Anne Perry - A Breach of Promise

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 Illustrated London News. The account had been terrible, even after censorship for the general public.

"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 thinking.

"Then Nena Sahib ordered all the remaining men shot," Gabriel went on as if he could not now stop himself. "The women and children who had made it as far as the shore he had taken to his residence. They were hacked to pieces too, and their bodies thrown down the well."

She looked up at him again. She must not run away from this. It was all past. They could hurt no more. But Gabriel needed not to be alone in his horror. He was the only one still alive she could help.

He went on talking.

"When General Havelock's men found it eventually, the floor of the room was two inches deep in human blood. They found the hacked-up limbs and bodies in the well. They pulled up the body of one of General Wheeler's daughters. They sent a lock of her hair home as a memento, to her family in England." His voice was low in the quiet room smelling of clean linen and candle wax. "The rest of the scalp they divided up among themselves and then each man counted the individual hairs in his portion and swore an oath by heaven, and by the God who created him, that he would kill one mutineer for every hair he had. I know, because one of those men was a friend of mine. He wept even as he told me of it. He used to scream in his sleep when he remembered that house and what they found in it."

"How did you escape?" she asked him.

"I was hit on the head and nearly drowned," he replied. "But I was washed up by the river further downstream. I lay senseless for so long I suppose they thought I was dead and not worth bothering with. When I came to myself they had taken the plunder and the prisoners who were still alive and gone. Then followed the worst two weeks of my life… I don't know how I lived, but I made my way towards Futtehpore and met up with General Havelock's men. I was nearly dead and of no use for the fight, but they took care of me. I recovered." He smiled as if it still surprised him. "I wasn't even badly hurt, just burned and half starved and on the point of exhaustion." He glanced at his empty sleeve. "I didn't lose that until a few months ago. It was a stupid street brawl I tried to stop. But you don't need to hear about that."