mountain passes into Afghanistan where the altitude thinned the air and peaks towered into the sky, the snow unmelted in millennia.
'Were you at Cawnpore?'
He nodded.
'In the relief column?'
'No… I…' He looked at her very steadily. 'There were over nine hundred of us, counting women and children and civilians. I was one of the four people who survived.' He looked at her, his eyes filled with tears.
What could one possibly say to that?
'I have never faced such savagery.' She spoke very quietly, a simple, bare truth. 'All the death I have seen has been either on the battlefield, incredibly stupid, senseless and pointless, men outmatched by numbers and by guns, ordered to charge impossible targets, but still soldiers even though their lives were squandered. Or people dying of starvation, cold and disease. Far more died of disease than of gunfire, you know.' She shook her head a little. 'Yes, of course you know. But I have never seen hatred like that, barbarism that would massacre every living soul. The siege of Sebastopol was at least… military.'
He clung to her understanding, his eyes fixed on hers unwaveringly.
'It began on the fifth of June,' he said. 'The Mutiny had already been sweeping across the country since the end of February. There had been disturbances because of the cartridges in Meerut and Lucknow. You know all about the cartridges?' He was watching her face. 'They were greased with animal fat. If it was pork it was unclean to the Muslim soldiers, and if it was beef it was blasphemous to the Hindus, to whom the cow is a sacred animal. On May seventh open mutiny broke out in Lucknow; on May sixteenth the sappers and miners mutinied in Meerut. By the twentieth it had spread to Murdan and Allygurh. The day after that we began our intrenchment at Cawnpore.'
She nodded.
'On the twenty-fourth Gwalior Horse mutinied at Hattrass,' he went on. 'By the twenty-eighth it had spread to Nuseer-bad. On the thirty-first it was Shahjehanpoor. June third, Alzimghur, Seetapoor, Mooradabad and Neemuch. The day after, Benares and Jhansi. On the fifth it was us.' He took a deep breath, but his voice did not alter. 'I learned after that on the sixth it was Allahabad, Hansi and Bhurtpore. The following week, Jullunur, Fyzabad, Badulla Derai, Sultanpore, Futteh-pore, Pershadeepore… and on and on. I could name every garrison in India. There was no one to help us.'
She could not imagine it. The isolation, the consuming terror must have been like a tidal wave, drowning everything.
He needed to know she could bear to hear it.
'How did it begin?' she asked. 'Guns?'
'No. No, the whole of the native troops set fire to their lines and marched on the treasury, where they were joined by the troops of Nena Sahib… which is a name I can still hardly say.' His face was tight with misery and the spectacle of horror was dark in his eyes.
She waited, sitting quite still.
'He had thousands of native soldiers,' he went on after a moment. 'We were only a couple of hundred, with three hundred women and as many children, and of course the civilian population, ordinary people: merchants and shopkeepers, servants, pensioners. General Sir Hugh Wheeler was in command. He ordered us to retreat to the barracks and military hospital. We couldn't possibly hold the whole town.' He frowned, as if even now uncertain and puzzled. 'Why he didn't choose the treasury instead I don't know. That was on high ground and had far more solid walls. In there we might have held out. I think… I think he couldn't really believe we would have to face them alone. He couldn't imagine that the sepoys wouldn't be loyal to us when it came to it.' He stopped again. His hand curled and uncurled on the edge of the sheet. 'Of course he was wrong.'
'I know,' she said softly. 'Did you have food and ammunition?'
He looked at her steadily.
'Food was modest; ammunition was good. But there was no shelter. After only a few days the walls were so riddled with shot we dug trenches and pulled carts and trunks and furniture over us to protect ourselves as much as we could. The heat was unbearable for many.'
She tried to imagine India in July. It was hotter than anything she had ever known.
'I don't know how many died of it,' he said, still watching her closely. He needed to speak of the loss of his friends, the human beings he had seen in the utmost extremity of suffering, and yet a part of him was still aware of what such knowledge might do to her. And he needed to know they were not empty descriptions she could not follow. He needed her companionship in his grief.
'I imagine it was worse than the cold,' she said thoughtfully. 'I've seen men freeze, and animals too.'
'The smell,' he answered. 'It was the smell… and the flies I hated most. I still can't bear the sound of flies. It makes me sick and I can't get my breath. I feel as if I am suffocating and my heart is going to burst.'
'You weren't relieved?' She remembered reading it in the
'No.' The word fell like a stone. 'Every day we kept expecting help would come. We didn't know the whole country was under the sword. We fell one by one, taking as many of the enemy with us as we could. I've never seen greater courage. Every able-bodied person did what they could, men and women alike. Every man stood his watch. The women nursed the sick, carried food and water, tried to protect the children.'
His hand rubbed the edge of the sheet, gripping it so hard the fabric must have hurt his skin. The movement was some kind of release of tension, even though his muscles were locked tight. She had seen it before in men recalling events of nightmare proportions. The room was silent in the spring evening.
'We were good shots,' he resumed. 'We kept them at bay. They didn't charge us and overrun. But there were so many of them, and their guns could reach us easily. They fired at everything that moved. Every day we thought help would come. It was so hot. No escape from it. You could smell the heat, feel it everywhere. The sweat dried the instant it broke. Skin hurt to touch. It cracked and blistered.' He shrugged very slightly. 'I don't know why I mentioned that. It hardly mattered. We died of heat stroke and dysentery… those who didn't die of their wounds. What did it matter if groins or armpits were on fire?'
'The one thing too much to bear,' she answered. 'For me it was the rats… rats everywhere, dropping off the walls.'
He smiled, a sudden wide grin, beautiful in spite of his disfigured face. It was not any kind of amusement, simply the dazzling, wonderful relief of being not alone.
'But you survived,' she said. She guessed that was part of the private torture inside him. She had known it before in men who had seen companions fall all around them, for no reason other than chance as to where they were standing. A yard this way or that and it would have been someone else. One moment they were alive, full of intelligence and feeling, the next just mangled blood and bone, torn flesh and pain… or nothing at all, the fire and the soul gone. One could not get rid of the guilt of being the one who survived. Part of you wanted to be with them.
His smile vanished, but he did not avoid her eyes.
'On June twenty-fourth Mrs. Greenway came to the in-trenchment with a aote from Nena Sahib. I can still see her face. She was old, very old indeed. She seemed like an embodiment of Time to me… or of Death. She had been a prisoner of the rebels and they sent her with terms of surrender.' His voice was harsh, filled with emotion so great it almost choked him. 'Nena Sahib promised that if we gave up all the money, stores and arms in the intrenchment he would not only allow all the survivors of the garrison to retreat unmolested but he would provide means of conveyance for the women and children as well.'
She looked steadily at his eyes. The horror was still so deep inside him it seemed to fill his being. It was like a storm about to break.
'The treaty was agreed upon.' His voice became strained almost to a whisper. 'On June twenty-seventh we surrendered according to the terms and filed out of the garrison. The women and children were led aboard boats on the river… there were small thatched coverings on them… protection from the sun. The man in charge was called Tanteea Topee. He was sitting on a platform watching it all. A bugle sounded at his command, and they ran out the guns which had been concealed up to that point. They fired on the boats. The thatch caught alight. Women and children were burned alive. Some jumped into the stream, but the sepoys rode their horses into the water and clubbed and sabered them to pieces. Some managed to struggle to the farther shore.'
Hester closed her eyes and put her hands up to cover her face. She had not meant to, but she did it without
