The sun beat down. Sweat ran down the diggers’ backs. Their faces were strained, for this was the desecration of an ancient grave, perhaps, that they were committing. In times of great calamity, or after battles, when the survivors had no leisure to cut the wood and no oil to make the wood burn, Hindus were sometimes buried in common graves like this.
Chandra Sen’s face was solemn. ‘These died a long time ago.’
Plague might have done it, or cholera, or smallpox, or famine, or war. William wiped his forehead. He had a splitting headache and sat down suddenly to ward off an attack of vertigo. He must go on and find out.
He said, ‘Get all your men, Chandra Sen. Dig up everywhere. Dig up the whole grove, especially where there are the marks of old fires.’
For a long moment the patel hesitated. The expressions of the men working set sullenly. At last the patel bowed his head. ‘It is an order.’ The digging began again.
The eight mounted police from Madhya arrived in a loud clatter. They were all the police William had for the whole district, and they were in reality only semi-trained cavalrymen, with little knowledge of police duties. He sent them out at once to search the roads for the merchant and his companions and the lopsided man.
An hour later Mary came. She slipped down from the saddle, gave the reins to her groom, and walked towards him. He got up quickly and hobbled over, holding out his hands. ‘Don’t look, dear. It’s ghastly.’
She took his hands and held them. He saw that she was looking over his shoulder at the lonely bones. Her mouth set and she turned her eyes to his. He was afraid to meet them. She said, ‘You were right.
I
knew they thought you were seeing things. And now you can show them -- Daddy and all the rest of them!’
He looked up in astonished wonder. ‘I was right? Show them what?’
‘You’ve found out something really big. Oh, it’s horrible, but you have discovered it, because you wouldn’t let that girl die!’
His mind whirled. He had not been thinking in that fashion. She went on, ‘Now you’re going to catch this gang. They must be a gang. And you will save so many more people’s lives.’ She looked straight at him, and her eyes were like sapphires. With her, he would succeed all right, and make George Angelsmith smirk the other side of his scented, damned face!
She said in a businesslike voice, ‘I’ve sent the bullock cart with our baggage on to Madhya. I’ve brought blankets on the horses, and some food. How long do you think you’ll have to stay here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll stay with you. Here --’ She gave him brandy and a cold chicken and warm chupattis. She brought out salve and bandages and patched the wounds showing on his face and hands. Then she sat beside him and held his hand and did not speak.
The digging continued through the afternoon and evening. Grumbling women arrived from the scattered holdings, bringing food. They set lanterns on the ground and held torches. The men dug. There were places where no one could dig, where the tree roots grew thick together; but in all the open spaces they burrowed into the earth. Travellers passed along the road; the police brought more in; William scanned them all closely and asked them questions. None had been among the party of murderers, he thought. Their recollections of other travellers were vague and useless.
On the ground the row of skulls and thigh bones grew longer. A second row had to be started, a third. Some of the bones were older than the first they had uncovered, so old as to be pockmarked with the small holes of organic decay. Some were so fresh that the maggoty flesh still clung to them, and the strangler’s mark was clear on their necks. They had all been mutilated. Where flesh survived, great driven holes showed through chest and belly. Every major joint had been broken back on itself. Big men, so smashed and folded, took no more space than a child; children, broken, became small square bundles. There were no women recognizable. The strong sweet smell of death filled the grove. The diggers dug with the ends of their turbans flung across their mouths and spat frequently. Mary watched with lips tight and blue eyes afire in the lamp- light.
As the second dawn broke, Chandra Sen’s face was as grey as the light, and his hand lay cold on William’s arm. ‘I am sorry. You were right.’
William counted. There were sixty-eight bodies -- rather, sixty-eight skulls. None could tell now how many bodies there might have been. Some had lain here years beyond reckoning, two centuries perhaps. The newest was not more than a week in the earth. The bodies of the Sikh farmer and his son had not been found.
The strength had gone out of William’s legs. Sher Dil helped him on to his horse. ‘Chandra Sen, let your men rest,’ he said feebly, ‘then bury all these again. Cause Hindu and Mohammedan prayers to be said over the grave. I will send back the priest from Kahari as I pass, and the maulvi from Madhya.’
His head sunk on his chest, he let the horse walk at its own pace down the road. Miles passed and he did not speak. He did not feel the burning sun, or hear the robin in a tree, or see the cheetal stag arching across the path ahead. He did not notice the travellers on the road who stared up at him, or the men in the fields, and he did not know that his wife was at his side. He remembered her; she had tried to cheer him up yesterday, when only a few skeletons lay on the grass. But this -- this was monstrous. He had believed her then, believed in himself. But all the warmth had ebbed away as the picks swung.
A mile out of Madhya she touched his arm gently. He started in the saddle and turned to her. Her eyes were full.
‘William.’
‘Oh! You . . . I’m finished. In disgrace.’ He had not slept for two nights, and the road swung like a pendulum in front of him. ‘I thought I knew everyone, everything. I could have said, I have said, that not a thief can move in my district without my knowing it. For three years I’ve sat here thinking that whatever sort of a fool I was at books I knew my people and I looked after them. Meanwhile sixty-eight of them have been murdered not a day’s stage from my headquarters.’
She held his arm tightly and the horses pushed together. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s not! Most of those poor people were killed years ago. No one can blame you.’
He shook his head, shaking off the excuse. ‘Yes. But a gang of six -- seven, perhaps -- has been committing wholesale murder during my three years here, and I’ve known nothing! I’ve made lots of mistakes, and I can face them and myself only because I thought I knew the way ordinary people here lived and moved and died. I thought I could help them.’
He did not speak again until they reached the bungalow. Dismounting in silence, he gave the reins to the groom and turned to laugh harshly in Sher Dil’s worrying face. ‘Sixty- eight, Sher Dil! You counted?’ The bitter laugh echoed behind him down the bungalow’s central passage.
Mary ran after him. ‘William, won’t you lie down? Let’s talk about it later, when you’ve had some sleep.’
‘I’ve got something to do first.’
In his study at the back of the bungalow he reached for a sheet of thick parchment, found the quill, and at the third try dipped it into the ink. She watched the trembling in his hand die slowly away. His wrist and strong fingers grew rigid. The black letters marched in slow time across the paper:
To: The Agent to the Governor-General for the
Kaimur and Mahadeo Territories.
From: The Collector of the Madhya District.
Sir, I much regret to report that I have this day . . .
He lifted his head. ‘Your father will like this. After what George Angelsmith has told him he’ll be expecting to hear that the woman at Kahari became suttee, but this is even better. This is just about what’s he’s always been expecting from me, isn’t it?’ He bent again over the paper. She did not answer but sat on the other chair and her tears fell into her lap.
‘Smile for me please, William,’ she said, an early morning two weeks later. ‘You don’t know how nice you look when you smile. George won’t arrive till the afternoon, and even when he does there is nothing to worry about. You’re such a serious old thing.’
‘I’m old all right, compared with you.’
‘Nonsense. I feel sometimes that I’m the old one! I believe lots of wives do.’ In a rush of words she tried to hide her chagrin at touching one of his many raw spots. They were standing side by side on the verandah of the bungalow, looking out over the garden. George Angelsmith was coming from Sagthali with some message from Mr Wilson. William did not know what the message was, but he could guess, and did not find it easy to smile today, even at Mary.
She said, ‘I’m dreading his coming too, really, you know, because we won’t be alone then. I love this. George seems to carry a whole station around with him -- all the rivalries and attitudes and habits.’
William nodded, and a smile came of its own to his lips. She had been too young to remember her first three years in India. Born in a little place in Bengal, she had gone home at the age of three with her ailing mother. Her mother died in England. A year ago Mary had arrived out here once more, to join her father, so all she knew of India was Sagthali. Sagthali was a ‘station’ -- a place where, beside but apart from the Indian community, there had grown up barrack cantonments for the army and bungalows and offices for the headquarters of the civil administration. In a station there were never less than ten English families, and often many more. Sagthali had over forty.
In a station, suburban England enclosed you, and you saw India only through those windows of the mind that you chose to scrub clean and look through. In the outlying district it was different. One Englishman, the Collector, to whose charge the civil government of the district was confided, lived alone in a headquarters town, such as Madhya. Madhya had a population of five thousand, all Indian. If the Collector did not like Indians, he liked no one. If he despised India, he despised everything. In a district an Englishman could be alone -- and lonely; or he could have a hundred thousand friends. His happiness rested in his own hands, and his wife’s if he was married. Many English women hated district life so much that they turned their husbands into embittered drunkards.
So William sighed with relief to hear Mary say out loud that she loved ‘this’. ‘This’ was Madhya -- aloneness but no loneliness; work without rivalry; the honoured place but no aloofness. Two weeks was not very long to judge by, but he knew she meant what she said. For their happiness she had to mean it, because he was changing. His unsure dependence on himself was becoming an interdependence, he on Mary, Mary a little on him.
His smile faded slowly. He did not know how strong this new thing of love in marriage was. George was coming, and with him the threatening shadows of Mr Wilson, and the Governor-General in Council. Trouble was coming. Many people -- especially women, he’d heard -- fell away from you if you went into disfavour. George’s presence did something strange to Mary. She hardened visibly and began to fight something -- or for something?
He walked slowly at her side through the spreading garden. She was talking about Sher Dil. A feud had grown up between them, the inevitable one between the new wife and the old servant, the old friend, who has served when his master was a bachelor, and borne all the responsibility, and known all the happy days and the sad days and has not had to share them with anyone else. Sher Dil obeyed Mary with wooden correctness, when he understood what she was saying. That was not often, although William knew that in nineteen years of service Sher Dil had picked up enough English to understand any message he wanted to understand. William had hoped, among his other worries, that this could be resolved. He did not want to lose Sher Dil. But Mary was so young and impatient; even now she was saying that she found Sher Dil’s manner intolerable. At any moment the underground struggle would break into the open. Then Sher Dil would have to go, to find another bachelor and begin all over again.
‘William, dear, who darns your socks? I see holes in them, and then the socks disappear when I’m ready to mend them.’
‘Sher Dil.’
She laughed. ‘I thought so! Cobbles them would be a better word. I’m surprised you don’t get bruises on your feet.’
They stood beside an oleander, and William carefully put his arm round her waist. She leaned back against him and dropped her head on his shoulder. A score of sparrows were out dusting themselves in the garden path. Solomon came out on the back verandah of the bungalow and stared at the sparrows; from the corners of their eyes the sparrows watched him. Solomon was a young cat, furry, gingerish, and unnaturally long of tail. He could not control his reflexes, so that as he watched his jaw muscles tightened and he gave out a trembling yammer. Then, one paw at a time, he slid down the steps and pressed himself flat on the lawn. The grass was an inch high; the ginger cat’s tail lashed and his jaws worked. Mary whispered, ‘Isn’t he sweet, and silly? He’ll never catch a bird in his life. Do you know, you never told me you had a cat?’
‘Didn’t I?’ He knew perfectly well he had not told her. He was afraid she would expect him to own a pair of large, exuberant hounds. Sometimes people didn’t understand a man who lived alone with a cat and a carpenter’s bench.
Solomon crept to the flower-bed and lay down eight feet from the sparrows, his head sticking out between the flower stalks. The sparrows ruffled their feathers and shouted ‘Cat, cat, cat’ more loudly to each other. Solomon bounded out of ambush, all his claws spread. The nearest sparrow flew chattering into a tree; the others moved a yard farther down the path and sneered volubly.
Mary stood away from the oleander and gripped his hand hard. ‘Come on in. Breakfast’s ready. And after that you’re not going to sit in your study and wait for Mr George Angelsmith. You’re going to give me another Hindustani lesson.’
‘All right.’ He took a last glance up the road, turned, and walked at her side to the house. She was wearing white, a flowing high-waisted Empire gown, almost transparent, so that the shape of her long legs showed through. He had tried to make her wear a bonnet to protect her head from the sun, but she laughed and shook out her short hair, and said, ‘I’ll look just as nice in freckles -- or just as dreadful!’