'It's alright Jack,' Mary whispered, 'the angels have come for her, they have taken her to Jesus she will be all right now, no more pain, sorrow or tears.' She lowered her voice. 'She met her son and heard him call her mother. That was all she wanted.'
'No,' Jack shook his head. 'We did not get a chance to talk.'
'She's listening now, Captain Jack.' Mary said softly. 'She won't leave you.'
'No,' Jack said, 'but I left her.' For a moment it all made sense; the dream had warned him of the danger from Sarvur Khan. He had known the two of them were intertwined and now he was in the darkness. It was not the physical darkness that he had feared, but the emotional agony of losing his mother before he had properly acknowledged her existence. Aware that a dozen hard-bitten soldiers were watching, Jack bent down and kissed his mother for the first and last time in his life.
'Sir! There's more rebel cavalry!'
Jack dragged himself back to his duty. There was always one more task to fulfil, one more battle to fight, one more march to make. His was the soldier's lot, and it did not matter if he was an Englishman, a Scotsman or a Eurasian, he was a soldier of the Queen and an officer of the 113th Foot, and he had his duty to do.
'Come on men,' Jack heard the gruffness in his voice. 'We've got a convoy to get through.' He looked at his mother; he would mourn her later. What had she meant about leaving him in good hands? He had no time to think about that yet. He would ask Mary; she would know.
Historical Note
Many of the events depicted in this book took place as described. Although Jack Windrush and the 113th Foot are fictitious, the Indian Mutiny was one of the British Army's most hard-fought campaigns of the nineteenth century. The reasons for the mutiny of the Indian soldiers – the sepoys – are many and varied and include beliefs that the British were violating their religions and decreasing their pay at the same time that the Honourable East India Company was taking over Indian-owned lands.
When many of the sepoys mutinied in 1857, there were 151,000 men in the Bengal Army, of whom only 23,000 were British. Thirteen thousand of the British were in the Punjab, many miles from the scene of disaffection. The remainder were stationed at Calcutta, Meerut and Delhi or scattered in small cantonments across Northern India. In the heartland of the rebellion, between Calcutta and Meerut, there were around 5,500 British troops and around 50,000 Indian or Native troops.
Although most officers of the Native regiments swore their men were loyal, there had been portents of unease for some months. There had been chapattis passed around the villages, although nobody, then or now, really understood the significance of the message, if indeed any message was intended. There had been isolated outbreaks in various regiments of the Bengal Army. There had been rumours of trouble ever since Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse had seen native states annexed to British rule, and when the Company sent Hindu regiments overseas, thus damaging their caste, discontent grew.
When the British introduced the new Enfield rifle, trouble came to a head. The paper cartridges had to be torn open with the teeth, and the Indians believed the British had greased them with a mixture of cow fat and pig fat. As cows are holy to Hindus and pigs anathema to Muslims, sepoys of both religions were insulted. Although the authorities saw sense and allowed the sepoys to make their own grease rather than touching the contaminating mixture, the damage had been done. The combination of attacks on their pride, race, money and religion roused the sepoys to mutiny. When some native rulers joined in, the insurrection assumed the aspects of open rebellion, encouraging some revisionist Indian historians to term it the First War of Independence.
Both sides were guilty of terrible atrocities. The Mutineers murdered men, women and children in horrible circumstances and the British retaliated by mass hangings and executions in a manner equally barbaric. The initial stages of the war were marked by sieges, with the British besieging Delhi and the Mutineers Cawnpore, Lucknow and other smaller stations.
Sir Henry Havelock (1795 – 1857) was born in north-east England and joined the army in 1815. He sailed out to India in 1823 and fought in the First Burmese War, Afghan War, Sikh Wars and Persian War before rising to fame during the Indian Mutiny. He relieved Cawnpore and fought eight victorious battles against the Mutineers in his first attempt to relieve Lucknow and another major battle when he and General Outram punched through to the Residency. Once there he was in turn besieged. He lived to see Sir Colin Campbell's relief before he died of dysentery.
Havelock's statue stands in Trafalgar Square, London, inscribed with one of his quotes: 'Soldiers! Your labours, your privations, your sufferings and your valour, will not be forgotten by a grateful country.' However the soldiers often are forgotten and in 2003 the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone proposed removing Havelock's statue and replacing it with what he termed a 'more relevant' figure.
Finally, the Eurasians, the product of British fathers and Indian mothers, formed a unique community in India. In 1791 the Directors of the Honourable East India Company banned Eurasians from many military or civil posts on the grounds that they would not command the same respect as purely British men would. However, there were notable exceptions, such as James Metcalfe, with a British father and a Sikh mother, who rose to be aide-de-camp to the Governor-General. There was also James Skinner who raised Skinner's Horse and Robert Warburton who was knighted and became a colonel. In saying that, a manual for Company cadets warned against Eurasian girls with their 'insinuating manners and fascinating beauty' which could help create 'a matrimonial connexion which' the cadet 'might all his life-time regret'.
Time will tell if Jack Windrush either contacts matrimony or regrets his association with Mary Lambert.
Malcolm Archibald
About the Author
Born and raised in Edinburgh, the sternly-romantic capital of Scotland, I grew up with a father and other male relatives imbued with the military, a Jacobite grandmother who collected books and ran her own business and a grandfather from the mystical, legend-crammed island of Arran. With such varied geographical and emotional influences, it was natural that I should write.
Edinburgh’s Old Town is crammed with stories and legends, ghosts and murders. I spent a great deal of my childhood when I should have been at school walking the dark roads and exploring the hidden alleyways. In Arran I wandered the shrouded hills where druids, heroes, smugglers and the spirits of ancient warriors abound, mixed with great herds of deer and the rising call of eagles through the mist.
Work followed with many jobs that took me to an intimate knowledge of the Border hill farms as a postman to time in the financial sector, retail, travel and other occupations that are best forgotten. In between I met my wife; I saw her and was captivated immediately, asked her out and was smitten; engaged within five weeks we married the following year and that was the best decision of my life, bar none. Children followed and are now grown.
At 40 I re-entered education, dragging the family to Dundee, where we knew nobody and lacked even a place to stay, but we thrived in that gloriously accepting city. I had a few published books and a number of articles under my belt. Now I learned how to do things the proper way as the University of Dundee took me under their friendly wing for four of the best years I have ever experienced. I emerged with an honours degree in history, returned to the Post in the streets of Dundee, found a job as a historical researcher and then as a college lecturer, and I wrote. Always I wrote.
The words flowed from experience and from reading, from life and from the people I met; the intellectuals and the students, the quiet-eyed farmers with the outlaw names from the Border hills and the hard-handed fishermen from the iron-bound coast of Angus and Fife, the wary scheme-dwelling youths of the peripheries of Edinburgh and the tolerant, very human women of Dundee.
Cathy, my wife, followed me to university and carved herself a Master’s degree; she obtained a position in Moray and we moved north, but only with one third of our offspring: the other two had grown up and moved
on with their own lives. For a year or so I worked as the researcher in the Dundee Whaling History project while simultaneously studying for my history Masters and commuting home at weekends, which was fun. I wrote ‘Sink of Atrocity’ and ‘The Darkest Walk’ at the same time, which was interesting.
When that research job ended I began lecturing in Inverness College, with a host of youngsters and not-so-youngsters from all across the north of Scotland and much further afield. And I wrote; true historical crime, historical crime fiction and a dip into fantasy, with whaling history to keep the research skills alive. Our last child graduated with honours at St Andrews University and left home: I decided to try self-employment as a writer and joined the team at Creativia . . . the future lies ahead.
Also by the Author
Jack Windrush -Series Windrush
Windrush: Crimea
Windrush: Blood Price
A Wild Rough Lot
Dance If Ye Can: A Dictionary of Scottish Battles
Like The Thistle Seed: The Scots Abroad
Our Land of Palestine
The Swordswoman
The Shining One (The Swordswoman Book 2)
Falcon Warrior (The Swordswoman Book 3)
Dear reader,
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