Zemindar (76 page)

‘Well—it could be,’ Kate said dubiously when I told her of Mrs Bonner’s diagnosis, ‘but I think the fever is too high. We must pray it is not a contagion. Try to keep her cool. Let me stay here tonight, my dear. I can be of some use in fanning her, at least.’

I gratefully accepted her offer and we took it in turns to wield the palm-leaf fan for hours on end, but on the third day Emily’s fever rose alarmingly, red spots appeared on her face and we knew she had smallpox.

Ajeeba had told us—how long ago it now seemed—that once smallpox entered a house, it would go through it ‘like an evil wind’. We had thought that in escaping from Wajid Khan’s house we had escaped also the contamination of the disease, and perhaps we had; but only to find it awaiting us in the Residency.

As soon as the spots appeared, I sent Charles for a doctor—any doctor—but it was hours before one could spare a moment to come. When he did arrive, Dr Darby took Emily’s pulse, examined the spots and shrugged hopelessly.

‘I can do nothing,’ he sighed. ‘If she has a good constitution and good care, she’ll pull through. Others have. I have some headache powders I’ll send you, but that’s all. When she becomes delirious, she’ll be reaching the crisis. Let me know and I’ll look in again. I wish to God I could be of more help, but …’ He shrugged again and went away wearing the angrily hopeless expression that all our doctors wore.

For three days and nights Charles, Kate and I watched beside the sick girl. There was little we could do apart from fanning her and keeping away the flies. The fever made her increasingly restless, dried her mouth and cracked her lips, but we had no salve with which to ease them. From somewhere (and we did not ask) Toddy-Bob produced a beautiful cut-glass jug full of barley water, which we made her sip, and we tried greasing her lips with morsels of butter that we also owed to Toddy.

Between his duties at Fayrer’s battery and his watch beside his wife, Charles slept even less than the invalid. One night, while I stood and watched him drink a cup of tea I had taken him, I realized he had grown old before my eyes. Never robustly built, he was now so thin that his fingernails looked too big for his fingers. His moustache was untrimmed, his eyes sunken, and furrows had appeared on the brow I remembered smooth and bland with confident well-being. Worst of all was the expression of despairing guilt in the eyes that met mine briefly in the wavering light of the candle.

‘Pray, Laura,’ he whispered as he gave me the cup. ‘Pray that she lives. I must have time, just time, to earn her forgiveness. If she dies, it will be the end of my life too.’

‘I do pray—constantly,’ I told him.

‘God!’ he muttered, holding his head in his thin hands so that I had difficulty hearing him. ‘I would so gladly suffer and die in her stead. So gladly. I have even told her so, but she always turns away from me. If only she will live, I will teach her to come to me with love. Oh, Laura, she must not die!’

Remorse is a poor substitute for love, I thought to myself, and it’s a poor woman who cannot tell the difference. But, naturally, I held my tongue.

‘I am rested and will stay with her now, Charles,’ I said. ‘It is time you took some sleep. You do her no good by neglecting your own health.’ But he would not leave her bedside, so I joined him in his watch and together we sat the noisy night through to the dawn.

We had been besieged for a fortnight—an eternity. It had been six weeks since we had left Hassanganj.

Only six weeks ago our lives had been secure, comfortable, holding out the hope and indeed the expectation of all the small, important factors from which we humans build our happiness, with however much trial and travail.

Only six weeks ago all that we had gone through, all that we had suffered, all that we were now anticipating was not only outside our experience but beyond our imagination. Six weeks had been sufficient to cleave a chasm that could never be spanned between the girl I had been and the woman I now was.

I thought with a bitter humour of the self-contained, smug, all-knowing creature who had so often congratulated herself on her handling of the silly storms at Mariaon and Hassanganj, who had felt so worldly wise at being able to deal even with the vagaries of Mr Erskine’s domestic affairs without self-betrayal. All those teacup tempests, the Avery finances, Emily’s unwanted pregnancy, the discovery of Moti’s status, Pearl’s birth. How they had exercised me, and yet how unimportant they had been, how small, in relation to the last great fact of death which I was now confronting. Emily might not die of the smallpox, but what was there to assure me that I would not? I knew how contagious the disease was, and how devastating, and, as I cooled her brow with cologne, I could not help wondering how soon I might be lying in Emily’s place. If I were to succumb and face death even more nearly, how would my life appear to my dying mind? Would I be satisfied with what I had fashioned of my days?

Charles, bent over the single candle, was reading from Emily’s little black-morocco Bible, and I was alone with my thoughts.

To know that there are no more chances, I said to myself; no possibility of explanation or apology; no time to make amends. Knowing that, what would be in the forefront of my consciousness? As though in answer to my question, the little room was shattered with sound as a shell exploded against a wall opposite our windows and forced the flare of its flame through the cracks in the ill-made shutters, briefly lighting the room. Charles looked up with a frown, and then went back to the Bible.

Mistakes, I said to myself, my mind lightened as suddenly and as brightly as the room had been. Mistakes! How often I had been mistaken. How grossly, wilfully, I had chosen to misunderstand not only the people around me, but myself. How easily I had always missed the substance for the shadow, and how beguiled I had been by empty appearances. Yet I had liked to think of myself as judicious, cool, balanced, not easily swayed. I had even persuaded myself that I detected the recognition of these qualities in others’ eyes. Yet all I had really been was a shallow, self-contained, selfish girl, almost as ignorant as Emily—but Emily at least had never had pretensions to superior wisdom and worth as I had had.

Self-knowledge is bought with pain, and I winced as I recognized the presumption and pride in my own character and remembered my many lost opportunities to give understanding to others. If I had not indulged my infatuation for Charles, I would have known, much sooner, how Emily had suffered in her marriage; and if Emily had not felt that Charles’s love was mine, she might have found it possible to give him the affection she had deflected to Oliver Erskine. Had I been able to accept the reality of Charles, instead of clothing him in the romantic dreams of a girl, perhaps my response to Oliver’s declaration of love could have been more affirmative. So many mistakes, misunderstandings, misconceptions! It would be regret for these that filled my mind in my last moments, and as I mulled them over, strong and living, the last one returned to fill my heart with unbearable poignancy. Oh, Oliver, where are you? Where are you? I cried silently in the unsilent dark.

As soon as the smallpox had appeared, Mrs Bonner had taken Pearl into her room to save her from infection, but explained that, under the circumstances, that was as much as she could do. With her own ‘dear ones’ to think of, she could not be expected to run the danger of contagion by helping to nurse Emily. Since no one had asked her to help, no one quarrelled with her refusal to do so. But Emily missed Pearl, and a dozen times a day I tried to explain why the child could not be with her mother. Often in her restless sleep Emily would mutter audibly to herself and, sitting beside her, I would catch the word ‘Pearl’ reiterated with anxious love. On one such occasion, after a flow of incomprehensible words, she smiled sweetly in her sleep and said with great tenderness ‘My love … Oliver.’ Charles was in the room with me; as he caught the words, he looked at me, then knelt down and buried his face against his wife’s sick body, and I saw his shoulders shake with sobs.

On the third night of the smallpox, Emily seemed easier, and I lay down to rest, hopeful that she would indeed ‘pull through’ as the doctor had said. Perhaps she would have recovered—many others did, despite the lack of medicine and proper care—but early on the following morning the dreadful symptoms of cholera appeared, and at three o’clock the same afternoon she died. She would have been nineteen years old in a few weeks’ time.

We were all with her when she went, except the baby. Charles held her hand, Kate and I knelt by her bed. Toddy-Bob was in the kitchen whittling into the fireplace and Ishmial sat cross-legged just inside the kitchen door, with his musket across his knees and an expression of deep dejection on his face.

Emily had been unconscious for some time and only Kate, I believe, realized how near the end was. None of us knew the moment her soul slipped from her body. Then a waxy blueness spreading around her lips told us she was no more. Charles leaned his head on her hand and wept despairingly, and Kate, with tears streaming down her face, joined her hands, bent her head and began the
De Profundis
:

‘Out of the depths I have cried unto Thee, O Lord
,

Lord, hear my prayer and let my cry come unto Thee
 …
’

Her voice faltered, then rose again, intoning David’s great song of lamentation, while outside the guns roared, and inside the whine of mosquitoes rose to a crescendo. That day the barrage was particularly heavy, for a couple of days earlier the mutineers had swarmed into the tall house of an Armenian merchant named Johannes that stood only a few feet outside our walls. They had posted snipers in the tower and installed several heavy guns, which were now showering us with an extraordinary assortment of missiles, from nails and bolts to ramrods and tins packed with splintered glass. But we heard nothing of the noise that afternoon. Only the mosquitoes and Kate’s voice praying.

We did not have much time to prepare Emily’s body for the evening burial.

Charles clung to Emily, and Kate needed all her powers of persuasion to make him leave the room. At length he calmed down sufficiently for Toddy-Bob and Ishmial to lead him away somewhere to recover, and Kate and I set to work. I had no tears, though I would gladly have wept, but the strain of the last hours had given me a headache so bad that I could hardly see as I moved about the room doing Kate’s bidding. We washed the wasted body and dressed Emily in her only spare gown, a flowered poplin with lace collars and cuffs. Then I combed her hair, rebraided it and wound it around her head. The smallpox marks were already fading in the pallor of death, but her face bore no memorial of the young girl who had left Mount Bellew. It was a mask, no more; vacant, bluish-white, the purple lips drawn back from the teeth and the protruding cheekbones deepening the violet under the sunken eyes. She looked old, and I was frightened. Kate remembered to remove her rings and handed them to me for safekeeping. Slipping them into my pocket, so that later I could give them to Charles, I remembered poor Emily’s wedding day and the pride with which she had danced around the drawing-room showing us her newly bedecked hand.

We had no winding-sheet or shroud, so, crossing her thin hands on her breast, we laid her on a clean grey blanket from my bed and sewed her up in it.

At sunset Ishmial, the strongest of our men, carried her down to the cemetery in his arms like a child, followed by Charles, Toddy and Mr Roberts. Wallace Avery did not yet know of his cousin’s death. Women were forbidden the graveyard, so Kate and I could only stand on the verandah with our neighbours and watch the strange little procession move away into the growing dimness. When it had disappeared from view, the other ladies on the verandah murmured their sympathy and went back to their rooms. Kate kissed me and made her way back to the King’s Hospital to rest.

Pearl was still with Mrs Bonner, so for the first time since our arrival in the Residency I was absolutely alone in the two small rooms.

No doubt it would have been more correct of me to pray, or perhaps to read the Bible, but I could not endure the idea of sitting still, so, sooner than move aimlessly about the rooms, I decided to give them a thorough cleaning. Ignoring orders to the contrary, I threw open the windows and doors leading on to the two verandahs, seized the twig broom, which was all I had to work with, and swept every inch of the floors, having first pushed our few pieces of furniture outside the doors. Then I swilled water over the hard earth floor, and, while it dried, stripped Emily’s bed; heedless of our shortage of such necessities, I piled the soiled mattress and her blanket and Kashmir shawl (which we had used to protect her limbs from mosquitoes and flies), together with the few garments she had used while ill, all together in a heap in the inner courtyard and set fire to them. The goat, tethered near by, looked on with its full yellow eyes, chewing placidly the while, and desultorily flicked an ear.

The flames took hold, leaping upwards briefly in the steamy malodorous twilight, and I sat on the verandah steps watching them, holding my aching head in my hands, suddenly drained of all will, all energy.

What had happened to them? Where had they really gone? The Wilkinses and Elvira, Moti, Connie and Johnny, Emily? Even the
sowar
in the forest clearing? They had all, in one way or another, affected my life so deeply. Where were they now?

In Heaven, the parsons would say; in eternity. In oblivion, my sceptic father would have answered me. I had no doubt that I would, personally, infinitely prefer oblivion to the conventional idea of Heaven, yet I could not rid myself of a stubborn desire to believe in some form of continuance for the human spirit after death. Mere conceit, I heard my father say, a symptom of the self-love in which we foolish mortals pass our days. But it could be some ancestral common sense. I found it then, I find it now, difficult to believe that personality is more ephemeral even than the memories it holds—or leaves behind.

How potent such memories may be, I discovered for myself that evening. Because I was so tired and bewildered, because I had so long suppressed my emotions, they now took revenge on me, and I found myself imagining the dead alive, all with such vividness and clarity that I heard their voices ringing in the deserted courtyard, remembered the style and colour of their clothing and seemed to glimpse their characteristic gait and gestures in the gathering obscurity of the evening. Mrs Wilkins in her purple dolman trimmed with bugle beads of jet, Emily’s green sprig muslin dress, poor Elvira in her girlish and unsuitable white, and Connie in the bedraggled yellow gown at the ball. I could smell them too. Connie always smelled more strongly of peppermint even than of gin, and Mrs Wilkins moved in an aura of patchouli, while everything that Emily owned was scented with violet cologne.