Zemindar (51 page)

‘I would hate to think of Hassanganj abandoned by the Erskines,’ I said, trying to imagine the contingency.

‘There is only one Erskine,’ he reminded me. ‘There’s the rub! But now, we are wasting time in thinking of imponderables. I don’t want to alarm you, but as you know what you do, I would be glad if you would help me by making some small preparation yourself—as a possible safeguard. No more.’

‘Of course. What can I do?’

‘Some time, sooner rather than later, get together a bundle of clothes and so on, toilet things—I leave it to you—the sort of things you might need if we had to leave hurriedly and you hadn’t time to pack. And do the same for Emily, but don’t let her know it. And don’t let the
ayahs
know either; they’re curious old harpies. I take it you have a wardrobe or a drawer you can lock?’

I nodded.

‘Good! That’s all. Take as little as you can, and don’t worry, it is most unlikely that you will need any of it, after all. What about money? Have you any cash?’

‘Enough.’

‘Good. Sew it into whatever … er … garment you wear next to your skin.’

I got up, thinking I would prefer to be employed in these matters than worrying about what might come, and went to the door. But Oliver stopped me.

‘One moment. Have you ever used a gun? A pistol?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. If you have to, you’ll find you can shoot a man with the most practised. Come to the library a moment, will you?’

He made his way down the dimly lit, horn-hung corridor. I followed him apprehensively. He lit the lamp on his desk, unlocked a drawer and took out a pistol, which he opened and examined carefully. He clicked it shut and held the weapon out to me.

I took it with reluctance. It was a clumsy thing and heavy in my hands.

‘Don’t be scared. It’s not loaded,’ he said, smiling. ‘Hold it like this, see …’ He demonstrated, and then gave me a course of instruction on how the thing worked, and how to work it. Again and again I practised cocking it, firing it, loading it and unloading it, cocking it again, firing, unloading and so on. At the end of three-quarters of an hour, I was handling the weapon with confidence, if not affection.

‘Good!’ said my instructor. ‘I believe you have the makings of an accomplished assassin. Now, I am going to load it, so don’t fiddle with the damn thing more than you can help. Hide it, but in an accessible place, and don’t forget you have it. If we have the opportunity, I’ll take you out to practise firing it.’

He loaded the weapon and handed it over, butt first.

‘Don’t point it at
anyone
,’ he said, quite unnecessarily, ‘unless you intend to kill them, and if you intend to, make a good job of it! By the way,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘you won’t need it if I am in the immediate vicinity. I shall be only too happy to put a bullet in your head to save you from … ah … the ultimate outrage.’

‘Good heavens! Is that what all this is for?’ I asked, genuinely astonished.

‘Certainly? What else?’

‘I thought it was to protect my life,’ I answered him, whereupon he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

‘An indomitable realist,’ he chuckled, fixing me with an appreciative eye. ‘Don’t let my old-fashioned notions deter you, m’dear. If your life is of more value to you than your virtue, by all means relinquish the latter for the sake of the former, and accept my congratulations on your common sense!’

He laughed again, as I cast round furiously for something withering to say; but before I could speak, he went on: ‘As a matter of fact, you are nearer the mark than you realize. I have armed you because I took it for granted that you would share the misconception of most young Englishwomen in India. But if we do run into trouble, it’s much more likely that they will want your life rather than your person. Whatever your own opinion of your attractions, most Indians, bar the very lowest, would consider any, ah—commerce—with a white woman a defilement. Though of course, in time of war …’

‘Thank you. I will know now what to expect!’

He came round the great leather-topped desk to where I stood with the pistol in my hands. At the other end of the book-lined room, I could make out Old Adam’s chair in the shadowed window alcove, and the lamplight just sufficed to glow dimly on the copper and silver-chased bowl of the hubble-bubble beside it.

‘Laura, I don’t want to frighten you, but it’s best to be warned, isn’t it? At least, I believe you would wish to know the worst.’

‘Naturally. Though I wish things were rather more definite. It’s the uncertainty, not knowing what will happen, or when, that I find wearing.’

‘And I, believe me! I’m sorry that … that your stay in Hassanganj has not been pleasanter. You’ve had more than your share of alarms to contend with.’

‘Oh, there is no need for you to say so. Indeed, we have been most comfortable and … and happy,’ I said, but not with entire truth.

‘I have been trying to see all this as it must appear to you, a young girl from a sheltered home, straight out from England, but I’m afraid the exercise of imagination is beyond me. Except, of course, that you must have cause to be more alarmed and agitated than you have allowed yourself to appear—by many things.’

‘You are wrong,’ I corrected him. ‘I am not a young girl, and I am only indirectly straight out from England. Nor was my childhood particularly sheltered. You are trying to make me see with Emily’s eyes. We are totally different people, with very different backgrounds. There is no need for you to worry about me, I assure you. I learnt early to take life as it comes.’

‘Yes? Well, perhaps that is why I find you so …’ Then he stopped, laughed, and shook his head. ‘Never mind! Not now. Perhaps it’s too late. Or perhaps it’s too early.’

‘What is?’ I asked, puzzled, but he just shook his head again, smiling.

‘Go on. Off to bed with you now. Pack up your duds. It will give you something to think of. And don’t … don’t be frightened, Laura. The worst might never happen.’

My memories of the following weeks are blurred and confused. So much happened in other parts of India, even involving people we knew, but nothing touched us directly. Life in Hassanganj continued as it had always done, and perhaps the very fact that we had lived in such isolation for the past five months, cocooned in self-sufficiency, made it harder for us to believe that the tempo of our placid days could change and be engulfed by violence.

I had made up two neat packs of clothes and other necessaries for Emily and myself, and locked them away together with the pistol, trying to realize that these precautions were indeed necessary, not merely the sort of action taken by a character in a schoolboy’s story. But as I worked in my big white bedroom under the swaying
punkah
, I found I lacked the imagination, or perhaps the experience, to envisage what circumstances would ever make them necessary. I was trying to anticipate seriously what seemed to me manifestly absurd, and this feeling that we were play-acting, that nothing was quite real, continued with me to the end. God knows why, for the following days brought us enough authenticated news to disquiet us to the point of alarm. I suppose Hassanganj’s characteristic, if somewhat bizarre, atmosphere of stability had something to do with it.

At the end of the week, we heard that the bazaar rumours reported by Toddy-Bob were only too true, and that the mutinous sepoys from Meerut, having murdered their officers, set fire to the cantonment and freed eighty-five of their fellows from the cantonment jail, marched that same night to Delhi and placed themselves under the banner of the last of the Mogul kings. Then the telegraph wires had been cut and no further news had come, but few could doubt that, incited by the Meerut rebels, Delhi, the last stronghold of the ancient glory, would also rise in arms.

Hardly a day passed now without someone—a lone officer, perhaps, or a whole family—stopping at Hassanganj for a hasty meal and to disburden themselves of their news; but, even if this had not been the case, information would have reached us, more mysteriously perhaps, but none the less speedily. For one thing, Ungud was now fully recovered, and I often caught a glimpse of his meagre form edging away from the direction of Oliver’s library. But more potent than any single source was the age-old system of communication that operates throughout India: the wells where the women gossip; the village tanks and groves where people gather in the dusk; the
serais
or halting places where travellers tell their tales all along the dusty ways that snake across the country; the roads themselves, always, however far from habitation, busy and alive; and the natural communicativeness of a people reared on curiosity and seeing no virtue in reserve.

No European could fail to be aghast at the news that the insurgent sepoys had been allowed to march from Meerut to Delhi without stay or hindrance. That they should attempt to do so was understandable; that they should manage to do so unbelievable.

‘But what, after all, could be more natural than that they should want to place themselves under the man they believe to be their legitimate ruler?’ pointed out Oliver. ‘In their eyes, what they are doing is not rebellion; nor insurrection nor mutiny. It is an attempt to throw off foreign domination, and remember that is what the Indians have been doing with various degrees of success for the last three thousand years. It was bound to come, I suppose. If not now, then in ten, twenty or fifty years’ time. But having come, their first instinct would be to place themselves under their king, doddery old puppet that he be.’

‘You speak almost as if you condone them, sir,’ observed our guest of the moment in an affronted tone. He was a major in the 71st Native Infantry, a round-faced man with large but dispirited whiskers and a pompous manner. Charles was with us also that evening, taking the air on the verandah. He was over the sunstroke, as Oliver had promised, but was plagued by boils and prickly heat.

‘At least I cannot condemn them for wanting what, in their place, I would also want. Their methods I do not condone,’ said Oliver.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the visitor. ‘The stories circulating in Lucknow regarding the Meerut massacre are too horrible to repeat!’

‘Nevertheless, we have heard them all, several times over, and with many variations,’ observed Oliver laconically.

‘Then I cannot understand how you can have even a vestige of sympathy with the devils.’

‘But I didn’t say sympathy. I said understanding,’ pointed out Oliver carefully.

‘The same thing, in my view!’

‘No doubt, but not necessarily in mine. Or not in all cases. Where I can place neither sympathy nor understanding is with the commanders in Meerut. They were on the spot and yet made so little attempt, not to halt matters—perhaps that was out of their power—but to raise the alarm in Delhi. One man on a good horse would have been enough to warn the city. But no one had the wit to realize it.’

His tone was scathing, and Major Ingham, rightly reading into it a condemnation of the military mind, huffed and fidgeted, but ventured no reply. For, indeed, the story which had come to our ears of that Sunday night in Meerut was no credit to the workings of the martial intelligence, but an indictment of the lack of initiative consequent on too acquiescent an acceptance of discipline.

The match set to the torch of Meerut was once again the abhorred Enfield cartridge. Advised of the sepoys’ objections to this cartridge, Lord Canning, the Governor General, had ordered that, since the cap could readily be removed with the left hand, the teeth should not be used for uncapping—a wise, if partial measure, which, had it been followed, might have averted much that came later. The military, however, from the Commander-in-Chief, General Anson, through senior officers down to ignorant, newly-arrived subalterns, objected to this compromise as a point of pride, and ignored the directive. In Meerut the commander of the 3rd Light Cavalry, by reputation a vain and puffed-up man, now decided to use the favoured and elite ‘skirmishers’ of his own regiment to prove to their companions that an order from a British officer was inviolable. The skirmishers were paraded and ordered to pull the cartridge caps with their teeth as laid down in regulations. Eighty-five of the ninety men refused. They were court-martialled, condemned, then stripped of their regimentals and fettered at an ignominious public parade watched by all troops, brown and white, in the station.

After a couple of days of savage brooding on this wrong, on a hot Sunday as dusk drew in, the enraged sepoys rose, released their imprisoned comrades (and the other inmates of the gaol) and turned on their officers. The 60th Queen’s Rifles, a white regiment, ready for Church Parade, were ordered out to quell them, but were first required to change their white drill for the Riflemen’s dark green considered more suitable for battle, so that by the time they had been issued with ammunition the station was aflame. Swiftly joined by the native police and the
badmashes
of the bazaars, the sepoys cut down any officer they encountered, fired the lines and the bungalows of cantonments, and murdered women and children without compunction. The general in command of the station, Hewitt, a man so fat he took parades sitting in a carriage, and his Brigadier, Archdale Wilson, shocked to paralysis by their
Baba-log
having the temerity to revolt, only added to the chaos with inept and contrary orders and by bickering between themselves. When a junior officer volunteered to lead a contingent of the 60th in pursuit of the mutineers to destroy them before they reached Delhi, his suggestion was refused since it was felt that it would divide the force necessary to ensure the safety of the remaining officers.

So much was fact, as were the terrible accounts of pregnant women disembowelled by mutineers’ swords, of others mutilated but yet living who were thrown on the pyres of their own bungalows, of children decapitated before their mothers’ eyes, mothers set alight while their children watched shrieking. And, as Oliver Erskine remarked acidly, in the horror engendered by these atrocities it was easy to forget the self-love and the complacent arrogance of the officers whose prideful stupidity had caused the holocaust.