FOLLOW THE DRUM
India, in the mid-nineteenth century, was virtually run by a British commercial concern, the Honourable East India Company, whose directors would pay tribute to one Indian ruler and then depose another in their efforts to maintain their balance sheet of power and profit. But great changes were already casting shadows across the land, and when a stupid order was given to Indian troops to use cartridges greased with cow fat and pig lard (one animal sacred to the Hindus and the other abhorrent to Moslems) there was mutiny. The lives of millions were changed for ever including Arabella MacDonald, daughter of an English regular officer, and Richard Lang, an idealistic nineteen-year-old who began 1857 as a boy and ended it a man.
JAMES LEASOR
FOLLOW THE DRUM
Published by
James Leasor Ltd at Smashwords
81 Dovercourt Road, London SE22 8UW
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ISBN 978-1-908291-31-8
First published 1972
This edition
published 2011
©
James Leasor 1972, 2011
For
THE DRUMMER
and all who follow him
FROM THE WRITER TO THE READER
According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a novel is a “fictitious prose narrative of sufficient length to fill one or more volumes, portraying characters and actions representative of real life in continuous plot”.
Follow the Drum is a novel. But, because fiction can only ever hold a mirror to real life, I would like to say here and now that the important incidents described in my story all took place.
Most of my characters were real people. And to those who were not, I have given real experiences from the lives of others, both Indian and British, who were involved in the tragic and heroic events that form the background to this story.
Looking back at these events from an age obsessed with leisure, amusement and "rights", it is difficult to believe that Indians could be blown from guns without arousing an outcry from either side; or that an Indian officer could be ordered to shoot his own son and not demur; or that two young British officers could ride out with fifty men and, through sheer audacity, capture the most wanted man in all India - although at that time he was surrounded by thousands of his own subjects.
Words like duty and honour and bravery and service held a depth of meaning for British and Indians alike in that long-lost world which many today will find hard to believe.
I hope that this preface may make their understanding easier.
J.L.
1
AFTER that night, long after it, whenever Lang saw the moon paint still water silver, or smelled the scent of roses on summer evening air, the years would melt away, and he would be nineteen again, on the evening of his engagement party at Five Mile Place.
Looking back, it seemed odd that he had only seen the great house for the first time that evening, arriving by hired carriage with his mother; although then this had not seemed in any way unusual.
He had been immensely impressed by its sheer size; but so was everyone who first saw the terraces and balustrades, the stone statues, the temple-like follies built in cypress groves and the five square miles of land from which the house took its name.
And he was to marry Arabella, the girl who one day would inherit it all. Their children would boat upon this lake, and ride across this park, and one day maybe he would hold an engagement party like this for them.
Across the shimmering lake, Lang saw the house, lit by flares. Hundreds of candles caged in coloured glass jars flickered in trees, like glow-worms. Above the poplars that lined the drive, owls and bats, driven frantic by the lights, fled silently, dark, sinister parentheses in the sky.
He turned to his mother and squeezed her hand; he could imagine what this moment meant to her. That her only son, for whom she had scrimped and saved through so many lonely years, should be marrying into the wealth that this party represented, was as astonishing as if she were marrying into it herself, after years of little money and other people's cast-offs.
Lang still felt secretly bewildered by the prospect. Only days before, he had been commissioned into the Bengal Army of the Honourable East India Company - that extraordinary commercial complex which had started in the reign of Queen Elizabeth with a few trading posts around the Indian coast to store Eastern spices, much valued for their ability to keep meat edible during English winters, and which now virtually ran the country.
He looked at his mother, and, mirrored in her proud eyes, he saw the house with its Palladian front and carved pillars of gentle Dorset stone, mellow in the lamplight. She had willed this for him; she must have done; there was no other explanation. He could never have accomplished it alone.
"You will marry well one day, Richard," she used to tell him when he was still at school. "You'll get a commission first, of course. Your dear father was a major. With the right wife, you'll rise to be a general."
"Yes, mama," he had replied, not really listening. The right wife. To Mrs. Lang this described Arabella MacDonald perfectly; rich, an only daughter, her father a colonel who had married a rich wife himself.
Every time Lang had looked at the faded brown daguerreotype of his own father that his mother kept in a silver frame on her dressing-table, he had re-affirmed his decision to be a soldier. This was the life he had been born to: a soldier's life, following the drum. But - marriage? This was another thing altogether, although, as his mother explained, intricately bound up in the first.
The coachman flicked his whip over the arched backs of the horses. Iron tyres growled on gravel. As they went forward, the music grew louder, and he saw the red and white marquees, lit within by trembling flames, alive with music.
Many of the guests were officers, who wore mess dress, blues and scarlets, brave with burnished shoulder chains and gold epaulettes. The women were in crinolines of white and blue and pink, with flowers in their hair.
Among them moved butlers and liveried footmen, expertly, and without fuss. But then they were not just servants hired for the evening, but regular staff. No one and nothing was hired here; everyone and everything was theirs - and one day would be his. That is what marriage meant - the right marriage, of course, as his mother insisted.
Arabella. It seemed incredible that he, with so little money, brought up in a small terraced house his mother rented cheaply in Torquay, should ever have met her, let alone be her future husband.
She had been walking out with Mrs. MacDonald along the sea front, looking out across the fishing boats beached on the shingle when a gust of wind had blown her hat away. He had picked it up, bowed, and returned it.
Her mother had thanked him, and somehow he was invited back for tea. Mrs MacDonald and Arabella explained that they had but lately returned from India. They had rented a house in Torquay for a month; the colonel was in the country seeing to some matters connected with his estate.
Lang explained that he had been born in India; his father had been a major in the Bengal Army.
"What regiment?" Colonel MacDonald had interrupted his wife when she told him about the meeting.
"Fifteenth Native Cavalry Regiment. Barrack-pore."
"Hm. Nothing special. Sort of regiment you'd join if you hadn't much money. They don't keep up much style."
"That's what I thought. But he's a good-looking boy. Tall. Nice eyes. And a lot better than, than the others."
"Oh, my goodness, yes."
The others. An Indian princeling she'd fancied herself in love with. Fancy, an Indian. Of course, he was rich, no doubt, and well born, and you might dine with that sort of person once or twice in a year if you were stationed near their palace. You might even permit them to lend you and your friends a dozen elephants with howdahs and half a hundred beaters for a tiger shoot, but that was the extent of your relationship; distant, correct, formal. Like two people playing a game, each knew his place and the iron rules and etiquette involved.
And there had been someone else equally unsuitable; a sergeant in his own regiment. Incredible, of course; he was quite a good-looking fellow in a common sort of way: father, a Sussex farmer. Good soldier, but nothing else about him. Well, there was one thing: his physique.
Colonel MacDonald had seen him bathing in a river, naked. The man had certainly been impressive; chest like a barrel, whang as big as a policeman's truncheon, sack well filled.
That's what had attracted his daughter, he realised; the physical side of the man. Perhaps it was the same with the Indian? He'd heard all the bazaar talk of their astonishing sexual appetites; how their women derived pleasure from sex - an extraordinary proposition by European and Christian standards and values, of course, but nevertheless believable as regards heathen natives. MacDonald had the authority of his own regimental surgeon for believing that Arabella was no longer a virgin.
"Of course, colonel," the surgeon had added, rather embarrassed, but trying to be reassuring; after all, he needed a good report from the colonel for his own promotion. "Of course, these young girls play tennis now, and some ride astride instead of side-saddle. And this sort of unaccustomed exercise can produce the same physical results as, ah, sexual congress."
"But in this case, surgeon-major, what do you think?"
"I hesitate to say, sir, but in view of the young lady's warm personality, and a certain full-blooded-ness about her private parts, I would consider that she has had intimate experience of some kind."
Obviously, the sooner Arabella was safely married, the better; and this subaltern Lang seemed an ideal choice; safe, uninfluential and Colonel MacDonald could still exercise some control over his career.
So, although Lang still could not understand how, for he never guessed that Mrs. MacDonald would approve of such meetings, let alone encourage them - he had met Arabella again and again, and then quite frequently. A chaperone always accompanied them, of course, and gradually it became accepted that he was courting Arabella, and that they would marry. And then, because the MacDonalds were returning to India, their engagement was announced; Richard had been carried on the tides of wills stronger than his own, and had not objected. After all, it was probably, as his mother insisted, a wonderful thing.
Her own life had not been easy: his would be infinitely better - if he married Arabella.
"Yes, mama," he had agreed, and of course he wanted it to be better. But what did they both mean by better?
To Mrs. Lang it meant being waited on, living like the MacDonalds, who rang a bell and a manservant instantly appeared, a genie in a swallow-tail coat. A life without washing-up; no scrag-ends, no more mending and letting-out or down. No more scrimping. Ever.
To Richard, a better life meant a chance of adventure, the opportunity to extend himself, to stretch his mind, to achieve something - he was not quite sure what. It never occurred to him that these two definitions did not have the same meaning.
The coach jerked round the last bend in the long drive and so Richard missed - if indeed he would ever have detected in the darkness - a slight movement among the dark-green laurels and purple rhododendrons.
The couple in the bushes lay watching the coach jog on towards the house, like a cut-out silhouette. Then Arabella turned to her companion, and stroked his chin slowly.
"Didn't hear that at all," she laughed. "Must have had my mind elsewhere."
"Not only your mind," whispered Garroway and kissed her neck, biting her ears gently, running his hands down over her shoulders, cupping her bare breasts in his hands, feeling the nipples harden under his palms. Arabella strained up against him. He leaned over her, pulling up her skirt and their mouths met, tongues fencing, as he covered her body with his. She arched up under him.
"I love you," he said untruthfully, looking down at her intently, as though he wanted to imprint in his mind how she looked with the clouds scudding across the moon, "You bitch."
"That's why you love me."
"Then what about this boy Lang?"
"Oh, that's Mama's and Papa's doing. They want me to get engaged to him. So I am. It's being announced any minute."
"My God, and yet you're doing this now, with me?"
"With no one else. At least, not at this moment. Know something, Ian?"
"What?"
"You talk too much."
Then there was nothing but their own movements and heavy breathing, and her long sobbing sigh of exultation, and they lay panting in each other's arms.
Suddenly, she struck Garroway in the middle of his back with her clenched fist, a small imperative blow.
"Get up," she hissed, wriggling away from him.
Garroway rolled to one side and knelt on the outspread blue and red cloak and watched her, listening.
"Do me up. Quickly."
"Why the hurry?"
"The band's stopped."
She was sitting up now, fumbling with the hooks and eyes of her bodice. He picked up his cloak, shook it, and brushed it as best he could with his hands.
"What about me?" Arabella asked petulantly. "Are there any leaves or grass on my dress?"
He brushed down her skirt at the back, and then pulled her to him fiercely. She shook herself free.
"Not now."
"You are a one."
"I know. But that won't help either of us unless we hurry. I'll go first."
She stepped out of the bushes on to the gravel path and walked swiftly towards the house. A plump man with a swinging lantern was coming down it. The butler.
"Miss Arabella?" he called tentatively. His eyes were weak and he had mislaid his spectacles.
"Yes, Charteris."
"The colonel is calling for you, miss. He wishes to make an announcement."
"I took a walk," she said. "It's lovely by the lake."
Charteris said nothing. He wondered who had been walking with her by the lake; and how long they had kept walking.
Garroway watched them go up the drive, and then came out of the bushes. He lit a cigar, pulled out the comb he kept in his left breast pocket, combed his hair and walked towards the house. The nearest table was packed with glasses of iced champagne, bubbles rising. He picked up a glass, drank it greedily. Then he drank a second, and carried a third glass towards the edge of the crowd that had now gathered around the steps of the house.
At the head of the steps stood Colonel Mac-Donald and his wife. The colonel wore mess dress, a tall, white-haired figure with small eyes, his face flushed with drink and self-importance.
Arabella would be a rich bride. And money, like food, was all the more desirable when you hadn't enough of it. Garroway picked up another glass of champagne thoughtfully from the tray of a passing waiter.
Trumpeters played a fanfare and Arabella's uncle, a short fat character showing a lot of starched cuff and stiff shirt front, held up podgy hands for silence.
"My lords, ladies and gentlemen," he intoned ponderously. "It is with great pleasure that I introduce my brother-in-law, Colonel MacDonald, our host here tonight, who has an announcement to make of the highest importance."
He waved one hand to MacDonald, like a barker in a fairground. The colonel bowed.
"I would like to welcome you all," MacDonald began. "Not only to this party which Bertha, my wife, and I are giving on the eve of our departure to India for our last tour of duty, before we return to stay here - I hope for ever - but also for another, and happier, reason.
"Our daughter, Arabella, is sailing to India with us. When she comes back here again, it will not be as Arabella MacDonald, but as the wife of an officer of the East India Company's Bengal Army, as Mrs. Richard Lang. It gives us the deepest pleasure to announce her betrothal to Richard tonight."
The colonel turned, and Lang stepped forward. He stood as tall as the colonel, his face pale in the hissing naphtha flares. Some guests began to clap, but not many; they didn't know this young man. Mothers, with sons they would have liked to see married to a girl with such rich expectations, looked at each other with raised eyebrows and shrugged their shoulders, pretending to clap their hands, careful not to let their palms touch.
"Richard also sails next week. But unfortunately not in the same ship. However, we will meet him again in India, and we have already made a provisional date for the wedding in June next year, at the church of St. James's in Delhi.
"Richard Lang is a young man who, I am sure, will go far. His father, the late Major Ralph Lang, tragically had his career cut short by an untimely death in the service of John Company and his country. I know that Richard will carry on in his father's tradition. And I know, also, that all of you here will join me in wishing the young couple great happiness in the years ahead."
"Hear, hear," shouted Garroway from the edge of the crowd, the effects of four glasses of champagne moving in his veins. He raised his empty glass ironically. People frowned at him. Some of the women stayed looking, for he was handsome: dark thick hair without a parting; a Spanish-style moustache drooping on either side of his mouth; a slightly sardonic gleam in his brown eyes as he turned and toasted the women who stared at him. They looked away, embarrassed that he seemed able to read their thoughts.
Richard and Arabella now stepped forward. They bowed and smiled and were holding hands.
"My lords, ladies and gentlemen," called the colonel, glass in hand. "I ask you now to charge your glasses and join me in a toast of long life, health and happiness for my daughter and her future husband."
The glasses went up with murmurs of: "Hear, hear," "I second that".
Several guests later remarked that Arabella's left hand was behind her dress, apparently brushing away a few blades of grass and crushed clover petals. But only one person in the crowd knew how they came to be there.
The maid bustled into Lang's room carrying a polished copper can of hot water, pulled the curtains, wished him good morning, sir, respectfully, curtsied, poured some water into the white china bowl let into the marble slab beneath the window, and withdrew.
Then a footman, with a dirty, pock-marked face under his white wig, walked into the room gravely, carrying a silver tray of tea, wafer biscuits, and an apple already sliced. He laid the tray down reverently in his white-gloved hands on the table by the bed, like an offering on an altar.
Lang slid out of bed and crossed to the window and looked down at the twenty-acre lawn that stretched to the drive. A dozen gardeners, all wearing green baize aprons and trousers tied with string below their knees, were carefully picking up the scattered debris of the previous night; pieces of bread, lobster shells, broken glasses, white linen napkins, a discarded fan. Other bearded men, in dark coats and black bowler hats were expertly lowering the marquees. A few ragged little boys scuttered like two-legged animals among the men, picking up crusts and dropped rolls, cramming them into their mouths hungrily. What they could not devour, they carried away in their shirts.
Lang poured himself a cup of tea without milk or sugar, drank it thankfully, then washed, shaved, and went downstairs for breakfast.
The dining-room was empty. On the sideboard stood a row of polished German silver domes covering plates of bacon rashers, rind already removed, sizzling on silver grills above blue-flamed spirit lamps.
He picked up a plate, already warm, put on two rashers from the grill, a couple of eggs from under the next domed dish, kidneys, fried bread, then poured himself a breakfast cup of coffee, and sat down at the table.
The Times and the St. James's Gazette were waiting on polished brass stands, with their folds ironed, and the pages sewn in with white thread, so they would not fall out when the paper was opened. An under footman had been downstairs at half past five to do this, and then had prepared breakfast for the first and second footmen, the butler and the housekeeper.
Lang glanced through the overseas pages for news about India. A dispatch from Calcutta mentioned vague unrest among the sepoys, so called after the Persian word Sipahi for soldier. Of course, these newspaper writers had always to keep looking out for trouble somewhere to provide something to write about.
The writer, like most of his kind, was obviously a clerk or doff-hat, who knew very little of military matters. Otherwise how could he claim that, in a number of regiments, sepoys had complained formally to their commanding officers about being ordered overseas to Burma, since this order was contrary to the terms of their enlistment, which explicitly stated that recruits would only serve within Indian boundaries?
Some high-caste Hindu sepoys viewed this prospect of overseas service with great alarm, not on the grounds of personal danger, but because of spiritual contamination. As Brahmins, they had been taught by their priests that to share a plate, a bed space or a drinking vessel with a man of lower caste, contaminated them eternally, so that they would have no part in the glories of the after-life.
To cross the sea in a ship with others of low caste or, worse still, no caste at all, or with bhistis, who drew and carried water for washing and drinking, or sweepers, who emptied latrine buckets, was comparable, in European and Christian terms, to asking a man to share his bed with a leper, with one fearful difference; they knew no cure for the disease, either in this world or the next.
The writer listed further reasons for the disaffection which he claimed should be causing more concern than it was in Calcutta, the capital of India, and in London. The East India Company, which frequently acted as though it was the government instead of being simply a commercial concern, had recently annexed the Kingdom of Oudh, a province about the size of Scotland, midway between Nepal and the North-West Frontier. From this kingdom the Company's two armies, in Bombay and Bengal, had drawn most of their recruits, for soldiers had privileges in Oudh which civilians could never achieve.
In any legal dispute, for instance - and India had many, because leases and wills and agreements were frequently only verbal - soldiers could be assured of help either in the courts or out of them by the British Resident himself. Very few Indian lawyers, however honey-tongued, would risk accepting a dubious case when they knew that the judge and the defending lawyer were both British and that neither could be bribed. Now, native judges were to be appointed in their place.
The East India Company had assumed control of Oudh because the old king was insane and his kingdom was, in fact, controlled by robbers, who grew wealthy through levies paid under threat of assassination. The Company had feared revolution, which would very seriously affect their revenues and profits, already the lowest they had been for years. But instead of giving this genuine reason, they produced an unconvincing excuse that an old treaty with Britain had never been ratified. No one in Oudh believed this, and few thought that the move was simply commercial: they believed that more sinister motives lay behind it.
So, at a stroke of whose pen no one really knew, the East India Company had not only alienated their own armies and their own families, but had spread unrest and apprehension for the future among people who had previously been proud to serve.
Richard threw down the paper irritably. It was rubbish, of course. These newspaper writers whipped up trouble where none existed. India was a hot country, and in hot countries you always had disputes and disagreements of some kind. He'd learned this from his history lessons at Addiscombe, the East India Company's college. A hundred years earlier, Indians had been similarly shocked when, through entirely humane motives, the British had forbidden the old Hindu custom of suttee, in which, to show their love and fidelity, widows would fling themselves on the flames of their husband's funeral pyres and burn themselves to death.
Then the Company had stopped parents murdering unwanted baby girls, also a Hindu custom, which kept roughly constant the ratio of boys to girls—a most serious necessity in a country of primitive standards of agriculture.
The arrival of missionaries preaching the Christian faith had caused more alarm, among Hindus and Moslems and Sikhs alike. Until then, they had all believed that the British were only interested in trade, and kept the peace in India simply so that they could do more trade at greater profit and disadvantage to their European rivals, France and Portugal. Now they thought that the British were intent on Christianising the country—and by force, if need be.
But then, Lang's tutor had asked his class rhetorically, what could you expect from heathens, blacks, people who could not read or write? What, indeed?
As Richard went out of the dining-room into the inner hall, a side door to the garden opened, and Colonel MacDonald came in. His face was puffy, his eyes red, as though they had been sandpapered.
"Ah, Richard," he said. "Up early, eh?"
"Not as early as you, sir," Richard replied dutifully.
"Hope you slept well?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'd like a private word with you," MacDonald continued.
Lang followed him into the library.
"Sit down," said MacDonald; more an order than an invitation. "Expect you're pretty tired after last night, eh?"
"Not really, sir. I danced most of the dances with Arabella. One with your lady wife. Two with my mother."
"Very fitting ratio," said MacDonald approvingly. "Drink?"
"Not so early in the morning, sir."
"Never too early for me. Medicinal purposes, of course. Settles the stomach. Keeps the vital juices working. Persuades the blood to pulse more agreeably around the body."
MacDonald poured himself half a tumbler of neat whisky, drank it in two gulps, gave a soft, wet sigh and sat down behind the desk.
"We'll speak man-to-man," he announced. "No rank, eh? First, about Arabella, She's a very high-spirited gel. Rather like a yearling filly. Headstrong. Always had her own way. Only child. Follows her mother. You were very young when you were last in India, but you're a man now and I can tell you that the heat in India sometimes does odd things to the ladies, bless 'em.
"They may be cold in temperament in England. Indifferent to our, ah, advances. Lacking as you might say, in ardour, even. But out there, the heat and the curries and a strong moon and the lonely feeling of being one of a handful of Europeans, amongst literally millions of natives—it all seems to charge their emotions. They become wayward, difficult, passionate. Not as one imagines ladies. As opposed to doxies. You get my meaning?"
"Perfectly, sir."
"Good. I'll be frank with you. When we were out there last, Arabella formed some idiotic attachment to some Indian princeling. You'll meet these fellers. Rich as Croesus. Charming. Educated over here. Just like one of us. Except, of course, for the colour of their skins and the fact they're heathens, worshipping gods of stone and wood. Which, of course, we can't do with.
"Mind you, we mix with these fellers, you know. Oh, yes. Our ladies even dance with them. And they're very hospitable in their own homes—palaces really. Ask us back to dine. Have wonderful horses, and literally thousands of retainers.
"Fellers like the maharajahs of Patiala and Ahmednagar. Then there's Baroda and Nana Sahib, the Maharajah of Bithur. Actually, the Government says he's not a real rajah of the blood—only adopted. So they won't allow him a salute of guns like the others. Bit short-sighted, I say, for he's just like the rest. Hospitable. Pleasant. Well-disposed. God knows how rich they all are, and they're all well, gentlemen. Wogs, if you like, of course. Worthy oriental gentlemen. A compliment in a way. But you'll form your own judgement.
"Anyhow, I was saying that Arabella became rather too involved with one of these chaps, and so we brought her home. Commander-in-Chief's lady wife thought it might be a bad example otherwise, you know. I admit you get rankers who marry Indian women out there—damned good looking they are, too, some of them—but not the colonel's daughter. Got to draw the line somewhere. Do I make myself plain?"
"Perfectly, sir," Lang said for the second time.
MacDonald opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out an envelope.
"Well," he said thankfully, "that settles that. Glad to get it off my chest. Best to be frank. Nothing hidden. Now, to the other matters. I know your father was a very honourable officer. But, of course, he's been dead for ten years. And you'll not know many people who can give you a push in your career when you need one. And if you haven't got money in India, then you need good friends, who'll help you—and perhaps you'll be in a position later on to help them. Turn and turn about. The law of life.
"So I've racked my brains to see who I knew out there who might be able to help you. And I've come up with two."
He opened the envelope.
"Both young men. Well, youngish. In their late thirties. One's a bachelor, one's married.
"The bachelor's Nicholson, John Nicholson. Irish. Father was a Quaker doctor, who caught fever from a patient and died. Left a widow and seven children, and nothing else.
"Nicholson was sixteen. So what did he do? He left school, got on to his uncle in the East India Company—see what I said about friends?—and became a cadet, then an officer, in the Bengal Infantry.
"He's an odd feller, rather a lone wolf. But I believe he's highly thought of. In fact, I know he is. Feller in my club last week said he's bound eventually to be a general. Maybe even govenor-general. He knows him well. So I got him to write this letter, introducing you."
"Thank you, sir," said Lang. "As a matter of fact, my mother knows his mother slightly. They both live in Torquay. She's also writing to him to say I'm coming out."
"Oh, well, perhaps I'll tear up this letter, then?"
"No. Please don't. It was most kind of you to get it for me."
MacDonald pushed the letter across the desk petulantly.
"Now, the married man. Again, I don't know the man personally—one can't know everyone personally—but I think he'll be useful to you. His brother's a parson. Bishop here knows him. So I got him to write this note to him. Name of Hodson, William Raikes Hodson. Was at Rugby. Cambridge. Evidently fooled about, wanted to be a lawyer, but did nothing—didn't get a degree, I mean—so came down and also joined the Bengal Army.
"Now he's married some woman older than himself. Think she's a son by her first husband. Boy must be in his late teens now. Funny feller, Hodson, apparently. Good at things you wouldn't expect an officer to be good at."
"Like what, sir?"
"Like being a mimic. Man can memorize pages of Pickwick Papers. Takes all the parts himself. Odd, don't you think?"
"Unusual, sir."
"Bloody unusual. Some of the best officers I've served with couldn't even read, unless it's a cheque—or a race card. I believe he's been in some sort of trouble out there, money or something.
"It's damned easy to run into debt in India, Richard, believe me. You never pay cash. You sign chits for everything. They don't come in till the end of the month, maybe not for three months. Sometimes they're sold by one trader to another at a discount. Then they'll all come in at once.
"So you borrow money to pay them, and the interest is high—or maybe you are asked to show a favour to someone instead. If there's a contract some native contractor's very anxious to get, for instance.
"So you've got to watch yourself with money. Don't think Hodson's a rogue, mind. I wouldn't give you his name if I thought he was. Just expect he was careless. Most of us are, about money.
"Anyhow, he's been seconded to the Intelligence Department. Bit of a backwater, I'd say. Not work for a gentleman. I take Napoleon's view. His spy-master, Schulmeister, ferreted out the secrets that helped him win both Ulm and Austerlitz. Napoleon gave the man money, of course, but Schulmeister wanted an honour as well. Napoleon naturally wouldn't consider the idea. 'I cannot honour a spy? he said. And he didn't. Quite right, too."
"But, what about this Hodson, sir? Isn't he an officer?"
"Of course he's an officer. A lieutenant. But mind you he's thirty-five or -six. Or maybe even older. He should be a captain by now. He would be. Even a major—if he had money."
"So all promotion goes by money? You've got to buy it?"
"Well, not all, but it helps, doesn't it? Dammit, you've got to run your polo ponies somehow and pay your bills, haven't you? Say you're the colonel of a regiment, and you've got two young fellers, equal in everything else—but one can put five hundred pounds into mess funds, or five thousand. Then he's got a better chance than the feller who can't put in anything. Must have. That's obvious, surely?"
"I don't think I have much of a chance, then. I've nothing except my pay."
"That's why I'm giving you these contacts, Richard," said MacDonald coldly. "You make yourself pleasant and useful to them. They speak well of you—and you could find yourself in a position where their good influence is as good as money. Or almost. Which means promotion. And promotion means success. And that's happiness for Arabella and you. It's a vicious circle."
"Certainly sounds a bit vicious, sir."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Nothing, really. Just a bad pun."
"Too early in the morning for jokes. Well, I'm going to London for a luncheon today. So I'll say good-bye to you now, Richard. Or rather, as the French say, 'au revoir'. See you again in Delhi. You know your posting yet?"
"Fifteenth Native Cavalry. Stationed in Barrackpore."
"Oh, yes. My wife told me. Near Calcutta. Bit dead-and-alive up there. Humidity's terrific. Curious thing. Civilians wear a white dinner jacket in Calcutta and black trousers. Go across to Bombay and they wear a black dinner jacket and white trousers. Deuced odd, don't you think?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, nothing much more. Are you taking out any guns? Do much shooting?"
"I haven't got my own gun, sir." Lang did not add that he could not afford one. His father's twelve-bore had been sold long ago.
"Pity. Get some damned fine shooting with these maharajah fellers. Don't use any dogs. You have native boys to pick up your birds for you. They are just like dogs, you know. I remember once, duck shooting, we all went to lunch, and I looked out of the window and, damn me, there were half a dozen natives swimming away for dear life in the lake to retrieve the ducks."
"Do they like it, sir?"
"Like it? Never asked 'em. Don't see why they shouldn't though. Keeps 'em cool. Anyway, you don't ask natives if they like something. You just tell 'em to do it.
"You have my address? Headquarters, Special Detachment, Delhi. In the Red Fort. My job's to look after the old King of Delhi, who's really only a king in name. An old fool on the Company's payroll, surrounded by concubines and eunuchs, and women he can do nothing to except look at. But he's very useful to the Company. A kind of totem for the Indians.
"The Company's got an agreement that they won't keep any British troops in Delhi, except the small detachment I'm in charge of. Sort of guard of honour.
"The nearest British regiments are about forty miles away, across the desert at Meerut. They can reach Delhi in a couple of days' fast marching, so everyone's happy. The Indians have their honour and pride and prestige—no foreign troops in what was their capital for hundreds of years—and we have the country and the trade. A very satisfactory distribution. I look forward to our meeting again, Richard."
"Yes, sir. And thank you for the letters."
They shook hands. The colonel stumped off up the corridor, and left Richard looking out of the window at the lawn. Both marquees were down now, and workmen were carrying the poles, like huge battering rams, towards the carts.
Did all successful people think so much about money, he wondered; or perhaps the colonel thought about it so much because it wasn't his money, but his wife's.
He knew she had come from some family in the north of England. Cotton-spinners or mill-owners. It was wise to marry a rich wife, if you hadn't money yourself. As his tutor at Addiscombe had advised his class once: "As officers and gentlemen, you don't talk about money. You either have it or you haven't. But if you haven't got it, then you make it. And if you can't make it, then, dammit, you marry it."
Looking out over the lawn, towards the sweep of trees, Lang suddenly realized that people could also say he was marrying for money:
Was he?
2
QUEEN VICTORIA was expecting her seventh baby. The courtyard of Buckingham Palace had been laid with freshly washed sea-sand to quieten the grind of iron tyres beneath the windows, although her private apartments were on the other side of the building overlooking the garden and the lake.
The special saluting guns of the Royal Artillery stood with horses bridled and limbers fitted, ready to move instantly to the Park, the Tower of London and to Fort Belvedere, out near the village of Sunningdale on the Southampton Road, to fire the Royal Salute of forty-one rounds as soon as the birth was announced.
One room in the Palace had been set aside for the event, and all the furniture inside it was draped with white sheets in an attempt at asepsis. The Queen's two nurses, Mrs. Lilly and Mrs. Innocenti, were already installed in their own quarters, and had discreetly fixed up a small Chinese screen in a corner of the room. Behind this stood a complex cluster of strange glass globes and bulbs and raw metal barrels hung with red rubber bladders and pipes. This was the anaesthetic machine.
The new baby would be the second royal baby to be born in something less than agony. Queen Victoria had inhaled chloroform four years earlier, in 1853, for the birth of her sixth child, and this unexpected Royal innovation had set a seal of acceptance on six years of unrewarded research and experiment by Dr. James Young Simpson who, still only in his forties, had struggled all this time unavailingly to influence the course of painless midwifery by the use of chloroform and ether.
A sitting-room was also ready for those Ministers of the Crown who had to be present by custom. There, within earshot, but tactfully not within sight of the Queen, they would satisfy themselves that the child was actually born to the Queen, and was not some other baby introduced illicitly.
This tradition stemmed from an ancestor of Queen Victoria, the sickly wife of King James II. All her children had died in infancy, and when, in July, 1688, she gave birth prematurely to a son, some politicians put about the rumour that he was not a real Royal prince, but a humble child smuggled into the Palace in a warming pan.
Lord Dalhousie, the recently-retired Governor-General of India, knew all about these preparations for the imminent birth. The servants' papers had been full of these details for days. One didn't read that trash for pleasure, of course, but sometimes a headline caught the eye.
Some men, no doubt, would have felt flattered that the Queen should still ask to see them at such a time, but not Dalhousie. A political opponent had told him once that he was vain as an ugly woman, and this was quite true. He was as conscious of his dignity as of his lack of inches. He was pleased he had retired as Governor-General of India. People in England were not at all concerned with India, thousands of miles away, when they had so many worries at home: mass unemployment, the rising cost of bread, demands to raise the school leaving age to eleven, and other irrelevancies of this sort.
Only the government was mildly concerned—and then simply from motives of fear. If the Company grew too rich and powerful, it could become a threat to their own existence. So could any general revolution in India, if British subjects were massacred, and the public at home asked why this had not been foreseen and prevented.
His successor in Calcutta, Lord Canning, was more to their taste: always ready to listen to the Indian side of any dispute. Personally, Dalhousie was well out of it all. He'd served for ten years; he'd earned the good things that would now be his.
His coachman turned into the gold-topped gates of the Palace, and the polished iron tyres struck sparks from the gravel. A footman in Royal livery stepped forward smartly, and bowed low as he opened the silver-handled door with Dalhousie's crest in gold as the carriage halted outside the main doors.
His own footman jumped down from his place on the box with the driver and saluted the open carriage door. Dalhousie waited for a moment—there was no need to hurry, you had to show these fellows who you were; they respected you more for it—and then he climbed down slowly, studiously ignored them, and walked up the red carpet into the Palace.
A butler stepped forward and bowed. Dalhousie stood on the points of his shoes in the subconscious hope of adding an inch to his stature, handed over his white gloves, his rolled umbrella and his polished silk hat. The butler took them, and passed them on to a second servant, who materialized behind them. Then a third footman appeared, in breeches and tail coat, wearing a powdered wig. He led Dalhousie along a tiled green-walled corridor lined with marble busts of long-forgotten kings and queens and statesmen, opened the door of a waiting room and bowed again.
Dalhousie went into the room. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was waiting for him, wearing his favourite dress of green trousers and blue coat, his whiskers carefully dyed to conceal his age. He was a vain man, but cheerful: only days before he had won a general election by seventy-nine votes, the biggest majority since the Reform Bill twenty-five years previously.
"Good morning, Prime Minister," said Dalhousie.
"Morning," replied Palmerston. "Thought you were going to be late."
He lived in a huge house just across the Park, in Piccadilly, and allowed himself six minutes for the short walk to the Palace.
Dalhousie took out his gold watch ostentatiously.
"Eleven fifteen is the audience. It's eleven eleven, Prime Minister. Precisely."
Palmston grunted. He had all the big man's condescension for someone much smaller: everything about Dalhousie irritated him.
"With the birth expected any day, it's a wonder Her Majesty will see you at all," he said.
Dalhousie said nothing. Instead, he prowled round the room on his toes, looking at ornaments and paintings that did not interest him; anything rather than have to face Palmerston. Or rather, not face him, but because of his height, be forced physically to look up to him.
A flunky wearing velvet knee-breeches and a white wig and jacket with gold buttons embossed with the Royal crest, a splendid outfit contrasting strangely with the sour smell from his pustuled and unwashed body beneath these fine clothes, opened the door.
"My lord, Prime Minister," he said adenoidally, looking from one to the other. "Her Majesty will see you now."
Some ancient knight from the shires, white-haired, pink-cheeked and trembling, a Gentleman of the Household, now appeared, and bowed deeply to both visitors. Palmerston bowed to him in return. Dalhousie bowed, but carefully to no one in particular. Then they all set off down the corridor, unconsciously falling into step.
Queen Victoria waited in an audience room small by the gargantuan standards of palace architecture, no more than forty-foot square. It had a ceiling painted by Cellini, embossed with gilt and blue cherubs against white Italian clouds scudding before a sunnier sky than London had ever seen. The curtains were drawn, so that the room appeared dim, almost at half-light. The small, puffy-faced woman of thirty-seven who awaited them, her clothes skilfully arranged around her by personal maids to minimize the fact that she was nearly nine months pregnant, sat on a throne decorated with lions' heads, gilded and built into the arm rests.
She nodded as the three men stood in the doorway, the courtier in front of the visitors. They all went down on their right knee before her.
"You may enter," she said, stroking the ears of the lions. They felt very smooth to the touch, almost like real gold. Would a real lion's head feel so silky? She must ask Albert: he would know; he knew everything.
Her voice was thinner and less regal than Dalhousie had imagined it would be. When he raised his head he looked into her hard small eyes, set in curiously white and waxy flesh, the face of someone who rarely saw the sun. It was as though one of the marble heads in the corridor outside had suddenly become animated.
"Well, my Lord Dalhousie, pray come forward," Queen Victoria told him. He took two paces into the room. The carpet was so thick that it muffled all sound of his movement.
"And how, pray, did you leave our Indian enterprises?"
Dalhousie took a deep breath, realizing that the question was entirely rhetorical. Queen Victoria wanted a quick answer, not the long, involved, carefully balanced statement he had rehearsed to himself in his study until he knew it by heart. Well, he would give her what she wanted.
"Your Majesty," he replied sonorously, measuring to each syllable the weight it deserved, "if I were asked to prophesy, I would say that this year will be one of unparalleled peace, prosperity and goodwill throughout the length and breadth of all India."
3
THE early morning sun, gathering strength for another burnished day, when the mercury in the barrack-square thermometer would boil in its bulb, blazed across the parade ground, throwing long shadows from the three cannons across the dry dust.
They were old siege guns with muzzles eight inches across, big and black as bear-holes, barrels intricately carved with serpents and fiery heads. Brought out from their artillery store, polished and sanded, black-spoked wooden wheels re-lacquered, leather release straps oiled, bronze on their barrels buffed, they stood in line, ready for their terrible purpose, barrels pointed to the sky at their highest angle of elevation.
Behind them stood the artillerymen in their full dress uniform, brass helmets, tiger-skins, and black leather breeches. Alongside each cannon lay newly sawn stakes of wood formed into crosses, about twelve feet long and four feet across, with mule-loading ropes coiled near them. Behind the gunners, on two sides of a square, stood two rows of British troops in red coats and white shakos. They were armed and carried their loaded carbines at the slope. On the third side of this hollow square an entire Indian regiment had been paraded, unarmed.
Behind them again, stood three ranks of British troops, and then the muzzles of other artillery.
Subedar Ram Gupta, with thirty years' service in the Bengal Army of the Honourable East India Company behind him, and now within sight of his pension, stood to attention in front of his men on his last parade, his mind numbed by the prospect of what was about to happen.
Late the previous evening, he had returned to Barrackpore from leave, from spending three months in his village with his wife and daughters near Cawnpore, nine days' march away, to hear the astonishing news that the regiment, his regiment, which had been both mother and father to him since he had joined so many years before, was to be disbanded. This might seem incredible, but it was true. And, worst of all, three old comrades were to be blown from guns. Alive.
Ram Gupta could find no English officer to tell him anything about his future, or why this astonishing and terrible decision had been reached. The colonel and adjutant, to whom he usually had instant access, were—so the regimental clerk told him—with General John Murphy, the divisional commander. All junior officers were in their quarters—sheltering in case of violence.
"Violence from whom?" asked Ram Gupta in bewilderment. Was he going mad, or was this some elaborate hoax?
"From us, subedar sahib," replied the clerk, grinning. His teeth, dyed red with betel juice, made his mouth seem full of blood, and gave him a sinister cannibalistic appearance.
"Us?"
"Jihan. We will be the masters soon. It is written."
"Where is it written?"
"In our stars, in our hearts. You have been on leave too long, subedar sahib. One regiment has already refused the new cartridges and has been disbanded. Now it is our turn."
"But, why? What cartridges have been refused?"
"The new issue. For the new Enfield rifles the English are giving us to replace the Brown Bess muskets. The cartridges have to be greased with cow fat and pig lard, and a twist of paper bitten off before we fire them."
"I don't believe it. The cow is sacred to us Hindus. As the pig is unclean to Moslems. The English would never be so foolish. They know our beliefs."
"The old ones did, subedar sahib, I agree. But not the new officers we have now. Not a fish's tit do they care for us. They cannot even speak our tongue, but need an interpreter."
"That is true," Ram Gupta agreed reluctantly. But did this also mean that the new English officers were so ignorant that they would deliberately insult and offend all the sepoys of both major Indian religions by insisting they used this grease? Surely not?
Man cannot determine at what hour or place he enters this world, but sometimes others decide when and how he will leave it. And the greatest defilement of all, the ultimate horror that paralysed Ram Gupta's mind as he clenched and unclenched his hands at the sides of his trousers, was the unspeakable way these men would pass from this world to the next—from the three siege guns.
How could refusing to go against their religious teaching bring such an ultimate punishment? Was there indeed truth in the bazaar rumour that the English planned to convert Indians to Christianity by force?
Ram Gupta's eyes, narrowed against the bright sun, tried to draw some comfort from the familiar background: the parade ground itself, rough as a rasp; the thatched barracks, with mango trees behind them, their branches trembling and feathery in the growing heat. How many hundred of times had he stood thus before his men under the roasting sun, proud of his position and rank!
Ram Gupta stood still as an iron man, not a muscle moving, eyelids barely blinking, although sandflies stung his neck, relishing the salt sweat that streamed down beneath his heavy shako.
The heavy serge hand-me-down red coat he wore (too tight under the armpits, because the local Indian tailoring contractor, who had copied a British design intended for cold climates, had defaulted on the amount of cloth) constricted the circulation so that he had no feeling whatever in his arms. Behind him, and on either side, in open order, boots polished like ebony on bare feet, their flesh beneath their uniforms soft with sweat, the rest of the regiment also waited as rigidly, their shadows shortening as the sun climbed up the sky.
The nine hundred men with whom Ram Gupta had served for so long might also have been statues, carved from dark stone, except for their grey hair. Many were in their fifties, and some even in their sixties, for promotion came slowly in the local armies of the Company. British officers could buy it—if they had the money—and set prices were laid down and adhered to with no bargaining, for gentlemen did not bargain. Four thousand pounds for the command of a regiment; two thousand pounds for a captaincy; a thousand for a quick commission to provide a gentleman's career for a feeble-minded younger son.
Indian sepoys tried to advance their humble rank by judiciously bribing regimental clerks, who might then plead their case for promotion with their superiors, or by giving presents to the Indian mistresses of British officers, who could speak kindly of them to their lovers.
But, even so, for naiks and havildars and subedars, as for lieutenants and captains, promotion often came so slowly in this hard, hot land that death overtook their chances. Now, disgrace had overcome them all.
A small group of British officers rode slowly out towards them from the shade of the barracks. The polished steel of the subalterns' drawn swords signalled wild messages from the rising sun.
The leading officer was a major of fifty-five, sweat already spreading its dark stain on his back and beneath his armpits. He turned to an Indian interpreter who ran barefoot alongside the horse, his feet hard as iron, never feeling the sharp flints of the barrack square.
Although the major had served for nearly forty years in India he could still only speak charwallah Hindusthani. He knew enough for his meagre purposes and his personal pleasures: to summon his Indian mistress to his bed, to rebuke a bhisti for running his bath too hot. But for the disagreeable and shocking task ahead, he needed professional assistance.
He reined in his horse and turned to the interpreter.
"Put it in their lingo as I-.speak it," he said briefly. "Understand?"
The interpreter nodded. He was a grey-haired man in his sixties, wearing a white dhoti that looked like a shroud when the wind flapped its length about his thin, brown, scaly legs.
"Right," began the major. "There is no need for me to tell you once more why you're here, but I will.
"You're here to be disbanded as a regiment. To be struck from the Roll of Honour of the East India Company. You are being disbanded because you have refused a lawful order to accept the new ammunition which all the armies in India, the Bengal and the Bombay Armies of the East India Company, and the British Army, are being issued with.
"Three of your number have also deliberately refused a further order, to embark for service in Burma. This is mutiny. The punishment for mutiny is death. Since the army is in the field, the sentence is to be fired from guns."
His horse broke wind and scraped its shoes on the ground; the flies were annoying it. The major tugged irritably at the bridle.
"Where are the prisoners?" he shouted.
"Here, sir."
Three sepoys came marching out from the barracks between double guards of British corporals. Their ankles were shackled with iron chains. They held them up as they walked, still keeping in step with the other troops; years of training were not easily forgotten.
A British sergeant-major, marching to one side, pace-stick under his right arm, wheeled them round in front of the nearest cannon, and kept them marking time. Their knees came up like pistons; six boots hammered the hard earth as one.
As they came in front of the muzzles of the three guns, he halted them. They turned to face the inner empty square, the huge mouths of the guns gaping blackly behind them.
"Prisoners in position, sir!" the sergeant-major reported.
The major raised his sword to return his salute.
"Have they anything to say?" he asked.
The prisoners shook their heads. The prospect of what awaited them within minutes had drained their minds of all thought and the power of speech. They stood numbly, eyes wide with horror. A wave of unease, like a wind in dry leaves before a storm, trembled across the ground.
A British lieutenant dismounted from his horse behind the major and crossed to the prisoners, spurs clanking. He carried a small knife in his hand. With this he ripped the brass buttons from the men's jackets. Smiths and armourers went down on their knees with hammers and huge pincers to nip the shackles. Other men pulled off the prisoners' uniforms, picked up the three wooden crosses.
The prisoners were naked now, except for loin-clothes. Their heads were shaven, because of their caste, save for long tufts of hair which distinguished the Hindu from the Moslem. Hindus believe that, at the moment when the spirit departs from the body, it is by this cord of hair that it ascends to the other world.
The punishment was the long-established way of dealing with mutiny, under the old Mogul Emperors, and was equally dreaded by Hindus and Moslems, for both their religions declared that it destroyed the human soul as utterly as the body.