Zemindar (75 page)

I think it was that same night that Pearl first refused the breast. She was now nearly three months old and, in spite of the alarms of her short existence, had given us very little trouble. She had a placid temperament, always until now had taken her food with enthusiasm, and had quickly accustomed herself to sleeping in any conditions. Now, she went off her food, and the sound of her almost perpetual, hungry little wail tired us more cruelly than the guns. Remembering how the
ayah
had given her sugar and water the day she was born, I tried to tempt her with a similar mixture, but she would have none of it. For two anxious days she tossed and fretted on her hot down pillow, a pitiful sight, with her small limbs covered with red heat rash and mosquito bites, and boils breaking out in the sweaty little joints of her legs and arms.

She became the focus of attention not only for Emily and myself, but for Kate and the menfolk as well. I never knew whether I wanted to laugh or cry as I watched Ishmial in his crossed bandoliers, his musket propped against the box, bending over and trying to soothe her. She seemed to get thinner and more white under the angry rash by the hour.

Dr Darby came in for a moment on the second day. The child wasn’t ill: it was the heat, the conditions—he could do nothing. And he went away. Mrs Bonner, who had come in to hear his diagnosis, wagged her head in solemn agreement as he went.

‘Ah, that’ll be it, I expect. The heat decline. Poor mite, but there’s nothing to be done.’ She sighed and went back to her own room.

That evening, Toddy-Bob dodged on to the verandah, pulling behind him a goat on a piece of string. Our hearts leapt at the sight, but our consciences were still active, and we were too familiar with the way in which Toddy-Bob ‘came by’ things to be delighted.

‘For the nipper,’ he announced proudly, hauling the protesting animal into shelter. ‘Very strengthening, goat’s milk is.’

We regarded the prize in silence for a moment. It was a fine nanny with bulging udders.

‘How—where did you get it, Tod?’ asked Charles dutifully, but without really seeking enlightenment.

‘Well now, sir, it were like this.’ Toddy pushed back the sun helmet which he wore in place of the turban—his tall coachman’s hat must by now have been forming an unusual part of the landscape of India. ‘There was a lady lived up back of the Begum Kothi with seven of these ’ere useful creatures, and she turns a tidy penny sellin’ the milk. Turned, that is!’

‘Turned?’

‘Yes, sir. She’s dead. The cholera!’

‘And so?’

‘So, ’appenin’ to ’ear of ’er goin’ like, I nips up there at the double and buys it.’

‘You
bought
it?’ Surprise, not disbelief, made me emphasize the verb, but Toddy was offended.

‘Yes, miss,’ he confirmed with dignity. ‘I bought it, with money. Me own money, too. A present for the nipper!’

‘Oh, Toddy, forgive me! I certainly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I think it is the most noble thing you could ever do. I was just so startled by seeing … it … and …’

‘That’s all right, miss,’ he conceded loftily. ‘If you can find a jug, I’ll see what I can do about milkin’ ’er.’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. You … you can milk then?’ I had been entertaining visions of having to attempt it myself.

‘Well, no, miss. Not strictly speakin’. But I’m game to try.’

So he squatted down behind a pillar of the verandah and, watched interestedly by the rest of us from the doorway, in a surprisingly short time had mastered the knack and handed over a bowl of warm, frothy milk.

Pearl accepted it. We had to feed her with a spoon, but slow as the process was, it was exhilarating to see her bend her small head forward in her mother’s arms for the next mouthful.

‘Oh, Toddy, you are a dear,’ smiled Emily, tears of relief in her eyes, while Charles clapped him on the back and declared him a ‘capital fellow’. Toddy smiled deprecatingly and, accompanied by Ishmial, who was as delighted as the rest of us, took his gift round to the courtyard in the centre of the building where he hoped it would be relatively safe. There was no shelter for it, but when the rain came, our neighbours said, they would not object to it being tethered on the inner verandah.

Pearl, content at last, settled into a quiet, soft-breathing sleep, and her elders, for the first time in two days, took some interest in their own food.

Late that night, when the men had returned to their posts and Kate to her quarters, and just as Emily and I were preparing ourselves for sleep, there was a knock on our ramshackle door.

‘Oh, drat! What now?’ I grumbled, as I carried the lantern across the kitchen and opened the door.

A woman stood on the verandah, the largest woman it had ever been my experience to gaze on. Not that she was fat. Just big. She filled the frame of the six-foot door from top to bottom and from side to side so adequately that it could have been a coffin especially built to hold her.

I blinked, too surprised to speak.

‘Are you the leddy with the goat?’ she asked without preamble as I looked at her. My heart sank at the words. Dead of the cholera indeed! Here, truly larger than life, was the rightful owner of our most valued quadruped.

I nodded, still speechless, but now with alarm.

‘I saw it without in the bittie court,’ the woman went on, ‘and a fine milkin’ animal it is. I’m a proud woman, and not one to beg, but, mam, ’tis my laddie, my wee Jamie! He’s awful sickly, and though I have more milk than a dozen nannies, it’ll no bide in his belly. Too rich it is for him, poor mite. But I was thinkin’, when I saw the goat, if I could mebbe have a wee drop of its milk and add water to it, the bairn might settle.’

‘Oh! Is that all? You only want some of the milk—not, not the …?’

‘Yes, mam,’ said the woman, looking me straight in the eye. ‘That’s all. A wee drop o’ the milk for my Jamie.’

‘Why, yes! Of course. We have plenty.’

Relief made me generous. We had each had milk in our tea that evening, but there was ample remaining. I ushered her into the kitchen.

‘Who is it?’ Emily wanted to know from the bedroom, and when I explained, echoed my offer, so I made our visitor sit down and poured out a cupful of the milk.

‘Now, you drink this yourself first,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ve seen no more milk than we have, and will enjoy it. And when you’ve finished, I’ll refill the cup for your little boy.’

The woman lowered herself on to a chair, her bulk seeming to fill the small room. I hung the lantern on its hook and, as she sipped with small, obviously ‘company’ sips, I examined her.

In spite of her height, she held herself as straight as a ramrod, not stooping, as do so many tall women to disguise their inches. She was neatly dressed in a grey gown covered by a spotless apron. Her large flat face was homely and the expression in her pale eyes stern; her nose was long and thin, her mouth wide; her head was crowned with heavy braids of magnificent auburn hair. Face and figure together gave an impression of quiet but massive strength.

‘Thank you kindly, mam,’ she said when she finished the milk and put the cup down in the mathematical centre of the table. In spite of her size, or perhaps because of it, she was extremely precise in all her movements, and sat with her large feet close together and in perfect alignment with each other.

‘You’re welcome,’ I replied. ‘Now, let me rinse your cup and then I’ll refill it for Jamie.’

‘Thank you kindly,’ she said again. ‘My name’s MacGregor, mam, Jessie MacGregor. My man was Corporal James MacGregor of the 32nd—killed at Chinhat. It’s like as if the bairn kens he has no daddy now. It breaks my heart to see him just lying below in his bit bed, never greetin’, or eatin’, or movin’.’

‘You’ve had the doctor to him, Mrs MacGregor?’

‘Oh aye—he came! But he could do nowt. He said the bairn had the fever, but there was nae physic to give him. So I havena’ been after him again. He has enough to do above in the hospital wi’ the laddies, the good Lord kens.’

She got up.

‘Come back in the morning for some more milk,’ I said. ‘And I do hope it will do your Jamie good. My cousin’s little girl took it gladly, so perhaps Jamie will too.’

‘That’s my hope,’ she answered briefly, then added, ‘You’re right kind and Christian, mam, and may the Lord have his hand on you.’

When she had gone, I realized that I had not even commiserated with her on the death of her husband. I recalled that morning scene as we had watched the 32nd, bawdily cheerful even if unfed, march off to Chinhat. So one of them had been Corporal James MacGregor. But after all, what was there that I, a stranger, could say to his wife? I put out the lantern and went to bed.

No rain had fallen since the great storm on the evening of our arrival in the Residency, and its absence was regarded with mixed feelings by the garrison. The military element was glad of the respite and made use of it to continue the work of strengthening the fortifications, even under constant fire. Many of the buildings were by now so badly shaken by the barrage that the first heavy rain would bring them down; so every day’s delay in the arrival of the monsoon was valuable in providing time to strengthen and repair those that could be repaired, or for providing alternative arrangements for the people still living in the houses that were beyond hope. But for the rest of us, everyone, and particularly the women, longed and even prayed for the rains to break. Cooped up in stifling rooms with doors and windows shuttered against the gunfire, we were driven half mad by prickly heat, boils, insects and by boredom.

But day after insufferable day the sun glowered in the haze of a colourless sky, oppressive and exhausting, and we moved in a daylong twilight, drenched in perspiration, scratching ourselves raw, unable to find a remedy even for the flies that tormented us. They were everywhere: small nimble black ones, and slow iridescent bluebottles, all plump and active as a result of good living on the carcasses of the dead and the wounds of the living. They swarmed over our food in droves, drowned themselves in our precious milk, crawled busily over bare arms and faces, stuck to our eyelids, even entered our mouths as we spoke or ate. Their constant hum and buzz mingled with the high whine of the mosquitoes that attacked us the moment we were still, and the noise and the nuisance frayed our patience to snapping point a dozen times an hour. Cockroaches lurked in the corners of the rooms; the string beds harboured bedbugs; sometimes scorpions scuttled in, tails up, out of the heat; and fleas hopped visibly on the earth floor.

We had no remedies for these pests and, though we suffered from them acutely, they were more easily disregarded than the smell, which rose steadily in the continued dry heat to really stupefying proportions.

I use the singular advisedly, for although many odours formed the components, their combination produced one loathsome, inescapable and indescribable effluvium of filth and decay, which penetrated the remotest corners, clung to clothing, skin and hair, and settled over the entrenchment like an evil miasma.

The chief trouble was that we had no adequate means of disposing of the dead—either human or animal. Before his death, Sir Henry Lawrence had given orders regarding the slaughter and burial of all superfluous animals, but the Battle of Chinhat had intervened and we were besieged before the directives could be carried out. On the day following Chinhat, most of the native labour had decamped, leaving the burial pits for the animals undug, and it had been considered ghoulish to prepare too many graves for the garrison in advance. So now, having finished their duties at gun battery or shot-step, the men went directly to work on the pits; many collapsed, several died at this work, from exhaustion, heatstroke and enemy fire. Still the animals sometimes lay for days where they had died before time could be found to haul them away and bury them. Then it became the practice for such carcasses to be thrown over the wall down near the Slaughter House, along with the entrails and viscera of the gun-bullocks that were systematically slaughtered to form our meat ration; yet this, while it spared the garrison the sight of horses, bullocks, even camels falling to gelatinous shreds in the heat, did nothing to sweeten the air.

Human remains met a fate that was hardly better, merely a little more dignified. The graveyard was in a peculiarly vulnerable position and each night one mass grave only, necessarily shallow for lack of time, was scratched out of the baked earth. There, each evening, that day’s toll was buried and covered hastily with a layer of dry, friable soil and a sprinkling of lime or charcoal. The stench of decay was so appalling that frequently the men on grave duty or the mourners at funerals were carried back fainting to their quarters.

Nor was this all. The sanitary arrangements, always primitive in India, suffered as much as the grave-digging for lack of labour; few sweepers remained to dispose of what was gently referred to as ‘night soil’, and what arrangements there were were inadequate for the swollen population now occupying the entrenchment. Drains were blocked by fallen masonry and everywhere water and excrement gathered in nauseous open puddles, breeding flies.

Smoke hung low in the hot air, smoke from the guns and from the multitude of wood and charcoal fires on which we cooked, and mingled its fumes with the acrid smell of cordite, the sour scent of sweaty bodies, and the limey odour of shattered masonry. And everywhere the yellow dust seeped in as ubiquitously, as pervasively, as the smell.

When Emily fell ill, it was natural to attribute her fever and lack of appetite to the terrible odour, and at first I did not allow myself to worry. We were comparatively safe in the Gaol; we had milk for Emily and Pearl, and, as well, I had hoarded a few other small comforts brought to us from time to time by Toddy-Bob, Mr Roberts and Wallace Avery—sugar, a few candles, a tin of biscuits, a tinned tongue and a bottle of cologne—this last from Toddy-Bob! Emily could not eat anything I prepared from our daily rations, but warm milk sweetened with sugar was nourishing and more than many other invalids had.

‘It’s the tertiary ague,’ Mrs Bonner had announced when she looked in on Emily. ‘No doubt of it. I’ve been a martyr to it, off and on, for twenty years. Very trying, my dear Mrs Flood, very debilitating, but not fatal, I do assure you. Just look at me!’ And all her many chins wobbled in a chuckle. ‘Just keep her quiet, Miss Hewitt, and, of course, if I can be of any use, you must just let me know.’