A Christmas Garland: A Novel Read online

  “I don’t just want to secure his conviction, damn it,” Busby said sharply. “I want to get the matter over with, with the least pain to the men and women who have suffered abominations you can’t even begin to imagine.” He swiveled around and started to walk swiftly back toward the barracks and the entrenchment where the army had been besieged. “Come!” he commanded.

  Narraway turned and followed him, catching up with an effort. He did not want to go to the entrenchment again. He knew what had happened there, and could imagine the terror of it all. It was a barren square of ground, a hundred yards or so in either direction, with two- or three-story buildings along most of two sides. The rest was walled by simple earthworks, dug by spade and thrown up to less than the height of a man. During the eighteen days and nights of the incessant bombardment from Nana Sahib and his men, nine hundred people had lived there. Many had died of heatstroke, of cholera, or from their wounds.

  Narraway still shuddered as he pictured the people huddled together, terrified, exhausted, trying to protect one another, waiting for relief that never came. He could see the ghosts of them in his mind. He wanted to turn and walk away, but he could not ignore Busby, who was his senior officer. And perhaps even more than that, he did not want Busby to know how deeply affected he was.

  He stood silently. If Busby had anything to say, he would have to initiate the conversation himself.

  In the distance a dog barked, a woman called out a child’s name. There was an echo of laughter, exactly as if everything were perfectly normal—sounds of life, like new green shoots of trees coming up after a forest fire.

  “Don’t let them down, Narraway,” Busby said at last. “You owe them.”

  Narraway wanted to say something brave, about justice having nothing to do with emotion or personal loyalties, but all the words that came to his mind sounded trite, and they would only anger Busby. Worse than that, he would not truly believe in them himself.

  Busby was staring at him, waiting for his response.

  “As I see it, sir,” Narraway began awkwardly, “the most important thing is that when the mutiny’s over and order is restored, India knows that British justice is fair and objective, sir.”

  Busby shook his head, momentarily taken aback. He started to speak and then changed his mind.

  Narraway waited. He longed to leave this place, but he would not go until Busby did.

  “I don’t envy you,” Busby said at last. “I suppose you have to make a show of it. Mind you do just enough.”

  “I didn’t choose this, sir,” Narraway answered.

  “Nobody chooses their military duty, Lieutenant,” Busby said tartly. He stared across the entrenchment. “These poor devils didn’t choose to be here either. Just make as much of an effort as you have to so there’s no question that the hanging is fair.”

  “Yes, sir,” Narraway answered automatically. He was not sure if he meant it.

  Busby turned and began to walk back the way they had come, his shoulders squared, but there was no spring in his step, no vigor.

  Narraway waited a few moments longer, then left also, feeling as if he were turning his back on the ghosts, in a way denying them.

  He needed to think. At the moment all he had for a defense was to try to discredit the witnesses Busby would call, and that was precisely what Busby had just warned him against. No one needed to tell him that attacking another man would earn him no friends. Most of them had already suffered deeply, lost friends and, in some cases, wives they loved, seen horrors Narraway himself could only imagine. He had been in India a year but he was an outsider to Cawnpore, and no one would forget that.

  If his father had not insisted that the army would make a better man of him than a few years at university, Narraway would now be huddling beside a fire in some lodgings at Cambridge, worrying about cramming for an exam, and looking forward to going home for Christmas. His greatest discomfort would be trifling cold, the greatest danger not doing well enough and getting lower marks than he should have.

  He had not chosen this. He remembered his last evening at home before taking the train to Southampton and then boarding the ship for what had seemed an endless journey south, around the Cape of Good Hope, into the Indian Ocean. Weeks cooped up, nothing more than a tiny dot on a measureless expanse of water, everywhere he looked nothing but blue. They could have been the only men alive on the earth and there’d be no way of knowing. Even the burning, blazing white stars in the sky above him changed, especially around the southern tip of Africa, before they started north again and re-crossed the equator.

  That endless journey—for what? Some of the men he had come to know on that ship were already dead as a result of this savage mutiny—in so many cases, Indian against Indian. He had heard that there were only a little over twenty thousand Queen’s troops in India and, of course, far more East India Company men, with all their wives and children—as opposed to Indians numbering uncounted millions.

  Without realizing it, he was walking toward the river. Its swift, brown water was dangerous, full of snakes and other creatures, especially along the banks. But it still held a fascination for him: a sense of width and a freedom that the land did not.

  Was that a log floating half-submerged in the water? Or a crocodile? If he watched to see, what else would he miss? Crocodiles sometimes came out onto the banks. He had seen their teeth, like a double row of jagged nails, needle-sharp. They could take a man’s leg off in a single movement. He did not believe the stories that they were not aggressive and preferred to eat fish.

  As he stared at the water, he wondered whether he was Tallis’s best chance or his worst. There was only one possible end for Tallis, really—the gallows. The difference lay in whether it appeared that someone had fought for him, or not. Narraway himself was expendable. If everyone loathed him afterward and he went down in history as the man who had tried to excuse Tallis, that was the price of a swift and unquestioned execution, and the matter laid to rest before Christmas.

  And if John Tallis was innocent? Was that even possible?

  The log in the river moved and sank gracefully beneath the water, leaving a momentary wake behind it.

  Crocodile.

  The facts said that Tallis was the only one who could be guilty. And yet when Narraway pictured his face again, recalling it as vividly as if he had seen it just moments ago—the clear, burning blue eyes—doubts arose in his mind. Irrational, but undeniable, doubts.

  Then who could be guilty? Who was lying? He could not imagine that several men were all lying to save the man who had really murdered Chuttur Singh and let Dhuleep go. And if they were, would they allow Tallis to be executed for it?

  Narraway could not get rid of the feeling that Tallis trusted him. All sorts of arguments came into his mind as to why it was not trust so much as hope, hope that Narraway could help. Or perhaps it was just a brilliant piece of acting. Or—and this was the easiest to understand—it was a denial to himself that he could have committed such a betrayal, a refusal to face the fact of his own guilt.

  But looking at Tallis, that was not what Narraway had felt. He believed he had seen real desperation there, the kind a man has when truth is on his side.

  How could Narraway even begin? If Tallis was innocent—and that was the only assumption he could work with—then either someone was intentionally lying, presumably in order to protect himself, or someone had been badly mistaken, gotten the facts wrong. Check everything—that was the only workable possibility, Narraway decided. It would at least provide him with his own set of details. Stand where each man said they had been, prove for himself that they had seen what they said they had, time it all, go over the work they claimed to have been doing. Find the mistakes, the excuses, or the lies.

  He turned and headed back through the trees toward the town.

  The events of the mutiny were about a year old. It had begun in January, in Dum Dum. Almost every day since then there had been some new disaster, victory and then reversal, sie
ge and relief, a new uprising somewhere else. How ridiculous to be trying one soldier for the death of one guard in the middle of Cawnpore while all over northern India, tens of thousands of men shot and slashed and stabbed one another.

  He looked around at the officers’ sprawling houses, with their verandas; their wide, scruffy gardens; the tamarind and mango trees, the lazy wind not stirring the leaves. In the summer the heat had been furnace-like, brutal. Now, at night, it was sometimes even cold.

  He was not fighting with sword or rifle, although that would come soon enough. Scores of towns and cities were besieged or already fallen. This was only a respite.

  In the meantime, as this day dwindled into nothing and disappeared, Narraway must prepare for the hopeless task of pretending to defend John Tallis, for which everyone would despise him, in spite of the fact that they knew he had no choice. He was cast as the second villain in a charade.

  He increased his pace a little. He would speak with the witnesses Busby would be bound to call. That had to be the three men who answered the alarm and found Chuttur Singh dying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and Dhuleep Singh gone.

  He was walking past one of the rows of houses where various noncommissioned officers had their homes. They were all built of brick coated with white plaster, in various degrees of shabbiness. Verandas ran around three sides of each one, a flight of half a dozen or so steps leading up to the doors. They each stood separately in their own arid two or three acres, as if space was no object at all.

  Narraway knew what they were like inside. The main door led into a wide, comfortless sitting room full of overused furniture—items that looked like they had been salvaged from a secondhand sale and intended only for temporary use, until something worthier could be found.

  On either side would be smaller rooms, for beds, and one for a bath. The water for it, when needed, was left to cool outside in a row of large, porous red jars, so the officer’s bath might be refreshing.

  He looked back at the road and saw ahead of him a woman walking slowly. She had a small child in her arms and a large bundle of shopping carried in a string bag, its handles biting into her shoulder. She was bent under the weight of it and limping slightly, although from what he could see of her slender figure, she was not many years older than he.

  Narraway increased his pace and caught up with her.

  “Ma’am!” he said more loudly than he had meant to.

  She halted and turned slowly. Her face was gaunt, and there were smudges of dirt where the child’s dusty fingers had touched her cheek, but her skin was smooth, blemishless.

  “Yes?” she said without curiosity. There was anxiety in her eyes, a shadow not unlike fear.

  “May I carry the bag for you?” he asked. “I’m going the same way you are. Please?” he added. He smiled at her. “My day has been fairly useless so far. I’d like to do something to make it better.”

  She smiled at him, suddenly and radiantly. It took away all the weariness and showed that she was indeed probably no more than thirty at the most, and pretty.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” She accepted, making a move to put the child down so she could unhook the bag and pass it to him, but he eased it off her shoulder and took it without her needing to. Its weight startled him. No wonder she had moved so slowly. The strings of the bag must have hurt her.

  They started to walk again, still fairly slowly.

  “You are new here,” she observed, looking straight ahead of her. The child in her arms looked to be less than two, probably well able to walk, but not far or fast. It regarded him solemnly with long-lashed eyes of golden brown. Its hair was curly, and long enough for Narraway to be uncertain if it was a boy or a girl.

  “Does it show so much?” he asked, referring to her observation of his newness. “Or do you know everybody?”

  “I know most everybody,” she replied. “Of course, people come and go a lot, just at the moment.” She made a sad little grimace. “But you look a bit paler, as if you weren’t here during the heat.” Then she blushed at her lack of tact in having made so personal an observation. “I’m sorry.”

  “No reason to apologize,” he replied. “I never thought of that. I suppose I stick out like a row of sore thumbs.”

  She laughed at the image of such a thing. “Next time I see you in the parade ground, I shall think of a row of sore thumbs,” she said cheerfully. “That will be a new insult for the sergeant major to think of. Except I see you’re a lieutenant. I don’t suppose you do a lot of marching around to orders.”

  “Not in the way you mean,” he replied. “Although I feel rather a lot as if I’m marching round and round, to orders, and accomplishing nothing.”

  She looked at him curiously. “A lot of army life is like that. At least my husband always used to say so.”

  He heard the past tense in her speech and saw the moment of pain, the tightening of her arms around the child. There did not seem to be anything he could say that would help, so he walked beside her in silence for twenty or thirty yards. Then a hideous thought occurred to him. Had her husband been among the soldiers of the patrol that Dhuleep Singh’s betrayal had killed? Suddenly, intensely, he realized that he could not afford to know the answer. He could not tell her who he was, and he was ashamed of that. It was a new and much harder bite into the soft flesh of his self-belief. How horribly lonely he was going to be after he had stood up to defend John Tallis, never mind that he had been ordered to do it, and that they could not hang Tallis until justice had been formally satisfied.

  He had been trying to frame a few questions to ask her about Tallis, anything that might allow him to learn a little background. Now the words froze on his tongue. The strings of the bag were cutting into his hands. He wondered what was inside it. No doubt fruit, vegetables, rice, food for herself and the child. Would she marry again one day and have more children, or was this one going to grow up alone?

  He wanted to speak with her. It seemed cold to walk side by side and say nothing, but consciousness of what the next couple of days would bring, and how differently she would see him, kept him silent. How long would it take him to live it down? The man who tried to defend John Tallis. Is that who he would remain to the people here?

  She stopped at a gateway outside a house exactly like all the others, at least from the outside.

  “Thank you,” she said with a shy smile. She bent and put the child down. It stood uncertainly on its feet before gaining its balance, then sat down suddenly.

  “I’ll carry the bag as far as the steps for you,” Narraway replied. “Then you can carry him.” He gestured toward the child, who was making an unsuccessful attempt to stand again.

  “Her,” she corrected him. “Thank you.” She bent and picked the child up.

  Narraway followed her up the path. They were still several yards short of the veranda steps when the front door burst open and a boy of about five came running out, a streamer of bright red paper in his hand.

  “Mama!” he shouted with triumph. “I made three chains! All colors. And Helena made one too. It’s not as good as mine, but I showed her how.”

  “That’s wonderful.” She smiled back at him. He had curly brown hair like hers but huge dark eyes that must have come from his father. “Helena?” she called out. “David said you made a chain too. Come and show me.”

  A girl of perhaps three stood inside the door, looking at Narraway warily.

  “Come on!” her mother encouraged her.

  Slowly she came across the veranda and took the steps, one down, standing on it, then the next down. She had a bright blue paper chain trailing behind her. She reached the bottom and joined her brother. She held the chain out to her mother, but her eyes were on Narraway all the time, curious but guarded.

  He looked at the chain. “It’s beautiful,” he told her solemnly. “Did you really make it yourself?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you are very clever,” he said.

  Slowly, shyly, s
he smiled at him, showing white baby teeth.

  “It’s for Christmas,” the boy explained. “To put up in the house.”

  “It will be lovely,” he answered.

  “Do you have Christmas?” Helena asked him.

  “ ’Course he does, silly!” Her brother shook his head at her ignorance. “Everybody has Christmas!” He looked at Narraway. “She’s only three. She doesn’t know,” he explained.

  Helena held out the bright blue chain. “You can have it, if you like,” she offered.

  He drew in breath to refuse, politely, but saw the smile again, and the hope. He glanced momentarily at the woman, uncertain what to do.

  “Take it.” Her lips formed the words silently.

  Narraway bent down a little to reach the chain and touched it. It was smooth and bright, the paper stuck together a trifle crookedly.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s very beautiful. Don’t you want to keep it?”

  She shook her head, still holding it out to him.

  “Thank you very much indeed.” He took it gently, in case she changed her mind at the last moment and clung on to it. “I shall put it up in my house, near where I sit, so I can see it all the time.” She let it go and it fell loose in his hands.

  The woman picked up the baby and carried her to the top of the veranda steps; Narraway handed the bag to her, then waited as they all went inside, the two older children still watching him as he turned and walked down the path again, holding the blue paper chain in his hand.

  THE PRISON WHERE DHULEEP SINGH HAD BEEN HELD faced a large, open yard with buildings on three sides and an open dogleg way out, which was where most of the observation had taken place. Men had been working at various jobs of maintenance and repair, the sort of routine necessities that occupied most of a soldier’s day when he was not in battle or marching from one place to another. They were tedious tasks but better than standing idle. It was easy to imagine leaving such a post, and then having to be a little imaginative with the truth in order to cover your absence.