The Officer's Wife by Merryn Allingham

Author:Merryn Allingham
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: JOFFE BOOKS historical romance and sagas
Published: 2024-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

One of those who had been shouting loudest was caught, the policeman grabbing him around the waist and felling him with a loud crack of the long, wooden pole. From her vantage point, Daisy could see the scuffle unfolding. The body lying prone on the ground seemed little more than a boy’s but, as he lay motionless, a much larger form intervened and pushed the policeman roughly out of the way. Screwing up her eyes, she tried to see his face. Something about him seemed familiar.

She dredged her memory and then it came to her. He was the man who’d run through the bazaar on her very first day in Jasirapur, the man who’d been chased by a police officer and was again their quarry. The policeman turned his attention from the boy on the ground and began to beat the would-be rescuer around the head with his fists, then took the wooden pole he carried and brought it down in a cruel arc across the man’s back.

Those nearest in the crowd sent out an angry mutter and, when the other police joined in the mêlée and began to labour the crowd indiscriminately, the mutter turned to a howl. As one, the crowd turned on their tormentors and several of the policemen disappeared in a welter of blows, their lathis useless on the ground. At that, their fellow officers waited no more and made for cover, the crowd swallowing them as they ran.

‘We must try to get out of here,’ Jocelyn said, her voice a little shaky. ‘I don’t like the way things are going.’

But they were still hemmed in on all sides, and the horse, docile until this point, began to toss his head impatiently and paw at the ground, clearly unsettled. There was now a pitch battle going on just yards in front of them. Bodies threshed in anger and curses were hurled, along with bricks and soda water bottles, while sticks cracked down on unprotected skulls with a sickening crunch.

A figure caught Daisy’s eye. It was Grayson Harte. He was not engaged in the fighting, but seemed to be trying to find a way through to the small circle of protesters who had begun the mayhem. A slightly built young Indian was by his side, and neither of them was making headway through the sprawling mass of fighting men.

Then soldiers appeared out of nowhere. Not mounted, for the cavalry had left the maiden before trouble had taken a real hold, but soldiers with rifles. The police had been unable to quell the disturbance and they had been summoned, no doubt unwillingly, to restore order. They made no attempt to infiltrate the crowd but instead herded them, pushing them back into a tight circle by dint of dropping their rifle butts on thinly shod feet. The once belligerent crowd were cowed, and began to file away as the soldiers directed.

But then one of the crowd disentangled himself from his fellows and, escaping the circle, began again to shout the inflammatory slogans that had started the riot.

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