Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  ‘Woman dear, that cannot be the truth.’

  ‘But it is, Oliver, it is! I wish it were not—most truly I wish it were not so, but I cannot bring myself to remain in India.’

  ‘Laura, do you not love me then, after all?’

  Tears came to my eyes at the gentleness of his tone.

  ‘Oh, Oliver, I do! You know I do!’

  ‘I thought so—only a few minutes ago. But if you did, you would be able to accept my life here. Is that not so?’

  ‘No! Not under the circumstances. My experience of India has been a great deal more than merely unpleasant, Oliver. It has been terrible.’

  ‘And only that?’

  ‘Of course not. There have been—there were happy times and pleasant ones.’

  ‘As there will be again. I promise you!’

  I shook my head. ‘Never for me,’ I said. ‘Never!’

  A strained silence ensued, and neither of us moved.

  ‘Then,’ he said slowly, ‘you are refusing me … my home and my idea of a good and rewarding life, simply because of what has happened here in Lucknow?’

  I am sure, now, that that was the truth, so far as there was truth in the matter at all. I took my time in answering, trying to work out in my mind just what had affected my decision. I knew I should have felt complimented by his desire for my companionship as well as my love, and by the confidence he reposed in my understanding of the affairs of Hassanganj; I had always felt that a passion that precluded comradely sharing was not love at all. Yet now some perverse impulse made me see in his vision of our joint life a selfishness in him that overrode my own interests and expectations. Perhaps it was fear at impending loss that drove me to try to mitigate that loss by seizing once again on my old, mistaken interpretation of his character.

  I began to speak, coldly and in a precise and distant fashion: ‘No. It is not wholly my experiences in this place …’

  ‘Charles?’

  ‘Of course not!’ My voice held more of its customary vehemence.

  ‘I wish I could be sure of that … but go on.’ And now it was he who was cold and contained.

  ‘I … I can acknowledge the attraction of your plans for Hassanganj, your dream of a useful, busy life—for a man. But quite apart from what I have endured here in India none of your schemes have left room for the fact that I … that I am a woman, and that as a woman I have needs and requirements separate from yours and a desire to fulfil them in my own way.’

  ‘Oh!’ For a moment he was puzzled. ‘Oh! If you mean children, why, you can have as many as you please. Jessie will be there to deal with them!’

  In fact I had not given a thought to children, but as the idea presented itself, I seized it.

  ‘Yes—I do mean children,’ I agreed warmly, ‘among other things. I want to bear my children in safety, knowing they will have the chance of a normal childhood, and not end as Johnny Avery did, or Jessie’s Jamie, and so many others. Is that so unreasonable?’

  ‘No, but Hassanganj will be safe for them again, and with Jessie to help you …’

  ‘But Hassanganj will always be India, and what peace of mind would I ever know there now? And you have never taken into account that I may be reluctant to leave my own home and family …’

  ‘But you haven’t any.’

  ‘Or that I too have strongly developed loyalties … and affections.’

  ‘You are rarely sentimental,’ he said, almost thoughtfully, as though he were trying to discern another meaning behind my words. His expression had changed from the puzzlement apparent at my first objections to watchfulness.

  ‘I realize you compliment me in wishing me to share your life as fully as you have described,’ I continued, trying desperately to explain myself adequately under his wary gaze, ‘and once perhaps I would have been able to. But I am no longer the eager, curious young woman I was in Hassanganj. Too much has happened, I have seen and learned too much of matters of which I would sooner have remained ignorant. I have changed, Oliver. And I have learned my limitations. I could not live with my fears. I would always be watchful, suspicious, anxious that once again there would be horsemen in the night and a house on fire. Even with you I could not live in such un-ease.’

  ‘But with peace, Laura, when things are settled …’

  ‘It is not peace, nor the things that can be settled. The difficulty lies in me, Oliver. I feel you are being over-riding and insensitive in not seeing that. I believe even you will live for a long while looking over your shoulder—in uncertainty. But you will have your work. Your purpose. Whatever you say, I will be much alone, with only my fears—and my memories. I cannot do it.’

  ‘You mean that, Laura?’

  I nodded, drained and miserable. His eyes travelled over my face and I became conscious of my horrid fringe of ugly hair, my thin cheeks and sunken eyes and the deplorable condition of my clothing. Conscious, too, that he had not yet understood me. In the silence that enclosed us, I recalled with anguish the many strange endearments he had used to me, telling me in Urdu that I was the light of his world, fairer than the rose and purer than the snow, and also that the ultimate words of love ‘jan se aziz’, dearer than life, had been reserved for his lion-coloured acres of Hassanganj.

  ‘What is it you do want, Laura?’ he asked at last with such unaccustomed pleading that my throat constricted.

  ‘Some … some security,’ I answered quietly. ‘A home, perhaps, in some small English town, and a regular, expected sort of life. A quiet life.’

  ‘Surely a husband?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘A husband like Charles!’ His voice cut like a whiplash.

  ‘Oh, you fool!’ was all I could find to say, and when I looked up with blazing eyes encountered an equal anger in his.

  ‘No, my dear. It’s you that are the fool!’ he answered and grabbed me to him with his one arm, holding me to him tightly. ‘That’s who you really want, isn’t it—still, and despite everything? Perhaps you’ve already had a surreptitious sample of delights to come when the conventions allow. From your noble Charles. How many weary hours have been made bearable by the memory of soft sighs, languishing looks and half-expressed aspirations—the tender joys of protracted wooing?’

  ‘How dare you! Let me go!’ I was furious, but had to keep my voice low, as Captain Germon and his wife, Maria, were somewhere about in the house below us. And I was hurt, cut to the quick by his words and the tone in which he had spoken them.

  ‘No! Not yet. Hear me out. I’ve chosen you because I see in you all the qualities I want in the woman who is to be my life’s companion. You are realistic, ruthless and honest—generally. You are capable of humour, generosity and sincerity—usually. You have energy and initiative and are as stubborn as a mule. All admirable qualities, and I appreciate them in you as much as I acknowledge them in myself. Your only weakness is that you have been reared to believe a man loves a woman solely because she is a woman. I’m no longer capable of that sort of love. I have had it—and often—but it is not enough. But you— you continue to think you must be cosseted as a weaker creature, protected from the buffetings of fate. Though how you can fool yourself that anyone (and least of all Charles) is going to take such a view of your character, after the way you have battled through this siege, is beyond my comprehension.’

  ‘Will you let me go!’ I muttered through clenched teeth, near to tears.

  ‘No! Be quiet and listen to me! You say you do not want to be alone with your fears and your memories. What you mean is that you know you will not receive from me the conventional attentions you could expect from a man like Charles. In your heart you want me to dance attendance on you, as Charles would do, and perhaps has done, making you the pivot of my besotted mind. But I am not besotted, I love you with honesty, and I am offering you a great deal more than an ever-ready hand with a chair or a door or a carriage step. Oh, I desire you! Do not doubt that. I want, and intend, to love you, to make love to you, to bed you, whichever th
e discreet euphemism may be that you best understand and will accept … not now, woman, at the moment you are about as appetizing as a navvy! But that is what I intend, and by God, Laura, no miss-ish haverings on your part now are going to prevent me. I mean to marry you. The only thing that will stop me is the honest assurance from you that you love Charles—not me. In that case, believe me, I will desist immediately and leave you free to pursue your suburban idyll with him in England. But not until I have that assurance from you will I give up hope of you.’

  ‘How can you speak as you do? Oh, Oliver, you must know I love you and you only.’

  ‘No, damn it! Hoped it, thought it, felt it sometimes—but known it … never!’

  ‘But I do love you, most truly and with all my heart and have thought that I had conveyed my feeling to you adequately. You are just being cynical. Because you are angry.’

  ‘Cynical? Perhaps. I have had enough experience of your sex to make cynicism pardonable. But the truth is that, even sometimes as I kissed you, I have remembered something. Something that I would sooner forget and cannot.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The expression in your eyes once, when I caught them meeting Charles’s eyes. In a mirror in Hassanganj. Do you remember? You were very embarrassed. And annoyed, naturally.’

  ‘I remember. But that was so long ago. What I felt then for Charles was … hero-worship, I suppose, or perhaps a sort of aggravated sentimentality. You can call it anything you like. It was not love as I know love is now—with you. You must believe that, Oliver.’

  ‘Yet you have never looked at me in quite that fashion.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense!’ I said sharply. ‘Now who is expecting the ridiculous inanities of “protracted wooing”?’

  ‘Hmph!’ He looked down at me quizzically, then released me, but held one hand. ‘Then, Laura, what has all this been about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Could it be that we just enjoy quarrelling? Or is it about other things, things quite different to any we have mentioned?’

  His cheek was laid against my hair, and I could sense his attention to my words.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Perhaps … perhaps it is about the peepul grove that starry night and the poor Wilkinses with their frightful eyeless torn faces and the flies gorging themselves in the opened bellies. Perhaps it is about Elvira, who must have been so frightened before they killed her. Perhaps it is about little Johnny screaming to his death in a bed of orange cannas; or Connie, who must have known what was coming, even though she would not learn the language. Perhaps it is about a scream I heard that day in the ice-house thatch, and a shot I fired into a man’s living face. Perhaps it is about the desperate sense of isolation we all knew in Wajid Khan’s zenana, or about smallpox and cholera. Perhaps it is about … the awful smell when poor dainty Emily lay dying, or about Mr Roberts shooting himself in despair, or about you lying sunstruck in your own blood on a sandbank.’

  I paused and shivered a little in the chill of those memories, and he drew me to him again.

  ‘Or was it perhaps really about me?’ I went on. ‘All about me? My own fear, my loneliness, my hurt? Perhaps it is really about my hunger, these dirty clothes I have worn so long, the heat and now the cold? Perhaps it is about the fact that I know I cannot live with the chance that any or all of these things might happen again; that I am a coward and tired—old in my soul and bleak in my heart. Perhaps it is because I cannot love your welfare … more than my own safety.’

  He sighed, removed his arm from my shoulders and moved over to the balustrade, where he stood looking down at the almost invisible city.

  ‘Yes. I believe you are right, Laura. You love me—but not enough. If it were not so, you would not allow this … this episode to stand between us and happiness.’

  ‘You said yourself that I was realistic. I know that love will not always fill my life, or yours. However ecstatic our passion, there must come a time when … when equilibrium returns, when we will have learned to take each other as a matter of course; and then, well, you would have Hassanganj, your work, your accustomed life. I would have what? A half-suppressed fear, an enormous distrust of the people among whom I lived, and all the disillusionment that this has brought me.’

  ‘But in that time, as you have termed it, of “ecstatic passion”, is it not possible that you might have been cured of your fear? That I might have cured you? I would try.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It is too much. Oh, Oliver, my dear, it is too much!’

  For a long time we stood together in silence at the balustrade. The night was almost quiet. When at last he spoke, there was finality in his tone and a note of something that might have been resignation.

  ‘I have said—more than once—that we are well-matched and equal, you and I, and it is so. Just now in anger, and in the fear you have yourself admitted, you rejected my wish to share my life with you as fully as I know how and in the only way I know how—in Hassanganj and India. It is not difficult to understand what you feel about India, and I do understand. But I have nothing else to offer you, Laura, particularly since I believe that you can change, and shall continue to hope that you will change.

  ‘Oh, Laura, I too have known days of fear, and many of them, when death would have come as a relief to me. I struggled to stay alive, and to believe in life, because once very briefly I had held you in my arms, and because in the worst of those moments I never ceased to hold you in my mind. So you must allow me to go on hoping—in my own way. I will not bother you further with plans for marriage or a life out here; I will not bother you at all. But I must believe, I will hope that, after a time, when you have been back to England and tried to take up the old life again, you will learn your mistake and let me know. You know that I love you; now believe that I will wait for you in patience and faithfully. But I will not bother you again. It is up to you now to tell me when you are ready to come to me. You must discover your own mind without my interference or aid, so that you will never say that I coerced you into a life not to your liking. Do you understand?’

  I nodded, then laid my head back against his shoulder, indulging myself with a moment of sweet physical content. Then I turned and buried my face in his shoulder and felt his arm come around me. Perhaps I expected him to kiss me. It would have been natural.

  ‘I will not ask you again,’ he reiterated. ‘Now it is up to you, my darling. Oh, my darling!’ But though I closed my eyes in anticipation of his lips, I felt myself released, and opened them to find him walking slowly away from me into the cold night.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the 130th day of the siege we received two welcome pieces of news: the Delhi Column was on its way to the Alum Bagh and Sir Colin Campbell, the Commander in Chief, had arrived in Cawnpore to direct the battle for our relief.

  The semaphore stood ready on the tower of the Resident’s House, but no signal came from the Alum Bagh. It was surmised that the instructions sent there for the construction of the machine had gone astray, and once again a messenger set out with new plans and orders. The erection of the second semaphore was now a matter of urgency, since there could be no delay in our receiving information as to when Sir Colin actually arrived, or when his force was to march on to the Dilkusha Palace, which would be the last halt before the final thrust through the outskirts of Lucknow to the Residency.

  Finally an answering signal was received from the distant palace, and then our anxiety switched to keeping our own machine in workable order, for the pandies took the greatest delight in trying to shoot it down, sometimes managing this feat and often damaging the semaphore.

  ‘Willing to bet the first damned message was safely received,’ Oliver said sourly when we heard of the message from the Alum Bagh. ‘They were probably just trying to decipher the mixture of schoolboy Greek and worse French in which the plans and instructions were sent, in case they fell into the pandies’ hands.’

  ‘What a pity you were not at the other end to lend the assistance of y
our excellent education,’ Charles answered caustically.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ his brother agreed, but before the contention could grow Kate broke in: ‘These messengers and spies wear so few clothes, it always astonishes me that they are able to conceal the messages they carry. Can’t think where they put ’em; it’s amazing any at all get through safely.’

  ‘Oh, not so difficult,’ Charles assured her. ‘They hollow out the soles of their shoes, or carry them in ready-cracked bamboo staves—so that if caught, y’see, the bamboo will break at an innocent section—and in their hair. Early on, a man got in with a message in his ear and it took the doctors more than an hour to extract it.’

  ‘Or placed in a quill and inserted in the rectum,’ Oliver added instructively, but solely to annoy his relative. Before Charles could remonstrate with him on his indelicacy, Jessie nodded over her knitting and said, ‘Aye! That would be the best place, no doubt!’ and even Charles had the grace to smile.

  Our interview on the roof of Captain Germon’s post had not resulted in any alteration of Oliver’s usual habits. He was with us each evening for a time, but now we remained in the Gaol sooner than go for an intimate walk, for we had learned that privacy held greater dangers for us than any supposed impropriety. That day he had appeared with another gift, a tongue in a hermetically sealed tin.

  ‘Cow’s, not horse’s,’ he had said as he sat himself down on Charles’s chair, while Charles went on to the verandah to open the offering with a bayonet.

  ‘Dare we ask where it came from?’ said Kate.

  ‘Certainly not. That’s Toddy’s secret. Only hope it’s not flyblown.’

  The meat looked and smelled fresh and, when Charles had resignedly seated himself on an upturned box, we each cut ourselves a small slice of the delicacy. Oliver put aside some for Toddy and Ishmial, and after some hesitation we allowed ourselves to be persuaded to finish what remained.