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Downstairs, the Sikhs, the Magistrate, Rayne, a couple of young ensigns, and a motley collection of indigo planters and Eurasians, were engaged in a desperate fight to keep the sepoys out of the building; but already they were being driven back from doors and windows. The Collector had fortunately laid a plan to meet this contingency. He had ordered the men at the north-facing ramparts and at the churchyard wall to fight their way back through the Residency from room to room towards the hall, from where a dash could be made for the head of the co
The Residency itself would be lost: the Collector had never been in doubt about that. The important question was how it was lost … for, at all costs, the momentum of the attack must be broken. He had come to think of the attack as a living creature which derived its nourishment from the speed of its progress. Delay it, and its vitality would ebb. Halt it for a few minutes and it would die altogether. Until now its speed had been so great that it had grown into a ravening monster, capable not only of swallowing the Residency, but of gulping down the banqueting hall as well.
The Collector had posted all the men he could spare on the upper, north-facing verandah. From this vantage point they were to keep up a steady rifle fire on the sepoys advancing over the open ground until they heard the first ringing of the Church bell. In addition they had two camel guns, small ca
Downstairs, the Collector was becoming desperate. He had just heard the banqueting hall ca
Upstairs, Fleury had taken the pistol to pieces (as far as it couid 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 Fieury 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, Fieury 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, unfortunateiy, was on the other side of the sepoy (it was a good thing he had not noticed it because it was so sharp that he would have been able to slice Fleury in two without even pressing). Fieury had no time to draw his final weapon, the two-bladed Indian dagger, for his adversary, it turned out, was no less impressively armed than he was himself and he was already flourishing a spare sabre which he had been carrying for just such an emergency.