114. ‘There is a report, which has been mischievously set about, and may have mischievous consequences—namely, that the king has the whole of his retinue, and has returned to his own apartments in the palace.
‘This is perfectly untrue. I went with Mr Saunders, the civil commissioner, and his wife, to see the unfortunate and guilty wretch. We mounted a flight of stone steps, at the bottom and top of which was a European sentry. A small low door opened into a room, half of which was partitioned off with a grass-matting called chitac, behind which was a woman cooking some atrocious compound, if I might judge from the smell. In the other half was a native bedstead—that is, a frame of bamboo on four legs, with grass-rope strung across it; on this was lying and smoking a hookah an old man with a long white beard; no other article of furniture whatever was in the room, and I am almost ashamed to say that a feeling of pity mingled with my disgust at seeing a man recently lord of an imperial city, almost unparalleled for riches and magnificence, confined in a low, close, dirty room, which the lowest slave of his household would scarcely have occupied, in the very palace where he had reigned supreme, with power of life and death, untrammelled by any law, within the precincts of a royal residence as large as a considerable-sized town; streets, galleries, towers, mosques, forts, and gardens, a private and a public hall of justice, and innumerable courts, passages, and staircases. Its magnificence can only be equalled by the atrocities which have been committed there. But to go back to the degraded king. The boy, Jumma Bukht, repeated my name after Mr Saunders. The old man raised his head and looked at me, then muttered something I could not hear, and at the moment the boy, who had been called from the opposite door, came and told me that his mother, the begum, wished to see me. Mrs Saunders then took possession of me, and we went on into a smaller, darker, dirtier room than the first, in which were some eight or ten women crowding round a common “charpoy” or couch, on which was a dark, fat, shrewd, but sensual-looking woman, to whom my attention was particularly drawn. She took hold of my hand—I shuddered a little—and told me that my husband was a great warrior; but that if the king’s life and her son’s had not been promised them by the government, the king was preparing a great army which would have annihilated us. The other women stood round in silence till her speech was finished, and then crowded round, asking how many children I had, and if they were all boys; examined my dress, and seemed particularly amused by my bonnet and parasol. They were, with one exception, coarse, low-caste women, as devoid of ornament as of beauty. Zeenat Mahal asked me—a great honour, I found, which I did not appreciate—to sit down on her bed; but I declined, as it looked so dirty. Mr Saunders was much amused at my refusal, and told me it would have been more than my life was worth six months before to have done so; and I have no doubt of it.’
Lucknow, from the Observatory.