Nizams Daughters mh-2

by Allan Mallinson

  He smiled. What simple loyalties fighting men enjoyed! ‘You don’t understand. I’m doing this because I’ve left myself no other course — because I’ve made such a hopeless job of the thing I was sent here to do!’

  ‘I could not care less. I have my reasons too. Just tell me what it is you would have of me!’

  Hervey would lose no time with any expression of gratitude, for he knew he could not express it sufficiently with brevity. ‘First, you could see that no harm comes to Emma Lucie. Get her out of Chintalpore — to Guntoor if you can.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And then I want you to go to Jhansikote and take charge there.’

  Locke nodded again, and smiled broadly. ‘I do have one question though. Would it not be better to see off the Pindarees first before turning to the nizam’s redoubts? If, as you say, he will take no offensive action against Chintal, what’s to be feared having him at our rear?’

  He had a point, though not one that Hervey had overlooked. ‘Do you recall what the Duke of Marlborough was said to have declared about campaigning — that no war could be fought without good and early intelligence?’

  Locke nodded.

  ‘Well, that’s more the essence of our problem than those guns themselves. We are, so to speak, like a prizefighter who’s blindfold. We surmise the purpose of the nizam’s men on the lower plains is no more than to rattle our nerve, that they have no offensive intent.’

  ‘Ay,’ said Locke, furrowing his brow more, ‘but you claimed — and convincingly — that the nizam could not risk taking such action. And for him to do so on the plains, which are so much closer to the Company’s territories, makes no sense at all.’

  Hervey nodded. ‘Yes, but what if his troops gave battle not as soldiers of Haidarabad but as Pindarees? They would be able to throw the whole of lower Chintal into confusion, cause the rajah to flee and give the nizam pretext for marching in to restore order.’

  Locke’s mouth fell open. ‘Hervey, that’s fiendish. Why did you not say all this in the rajah’s chamber?’

  ‘For two reasons. First, I could not be sure who might hear — nor even could I be sure of the discretion, perhaps even the loyalty, of all that were in the chamber. And second — and I am most loath to say this, for I admire so much in the man — the rajah is not of the most resolute disposition, at least for the present. If he flees Chintalpore it will be the end.’

  Locke blew out his breath in a gesture that acknowledged the true extent of the danger. ‘And you still believe that disabling those guns is the key?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hervey, and with some assurance. ‘We may take our chances with the Pindarees, but if they were backed by those guns, I think it another matter.’

  ‘You think the nizam could simply move those great things the other side of Chintal?’

  ‘Let me put it to you thus, my dear fellow,’ replied Hervey, smiling. ‘From my reading of history, whenever a plan has depended upon the enemy’s not being able to move guns into a certain position, it has been overthrown by the very fact of his doing so!’

  ‘Yes, but here—’

  ‘Even here — even with these forests and hills. What about the Godavari? Now that Haidarabad appears, in practice, to have immunity from dastak, who knows what is moved along the river? Don’t lose heart, though. We shall be fighting the Pindarees with relief at hand — for I can’t think it will be long before the Company is able to despatch the subsidiary force. In any case, I’ll send urgent appeal to the collector this very day. What I want you to do, my dear Locke, is to drill the rajah’s infantry as light companies, for we shall have to bustle them about as nobody’s business. And have them ready, if you will, in three days’ time to take to the field. Tonight I shall leave with half a troop and the galloper guns for the west — I would do so earlier if this heat were not so punishing. And first I shall have it spread abroad that all of the rajah’s troops are to march on the nizam’s redoubts — for having us so march is their purpose. There are agents aplenty in Chintalpore: the false news will not take long to reach the guns.’

  Locke looked puzzled. ‘Why do you want them to believe that all the rajah’s men are marching west?’

  ‘So that, my good friend, they are not tempted to move the guns. If they do, I cannot very well destroy them!’

  Locke, knowing now the full risk of the enterprise, would hold Hervey in even higher regard than he had after the mutiny. He knew he could never match the acuity with which his erstwhile junior examined a problem. He could count himself just as brave in battle, but he knew that courage was more than that. It required nerve. That, indeed, was how Nelson and Hoste would have had it. And he did not, in his heart, trust he had nerve in the same measure.

  All this he admitted freely to his nautch girl, the Maharashtrian beauty whom Hervey had first been suspicious of for her cloying attachment, but whom latterly he had come to believe was, in her affections, wholly genuine. She helped him make ready for his ride to Jhansikote, bringing him ripe figs from the palace gardens for the journey. And as he set out, when the full heat of the day was beginning to abate, there were large tears in her eyes, and entreaties that he would return to her unharmed. Had Locke given it but a second’s thought he would have known it an unlikely possibility — about as great as leading a boarding party against a deck swept by carronades. But his relish for the fight was growing by the hour, and after Jhansikote nothing seemed impossible. He kissed each eye gently — and then her lips with all the passion that was welling for the battle to come. ‘I shall be back,’ he said defiantly; ‘and then you shall come with me to England!’

  Half an hour before dawn, Hervey stepped down from the saddle in a nullah close to the nizam’s redoubts. He had ridden hard all night. There had been — just as on the ride to Jhansikote on the night of the mutiny — an obliging moon, and there had been stretches of the road on which he could put Jessye into a hand-gallop. For the rest of the time they had trotted hard, except when she was in need of respite or where they came upon a hackery travelling by night to escape, as they, the heat of the day. Those travellers who were on foot — and there were many — simply stood aside as they heard the pounding hooves. Hervey, Johnson and the Maratha subedar had made the forty miles between Chintalpore and here in six hours, and their horses had yet something in reserve.

  Behind them, hurrying at best speed, was a halftroop of the rajah’s cavalry (Hervey had specified not fewer than thirty sowars) and two galloper guns. But since these were coming from Jhansikote they would be four hours behind at least. He wanted all the time he could to think of some way to overcome the guns, however, and he knew, from long experience in the Peninsula, that if he could observe the routine of a defended position at first light it would reveal the best means of proceeding against it. He loosened Jessye’s girth and unfastened the noseband on her bridle so that she could pull at the couch grass: he would give her some of the oats he carried later. As he stood rubbing her ears, wondering what he might see when the sun revealed the redoubts to his telescope, Johnson handed him a tin cup. ‘Tea, sir,’ he said simply.

  ‘Tea?’ said Hervey incredulously. They had only just arrived, yet the cup was hot to the touch. Not even Johnson could have brewed tea in the saddle!

  ‘Ay, tea.’

  ‘Well tell me, man: how in heaven’s name have you hot tea so quickly?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ and he went to retrieve the tea’s conveyance. ‘Here, can you make it out?’ — it was very dark now that the moon had set — ‘It’s a stone bottle which keeps ’ot with this charcoal ’ere in a cooker underneath. And it all fits together in a tin ’arness. I bought it in t’bazaar.’

  Dark as it was, Hervey grasped the principle and wondered why he had not seen the same on campaign. Perhaps, however, in the everyday of the Indian bazaar or the London emporium, such a thing seemed overcontrived for its simple product. Yet no-one who had been on campaign would ever undervalue hot tea before stand-to on a day when battle was expecte
d.

  ‘Johnson,’ he said simply, with a note of disbelieving admiration, ‘I do not know how I should fare without you!’

  They ate some chapattis and gave the horses a little corn, and soon the first shafts of daylight were piercing the darkness behind them. He told Johnson to take the three horses a little way back along the nullah, and then he and the subedar ascended its sides, and a hillock no wider than a dewpond, so that they might spy out the strength of the nizam’s lure. He was confident they would be able to do so undetected: the subedar knew the ground well from many a patrol, and the dastak official whom they had sought out at the village a mile or so back had confirmed that here exactly was where they would see the redoubts. He would have wished the sun were not rising behind them, for it risked their exposure in silhouette to an observer still concealed by the darkness. But then, had the positions been reversed, he would not have been able to use his telescope for fear of the sun’s reflection on its lens. In any case, avoiding a silhouette was but part of the scouting cavalryman’s art: he must find some background cover — a bush, or suchlike.

  They found a handy euphorbia and crawled under its protecting greenery. Hervey took out his telescope and searched in the direction the official had indicated. He had first been surprised there were no campfires, and now, with the glass to his eye, he could find no flame, no movement — no activity whatever. And there was not a sound, either. These, truly, were soldiers of high discipline, he muttered to the subedar.

  As the light grew, almost with each tick of Hervey’s full hunter, he was able at last to make out one of the redoubts. ‘The guns must be run in: I can see nothing of them,’ he whispered, rubbing the condensation from the eyepiece before taking a further look. It was the same with the second redoubt: the embrasure could be made out clear enough, but again the gun appeared to be run in. He found the third: it was the same. Surely the guns would be run out for the dawn stand-to? Yet each of the eight redoubts looked, in the half-light, asleep, inattentive — not even the sign of a sentry. If only he now had the halftroop and the galloper guns: he wagered he could storm each in turn and take them at the point of the sword. Scarcely would the enemy have time to rouse! He even thought of rushing the nearest redoubt himself and, with the subedar, turning the gun on the other seven. But he knew well enough that, so alerted, they would overpower him first. No, he would have to wait another night and take each by stealth. But then he had spread word that the rajah’s troops were advancing: they would be waiting tomorrow, alert — surely?

  The sun was now glinting over the hills to the east, the light growing ever stronger. After five more minutes, still peering through his telescope, Hervey started suddenly: ‘Great heavens! There’s no-one there — no-one at all!’

  The subedar looked at him in astonishment. ‘Why would they build redoubts like that and then abandon them as quickly, sahib?’

  ‘I don’t know, Subedar sahib; I simply don’t know.’

  He called for the horses, but as he did so there was a fearful squeal from one of them, and then squeals from all three. ‘What in God’s name is Johnson doing?’ he rasped as they scrambled down the hillock and into the nullah. The squealing continued as they ran to where Johnson was struggling to keep hold of the reins of the three terrified animals — rearing, jumping and kicking in a manner he had rarely seen. ‘What is it Johnson? What’s got into them?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir; they was all just ’aving a bit of this couch grass and suddenly they all goes barmy!’

  ‘Snake, sahib! They are panicking because of snake!’

  There was no sign of a snake, however.

  ‘They know when there is snake, sahib; it is most likely gone by now, though.’

  The horses were, indeed, settling. Hervey took Jessye’s reins and brought his hand up to her muzzle to reassure her. ‘Oh God,’ he said suddenly. ‘Subedar sahib, come look here: there’s blood on her nose!’

  The subedar took one look and sucked in air between his teeth. ‘It is snakebite, sahib — no mistake.’

  Hervey looked closer and saw the tell-tale pinpricks from which the blood oozed. He went cold with dread: he had heard of horses dying within minutes of a snakebite. Jessye was now standing stock-still, her legs spread as if to keep herself braced. She began to pant. Only a month before Waterloo he had read of a condition described as ‘shock’, explaining why he had seen horses most cruelly mutilated on the battlefield which had not succumbed, and yet others with little apparent injury failing to recover. The paper suggested it was a collapse of the respiratory system — and Jessye’s quickened breathing, and now her sweating flanks, pointed to just this. He called for a knife, but then decided against making free with it across the bite since the poison would already be deep. He took off the saddle and bridle as she began to shake.

  In a while her forelegs began to buckle and she almost fell to the ground, just managing instead to drop unsteadily to her knees and then to roll onto her side. She lay sweating prodigiously, her breathing now growing shallow. ‘Sahib, send to the village for sadhu,’ pleaded the subedar.

  Hervey had to check himself: the subedar’s plea was well meant, but he wanted no fakir dancing about his mare. He knew in his heart that nothing could be done for her, nothing that could arrest the poison’s evil, now deep in her vitals. Would Selden have bled her? The poison was in her blood, and bleeding would remove some of it, would it not? But Selden had always been so sceptical of bleeding. He would surely urge that not one drop of blood was better placed than in a vein. Jessye had survived so much — three years of the Peninsula, and then Waterloo. To succumb now to something that slithered in the couch grass was ignoble, the basest of ends — like Edmonds’s death to the first volley in that battle. He pulled his pistol from the saddle and began to prime it. He would not let her end come from a serpent: better that she die at the hand of a friend. He lifted her head, and she grunted. He pulled her ears, blew in her nostrils, wiped the blood from her muzzle, keeping the pistol out of sight as tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Is she in pain, Subedar sahib?’

  ‘No sahib, she not in pain. Snake’s poison in horse only make it sleep in peace. Let me fetch sadhu, sahib. He know many mantras to draw out poison.’

  ‘Thank you, Subedar sahib, but no. I can feel her slipping away even as we speak.’ He brought the pistol to her head, gently but firmly putting the barrel to the fossa over her left eye so that the ball would not strike bone. He pulled the hammer back carefully to full cock, the ‘click’ as it engaged in the notch of the trigger arm seeming louder than he had ever heard. He prayed it would take just the one round… and then he drew the pistol away. ‘If she is in no pain, let her lie in the sun at rest, Subedar sahib. Let her remaining time be peaceful. I don’t want her to hear another shot: she’s heard too many.’

  ‘Yes, sahib; let her pass in peace with the sun on her.’

  It had been no more than five minutes since he heard the commotion, but he knew he should now be about the business of the guns. Every instinct, every precept he had been taught and every lesson from life told him so, for in war, time was the only commodity which, once lost, could not be regained. ‘Johnson, stay with her until…’ He found himself choking on the words. ‘And then have her buried — I don’t want her on a pyre.’

  ‘Ay sir,’ replied Johnson quietly, just as moved at her plight, for he had been with Hervey, and therefore Jessye, for more than three years.

  He cradled her head to his chest and whispered a farewell in her ear, tears now running freely. He gave Johnson a handful of silver to see to her burial. ‘There will be men in the village who will dig. Find whatever horse you can to get back to Chintalpore.’

  Then he sprang up with all the resolve he could muster and leapt into the saddle of Johnson’s mount. ‘Come, Subedar sahib,’ he called briskly, his face streaked where the tears had washed the caked dust. He dug his spurs into the little Arab, and did not look back.

  The redoubts were as empty as if they h
ad never been occupied. Except that there was the unmistakable spoor of heavy guns — and easy to follow, for their wheel-ruts were as deep again as those of the wagons that had accompanied them. Hervey soon found the tracks of eight pieces converging beside the Godavari. This could not be a fording place, surely? There was no exit that he could see on the far bank. Had the nizam withdrawn his guns, therefore? Surely not on hearing that the rajah’s troops were marching west. There must therefore have been some interior cause for withdrawal, but it seemed unusually coincident. Which left only the possibility that the guns were taken downstream. To Chintalpore? Or to the Pindarees? If Haidarabad had known that the rajah’s forces were not moving west after all — that they were not, indeed, to be drawn by this lure — then the nizam’s men would have removed the guns at once. But how might Haidarabad have learned of this? Hervey had, after all, told only one man. Surely he and Locke had not been overheard? Surely Locke had not…? And then came the awful realization: the Maharashtri girl. Like the wretched Samson at Gaza, groaned Hervey, who ‘weakly to a woman revealed it’. He groaned again: Locke — brave, true, foolish. ‘O impotence of mind, in body strong!’

  But what was the purpose now of railing? Indeed, the guns, if they were on the river, were powerless. With the lightest galloper gun he could force them to surrender, or even send them to the bottom! He looked again at the river, to the middle where the stream seemed fastest. A tree trunk bobbed obligingly by, giving him the chance to assess the speed. It seemed little more than marching pace, and since there was no breeze he estimated that barges carrying the guns could not exceed a horse’s jogtrot. They had had, perhaps, six hours’ start at most. They might be, say, forty miles downstream — at Chintalpore. His heart sank. But his duty was clear either way: if the guns were making for Chintalpore, his place was back at the rajah’s palace. And if they had not been able to make such speed…

  He swung the mare round. ‘Subedar sahib,’ he shouted, ‘the guns are on the river between us and Chintalpore. We are going to destroy them!’