Shadow of the Moon (48 page)

The sun sank and the room filled with shadows. Lamps and candles were lit and the
chiks
rolled up to let in the cool night air, but still the noise went on and still no one left. Hours later - or so it seemed - a meal was served in the big dining-room, and Winter sat beside her bridegroom at the head of the table, white-faced and dry-eyed, smiling with stiff lips and trying to force herself to eat the food that was placed before her. Toasts were drunk and speeches were made, and still she sat there as if she were held in a strange trance in which her body had turned into some inanimate jointed thing and her mind had ceased to function. She was aroused from it at last by someone plucking at her arm, and turned stiffly to see Mrs Cottar.

‘Do forgive me, dear Mrs Barton, but I do not expect you are used to playing hostess as yet, and we are waiting for you to leave the table,' explained Mrs Cottar. ‘If we do not leave the men to their port soon, we shall none of us get to bed this night.'

It was midnight before the guests departed, and they would not have gone then but for Major Mottisham, the second witness at the marriage ceremony, who, suddenly recollecting that this was a wedding party and not a carouse, had made a short and garbled speech full of distressingly broad allusions, and herded the wedding guests into the hall.

Winter stood on the porch steps beside her husband with her hands hanging at her sides and her face still wearing that frozen smile, while carriage wheels rolled away and horses' hooves scattered the gravel. They had gone at last, and the house was quiet.

The garden was full of moonlight, and in the drawing-room the servants were stacking glasses and removing cigar-stubs, turning out lamps and blowing out candles. ‘Well, we may not have had a full-dress weddin',' said Conway, ‘but we cer'nly had a capital celebration. Don't get married every day of yer life, s'just as well to enjoy it. Eat, drink and ge' married! That's it, ain't it, m'dear?'

He appeared to expect some reply and Winter said in a stiff, expressionless voice: ‘I am very tired. I think, if you do not mind, that I will go to bed.'

‘Tha's right. You go to bed. I won't keep y' waiting!' He laughed uproariously and Winter turned away and walked slowly and unsteadily to her room, as though it were she and not Conway who was drunk.

Hamida was waiting for her, and the sight of the girl's white face and dazed eyes filled her with clucking alarm. But Winter paid no attention to her
words and did not even hear them. She allowed herself to be undressed and bathed and put to bed as though she were not even a child but a large doll. Her world - the dream world that she had built up for years and planned for and longed and lived for - was in ruins about her, but she could not even think.

At least it was quiet at last. The noise and the babel, the meaningless talk, the incomprehensible jests, the shouts of laughter and the clink of glasses had stopped, and she was alone; for now even Hamida was gone. Now perhaps she could think again - could cry, to ease the terrible pain in her heart. And then the door opened and Conway was there.

Winter sat up swiftly, pulling the sheets up about her, wondering dully why he was here and what he wished to say to her so late at night. She had not taken in the sense of his last remark to her, and in the dazed nightmare of that terrible wedding party she had forgotten that people who were married shared the same bed. She watched stupidly while he came towards her, weaving a little in his walk, and put his candle down upon the bedside table and began to remove his dressing-gown. And then, quite suddenly, the numbness left her and gave place to sheer panic and horror.

This man - this gross, repulsive, drunken stranger - was going to get into the same bed with her. To lie down beside her - perhaps touch her - kiss her! She dragged the sheets up to her chin and her eyes widened until they were enormous in her white face.

‘Go away! Please go away at once!' Her voice was hoarse with fear and loathing. ‘You cannot sleep here tonight - not tonight. Go away!'

Conway gave a drunken chuckle of approval. ‘Coy are you, my shy little virgin? Tha's as it should be. But yer a wife now.' He looked down at her and his red-rimmed eyes lit with a look that she had seen before. A look that had been in Carlyon's eyes.

‘By gad, yer a beauty after all!' The thick voice held a note of awe. ‘It would a' been worth marryin' any ugly wench with that fortune, but to get a beauty into the bargain—!'

He reached out an unsteady hand and lifted a long tress of the black unbound hair, and Winter struck at his hand in fury and terror.

‘Don't touch me! Don't dare to touch me!'

Conway lunged towards her across the bed and she flung aside the sheets and leapt out, in the grip of the same frantic, shuddering panic that she had experienced when Carlyon had looked at her by the door of her room at the dâk-bungalow beyond the ford. But her husband's clutching hands were on her hair and they gripped it and jerked it brutally, so that she fell back and was caught. And this time there was no escape.

26

Alex was both strong and healthy, and Niaz had sufficient knowledge of such matters as concussion and broken collar-bones to deal more than adequately with the situation. Having assured himself that the injury was not serious he had eased off Alex's coat and set the collar-bone, binding it securely with his
puggari
, and having retrieved Shalini had ridden back to a small village they had recently passed, where he had procured a ramshackle palanquin and bearers to carry it. An hour later Alex had been installed in the hut of the village headman and under the care of a wrinkled crone well versed in the use of healing herbs.

He had not recovered consciousness until well after dawn, and all through that day, while Niaz held him down so that he should do no further injury to his arm and shoulder, he had talked; sometimes in English, sometimes in Hindustani or Pushtu, muttering and raving. Exhorting a gang of labourers who built a road through wild and trackless territory; shouting in a cavalry charge; whispering to a havildar eight years dead as they crawled forward under cover of darkness to attack a fort; discussing philosophy with a mullah in the foothills beyond Hoti Mardan, or arguing with the Commissioner of Lunjore - expounding policies, pressing for action, explaining patiently the need for reforms.

Once he spoke in a strange tongue. An odd sentence, twice repeated:
‘Kogo zakhochet Bog pogubit, togo sperva lishit razuma.'
Niaz did not know that he spoke in Russian, or that the words were those that he heard Gregori Sparkov speak in a moonlit garden in Malta: ‘Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.'

Alex tossed and turned and muttered of Khanwai and white goats, of sharks and sacrifices and the stupidity of fools who would neither see nor hear, look nor listen. But towards sunset he became quieter and lay still at last, talking to Winter, his hoarse, exhausted voice barely a whisper.

Niaz slept, stretched on the ground beside the low
charpoy
on which Alex lay, his shoulder touching it so that he should wake to any urgent movement, while the aged crone crouched at the far side of the bed coaxing occasional strange herbal draughts between Alex's dry lips and down his parched throat, listening to the endless, incomprehensible murmuring, and aware, through some feminine instinct, that the Sahib spoke of a woman …

Twenty-four hours later the invalid woke to drugged sanity and a splitting headache. He could remember nothing of the past few weeks; his last coherent recollection being of a dâk-
ghari
overturning on the journey up from Calcutta. He supposed that he must have suffered some injury in the
accident and wondered what had happened to his fellow-passenger, the morose Major?

Niaz, discovering this gap in his memory, made no move to repair it, for instinct told him that once Alex remembered what it was that he had set out for, he would start off again long before it was safe for him to do so. But since there had been no driving urgency to reach Lunjore from Calcutta within a given time, as long as Alex imagined himself to be on that journey he might be persuaded to remain where he was and lie quiet. The beldame's drugs helped in this. Alex was drowsy and stupid and in pain, and he drank them obediently and slept; woke to a smell of dung-fires and sun-baked earth, the aromatic scents of masala and cardamons and all the familiar sounds and smells of an Indian village, grinned at Niaz and swallowed the infusion of herbs and hot milk that he was offered, and slept again.

It was not until the morning of the sixth day when, awaking to the first brilliant rays of the sun and the squeaking of a well-wheel, he remembered Delhi and all that had happened there. It had taken him some time to realize how many days had elapsed since he had ridden in pursuit of Winter and Carlyon, and when he had done so he had propped himself on his unwounded arm and cursed Niaz with a savage, concentrated fury for having let him lie there; for having given him drugs and for not having put him on his horse and taken him on to Lunjore or back to Delhi.

‘Had I done so, it had gone ill with thee,' said Niaz, unmoved.

‘Saddle the horses. We go now.'

‘To Delhi?'

‘To Lunjore.'

Niaz shook his head. ‘If we go today thou wilt be able to ride two
koss
. Perchance three, but no more. Wait here yet another day and I will ride to Delhi for Latif and our gear. I sent word to Fraser Sahib in Delhi, and also to Barton Sahib, that thou hadst met with an accident and would be delayed. There is no need for thee to ride to Delhi and back. I will go; and tomorrow, if I return in time, we will go on to Lunjore.'

‘We will go today, and within the hour,' said Alex.

Niaz observed him with a thoughtful eye and said in a non-committal voice: ‘I sent a man to get news at the ford. The river fell three days back, and the Lord-Sahib returned with the carriage and horses and his
nauker-log
. They go to Delhi.'

Alex looked at him for a long moment. Then he said: ‘Was the Lady-Sahib with him?'

‘No. But the man spoke with one of the syces, and it was said that she had met with friends upon the road and had gone forward with them to Lunjore.'

Alex lay back slowly on the string bed and stared up at the smoke-blackened ceiling above his head. He was silent for so long that at last Niaz cleared his throat and said carefully: ‘Do we ride today?'

‘No.' Alex closed his eyes and spoke without looking at him. ‘I will wait
here. Fetch the gear from Delhi.' He turned over on his right side with his face to the wall and did not speak again.

Niaz did not return for two days, and those days had given Alex plenty of time for thought. His shoulder still pained him and his head still ached, but the dizzy stupidity had gone. He would drink no more of the old woman's drugs and his brain was clear. There had been a moment when he had been tempted to return to Delhi and demand an account of his behaviour from Lord Carlyon, but five minutes' reflection had convinced him of the uselessness of such a proceeding. He had no shadow of right to take Carlyon to task, and Colonel Abuthnot could be counted upon to say all that was necessary upon that head. As for Winter, if she had indeed met with friends upon the road she would have reached Lunjore days ago, and there was nothing more that he could do about that either. She would have learned by now what sort of a man Conway Barton was, and would probably be staying with these friends until she could arrange to return to England.

Whether he wished her to return there was another matter, and one which he was not in the least desirous of facing. He had kept free of entanglements with women of his own class and kind, largely because of a conviction that work and women in such a country and climate, and under the conditions that prevailed in India, did not mix. One or the other of them were bound to suffer. Those wives who endured the heats and hazards of hot weather in the plains in order to be with their husbands grew old before their time, yet to go to the hills meant months of separation. And children were less a blessing than a continual and terrible anxiety. Hodson had lost his only and beloved child the previous year, and India was strewn with the graves of children.

One day, when conditions improved and such things as railways and good roads had linked up the provinces and states, it might be different. But in the present state of the country, Alex considered that marriage was something to be avoided, while if there should ever be a rising on the scale that he suspected was being plotted, then all women would not only be an anxiety but a deadly handicap. Remembering the capacity for cruelty, the indifference towards suffering, the fanatical hatreds and blood-feuds that obtained in the East, Alex imagined that there might well come a time when a man might wish with all his heart that there had never been such a thing as a woman; or that he himself had never known or loved one.

Winter … If he should see her again, would he try and stop her from returning to England, or would he let her go? He did not know. Barely more than a week ago he would have been thankful to see her go. But that had been before he had kissed her. He had kissed other women, lightly or passionately, and had forgotten them. But he could still feel that warm, rounded slenderness in his arms and the way in which, for a long moment, she had seemed to melt against him and become so much a part of him that her every nerve and pulse and breath and heartbeat had been as though it were his own.

Her mind could deceive her with the pretty pictures that it had made up and hugged for comfort during the past six years, and her tongue could talk of her love for Conway: but her body had betrayed her. If she had known anything of love - if her love for Conway Barton had gone deeper than a lonely child's romantic attachment and hero-worship - Alex's arms and his kisses would have been unendurable to her. But they had not been. For a long, long moment they had not been …

Behind his closed eyelids Alex saw the young heart-shaped face, and the dark eyes that were so unsure; one moment so brimful of hope and happiness, and the next so still and so wary - and sometimes so frightened. She had learned to school her face. To wear a dignity and calm and composure beyond her years. To hold her chin high and her slim figure erect, and to hide loneliness and hope and hurt. Perhaps in time she would learn to force her eyes to do these things too, unless happiness and security saved her from that sad necessity. But he, Alex, was the last person who could offer her either.

She had better go home, and soon. He would not see her again, and for all he knew she might already have left Lunjore. He should have refused point-blank to have anything to do with bringing her out to this country. Yet if he had quarrelled with the Commissioner … Once again he found himself back in the old, infuriating impasse.

To come into direct conflict with the Commissioner would have meant, without a shadow of doubt, that he would end up being sent to some nonessential post where he could do neither harm nor good, and to Alex, pupil and disciple of Sir Henry Lawrence, the necessity of doing to the best of his ability the work that lay to his hand, no matter how many obstacles officialdom placed in his way, took precedence over every other consideration.

Officialdom, in the person of Lord Dalhousie, had disagreed with Sir Henry's moderation and humanity, and removed him from the Punjab, leaving it to be settled by the harsher hand of his brother John who preferred force to persuasion. And Alex knew that the Commissioner of Lunjore, left to himself or assisted by someone possessing less understanding and sympathy with the problems of the district than he, Alex, did, would be capable of alienating the local talukdars and small-holders beyond any hope of counting upon their co-operation except under the threat of force.

His mind turned from the problem of Winter to the problems inherent in controlling and administering the one small piece of India whose welfare was his own responsibility: ‘Why in hell's name,' thought Alex with impatience, ‘haven't the Governor's Council the sense to send Lawrence to Oudh? If anyone could settle it without bitterness and injustice, he could. If he had it in charge for a year he could hold it quiet even if the rest of India rose all round it. Oudh is the plague-spot now, and Lunjore is right on its borders …'

In the evenings, when the cooking-fires were lit, the headman and some of the village elders, finding that he was sufficiently recovered to sit up and eat
the first solid meal he had eaten in days, came to squat by the door, smoke their hookahs and converse.

Their talk was a talk that Alex understood and had listened to on many occasions - the all-important problems of village life. Crops and harvesting, the drying up of a well, the damage done by deer and wild pig, the failure of certain crops owing to a poor monsoon, a dispute over a marriage dowry - the half of which had not been paid - and a vexed question of grazing rights. This was the India that he knew and loved, and which, as far as any European may understand the mind of India, he understood.

India, to Alex, was the land. The cultivator and the herdsman and the hundreds of thousands of small, humble village communities whose way of life had not changed in the slow centuries since Alexander of Macedonia and his warriors had poured through the passes to conquer the unknown land that had been old when Greece was young. He had little love for the cities, for to him they seemed to contain all that was worst in the East, and he could never ride through them without experiencing horror and pity and despair.