Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

‘Not a chance, God rot ’em! Now, pick up your heels and follow me.’ And he made a tangent to the left. Here the ground was rough, matted with unscythed grass and treacherous with unseen obstacles; but fear carried us over it safely, and within a few seconds we were in the grove of trees in which were situated the ice-pits, those queer beehivelike structures of thatch which had once so captivated my mind with their ingenuity.

  Needing no instructions now, we crouched behind the thatch deepest in the shadow, hearing above our own gasps for breath the sound of shouts, hoarse laughter and hoofbeats growing momentarily nearer.

  ‘They’ll make straight for the house,’ Oliver whispered, trying to reassure us, ‘and we are off their route. Just keep quiet until they have passed.’

  His voice was calm and, to my astonishment, now that I was nearer true peril than ever before in my life, I felt comparatively collected myself. Every sense was alerted and quivering with a rare sensitivity; never had my hearing been so acute, nor my eyes so fully adapted to darkness, and my mind raced, relating every smallest fact recorded by eyes, ears and nose to a reality already half apprehended. Even my body felt light and capable of extraordinary exertion. This, then, was the experience of danger. I knew now where lay the attraction in climbing mountains or shooting big game. Danger induced a sense of super-normality in the midst of fear that made men, for an instant, the kin of gods … or perhaps, more accurately, most truly human.

  So we waited, holding our breaths, as the troop approached us, and I was glad for no rational reason that I was next to Oliver Erskine, and that his body shielded me from seeing round the edge of the domed thatch.

  The noise was not loud; rather, it was controlled and ominous, though men called to each other and shouted. Somehow, it indicated a confidence that was unnerving to us, hiding like foxes in a covert. After what seemed an age, they had passed. We gave them more time, then Oliver peered round the ice-house.

  ‘All clear—but keep your voices down. There might be stragglers.’

  ‘What can we do now? For God’s sake, Oliver, we have got to get Emily and the baby out of here,’ whispered Charles. ‘Where were you taking us in the first place? Can’t we make a run for it, before they discover we have left?’

  ‘Not a chance! There’s a cellar under the flag floor of Moti’s house, she suggested it herself. It would have been safe enough, but too far. Too risky with the beggars all around us.’

  ‘Then what the devil …’

  Oliver had turned his attention to Yakub Ali, who was whispering to him.

  ‘He’s right, by God!’ he said, turning back to us. ‘This is as good a place as any.’ He patted the thick thatch of the ice-house. ‘This stuff is in two layers, and Yakub says a man can lie comfortably between the two. We’ll soon find out.’

  He began to pull out large sections of thatch from the edge of the roof, but Yakub, who had been examining the structure, beckoned Oliver to him. He had found a place where the thatch had already fallen out or disintegrated. Peering over Oliver’s shoulder into the slit this made, I felt rather than saw a space of about twenty inches between the two stout layers of thatch and dried palm leaves.

  ‘In with you, Laura, and be ready to take the bundles.’

  I did not like being the first to enter. There would be insects and mice; perhaps even scorpions, or snakes, and what if … but the thought of the thatch on fire was too awful to formulate.

  ‘Get in,’ whispered Oliver again impatiently. ‘Even if it doesn’t hold, you haven’t far to fall.’

  I believe he was joking, but at the time his remark added one more fear to my litany of horrors.

  All that met me, as I crawled and clawed my way in, was a smothering cloud of dust. I could not stop myself from coughing and, though I did so as quietly as possible, was met by a harsh ‘Be quiet, will you!’ from below me as the bundles were pushed into the aperture. My eyes smarted, my nose was full of powdery grass and I nearly choked, so that I am not sure how long it took for us all to dispose ourselves around the central cone of the roof and arrange our luggage. But soon everyone was coughing and spluttering, even, as I was pleased to realize, the impatient Mr Erskine. Yakub Ali remained outside, and in response to Oliver’s whispered instructions we could hear him stuffing back the thatch that had been displaced by our entrance and sweeping up the odd wisps that must have littered the ground.

  ‘Khub thik hai ab!’ he whispered, and Oliver thanked him. We could not hear his footsteps as he departed.

  ‘What will happen to him now?’ I enquired anxiously. ‘Wouldn’t he be safer with us?’

  ‘He will be all right. He can make his way out without difficulty. No one will know he was with us.’

  ‘He won’t tell them, will he?’ I was ashamed to have to suspect, even so negatively, the stolid, prosaic Yakub, always so dignified and imperturbable; but I had thought of the abandoned gong in the porch, and the deserted bedrooms, and the motionless punkah. They had all known what was coming, but no one had warned us. No one but Moti. Which could only mean that there was danger to them in their association with us.

  ‘We must hope not,’ returned Yakub’s master.

  ‘And, Oliver …?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Have you thought that they might … they might set these roofs on fire. If they burn the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Sparks won’t do it. Too far, and the trees will protect us. They might fire them deliberately, but that’s a risk we have to take. They won’t suspect us of hiding in these things; there are no doors. The thatch is lifted off when the ice is removed. And they know how—er, delicate, English ladies are.’

  ‘Oh!’

  I lapsed into silence and tried to pray; but within moments, the quiet was broken by yells that even in the distance were unmistakably enraged. Our escape had been discovered.

  In the dust-filled darkness of our hiding place, we strained our ears to try to make out what was taking place, but it was difficult even to estimate distance correctly. Horses galloped past two or three times in the direction from which the mutineers had come and then doubled back on their tracks towards the house and out through the main entrance to the park. Oliver, listening intently, chuckled.

  ‘They have found the carriage tracks. Must have been a devil of a job in this darkness, even though I told Tod to fill it with fodder and make sure to cut corners across the flowerbeds. Perhaps some of the servants saw it go.’

  ‘They will know we were not in it then.’

  ‘No, it was the closed travelling carriage, blinds modestly down. There were trunks and band-boxes strapped to the back; Toddy took care of that. It will puzzle them, for a time at least.’

  ‘So you had it all planned.’

  ‘I thought so, but I misjudged the time of their coming—for which my apologies,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Very clever,’ I answered acidly.

  The noise continued for hours—all through the long hot night. I wondered why no attempt was made to search the grounds for us, until I remembered the looting and the open wine cellar. Suddenly, a thought struck me.

  ‘If they are Mohammedans they won’t drink, will they?’

  ‘Not as Mohammedans. But as looters, I fancy they will allow themselves some indulgence.’

  When the early dawn began to force slivers of dusty light through the thatch above us, the sounds outside became more dispersed and, at the same time, easier to recognize. I had dozed a little, but was fully awake to the departure of the elephants, trumpeting angrily at being driven by strange mahouts. A little later, the draft bullocks were driven out and then, as the light grew stronger, the horses passed in the distance, whinnying and dancing in distress. I thought of my roan, Pyari, and of Oliver’s great bay beast, handled by strangers and perhaps with cruelty, and for the first time felt more angry than frightened. Then, later again, horsemen galloped past us, very close, along the path to the garden pavilion.

  ‘Oh, O
liver! Moti? Will she be all right there?’ I asked. ‘They seem to be making towards the tower.’

  ‘She’s safe enough. She said she would leave for Cawnpore, and by now she should be well on her way. Even if she were here, she’d be all right so long as she kept her temper, but she’s liable to throw something at them.’

  I remembered her reception of me, and smiled. ‘Yakub will have told her why we did not reach the tower. She’ll have left by now,’ Oliver said again, as though reassuring himself.

  Some time after this—the sun was already gaining strength and I was sweating as I lay half asleep with my face buried in my arms—I thought I heard a faint scream, but no one else stirred and I said nothing. By then, the shouts and noise from the house had almost ceased, and I forgot the half-heard scream as we became aware of the smell of burning.

  ‘Oh, Oliver! Oh, the house!’ Emily wailed. ‘Oliver, they have set fire to the dear old house.’

  ‘Blast them for destructive swine!’ cursed Charles, but Oliver said nothing. Beside me, I felt his body stiffen, but he said nothing.

  Of that day of heat and fear, of thirst and cramped discomfort, my recollections are acute. Even now, I sometimes wake at night gasping for breath because my nostrils are full of dust, straw and the scent of fire.

  The sun rose, swiftly and inexorably, beating down upon us, despite the shade of the little copse in which we lay. The thatch gave us protection from the glare but none from the heat, which was intensified by the airlessness. We could move if we wished to; lie on our backs, stomachs or sides, but every movement created such a choking fog of straw dust that we found cramp almost easier to endure. The thatch was full of rustlings and small movements, and as the light grew, insects of all kinds emerged to run across our faces and hands and tangle themselves in our hair.

  The baby slept, a deep uneasy sleep. We had laid her, practically naked, on her shawl, and Emily and I took turns to keep the insects away, the light filtering through the worn thatch serving us to this extent. Sometimes she rolled about disconsolately, uttering little cries, but all in her drugged sleep.

  Poor Charles suffered the most, I think. Already raw with prickly heat and suffering from a series of unpleasant boils, he was unable to find comfort but lay sweating profusely and enduring agonies of irritation to save us from the suffocating effects of any movement he might make.

  All of us fought thirst. I began to long for water very early in the day, at about that hour when we should have been enjoying fragrant tea on the verandah. I determined to say nothing, knowing that all suffered alike, but when I dozed my troubled dreaming was all of water: of streams cascading down green hillsides, fountains spilling back into rounded basins, leather buckets pouring their limpid contents into the irrigation canals in the garden—even of raindrops beating against window panes. So preoccupied was I with thirst that I felt no hunger at all. Just below us lay a great quantity of ice, stored up from the brief winter frosts, but even if one of the men had risked leaving our hiding-place in daylight, or if we had been able to burrow through the lower layer of thatch on which we lay, a pickaxe would have been needed to free the ice from its bed, and we had none. The thought of it there, just below, tortured me all day.

  And all day the great pink house suffered in its death throes, fighting the flames that sought to devour it. So solidly built, roofed with tiles instead of thatch, it put up a long struggle, but the flames won at last, and as the day wore on, our dim refuge was several times illuminated as a great tongue of victorious fire forced itself into the overhanging smoke, to be followed by a roar of falling beams and disintegrating masonry, as part of the roof, or an angle of wall, collapsed into the inferno beneath. I thought of Danielle, of her jade, porcelain and crystal, so lovingly collected over so many years, and of Old Adam’s library. I thought of the effort, of the caring, of the time that had been put into creating the oasis of civilization that had been Hassanganj, all gone in one spiteful day, and I came near to real hate.

  When the day was at its hottest, I was woken by Oliver shaking my shoulder and holding a flask to my lips.

  ‘Drink up,’ he said as I opened my eyes. I shook my head. It was the flask he normally filled with brandy when he went duck shooting in the early mornings. The very thought of that scorching liquor on my dry tongue made me want to vomit.

  ‘Come on now … it’s water. Only water.’ Unbelievingly, I took a sip. It was warm and tasted slightly of brandy, but nevertheless it was water.

  ‘Go on. Drink away. We’ve all had some.’ So I raised myself on one elbow and drank. It cleared my head; and my first reaction was annoyance. Why had he kept it from us for so long? Hadn’t he guessed how thirsty we would be?

  I saw him grin in the half-light.

  ‘We have only two flasks; no sense in telling you until we really needed them. You don’t know what thirst is yet, but this will have to do you until five o’clock this evening, so stop grumbling. What did you expect me to have—a mushak full?’

  Afterwards I fell into a deep sleep, from which I did not wake until late afternoon. The house was still smouldering. We ate hunks of buttered bread and slices of meat that Charles took out of his shooting bag. It was an effort to force the stuff down my throat, but Oliver had warned us that there would be no water until we had eaten and, like children, we obeyed him. The second flask was passed round. Immediately I felt better and my spirits rose. It was cooler now, and in less than two hours would be dark. Pearl was beginning to whimper and her sleep seemed lighter. Emily, I knew, was longing for her to wake, not only to reassure herself of the child’s health, but to ease her aching, over-full breasts.

  When it had been dark for a full hour, Oliver decided to move. We covered the baby with her shawl, and our own faces with our clothing as he set to work reopening the aperture by which we had entered. He slid his body through it to the ground. I was just about to follow him, when he ordered me to stay where I was. He would take a look around and we were not to stir until he got back.

  ‘You might never come back!’ I pointed out irritably.

  ‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But don’t waste time wishing me dead. I’m as fond of my own skin … as I am of yours!’ He was gone before the words had sunk in or I had thought of a retort.

  CHAPTER 6

  I resigned myself to another period of waiting, but more cheerfully, and it did not seem long before Oliver’s voice was telling me to get out, and his hands were pulling at the thatch to assist my descent into the open air. Stiff and cramped beyond bearing, I would have fallen as my feet touched the ground had he not held me upright. His face, close to mine for a moment, was strained and grim, and I realized in the midst of my own discomfort how much he must be suffering at the loss of his home.

  After a moment I was able to stamp the circulation back into my legs, and gasped in great lungfuls of smoky air as he helped the others out in their turn. Not until we all stood together in the darkness behind the ice-house, giggling shakily in mingled relief and nervousness, did I notice his clothes. In place of his drab trousers and alpaca jacket, he wore now the baggy pyjamas, long loose shirt and starched turban of a Pathan, with a red velvet waistcoat covering his chest, and crossing it a pair of bandoliers such as Ishmial wore. Probably the things were Ishmial’s, I thought, but then remembered the talk in Lucknow so long ago when someone had hinted with disapproval that he assumed ‘native dress’. To judge by the ease with which he carried his strange apparel, perhaps they had been right.

  ‘Why, Oliver, how funny you look,’ exclaimed Emily. ‘Do we all have to dress up like you?’ The thought appealed to her.

  ‘Not just now, but later perhaps. First, we have to get out of the compound and find Ishmial and the bullock-cart which I hope he has managed to get for us. There’s no one around, neither our own folk nor the others, but go quietly and keep in the shadow.’

  Charles took Pearl from Emily and the rest of us picked up our various bundles and followed Oliver, who carried a mysterious b
urden that had not been with us in the thatch under one arm, and a rifle on the other.

  Our direction took us away from the house, but I turned back several times to watch the rosy glow of the smoke still rising from the ruins. Of the house itself, I could see nothing. It must have collapsed thoroughly into itself. Presently, we arrived at the high boundary wall that enclosed the whole park, and followed it for perhaps ten stumbling minutes. Then Oliver, placing his bundle and rifle on the ground, scaled the wall with disconcerting ease and, sitting crouched on the top in the shadow of a tree, gave a low whistle. Instantly, he was answered. In a few moments, amid the lamentations of Emily and only too aware of torn clothing, scraped knees and broken fingernails, we were all over the wall and on the edge of a rutted country track where waited Ishmial (a close approximation of his master now), Toddy-Bob and a bullock-cart.

  My relief was great on seeing those two familiar figures, but, wasting no words on greeting, Oliver strode to the cart and came back with a large earthenware jar full of water and a copper container of food. It was native food—chapattis, vegetable curry and lentils—and we ate it with relish; having at last had our fill of water, we were able to turn our full attention to our plight.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ Oliver grunted, standing up and rubbing his hands inelegantly on the seat of his baggy trousers, while Charles wiped the curry from his moustache with a grubby handkerchief. ‘Now get into these all of you, and you too, Toddy-Bob, and no argument!’ His voice was harsh and his manner brusque, but under the circumstances, who could blame him?

  Oliver pulled apart the bundle he had carried and threw us each a voluminous tentlike garment of heavy cotton called a burqha … such garments as Muslim women wear when outside their homes to protect themselves from the gaze of males.

  ‘Not me, Guv’nor!’ Toddy-Bob objected immediately.

  ‘Yes, you. God knows how you have managed so long in those clothes as it is.’

  ‘I only been out by night, as you well know—and then I ’ad me ’at off,’ Toddy said in an injured tone, removing his high coachman’s hat as he spoke and holding it behind his back. ‘S’truth, Guv’nor! You can’t expect me to wear no Muslim nightgown! Really you can’t! Tells you what … I’ll pull me shirt out over me breeches, and snitch a puggaree next time I ’as the opportunity. But you can’t get me into no burqha; and, Guv’nor, I’m that brown now, I’d be taken for a bunnia by me own mother—you know that!’