Free Lance Page 16

  Todd’s square-jawed, craggy face was grave. ‘Such an enterprise I must consider rash, probably resulting in losses we can’t afford. To seek Vedvyas directly, ignorant as we are of his strength and dispositions, would be shockingly imprudent.’

  Marriott said, ‘Henry is right. We cannot hurl ourselves at Vedvyas in a slender hope of surprise. He will at once retreat within his stronghold - Hurrondah, is it not? Then, lacking a siege train, we are helpless. Nor, Hugo, as you have said, can Vedvyas be allowed to leaguer Gopalpore. Therefore we must wait until he marches, encounter him and beat him in the open.’ Above their heads the azure banner drooped in midday heat. Smoke coils climbed in ascending whorls from the plain where they had fought. Marriott, exercising the Company’s first authority in Bahrampal, had insisted the enemy dead be buried or burnt - a task which, after stripping the bodies, Srinivas’s pillagers had deemed totally unnecessary. Todd’s soldiers kindled fires for two dead sepoys; five more had been lightly wounded.

  ‘A sound appraisal,’ said Amaury. ‘So be it. The prisoners say Vedvyas will take a month to collect a sufficient force and set them moving. Meanwhile I shall examine the country as far as Hurrondah. I have persuaded Srinivas to furnish guides familiar with the region - but the rogue must never guess we shall not fight at Gopalpore.’

  ‘And that favour,’ said Marriott greyly, ‘finishes his benevolence. Srinivas is convinced we shall be beat, and will not entrust a single man to the Company’s command.’

  Amaury crossed his arms on the parapet, and frowned at the trees and scrub that unrolled in a mottled quilt to a hill-ramparted horizon. On fields beyond the gates sepoys pitched tents in rows, drovers herded transport from the town, followers off-loaded baggage, coolies surrounded the encampment with a prickly-pear abattis. Marriott had decided he was safer outside the walls: his force, confined within a native town whose chief official could not be trusted, was vulnerable to thievery at the least, and maybe worse.

  ‘If I could persuade old Gopal Rao to break his oath,’ Marriott continued, ‘he would willingly raise five hundred men to support us - but he won’t, and stays in a tent down there.’ He jutted his chin at the camp below. ‘Do you truly believe, Hugo, the sepoy companies with fifty mounted hircarrahs can beat Vedvyas’s thousands?’

  ‘Remember Plassey!’ Todd said aggressively.

  Amaury smiled. ‘To harness precedents, Henry, can be dangerous. But given foresight, skill and a measure of luck, I have no doubt whatever. My explorations to Hurrondah may take several days. I shall be obliged for the loan of a thousand pagodas from the treasure you guard so carefully.’

  ‘A thousand!’ said Marriott, startled. ‘Why do you need money in the jungle? How may I account it?’

  ‘Expenses in the brothels,’ Amaury said solemnly. ‘Don’t look so horridly serious, Charles! I must engage spies in all the villages that neighbour Hurrondah, who can warn us about Vedvyas’s movements. If they are well rewarded they may send reliable news - without competent intelligence we are blindfold in the dark.’

  ‘Disbursements to friendly agents,’ Marriott muttered, conning the cash-book columns in his head. ‘Tis reasonably legitimate. I dare say you may have your pagodas.’

  ‘I shall try to reward your generosity,’ said Amaury ironically. ‘Meanwhile, I entreat a favour. Repair the cannon we took, and train a gun crew from the peons.’

  ‘What the devil do I know of artillery exercise?’ Marriott demanded crossly. ‘As well ask a ferryman to con a seventy-four!’ Amaury laughed. At evening, to Marriott’s astonishment, he appeared in loose Musulman trousers, a flowing cotton coat buttoned high about the neck, and a gaudy turban - ‘wiser to wear native dress where I am going; and these clothes are uncommonly comfortable!’ He took a few hircarrahs and the native guides Srinivas reluctantly released, carried on pack ponies a fortnight’s rations and forage, and disappeared into the jungle.

  Marriott examined the captured cannon mounted triumphantly in front of the quarter guard, summoned blacksmiths from the followers, extracted Amaury’s spike and bouched the vent. Assembling a dozen bewildered peons he tried to formulate a drill for loading, laying and firing. The men’s utter ignorance of a single word in English - the language always used for military commands - compelled him to ask Todd’s help. The pair discarded waistcoats, coats and cravats, rolled shirtsleeves to the elbows and practised detachment drill throughout a broiling day until the peons had achieved a reasonable competence in sponging, ramming cartridge, loading ball, priming the vent and laying. Towards sundown Todd combed fingers through his sweat- soaked hair and said, ‘They exercise tolerably well. Let us fire a round or two before it is dark.’

  They yoked a forty-bullock team and hauled the gun to a field outside the abbattis. Marriott pointed a target - a prominent rock, streaked white by vultures’ droppings - four hundred yards away. Dragging the ponderous trail, they traversed the barrel and layed. Marriott rapped the orders he had invented.

  ‘Advance... sponge!’

  ‘Load... cartridge!’

  ‘Spring... rammer!’

  A subhadar and a file of sepoys escorting a ragged prisoner advanced purposefully towards the gun.

  ‘Load... roundshot!’

  ‘Prime... vent!’

  Marriott squinted along the barrel, flapped a hand to the left; the crew laboriously moved the trail according to his gestures. Satisfied, he straightened. The subhadar stamped to attention.

  ‘Sahib, we have taken a Fringee who tried to enter the camp. Shall I--’

  ‘Not now, subhadar sahib!’ Marriott said impatiently. He bent over the breech and wrenched a rusted screw until the muzzle lifted enough to hide the target.

  ‘Advance... portfire!’

  A peon dangled a smouldering cord above the vent. His teeth chattered, and his hand shook so violently that the glowing tip dripped sparks. The crew precipitately retreated.

  ‘Fire!’

  The peon dropped his portfire, turned and bolted. Marriott bellowed curses, Todd began to laugh. The subhadar’s scarecrow prisoner moved swiftly to the trail and, before anyone could stop him, retrieved the fallen portfire and touched it to the vent. The gun banged and recoiled. The roundshot bounded from tussock to tussock, kicking up flowers of dust, and rolled to a stop beyond the piebald rock.

  ‘What the deuce--!’ Marriott seized the intruder’s shoulder and swung him round. ‘God’s blood, a European!’

  The man bobbed his head and knuckled his brow. ‘Joshua Welladvice, at yer service, sir!’ He looked sadly at the gun: ‘Too light a charge, I reckon - she ain’t run back enough.’

  Marriott surveyed him angrily. Frayed spunyarn tied in a queue the gingery hair that was clubbed from a balding head. A bristle-bearded face woven in deep wrinkles and old scars, pale sunken eyes and a humorous mouth. A torn and filthy shirt, faded, tattered breeches, bare thorn-scratched legs and ruinous shoes.

  ‘Who the devil are you? Why the hell did you fire my gun?’ Cracked lips parted in a smile. ‘Being by profession a gunner, sir, I could not resist, seeing as ’ow yer Number One deserted from his dooty. ’Tis a long story, sir. Could yer give me a drink - I’m terribly dry.’

  Todd offered a flask: Welladvice tilted his head and drank, the Adam’s apple bobbing in his scrawny throat. He wiped his mouth. ‘I thank yer. Well, sir, ’tis like this.’

  The sun in crimson glory descended behind the hills, parakeets screeched noisily to roost, crows flapped like slow black witches across a golden sky. The gun crew squatted among the bullocks and loquaciously embroidered a terrifying experience; someone produced the inevitable houcca. A bitter reek of gunpowder tainted the scent of woodsmoke that drifted from the camp. Marriott wearily straddled the trail, Todd leaned against a wheel, and listened in the evening’s calm to Welladvice’s story.

  Originally a worker in the Tower Ordnance foundries, he had been pressed into the Navy and graduated over the years from foremastman through gunner’s mate to gunner. After serving
in several ships and various actions he came to the East Indies in the Belliqueux sixty-four, Captain Byng, and joined Sir Edward Pellew’s squadron which guarded Coromandel against French privateers. Enraged by an unjust punishment - ‘thirty lashes, and ’twarn’t me as slipped the shackles so the gun ran wild’ - he deserted in Madras. An impoverished, furtive existence as taverner, pimp and beggar in the Black Town’s dingiest purlieus persuaded him to sea again: he shipped in a trading brig which, by an odd coincidence, Joseph Harley owned. For two years he had plied between Calcutta and Trinkomalee, surviving monsoon hurricanes and evading predatory Frenchmen - ‘I allus missed me guns’ - until the brig, chased by Surcouff’s Confiance in the teeth of a southerly gale, had run ashore on a rocky stretch of the Circar coast.

  ‘Smashed to splinters, she was, an’ drowned all ten o’ the crew ’cept me an’ a native lascar. We crawled ashore, searched the beach, found nary a village an’ started walkin’ inland. ’Twas rough travellin’.’

  The couple crossed the coastal plain and climbed into the hills. Welladvice lost count of the days they wandered. The lascar begged food from villagers, who informed them vaguely that a Fringee lived in the ghauts - Beddoes’ fame had flooded far beyond his District. Following native instructions, often misinformed, constantly losing their way in tangled, forested uplands, they struggled, starved and spent, to Bahrampal.

  ‘Then a sarpint bit the lascar. An ’orrible death, pore crittur - an’ a right good fellow he was. I buried him arter a fashion, an’ went on. The Moors in them parts was a rougher lot, an’ acted downright nasty when I asked ’em fer a bite. Yesterday I struck me colours, laid me down to die. Heard gunfire an’ thought I were dreamin’, delirious like. Got up an’ wandered on, walked all through the night. An’ here,’ he ended simply, ‘I am. Ain’t got a morsel o’ food, sir, have yer?’

  Marriott scanned with pity the emaciated face. ‘You shall be fed and clothed and put to bed. A gunner, eh? I think you have brought the measure of luck we badly need.’

  Joshua Welladvice, stoked by a dinner of mutton chops washed plentifully down with rum, fortified by eight hours’ sleep and an enormous curry breakfast, readily assumed the mantle Marriott bestowed. ‘Gun commander, hey? ’Tis no more than me rating in the old Belliqueux. But I mislike the shape o’ that piece you got.’ He eyed disparagingly the captured cannon, now restored to dignity in front of the quarter guard, tugged the elevating screw and kicked the ponderous trail. ‘Heavy as an eighteen pounder, okkerd ter run up, a bastard to lay - an’ the bore worn loose as the slot of an ’Oundsditch ’ore. What, sir, do yer need her for?’

  ‘For want of being fully apprised of our military intentions, I cannot properly judge,’ Marriott admitted. ‘But I collect the gun will support our sepoys in the field.’

  ‘Then yer wants summat light an’ handy, like them galloper guns the cavalry use. Seen ’em, sir?’

  ‘I have. They will not,’ said Marriott sourly, ‘drop on this benighted place like manna from the skies.’

  ‘I can make ’em, sir, if yer lets me have the stuff.’

  Marriott stared. ‘Make them? Stuff? What the devil do you mean?’

  Grinning enthusiastically, the sailor explained, increasing Marriott’s bewilderment with every word he spoke. At length, still unconvinced, he said, ‘We have blacksmiths, farriers and carpenters among this mob.’ He flapped a hand to the encampment surrounding the companies’ tents. ‘You can fell all the wood you want. But the metal - do we dig for ore?’

  ‘Pots an’ pans, sir!’ Brass an’ iron, copper an’ tin!’ Welladvice jerked a thumb across his shoulder. ‘There’s enough in that there town ter cast a heavy battery!’

  Marriott, incredulous, consulted Todd. The ensign said, ‘ ‘Tis worth the trial, and very pat to the purpose. Srinivas refuses us soldiers - make him surrender his kitchen ware!’

  Marriott went with a file of sepoys to the citadel and told Srinivas through an interpreter what he wanted. Anger chased astonishment across the man’s features; and he sullenly refused.

  ‘I shall pay for every pot we take,’ Marriott explained.

  ‘No! Why should you seize my people’s household chattels?’

  ‘I have offered money. There are harsher arguments. Come with me to the battlements, Srinivasjee.’

  From an embrasure Marriott pointed to the plain below. Srinivas scowled. The cannon had been dragged into the open, and cocked its barrel at the citadel where they stood. Welladvice, portfire burning, crouched over the vent. On either side the companies ranked in line, bayonets fixed and muskets poised.

  Srinivas snarled, and dropped a hand to the scimitar draped from a shoulder. The naigue commanding Marriott’s sepoy escort said briskly, ‘Recover your firelocks! Cock your firelocks!’ The mirasdar flinched. His retainers recoiled against the rampart. Marriott said, ‘You will stay here under guard, Srinivas, until I have taken what I need. I advise you not to interfere.’

  He spoke briefly to the naigue, and ran down the steps. In the camp he collected the parties of peons whom Todd had already detailed and sent them, backed by sepoys, to the town. They ransacked every building, every shop and godown, and flung into the alleys all the metal pots and pans. Marriott and Todd, carrying coins in bags, tried to recompense the owners for their loss. Inevitably they failed to pace the agile peons, whose scavenging quickly assumed the proportions of a sack. The booty, piled on requisitioned carts, was taken to camp. Welladvice, gloating like a miser savouring gold, pawed the jangling loads.

  ‘Enough ter cast a siege train! I promise yer a brace o’ guns, an’ that within the fortnight!’

  The sailor hunted out a forge equipped with furnaces and bellows, and there installed his foundry. Digging like a terrier in pitchers, plates and pots he chose the metals for his alloys. He picked a labour force - every blacksmith in the camp, and local metal workers attracted by the pay - who sweated in the foundry from daybreak until nightfall, hammering and filing, labouring the bellows, yelping as molten splashes scorched their naked bodies. He stoked a roaring furnace, melted down the metal and poured it in enormous moulds he made from fired clay. He cast the pieces in a vertical position, breech end downwards. When the bronze was hard Welladvice broke the mould, sawed six inches off the top - ‘the castin’ ain’t reliable near the surface’ - set the barrels in clamps and drilled out bores on lathes that horses turned.

  Despite blistering invective and the kicks and buffers they got the labouring gangs worked cheerfully under Welladvice’s orders. Marriott paid them lavishly, which alone did not account for the bond of rough affection binding master to his men. In an extraordinary patois, a broil of Telegu and Hindi, French and Portuguese, he would insult a native’s ancestry to his remotest swinish forbears - but a smile on the wrinkled face dissolved offence. A jest accompanied a blow, and solicitous inquiry about the health of the victim’s family. The sailor had a way with natives, a kind of sympathetic understanding which few Europeans owned. Amaury had the same instinctive empathy.

  After days of incessant labour he proudly displayed to Marriott two shining trunnioned pieces.

  ‘Six-pounders - true as any come from the Tower. Now fer case and roundshot. Best melt down that old twelve-pounder and all her ammunition - I reckon yer won’t be wantin’ her no more.’

  Wishing the decision was Amaury’s, Marriott assented. Amaury had been gone for a fortnight, and Marriott - when he had time to think - felt twinges of anxiety. In fact he was far too busy to worry overmuch. The column’s supplies were depleted; by cajolery and threats he extracted from Srinivas the victuals to feed his force, paying exorbitant prices, promising himself angrily to recover these extortions when the Company’s authority was restored in Bahrampal. He kept meticulous accounts, and brooded over expenses which receipts did not support, and the long blank sheets where credits should be entered. ‘Confound it, I’ll be tried for peculation next!’

  Gopal Rao squatted cross-legged at the entrance of his tent, survey
ing benevolently the activities around him: sepoys cleaning firelocks, grass-cutters building forage stacks, drovers leading camels out to graze. Marriott sometimes sat beside him, shared his houcca, urged him to depose his stubborn son and resume his proper station. The old man steadfastly refused. Marriott grudgingly respected Gopal's scruples: natives were seldom so particular. Nor did he wish to offend him, for he realized that, when Vedvyas was removed, the backing of the mirasdar's authority would be an invaluable help in settling the jagir.

  Gopal was confident the Company’s little detachment would overcome the enemy. ‘I did not see you rout the tax gatherers but’, he said serenely, ‘I have spoken with your prisoners. They swear no Hindoo matchlockman will stand against the bayonet charge that follows your terrible volleys. I fought Vedvyas, you remember. His bodyguard is formidable: mercenary cavalry from Marwar and Rohilkhand; but the rest are reluctant hirelings from the districts he has ravished, badly paid, disorderly, strong in naught but numbers.’

  Except for the Company’s sepoys, whose affairs were managed by Todd, all the camp’s administration devolved on Marriott’s shoulders. With his banian’s assistance he doctored the sick, judged disputes, settled quarrels that sprang from trifles, wrote to Amelia, Fane and Beddoes, and sent an official report to Joseph Harley. ‘Little enough,’ he mused, ‘to satisfy the Council - should I say our fate hangs on a whisker?’

  Meanwhile, Welladvice, his pieces cast, stormed with axemen into the woods, chopped and sawed and planed, built carriages, wagons and limbers. ‘Wheels are tricky,’ he declared. ‘Yer got none in yer force, an’ so no wheelwrights. Them black loons in the town can make 'em fit fer hackeries, not fer guns.’ He cursed and drove his carpenters until the work was done; then manufactured gunpowder in a factory he sited well away from camp and town.