A Proper Education for Girls (35 page)

“Goodness me, Harshad,” said Lilian in surprise. “I don't need to barricade the doors and hide in the cookhouse to escape the attentions of the doctor and the magistrate! And I already have some
chapatti
s in my saddlebags, for the journey.”

“Trouble coming,” repeated Harshad. “Please to stay here in bungalow.”

But Lilian was not to be persuaded. She had planned for weeks and now was the time to leave. She told Harshad to take the contents of the cookhouse and larder to his wife and to pay off all the other servants. If there was any money left in the purse after he had done this (and Lilian had ensured that there would be), he was to keep this for himself.

“Keep to confounded Trunk Road,” said Harshad, shaking his head. “Speak to no one. Bloody bandits and ruffian bastards everywhere. Tigers also most fierce. Be sure to ride bloody quickly and with purpose to avoid men and beasts.” He seized her hands and sunk to his knees before her. “Then it is good-bye,
memsahib
Lilian. Good-bye, damn your eyes.”

From her bedroom window, as she wound her turban about her head, Lilian had watched Mr. Hunter riding across the
maidan
toward her bungalow. How long would it be before any of the Europeans realized she had gone? Not long. Not that it mattered. There was nothing they could do to stop her.

L
ILIAN BREATHED DEEPLY
, feeling her chest expand agreeably without the constraint of lacing and corsetry. She would ride south and east to Calcutta, and take a berth to England. She had enough money left over from Selwyn, and her paintings had found a lucrative market. Her coded letter had asked Alice to come out to India, but it appeared that it was up to Lilian to fetch her sister herself. Perhaps she and Alice might adopt male clothing for good, she thought as she rode toward the native town. They could cut off their hair and ride astride, like men. It was liberating, after all, to be free from the terrible encumbrance of so many layers of complicated female clothing, to be freed from the expectations and restrictions of womanhood. A man might go anywhere; say anything, without so much as a raised eyebrow or a disapproving glance. Why should she, and Alice, not do the same?

The pony tossed its head anxiously.

Lilian patted its neck. “You agree then, do you, boy?” She smiled, and wondered what sort of pony she should get for Alice—it would have to be one that complemented her sister's athletic figure and assertive nature. Lilian pictured Alice in her mind, proudly sitting astride a spirited chestnut pony, her long legs clad in breeches, her strong hands holding the reins … Together, they would go anywhere they pleased.

Lilian had to cross the bazaar to reach the open road. She passed through the crowds unmolested and unnoticed. But Lilian's presence in the bazaar was disregarded for reasons other than her native costume, and she had not gone far before she began to make out the sound of a disturbance above the usual din and chatter. The faces that passed her looked uneasy; their eyes wide, their expressions troubled. She felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle as the sound of shouting, the tramp of running feet and the crash of overturned wares echoed along the narrow streets. No doubt it was simply another brawl, she said to herself, an altercation between Pushtu cutthroats or Marathi horse thieves that had escalated into something vicious. India was full of one-eyed men and scarred faces, just as Dr. Mossly's hospital was filled with knife wounds and torn ears.
There was always something violent going on somewhere, and the Kushpur bazaar was no exception. Lilian pressed onward.

As she pushed her way through the busy thoroughfare, however, the shouts and screams became louder—closer and more insistent. The crowd heaved against her pony. The noise increased, a noise that Lilian suddenly realized was not made by haggling natives or the calls of booth-
wallahs
, but was the sound of anger and fear, the sound of violence and destruction, and it seemed to be coming not from any specific area of the bazaar, but from all sides.

Lilian drew her pony to a halt. Perhaps Mr. Hunter was right. Perhaps there really
was
a whiff of insurrection blowing through the bazaar; perhaps the
nawabs were
dissatisfied with the
sircar
. Certainly, he had spoken to her most persuasively on the subject many times. Perhaps she should have asked Harshad? But then Harshad's world, like that of so many native servants, revolved around his
memsahib
and the requirements of her household. Surely he would have no knowledge of, or interest in, barrack room gossip and the discontent of princes?

Her fingers curled around the unfamiliar handle of Mr. Gilmour's pistol. Would she be obliged to defend herself? Was not white skin protection against everything—apart from cholera and insects, of course. Why, not even the Thugs had attacked Europeans—or so Mrs. Birchwoode had told her. Lilian peered uncertainly into the sea of worried-looking faces that bobbed about her ankles. Suddenly she was not quite so certain.

All at once people began running—from left to right; in and out of alleyways; toward the noise and away from it. A teeming frenzy of bodies swirled and buffeted about the legs of her pony like flotsam carried on floodwaters. Musket fire rang out above the din. The crowd surged. Lilian's pony reared up in alarm, its hooves dashing heads in front and bodies beneath. Lilian grabbed hold of its mane to stop herself from being tossed into the maelstrom. A woman with a baby staggered in front of her, narrowly missing the flailing hooves. A man began pulling at her leg, trying to unseat her and drag her onto the ground. Before she had time even to think about
what she was doing Lilian drew the knife from her belt and slashed at the man's fingers. He staggered back, clutching his bleeding hand, falling to the ground and disappearing instantly beneath the boiling throng as a man overboard might plunge into a turbulent sea. Lilian shouted, digging her heels into the pony's sides and urging it onwards, swiping at clutching hands and arms with her knife.

And then she noticed something else. There was now a distinct smell in the air, a charred reek that was different from the usual smells of cooking fires and spices and
ghee
and refuse. She looked into the sky and saw that it was dark with billowing clouds. Smoke was issuing from the direction of the river, to the north of the European enclave. The barracks were burning.

Lilian urged her pony up a passageway that led in a roundabout way to the
dak
bungalow, away from the
sepoy
barracks, and in the opposite direction from the European cantonment. A group of men staggered into view. They were dressed not in the garb of bazaar ruffians, but in the red jackets and white cross-belts of the Native Infantry. One of them carried a burning torch. It was ungainly in the man's grasp, and as she reined her pony in, Lilian realized with a start of horror and disbelief that it was not a burning torch at all but a human arm, clothed in red with a white hand dangling like a wet glove from its cuff. With the flaming arm the
sepoy
set fire to each booth that he passed, the smoke swelling and dancing behind him, as though he was emerging from the clouds of hell itself.

So unreal was the sight that Lilian was reminded, fleetingly, of the collection of prosthetic limbs that filled a display case in her father's house in a macabre gallery of wooden gestures. Perhaps this
was
a prosthetic limb, she said to herself, groping for a rational explanation. But she knew that it was not.
How frail we are
, she thought, her head spinning.
How insubstantial our bodies that we can be dismembered as easily as a marionette
.

Suddenly, as though from out of a rabbit hole, a British officer rushed into the passageway in front of the
sepoys
. He sprinted away from them and toward Lilian. He was no one Lilian recognized, but then his face was set in a mask of such rage and fear that she didn't
think she would have known who it was, even if it had been one of those officers whose smiles she had beheld across Mrs. Birchwoode's dinner table on so many occasions. The man's cherry red uniform was torn and dirty his face bloody from a gash above his eyes and his cutlass and pistol were gone. With the
sepoys
now screaming and waving their sabres behind him, he ran blindly in the direction of Lilian's horse.

Lilian saw the terror in the officer's eyes as he stared at her. She was blocking his pathway, her face streaked with smoke and spattered with blood, her
pyjama
trousers stained crimson. He tried to stop, but his boots slipped on a pool of dried peas and he continued to skid forward, his legs flailing as the peas scattered like ball bearings from beneath his skittering feet. Lilian hauled on the reins. With some difficulty she managed to turn her horse in the narrow passage, and not waiting to see whether the officer followed or whether he was engulfed by the baying mob, she charged back into the main thoroughfare of the bazaar.

In that short space of time the smoke had thickened into a sickening, greasy pall. Booths had been set alight and were burning angrily, adding acrid fumes to the reek of destruction already filling the air. To her left, the sound of exploding glass from a lemonade vendor mixed with the crack-crack-crack of unattended cooking fires from a
bhaji
seller next door. The body of a soldier, his red coat slathered with blood and his face smashed open like a watermelon, sprawled in the dust before them. On either side a rabble of
sepoys
, their uniforms gray with dirt and dust and smoke, ransacked stalls and overturned piles of baskets, boxes of vegetables, pitchers of grain and oil, anything that stood in their path.

Lilian whirled her horse around looking for a way through the mob. Her senses could hardly take in what was happening. Only yesterday they had made a serene boat trip to the botanical gardens. Today, in the space of a few minutes, Kushpur had been transformed into an abattoir. She had no idea what to do, or where to go …

A shout brought Lilian out of her daze, and she turned just in
time to see a European officer, his coat torn at the shoulder, his ears and nose streaming with blood, charging toward her. His mouth was open in a furious snarl, and he raised his cutlass to strike her from her horse. There was no time to move or even to shout a warning. There was only one thing she could do if she was not to be hacked into pieces, and without hesitation Lilian did it. She pulled the pistol from her belt and emptied the contents into the man's face.

M
R.
H
UNTER STOOD ON
L
ILIAN'S VERANDA, WITH
the doctor and the magistrate, and watched flames rising from the bazaar. The sun had disappeared behind a smudge of black smoke and the air tasted bitter as wormwood.

“Where can she be?” said Mr. Vine.

“You don't think she's gone to the native town, do you?” said Dr. Mossly. His pale cheeks turned paler still.

“Quite possibly,” said Mr. Hunter. He called to his
sa'is
to bring his horse. “I'll ride through and see what's going on.”

“The native town is burning,” said Mr. Vine irritably. “That's what's going on. You don't need to ride into the bazaar to get a view. We can watch the fires burning from Mrs. Birchwoode's roof. We'll go and inspect the damage in the morning.”

“Don't be a fool, man,” cried Mr. Hunter. “Lily might be dead already.”

A
T LAST
L
ILIAN
found herself in a silent passageway. The hurricane of violence had already swept through it, and all the occupants appeared to be dead. A trickle of crimson water made its way sluggishly through the debris of shattered bodies, torn clothing and piles of refuse. Lilian cleaned her knife blade on her trousers and reloaded her pistol with shaking hands. A spattering of pink, spongy matter was slathered over barrel and chamber and had
turned the handle sticky. Lilian gazed at her red-stained fingers. And then all at once she vomited lavishly onto the ground. She slumped against the neck of her pony gasping for breath. If only she had left the week before! Still, it was too late now for such pointless thoughts.

Stupefied with fear and horror, Lilian made her way through the native town. The confidence she once had in her disguise had evaporated long ago. At any moment someone might notice who she was, and she felt frightened and vulnerable, alone in the blood-soaked bazaar with her silly costume and Company pony. She had thought she was familiar with Kushpur, with India and Indians. Now this assumption appeared arrogant and naive. Kushpur had become a dark and foreign place, filled with terror and resentment. It was a place she hardly recognized.

Lilian rode in a daze, passing scenes of such slaughter that she could hardly believe she was traversing the same streets she had walked a hundred times before without fear. Her idea of heading to the Trunk Road to make her way to Calcutta seemed foolish and ill judged. She knew she would never be able to reach that faraway place alone, and what dangers might it hold for her once she got there? She wanted to burst into tears (indeed, some had already trickled a pale pathway through the dried blood and smoke smuts on her cheeks). Who could she turn to? Who would help her to escape from this hellish place? The answer was an obvious one: Mr. Hunter, of course. Mr. Hunter would know what to do and where to find a place of safety. He had probably left the European enclave and returned to the native town to collect his belongings at the first sign of trouble. Would he not then begin to look for her? Perhaps she would find him at the
dak
bungalow. Lilian turned her pony and headed back out into the terrifying thoroughfares of the bazaar.