Nana Sahib was an epicure in cruelty, and was disposed to take his murders in dainty and lingering instalments. At four o’clock on the afternoon of July 15 he sent over some of his officers to the Bebeeghur, and bade the Englishmen come forth. They came out, the two colonels, the judge, a merchant named Greenaway, and his son, and with them a sixth, an English boy, fourteen years of age, nameless now, but apparently willing to share the perilous responsibilities of “being a man.” Poor lad! Motherless, his name all unknown, his father, perhaps, floating a disfigured corpse on the sliding current of the muddy Ganges, he appears for a moment, a slender, boyish figure, in the living frescoes of that grim tragedy, and then vanishes.
Under the cool shade of a lime tree sat Nana Sahib, dark of face, gaudy of dress, and round him a cluster of his kinsmen and officers, Bala Rao among them, whose wounded shoulder was now to be avenged. Brief ceremony was shown to this little cluster of haggard and ragged sahibs. A grim nod from the Nana, a disorderly line of Sepoys with levelled muskets and retracted lips, and the six were shot down and their bodies cast on the dusty roadside for every passer-by to spit at.
A little before five o’clock a woman from the Nana’s household stepped inside the door of the Bebeeghur, and looked over the crowd of weary mothers and wan-faced children. A curious stillness fell on the little company, while, in careless accents, the woman gave the dreadful order: they were “all to be killed”! One English lady, with quiet courage, stepped up to the native officer who commanded the guard, and asked “if it was true they were all to be murdered.” Even the Sepoys shrank from a crime so strange and wanton. The officer bade the Englishwomen not to be afraid, and the woman from the Nana’s harem was told roughly by the soldiers that her orders would not be obeyed.
It seemed monstrous indeed that an order which was to send 200 helpless human beings to death should be brought, like a message about some domestic trifle, on a servant-woman’s lips. The messenger vanished. The Sepoys on guard consulted together and agreed that with their own hands, at least, they would not slay the prisoners. According to one account they were ordered by a new messenger to fire through the windows upon the company of women and children, many now praying within. They obeyed the order to fire, and the sudden wave of flame and smoke, with the crash of twenty discharged muskets, swept over the heads of the captive crowd within. But the Sepoys, of design, fired high, and no one was wounded.
