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definitive manner possible. This method of “blowing away” a man, leaving no trace of his body for
burial or any such memorial service, was reserved for the worst of criminals and the report calmly
noted that “there was an intense period of such activity in the fall of 1857.” Were all those who were
blown away mutineers? Of course not. In most cases, their sole offense was likely nothing more than
the color of their skin. For Cawnpore had sparked a kind of hysteria in the English of India, a
hysteria which still had not entirely faded. Created a mistrust between the Raj and its subjects which
lingered to this day.
Rayley sighed. Removed his glasses and closed the folder. Hardly the best of bedtime
reading, but reviewing the story of Cawnpore made him all the more eager to speak to Anthony
Weaver. Trevor’s interview with the Secretary-General had been but the first of several, for they
planned a slow wearing down of the man’s haughtier, and Rayley made up his mind to press for the
right to speak to him next.
For there had been another notation in the report.
Not all the English of Cawnpore had made it to the fortress before the siege. Some small
pockets of farmers, either too far from the station to safely travel or too stubborn to believe the danger
was real, stayed in their homes. As the army made its way toward the city, Roland Everlee heard of
such a stranded family. A widow, a woman whose husband had died in the first days of the uprising,
left alone with her five children.
Everlee went himself to ensure that they were safe, ordering the rest of his unit to press
on to the fortress. He found the farmhouse but as he was packing the woman and her children into his
cart, the luckless family was swarmed by a band of mutineers. Everlee, the woman, and three
children were killed in the yard of the house. The other two children survived.
But… how?
Rayley frowned at the report. It was a typical military accounting - quite specific on
some issues and maddeningly vague in others. A five year old girl was spared, along with her infant
brother, but there was no explanation for how these children might have found their way back to
Bombay. The city was two hours from Cawnpore under the best of circumstances and the roads had
been cut by the rebels when the mutiny began. But somehow, as if through divine manifestation, it
was written that the children had been returned to Bombay. The baby boy died there some months
later, the report droned on, in one of the city’s frequent cholera epidemics. The girl was shipped back
to an aunt in England.
It had always been said that Cawnpore yielded no survivors. No eyewitnesses. No one
to tell its story. Just an army of husbands and fathers returning to find the walls of a schoolhouse
splattered with blood and their families gone, wiped from the earth. A few farmers in the highest
hills of the outlying districts never saw a single mutineer and thus likewise had no stories to tell. The
truth of Cawnpore, therefore, was to remain ever as inexact as the number of Indians who were killed
in revenge. An interim history, the language describing it uncertain, the official reports written by
those who had merely been nearby or who had arrived too late to know anything for certain.
That was, except for this lone child, this five year old girl. Her family name was
declared to be Sloane, her first name went unrecorded. She would be a grown woman now, Rayley
reflected. Near unto forty and it was doubtful she retained any memories of India or the family she
had lost there. And even if she did – even if she could shed some light on how two helpless children
had somehow managed to become the only survivors of the Great Mutiny – how on earth would they
ever find her?
***