Zemindar (124 page)
Authors: Valerie Fitzgerald
A white bench stood beneath a spreading tree. A pleasant vista of sloping lawns and bright flowerbeds, backed by the ancient crenellations of the Mogul walls, spread before me. Idly flipping through the gilt-edged leaves of my book, I came upon the inscription: ‘The perfection of moral character consists in this: in passing every day as the last.’
I had recalled those words with bitterness as I stood at my friend’s grave. They had seemed inappropriate to what I had learned of Mr Roberts’s character and knew of his despairing end. Yet he had thought so well of that short sentence that he had given it to me, in a special sense, in his own handwriting. I would never know the frame of mind in which he had copied it for me but, recalling the words at his graveside, I had realized that most of my objections to life in India, with Oliver, sprang, not from what I had already experienced, but from fear of an imaginary future. That swift second of illumination had been sufficient to change my mind, conform my stubborn will to my real desires, and …
A shadow fell across the book. I looked up from my musings to find a servant before me, holding out a salver on which lay a sheet of notepaper halved and correctly cornered. I took it, nodded dismissal to the man, and opened it.
Mr Oliver Erskine presents his compliments
and begs leave to call in person upon
Miss Laura Hewitt.
I sprang up, poor Marcus falling on his well-bound face in the grass.
‘Wait!’ I cried to the retreating servant. ‘Wait, the
sahib
who brought this … where is he?’
The servant turned in puzzlement, and I repeated my question.
‘There, Miss-
sahib
!’ he said, pointing to the corner of garden led on to by the verandah steps. ‘He but waits your coming.’
I saw him then, standing at the top of the broad white steps, laughing at me. I suppose he wore new clothes and boots as I did, but I did not take them in. A memory invaded me of another day, and another flight of broad steps on which he had stood waiting for us to leave the carriage that had conveyed us to Hassanganj. He had changed as much as I had, I could see—yet remained so much the same.
I walked towards him—quietly—and only when he threw aside his riding crop and leapt down the steps, did I pick up my skirts and run.
Neither memory nor imagination, and both had been much exercised in the time since I last saw him, had prepared me for the vehemence of his embrace, nor the eagerness of my response. It was as though I had never before felt the touch of his lips or the pressure of his single arm around me. We could not let each other go. When we did draw apart it was solely that eyes might query eyes before our lips sought once again the answer that only lips can give.
He released me at last and, cupping my face in his hand, with the old glint in his eye and the familiar sardonic smile, said, ‘This time, woman dear, you are sure. No more doubts. And oh, my love, you have no more fears!’
It was, as so often with him, a statement not a question, but I answered nevertheless: ‘Yes, I am sure. Very sure. Oh, Oliver! How could either of us ever have doubted?’
‘There will be time to discuss the matter—in the future,’ he replied, ‘but now …’ And grasping my hand he led me to the bench beneath the tree.
There followed then the usual concomitants of such happy occasions. There were promises made and reasons given and explanations proffered, and, as a result, a measure of deep and necessary joy. There were kisses and continued wonder that we should ever have known misunderstanding, and the breathless reiteration of each other’s name.
But I knew, beneath the lovers’ murmurings and the fervour of eyes and hands and lips so long deprived, that this was no happy ending, no culmination of desire, nor yet the blissful assuagement of hope deferred. It was something much better, much more filled with both promise and content.
I knew, in that sun-filled and water-whispering garden, with the neem shadows flickering on the grass and the butterflies hovering over the flowers, that this was but the first lesson in the long learning of love.
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An invitation from the publisher
Any reader familiar with the period and events covered by the foregoing tale will at once discover that certain small liberties have been taken with the known facts—all too well documented for any novelist’s comfort—of history.
First, I have given the
cossid
Ungud (otherwise spelt Angad, Ungad and Anghad) a particular background and certain specific emotional responses to the happenings in which he became involved. This might fairly be construed as impertinence, but not, I hope, as inordinate imaginative liberty. All that is known of Ungud, apart from his three brief and dramatic entries into history during the Siege of Lucknow, is the fact that he was a pensioner of the Bengal Army, who, like many others, rallied to Sir Henry Lawrence’s call for assistance at the beginning of May 1857, and that he was a tenant of a ‘
zemindar
of Oudh’. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that this
zemindar
was a European such as I describe. However, the loyalties and emotions I have ascribed to Ungud in relation to that
zemindar
are merely extensions of the loyalties and emotions that were obviously part of his make-up, as the accounts of his prowess and his relations with the officers of Lucknow make plain.
Secondly, there were only four known survivors of the massacre at the river in Cawnpore: Captain Mowbray Thomson, Lieutenant Delafosse and Privates Murphy and Sullivan. Several accounts, however, mention a ‘British officer’, ‘gentleman’ or ‘white man’, encountered by Havelock’s troops after they had taken Cawnpore and were marching to Lucknow. This unfortunate, described as ‘naked, heavily bearded’ and ‘almost certainly crazy’, had been sheltered or perhaps imprisoned in some native village, and was thought to be a further survivor of the massacre at the river. Unfortunately, before he could be interrogated, he was shot—some accounts have it by the hostile villagers, another by the alarmed British soldiers. It is therefore at least debatable whether only four men survived the terror of the river.
In this connection also, my hero’s musings on the cause of the massacre at the river, though unpopular in his own day and discredited in the accounts that appeared soon after the Mutiny, are not without foundation. In a brief note such as this it is not possible to go into detail regarding the many contradictions, anomalies and paradoxes observed by the survivors and stated in the depositions of witnesses when the matter came to be examined by the British authorities. That there was a struggle for precedence in the Court of Bithur was common knowledge at the time, and that the Nana Sahib always fervently protested his, at least, partial innocence, as ‘he had never intended things to go so far’ is a matter of historical fact. What was actually in the Nana’s mind we can never now know, but I think it is at least possible that whatever scheme he set afoot was expanded, or even directly perverted, by one or other of the three men about him who were jockeying for position, power and a share in the dead Peshwa of Poonah’s estate. The convoluted corruptions of a native court would have been well within the experience of a man with Oliver Erskine’s background. For the rest, he comments on nothing that was not observed, and puzzled over, by the writers of one or other of the many written accounts.
A third point, though trivial in nature, has given me some concern. Most of the diaries and journals mention the ‘heroic work’ in the Hospital of Mesdames Polehampton, Barber and Galt in the early days of the Siege, but then indicate that, when these ladies were ordered by the authorities to terminate their endeavours, no further help was forthcoming from among the female population of the garrison. However, by way of contradiction and merely to confuse the poor researcher, it is asserted in more than one account that Miss Birch and her sister-in-law, Mrs Birch, continued to lend assistance to the doctors throughout the Siege, and Mr Gubbins, as always expansive but not particularly accurate, extols the ‘Angels of Mercy’ who had worked so faithfully in such horrible conditions throughout. Since the Birch ladies were at one time in residence in his house, it is possible that they were the angels in question. On this slim evidence, and for the sake of my story, I have allowed two of my fictional characters to swell the ranks of the ‘Angels’.
Lastly, one of my fictional characters undergoes the experience of an actual member of the garrison, Captain Waterman, who, on finding himself alone in the deserted enclave on the night of 22nd November 1857, lost his mind, though happily only temporarily.
The reasons for the revolt of the sepoys in 1857 is still a matter for debate. The explanations given by the characters in this story, though not uniformly acceptable after the lapse of a century, are those held in common belief at the time of the uprising.
The life of a European
zemindar
, as sketched in Book II, remained very much the same until the
zemindari
system was abolished by the Indian Government in the early 1960s. The extraordinary mansion described as Hassanganj still stands, and is still occupied, in Uttar Pradesh in Northern India.
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A magnificent, twisting, turning love story unfolds amid the exotic splendour of the British Raj.
Englishwoman Laura Hewitt accompanies her newly-engaged cousin to India, first to Calcutta and then to the fabled fiefdom of Oliver Erskine, Zemindar – or hereditary ruler – of a private kingdom, with its own army. But India is on the verge of the Mutiny, which will sweep them all up in its chaos.
‘Utterly addictive…Leaves us panting for a sequel’
Washington Post
‘If you loved
The Far Pavilions
– and who didn’t – this will be your dish too’
Cosmopolitan
ZEMINDAR
is drawn from personal experience. Valerie Fitzgerald’s grandmother lived through the Indian Mutiny. When her soldier father was posted to Lucknow in World War Two, she spent winters in the city and summers on a zemindari. She now lives in Ottawa, Canada.
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