A Dark and Distant Shore (98 page)

Dr Darby said nothing of it, and neither did Juliana. All she said was, ‘It’s so strange that my husband has not come in yet.’

He found he hadn’t the strength to tell her, pretty, helpless child that she was. What was she doing in this heathen land? What were any of them doing in this heathen land? ‘It
is
strange,’ he said. ‘Will you forgive me if I leave you? I must go and see to my patients.’

She knew, then.

The baby was asleep on the bed, thin and pale, but she didn’t wake him. Kneeling beside him, she buried her face in her poor, scarred hands and, this time, couldn’t weep. Because she had been expecting it for hours, there was no blessed numbness to take the edge off her agony. If she could have died then, she would. But grief didn’t kill, or not quickly, and the refrain that had haunted her all these months, that had kept her on her feet despite everything, ran through her head still – ‘Who would look after the baby?’ Now, for a moment, she remembered Lizzie and envied her.

Mrs Polehampton came in to her after a while and sat with her, saying little.

Once, Juliana gasped, ‘Poor baby. All these weeks when he has been sick, I have said to him, “When Papa comes, baby will get well again.”’

And later, ‘I can’t endure it.’

And, hours afterwards, ‘You are so serene, but your husband was a chaplain. Does that help? Is that what gives you strength? I don’t have that kind of faith.’

Mrs Polehampton had her own wisdom. ‘Strength comes from whatever matters most to you.’

Juliana raised her head, and it was as if her eyes, ringed with great purple shadows, were all that existed in the white, piquant little face. ‘Luke?’ Then, after a long, long pause, ‘Yes.’

The following day, two of Richard’s native servants appeared with their master’s handsome black horse, the horse Juliana herself had ridden during her first few weeks in India. They brought a few of his personal possessions, too – his watch and his fob; his purse; and his wedding band. Still, the tears didn’t come.

They didn’t come the day after, when Dr Darby brought a newcomer to see her, another doctor who had been with Richard when he was killed.

There had been a fearsome attack on the rearguard, for all the mutineers – thousands of them – had turned on it in frustrated fury. Richard had gone to the other surgeon to ask for his help with some wounded, and as they had made their way towards the litters, the surgeon had flinched at the shots whistling all round and exclaimed, ‘I hope we may get out of this!’

Richard, laughing, had replied, ‘What! With my wife and child only a mile away? Nothing can touch us!’ And then had come the shot that killed him. It was immediate – or so the surgeon said – and he hadn’t suffered.

No one knew what had happened to his body. The fighting had been too severe.

The days passed, and it soon became clear that the relieving force had brought not relief, but more trouble. Strong enough to break into the Residency, it wasn’t strong enough to break out again. In their haste to relieve Lucknow, Havelock and Outram had even left their stores behind at the Alambagh, four miles away, and with sepoys thicker than cockroaches on the ground between, there was no possibility of getting them in to where they were so desperately needed. Rations were cut again; six ounces of meat, half of it bone, three-quarters of a pound of unground wheat; one and a half ounces of rice; half an ounce of salt.

Juliana found that she wasn’t hungry, anyway, though she drank a great deal of toast water, the liquid in which scorched chapatis, made from the wheat ration, had been soaked to provide a kind of substitute for tea. She passed the six dreary weeks following the so-called ‘relief’ in a kind of trance, doing everything she had done before without even being aware of it. Sometimes she would stop and wonder whether she had, in fact, washed baby Luke that morning, because she had no recollection of it at all. Sometimes she would frown for a long time over the strange noises she could hear upstairs in the Begum Kothi, until she remembered that it was a hospital annexe now. And, conscientiously, she still stayed indoors even though Havelock and Outram, in a few wild sorties, had flung the mutineers back from the walls of the Residency and extended the perimeter.

She was in the world but not of it. There was nothing to look forward to but difficulties she couldn’t even contemplate. If the city were to be properly relieved, her rough cocoon would be stripped from her and she would be all alone except for the baby. Where would she go? Where else was there but Kinveil? But she would have to find her way to Calcutta, and she didn’t know how. And have to arrange a sailing; how did one do that? She had very little money left, and had no idea whether there were still banks in existence. Everything was beyond her.

On November sixteenth there was intensive fighting outside, and on the seventeenth Mrs Polehampton and Mrs Kendall gently but relentlessly forced her to go outdoors with them to watch the arrival of the second relief force. Sir Colin Campbell was in command.

‘The soldiers are coming in now,’ Mrs Polehampton said. ‘Come. These terrible months will soon be over.’

The soldiers this time were as clean and sturdy as the now thin, dirty and tattered men of the first relief had been. Incongruously, six hundred miles from the sea, there were straw-hatted sailors with them. Juliana spoke politely to one or two of them, and smiled, and shook hands, and allowed them to tickle baby Luke under the chin. Then she went back indoors again.

After a while, vaguely aware that there was someone standing in the doorway, she looked up from where she had been sitting emptily beside the bed. It was a tall man in civilian clothes, and he was watching her gravely.

At last she whispered, ‘Gideon?’

Gideon had been on his way to China for the
Times-Graphic.
He had become very restless after a few months at home, and the Chinese at Canton had taken a high-handed line with what they claimed was a pirate ship that happened to be flying the British flag. All the Western powers had been looking for a chance to get a foot in China’s door, and this one was too good to miss. So Lord Elgin had been briskly dispatched with a few gunboats, and Gideon had succeeded in negotiating a passage with him. News of the Mutiny in India had come while they were at sea, and Elgin decided to leave the war steamers
Shannon
and
Pearl
at Calcutta for use against the mutineers. Gideon had stayed with them. There was no conflict that he could see between his duty to his paper and his personal anxiety for Juliana and young Curtis. The tragedy in India was far more important than a petty war of imperialism in China.

With the Naval Brigade from the
Shannon
and the
Pearl,
Gideon had travelled with agonizing slowness from Calcutta to Allahabad, and then, after a rousing battle at Kujwa, on to Cawnpore to join up with the commander-in-chief’s forces there. Sir Colin Campbell, his lips pursed, had said, ‘Aye, I remember you from the Crimea, Mr Lauriston. You and Mr Russell of
The Times.
You hadn’t many good words to say about the army then; some of the officers were wondering just whose side you were on. I trust that this time you don’t have any doubt about where your sympathies lie?’

For three months, Gideon had heard nothing but tales of the atrocities committed by the mutineers, and neither had anybody else. He knew that the Highlanders now were in the habit of shooting or bayonetting any wounded ‘Jack Pandy’ left on the field of battle – ‘to put them out o’ their misery. They’re just animals, you see’ – and though he didn’t like it, he could sympathize. If Juliana had been one of the victims of the Cawnpore massacre... Until he reached Cawnpore on November first, he hadn’t known for sure, although he had been repeating to himself over and over for three months that she was more likely to be in Lucknow, which was nearer where Richard had been stationed. If she had succeeded in getting a letter out, Gideon hadn’t received it before he sailed from England.

With a sigh, he replied, ‘No, Sir Colin. No doubts this time. And I was never on anyone’s side but the men’s. It was the high command I criticized.’

‘Aye, well,’ Campbell had said with a snort of laughter. ‘Oblige me by remembering that
I’m
the high command now! And you can tell Mr Russell, too, when he gets here, as I’ve no doubt he will.’

In the two weeks since then, Gideon had discovered what a good officer Campbell was. Even if he moved so slowly that he was called ‘Sir Crawling Camel’ by his impatient men, it was better than moving too fast, as Havelock and Outram had done. When Sir Colin relieved Lucknow, it would be the genuine article.

And now they were here. Gideon had stayed with the Naval Brigade, a rollicking lot who viewed army discipline with jovial contempt. Their talent for survival was a source of wonder to Gideon, for they liked nothing more than a good bout of hand-to-hand fighting, and their captain encouraged them by behaving in the field very much as if he were laying the
Shannon
alongside an enemy frigate. Gideon had been surprised to arrive intact.

It hadn’t been difficult to find Juliana. The third scarecrow he had asked had directed him to the Begum Kothi, and a lady who had been standing hesitantly outside the door – Mrs Polehampton, she said – had told him what had happened, as soon as she knew who he was.

‘Mrs Curtis needs to weep. Help her if you can,’ she had concluded, and then, sizing him up with exhausted eyes, added, ‘I have been trying to nerve myself to tell her that Dr Darby, who has been very good to her, has been wounded and is not expected to live.’

‘Leave that to me. I’ll choose my moment.’

She had nodded. ‘I will see that no one comes in to interrupt you for a while.’

Juliana whispered again, ‘Gideon?’

She looked as if she would fall apart if he touched her. Her bones were thin as a sparrow’s, her eyes huge and sunken, and her lips had no more colour than her cheeks. She was wearing a limp black gown two or three sizes too large.

He moved forward, his heart breaking for her. It cost him a good deal to say, half derisively, ‘My poor pet. What have they been doing to you?’

Familiar, reassuring Gideon, who had only that moment discovered how much she meant to him.

And then she was in his arms – his kindly, reliable arms – clinging to his coat lapels with astonishing strength, quite unable to speak but breathing in harsh, jerky little gasps. He thought that, left to herself, she would never let go, so after a time he dropped a kiss on her forehead and, unclasping her fingers, persuaded her to sit down again.

‘A large handkerchief, or a large whisky?’ he asked provocatively.

And that was all it took. Half laughing, she wailed, ‘Oh, Gideon!’ and then the dam broke and her tears flowed as if they would never stop.

He cradled her while she wept, deep, racking, rending tears, his fingers smoothing the elflocks back from her brow, and loosening the mass of hair that clung to the nape of her neck. Lice, of course, poor lamb, he thought unromantically, and glanced round the dismal cell where she had lived for five months without comfort or privacy. The stone walls were pitted with holes where the mortar had crumbled and been shaken loose by the gunfire and explosions outside, and the plaster hung from the ceiling in thick, ragged flakes, like discarded pieces of jigsaw puzzle. Perched on one of them, staring down at him, was a scorpion. The beaten earth floor was powdered with dust and mortar fragments, and there were cockroaches on the piles of rubble someone had swept into the corners. A tide mark ran round the walls, a foot or so up from the floor, faintly green where fungus had grown during the rains. The only furniture consisted of a scarred table, a few boxes, a large covered object in one corner, presumably the privy, and half a dozen hammock-like beds, two of them neatly made but the others rumpled and slept in. An emaciated child of six or seven months lay on the neat bed by which Juliana had been sitting, his eyes – blue and dark-ringed like his mother’s – gazing towards her, wide open and empty. The room was dim, sour-smelling and oppressively close, for the only light and ventilation came from the doorway, which itself was half underground. The flies, fat and loathsome, were everywhere. Gideon’s mind fled for a moment to Kinveil, cool, fresh, and orderly, and his arms tightened round the girl convulsively. Poor, helpless, unprepared Juliana. He found himself cursing the ghost of the young man she had married. Surely he must have seen trouble coming? Surely he could have got her away to safety before it happened!

Finally, he said, ‘That’s my last clean handkerchief, I warn you. Come along, my pet. Blow your nose and sit up like a good girl. I have something for you.’ He rummaged in the bag still slung over his shoulder. ‘Not silks or jewels or looted treasure, although God knows there’s enough of that about. But...’ One by one he dumped a number of small packages on the table, itemizing them as he went. ‘Tea, real bread, fresh butter, milk, sugar, and oranges for the baby. Now, for heaven’s sake, don’t start crying again! Where can I boil up some water for the tea? Have you anything to use as a teapot?’

The bracing treatment helped, as he had hoped it would. After months steamy with emotion, he thought there was probably nothing she needed more than a sense of normal, commonplace reality.

The effect of being transported from the depths of despair to, not the seventh, but at least the second or third heaven, was to produce a slightly delirious euphoria. Extravagantly, she began to pour out to him the tale of everything that had happened inside the Residency during the siege, in a breathless, uncoordinated stream, exclaiming, every dozen words or so, ‘Oh, Gideon!’ as if his name were a kind of talisman. He had no idea how long this state would last; a few days at least, he hoped, because what still lay ahead was going to test everyone’s nerve and stamina to the uttermost, and he didn’t want Juliana suffering from the nervous collapse that was bound to come. She still hadn’t mentioned Richard at all, and he thought perhaps she wouldn’t until Lucknow was far behind them.