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By Root 948 0

towards the window, laid it on the sill, cocked it, put a percussion cap beneath the hammer, directed it at some sepoys trotting below, and pulled the trigger, confident that a sepoy would throw up his arms and sink to the ground. There was a crack, but no sepoy dropped dead; the percussion cap had fired but not the pistol. Fleury uttered a curse and started to examine it, for the life of him he could not see what was the matter. Soon he was absorbed in the workings of the pistol, which was designed according to principles that were new to him. He would not be surprised to find that by using his intelligence he could add one or two significant improvements to this design. Again the great bell rang out. What on earth could it be? The next time it rang he was so absorbed in the problem of getting the pistol to work that he did not notice it; nor the next time either. Or the one after that.

Downstairs, the Collector was becoming desperate. He had just heard the banqueting hall cannons fire, which must mean that the sepoys were attempting an attack from the flank; he hoped that their attack had not succeeded because he and his men had more than they could cope with already. It was not that his plan of fighting from room to room was not working...on the contrary, it was working to perfection: every room they retired from was crammed with dead and dying sepoys. The only trouble was this: the sepoys kept on bravely coming forward, while he and his men kept on retreating. Against such an onslaught there was nothing much else he could do. They had fought their way backwards through pantries and brushing-rooms and knife rooms, past the European servants’ staircase, past the European butler’s room, the nurseries, the nursery dining-room, and the ayah’s rooms, until in the dining-room he knew he would have to make a stand. But the dining-room was too spacious: there the sepoys could use their numbers for a devastating bayonet charge. So, once again, he had to give the signal to Hookum Singh. The giant Sikh’s muscles bunched, the veins stood out on his throat and temples, his eyes bulged, and somehow he heaved the great iron bell into the air and swung it back and forth three times, making the walls sing and tremble, before silencing it again on the pulsing floor. Then he dragged it away to the drawing-room. The door into the drawing-room must be defended, no matter what happened...Otherwise, so quick had been the retreat through the Residency, the men fighting their way back from the hospital and across the yard would find themselves outflanked and unable to reach the connecting trench. So the Collector and Hookum Singh and half a dozen others prepared themselves to defend the drawing-room door, if necessary with bayonets as well as firearms.

Upstairs, Fleury had taken the pistol to pieces (as far as it could be taken to pieces which did not seem to be very far) and put it together again. He did not believe himself to be any the wiser as regards the reason for it not firing, but he thought he might as well try again.

“I say, you don’t happen to know how this blessed thing works, do you?” he asked the person who had just come into the music-room. But he did not wait for a reply before throwing himself to one side as a sabre whistled down and buried itself deep in the brickwork of the window-sill where he had been sitting. Somehow a burly sepoy had found his way into the music-room; this man’s only ambition appeared to be to cut Fleury in pieces. Luckily, the blade of the sabre had snapped off and remained embedded in the wall, giving Fleury time to aim the pistol and pull the trigger. But this time there was only a disappointing click; not even the percussion cap fired. Never mind, Fleury had plenty of other weapons. He was now trying to drag one of the wavy-bladed Malayan daggers out of his belt, which was actually a cummerbund; he was having difficulty, though, because the corrugated edges had got caught in his shirt. Well, forget about his dagger, where was his sabre? His sabre, unfortunately, was on the other side of the sepoy