Zemindar (93 page)

‘He’s gone,’ I said to Saunders, the apothecary, who was tending the man on the next pallet. ‘He’s gone—and he was talking!’

Saunders turned on his haunches and finished the work of pulling off the shirt. ‘Back wound, miss. Ball or shell fragment too near the heart, I expect. Moving him was enough to kill him. Now don’t fret, miss, you couldn’t have known and when your number’s up, it’s up!’ He turned away.

There was no sheet or blanket with which to cover the dead face. I crossed the still-warm hands over the bare breast, pulled down the eyelids, and rose to my feet, feeling nothing, not even the rough kindness in Saunders’s brusque words. Mindful of our necessities, however, I tossed the dead man’s shirt on to a nearby heap of dirty bandages.

It was nearly noon. Above the vehement rain the guns of the Kaiser Bagh could be heard. I wondered whether I was hungry, decided I was not, but that I must have some fresher air very soon or earn Dr Darby’s contumely by fainting or vomiting over my next patient. Slowly I worked my way on to the verandah, shaking my head dumbly at beckoning hands of doctors and patients alike.

Outside and away from the open door into the hospital, the air was better. I picked a path to the edge of the verandah, and was grateful for the feel of warm rain on my hot, wet face. The world had disappeared behind sheets of solid grey water, the buildings nearest the hospital, the Resident’s House, the Treasury, Dr Fayrer’s house, only visible when the downpour veered for a second and afforded a momentary glimpse of their ruined wraith-like forms.

A little revived in body if not spirit, I leaned my cheek against the damp pillar to which I clung in order to feel the rain on my face, and surveyed the scene around me.

The generous architecture of an earlier day had endowed the Banqueting Hall with a wide, arcaded verandah. Once the pillars that supported its considerable length had supported also the flowery masses of jade-leaved quisqualis and the brazen trumpets of bignonias. The red tiles had been polished to a brightness that reflected Chinese lanterns and fairy lights.

I wiped the rain and sweat from my face with my sleeve and looked around me.

The climbing plants were long gone, and with them some of the pillars. The shot-holed roof sagged threateningly and the worn canvas and old awnings with which it was now repaired did little to keep out the rain. The bright tiles were smashed and men lay, sat and sprawled on the soaked stone, propped against the wall, the pillars or the backs of their companions. Some shivered with ague, teeth chattering; some moaned; one or two muttered in delirium; most endured in a silence that was itself agonizing. Doctors, apothecaries and the few women moved among them, and those of our own wounded who were capable helped their new comrades with a few poor means at their disposal: a mug of water, a hand with the unlacing of a boot on a swollen foot, or a shoulder to lean a bandaged head upon. They were still arriving, the wounded from the city. If a man could walk, he was sent on up the slope into the entrenchment to find what accommodation and assistance he could. If not, his comrades on the verandah drew in their legs, hunched closer and made room for him on the sodden floor.

A cauldron of gun-bullock soup was lugged out and the women on the verandah prepared to serve it. I should be doing the same inside, I knew, so I filled my lungs with a few deep breaths of air, pushed my damp hair back from my forehead and was about to return to the ward, when through the rain I glimpsed what I thought was a familiar figure helping yet another wounded man toward us. Curiosity made me pause for a moment as they approached.

It was Ungud, but with a cotton sheet wound around his skinny form to protect him from the elements. That, then, was why I had not seen him, I thought. He had been sent out again to act as a guide to the relief. When they were near enough, I called to him, indicating a vacant spot on the very edge of the verandah where he could deposit the man he was helping. He nodded and made towards me, without surprise. The verandah rail had been taken for fuel, so all he had to do was disengage the man’s arm from around his shoulders and allow him to slide down to a sitting position on the plinth. The man remained upright but slumped against a pillar and, as he did so, I saw blood dripping down his arm and over the slack fingers resting on his knee.

‘Thank you, Ungud,’ I said wearily, wondering whether the wound was something I could take care of myself or whether I would have to go in search of a doctor. He would have a long wait if the latter.

‘Give him water!’ ordered Ungud peremptorily, instead of shuffling off after salaaming, as I had expected him to do. ‘The blood is nothing, but he is tired, too tired. Feed him quickly and let him sleep!’

Something in the small brown man’s tone of voice, in the proprietorial manner in which he stood looking down anxiously at his erstwhile burden, made me take a closer look at the man.

He was dressed in a ragamuffin accumulation of clothing: cord breeches and native string-soled sandals, a soldier’s grey-back flannel shirt, and a white helmet with a brass spike at the top. His head was bowed on his chest and the peak of the helmet came low over his forehead so that all I could see was an unkempt brown beard covering the lower part of his face.

‘Miss-
sahib
! Food and rest.
Juldi!
’ Ungud said again.

I took a grip on myself. This was no time to give way to fancifulness. I had waited and I had hoped; I had longed for the improbable always, and believed in the impossible sometimes. I must not now allow my heart to beat with such ridiculous haste because of the tone of voice of a damp and dirty native pensioner.

Merely to still the clamorous thudding of my heart, I knelt beside the man and gently lifted the helmet from his head. The lock of sun-bleached hair that fell forward over his forehead had choked me with tears even before the stubbly black lashes parted over the hazel eyes.

‘Do as he says, Laura,’ said Oliver, trying to smile, ‘I’m … thirsty.’

He fell against me, fainting.

No qualms of guilt assailed me as I deserted my duties, and I gave no single thought to the other men in the hospital who needed my help.

We laid him on my string cot. Jessie boiled water and tore her last remaining petticoat into bandages, while Ungud and I pulled off the string-soled sandals and cut away the sleeve of the grey shirt to attend to Oliver’s wound, a jagged slash on the inner side of his right arm just above the elbow. I had by now garnered enough experience of such matters to realize that the wound was an old one, partially healed, that had broken open anew under some undue exertion. It bled freely, but I knew I could stop the flow.

‘Aye, and many’s the one I’ve seen like this one after a hand-to-hand,’ commented Jessie, as she brought in water and bandages. ‘He had his arm upraised to strike, d’ye ken, but the other man sidestepped smartly to the left and brought his weapon down just that mite the sooner, making for his enemy’s arm. “Butcher Cumberland’s cut” the lads ca’ it, and ’tis many weeks old, too.’

We worked together to staunch the blood and then bound up the wound and laid the arm across Oliver’s chest. He never stirred. He bore no signs of other injury severe enough to account for his unconsciousness, so I had to suppose the wound had broken open more than once and that loss of blood, lack of food and exhaustion accounted for his weakness. On the soles of his feet were scars and scabs of severe lacerations, some of which now oozed blood. These too we cleaned and bound.

Having satisfied himself that his
Lat-Sahib
was in competent hands, Ungud went away, returning presently with Toddy-Bob, who burst into the room without preliminaries and then, on seeing his master’s apparently lifeless body stretched on the bed, promptly burst into tears. While Jessie hushed him, attempting to explain that all was well with Oliver, I fetched the remainder of the birthday brandy and slipped a spoonful of the neat spirit between Oliver’s teeth. He shuddered a little but his eyes remained closed, so I repeated the dose two or three times, my anxiety mounting as each time he failed to respond. Then at last he heaved a long sigh and his eyes fluttered open. For a second or two he gazed around the room, taking in nothing; then his eyes focused on the white frightened blur of Toddy’s face and his lips twitched in a smile.

‘Tod.’ The whisper was so faint it would have gone unheard but for the light of recognition in his eyes. ‘You here?’

‘That’s right, Guv’nor,’ answered Toddy, edging nearer. ‘We’re fine, me and Ishmial too. I’ll fetch him in a moment.’

Oliver then looked enquiringly at Jessie’s vast bulk as she peered down at him with worried interest.

‘This is our dear friend, Jessie,’ I explained, speaking for the first time. ‘She lives with us—here in these two room—and looks after us all.’

‘Laura!’ he exclaimed on hearing me, in a stronger voice. ‘Laura!’ He paid no attention to my explanation of Jessie’s presence. ‘Where are you?’ I was kneeling by the bed and a little behind his head, so he had to turn to see me.

‘Laura, are you …’

‘Yes, I’m here and well. You mustn’t worry about anything, just rest and get well and strong. There’ll be plenty of time to talk later, but now we are going to bring you some food and then you must try to sleep.’

‘Laura … Laura.’ His voice dropped away and his eyes searched my face wonderingly. Then he lifted his left hand and touched my cropped head.

‘No hair?’ he asked in a puzzled way. I had forgotten my hair, forgotten the curious sight I must present to someone unaccustomed to my present appearance.

‘I had to cut it off. Lice.’

‘Oh!’ He laughed silently. ‘Look funny.’

I nodded in agreement. His hand slipped to my shoulder and stayed there. I covered it with my own and laid my cheek against his wrist. He sighed and closed his eyes; then in a moment and in another tone of voice said, ‘My arm’s done for.’

‘Nothing of the sort!’ I protested immediately. ‘It’s a clean cut, it will mend in time.’

‘No. No good,’ he insisted quietly. ‘Sabre cut through the muscles. Useless. Useless now. Weeks ago, but …’ And he slipped back into unconsciousness.

So he remained, on the borders of consciousness, for two days and nights. Sometimes he knew us all and spoke rationally. Then at other times he would address us by strange names, give us orders in Hindustani or English, mutter feverishly, flinch and toss himself about in the bed. Once he shot up, his eyes wide open in terror, and yelled, ‘Dive, damn you! Dive! Dive!’ Often tears slid out from his black lashes into the unfamiliar whiskers and, like many of the sick in the hospital, even his quieter moments were marked by groaned curses.

Late on the first night Dr Darby came to see him at Kate’s request. Knowing of the doctor’s own terrible bereavement—he had lost his own wife and baby at Cawnpore—I protested at his being bothered, but Kate replied, ‘The work is what the poor man needs just now. It will help him more than sympathy.’

So he came and cleaned the wound and redressed it, examined Oliver thoroughly and confirmed Oliver’s own diagnosis of the sabre cut. ‘He’ll never use that arm again,’ he said gruffly. ‘Muscles cut through and the bone chipped, which is why it won’t heal. Chips are probably still working their way out. Try compresses. Keep him quiet. Not much fever just now, and try to keep it down. You know what will happen if I have to amputate! Otherwise, he’s shocked and exhausted. Don’t worry about the unconsciousness; Nature’s method of keeping him still. He’ll mend in time. Or his arm will, anyway.’

For those two days and nights, no thought entered my head that was not in some way connected with Oliver and the miracle of his return. I was with him almost constantly, poulticing the angry wound, cooling his head with water and vinegar to reduce the fever, feeding him when he was sufficiently conscious to swallow with a gruel of arrowroot, which the resourceful Toddy had somehow come by.

It was Toddy, too, who told us of how and where Ungud had found Oliver. When Ungud had gone out for the third time, shortly before the arrival of the relief, he had heard from sources we could only guess at that a
sahib
had been living for some weeks in a village about halfway between Cawnpore and Lucknow, protected and tended by the villagers. The hint had been sufficient to make him find the village, only to be told that yes, a
sahib
had been there, wounded and ill, for many weeks, but that a couple of days previously he had insisted on setting out on foot to try to join General Havelock’s column. This was, so said the villagers, madness, for he was still ill and weak. They feared he must have been captured or killed long before he could meet his fellow countrymen. Ungud had tried to trace the fugitive’s trail as he returned to Lucknow, but without success. He did not forget the incident or the unknown man’s intention, however. When the relief arrived on the 25th of September, he heard that more than one white man had joined the force on the way up from Cawnpore; hope had revived and on the following day, early in the morning, he had set out for the city. He had found Oliver among a party of the ambulant sick and wounded in the last straggle of the rearguard. The rest we knew.

‘It’s a miracle in itself,’ I said, ‘that he wasn’t in one of the
doolies
of sick that were wiped out by the pandies.’

‘Maybe.’ Toddy was sceptical. ‘But ’e never give up, you see! Ungud never give up. Not like some of us!’

Kate, Jessie and I took it in turn to watch beside Oliver all night, and I would start awake after the short rests Kate forced me to take and rush into the bedroom to assure myself that his presence was more than a dream.

Charles visited us as often as he could during those first two days but never found his brother conscious. Toddy-Bob and Ishmial insisted that only they had the right to wash and change their master and for the rest of the time practically took root on the verandah, where they remained whittling and dozing night and day, all their duties forgotten and somehow evaded.

Others also came to enquire and exclaim: Mr Roberts and Wallace Avery, acquaintances of the old garrison (I was astonished at the number who knew him and who because he was a survivor of Cawnpore suddenly chose to develop their acquaintance) and neighbours from the Gaol. Many strangers bereaved by one or other of the massacres at Cawnpore came to hear with sad pleasure of this one prayer that had been answered.