Shadow of the Moon (24 page)

The knife sliced through a foot of the creature's side and was wrenched from his grasp, and there was a cloud of blood in the water. For a moment the other sharks lay motionless and then suddenly the water boiled into foam as they rushed in upon their wounded companion, fighting, snapping and tearing like hounds upon a fox. The dark water was red with blood, and Alex turned and swam desperately away. He was still swimming when someone grabbed his shoulders and shouted above his head, and then hands were pulling at him and he was dragged over a gunwale to tumble gasping and helpless among the feet of the boat's crew.

‘That was a near thing,' said the first mate, beating him on the back. ‘Touch and go. Here! get down, Mr Prasad. Holy Moses! Look at the brutes, they'll have us over. Hit with oars -
sumjao
.' The boat rocked dangerously as a ten-foot blue shark, attracted by the taint of blood, rubbed along the keel, and the sea seemed alive with triangular fins and lithe rolling bodies. And then they were rowing back to the ship into the eye of the setting sun over a sea that was no longer blue, but black below them and bright gold beyond.

Alex sat up dizzily and grinned at Kishan Prasad, and Kishan Prasad laughed and lifted his head in a brief gesture of salute. For a moment they were no longer enemies, but men who had seen no escape from death and yet by some miracle had escaped it, and were whole and alive. They drank the fiery grog proffered by the first mate and grinned weakly at each other and looked with dazed thankfulness at the clear sky above them while the lascars chattered and tugged at their oars, and the
Glamorgan Castle
, its deck-rails lined with excited cheering passengers, grew larger and nearer and at last loomed solid and safe above them.

Alex was aware, as though through a thick fog, of noise and shouting
voices and people who shook his hand and thumped his shoulders. He felt absurdly sleepy and rather as if he were very drunk. It was an effort to keep his head erect and his eyes from closing, and he yawned largely in the faces of the congratulatory passengers, and pushing his way through them, stumbled down to his cabin and collapsed onto his berth, where the ship's doctor, following him, found him so deeply asleep that he did not even wake when his wet clothes were removed and a blanket thrown over him.

He woke early the following morning, feeling refreshed and fitter than he had for many days. The long swim and the violent exertion of the previous evening, followed by almost twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep, had apparently proved more beneficial than the hot idle days and sweltering sleepless nights that had followed on their departure from Malta. His cabin companions had evidently slept on deck, and Alex lay looking about the small cramped space and the low ceiling above his head with a strange new appreciation of mundane things and the miraculous fact of being alive. He rolled out of his bunk, and pulling on a pair of trousers went up on deck to breathe the dawn air.

The sun had not yet risen, but the sky was already bright and the decks glittered with the night dew and the salt water with which a busy group of lascars were washing down the planks. The sea lay colourless in the dawn light except near the ship where it appeared coldly black and clear as glass. The whorls of foam and bubbles sank down into the blackness, still visible a fathom and more below the surface and turning from white to silver to grey until they vanished into nothingness. The deck hatches were strewn with the bodies of those who preferred a cool night under the stars to the close heat of the cabins, and only the lascars were as yet awake.

Alex went aft and leant against the rail, idly watching the long white track of the wake. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Kishan Prasad. The two men looked at each other for a moment or two in silence and with the cool, narrowed, calculating look of adversaries who measure swords, and then Kishan Prasad said slowly: ‘I wish to thank you—'

‘You have nothing to thank me for,' interrupted Alex curtly.

‘You mean because had you known that it was I you would not have saved me? Is that indeed the truth? If you had known - and knowing that I could not swim, must drown - you would not have gone after me?'

Alex returned his look with eyes that were hard and level. ‘No. I would not have lifted a hand to save you.'

Kishan Prasad bowed gravely as though he had received an answer that he both expected and understood. He said: ‘It is for that reason that I come to thank you. Not for what you did for me, but for what you would have done for one of my servants. There are very few who would have risked their lives for … a black man and the servant of a black man.'

‘You overrate me,' said Alex brusquely. ‘There was no risk. I am a strong swimmer.'

‘And the sharks?' asked Kishan Prasad gently.

‘You force me to admit,' said Alex with a grin, ‘that I had clean forgotten that there might be sharks. If I had remembered it, I give you my word that I should not have jumped. So you see, you owe me nothing.'

‘Nevertheless,' said Kishan Prasad smiling, ‘willingly or unwillingly, you gave me back the life that the Gods would have taken from me. In the past I have intrigued against your race—' He saw the sudden flare in Alex's eyes and laughed, lifting a protesting hand: ‘Oh no! That is not evidence - I tell you nothing that you did not already know. And here there is no one to overhear. We two speak under the thorn tree. Your Commissioner will not move against me. That I know.'

‘And I also,' said Alex bitterly. ‘Are you by any chance telling me that you have suffered a change of heart because I risked my neck to pull you out of the sea?'

Kishan Prasad smiled and shook his head. ‘Alas, no. I have suffered no change of heart. In the name of my country and my people and my Gods I will do all in my power to pull down your Company's Raj.'

‘And I,' said Alex, ‘will do all in my power to get you hanged or transported - for the sake of my countrymen who govern your country.'

‘It is well,' said Kishan Prasad gravely. ‘We understand one another, and we are not children.'

He twisted a small ring that he wore on his right hand and pulling it off held it out to Alex. It was a trumpery thing of little value, fashioned out of silver in a curious design set with three small red stones that might have been flawed rubies. An odd ornament for the hand of such a man as Kishan Prasad. He said: ‘Will you wear this for me? As a token of my gratitude? It is worth less than ten rupees, but it is a talisman that may one day save you from much evil. If ever the day comes, as I pray it will, that the Company's Raj falls and its charter for robbery and confiscation is destroyed, look on that ring and remember Kishan Prasad. For in that day - who knows - it may repay a part of my debt.'

Alex looked at the outstretched hand with a frown in his eyes and made no attempt to disguise his hesitation. Then he reached out and taking it slid it onto the little finger of his right hand and said slowly: ‘I did not remember that there might be sharks when I went over that rail yesterday. But you would have had me take your place on that damned hen-coop when you saw them come. I will wear this because it is the gift of a brave man.'

Kishan Prasad put his hands together, the finger-tips touching, bowed gravely above them and turned and walked away.

13

‘We shall be in Calcutta tomorrow,' thought Winter. ‘Only one more day - and then I shall see Conway!'

It did not seem possible that the long waiting that had begun six years ago in the Long Walk at Ware could be over at last, and that in only two days' time she would no longer be ‘Miss Winter' or the Condesa de los Aguilares, but Mrs Conway Barton; driving away from the church with her handsome husband to live happily ever afterwards like a princess in a fairy-tale.

The
Glamorgan Castle
was anchored off the Sandheads awaiting the first light and the turn of the tide when, with the pilot on board, she would begin the slow journey up the Hooghly to Calcutta, and Winter, lying wakeful in her narrow bunk, wondered if Conway would meet her at the mouth of the river or board the ship on the way up - Colonel Moulson seemed to think it possible.

There had been a time during the voyage when she could not picture Conway clearly and his image had become unreal and lifeless - a shadow without substance. She could not explain why this should be so, and she had, obscurely, placed the blame for it on Captain Randall, though she could not have told herself in what way he was responsible. But at least it had been Captain Randall who had been responsible for reinvesting Conway with all his old glamour. The way in which he had brought this about was equally involved and quite as impossible of explanation. It had arisen out of his dramatic rescue of the Indian, Kishan Prasad …

Winter had been in her cabin when Lottie screamed, and the sound had been muffled and indistinct. She had heard the thud of running feet on the deck overhead and had been aware of uproar and confusion, and then, through the open port, she had heard the cry of ‘man overboard!' and had run up on deck to find it crowded with excited passengers and noisy with bellowed orders to stop the ship - to lower a boat - to come about—

Whistles had shrilled, men had shouted, and Lottie had continued to scream. Winter had taken her by the shoulders and shaken her violently, which had proved instantly efficacious. Lottie had gulped, gasped, drawn breath and poured out the story. Kishan Prasad had fallen overboard - Lottie had seen it - and he could not swim, and Captain Randall had gone in after him.

Winter had been conscious of a sudden cold shock as though she had been hit by something frozen and solid: an icy fist that lashed at her and was gone. She had released Lottie and run to peer over the rails, but the crowd
was too thick and she could not see, and she had waited with a strange sense of breathlessness for what seemed like hours while the ship had slowed and circled back.

‘Just as well we ain't running under sail,' said Colonel Moulson. ‘If there'd been a breath of wind and we'd been carryin' canvas we'd have left 'em miles behind before we could have heaved-to. Steam's a marvellous thing, by George!'

‘Can you see them?' demanded Winter urgently.

‘Not a sign. But we'll pick 'em up the moment we get a boat out. Sea's as calm as a billiard table; no danger at all, provided they keep afloat. Unless the sharks sight 'em of course. If that happens it will be all over with them. Saw a man fall overboard at Aden once. Sharks got him before we could lower a boat. Tore him to bits. Dreadful sight!'

Mrs Abuthnot screamed faintly and Winter turned so white that the Colonel, afraid that she was about to swoon, hastily excused himself and hurried off to watch the boat being lowered and pulled smartly away under the charge of the first mate.

The hour that followed seemed endless to Winter. The sun was moving down the sky and she watched the shadow of the wheelhouse stretch out across the deck and grow longer and longer. Then, from the mizzentop, a look-out with a telescope who had sighted the two men, and had been shouting at intervals that all was well, put his hands to his mouth and bellowed: ‘
Shark
!' And once more the deck was in an uproar.

Women screamed and wept and Sophie, who had conceived a passionate though secret admiration for Captain Randall, swooned and had to be carried below; followed by Mrs Abuthnot, whom affection for Alex, and the conviction that he was even now being torn limb from limb and devoured by sharks, had sent off into strong hysterics.

Lottie having collapsed into tears, it was left to Winter and the ever-helpful Mrs Holly to minister to Sophie and her mother. But when Lottie brought the news that both men had been rescued in time and were being rowed back to the ship, Mrs Abuthnot, pausing only to take another strong dose of
sal volatile
and grasp her smelling salts, had hurried up on deck. Winter had followed more slowly. She had heard the shouts and cheers as she left the cabin, and Alex had stumbled down the stairs and passed her without seeing her.

His face appeared drained of all colour and drawn with exhaustion, and he walked as though he were drunk or drugged. The ship's doctor hurried down after him, and Winter went up on deck where the first mate and various passengers were vying with each other to tell the story as Kishan Prasad had told it to them, with embroideries and embellishments of their own.

Winter sat down in a deck-chair, her knees feeling unaccountably weak, and remembering that Alex had once expressed regret that he could not
bring himself to murder this man whose life he had just risked his own to save, she was filled with a warm, glowing flood of admiration that went a long way towards expunging the memory of his disloyal attack on Conway.

The admiration, however, had lasted considerably less than twenty-four hours.

She had had no opportunity of speaking to him until half-way through the following morning, when at Mrs Abuthnot's imperious bidding he had come to sit on the deck at her feet under the shade of the awning and to answer innumerable questions. ‘Of course it was exceedingly noble of you, dear boy,' said Mrs Abuthnot, handing him a skein of embroidery silk to unravel, ‘but quite inconceivably rash. You could well have drowned!'

‘In a sea like a mill pond?' inquired Alex lazily. ‘Nonsense. No one who could swim a stroke could have drowned in a sea like that, and I'm a strong swimmer. It was extremely pleasant after the heat of these decks, let me tell you.'

‘I see that you are determined to make light of it,' said Mrs Abuthnot approvingly. ‘But I shall not allow that. To jump unhesitatingly to the rescue of a drowning man in a shark-infested sea was a heroic deed and worthy of the highest praise.'

‘Mrs Abuthnot,' said Alex, handing back the skein of silk and receiving another, ‘I cannot masquerade as a hero to you, much as I should enjoy doing so. But as I have already been forced to point out to a good many people, I had entirely forgotten that there were such things as sharks. The possibility of meeting any had not so much as crossed my mind, and had it done so I do assure you that I should not have gone in after that man. I should have contented myself with throwing over another hen-coop, and prayer.'

‘I do not believe it,' said Mrs Abuthnot with energy.

‘Alas, it is only too true. The sight of that shark gave me the worst shock of my life and I hope I may never have another as bad.'

Winter looked up from the embroidery she held in her hands and spoke for the first time:

‘Perhaps you had not thought of there being sharks, but you went to the rescue of a man whom you - you had no cause to think well of. That at least was noble.'

Alex regarded her with a distinctly ironical eye. ‘I'm afraid not. You see I did not know who it was whom I had gone after.'

‘You didn't know?'

‘Not until I had reached him; no.'

Winter stared at him wide-eyed. ‘But - but if you had known, you would not have left him to drown.'

‘Oh yes, I would,' said Alex grimly. ‘The gesture was a lamentable mistake on my part, and one which I deeply regret.' He came to his feet,
and handing over the unravelled skein of silk to Mrs Abuthnot with a bow and a smile, turned away and left them.

‘He does not mean a word of it,' said Mrs Abuthnot comfortably. ‘He is just being modest. So truly heroic!'

‘Oh, no, he is not,' said Winter scornfully, her eyes sparkling with anger. ‘He means every word of it. And he is quite right - he did nothing in the
least
heroic, because he knew quite well that he himself would not drown and he had not even thought of there being sharks. He did not know who had fallen overboard, and may even have thought it was you or Sophie. If he
had
known, he would have let that man drown!'

‘How can you say such a thing, Winter?' Sophie's soft voice quivered with indignation.

‘Because it's true,' snapped Winter. The reflection that she herself had come close to regarding Captain Randall's exploit with as much admiration, if not more, as the hero-worshipping Sophie, filled her with fury, and the fact that she had been in a fair way to forgiving and forgetting Captain Randall's disloyalty to Conway added immeasurably to her anger.

Conway, she thought, would have sprung to the rescue of a drowning man even if he had known the risks - it would not have occurred to him to stand by and see even an enemy drown. And suddenly, with that conviction, Conway was alive and real again and no longer a thing of pasteboard and straw.

The remainder of the voyage had been uneventful. They had seen a school of whales off Colombo and passed an East Indiaman under full sail by moonlight, looking like some fabulous thing made of silver. They had braved the surf in cockle-shell boats to land at Madras, and had driven through the town in curious carriages shaped like oblong boxes made from Venetian blinds. And now at last they were almost at the end of their long journey.

The tide lapped and gurgled against the sides of the stationary ship, and through the open porthole Winter could see an enormous star, low above the the sea and swinging like a diamond on an invisible chain to the slow rocking movement of the anchored ship. One of the housemaids at Ware had told her that if you wished upon a star your wish would come true, and ever since then, on every clear night, Winter had wished on a star. Always the same wish. That the years would pass quickly until the day that Conway would come for her. Now there was no need to wish that wish any longer, and the blazing brilliance of the star that she could see beyond the cabin porthole seemed to point the difference between tonight and all those other nights, and to be a sparkling omen marking the start of a new life and of so much happiness that she would never need to wish upon a star again - unless, perhaps, it were to wish that Conway might never be disappointed in her.

As she watched, the sky turned to grey and a cock in the galley began to
crow. Soon the sun would turn the silt-stained sea to gold, the boatswain's whistles would shrill and there would be a patter of feet on deck and the rattle of the anchor chain. The last day—!

Except for the last few necessities, Winter had completed her packing on the previous afternoon, for she could not bear to waste a moment of that wonderful day. Every foot of the way, the tangled thickets of bamboo, the thatch-roofed huts surrounded by groves of tamarind, jackfruit and custard apple, the low brown land, the temples and the wide, mud-coloured Hooghly with its treacherous shifting shoals and unpredictable currents, was wonderful and exciting to the girl who had passed that way as a child almost a dozen weary years ago, held in the arms of Zobeida who had wept as she looked her last on her homeland.

Every approaching craft, every carriage seen upon either bank, might be one that contained Conway. A horseman riding behind a far belt of trees or a figure carried in a rough palanquin might be he.

Alex Randall, seeing her run to lean over the deck-rail as a river launch approached the ship, felt again the same half-angry, half-exasperated desire to tell her that she must not look like that: she should not let such glowing expectation show on her face for all to see, for before the day was out she would have seen for herself what the years had done to Mr Commissioner Barton, and she would never wear that look again. Watching that young and vulnerable face, Alex thought entirely dispassionately that it would be a pleasure to choke the life out of Mr Barton.