to ground. Besides, in my experience, if you provide a picture of a wanted man for the public to pore over, you receive a hundred false sightings for anything genuine.’
‘Very well.’
‘Next we should call on Mr and Mrs Ansell and alert them to their, ah, predicament. And tonight I will take up your most kind offer of accommodation.’
Harcourt summoned Humphries to take Traynor’s portmanteau direct to his house in Hallgarth Street. He instructed the constable to inform his wife that they were expecting an important visitor from Great Scotland Yard. Then he and Traynor went to Julia Howlett’s house in the South Bailey, only to find that neither Tom nor Helen was there. They had apparently gone to the County Hotel.
The police officers did not want to cause alarm by mentioning the reason for their visit or even hinting at the existence of ‘Doctor Tony’, but Harcourt — prompted by the Inspector — did tell the housekeeper to check on the locks and bolts and shutters. He said that there was a particularly skilful housebreaker at large. This was the story the men had agreed on beforehand.
The Lucknow Dagger
Helen and Tom were having an early supper in Major Marmont’s room at the County Hotel. He said that he could not appear on stage unless he had eaten beforehand. He welcomed their company — the slight prickliness of their earlier discussion in the Assembly Rooms had disappeared — and he wanted to give them his personal account of the Lucknow Dagger.
‘You’ve got my notes, Mr Ansell, though as I said I don’t require an affidavit now. But I feel I owe it to you to tell you both how I came by the wretched thing.’
So over cold pork, chicken and hard-boiled eggs together with pickles and warm potatoes and a bottle of Sauternes, Major Marmont related how he had been a junior officer in the Native Infantry at the time of the Mutiny less than twenty years before. Efficiently, he sketched out the circumstances leading to the Lucknow siege. The attack on Meerut, the terrible massacre at Cawnpore which filled every true-born Englishman with horror and fury, and then nearer to Lucknow the rebellions at Sitapur and Faizabad. Fortunately the quick action of Sir Henry Lawrence, the Commissioner at Lucknow, resulted in the higher parts of the town around the Residency being fortified or at least made defendable.
‘But we must come to the immediate reason you are here, Mr and Mrs Ansell. It is to hear how I acquired the Dagger of Lucknow. We hung on by our fingertips, as I say, but we hung on. We had a great piece of good fortune when we discovered more stores hidden beneath the Residency. Good old Lawrence had had them put there but he had neglected to tell anyone — his death got in the way of imparting the information, you see. But what we found in the cellars was enough to provision us for a couple more months and the relief parties were starting to get through. One of them had secured a place called Alum Bagh about four miles south of the city. It wasn’t a town or settlement, more of what they sometimes call a pleasaunce in that part of the world, a kind of park. But it had walls and was capable of being defended. More importantly, messages could be got through from Alum Bagh to Cawnpore, which had been retaken by this stage. Of course someone first had to cover the ground between Lucknow and Alum Bagh. Later they worked out a system of signalling by semaphore but before that they depended on foolhardy volunteers to carry messages.’
As he was speaking, Major Marmont laid out a salt cellar and pepper pot close together and put a knife-rest on Tom and Helen’s side of the table to show the relative position of the three places. This was hardly necessary but Tom supposed it was a habit acquired from years in the army. Given his other trade, perhaps Marmont would shortly make the salt cellar disappear.
‘I was young and reckless enough to volunteer to deliver a message to Alum Bagh, information which had to be carried forward to Cawnpore. Also someone was required to guide the next relief column into Lucknow. We were surrounded by rebels and, poorly organized though they were, the sepoys were scattered at points around the city which were known only to the defenders. Having volunteered myself and received a pat on the back from Colonel Sir John Inglis, I decided that I would carry out my mission in native disguise as a sepoy. It was a foolish thing to volunteer, no doubt. I had every reason to live, even though all our lives were in peril. But I had found a girl, you see. An Indian girl. I suppose I wanted to show off.
‘You may not think it, but I was once a lithe young man, quick and nimble. Months in the sun had darkened my complexion but I darkened it further by the application of walnut dye, not forgetting arms and legs, and I clad myself in native garb. I must have had the desire to dress up even then. I was accompanied by a local man called Lal. He was a little younger than me, almost a boy in fact, and although a fairly recent arrival in Lucknow he was familiar with every inch of the ground.
‘The distance between the Residency and Alum Bagh was only a few miles as the crow flies but we decided not to go through the city which lies to the south of the Residency compound — it was too full of rebel sepoys and dark alleys where any peril or patrol might be lurking. For safety’s sake we would take the longer route through the open country in the east and past the entrenchments before we circled back to the west and so towards Alum Bagh. It was a night with a crescent moon and a few stars. Although the rains had started it was very hot and humid.
‘I remember sitting with Lal while we waited for it to grow dark enough for us to get started. I hadn’t eaten. I couldn’t have kept anything down. Concealed under my shirt was a pouch containing various letters from Inglis which were to be forwarded to Cawnpore. They were to do with the number of soldiers and civilians left in the Residency, our dwindling stock of ammunition and so on. I also carried hastily drawn maps showing the best routes into Lucknow, although these might change from day to day. The pouch was secured by a cord about my neck. In the event of danger I was to dispose of the maps and letters, although no one told me exactly how. Eat them perhaps.
‘I noticed that Lal also had an object secured by a cord about his neck and, seeing my gaze, he drew out a sheath attached to the cord, withdrew a dagger from the sheath and handed it to me. It was one of those fine Hindoo artefacts, half for use and half for ornament. It sat nicely in my hand but I felt very uneasy holding it. There were ivory designs on the handle. We were sitting in the half-dark but the ivory gleamed like a skull. I was surprised that an ordinary young man should be carrying something so apparently precious — and indeed he had shown it to me with an odd sort of reluctance — but I said nothing and handed back the dagger. Seeing the weapon made me think that I should equip myself with a knife or a pistol. But I had no knife handy, and I thought that if I took my pistol it would conflict with my disguise. I was setting out, unarmed.
‘Anyway, to distract ourselves we talked a lot, talked about anything and everything. Lal had pretty good English. I didn’t know much about him before except that he was an admirer of the British. Turned out that he’d been born outside Lucknow and that he was much grander than I thought. He was the son of some prince in those parts. There are more Badshahs and Rajas and Nawabs and Nizams up there than you can shake a stick at. That no doubt explained how he came by the dagger.
‘Anyway I suppose I spoke to Lal with a touch more respect than I would have done otherwise but I didn’t spend much time thinking of his lineage. You don’t when you might be walking to your imminent death.’
Marmont paused for a mouthful of food and half a glass of Sauternes and to catch his breath. Tom thought, old Mackenzie said I’d enjoy meeting the Major and listening to his tales and he was right.
‘The going was straightforward at first,’ resumed Marmont. ‘We had to cross a canal at the point where it met the Gumti River but we already knew that the sepoys had damned the canal so that a stretch to the south would flood and make it harder for any relief to get across with their heavy guns. We crept across the nullah — that’s their word for the canal — which was little more than a dried-out depression in the earth at that point. It was eerie. There was no one about but we imagined sepoys waiting to jump out at us from behind every palm or pepul tree. They weren’t expecting any trouble in the eastern quarter but only from the south, you see, which was why they’d flooded the canal down there.
‘Anyway, Lal and I made our slow progress to east and south. When we began to go parallel to the line of the nullah between Dilksuka and Char Bagh Bridges, which were half submerged, we could see what little moonlight there was glinting on the flooded plain. There was the occasional spark of a campfire on the far side. Eventually we arrived at Char Bagh itself, which was a kind of landmark no more than a couple of miles from our destination. Char
