by M. M. Kaye
‘If only I could get away!’ thought Alex. ‘If only I could get news! How much longer can they hold out? How many of them are there left?’ It was unbearable to lie there and listen to those sounds, knowing what they meant; knowing what it must be like inside the battered and beleaguered Residency; and to do nothing - nothing!
He had been brought a nauseous draught in the course of the afternoon by Rahim, the elderly, silent servant who looked after him. The Begum Sahiba had prepared it, said Rahim. Alex drank it to save argument, and it had relieved the pain in his head and eventually sent him to sleep. And so, for him, the day that marked the second serious assault on the Residency passed. And the flimsy defences still held.
But the hope of relief that the hard-pressed garrison had once expected hourly was receding. Havelock’s army, which had crossed the border into Oudh in the last days of July and had subsequently fought and won two battles, had suffered heavy losses in the fighting, and finding their communications threatened by the Nana Sahib’s forces, had fallen back on Mangalwar to wait for reinforcements. Twice in early August Havelock had advanced again towards Lucknow, only to be checked: the first time by an outbreak of cholera, and later by the mutiny of the Gwalior Contingent which had compelled him to secure his base and fall back on Cawnpore.
The news that the feringhi army was in retreat was received with wild rejoicings in Lucknow, and the position of the beleaguered garrison - and also of the handful of refugees in the Gulab Mahal - grew even more precarious. Many of the insurgents and a large proportion of the populace who had been daunted by the realization that an avenging army was almost within striking distance of the city, swung back to the wildest heights of optimism when it was learned that the enemy had not only been forced to retreat, but were no longer within the borders of Oudh.
The sound of desultory firing from the direction of the Residency became an integral part of life in the Gulab Mahal: as familiar as the cawing of the grey-headed crows, the liquid cooing of the doves or the creak and squeak of the well-wheel. It was, to the fugitives, a comforting sound, since it told them that the garrison was still holding out and that the Residency had not fallen …
There had been a third assault on the eighteenth of August (Alex had worked out the date and scratched it with a nail on the wall of the pavilion) and they had waited, all of them, with a tension that seemed to make it difficult to breathe, for the sound of musketry-fire to start again after the silence that had followed the din of the assault. And hearing it they had felt their nerves and muscles go slack with relief, and had breathed as though escaping from near suffocation. Three days later they had heard the thunderous crash of exploding gunpowder, and Dasim Ali had told Alex that evening that it was the work of the garrison, who had at last succeeded in blowing up Johannes House, a stronghold of the mutineers beyond the perimeter of the defence, from which a deadly crossfire had been directed upon the Residency.
But the next day there had been another sound. The sound of gunfire from the south-east.
‘By God - they’re here!’ cried Alex, running to the parapet of the roof in the drumming, drenching downpour of the monsoon rains and straining to listen while the water poured off him in a warm torrent.
It could only mean one thing: Havelock was marching on Lucknow again. And presently, as the downpour ceased and a hot wind began to blow, the sound of those guns came clearly through the humid, clean-washed air.
They had heard them at intervals all that day and for much of the following one, and it occurred to Walayat Shah for the first time that perhaps God had been at his side when he had agreed to shelter those bedraggled fugitives for the sake of the dead of Cawnpore, and that perhaps, because of it, he and his household would one day be saved from destruction. It was not a thought that pleased him, for had it not been for his horror of the treachery and the butchery of Cawnpore, he would have preferred to die fighting the feringhis rather than to accept any favour from their hands.
But they had heard Havelock’s guns no more; nor any news of what had happened to his army. And August dragged out its slow length, and it was September. And still the dwindling, dying, fever-racked garrison in the Luck-now Residency held out, and still the torn rags of the Union Jack fluttered defiantly from the flagstaff that had been shot down and replaced so often, and at the cost of so many lives, on the topmost roof of the shattered Residency.
49
It seemed to the fugitives in the Gulab Mahal that they had lived in their hot, cramped quarters in the little pink stucco palace in Lucknow for a lifetime.
Day succeeded day with an appalling, crawling monotony, and nerves grew ragged and tempers flared. It needed very little to touch off a furious quarrel and an exchange of blows between the six men who passed the greater part of their time shut in together in one small hot room, where the floor space was largely taken up by the cheap string cots on which they sat or lay for most of the day-time, and on which they slept at night.
The lack of news from the outside world was the worst affliction they suffered. The heat was endurable because of the frequent downpours that roared off the roofs and gutters and drenched the gardens, cooling the hot stone and turning the dust to liquid mud where frogs croaked and winged ants hatched out in drove after fluttering, crawling drove.
The food was scanty, since there was little money to spare for the feeding of a band of Hell-doomed infidels, but it was enough, and the sanitary arrangements, though primitive, were adequate. Compared with thousands of their fellow-countrymen, they were living in comfort and safety. But not to know what was happening to the garrison in the Residency, to Havelock’s forces, to the regiments on the Ridge before Delhi, to the rest of India and the Empire of ‘John Company’, made the long days longer and frayed their nerves to breaking-point.
They had discussed, endlessly, the possibility of escaping from Lucknow and trying to make contact with the relieving army, and one night three of them, Captain Garrowby, Dr O’Dwyer and Mr Climpson, had climbed out of the enclosed garden, scaled the outer wall by standing on each other’s shoulders, and vanished into the maw of the city.
They had told their plan to no one, for they realized that a small party stood a better chance of escape than a large one, and they considered that Lapeuta and Dobbie, both elderly and frail, were better off where they were, while Alex was not only still subject to occasional bouts of fever, but naturally could not be asked to abandon his wife and leave her behind in a city that might well soon be taken by assault. As for Carlyon, they had had no intention of saddling themselves with a man who had done nothing to endear himself to any of them, and whose ignorance of the language and the country, combined with his uncertain temper, would make his company a hazard to all of them. They had therefore kept him in ignorance of their plans and had only, late in the evening, told Mr Lapeuta in order that their disappearance might not panic the remaining fugitives into thinking that they had been done away with by any of the inmates of the Gulab Mahal.
Carlyon had stormed and raged when he had awoken the next morning to find that they had gone, for he realized it might mean weeks if not months more of this enforced confinement for himself. He knew that he could not get far alone, for apart from not being able to speak one word of Hindustani, he had no knowledge of the city or the country surrounding it, or even in which direction to go in order to reach the British force.
Lou and Mrs Hossack had been white with anxiety, Walayat Shah relieved, and Alex restless and either silent or curt to the point of rudeness.
But Captain Garrowby, Dr O’Dwyer and Mr Climpson had not gone far. They had kept together instead of taking the wiser course of separating, and they had lost their way in the maze of streets, so that dawn had found them still in the city. They had been stopped and questioned, and that afternoon they had been shot, and their bodies hung up by the heels for an encouragement to the mob.
Dasim Ali had brought Alex the news on the following evening. The men, he said, had been tortured first to
make them tell where they had been hiding, because the state of their garments and their shoes suggested that they must have been sheltering in the city itself, and had not, as they claimed, reached it only that night. Moreover they had been captured trying to leave Lucknow and not to enter it.
They had died without divulging their hiding-place, but Dasim Ali’s wife Mumtaz, and others of the Gulab Mahal, had been frightened and angry, and immediate precautions had been taken to see that none of the remaining feringhis jeopardized them by escaping. That the three men had not betrayed them under torture did not mean that one of the others might prove less courageous if caught and subjected to similar treatment, and any more feringhis found in the city might lead to a house-to-house search. The doors were locked now at night and the gardens patrolled, and what little liberty the fugitives had previously possessed was drastically curtailed.
To Lou and Mrs Hossack, made selfish by fear for the safety and well-being of two small children, the loss of Dr O’Dwyer meant more than the fact that all three men had been caught and killed. Privately, they considered it thoughtless in the extreme of Dr O’Dwyer to have even contemplated leaving: he should have thought of them first. They had no confidence whatsoever in the herbal brews and remedies of the native women in the Gulab Mahal; which was hardly surprising, for many of the medicines prescribed for illness were of a wildly improbable and entirely useless character; such as verses of the Koran written on scraps of paper in cheap bazaar ink and boiled in water - the water then being considered a sovereign specific for every form of illness. But Dr O’Dwyer had been a tower of strength when colic or convulsions or any other infant ailments had threatened Jimmy Hossack or Amanda Cottar English, and now that he had gone their anxieties were doubled.
Neither Lou nor Mrs Hossack would, at that time, have escaped from the Gulab Mahal if they could, and the death of the three men who had done so had only served to convince them that their greatest safety lay in staying where they were. But they hated the small, hot airless room that became an oven when the sun shone and grew damp patches of mould on the walls when the rains fell. They hated the invading armies of creeping, hopping or flying creatures which came in under the ill-fitting door or through the fretted stone that filled the narrow windows, and which could not be kept out. They hated the native dress they wore and the native food they ate, the monotony and the confinement. They quarrelled with regrettable frequency and got on each other’s nerves to the point of desperation, and complained about each other to Winter.
Winter herself was far from happy in those days. She might never have been married to Alex, and she was often tempted to wonder if that brief ceremony on the moonlit roof had ever taken place, or if she had only dreamt it.
She still slept and spent the greater part of each day in her own gaily painted room, and Alex still lived in the little pavilion on the roof. She saw as little of him, or less, in these days, as she had when they had first come to the Gulab Mahal. His manner to her was much as it had always been, and he did not appear to think that the fact that she was now his wife necessitated any change in the monotonous routine of their days.
She wondered sometimes if she had been mistaken in thinking that Alex cared for her. Had he after all only thought of her as he had thought of that auburn-haired actress whom he had taken home one night from a party at the Lunjore Residency? Would he ever have married her if she had not made him? He had never made any attempt to touch her or kiss her since the night that he had kissed her at the edge of the river when they had fled from the fire, and she had been sure that he loved her. Had he only kissed her then from relief - because they were safe? The same relief that had made them all laugh together helplessly a moment later, despite the fact that they had been driven from the safe refuge of the Hirren Minar and were stranded in a strange jungle and within the hostile borders of Oudh?
Alex had recovered much of his former health, and the maddeningly recurrent bouts of fever left him at last. He was still painfully thin, but his skin no longer had that underlying and frightening tone of greyness, and his hair was crisp again instead of lying dull and lack-lustre. But Winter could not forget that he had been ill with fever on the night that she had asked him to marry her, or that he had been drugged with both fever and opium when he had actually done so. If he had been in full possession of his faculties, would he have consented to marry her? She began to wonder why he had ever agreed to do so, and if he had really not known what he was doing, and had subsequently regretted it.
It did not occur to her that Alex imagined that she had been frightened by Carlyon, and by some attack that Carlyon had made upon her, into taking the extreme step of asking him to marry her, for Carlyon’s savage kisses had not frightened her in the least, and she had forgotten them long before the bruises they had left had faded. It had been Carlyon’s disclosure that Mr Dobbie was as qualified to perform a marriage service as a christening that had sent her straight to Alex, and it is doubtful if anyone or anything could have frightened her to the point of doing such a thing. To ask a man to marry you was shameless and unheard of, and possible only in the case of the Queen of England, whom etiquette and protocol had compelled to propose marriage to the man of her choice instead of being in the gratifying position of hearing him propose to her.
Winter had had her own reasons for asking Alex to marry her instead of waiting in the hope that he might one day ask her himself, but she did not divulge them. Ameera and Hamida knew, and Lou guessed, but she did not ask any questions.
Winter did not even trouble to avoid Lord Carlyon. She saw very little of him, and that only in the company of the others on the roof-top by starlight or moonlight, or in the walled garden at dusk and before sunrise. She was seen in the gardens with less and less frequency at dawn, but Alex did not think to inquire why she alone so rarely took advantage of those cooler early hours under the trees, and supposed that she slept later. Recently, on the few occasions when she had joined them, he thought that she looked tired and strained and that there were shadows under her eyes. But it was difficult to tell in the grey first light of the morning. They all looked ill and weary by that light after the hot, restless nights.
Alex himself was silent and more short-tempered than ever these days. He knew that he was fit enough now to leave the Gulab Mahal without fear of being struck down by fever and weakness just when he needed his strength and his wits most. He knew that he should go and what he should do - as he had always known. And he was sure that Dasim Ali would help him to get safely away. But he could not bring himself to leave Winter while Carlyon was in this ugly, dangerous and unpredictable mood. He did not trust Carlyon, or the ability of any of the others to protect his wife. He told himself repeatedly that this was absurd, and that Ameera alone, or Lou, would see to it that she came to no harm. But would the efforts of either of them - or any or all of the others - keep Carlyon’s passions in check as Alex’s mere presence could do, because he was Winter’s husband? The opposing strains tugged and dragged at Alex’s mind and his emotions, and he hated himself for not going. And could not go.
Carlyon for his part no longer regarded Alex with dislike, but with active hatred and a corroding resentment which was not only on Winter’s account, but because of the greater degree of freedom and, above all privacy, that Alex enjoyed.
To Carlyon the enforced and continual company of two such men as Lapeuta and Dobbie was as near unbearable as made no matter. He had nothing whatever in common with either of them, and he regarded them both, from a social standpoint, as being on the level of the servants’ hall. Their views, their voices, their conversation and their mannerisms - in particular their soothing and somewhat nervous manner towards him, as though he were some fractious invalid to be humoured - frayed his nerves until there were times when he could have shrieked aloud. To be compelled to associate with them, to be locked up with them in one small room day after day and night after night, was, in his opinion, considerably worse than any solitary confinement would ha
ve been.
He did not know that Alex saw no more of Winter than he himself did, and imagined him to be enjoying a halcyon honeymoon while he, Carlyon, sweltered and raged and dragged himself through the long, weary, endless hours in the company of a tedious little Eurasian and a prosing parson who suffered from dyspepsia and prefaced and punctuated every platitude with a small dry cough.
And yet there was something that he did not understand about Winter and Randall. Something that did not quite square with that tormenting picture of a halcyon honeymoon. Winter did not look well, and she did not have the appearance of one who is happy. Neither, for that matter, did Randall. But then Randall had always had a trick of wiping all expression from his face when he wished, and it was difficult to know what he felt or thought. Neither he nor Winter seemed to have much to say to each other, and they might almost be thought to avoid each other’s company, although they were never very far apart during those evenings in the walled garden or upon Randall’s roof-top.
Carlyon knew that he would stand less than one chance in a hundred of winning free of Lucknow even if he should somehow manage to get out of the Gulab Mahal, yet he still spent the greater part of each day in brooding over and plotting escape. And then with the evening he would see Winter again, and know that he could not leave as long as she was there …
She appeared to feel no embarrassment in his presence and would talk to him as pleasantly as she talked to any of the others. It was only Randall whom she appeared to avoid. But then Randall was always there: always within sight of her, or within earshot, to remind Carlyon that she belonged to someone else.
He had at times wild, insane, ridiculous ideas of killing Randall so that she would have to turn to him, because there would be no one else; Lapeuta and Dobbie would be useless in any crisis. He had been a fool, as he had been once before. He had not learnt his lesson. He had frightened her, and she had protected herself in the only way she knew, by marrying Randall. But with Randall out of the way he could prove to her that she had nothing to fear from him, and then surely she might turn to him at last? - if only because there would be no one else for her to turn to.
