to anticipate being shot at down there.’ He moved his stool so that he could lean his back against the wall and stretch out his long legs.

‘I still think you are foolish to go down, Oliver. You aren’t up to the strain, and you couldn’t move quickly enough if you had to get out in a hurry. You’re too big!’

‘I’m not as big as Kavanagh, and he spends so much time down there in the darkness, he’ll come up one day to find he’s grown claws like a badger. Curious fellow that Kavanagh. You know him, I suppose, Charles?’

‘Everyone knows Kavanagh. The biggest braggart and the most confounded bounder in the place!’

‘That so?’

‘Och, sure now, Charles,’ protested Kate. ‘The man’s had a rough time of it and he’s been doing his best for us all, in his way. There’s been no one like him at the mining since Captain Fulton was killed, and he’s lost a child, you know, and his wife’s been wounded too. And did you ever know an Irishman who didn’t talk too much?’

‘He’s very warlike in his attitudes now, but how did he start life?’ Oliver asked.

‘Oh, just a clerk,’ said Charles, ‘an uncovenanted civilian. If you ask me, this business has been a godsend to him. Always fawning around the generals and the staff officers and giving advice on the native character and so on. An insufferable bounder. I hear he has a large family and many debts.’

‘Well, that would explain his anxiety about money, I suppose. Never talks to me of anything else, and in the intervals spends his time totting up rows of figures on little scraps of paper he keeps in his helmet. I thought he was ill today. Restless as the devil; kept muttering to himself and once I swear he was blubbering about something down in that infernal smelly blackness. Couldn’t think what had got into him.’

‘Perhaps he has had too much of the mines. Is he becoming a little hysterical from the strain?’ I wondered.

‘Could be, I suppose. And I wouldn’t blame him. I might come up gibbering like a maniac myself one day. Don’t like it at all.’

‘I was watching the semaphore at work at midday,’ Kate said after a while. ‘Most ingenious, but a terribly exposed position and the firing was very heavy.’

‘The
Baba-log
are using it for target practice,’ Charles agreed. ‘It’s been down a few times now. A fellow from our battery volunteered to put it back together again this morning and was lucky to get down with his skin in one piece. He says the wind up there is enough to cut you in two, never mind the pandies’ bullets.’

‘There’s great interest in the fortunes of the thing down at the Ferret Box too,’ Oliver concurred. ‘I am told that a couple of excursions up the tower should be good for a Victoria Cross at least. Anxiety to find the courage to volunteer to repair the machine is outweighed only by the anxiety that it might not be shot down again.’

‘Still the old cynical Oliver,’ Kate observed without rancour.

‘Merely because I am entertained by my fellows’ careful weighing up of risk versus glory? But I assure you it is true.’

‘I’ve no doubt it is. I heard Captain Masterson discussing what the perks would be if he were to lead a sortie as far as the Tehri Kothi. It took no great eloquence to persuade him only a grave would be his reward, so he stayed within the entrenchment.’

‘And why may not a soldier anticipate or plan for decorations?’ asked Charles. ‘In any other profession, rewards of some sort are part of the inducement to taking it up, and God knows the pecuniary advantages in winning a medal for valour are insignificant enough!’ He was heated, and I recognized the look in Oliver’s eyes that meant he had achieved what he had set out to do.

‘No reason at all. No reason. But I cannot see why I should be considered cynical for merely observing—not decrying, mind you—what is surely a cynical practice.’

‘Yes,’ Kate said judiciously. ‘I suppose it is a little dubious, trying for a decoration in order to get the pension attached to it. But surely understandable; as Charles says, a soldier’s pay is scarcely princely and even the small annuity carried by these things can make a difference.’

Later, when the dark had fallen, I went to the verandah steps with Oliver, but he only pressed my hand as he said goodnight. Filled with a sense of incompletion in myself, I watched him walk away. Nothing had really been settled by our long, troubled talk on Germon’s roof. We had used many words, but when it came to the point, I felt that we had failed to say anything to each other. As on countless occasions in the last couple of days, I told myself that if he would only give me an opportunity to explain myself more coherently, more plainly, he must understand my point of view and accede to my wishes. It looked, however, as though he had decided not to give me that chance. I knew he loved me. I loved him in return, yet somehow we had not only failed to reach an understanding but had perverted the sense of each other’s words and allowed ourselves to be diverted from the main issue by his jealousy of Charles and my justifiable annoyance at that jealousy. We had ourselves erected the barrier that was now between us.

When I got home from the hospital a day or two after the tinned tongue supper I found the whole entrenchment buzzing with talk and the name of Kavanagh on every lip.

‘Major Bonner was there, my dear Mrs Barry, actually there with the General and members of the staff when it was all decided, and he never breathed a word to me of what was afoot. He’s so responsible, Major Bonner, but I really do think he could have dropped a hint to his own wife.’

Mrs Bonner, sipping toast-water in our kitchen, was not quite sure whether to be pleased or chagrined that her husband had been implicated in the latest drama without her knowledge or approval.

I asked what had happened.

‘Well, Mr Kavanagh last night volunteered to make his way to the Alum Bagh through the enemy lines to guide Sir Colin Campbell’s column into the city. This afternoon there was a signal flag on the Alum Bagh—and Henry Kavanagh is safe.

‘Well, really it gave them all quite a turn!’ Mrs Bonner continued. ‘You see, apparently General Outram had said that he could only permit the venture if Mr Kavanagh could persuade him, the General I mean, that he could pass as a native. With all that red-gold hair and those blue eyes, I suppose the General thought he was safe enough, and that he would hear no more of the matter from Kavanagh.

‘Major Bonner assures me, however, that the General was most intrigued by the idea and by Mr Kavanagh. Quite taken up he was, the General, by the enthusiasm and spirit with which Mr Kavanagh outlined his scheme. And then, of course, Major Bonner says that the General has been worried for some time about getting messages through to the Alum Bagh. He had given instructions that Sir Colin should approach us through the very outskirts of the city, from over the canal, but without a guide; why, you know what those little lanes and narrow roads are like? But Mr Kavanagh knows the place like the back of his hand, so he told the General, and would make an excellent guide.’