Zemindar (68 page)

As a last resort, Kate decided to throw us on the mercy of Mrs Gubbins herself. Mr Gubbins, though contentious, overbearing and unpopular, was of a generous disposition, but when we arrived at his house wet and muddy, it was to be informed by the Gubbins’s starched and starchy maid that her mistress was ‘not at home’.

‘Stupid females!’ stormed Kate, as we walked into the rain again. ‘They pay morning calls, leave cards on each other and gossip away their days as though they’d never left their dreary villas in Surbiton or Bournemouth—or seen their bungalows in cantonments go up in flames either. Most of them arrived here with so much baggage and furniture, birds and pets—Mrs Germon even brought her piano—you’d think they were settling down for a protracted holiday, instead of making ready for a siege!’

In the end, it was the sandy officer who had first befriended us who took us to the Gaol and installed us in the two small whitewashed rooms, while Kate regaled him with a spirited and not entirely accurate account of the reception we had received at the various houses, and Toddy-Bob and Ishmial, still homeless, stood on the verandah with the rain gusting over them, looking bewildered and depressed.

‘Sorry about it, Mrs B,’ apologized Captain Emerson. ‘But we can’t force ’em to take your friends in, you know; they are still private houses! I thought they’d be more hospitable, though, which was why I let you take them over. However, this place is at least weatherproof and in the second line of defence, so they’ll probably be safer here than in the Doctor’s place, or Mr Gubbins’s come to that.’

‘Oh quite, quite, Will! No one’s blaming you, dear boy! But now we must have some more furniture, and you must find a billet for Ishmial. Toddy will have to sleep in the kitchen with you, Charles, for the moment.’ We had already termed the larger and lighter of the two cells the kitchen, since there was a primitive fireplace in one corner.

‘I’ll go and see about the blankets and so on now, and your man there will be billeted quite snugly down in the native lines.’

Captain Emerson took Toddy-Bob and Ishmial with him when he went, and after a time they returned laden with four bedding rolls, such as are issued to the troops, together with a tin mug and plate for each of us. Another expedition saw them return with a rickety table, two kitchen chairs, a stool and two thin mattresses. Somewhere along the route Toddy-Bob had also managed to ‘collect’ a wooden packing case, fitted, illegally we felt sure, with a pillow of real down; Pearl was thus provided with a cot.

When everything was in place and we had eaten the sketchy meal which was all we had the energy to prepare, Emily and I lay down gratefully on our string beds while the men spread their mattresses on the floor of the other room, all of us beyond caring that previous occupants of our quarters had been mass-murderers awaiting the scaffold! The Thugs for whom the Gaol had been built were members of an Indian religious society who earned merit for themselves by strangling unsuspecting travellers with a knotted handkerchief. Their secrets had been discovered and their activities suppressed within recent years by Colonel John Sleeman, a former Resident at the court of Oudh. I thought of Colonel Sleeman with the deepest gratitude that night. And of Oliver Erskine with anxiety …

There were two or three shops in the enclosure, still fairly well stocked, and on the following morning, the rain having cleared away, we purchased some further small comforts for our rooms: cooking pots, a lantern, an enamel bowl for washing, cutlery, and various other useful articles, as well as food to supplement our rations.

It was as well we did, for on that day Sir Henry Lawrence summoned into the enclosure the remainder of the troops from Mariaon Cantonments, and with their coming our situation would become more crowded and correspondingly less productive of comforts.

Now that I was adequately rested and fed, I began to react in a less supine manner to the circumstances in which I found myself, and with Kate’s help came to a better understanding of all that had happened while we had been in the house of Wajid Khan. No reliable information had penetrated to us there, not even rumour—bar the manifestly biased stories recounted by the girl Ajeeba—and even when we had left Hassanganj the situation had been so confused and reports so contradictory that we had no true idea of what we could expect in Lucknow or what would happen in the foreseeable future.

The petty incidents and minor outbreaks of April and May, those unfocused, ineffective symptoms of a radical grievance, had been but the tinder set to kindle the flame which had leapt to monstrous life at Meerut and spread so swiftly and disastrously to Delhi. Now all Hindustan, all that part of Northern India watered by the great rivers and known as the Gangetic Plain, from Bengal to the Punjab, was in revolt. Meerut, it seemed, had been the signal for the mutiny of the army of Bengal, as Oliver had feared, the blazon that encouraged every aggrieved sepoy to desert his post, break his ‘salt’ and rally to the banner of the Emperor. In his rose-red fort at Delhi, the last of the Moguls, senile and almost blind, spent his time writing poetry, while the men who had been summoned by the magic of his name and ancient state, the men whom he had never led and now could not control, plundered, burned and killed. One by one the British strongholds fell.

Meerut. Delhi. Allahabad and Agra. Then Ferozepore and Aligarh and a hundred smaller posts. At last Cawnpore, only forty miles away, had fallen too.

It had been on the Queen’s birthday, the 24th of May, that Sir Henry Lawrence, merely as a precaution, had ordered all the women and children from Mariaon Cantonments, together with the sick of the 32nd Foot, the only Queen’s regiment in the district, into the Residency. The order had caused some alarm, but soon, Kate said, everyone had settled down to the novel, picnic-like existence, refusing to take the threat of danger seriously until more than a week after their entry into the enclosure, when the 71st Native Infantry mutinied, fired bungalows in cantonments, murdered several officers, and then were joined by the greater part of three further native regiments. After that, alarm heightened: the murdered officers had been known personally to many in the enclosure. Other intelligence as bad came in day by day from outlying posts and small stations, brought in by fugitives who had escaped with only their lives; women who had seen husbands murdered by the men they had commanded for years; husbands whose wives and children had been slaughtered or burned to death in blazing thatch-roofed bungalows.

No one now could dismiss the reality of the danger, but not until the day of our own arrival, that day on which the news had come of the fall of Cawnpore, had even Sir Henry been certain that the Residency would be invested by the mutineers. For a fortnight past, knowing the entire country was in revolt, he had pressed all measures to fortify his little stronghold, in spite of the fact that the only troops he had to defend more than six hundred women and children were one British regiment much depleted by illness, about seven hundred native troops, some of whom at least were thought to be disloyal, and a hundred and fifty civilian volunteers. At first he had hoped that relief, or at least reinforcement, would arrive from Cawnpore, but early in June it was known that Sir Hugh Wheeler, the commander of that garrison, was himself besieged in an inadequate entrenchment by the forces of the Rajah of Bithur, better known to the Europeans of the district, with whom he had been on most amiable terms, as the ‘Nana Sahib’. This intelligence had made apparent the fact that, due to the inadequacy of communications, the incendiary state of the country and the difficulty of transporting troops in a land without railways or metalled roads and whose waterways were now controlled by the enemy, the only remaining hope was to strengthen the Residency, concentrate all Europeans within it, and prepare to withstand a siege.

‘So now there can be no doubt that we shall be besieged?’ I asked Kate, as we walked back to the Gaol from the shops.

‘Well, there is no reason now why we should not be; with Cawnpore gone, we are entirely cut off, you see. Besides, the servants have begun to leave. A lot of them went yesterday, and this morning my own
ayah
and bearer, who have been with me for years, have not shown up. That, my dear, is much more significant than all the tidily worked out theories of the pundits round Sir Henry.’

‘Gone, have they? Then how are you going to manage, Kate?’ asked Charles.

‘Oh, I’ll be all right. George and I have quite a snug little room in the King’s Hospital with the other officers of mutinous regiments. The lads there have so many servants some of them at least are bound to stay on, and I’m sure they will put me in the way of whatever help I need. Of course I’m not much of a cook, so George’s girth will probably diminish. But it looks as though we are not going to have very much to cook anyway!’ she ended cheerfully. ‘Oh, Charles, I nearly forgot to tell you. George asked me to say if you, Toddy and Ishmial will go up to the Resident’s House at about ten, he will see about arms and ammunition and so on, and have you detailed to your posts.’

‘Good! I presume we will be officially called volunteers from now on?’

‘You will, and a marvellous bunch of brigands you are too: French, Italian, German, Swiss, Irish, of course, Goanese, Eurasians and I don’t know what else besides. Oh, and Laura, a friend of yours is among them—Mr Roberts.’

‘Mr Roberts! Good gracious. Poor man, I thought he must be safely in Calcutta by now.’ We had not had time the night before to think of anything but our own predicament, but now the mention of Mr Roberts made me curious as to others of our acquaintance who might be in the Residency. Yes, Major Dearden, Captain Fanning and Major Cussens were all somewhere about, said Kate in reply to my query—and also poor Wallace Avery.

‘Wallace here too? And Connie and Johnny?’ Charles sounded pleased to know his cousin-in-law was at hand, but Kate stopped in her tracks, her hand over her mouth.

‘I had forgotten! Of course you can’t know about … about what happened. Just as we could not know what happened at Hassanganj. Connie is dead. And Johnny.’

‘Oh, no, Kate, not Connie! Poor Connie! What happened?’ I asked, shocked.

‘Nobody’s very sure—and it’s impossible to get Wallace to say. It seems he must have been away for a few hours, and when he got back the bungalow had been burned, and Connie and Johnny were dead.’

‘Good God! Were they burned in the house?’ Charles asked.

Kate shook her head. ‘I believe not. He found them in the garden—bayoneted I think, but as I say, one can’t make him talk. He has been here for about a fortnight, and we’ve all tried to comfort him, tried to get him to unburden himself. He just shakes his head, and the moment he’s alone gets out the bottle. He’s so thin now, Laura, you won’t recognize him. We can find no way of helping him.’

‘Oh, poor fellow! Poor Wallace, there seems no end to his unlucky streak,’ said Charles, while I remembered watching the shabby buggy drive out of the gate, followed by the bullock-cart of baggage with Polly in his cage on the top. ‘Good girl, Connie, good girl,’ the parrot had squawked as the last flutter of Connie’s handkerchief had disappeared. Irrelevantly, I wondered to myself what had happened to the bird.

‘You must find him out, Charles,’ Kate said, ‘and talk to him. Perhaps having someone of his own will make him more communicative—and he was always fond of Emily and Laura. He needs to talk, poor fellow, not shut away all the horror and grief in his own mind to dwell on, as he is doing.’

‘But of course, as soon as I have seen George.’

‘Yes, and George can tell you where to find him. I’m sure I don’t know where he is, or where any of the men are now in this confusion. But George will direct you.’ She shook her head sadly, and we walked back to the Gaol in silence to break the news to Emily, who had remained behind to feed Pearl.

It was a long, trying day. The sky darkened, the heat gathered under low clouds, but no more rain fell. Emily and I put away our few possessions, swept out the rooms with a twig broom, tried to cook an edible meal on a fire set between three bricks on the floor, and waited for the men to come in and eat it. Then there was nothing more for us to do but sit on the hard chairs in the sticky heat and pursue our own thoughts. During the morning the last of the troops from cantonments, British and native, marched in cheerfully to add to the congestion, and our neighbour on the Gaol verandah, a very fat woman with an immense bosom and an immoderate number of chins, told us joyfully that her husband was among them, so now all would be well. Something in her manner put me in mind of Mrs Wilkins, and Mrs Bonner, like Mrs Wilkins, had one thin and puny daughter, named Minerva.

Although we tried to keep busy, it was impossible not to think of Connie Avery; but we did not talk of her.

And always, lurking behind every other thought in my mind, was the thought of Oliver Erskine. What had happened to him? Where could he be? What was there to keep him away from Lucknow now? Had something happened to Yasmina? Had she fallen ill perhaps; or, worse still, fallen into the hands of the mutineers? But they would not surely harm a child of their own blood? Not like little Johnny Avery. It was said that no one was kinder to children than the Indian, no one more foolish, fond and indulgent. They had not indulged Johnny.

But not even the thought of Johnny’s death could for long deflect my mind from Oliver. He had meant to come straight back to Lucknow. Of that I was sure. So something untoward must have happened to keep him from his purpose. Had someone penetrated his disguise, perhaps? Or some of his own tenants or retainers at Hassanganj betrayed him to the rebels? Or could it be that he had changed his mind after all, and decided to remain in Hassanganj? No, that was impossible. How could he stay there with his house burned, his servants fled, and even Moti, who could have harboured him, dead? In my mind, I went back over all the stages of the road we had travelled together: the dusty mud villages that had seemed so full of hidden eyes; the crowded
serais
and lonely camping places; the long stretches of rutted track running between sun-baked fields. Anywhere along that road he could have met with discovery and death. And yet … and yet there was something inconceivable in the thought of Oliver lying dead in some dry ditch. I could imagine the scene well enough but credit it not at all. Something of his own belief in his capacity for survival, something of his confidence in himself, had infected me, so that I could not see him overcome by circumstances which, after all, he had deliberately chosen to meet. And, as my anxiety waned, its place was taken by familiar irritation with the man and anger at his thoughtlessness and lack of concern for the rest of us. Surely he must know that we were worried about him? But that was the last thing that would make him change whatever plan he was pursuing.