A Dark and Distant Shore (96 page)

Even Gideon, more aware than most of what was going on in the world, could never have foreseen that, on the first anniversary of her wedding, Juliana would be sweltering in a bungalow in northern India, terrified for her life and the life of the seven-week-old baby who lay, gurgling peaceably, in his cot beside her. She jumped like a cat at every sound, silencing her own sobbing breath while her ears strained for the approach of danger.

The mail went next day, and she knew she must write, because it might be the last opportunity for a long time. She had already, with much difficulty, finished a serious but carefully unalarming letter to her father and Vilia, and it had nearly drained her of the little courage she had left. At least she could be more honest with Gideon, who would understand.

May 29 1857. My dear Gideon – I seldom put off writing until so late, but the last two weeks have been quite dreadful. You probably know by now that the native soldiers, the sepoys, who make up such a large part of the British army here in India, mutinied at Meerut on the 10th, and massacred their white officers before setting off for Delhi to do the same thing there. They seem to have run mad, for they have murdered women and helpless babies as well, people who have never done them any harm. During these last days, we have had reports of sepoys on other stations rising in support of their comrades. You may know more at home than we do here, in our lonely outpost, where every tiny fact arrives embedded in a whole snowball of rumour.

She stopped, forcing back the tears. Snowball! Such a word to choose! May here was the hottest month of the year, although in April she couldn’t have believed it possible for the heat to get worse. Her hands were sticky with perspiration and coated with grit from the dust storm that had just passed, the searing wind of it finding its way through every crack. The only way to stay sane in the hot weather, she had been told, was to lie on a sofa and not move at all. But she couldn’t do that. There wasn’t time. Dashing the back of her hand across her forehead, and running a parched tongue over her lips, she began to write again.

We hope that our own regiment will stand firm, but who can tell? We are only a dozen Europeans in this great sea of dark and threatening faces – seven officers, Richard and myself and baby Luke, and Mrs Clark (the wife of one of the officers) and her baby. None of us, I suspect, is able to think properly, although we all try to hide it.

If only I were stronger! But the birth of my darling boy, and the dreadful heat and the insects and all the things that are so horrible and strange about India have combined to leave me fit for nothing, except to weep miserably to myself when Richard is not here to see. Oh, Gideon! I do try to be brave, but I am such a dreadful coward inside! Richard is out now, helping to fortify one of the bungalows. It has to be done secretly, in case it goads the sepoys into the mutiny we still pray may not happen. And what use will it be, I wonder, against hundreds of bloodthirsty sepoys with flint and tinder. They burned the houses down at Meerut, with people inside.

It must be done, I suppose, but left alone here with the servants I become convinced that they are all in league with the mutineers. Our dhobi (washerman) has a cousin at Meerut, and the grass-cutter’s brother was employed in the Native Lines there.

Richard says that if only General Anson would make some move, even the three thousand white troops at Peshawar could make mincemeat of any number of sepoys, but in the meantime we scarcely dare close our eyes at night. I keep a sword under my pillow, and Richard has his pistols ready loaded, prepared to start up at the slightest sound. He has promised that, if things come to the worst, he will put an end to baby and me with his own hands. How unreal it all sounds, doesn’t it? Like one of those trashy tales in
Reynolds
’
Miscellany.
But it is true.

Again, she stopped. But the creaking noises were only the sound of the house settling again after the dust storm.

Such a world. Such a world. Richard has become so dear to me that I can almost contemplate dying
with
him, but not being separated from him. He is so anxious to send me to what he calls the ‘safety’ of Lucknow, which at least has the merit of being defensible, but
I will not go
unless the baby’s life depends on it. Richard and the baby
are
my life, and I pray I will never be faced with having to make such a terrible choice.

Once or twice over these last days, I have wondered how Vilia would act in my situation, for she is the strongest person I know. But all it does is sink me deeper into despair, because I know she would do
something
–
even if it were only to line the sepoys up and give them a good talking to. The trouble is that I am not like Vilia, but just very ordinary, and very weak, and so frightened that I can’t even think. God preserve us all, through whatever may come. Oh, Gideon! How can such awful things happen? I must stop now. All my affection – Juliana.

And even there, she had succeeded in sounding braver than she felt. She laid her pen down and wept.

Ten days later, a message came from Sikrora, sixteen miles away, to say that there was an officer there, with an armed guard and transport elephants, to escort the women and children of the district to Lucknow. They must leave at once. Richard rushed Juliana round the house, one arm on her elbow, saying ‘What will you need?’ and picking up and discarding all sorts of useless things until she stopped him at last, gasping, ‘But you’re coming, too?’

Then he gave up the pretence, and put his hands on her shoulders and said, the boyish smile still breaking through all the new-cut lines of exhaustion and worry, ‘Poor kitten! Lucknow is for refugees, and fighting men to protect them. I’m not a fighting man, and I’d only be a useless extra mouth. I have to stay and help the people who will be trying to bring back order and sanity. No! Don’t argue, because I won’t listen. Don’t be frightened, my darling. It won’t be long.’

Lucknow, July 1.
My pretty diary, where are you now? With all those pages I filled so dutifully after we sailed from England. Still in my writing desk, or in ashes? Oh, Richard, if only I could know what has happened to you, where you are! Do
you
know that, here in Lucknow, we are besieged after a terrible battle yesterday? There are wounded men all over the place, and their screams as the surgeons do their work are the most horrifying things I have ever heard. I tried to go with some of the other ladies to give them comfort, but I fainted the moment I set foot in the hospital. So I was sent back here, because the doctors said they didn’t need swooning ladies under their feet, to add to all their other troubles. I am so
ashamed
!

The mutineers are all round us now, and their guns are firing, and when they score a hit, the walls begin to fall down – first a bang, and then a grinding noise, and then a kind of soft crash and a hissing. I can hardly write because my hand is shaking so, even in this windowless, underground room, where the baby and I are safe – at least from the guns. But the noise and the heat...

When I recovered consciousness I hugged the baby so convulsively, and cried over him so much, that I have made him cry too. So I thought that if I began a new diary, it might concentrate my mind.
There is nothing else I can think of to do.

We have been in Lucknow for more than two weeks now. It is unbelievably hot, and the place swarms with flies and mosquitoes and other insects that I can’t – and don’t want to – identify. ‘The place’ is an old native house with three onion domes on top, called the Begum Kothi. I am told it was formerly the residence of one of the King of Oudh’s wives. I suppose it must have been luxurious once, but now it is empty of everything except people. Our first night here we slept fifteen in one room, and all in the centre, because someone had contrived to have a punkah – a swinging fan – fitted, and we were all gasping for a breath of air, no matter how hot and dusty and evil-smelling.

Lucknow itself is beautiful. As we approached it that first day, weary and overwrought as we were, we couldn’t help but stop to admire it. There were no mutineers in sight, then, and it was a perfect vision of palaces, minarets, domes and spires of azure and gold glittering in the sun, long arcaded buildings, terraced roofs, all rising out of a wide, calm landscape that is the colour of champagne, though when the rains come it will all turn green again. It looks rich, magnificent, enormous.

Since this morning, most of the city is occupied by the mutineers, mad with delight over their victory yesterday. There are said to be ten thousand of them. We British are confined in what is called the Residency area, a group of about twenty buildings inside a kind of enclosure (I have had no real opportunity, or inclination, to count) ranging from a sheep pen to a church. It used to be the headquarters of the East India Company’s representative in the state of Oudh. After yesterday’s battle there remain only about 1,600 men to defend us, and they include 700 so-called ‘loyal’ sepoys. No one knows whether they will continue to remain loyal when they are asked to shoot at their fellow-sepoys outside the walls. There are about 500 women and children here, most of them refugees from the outlying military stations, and goodness knows how many servants and coolies. I don’t know whether to envy their masters and mistresses, or to fear for us all, with so many Indians inside our defences. Mrs Clark and I have no one, having rushed off from home so quickly.

Oh, Richard, my darling! You were wrong when you said we would find everything we needed here, and shouldn’t burden ourselves. The fugitives are very ill supplied. I hadn’t even a change of clothes for the baby, poor mite, until Mrs Captain Germon sent me some linen, as well as some china, of which we had none, and a table. Her husband has been stationed in Lucknow for some months, so she was able to bring a good many comforts into the Residency with her. How funny it is to refer to someone as Mrs
Captain
Germon! There is Mrs
Colonel
Inglis, too, and Mrs
Colonel
Case – although since yesterday, poor soul, she has been Mrs
The-late-colonel
Case. India is so conscious of rank and precedence! It is necessary for ignorant provincials like us to know precisely where everyone stands in the hierarchy. As far as I can discover, Mrs
Doctor
Curtis stands nowhere.

The first days here were awful. Everyone was too taken up with their own troubles and anxieties to care for anyone else’s, myself included. Separated from my dearest husband, not knowing what had become of him, without servants for the first time in my life, quite ignorant of how to care for my baby, and thrown all alone among strangers – I veered from moment to moment between numbness and hysteria. We have settled into some kind of routine now; ten women and their children in one room.

What am I saying? Nine women since two days ago. It was Mrs Hale, whom I scarcely knew. She became ill quite suddenly, and was dead within hours, despite what the doctors could do. It was cholera. She lost consciousness just before the end, and her brow was damp, as if there were dew on it. Mr Harris, one of the chaplains, came and read some of the Visitation Service, and we stood and watched her pass quietly away. I have never seen anyone dead before.

There are other sicknesses in the Begum Kothi, too. Baby and I have been suffering from prickly heat, and my poor pet is miserably unhappy, but someone in one of the other rooms has smallpox, and there are two or three cases of dysentery. Until the chaos after the battle yesterday, none of us had seen anyone but doctors and chaplains for days. Sir Henry Lawrence was determined that the infections should not spread, so we were all left here in a kind of lazaretto, to live if we could, or die if we must.

Oh, Richard, Richard! I could have faced death with you in the open, but I cannot, I
cannot
face it here without you, in an underground room where the heat is suffocating, and everyone fevered in body and mind, and the little ones beginning to sicken. We can’t even tell what the food is when it is placed on the table, because it is no more than a black and crawling mass of flies. I found a rat in my bedding last night. Everyone told me things would be better when the rains broke, but it poured on Saturday night, and everything now is far, far worse. The floor of our room is sodden and green, and the walls steam, and my skin is as soft and clammy and wrinkled as if it had been soaked in water. Every movement is an indescribable effort, and our regiments of crawling things have become armies. The cockroaches are disgusting. Mrs Clark is due to be confined with her second child some time this month. Poor soul, poor soul!

Every day since our arrival there has been alarming news of some kind. All the little babies at Sitapur were cruelly bayonetted by the sepoys, and their bodies tossed in a heap like so much refuse. There was a massacre at Sultanpore, too, and we have heard the most frightening reports from Cawnpore, where General Wheeler had only two hundred men to defend four hundred women and children. They are said to have surrendered, and all been massacred.

We have been told not to go outdoors because of the shot and shell flying about so the days are little different from the nights, which are so hot and wearisome that we have to sit up in turns to fan the children, so that they can have some rest. My heart aches for them. Even my own plump baby is growing thin and fractious before my eyes with this unnatural life. Today we are being served out rations – flour for chapatis, rice, dried peas, salt, and meat weighed with the bone still in, which I think isn’t fair, because it means that some people will have far more eatable meat than others.

July 2
There was the most terrible explosion in the middle of the night that made us all think our last hour had come, because it sounded as if the sepoys had blown up our defences and forced their way in. We all sprang from our beds, and when we lit a candle the whole room was so thick with dust we could scarcely see one another. The bricks and mortar had fallen from the ceiling and the children were screaming with terror. But it turned out that some of our soldiers had been cut off from the Residency in an old fort near-by, and had been ordered to blow it up and make a bolt for safety under cover of the noise. It all went off very well, from their point of view. It’s just that I’m surprised half the garrison didn’t die of shock.