The Distant Kingdom Page 26

  Understanding how useless he was, he sent for Shelton, who had been quartered in the Bala Hissar since the beginning of the troubles. He also sent letter after letter down through the passes to Sale, begging, ordering, cajoling him to return at whatever cost to save the Caubul army. Macnaghten did the same, but as the days went on, wearing down the spirits of the beleaguered English, it became horribly obvious that for whatever reason Sale was not coming.

  Very few people ventured to criticize him in his wife’s hearing but more than one considered that his refusal to obey orders to come to their rescue was tantamount to cowardice and desertion. He had a strong brigade with him, and several guns, all safely ensconced behind the high walls of Jellalabad, while at Caubul his colleagues, not to speak of his wife and daughter, were facing imminent defeat and very probably death.

  Every day seemed worse than the last. Food became scarce, and, as the weather worsened daily, the lack of firing became acute. The commissariat officers did their best to buy food and fuel from the surrounding villages, but even when the prices were reasonable, the villagers and their convoys of vital produce would be harassed and attacked by tribesmen.

  Perdita, struggling to keep the two children unaware of their plight and warm and fed, thought she could have kept her equanimity better if only she could have had peace at home. But no house containing James Thurleigh could offer that.

  Their brief moment of alliance just after Marcus’s return from the pass might never have existed. Perdita could feel Captain Thurleigh’s irritation whenever she entered a room where he was talking to her husband, and from the bleakness in Marcus’s eyes as he watched them, she knew that he could feel it too. When they were all three together, he seemed to withdraw from both James and Perdita, and they were left to converse spikily with each other. Perdita used to wait avidly for the sight of James Thurleigh descending the steps from the verandah, so that she could go to find Marcus blessedly alone. Then, he would seem gravely glad to see her and they would be able to talk.

  On 16 November Thurleigh left the house immediately after tiffin and Marcus was off duty until the evening. Perdita was sitting peacefully with him in the afternoon, and, for once, he was almost frank about his fears for the future. Perdita had told him a little of her own when they were interrupted by Thurleigh. She tried not to show him the kind of anger he displayed so openly to her, and she was glad of it when he told Marcus why he had come.

  It seemed that Shah Soojah wanted to negotiate with the rebels to put an end to the fighting. Perdita said:

  ‘Thank God. Then there may be some hope for us all.

  Thurleigh answered bitterly:

  Don’t depend on it. I believe that the chiefs would take any agreement as a sign – yet another sign – of weakness on our part, pretend to agree and then once our defences are relaxed attack with all the men they can muster. But Sir William has demanded to see a copy of any terms before Soojah signs, so we may get away with it. But, you know, the best news is that the Afghans are fighting amongst themselves. If Macnaghten can divide them properly, we’ll be able to rule them once again.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather risky?’ asked Perdita. ‘Did any of us believe at the outset that the tribes would unite to the extent they have now?’

  James Thurleigh glared at her, and Marcus quickly changed the subject to the more acceptable if equally important one of the garrison’s dwindling stores.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll start eating the dead camels. At least that would be better than suffering the stink of their rotting carcases,’ answered Thurleigh. Perdita felt sick.

  The situation grew desperate as November ended, and officers no longer worried about letting their men see how little hope they had of victory, or even of survival. One morning when an encouragingly larger consignment of grain reached cantonments, the colonel of the 5th Native Infantry said gloomily:

  ‘It is needless, for they will never live to eat it.’

  Everyone knew that Brigadier Shelton was urging General Elphinstone to decide on a mad retreat to Jellalabad, while Sturt, now partly recovered from his terrible wounds, was begging the old gentleman to move the entire garrison into the Bala Hissar, which at least could be properly defended. It was common knowledge that Shelton always pretended to be asleep during consultations so that he would not have to answer difficult questions; that Captain Bellew raised objections and difficulties to every plan proposed; and that the general would no longer order out any of the troops unless he could persuade Macnaghten to take responsibility for it.

  Creeping despair and a conviction that they would all die or at best be made prisoners and slaves had seized almost all of the English when at last a loophole seemed to open. Akbar Khan, the fighting second son of the Dost, arrived at Caubul and assumed leadership of the chiefs of all the tribes with whom the Envoy had been attempting to negotiate. His terms were stiff – and humiliating – but at least guaranteed the garrison a safe retreat out of his country.

  When the news leaked out, Perdita and most of the other ladies felt astonished relief. To get out of the hated country at last, with an escort of tribesmen to see them through the passes! In the sudden exhilaration that attends any release from paralysing fear, they set about packing up once more. The idea of such a long journey in the cold, sleet and snow of the last few days was unattractive, but most of them believed it would be worth it. Perdita looked out all the warm furs and skins she could find for her family and servants, and gave orders for the best arrangements for packing up all the furniture and silver she had brought up with her.

  Marcus warned her that with so many of the camels having died, it was unlikely that she would be able to take it all. Cheerfully enough, she revised her plans and had some of the less favoured pieces chopped up for firewood for the last few days in Caubul. Once again the house became really warm, and the Beaminsters found themselves immensely popular.

  Visitors called at all hours to sit over Perdita’s fires talking now hopefully, now in despair, about their prospects of survival. Notably absent from these almost jolly gatherings, though, were the politicals, who seemed to be avoiding their friends and military colleagues. One or two officers remarked on it, but the general opinion was that they were working out the details of the march and the Afghan escort with the chiefs.

  The true reason for their absence did not become clear until 23 December, when Sir William was treacherously murdered by Akbar Khan, and the English discovered what he and his assistants had been plotting. Captain Trevor fell too, leaving his wife with the frightening prospect of getting the eight children back to India alone. The rest of the English officers who had accompanied the Envoy to his meeting with Akbar were taken prisoner. Disgusting details of what was done to the poor men’s bodies began to circulate round cantonments. Macnaghten’s hands had been cut off, and his head, and his legs. The head was paraded through the streets of Caubul and the trunk hung from a meat hook in the Char Chouk.

  It was with some shame that James Thurleigh admitted to Beaminster that his dead chief had been trapped by Akbar into breaking faith with the tribes. Once they had reached agreement with Macnaghten, Akbar sent him a secret message, offering infinitely more attractive terms in return for a personal subsidy and a promise of British support for his own campaign against the other chiefs.

  Thurleigh saw Marcus’s expression of horror, and hurriedly said:

  ‘I know. I knew what you would say. But look at it from his point of view: Akbar proposed our waiting until the spring before attempting the passes, quite apart from helping us to retrieve our honour.’

  ‘Honour? By breaking a treaty?’ demanded Marcus angrily.

  ‘I think,’ commented Perdita in a dry voice, but with almost equal anger, ‘that pride would be a more appropriate word.’

  This time she did not wait for their response, but left them, and wondered whether to have everything unpacked yet again or to leave the cases and boxes and trunks as they were. She wished she had not been so profligate w
ith the furniture. Now it looked as though they might all be stuck at Caubul for months longer, and the weather would become far worse before spring.

  But eventually, on 6 January, the Caubul garrison marched out of its expensive cantonments. The last days had been hideously cold, and everyone had been hungry; even the officers and their families had been cut to half and then quarter rations like the sepoys and camp followers. Rumours about the finally agreed treaty circulated as usual, and everyone who heard them was loud in condemnation of the terms. General Elphinstone had agreed to pay fourteen and a half lakhs of rupees for safe conduct through the passes to Peshawar, leaving six hostages to guarantee their behaviour and six of their guns.

  Few but he were disposed to trust the word of Akbar Khan. It was universally agreed that the Commander-in-Chief should have ordered the six guns to be spiked so that they at least could not be used against the retreating army. But General Elphinstone for once stuck rigidly to an opinion of his own: the six guns formed part of a treaty; it would be dishonourable to do anything but hand them over in proper working order.

  ‘I wonder he does not leave Vincent Eyre behind to help them fire the damn things,’ said Thurleigh furiously when he heard.

  He was far from being the only man to doubt the good faith of the tribesmen. Sergeant Deane, who had married an Afghan and so had innumerable friends in the city, reported that he had heard that the column was to be attacked by 10,000 Kohistanis at Tizeen and then by all the Ghilzais at Soorkhab. But his information was dismissed.

  Lady Sale’s servant, Mohammed Ali, warned her to beware of treachery, and Perdita’s erstwhile groom, Aktur, forced his way into the cantonment once more to deliver a similar warning. She said in her halting Pushtu:

  ‘I will tell the sahibs, but I think they will march even so.’

  He looked at her with an intensity in his black eyes, saying urgently:

  ‘If that is so, do not ride with the other memsahibs, but among the sowars. And wear these.’ He presented her with an unsavoury bundle, containing what he called neemchees, a kind of sheepskin spencer, and coarse turbans.

  ‘That sounds wise counsel, Aktur. But what of my children?’

  ‘They must wear the same and go nowhere near the palkees or camel panniers. They must ride with you.’

  ‘But they are too young. It is nine times ten miles to Jellalabad alone.’

  ‘I know it. But ride they must. There are coats enough here.’ Then he went, reiterating his warnings, which Perdita repeated to Marcus later in the day. He said dispiritedly:

  ‘I can well believe that the Afghans will attack us, for a more treacherous set of blackguards I have never set eyes on. We must march as soon as possible, and the southern route is impossibly long and probably just as dangerous. But there is nothing to be done. We must go as soon as we can. And may God have mercy on our souls.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Perdita had never been so cold or so afraid. She was half-lying, half-sitting in a kind of nest of poshteens and neemchees she had made in the snow when the column, halted to bivouac for the night. Marcus, on his way to see to his men, had urged her to take the children at least into a tent that had been pitched for the officers’families. But, remembering Aktur’s advice, she had insisted on camping among the troops at the head of the column, in spite of the children’s tearful protests and wailing demands for their ayahs and their beds. As Marcus walked away, she called:

  ‘Come back when you can. We shall be warmer all together.’

  He waved in what she took to be agreement, and so she persuaded the children to lie down in their eccentric and distasteful bed and settled down to wait for him. All around them were noisy animals, worried officers, men straggling in and trying to find their companies, and hundreds and hundreds of camp followers, trailing their babies and their baskets, getting in the way and causing unutterable muddle for the soldiers.

  As darkness fell, the sky to the west of the bivouac was lit with an orange-red glow that was unpleasantly reflected in the moonlit snow. Perdita asked a passing officer of the 121st what it could be and he called despairingly:

  ‘It’s the cantonment burning. They started the sack even before the last of our fellows got away.’ He strode off, leaving Perdita to try to ease her aching back and wait.

  Once she was sure that the children were asleep, she took her arms from around their shoulders, then she half-turned awkwardly to scoop up a mound of snow under sheepskins to make a back rest. The relief she felt as she leaned against it was almost piercing, and she believed after all that she might survive until Marcus returned.

  He came nearly an hour later, with Captain Thurleigh, and she persuaded them both to add their sheepskin coats to her nest and lie down close to the children. Thurleigh hesitated, but the cold was so intense that he saw the sense of it, and lowered himself down between the layers of skins. Marcus watched him, and then said:

  ‘Perdita, my poor dear, are you very uncomfortable?’ She summoned up a smile and said:

  ‘Not so bad. If only there were some water! But any thirst is better than staying in Caubul, so I am not complaining. How far have we come?’

  The two men looked across the heap of coats that covered them all, and Thurleigh said roughly:

  ‘About five miles.’

  The horror of it silenced Perdita. They had ninety miles to go, and in a whole day’s cold painful marching had only achieved one eighteenth of the total. There was no wood for camp fires, no fresh water, and the baggage train was in such disorder that no food had been distributed. She and the children had dined off biscuits soaked in sherry, the only liquid available.

  ‘At least it is helping them to sleep.’ she said aloud.

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry, Marcus: I was thinking aloud – that at least the sherry I gave the children is helping them to sleep.’

  He found her hand under the furs and squeezed it.

  ‘And you too, I hope. You will need all your strength when we reach the pass tomorrow.’

  ‘Shall we reach it tomorrow at this snail’s pace?’

  ‘We must.’

  When the grey dawn came, releasing them from the necessity of

  pretending to sleep and trying not to move in case they should

  inadvertently wake the others, all three adults were unsure whether or not they had actually slept at all. But at least they were warm, except for their faces, which were pinched and reddened from the cold. Perdita brought one of her hands, warm from the nest, up to brush something from her eyelids and discovered that her eyelashes and brows were frozen hard. She was trying to thaw her face, wincing in the pain, as she saw the others struggle out of their coverings. Marcus said:

  ‘I have to see to the men. But I’ll try to find some breakfast for you and the children, and discover when we’re to march.’

  ‘Thank you, Marcus,’ said Perdita, resolutely trying to keep down the panic that seemed to rise in her throat like vomit.

  When he came back, his face was unhappier than she had ever seen it. She started to get up, saying:

  ‘Marcus, what has happened?’ He said:

  ‘This is catastrophe: the worst mess anyone could have imagined. The rear guard did not reach the bivouac until two this morning – that was what all the commotion was; most of the baggage train has been lost, and with it the entire commissariat. But worse, far worse …’ He broke off and actually groaned. Before Perdita could urge him to tell her the worst, Thurleigh walked up and gripped Marcus’s arm above the elbow.

  ‘There is nothing to be done now, old fellow, except see that the march is pushed forward with all speed, to get the living to some kind of shelter.’ Perdita said forcefully:

  ‘Will one of you two please tell me what has happened?’

  ‘Most of the Indian troops have suffered severely from frostbite, Lady Beaminster. Many of Marcus’s men are dead …’

  ‘From cold?’ asked Perdita.

  Marcus said b
itterly:

  ‘They were not allowed to wrap leggings around their boots as some of us wanted and they had no bedding. Some of them took off their clothes to burn as fuel in order to feel some warmth before they died. The camp followers are in worse condition, if possible. There are bodies all over the road; they just lay there and died.’

  ‘Ayah,’ came Charlie’s voice sleepily from beneath the poshteen.

  Perdita gestured her husband to be silent. ‘Ayah, bring my clothes.’ He spoke imperiously in Hindustani.

  Perdita answered in English:

  ‘Ayah is not here, my son. And you are wearing your clothes. Look. We are on our way to Jellalabad, remember? Annie, here, let me help you to sit up.’

  ‘Breakfast, Mama. What is for breakfast?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘I don’t really know, old chap. Marcus, did you …?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, feeling in his pockets. ‘Johnson has given me some Caubul cakes and tea for you all. But didn’t you tell me that you had some raisins and ottah in your saddle bags?’

  ‘Yes, but if we are marching at only five miles per day, and the army has rations for only five days even if they have not been lost, we shall need those supplies before we reach Jellalabad.’

  ‘I don’t think it right to take Johnson’s food while you have your own,’ said Marcus.

  Perdita was so angry that she actually felt the blood warm and pounding in her cold cheeks. With some difficulty she said:

  ‘I cannot fight. But I am trying to ensure that the children reach Jellalabad alive. And if that involves keeping the food I brought in spite of all the official reassurances that rations would be provided I shall do it.’

  Marcus, who had never seen her so definite and was in any case too worried, cold and exhausted to argue, handed over the flask of tea and the collection of flat greyish-brown wheat cakes, and went back to his company.

  Before any orders were given to march, at about half past seven, groups of Indians began to struggle through the encampment carrying bundles and squalling children. They stumbled past Perdita’s bivouac, one child tripping over the tether of Perdita’s yahoo.