Not Quite a Husband (23 page)

Leo leaned against the edge of the desk. “Could you help me with my boots?”

“Of course.” She carefully pulled them off.

“I need to change clothes.”

He did. His jacket and shirt were both missing the left sleeve and the left side, his trousers missing the right leg. She checked his saddlebag and brought out the kurta pyjama.

“No, I only wear those to sleep.”

“Which is exactly what you are going to do now, aren’t you?” she asked suspiciously. “Right after I find us some food.”

He shook his head. “I’m not injured so severely that I can take to my bed with a clear conscience while the men of this fort are outnumbered ten to one.”

Her jaw went slack when she realized he wasn’t speaking in jest. “Absolutely not. You will not leave this room.”

“I must. It’s a matter of duty.”

“You’ve no duty to anyone here. You are a passerby and you are injured, while this fort is full of able-bodied men, trained and paid to fight. Let them fight. You rest.”

“The officers and soldiers of this fort have offered us shelter in our most desperate hour. I will not rest easy if I don’t do something for them in return.”

She sighed, knowing a lost cause when she saw one. “Wait here. Let me change out of your clothes and I’ll help you dress.”

She did her changing in the bath and returned in her blouse and skirt. With great care she disengaged him from his ruined garments, eased him into clothes yanked off her back, and pulled on his boots for him.

“Promise you will be careful about the stitches?”

“I will. I will sit in a corner and load rifles, which is all I can do now.”

“And you will be careful otherwise too?”

“Of course. I plan to live a long and much-laureled life yet. You stay here. Some of the men marching on the fort have firearms. There will be loose bullets flying about.”

She handed him his crutch and his rifle and walked ahead to open the door for him.

As he passed under the lintel, he stopped and turned toward her. “About what I said night before last, I’m sorry. It’s because I cannot forgive myself that I think you too cannot possibly forgive me.”

Tears stung the back of her eyes. She rose to her tiptoes and kissed him on his chin. “Just come back.”

S
uch was the fort’s need for men that Leo, despite his crutch and his fresh wounds, was immediately assigned a place on the eastern rampart, next to another civilian, Mr. Richmond, Chakdarra’s resident political officer. They’d barely shaken hands and introduced themselves before the first shots rang out.

Leo had never been in a war: The closest he’d ever come to a battle had been when he played Henry V in an Eton production and gave a rather stirring recital of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. A nodding acquaintance with Shakespeare, as it turned out, was hardly adequate preparation for the overwhelming cacophony of modern warfare.

Machine guns—two mounted on the rampart, two in the guardhouse over the bridge—thudded
loud and staccato. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rifles discharged continually in a messy, deafening percussion. Outside the walls, war cries rose like successive waves of a swelling tide, passion begetting passion, fever breeding fever. And cutting through everything else, the deep rumble of war drums,
ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom-boom-boom—
the pulsating heart of the Swat Valley Uprising.

Within minutes, the air was heavy with the smell of black powder—most of the cartridges used by the Indian army employed smokeless powder, but the ammunition of those laying siege to the fort was more old-fashioned. The officers sprinted from corner to corner on the rampart, directing the placement of the sepoys, as the Pathans attacked the west wall, the northeast corner of the fort, and the cavalry enclosure in succession.

There was no time to be afraid. Leo sat with his back against the loopholed wall of the rampart and loaded rifles for the bespectacled Mr. Richmond, who would mutter, “God, I can see their faces” every so often.

During a short lull in the fighting, coffee was brought up to the rampart. Mr. Richmond shared his mug with Leo.

“They certainly caught us with our britches
down,” said the political officer. “I never thought it would really come to pass. Or that it would amount to anything more than a skirmish.”

“You were hardly alone in that opinion.”

“Well, at least it won’t last much longer. By morning the Swatis will take a look at their fallen and decide it’s not worth the fight.”

“You think so?” Leo asked, half incredulous, half hopeful.

“The Swatis don’t have much of a reputation as fighters—the other Pathans look down on them. And the clans up and down the river squabble with one another constantly—they are about as organized as a bag of sand.”

Leo thought about the silent crowd trying to retain Bryony and him, so as not to have their ambush revealed—that seemed to speak of some organization. And the other Pathans might look down on the Swatis, but they were joining them in droves, coming from as far as Bajaur, if Imran had it right.

He kept his thoughts to himself. As a mere traveler, he could not hope to convince Mr. Richmond otherwise on his say-so. They’d learn soon enough whether the Swatis and their fellow Pathans were cohesive and united.

And soon, as it were, came at the end of that very night.

“Twenty lancers, one hundred and eighty rifles, three officers, the surgeon-captain’s assistant, myself, and the usual camp followers,” Mr. Richmond said with regard to Leo’s question concerning the precise head count inside the fort. The political officer leaned against the wall, his drowsiness barely held at bay by the quart of coffee he’d consumed. “And see, we made it through a whole night with hardly any casualty.”

The sun was rising, the mantle of darkness quietly dissolving. Leo thought with some longing to the sunrise over the Swat River that he’d have enjoyed in times of peace, long ripples of flame and copper on wide, swift water, beneath a sky still streaked with purple.

Before he could reply to Mr. Richmond, gasps went up around the rampart. Sepoys and sowars pointed to the north of the fort.

In the hills that overhung the knoll on which the fort stood, hundreds of colorful standards fluttered in the morning breeze. Men, not in thousands, but in untold tens of thousands stood shoulder to shoulder, their ranks stretching as far as the eye could see east and west, the white of their tunics glinting like new snow in the first light of day.

“God have mercy,” said Mr. Richmond, staring at
the banners. “All of Swat is here. And the Bajaur tribes. And the Bunerwals and the Utman Khels.”

To cries of alarm and dismay, bullets rained
into
the fort. The fort, seemingly impregnable when viewed in isolation, strong and splendid upon its fortified knoll, was actually dwarfed by the cliffs to the north of it, which now abounded with sharpshooters seeking to pick off the fort’s defenders.

The officers organized a group of sepoys to carry sandbags and stones to pile on top of the walls for additional protection against the snipers. Mr. Richmond rushed off to help. Leo stared at the chaotic scene.

He’d failed Bryony. He was to see her to safety. Instead, he’d delivered her to the very battlefield of the worst uprising in decades. It didn’t matter that this was what she’d wanted. He should have overridden her and he hadn’t.

Now she was in mortal danger. Should the fort be overrun, it wouldn’t matter that they were two hapless travelers caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d share the fate of the rest.

He instinctively turned away from the images his mind generated. But fragments cut through. Her upturned hand on the ground. Her cheek, pale as marble. Her shirt, caked in blood.

He could not breathe. For the first time he understood
what it meant not just to lose her, but to
lose
her.

And he was not strong enough for it.

Bryony had thought she’d be kept awake all night by her worry and the constant barrage of gunfire. But instead, she fell asleep with her head on Surgeon-Captain Gibbs’s desk, his field surgical manual on gunshot and other trauma wounds still open before her, and dreamed of circus cannons and the precise procedure for wiring a shattered knee.

The clamor of battle acted as a perverse lullaby. When the gunfire became more sporadic, she’d drifted closer to consciousness, only to sleep more deeply as the battle intensified, and the shots, the human cries, and the footsteps thumping on the rampart all fused into a uniform din.

She woke up shortly after dawn. The fort was almost quiet. She opened the shutters an inch and saw kitchen workers running toward the rampart with large pots of tea and baskets of foodstuff. At least Leo would be fed.

She brushed her teeth, rebraided her hair, and looked into Leo’s saddlebag to see if he had anything for her to eat. He did, a few dried apricots, which tasted wonderfully sweet.

A knock came at her door. She rushed to open it. But it was not Leo, only Ranjit Singh, the hospital assistant.
“Memsahib
, we have a man who has been sh—”

“It’s not Mr. Marsden, is it?”

“No,
memsahib
. It’s a cook’s assistant. Can you operate on him?”

She hesitated. She had very limited experience with the sort of surgical practice that was particular to battlefields. Her only encounter with a gunshot wound had been a hunting accident, when she’d last visited Thornwood Manor and the village doctor had been away on holiday.

“Yes, of course.”

“Thank you,
memsahib. Memsahib
will please be very careful walking outside. The Pathans can get a shot clear into the fort from the top of the hills.”

As if to underscore Ranjit Singh’s point, two shots landed not fifteen feet behind him. They both jumped. Bryony swallowed. She had not believed the inside of the fort could be so vulnerable.

They ran for it. The cook’s assistant had been shot in the shoulder. Bryony put him under general anesthesia. When she had extracted the bullet with a bullet probe, the hospital assistant found a laundry worker and the two of them carried the cook on a stretcher to the sick ward—now injury ward—next door.

Bryony washed her hands thoroughly. While the hospital assistant scrubbed down the operating table, she sterilized the rubber gloves and surgical implements she’d used and mixed more anesthetic solutions.

Another cook’s assistant braved the rain of bullets to deliver a plate of breakfast to Bryony, which she gratefully accepted. But before she’d taken two bites, the door of the surgery opened to a pair of sodden sowars, one of whom bled profusely from his thigh.

She stopped the bleeding, extracted the bullet, sent the man to the injury ward, and returned to her breakfast. The door to the surgery opened again, and in came an officer, whose uniform, like the sowars’, was drenched from the waist down.

“Are you the surgeon, ma’am?”

“Temporarily. May I help you?”

“Captain North of the Eleventh Bengal Lancers—I’m the commanding officer of Debesh Sen, on whom you just operated. I would like to know his prognosis.”