A Christmas Garland: A Novel Read online

  HE NEEDED TO BE ALONE TO THINK. HE WAS TOO FILLED with emotion. The futility of it all was overwhelming him. Everyone knew at least something of the needless waste of the Crimean War and questioned the purpose of it. The army that had beaten Napoleon at Waterloo had rested too long on its laurels. It was now cumbersome and sorely in need of updating.

  The idiocy of the grease on the bullets, which had fired a whole nation’s mutiny, was still being excused by some. But it could’ve been avoided so easily! Was there no communication, no Intelligence from which to foresee such errors and avoid them? Didn’t the army speak to the government, or listen?

  This was such a small part of the whole, and yet thinking of a few greased bullet cases, Narraway saw the enormity of even the smallest thoughtless act. One match could light the flames that consumed a nation, especially if the earth was already tinder dry—and no one had noticed that, either.

  For everyone’s sake, he must do the job that Latimer had commanded him to do. If he did not defend Tallis sufficiently well, if the Court could not say honestly that he had been properly represented, then Tallis’s execution would in a sense also be murder. It would seem to others as if the regiment had convicted him in order to appear to have dealt with its own failure—vengeance rather than justice. They would look weak, not to be trusted; more than that, history would judge them to be without honor.

  He continued walking, his feet making little sound on the earth and the thin winter grass. He passed walls broken by shellfire. They were crumbling away now. Ahead of him was a small, grassy mound with a few tangled bushes at the base of three trees. They were spindly, graceful. One was leafless and clearly dead. The other two still had rich evidence of life and in spring would no doubt have leaves, perhaps even blossoms.

  A few yards beyond was a round stone-rimmed well. There was nothing there with which to draw water, no covering to keep falling leaves out, no rope or pulley, no bucket of any kind.

  He stopped and looked at it curiously. There was an air of desolation about it.

  “You can’t want to stand here, sir.”

  He turned and saw Peterson a few feet away from him.

  “Can’t I?” He was curious. Peterson’s face was white, his eyes hollow, without life. “Are you ill?” he asked suddenly. “You look—”

  Peterson shivered. “That’s the well, sir—that well. You don’t want to stand here.”

  “ ‘That well’?” Narraway repeated.

  “Bibighar. They massacred the women and cut them up, cut their heads off, and their …” He made a helpless gesture, half indicating breasts. “That’s where they threw the bodies. Then their children after them. Scores of them, not all of them even dead. Filled it right up. You don’t want to stand here, sir.”

  Narraway thought for a moment he was going to be sick. His stomach clenched, and the outlines of the trees blurred in his vision. Sweat broke out on his skin. He turned to face Peterson.

  “No,” he agreed. “I didn’t know it was … this well.” Carefully and a little unsteadily he put one foot in front of the other and walked away, Peterson a yard or so behind him.

  He had heard the story in whispered pieces, conversations that trailed away into silence. Cawnpore had been relieved on July 17, about five months ago now, but the ghosts of the siege were everywhere. The heat had been appalling, over 120 degrees in the shade. The horrified soldiers of the relief had found the corpses of more than four hundred men, women, and children.

  In the Bibighar—the huge, two-roomed house in which Nana Sahib had kept the women of his pleasure during his occupation of the town—the soldiers had found the walls scarred low with the marks of sword cuts where women had been beheaded while on their knees. It was littered with hair and the combs that held it dressed, children’s shoes, hats, bonnets, the torn pages of Bibles and prayer books. They had looked down to find their boots submerged in blood.

  “I’d slit him open and pull his entrails out,” Peterson said quietly, staring into the distance. “And burn them in front of him, still attached.”

  Narraway found his voice with difficulty. “Nobody would charge you for it,” he said, coughing a little to clear his throat. “But if they did, I’d defend you. You wouldn’t need any better skill than what I’ve got to get you off. I don’t know how anybody here is still sane.”

  “Maybe we aren’t,” Peterson replied. “I wonder sometimes if I am. I wake up in the middle of the night and I can still smell it. Funny that, isn’t it? I can’t always see it, but I can smell it, and I can hear the flies. Do you believe in God?”

  Narraway was about to answer automatically, but then he stopped. Peterson deserved better than that. Narraway himself needed more than a trite response.

  “Well, I certainly believe in hell,” he said slowly, selecting his words. “So I suppose I must believe in heaven, too. And if there’s a heaven and a hell, then I think there must be a God. All this is unbearable if there isn’t.”

  Peterson shook his head. “It’s not the same as good and evil. Nobody doubts that. But is there anybody in control of it? I wonder sometimes if there isn’t. If it all just happens, and that’s all there is. Is there any sense, any justice? Or is it up to us to make sense and justice?”

  “That’s a hell of a question, Private Peterson. But I suppose Bibighar is as good a place as any to ask it.”

  Narraway thought for a while. It was also a place that demanded answers to such questions, not just for Peterson, or the Court that was set for tomorrow, or Tierney, or John Tallis. He needed them for himself.

  Peterson waited.

  “If there was somebody in control, you’d think they’d make a better job of it, I suppose,” Narraway began. “What happened here seems beyond ordinary human evil. It’s as if someone opened a door into … something else. But if hell were not more despicable than anything a sane man can imagine, then maybe heaven wouldn’t be higher than even our most exquisite dreams.”

  Peterson shook his head slightly. “Wouldn’t you accept heaven a little lower if hell could be … not this bad?”

  “I don’t think anybody asked me,” Narraway replied seriously. “But if they had, I don’t know what I would have said. After all, we haven’t seen the heaven part of it—only this.”

  “But you believe in it?”

  Narraway suddenly remembered the blue paper chain, and all the women who were going to celebrate Christmas, for their children. “Yes, I do,” he answered. “Lots of people do, no matter what happens. We pick up the pieces and start again, for the sake of those who believe in us. If we can do it, then the best in us is trusting in something, reaching toward something. And that’s what’s important.”

  “Reaching toward God?” Peterson asked. “Sir?”

  “I think so. Something that is as good as this is awful. Believe it, at least until you wake up dead and find it isn’t true.”

  Peterson’s face relaxed in a smile. “I didn’t expect you to be so honest. Thanks. But I’d still leave this place, if I were you.” He motioned to the well in the distance.

  Narraway agreed, and with a brief salute he walked away from the Bibighar and its ghosts.

  KNOWLEDGE, THAT WAS THE KEY. NARRAWAY SAT ON THE stone buttress of the old armory, now little more than a pile of rubble. The wind was rising, cold-edged, tossing the leaves on the trees. Information was what mattered, and how it fit together to form meaning. Everything was a matter of putting the pieces into the right order.

  One of the difficulties was that you never knew if you had all the pieces or if something vital was still missing, something that formed the center of the picture.

  What had he overlooked? Because so far, it all made no sense. He was a soldier, not a policeman, not a lawyer. But he should still be able to understand it if he tried hard enough. He knew the people, he knew the events. Did he know them in the wrong order? Was it something missing that was wrong, or one cornerstone point that was a lie? What one change would alter it all so it fit? />
  There had been no one inside the prison except Chuttur and Dhuleep. The door opened only from the outside. Grant had found it closed, had gone in and discovered the dying Chuttur, who told him that Dhuleep had escaped—that someone had engineered his escape—but he had not said who. Attwood and Peterson had then arrived, perhaps a minute later, and passed no one. Chuttur died without ever speaking again.

  The three soldiers had gone looking for Dhuleep, but found only traces of his escape, signs of where he had been. The patrol had been ambushed and killed, all but Tierney.

  The only man unaccounted for was Tallis. Tallis swore he was innocent. What was missing? Where was the lie?

  It had to be Tallis—didn’t it?

  What was the information, the knowledge that Narraway did not have? He hated the chaos that had spread like madness across India, and the tiny piece of it that jumbled and boiled in his own mind, senselessly. He hated the internal darkness of it.

  HE WAS ALLOWED IN TO SEE TALLIS WITHOUT QUESTION, although the guards’ faces reflected a coldness, as if they imagined he was defending him because he wished to, not because he had been commanded. He hesitated, wanting to tell them how much it was against his will, then realized that would be childish. Half of what anybody did in the army was against their will. You still should do it to the best of your ability, and without complaining or trying to justify yourself. He was an officer; better than that was required of him. The fact that just over two years ago he had been a schoolboy was irrelevant. Many of these men had been soldiers in combat, shot at, acting with courage and loyalty at eighteen. Respect had to be earned.

  He thanked them and went into Tallis’s cell.

  Tallis stood to attention. It hadn’t been a day since Narraway had seen him, but he looked leaner, even grayer in the face. He was a man with only two or three days to live, and the shadow of that truth was stark in his eyes.

  Time was too short for niceties. They stood because there was nothing in the cell to sit on, except the floor.

  “At ease,” Narraway said. Otherwise Tallis would be obliged to remain at attention. “I’ve spoken to the three men who answered the alarm and found Chuttur Singh. He didn’t name you, but he said there was a man who came in and took him by surprise, and let Dhuleep out. And given the situation, that’s the only answer that makes any sense. Dhuleep couldn’t have opened the door from the inside himself.”

  “I know that,” Tallis said quickly. “We all know there had to be someone else, but it wasn’t me.” His voice was level, but there was desperation in his eyes. “I was counting bandages and checking what medicines we had left in the storeroom. I can’t prove it because no one else even knows what was there. I wouldn’t have been counting them if I knew myself what was there! It’s the only time I’m sorry we didn’t have some poor devil sick, in need of medicine!”

  “Ever treat Dhuleep?” Narraway asked. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “I suppose I could always invent something,” Tallis said with mock cheerfulness. “How about rabies? I let him go so he could infect the entire mutineer army. No good? I could say—”

  “Tallis!” Narraway snapped. “I want to know if you knew the damn man. Did you ever treat him?”

  Tallis looked slightly surprised. After a moment, he spoke seriously. “Yes. He had a bunion on his left foot. I’m intimate with it. I could draw you a picture. Couldn’t cure it, of course. But I cured his indigestion. It doesn’t exactly rate as a friendship. I cure people I don’t like exactly the same as people I do. That’s what medicine is about.” He gave a sad, self-mocking smile. “Just like you defend people whether you think they’re guilty or not …”

  Narraway was temporarily robbed of words. He had not intended to be so transparent. “Give me anything to argue with,” he begged. “What was Dhuleep like? Why did no one expect him to escape? Why was there only one guard? Who would want to help him? Who did he associate with? Who would want him free? If you didn’t do it, then someone else did. For heaven’s sake, man, help me!”

  “Do you think I haven’t lain awake trying to think?” Tallis asked. “Nobody likes a telltale, but I’d outdo the best actor on stage with stories that’d curl your hair if I knew any. I thought he might know something that was worth his freedom, but who would he sell it to? Latimer? Then I wondered if he was a double traitor, to us and then to the mutineers. Maybe he was let go on purpose, like a disease, to spread lies.” He shrugged. “But as far as I know, he was just one more Sikh soldier who seemed to be loyal to us. Some are, some aren’t. We can’t afford to do without the loyal ones. I mean, look at it!” He swung his arm around, indicating the immeasurable land beyond the cell and the compound. “We’re a handful of white men, a few tens of thousands, half the world away from home, trying to govern a whole bloody continent. We don’t speak their languages, we don’t understand their religion, we can’t stand their bloody climate, and we have no immunity to their diseases. Yet here we are, and we expect to be liked for it! And we’re all taken by surprise when they stick a knife into our backs. God help us, we’re fools!”

  “Don’t say that in court tomorrow,” Narraway said drily, although he was startled by how much he agreed with Tallis.

  “Never let the truth spoil a good defense,” Tallis said, paraphrasing with a crooked smile. “I haven’t got a good defense, except that I didn’t do it. And I haven’t an idea in hell who did. I’m trusting you because I haven’t got anything else. If you’d asked me a month ago if I believed in some kind of divine justice, or even in a manmade honor, I’d have laughed at you, probably made a bad joke.” He shrugged his thin shoulders.

  Suddenly his face was totally serious. The laughter had vanished; even the self-mockery was gone. “You see courage that’s sublime. People enduring pain, disfigurement, losing parts of themselves so they’ll never be whole again—and yet not complaining, still keeping the dignity that’s inside them intact. People care for others, even when they know they’re dying themselves. They keep faith even when it’s idiotic, even when everything’s gone and they know it’s gone.”

  Narraway wanted to shout at him to stop, but he couldn’t.

  “I know they’ll convict me, though I didn’t do it,” Tallis added, his eyes never leaving Narraway’s. “But I still believe you’ll find a way to prove that I didn’t. Unfair, isn’t it?” He grinned. It was a brilliant, shining smile, as if in spite of all that his brain told him, he had a kind of happiness he refused to let go of. He would not accept reality. “You should try being a doctor sometime. See this after every battle, every skirmish. They carry them in one after another, people who look to you to save them, and you can’t, but you try anyway. One thing you learn, Lieutenant: You can’t tell who’s going to live and who isn’t. You learn there’s something bigger than you, bigger than anything sense tells you. I believe in the impossible, good and bad. I’ve seen lots of it. I did not kill Chuttur Singh, nor did I let Dhuleep go. I wasn’t even there.”

  Narraway wanted to have an answer, something brave and wise to say. He wished, with a hunger that consumed him, to believe in the impossible, but he could not. So he did the only thing he could bear: He lied.

  “Then I’ll believe in miracles too,” he said quietly. “And I’ll find you yours.”

  He did not remain. He had already asked all the questions he could think of. He left the prison and walked outside into the dark. The vast night sky arched over him, brilliant with stars. The faint wind stirred through the branches of the few trees, a black latticework against the sheen of light. And he felt just as boxed in, as locked and shackled, as Tallis.

  He walked for quite a distance. He knew that before he turned in he should report to Colonel Latimer, but he was putting it off as long as possible. He had learned nothing useful in the time he had been given to look into the case. Quite honestly, he did not believe any extension of the time would make a difference. It would just be putting off the inevitable and prolonging the misery for everyone, i
ncluding Tallis himself.

  He turned and went in the direction of the officers’ mess, where he knew Latimer would be at this time in the evening. Probably Busby and Strafford would be with him, which would make it worse.

  He passed a couple of small buildings and heard someone tapping nails into wood. He wondered what they were making. Household furniture? Mending a chair or a table? Or maybe working on a toy for a child, a Christmas present? A wagon with wheels that turned, perhaps? He could dimly remember one in his own childhood. Only fifteen years ago he had been the right age to play with such a thing.

  Would the widow’s little boy have a wagon, or colored bricks this Christmas? Perhaps Narraway could make sure that he did. He didn’t have to give it to the boy himself; that might only embarrass her, make her feel obligated to him, and he did not want that. Would the boy even like a wagon? Wasn’t it worth trying? The little girl, Helena, had given him the blue paper chain, certain that he would like it because she liked it. He should find something for her too. He would have to ask somebody. A woman would know.

  He stopped and knocked on the door of the building where the banging came from. After several moments, a man in a leather apron came to the door. “Yes, sir?” he said politely. He was Indian, dark-skinned, black-haired.

  “Are you a carpenter?” Narraway asked.

  “No, I just mend things here and there. If you have a chair that is broken, perhaps I can help?”

  “Actually … what I want is a small wooden wagon … for a child,” Narraway replied, feeling foolish.

  The man looked surprised. “You have a son? You want something for him for a gift, sir?”

  “No … and yes. He’s not my son, but he’s lost his father. I just thought …” He trailed off, his confidence draining away.

  “I can do that,” the man said quietly. “I will make you one. Come back in a few days. I have many small pieces of wood. And red paint. It will not cost much.”

  “Thank you,” Narraway replied. “I’d like that very much. My name’s Lieutenant Narraway. I’ll be back.”