If the various degrees of wretchedness are to be estimated by the faculty for suffering contained in the victim, then were these ladies of all women the most miserable. Few or none amongst them had been aware that in some corner of the mansion beneath whose roof their happier days were passed, there existed such foul holes as those in which they now lay panting by the score. It was much if they had cared to hazard a supposition that "the servants slept somewhere about the compound." They had neither furniture, nor bedding, nor straw; nothing but coarse and hard bamboo matting, unless they preferred a smoother couch upon the bare floor. They fed sparely on cakes of unleavened dough, and lentil-porridge dished up in earthen pans without spoon or plate. There was some talk of meat on Sundays, but it never came to anything. Once the children got a little milk. The same day the head-bearer of Colonel Williams came to pay his respects to the daughter who was the sole survivor of that officer's household. "I could not," he says, "get near the ladies on account of the sentries, but saw that food was being distributed to them. It consisted of native bread and milk. I remonstrated with a soldier who had formerly served under my master, and begged of him to supply with better food people who had lived in a very different way. He gave me eight annas" (twelvepence) "to go to the bazaar and buy some sweetmeats. I did so; and on my return Miss Georgiana and a married lady came into the verandah to meet me. Miss Georgiana repeated to me her mother's injunctions about my going to her brother. I gave them the sweetmeats, and had little time to speak to them, for, seeing me, the other ladies came out into the verandah: on which the sentries turned me out."
The matron of these female prisoners, whom it took so little to keep in order, was a woman described as tall; of a fair complexion; twenty-eight or thirty years in age, but with a few grey hairs. She went by the nickname of "the Begum," and her character was no better than could be looked for in a waiting-maid of the courtezan who then ruled the circle of the Nana. She superintended a staff of sweepers, who furnished the captives with their food. The attendance of such debased menials was in itself the most ignominious affront which Oriental malice could invent: and even these were provided exclusively for the humiliation of our countrywomen, and might do nothing for their comfort. A young Brahmin, who chanced to look over the fence of the enclosure, saw some ladies washing their own dirty linen. With the irrepressible loquacity of an Hindoo he began asking some strangers who were standing by whether there was no washerman who could undertake to do for the Mem Sahibs: an ill-timed curiosity which procured him a slap on the face and a night in the guard-room.