India Dark

by Kirsty Murray

  ‘First class, that’s the way to travel,’ they said. ‘You should see what the gents in first class get.’

  ‘Won’t we be going first class?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Bubs. As if there’s money for that,’ said Max, laughing at her. ‘At least we don’t have to travel like that lot.’ He waved his thumb at the Indians who were crowding behind railings, eating tiffin from baskets and waiting to be let onto the platform. As soon as the station guard flung the gates open, the Indians raced at the third-class carriage and dived in through windows and doors, scrambling to find a seat. We watched with our mouths open.

  We were bundled into a carriage and sat wedged close together on uncomfortable benches. This definitely wasn’t first class. As we travelled deeper into the country, I stared out at the passing landscape – houses with whitewashed walls, brown coconut-palm huts clustered together like a herd of small, leafy elephants. We crossed a wide river full of jagged rocks. A brightly coloured sari lay out on a stone, drying in the hot afternoon sun.

  It was hundreds and hundreds of miles from Calcutta to Allahabad and after a while we fell asleep upon each other’s laps, a tangle of limbs and sweaty petticoats. We were halfway across a long, dry stretch of country when the Butcher came into the carriage and counted us.

  ‘Quickly, Daisy, Flora,’ he said, dragging the little girls up by their arms. ‘Under the seats.’

  We barely had time to grasp what was happening. Flora squawked loudly and Daisy began to cry.

  ‘Get under the seat, I tell you,’ he said, with an urgency that frightened all of us.

  He knelt down on the dusty floor and forced the girls onto their backs, one little body under each of the long benches.

  ‘Now sit up, you lot. Sit up straight and spread your skirts so Daisy and Flora are hidden and make sure they don’t make a peep. The ticket inspector is coming along the carriages, and when he gets to this compartment I don’t want to have him chase me down because you girls have made a hash of things. He’ll throw us all from the train, each and every one of us.’ He handed a clutch of tickets to Myrtle, who was sitting nearest the door, and then hurried into the next carriage.

  ‘There are only ten tickets for this compartment,’ said Myrtle. She counted us again to be sure: with Flora and Daisy there were twelve of us. Why the Butcher thought she was the one he should trot out as our teacher beggared belief. She could barely count. It was another sign of how hopeless he was at managing the troupe.

  ‘I suppose he’s going to make Henry and Billy crawl under the seats in the boys’ compartment too,’ I said. Myrtle looked at me blankly. I swear, I have never seen a girl with such blank, expressionless features.

  ‘Are you all right down there?’ asked Poesy, leaning over and lifting her skirt a little so we could all see Flora’s pouting face. The tot was trying hard not to cry. ‘Don’t worry, darling. It won’t be long.’

  That’s Poesy for you – making things worse by comforting everyone all the time. It would have been a fine thing if Flora had screamed her head off and we’d all been thrown from the train. It would have saved us from what was to come later.

  The afternoon sun grew hazy and the shadows cast by the palms were long across the landscape before the ticket inspector came into our compartment. He was a plump Indian in a too-tight uniform and we all watched as he fanned the tickets out and then clipped them, looking up to match a girl to each ticket. We held our breath, hoping that neither of the little ones would call out in loud complaint as they had been doing for the past hour.

  Then, as the inspector turned to leave, Flora sneezed. Quickly, as if we had staged it, every girl in the carriage covered their mouth with their hand, and when the inspector turned about we must have looked a pretty sight; ten girls coughing and spluttering as if his presence had precipitated an allergic reaction.

  His beetle-black eyebrows rose and he shook his head but he didn’t speak. When we were sure he was gone and Myrtle had checked the passage, we flipped up our skirts and pulled the little girls out. Flora jumped onto Poesy’s lap and burst into tears.

  ‘There’s cobwebs down there and it’s horrible and dusty,’ she wept.

  Daisy sat on Ruby’s lap and popped her thumb in her mouth. She looked out the window and frowned. ‘And I fink Fwowa fwarted and it fwelt awful.’

  Ruby laughed, and though it was good to see her showing a touch of her old self, I did feel sorry for the poor babies. It would be a long journey across India if they had to spend most of it under the seats.

  We reached Allahabad early the next morning. We were all hungry, for although Lo and Miss Thrupp had come up and down the carriages with food that they’d bought from station hawkers, there hadn’t been enough to go around.

  We did three shows at the Allahabad Railway Theatre across the road from the station. Considering what happened there, those days should be etched into my memory. But all I can recall is the sound of Miss Thrupp weeping in her room, each and every night that we were in town. In a way, her sobs were the last we heard of Miss Thrupp, even though she would travel with us for another seven months. In Allahabad, Miss Thrupp became invisible.

  37

  DEATH AND THE INVISIBLE RIVER

  Poesy Swift

  Allahabad smelt of death. I woke up on the first morning we were there and even though the air was cool and crisp I could smell sadness.

  In Allahabad, two rivers meet – the Ganges and the Yamuna. The Indians think they’re holy rivers. They even believe that a magic, invisible river called the Sarasvati joins them. Further up the river, at Benares, Indian people make pilgrimages to die. Charlie went down to the riverbank and brought a jar of water back with him. He wanted to test it, to see if there was any magic swirling inside. He said the Indians threw the ashes of thousands of bodies into the Ganges and maybe there were spirits in the water. I wouldn’t drink anything but cocoa for the rest of the time we were in Allahabad.

  When my father died, we weren’t allowed to see him laid out because the accident had made such a mess. The first dead body I ever laid eyes on was the sailor on the Ceylon. The second was little Timmy Thrupp. And I didn’t even realise he was dead. That was the shame of it.

  We had been rehearsing all morning and Mr Arthur wouldn’t let us go until everything was running smoothly. As I was only in the chorus, I could be spared. Miss Thrupp sent me to ask the ayah to bring Timmy and Lo’s baby Bertie across the road to the theatre. I heard Bertie wailing long before I reached the hotel room. He was standing up in his cot, his face scarlet from crying. The ayah was nowhere in sight and Timmy was lying peacefully in his cradle on the other side of the room. I picked up Bertie and comforted him until his cries turned to hiccups. He sucked on his fist and buried his face against my neck. Then I tiptoed over to Timmy’s cot, as if my footsteps might wake him, though he had slept through all Bertie’s wailing. Timmy’s face was pinched and sunken. He was so still I thought he must be in a deep, deep sleep. He looked like a little wax dolly.

  I shifted Bertie onto my hip and took him down the stairs and across to the theatre, where I handed him to Lo.

  ‘Where’s Timmy?’ asked Miss Thrupp.

  ‘The ayah wasn’t there to help me carry him so I left him asleep in his cot.’

  Alarm flickered across Miss Thrupp’s face and she ran from the theatre. I remember her white skirts disappearing through the theatre door. The next time I saw her, she was a different person.

  Whatever horrible things people say about Mr Arthur, when Timmy died he was kind to Miss Thrupp. He paid for the funeral and he didn’t ask anything of her. He told us that we weren’t to bother Miss Thrupp with any of our needs but to come to him or Eddie or Lo if we had a problem. Then again, there wasn’t much point trying to talk to Miss Thrupp. The way she grieved made me think perhaps Ruby was right: Timmy had been her son, not her nephew. She lay curled on her bed like a crumpled paper doll. She couldn’t even feed herself, let alone see to any of the Lilliput
ians’ needs. She seemed to shrink before our eyes, growing smaller and older in a matter of hours.

  The funeral was held the evening of the day Timmy died. It seemed too soon to lay him beneath the earth but Mr Arthur said that in India people always buried the bodies quickly because of the heat. We travelled in gharries to the cemetery at Kydganj, on the banks of the river Yamuna. Lo stayed back at the hotel with the younger children, but all the gentlemen came and some of us girls and Charlie and Lionel too. I shut my eyes as they lowered the tiny box into the ground and tried to imagine Timmy travelling down the invisible river that flowed into the Yamuna.

  The cemetery was lush and green, and as we walked between the tombstones and read the sad stories I realised it was years since anyone had been buried there. Most of the graves were dated 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny. It was odd to have little Timmy Thrupp lying among the fallen from such a terrible time.

  ‘The local people call this cemetery “Gora Qabristan” and it means Grave of the Fair,’ I told Charlie. I thought he’d be pleased I’d found out something about the place.

  Charlie winced and then scratched his head. ‘I heard it only means Grave of the White People. And you know why there are so many Britishers buried here, don’t you?’

  ‘Because of the invisible river? Or because of the Mutiny?’

  ‘They don’t call it the Mutiny. The Indians call it the Uprising.’

  ‘But it was a mutiny,’ I said, thinking of what I’d read. ‘The British are in charge, after all.’

  ‘India isn’t a ship.’

  ‘I don’t understand you sometimes, Charlie.’

  ‘Look, if we decided that Old Man Percy was doing a bad job of running the troupe and we decided to leave, would it be a mutiny or an uprising?’

  He was watching me very intently with his green eyes.

  ‘But we wouldn’t do that, would we?’ I countered. ‘And if we did, how would we ever get home?’

  As we walked through the gates of the cemetery, following the grown-ups, we could hear the sound of drumming from the village. It made the cooling night air throb.

  Mr Arthur took Miss Thrupp back to the hotel in a gharry but the rest of us walked through the town as evening fell. Lionel pointed out the first lamp and then suddenly they were everywhere – tiny little heart-shaped earthenware lamps burning brightly in the soft evening light. People had lined them up along the roofs and windowsills. Servants knelt outside every house to set lamps on the steps and at the gateways, filling them with oil and touching a flame to the wick until the streets glowed with flickering light.

  For a moment, I wondered if all this was because of Timmy’s funeral. Had the natives seen us passing by with his tiny body on the way to the cemetery? Perhaps they were lighting candles for his soul. But Charlie turned to Lionel and said, ‘It’s Divali. It’s the Indians’ festival of lights. Later, there’ll be fireworks. Like Guy Fawkes Night at home. We could sneak out and watch.’

  ‘I don’t think Mr Arthur would like that,’ said Lionel, ‘even if he has cancelled this evening’s show.’

  Charlie said nothing further and I wondered if Lionel knew how often his brother broke the rules and disappeared into the night.

  From a turn in the road, we could see lights burning all along the river, on rafts and boats, on rooftops and glowing from laneways. It was so beautiful, all the tiny pinpoints like stars, it made me catch my breath. I hoped Miss Thrupp didn’t know about Divali, I hoped she thought they were all for Timmy, whose little light had been extinguished.

  38

  SWEET SIXTEEN

  Tilly Sweetrick

  Our first night in Lucknow we were squashed into a tiny annexe of the local clubhouse. There really wasn’t enough room for everyone. All the grown-ups except the Butcher stayed at another hotel. Even Miss Thrupp was sent away. Me, Poesy, Ruby, Eliza and po-faced Myrtle were all muddled into a room together. It was the first time I’d shared with Eliza since we’d left Melbourne and I remembered why once upon a time I’d rather liked her. Even if she did slip out for her ‘supper’ with the Butcher, she seemed perfectly sweet when we were together, like the old Eliza who had been my friend on my first American tour. For a few weeks, it was just like old times. Until she showed her true colours.

  On our first night in Lucknow, we performed at the Mohamed Bagh Theatre. Like the clubhouse, it was too small and we were constantly bumping into each other backstage. Freddie and Max took up far too much space for a pair of fourteen-year-old boys. Once they were all kitted out for their onstage boxing scene they started taking swings at each other.

  ‘Watch out,’ said Lionel, trying to edge past them and not be hit by a flying boxing glove. When Freddie caught Lionel with a left hook to the side of his face, the Butcher grabbed poor Freddie and boxed his ears so hard that his eyes rolled back in his head.

  ‘Watch yourself, Kreutz,’ he growled. ‘If I catch you lashing out at young Lionel again, you’ll answer to me. I won’t be so gentle next time.’

  Lionel tried to hide his glee. Disgusting little Butcher’s Boy. He knew Freddie had only cuffed him by accident.

  For all the problems with cramped lodgings and fraying tempers, at Lucknow every show was a hit. When Flora minced about the stage as Fifi Fricot in The Belle of New York and wiggled her hips like a little coquette, the audience roared, but when I transformed myself from ordinary Violet the Salvation Army girl to outrageous Violet the showgirl, I nearly brought down the house.

  I loved my costume for ‘At Ze Naughty Folies Bergère’. The tiara, the black velvet collar with the white silk rose and my silver dancing shoes with the big diamante buckles were delicious. But the low-cut pale green satin dress that was nipped so neatly at the waist showed off my figure to perfection. The layers of luscious tulle petticoats were so easy to angle I could show just a little bit of lace garter at exactly the right moments.

  The audiences ate me up with their eyes. They laughed at every trick and joke and wept at the least little sentiment. They treated us all like stars. Lionel tried to spoil things by saying it was only because so few touring companies visited Lucknow that the audiences were utterly grateful to the Lilliputians. But I didn’t see what their terrible history had to do with me. It was simple. They loved us. The Butcher must have been raking in money and I began to see why some people rather fancied India. The audiences were hungry for us in a way I’d never felt before. Perhaps it helped that we’d escaped the heat. Now that we were further north, the days were bright and clear and the nights cool enough for us all to sleep. My blood had flowed like treacle in my veins all the time we’d been travelling through the Dutch colonies and Malaya and even in Calcutta, but in Lucknow it was as if my heart quickened and my skin sparkled with a new surge of life.

  The Butcher still refused to pay us any pocket money and Miss Thrupp still moped around, a ghost on the edge of our days, but I started to feel differently about India. I began to feel differently about everything. In Lucknow, I became myself. And it was because of George. Lieutenant George Madden.

  Somehow, the Butcher had managed to secure the Chattar Manzil Palace for a performance. The Palace was like something I’d dreamt about, something you could only imagine reading about in a picture book. It was nearly a hundred years old but it felt timeless. The locals called it the Umbrella Palace, and its roofs spread above us like heaven. The walls and ceilings were decorated with plates of silver and the audience looked just as grand as the palace itself. There was even a maharajah, dressed in a blue military uniform embroidered with gold. He wore an utterly magnificent diamond aigrette in his turban and a gold sword with a diamond hilt slung from his sword belt. There were dozens of men in his retinue, but no women. There were generals and beautiful ladies and scores of soldiers in lovely crisp uniforms.

  We performed The Girl from Paris in the palace hall to a huge audience. It was a perfect moonlit night. The Gomti River shone like silver and our voices rose up into the turrets and minarets and e
choed through the antechambers. After the show, as we stood waiting for carriages to take us back to the hotel, the air seemed to shimmer with magic. There were men down by the water and I heard one cry out, and even though he was a native his voice sounded beautiful on the cool evening air. I turned to ask one of the other girls if they’d heard it too, the cry of the boatman, and that was the first time I saw Lieutenant Madden. He was standing quite still, like a part of the grand picture, in the silvery moonlight on the steps outside the Palace. His brass buttons gleamed and his eyes were bright. Bright when he looked at me.

  We took a train trip to Cawnpore the next morning and the Lieutenant was there too. After Cawnpore, we went to Meerut where there was a cantonment station and the headquarters of a division of the army, and that’s when I realised Lieutenant Madden was following me. At first, I wondered if it was simply a coincidence. I didn’t want it to be a coincidence.

  I’d never seen so many soldiers in one place as there were at Meerut. Their faces glowed with rapt attention as they watched every turn, every flounce, every gesture I made. I knew it was what I was born for, to be admired in that way. It made me long to dance at the Tivoli, to sing vaudeville, or at the very least perform upon a stage where I’d be seen as a real actress, not simply a Lilliputian.

  Some of the soldiers were only a few years older than we were and I don’t think they thought of me as a child. I’m sure George didn’t. When he looked at me, I could see that I was a woman in his eyes. When he smiled at me, his smile was for me alone. He came to every show. The first night in Meerut, when I saw him in the audience, I felt a throbbing in my temples, as if my heart was beating furiously and my blood bubbling like champagne.

  It was in Meerut that George finally spoke to me.

  Meerut was a city of canvas, with streets lit by electric light. The tents were unimaginably elegant. They had carpets, dressing tables and armchairs, as if they were real rooms, and in some of them the walls were lined with pretty patterned material.