by M. M. Kaye
The year wore slowly on, and the ceaseless, familiar sound of musketry and gunfire from around the Residency still made a background to each day, and it was not until mid-November that once again the roar of guns and the din of battle rattled the rickety fabric of the Gulab Mahal as another British force fought its way towards a second relief of the Lucknow Residency, and once again the ugly tide of war surged through the narrow streets of the city.
Once again the gates of the pink palace were barred and barricaded; but fortune was with it, for it did not lie in the line of the advance, and the flood-tide of the street-fighting passed it by.
For a week gunfire and the crashing detonation of buildings being blown up shook Lucknow, but no one seemed to know how the battle went. The Residency had been relieved for the second time, but had Lucknow itself been captured by the British? None from the pink palace dared go out for news because the streets were not safe, and food ran short and there came a day when there was no milk for Amanda and Jimmy Hossack.
Havelock died in that month, and on the day after his death word had been whispered in the dusk at the barred gate of the Gulab Mahal that the Jung-i-lat Sahib, Sir Colin Campbell, was going to retreat from Lucknow and fall back once more upon Cawnpore, and that the evacuation would take place that very night, and in great secrecy. The women and children were to leave in carts and dhoolis at midnight while the city slept; stealing out under cover of darkness and making for the Alam Bagh, which was strongly held by the British.
Ameera had brought the news to Winter. ‘My husband and Dasim Ali,’ said Ameera, ‘say that if it be thy wish, it can be arranged that thou and the two women with the children go also. There are dhoolis here, and men to carry them, and they will join with the other mem-log at a place that is known to them, and take thee to safety. But it must be decided swiftly, for already it is dark.’
Winter had smiled lovingly at her. ‘I will tell the others. It may be that they will choose to go. But I will stay here - unless thou and thy husband wish me to be gone. And if that be so, then thou wilt have to send me away by force!’
‘That we shall never do,’ said Ameera, embracing her. ‘Is this not the house in which thou wast born? Go and tell thy friends to make ready if they would go.’
They had gone.
Mrs Hossack had tried to persuade Winter to go with them, and even Lou had urged her to leave. ‘I know you are safe here now,’ said Lou, ‘and that you will be happier here than in Allahabad or Calcutta, or wherever they send us. But it isn’t safe to stay. Can’t you see that even if they are retreating this time, they will come again? Lucknow will be taken in the end - it’s got to be! And when it is, the fighting will be far worse - a hundred times worse - than it has been this time, or the time before. The place may be sacked. Anything may happen. You can’t risk it, Winter. You have the child to think of.’
‘It is Alex’s child,’ said Winter. ‘Alex knew that Lucknow would be taken, but he did not make me leave. Don’t you see, Lou, that even if I wished to go I could not? Everyone in this house has risked their lives to save ours. And when they took us in they had no idea of profiting from it. We owe them a debt; a very great one. If I stay here, and I am here when the attack comes, the fact that I am in this house may save it. I could not leave … Alex knew that.’
Lou had wasted no more words. She had, somewhat unexpectedly, kissed Winter; and even more unexpectedly, there had been tears in her eyes. They had smiled at each other with affection and respect, their hands holding tightly for a moment, and had kissed again, saying nothing because there was so much to say - and yet so little that need be said. And then Lou had gone. Lou, Amanda, Mrs Hossack, Jimmy.
The gate creaked shut behind them and the bars and bolts grated hurriedly back into place, and the shuffling footsteps of the dhooli-bearers faded and were swallowed up by the night as Alex’s quick, light ones had been.
Sir Colin Campbell’s army - Havelock’s army - retreated from Lucknow, taking with them the women and children and all who remained of the gallant garrison who had held out so stubbornly and for so long, and leaving behind them the lonely dead and the empty shell of the Residency where a tattered Union Jack still fluttered in the dawn wind above the broken roof. And in the Gulab Mahal, the little pink stucco palace in Lucknow city, only Winter remained of the thirteen fugitives who had been taken in and given shelter on a hot night in July.
Once again the tide of war drew out of Lucknow leaving the ruin and the wreckage behind it, and there were no more sounds of the siege. Only the doves and the crows and the parrots again, and the chattering squirrels and the hum of the city from behind the high wall that shut in the Rose Palace.
There was firing still, but not from the Residency. It was further away now, from the Alam Bagh - the ‘Garden of the World’ - a walled and fortified royal garden some two miles outside Lucknow, where Sir Colin Campbell had left a force under General Outram to hold at least one outpost within sight of the city.
The Maulvi of Faizabad, the best of the generals that the mutineer armies had produced, attacked the British there, and cut their communications with Cawnpore. All through the succeeding months the Alam Bagh was attacked again and again, as the Residency had been. But unlike the Residency it was not a besieged garrison holding out against insuperable odds, but a strongpost that defied capture and waited for the day when it would act as the spearhead of the final advance upon Lucknow.
There was no word of Carlyon and the two men who had gone with him: or of Alex. But the bearers of the dhoolis had returned, saying that the memsahibs and their children had reached the Alam Bagh in safety, and had been sent forward with all the other mem-log to Cawnpore. So Lou and Mrs Hossack at least were safe, and Winter hoped that Lou would not find that escape had robbed her of Amanda. Lou deserved Amanda.
The year drew to its close, but the mutiny still raged. Men still fought and died, and in Lucknow the mutineers dug defences and built barricades in preparation for the attack that they knew could not be long delayed. For the make-believe Mogul, Bahadur Shah’s, brief, soap-bubble dream of Empire had vanished with the fall of Delhi: Dundu Pant, the Nana Sahib, was a fugitive, and many of the strongholds that the insurgents had won were once more in British hands.
But within the faded, pink-washed walls of the Gulab Mahal the days passed peacefully, and Winter sank into the life of the Rose Palace and became part of it - as she had been part of it in the long-ago days when Juanita and Aziza Begum had been alive and Winter herself a small, black-haired child playing with the painted plaster birds in the room that had been Sabrina’s.
The inmates of the palace frequently forgot that she was not one of them by birth, and she spoke and thought and dreamt in the vernacular as she had done as a child. She busied herself with the same household tasks, and was scolded by Mumtaz and instructed in the mysteries of drying and preserving fruits and spices, of making jasmine oil and soap made from powdered gram, or preparing surma - the black ore of antimony used for beautifying the eyes. There were few idle hours in the Gulab Mahal, and there was always Ameera, and Ameera’s small sons to play with, and other and older children to fly kites with on the roof and to tell stories to, and their mothers to gossip and laugh with.
Twice a day, morning and evening, Winter would go alone to the roof-top where Alex had lived, and look out across the tree-tops and the lovely battered city, towards Lunjore.
‘He is not dead,’ she told Ameera. ‘If he were I should feel it; here, in my heart.’
But there were times when she was not so sure; when terror would suddenly overtake her and she would think of him lying dead or dying in Lunjore - tortured or wounded or sick. And when those black times came upon her she would run to her own room, and the room, as it had always been, was a talisman and a charm that could reassure her and make her believe that all would be well. She had only to lay her hand on the gay, worn curves of Firishta, and stroke his plaster feathers, to feel calm flow back to her as though his touch we
re indeed magic. Alex would come back.
And then in January she had heard news of him at last. Old Dasim Ali, who had friends everywhere, had heard by a roundabout route that there was a Sahib again in Lunjore who had brought back order to the district. He had been protected by a bodyguard of men provided by a Sirdar who had reason to be grateful to him, and with this backing he had taken control of Lunjore, put down the malcontents and set up courts again with native magistrates and judges and native police, so that life was gradually returning to normal. The rumour gave no name, but Winter did not need one. She knew that it must be Alex, and that he had been right to go.
All through January the insurgents had kept up their attacks on the Alam Bagh, but in mid-January the Maulvi had been wounded and driven back. Their inability to carry the Alam Bagh by assault, and the defeats inflicted upon them, disheartened the rebels, and they began to quarrel among themselves, and many drifted away, returning to their own towns and villages. But many more stayed and continued to attack, fighting with ferocity and valour, and towards the end of February a last and desperate assault was launched against the garrison. The Royal Begum of Oudh had accompanied the rebel army in person, together with her Prime Minister and many of the great nobles of Oudh, riding in state on gorgeously caparisoned elephants.
Winter heard the opening of the cannonade in the early morning, and it shook the walls of the pink palace and sent the startled crows and pigeons cawing and whirling above the roofs of the city. But the roar of the guns meant no more to her than the cawing of the crows, for her pains had started before dawn and the guns were only a dim and disregarded background to the ordeal of birth.
It was not an easy birth, and there had been times when Ameera and Mumtaz Begum and Hamida, and others of the women who were continuously in and out of the painted room, had looked at each other in fear and anxiety. But Winter remembered a long, hot, agonizing day in the Hirren Minar, and Alex’s voice talking to Lottie - explaining, encouraging, soothing; and it was as if he spoke to her now as he had spoken then to Lottie; telling her not to be afraid. And she had not been afraid.
Through the waves of pain she could see the pink sunset sky that was the walls of her room; the dear enchanted trees and flowers that swayed in a secret breeze against that sky, and the birds and beasts that had watched her own birth and been her first playthings.
The sun had set and the moon had risen. Ameera had lit the oil-lamp, and her shadow and Hamida’s and other shadows of women moved and leapt upon the walls, and the ceiling was lost in a rosy mist as it had been on the night when Alex had come down from the roof, and on the night that he had left her. And then suddenly she had thought that he was in the room, and had screamed to him by name - a scream that rang out through the open windows and across the silent garden and awoke the echo that lived within the high, encircling walls - ‘Alex!’… Alex! … Alex! … And to the sound of that echo Alex’s son was born.
It was March when the long-expected attack upon Lucknow began, and day after endless day the guns had roared in the city while the streets became battlegrounds and graveyards and charnel houses, and the dead littered every yard of the contested ground.
Colin Campbell’s army - Highlanders, Sikhs, Punjabis, British and Indian regiments of Cavalry and Infantry, Peel’s Naval Brigade and Jung Bahadur’s Gurkhas from Nepal - had stormed the defences and flung themselves on the guns, fighting forward yard by yard through the red, reeking streets; through the storm of grape and canister and round shot and the choking smoke of burning houses; past fortified palaces and over the bodies of the grinning dead, driving the insurgents back from street to street, from building to building …
Curiously enough - or perhaps justly - it was Carlyon who was largely responsible for saving the Gulab Mahal from the sack and slaughter and destruction that overtook almost every house in that shattered city. Mr Lapeuta, Mr Dobbie and Lord Carlyon, Lou Cottar, Mrs Hossack and the children, had all reached safety. And they had told their stories, and told too of Captain Alex Randall’s wife who had remained behind in the house and with the people who had sheltered them. And later, when the Delhi Column had joined Sir Colin Campbell’s force and the army moved to the final attack upon Lucknow, Carlyon had used his considerable influence to urge that the Gulab Mahal should be granted as much protection as was possible in such circumstances. It had been promised him, and even in the frenzy of the fighting the promise had not been forgotten. With the terrible tumult of battle ebbing and surging like a furious sea through the city, rifle-butts had knocked on the barred door of the Gulab Mahal and men’s voices had shouted above the clamour, demanding entrance.
Winter had gone down to them alone, wearing Juanita’s white dress, not knowing who it might be. She had heard the British voices above the din and had opened the gate, tugging at the heavy bars and locks with her small hands - for the gateman had run away in terror - and had opened it at last to see the smoke-blackened, blood-streaked faces that filled the once quiet street.
They were men of the Highland Brigade and half a dozen mounted sowars of Hodson’s Horse, and there was an officer with them. A man on horseback who laughed down at her and dismounted to take her hand. ‘Do you remember me, Mrs Alex? I met you at Delhi - William Hodson.’
‘Yes,’ said Winter, looking up into the white, battle-grimed, laughing face of the man whom Alex had said would always be twenty paces ahead, and thinking that no one who had ever met him would be likely to forget him: ‘I remember.’
‘I cannot stay,’ said Hodson. ‘I came only to tell you that as far as possible this house will be protected. If you see Alex before I do, tell him that the astrologer in Amritsar was right! He will know what that means. But if we get these wretches on the run I may see him before you do.’
He sprang back into the saddle, saluted her, and wheeling his horse galloped away with his men behind him; his face as eager and his eyes as hot and bright and glittering as though he rode to meet a friend or a lover instead of the death that awaited him that day.
The Highlanders had stared at Winter open-mouthed, and had grinned at her. Friendly, amazed, half-shy smiles that had transformed them in an instant from furious, fighting animals with the red haze of killing on their faces, to kindly, ordinary men with wives and children and sweethearts of their own. Then the door had been barred again and an order signed by Sir Colin Campbell himself nailed to it, and while the fighting lasted a guard had stood at the gate and protected the Gulab Mahal from the looting and the frenzy of battle-crazed, blood-drunk troops until the worst of that delirium was past.
Food had become scarce again in the pink stucco palace while the fighting swayed to and fro through the city and none dared venture beyond the walls, and towards the end of the month, when the last resistance had been crushed and the terrible guns were silent, there was little food to be obtained in the broken, burnt-out bazaars, and the shattered city starved.
Winter grew very thin in those days - as did Ameera and Hamida, and many others not only in the pink palace but in all Lucknow. But the baby throve, and her anxiety was not on her son’s account. It was, as it had always been, for Alex. For the fall of Lucknow had not brought peace to Oudh.
General Sir Colin Campbell, the Commander-in-Chief, had committed one of those incomprehensible tactical errors that mar the success of so many campaigns. He had prevented General Outram from cutting off the enemy’s retreat, with the result that the greater part of the opposing army had escaped. And old Dasim Ali, hearing that news, had shaken his head lugubriously and wagged his red beard. If only part of that army crossed into Lunjore, said Dasim Ali, it would go hard with Randall Sahib - if he were there, and still alive.
April brought with it once again a warning of the molten heat to come, and the small bare rooms of the Gulab Mahal seemed airless once more, and stifling. Food was still scarce and milk was still scarcer - but news was scarcest of all, and what there was of it was never reassuring.
The mutiny was being stamped
out, and the savage reprisals that Alex had feared and predicted were accompanying that process - in the old and evil belief that only blood and savagery can repay and wipe out the stain of blood and savagery.
The British troops who had been rushed to the defence of the dying Empire of a ‘Company of Merchants Trading to the East’ expected no quarter and gave none. They went into battle, shouting as their battle-cry ‘Remember Cawnpore! Remember Cawnpore!’ - and they remembered Cawnpore and killed without mercy and hung without mercy; condemning a man as often as not for the colour of his skin as from any proof of guilt.
But although it would be many months yet before peace was fully restored it was already plain that the prophecy that the rule of the Company would end a hundred years after Plassey was to be fulfilled. India had become too great a thing to be the private possession of a Trading Company. It would have to be taken over by the Crown; that long step forward that Alex had spoken of.
‘We have not won back Hind,’ said Walayat Shah, ‘but it was the Company’s Raj that we had hoped to pull down, and, Shook’r Khooda, we have succeeded in that! For now the Company’s Raj will go, and their long reign of robbery and confiscation will be ended.’
Soon it would be May again, and the breathless, burning days that a year ago had seen the fuel catch fire would see it still burning fiercely, though with a dying flame, in Jhansi and Rohilkhand and Gwalior and Oudh. But there was still no news from Lunjore—
