A Breach of Promise by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

speak of it as history, as from the pages of a newspaper or a book, to whom the pain was only words.
    She asked him the inevitable question. The Mutiny had ravaged all India from Calcutta and Delhi to the 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 adeep 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, Futtehpore, 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.