FREE LANCE
George Shipway
Published in 1977 by Mayflower Books Ltd.
First published in Great Britain by Peter Davies Ltd 1975.
Copyright © George Shipway 1975
George Shipway’s knowledge of India and its past, which provides the background to Free Lance, was based upon many years’ living in the country. In 1928 the author was commissioned into the Indian Army, in which he served as an officer for almost twenty years. He returned to England after India became independent and from 1949 to 1968 was a schoolmaster in Hampshire. He became a highly successful professional writer, well-known for such historical novels as Imperial Governor, Knight in Anarchy and The Wolf Time. He wrote nine novels before his death in 1982.
To
The Diminishing Band of Elderly Gentlemen who were once Officers of The Imperial Indian Army
Nearly all of the more improbable episodes in this tale are based on contemporary records. Although the chief characters are fictional, students of the place and period will recognize the prototypes. Their attitudes and outlook, however deplorable in modern eyes, are those of the average Englishman in India at the time.
G.S.
CHAPTER ONE
Wind whispered from the sea and rattled the brittle fronds of the palm trees fringing the shore. There was no coolness in the wind; it stirred with a lesser heat the night’s suffocating air.
Marriott shifted his head on the cushion and groaned. He opened sticky eyelids and stared into the dark. His body felt harsh and scaly, crusted by dried sweat; tiny founts of perspiration spurted beneath his armpits. He turned over laboriously; the movement roused a thudding in his temples and a pain behind his eyeballs like the piercing of a sword.
Crows cawed distantly. The sea breeze carried familiar smells: a sour-sweet scent of mangoes, the sea’s salt tang, burning cowdung, spices and excrement and rotting fish. Warm and glutinous as sewage the miasma clogged his nostrils.
An explosion slammed the stillness. Parrots screeched overhead. Gunfire, Marriott thought irritably: the military announcement that another day had dawned, another day of heat and work and sweat and ragged tempers. Soon his steward would part the mosquito curtains, and the barber gently start to lather his chin. Devil take them, Marriott decided: I shall sleep late this morning; the office will not see me before noon. Ah, God, this headache - what a hellish debauch last night’s set had been!
Face buried in the cushions, Marriott raked his memory. Disjointed pictures flickered behind his eyelids: a rout at the Assembly Rooms - whose entertainment was it? No matter - somebody would know; and tomorrow he would wait upon his hostess. Not today, he was too ill. Then supper at Ellis’s house in the Black Town - what had passed, who was there? Eastwick of the 73rd, Surgeon Harris, Amaury of the cavalry - of course Amaury: he never missed a convivial set - the riotous companions of many gay carousals. They must have pushed the claret about pretty freely, and brandy and arrack punch: nothing less would answer for the pain that thumped his skull, the nausea in his stomach and the deadly sense of impending doom which oppressed his mind. What afterwards? Whist and hazard, for certain. Had he won or lost? Eyes screwed shut, Marriott tried to remember. Useless: the ending of the evening was a blank, a non-existence shrouded by the fumes of tobacco and wine.
Where was Hanuman his steward? - the man always roused him at gunfire. Marriott heard native voices muttering close at hand. What ailed his servants? He opened his eyes, and gazed emptily at a plaited wicker roof a yard above his face, the yellow arabesques decorating curtains which enclosed a pallet strait as a pauper’s coffin.
God’s blood, he was in his palankeen!
Marriott thrust the hangings aside. Four bearers, murmuring among themselves, squatted in a group near by. A solitary palm leaned crookedly against a sky which sunrise washed with a coppery sheen. The breeze, already fading, rustled the dead-brown grass on a slope which climbed to an embrasured wall. Gun muzzles peered from the crest. Two hundred yards away, stark against the dawn, a pillar reared a slender silhouette - Powney’s monument - and beyond it a gallows dangled two limp bodies. Trumpet calls wailed faintly from the barracks within the walls.
The glacis of St George’s Fort, Madras.
Marriott scrubbed his bristles and stirred his muddled memory. The Governor’s swarry, a dinner at the Assembly Rooms and dancing after; and then supper at Ellis’s house. Lord Clive on these occasions directed that the gates stay open until all his guests who lived in the Fort were in. The gates should not have been shut until well after midnight - he must have been too late. Vaguely he recalled an argument with the Gate Guard, and the sergeant’s blunt refusal to unbar so much as a postern. ‘I has me orders, sir’ - in a tone that scarcely veiled his contempt for a drunken civilian, a gentleman maybe, but certainly no officer. The damned superior military!
Well, he had spent the night in his palankeen, and none the worse for that - he was not the first belated traveller to have slept till dawn on the glacis. And now for his house in St Thomé Street, and bed, and the barber’s soothing fingers kneading his scalp. Marriott clapped his hands; the palankeen bearers rose, joined fingertips to forehead in the native salutation and put their shoulders to the poles. He dropped thankfully back on the cushions as they padded up the slope, and swallowed the sudden sickness which the litter’s swaying provoked.
The convolutions of the gateway’s passages enclosed him in a narrow zigzag, roofed and walled, a corridor of suffocating heat. Sentries jumped to attention and then relaxed, leaning on their muskets, when they recognized the traveller. No salutes for civilians, Marriott reflected acidly, except for the chosen few: those ageing, climate-blistered men elected to the Council of Madras. A road bordered by magazines opened on the Parade, a vast open space in the fortress’s heart, trampled smooth by countless feet for a century and more.
The Parade was a busy turmoil, a bustle of noise and movement. St George’s was a township in itself; the fort’s defences - counterscarp and ravelins, bastions and ditch - guarded magazines and barracks, offices and mansions, houses, shops and stores. The streets which divided the buildings disgorged scarlet-coated files who marched and countermarched and wheeled in column and line. Sunlight lanced embrasures and glinted on the bayonets. Cavalry in threes clattered from the barracks beyond St Mary’s church and jingled into line, the horses flecking spume on gold-laced regimentals. Orders cracked like snapping sticks; a veil of dust climbed slowly in the air.
The palankeen bearers hesitated. Marriott made downward motions with his hand, twitched the curtains aside and surveyed the scene. A full garrison muster: what forgotten victory did this ceremony celebrate? His military friends, often garrulously pompous about their abstruse rituals, had given him no hint that a special parade impended. A private soldier stood near by, leaning on a cane, and watched his comrades’ evolutions. The man’s trousers, slit to the knee, revealed a dirty bandage swathing his leg. Marriott looked at the plate on his crossbelts. H.M. 33rd Foot, one of the Seringapatam regiments: the wounded from that affray still thronged St George’s hospital. He poked his head from the curtains and pointed to the square.
‘What does this assembly signify?’
The soldier glanced at Marriott and resumed his frowning stare. ‘A shooting,’ he growled. ‘Deserters - three of ours.’ He hawked and spat. ‘All due for the halberds, they was: drunk on guard. So they broke from the Conjee House and run for it. Was caught somewhere up-country. And now this.’
He glared at the marching troops. ‘It ain’t right. Long service men, all on ’em - marched wi’ Cornwallis in ’92 and helped in fryin’ Tippoo’s hash last year. Makes no odds. Them off’cers on the courts - they goes by the book. Desertion, death, it says - so they damns good men and ret
urns to their cards and booze.’
Sunlight struck sparks from resentful eyes and stressed the pallor of a lined and leathery face. The soldier groped in a cartridge pouch, extracted a twist of tobacco, bit a quid and chewed.
‘’Owsomever,’ he mumbled cryptically, ‘two on ’em still has a chance.’
The troops formed ranks enclosing three sides of the Parade: scarlet infantry jackets crossed by pipeclayed belts, the artillery’s blue and red, the cavalry’s gay uniforms and crested leather helmets, ruddy English faces and brown-skinned serious sepoys. On the open side was a pock-marked earthen bank: a stop butt made for mustketry live firing.
Officers barked commands, turned about, twirled swords point-down and rested hands on hilts. A heavy silence settled upon the square. Through a gap between the cavalry ranks and artillery on their left an officer led ten files of English privates, muskets shouldered, marching slowly. Behind them shambled men in stained white shirts and trousers, and natives carrying a dhooly where a prostrate figure pointed his chin to the sky. Soldiers bore a coffin behind the litter; a firing party followed, grim-faced men with muskets bare of bayonets. A regimental band completed the strange procession; the sunlight sparkled on gilt-scrolled drums and silver trumpets.
The lame private jerked a thumb at the dhooly. ‘Pore beggar’s bin sick for weeks. Can’t walk.’
The cortege wheeled and halted in front of the stop butt. The escort lifted the recumbent man and held him, drooping like an empty sack, beside his fellow prisoners. A drummer stepped from the band, unbuckled his baldric and put the drum in front of them. The officer faced the Parade, unrolled a paper, cleared his throat and read in a strained, hoarse voice.
‘Whereas private men John Bishop, Thomas Churcher and Benjamin Lardiman, all of His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot, have been judged guilty by General Court Martial under the Articles of War of purposeful desertion, the sentence of the Court is that one of them shall be shot to death in the usual manner, that they shall throw dice at the place of execution on a drum head, and he that throws the least number at one cast shall be the man to die.’
A sergeant produced a leather cup, dropped two ivory cubes inside and thrust it into the nearest prisoner’s hand. The patter of the dice on the drum head carried clear across the Parade. The officer stooped.
‘Seven,’ he announced.
The second man grinned broadly, spat in the cup and threw.
‘Nine!’
The rogue capered joyously; then soberly collected the dice and gave the cup to the invalid supported on the shoulders of his comrades. A soldier closed the flaccid fingers round the cup; listlessly he tilted it over the drumskin. A dice bounced and fell in the dust.
‘Foul throw,’ said the officer, lips compressed.
The tension among the watching troops was palpable as the sultry heat which sunlight sucked from the air. Every head was turned towards the group round the drum; sweat drops coursed the strained and sullen faces. The prisoner tried again. Dice trickled from the cup and slid across the drum.
‘Five!’
The man who had thrown first buckled at the knees. His braggart companion seized his collar, hauled him upright and slapped his back. ‘Our luck’s in, cully!’ he said huskily. ‘Why d’yer throw a faint?’ The officer gestured disgustedly; a file closed round the pair and hustled them away.
The procession re-formed, bandsmen leading, the dazed prisoner stumbling between his supporters, his coffin borne in front and the firing party behind. Drums tapped a mournful beat; fifes and bugles played a funeral march. Pacing slowly to the melancholy rhythm they passed within a musket’s length of the three long lines that hemmed the square. Soldiers stared at the ground when Private Lardiman went by; no one looked at the pain-contorted face. By the time they returned to the earthen mound he seemed already dead; his dragging feet scored parallel grooves in the dust.
The coffin was dumped on the ground. The victim knelt on the lid; when the escort released their grip he folded on his heels and squatted native fashion on his haunches. The eyes were closed, his head lolled drunkenly, chin touching chest. A corporal wrapped a kerchief round his face; the ends of the knot flapped sideways like small white wings.
A provost sergeant, stepping smartly, measured six paces’ distance, scratched a line with his halberd’s butt and beckoned the firing party. They shuffled forward, toed the mark.
‘Handle your cartridge!’
Fingers extracted cartridges from pouches.
‘Prime!’
They bit the cartridge ends and trickled powder in the pans.
‘Shut your pans!’
Covers settled gently on the priming.
‘Draw your rammers!’
Thin steel cylinders flashed in the sun, ferrules entered muzzles.
‘Ram down cartridge!’
A man bungled his loading, dropped his rod, stooped hastily to retrieve it. The sergeant cursed beneath his breath.
The wounded private spoke to Marriott without turning his head. ‘Nervous as kittens, they are. None on ’em has seen an execution afore. You can'see ’em ashake from here.’
Marriott clenched his hands till the nails dug into his palms.
The sergeant marched to his officer, halted in a spurt of dust and saluted.
‘Firing party loaded, sir!’
The officer nodded curtly, licked his lips and filled his lungs.
‘Party, cock your locks!’
A ragged clicking tapped the silence.
‘Present... fire!’
Crows in hundreds swirled from the trees; a strident cawing overlaid the echoes. Smoke, grey-white and greasy, hung like a ragged curtain between musketeers and target. An acrid tang of powder drifted on the air.
The prisoner’s head jerked up, his body quivered. He stayed squatting on the coffin.
The provost sergeant vented an obscenity, dropped his halberd, tugged a pistol from his belt and ran, cocking as he went. He put muzzle to the prisoner’s nape, hard against the bandage, and fired. The body toppled crookedly from a little cloud of smoke. Bandage and face had gone. A crimson mess remained.
Marriott rolled from the palankeen, propped himself on hands and knees and vomited. The soldier with the cane studied him impassively, squirted tobacco juice between his teeth and hobbled away.
‘What is the matter, Charles?’
An officer bridling a restive stallion regarded Marriott amusedly - a splendid figure wearing scarlet regimentals parted at the breast to show an azure waistcoat spangled by gilded buttons. Cream-coloured buckskin breeches vanished into riding boots which gleamed like polished ebony; a shining leather helmet sprouted a horsehair crest. The black charger snorted through his nostrils, seemingly aware of the magnificent picture he and his rider presented.
Hugo Amaury, captain in the Honourable East India Company’s 7th Madras Native Cavalry, famous swordsman, notorious duellist and a hero of the Mysore War.
‘A passing sickness,’ Marriott muttered. ‘I shall be myself within the minute.’
‘Charles, my boy, you punished the claret last night!’ Twinkling sky-blue eyes belied the solemn tone. ‘Brandy and porter after. No wonder...’
‘It is not the drink alone. But there--’ Marriott flapped a hand towards the Parade. The regiments were marching off, stepping briskly to the tune of ‘Nancy Dawson’. A little group was gathered round the coffin; a staccato hammering broke the cadence of the bandsmen’s lively rhythm. ‘That bungled execution ...’
Amaury raised his eyebrows. ‘How so? I have seen worse. The 74th shot a runaway after the fight at Malavelly. An officer went to give the coup de grace and, believe me or not, he missed at a handsbreadth range! Had to reload his pistol there and then, while the half-dead wretch thrashed at his feet like a stranded fish!’ Amaury laughed. ‘I have never seen a man in such a taking!’ Marriott sank back in his palankeen and grunted an order. Amaury walked his horse alongside. ‘I shall see you set to rights in your quarters. Parades
are done for the day. ’Twas more than enough - we saddled before light!’
The palankeen stopped outside a flat-roofed, three-storied house in St Thomé Street, a narrow canyon between tall white- plastered mansions fashioned largely in the Palladian style. Amaury handed his horse to the sice who trotted at heel; the two men climbed a stairway to a wide central hall whence, through a door on the right, they entered a lofty chamber, gloomy after the glare outside; at sunrise every window was shuttered against the heat. Marriott clapped his hands.
‘Holloa, boy, boy!’
Natives appeared from the shades, silent-footed men in long white gowns and plate-like turbans. Marriott lifted his arms; a servant removed the crumpled olive-green coat and winestained waistcoat, breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. Stripped to shirt and drawers he doused his head in a basin; water sprayed the plastered floor. Amaury removed helmet and coat, reclined gracefully in a rattan chair and looked pensively at his friend.
‘Charles,’ he observed during a pause in the splashing, ‘I think it time you hauled a trifle on the curb. Have you any remembrance of the play last night?’
Marriott towelled his hair, draped the cloth round his shoulders and slumped on a teakwood stool. ‘Very little. I recollect the dice ran against me. Ellis, I believe, had all the luck.’
‘Indeed. Hazard, apparently, is not your game. You finished a hundred pagodas in his debt.’
Around forty guineas, Marriott reflected despondently. Moreover Ellis - and others - still held his notes of hand for lesser sums. Confound it, what a stew! He submitted his face to the barber, felt the cool blade stroke his cheek, closed burning eyes.
He said, ‘An Indiaman is due to berth this month. She carries upon my requisition twenty pipes of Madeira. In Hyderabad they should fetch a liberal profit, and clear every fanam I owe.’
‘Private trade,’ said Amaury sardonically, ‘the salvation of the Company’s covenanted servants! We humble soldiers exist on our pay alone.’
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