Shadow of the Moon (50 page)

Winter's hysterical assertion that she intended to leave Lunjore immediately was received with scandalized horror. Such a thing was impossible - unthinkable! Wives did not behave thus. They had their duties and their responsibilities, and to run away because they found a bridegroom not entirely to their taste was unheard of. She was married now, and that could not be undone. She had not even been forced into the marriage. It had been of her own choosing, and she could not now run away from it.

Hamida read Winter a lecture on the duties of wives. A wife must submit herself to her husband and try by meekness, diligence and obedience to win his regard. Let his defects be what they may, a wife should always look upon her husband as a god, lavishing upon him her attention and care and paying no heed to his displeasure. If her husband should threaten her, abuse her, even beat her unjustly, she must answer meekly and beg his forgiveness, instead of uttering loud outcries and running from his house.

Winter had listened numbly to Hamida's voice, but only one thing that Hamida had said made sense to her - she was married now, and that could not be undone. Hamida was right. But within a week Hamida had gone.

It was the plump painted woman whom Winter had found sitting beside Conway's bed on the morning of her arrival who was responsible: Yasmin, the woman who lived in the
bibi-gurh
behind the scarlet poinsettias and the feathery screen of pepper trees, with her sister and her own serving-women. Yasmin had recognized an enemy in Hamida and had taken steps to remove her. Conway had told his wife that she must dismiss the woman she had brought with her, as he had already made arrangements for an ayah, and an outsider would only cause trouble among the other servants.

Winter had refused flatly to part with Hamida, and Conway, to his wrath, had found that he could do nothing to alter her decision. He had lost his temper and had said things that had stripped the last rags of her illusions from
her. She had not given way, but the next day Hamida had been taken ill, and had whispered to Winter that her food had been poisoned. ‘Do not fear, child. I ate only a little, and tomorrow I shall be well again. But after this I must buy all my own food and cook it apart, letting no one near, so that they cannot try again.'

But Winter would not hear of it. She would not risk Hamida's life and she sent her away, sending gifts and messages by her to Ameera. And with Hamida went her only link with the outside world until the Gardener-Smiths should arrive in Lunjore. Perhaps they would be able to help her; lend her money so that she could return to England and to Ware. To Ware! She had never believed that she could ever desire to return there, but anything -
anything
- was better than life in this horrible house with this coarse, gross, brutal stranger who was her husband, and who had told her furiously to her face that he had married her only for her money.

Alex Randall had still not returned and Winter could only be thankful that she was spared the humiliation of facing him. Conway had mentioned casually that he had met with some accident that would delay his return and that it was curst careless of him. But Winter had not believed it. She had been sure that after the incident on Delhi wall Alex would prefer not to return to Lunjore, and was probably arranging to get himself transferred to some other post. She had no knowledge of officialdom and it seemed to her an obvious course of action. Alex had no illusions about his chief. He had spoken of him in unmeasured terms, and he had kissed his chief's betrothed and had been accused by her of jealousy and lying. No, he would not wish to return to Lunjore and she would not be seeing him again.

There remained Mrs Gardener-Smith, who had called upon her from mixed motives on the afternoon of their arrival. The motives appeared to be curiosity, a desire to impart all the news of Lottie Abuthnot's wedding and to lose no time in making the acquaintance of so senior an official as the Commissioner, coupled with a wish to express disapproval of Winter's unmaidenly conduct.

Mrs Gardener-Smith was most affable to Mr Barton, and Mr Barton, much taken by the looks of her daughter Delia, who was in every way exactly his idea of a handsome young woman, had set himself out to be pleasant. Mrs Gardener-Smith was favourably impressed by his manner and surprised to see that his bride was not in looks. The girl appeared to have aged ten years. The drawn pallor of her face was noticeable even in the shaded drawing-room where the blinds were drawn against the sun, and there were dark shadows beneath her eyes that made them look too large for her face. She was, however, perfectly composed and much interested to hear of Lottie's wedding. She had asked permission to call upon Mrs Gardener-Smith on the following day, and had arrived at eleven o'clock. But the interview that had followed had been painful to both.

Mrs Gardener-Smith's views on young wives and their duties towards
husbands - especially husbands as senior and affable as the Commissioner of Lunjore - appeared to be much the same as Hamida's. She had not only been unsympathetic, she had been scandalized. Of course all men drank! and on occasions drank too much and behaved accordingly. But ladies did not mention such things. They looked the other way. As for the suggestion that she should assist Winter to leave her husband, she would have nothing whatever to do with such a preposterous proposal. Such a course could only involve her in unpleasantness with the Commissioner, and on those grounds alone she would not think of it. But even if Winter
should
be mad enough to run away, she would not get far, since the law would be on Mr Barton's side and could force her to return. Mrs Gardener-Smith had pronounced herself shocked that dear Winter should be so lacking in restraint, and so lost to all sense of responsibility towards her husband and to society, as to even think of such a thing! She must remember that she was no longer a heedless girl but a married woman, and marriage entailed responsibilities …

Winter had driven away down the dusty, shadow-barred roads of the cantonment with her last hope gone. Mrs Gardener-Smith had been right, as Hamida had been right. She had married Conway and she could not run away; because there was nowhere to run to, and because however far she ran it would not be far enough, for the law would send her back to her lawful husband. She had indeed made her bed and now she must lie on it.

Returning wearily to the big white house that was now her home she had not thought it possible to experience more humiliation or more despair. Until on the evening of that same day she had opened the door into the drawing-room and had seen Alex Randall, and known that she was wrong.

In the slow days and weeks that followed Winter had seen Alex only rarely and never to speak to. He had not left Lunjore, and she who had once - how long ago it seemed! - meant to influence Conway to send him away, had grown to be almost glad of it. The fact that he was here, even if she did not speak to him or see him, was curiously comforting; the one strong link in a rotted and rusty chain. If ever life and living became more than she could endure, there was Alex. He at least would not refuse to help her. He knew Conway.

Alex spent a large part of his time in the outlying areas of the district, and when he was not on tour he avoided entering the living-rooms of the Residency. But he was often in the Commissioner's office and Winter would hear the murmur of his level voice that always seemed to her, when he was addressing her husband, to hold something of the restraint of an adult explaining a problem patiently and tactfully to a spoilt, backward and fractious child. She was obscurely aware that Alex rode his temper on a tight rein, and often wondered why he should trouble to do so, for the truth of Mrs Cottar's flippant remark that Captain Randall did the work while Mr Commissioner Barton took the credit was soon patently obvious.

Conway did little work and was content to leave the greater part of his duties in Alex's hands. He signed papers that Alex laid before him, and agreed to decisions that Alex had made, imagining, from the way in which they were presented to him, that the decisions were his own. He had not, after all, sent in his resignation, for rumour had it that the Governor-General was contemplating an extensive tour, which would include Lunjore, in the following year, and the Commissioner scented a possible knighthood. The prospect of being able to retire not only as a rich man but as ‘Sir Conway' appealed strongly to his vanity, and he decided to postpone his resignation for a year; and also to make that year as pleasant as possible. He ceased to take even a casual interest in the affairs of Lunjore, and Alex's work was greatly simplified thereby, though it meant that he spent more time in Lunjore itself and less out in the district.

Secure now in the possession of large wealth, the Commissioner entertained lavishly and the Residency was always full of guests. He ordered new furniture and furnishings from Calcutta so that his house should be fit to entertain the Governor-General and his Staff in, and talked of building a new wing. He was proud of his wife's looks and poise, and it pleased him that her dresses and jewels and her youthful dignity made an impression on his guests. But he had early tired of her as a woman. She had never again screamed and wept and fought him, but the passive, rigid disgust with which she had endured his subsequent embraces had soon robbed them of any pleasure, and he had returned to the coarser and more co-operative Yasmin for his entertainment.

There had been a brief period, while his interest in his wife had lasted, when Winter too had eaten food that made her unaccountably ill, although the Commissioner appeared to suffer no ill-effects. And she had remembered Hamida and been frightened. But who in the house would want to get rid of her? Hamida had been different, for she had been a rival servant and her presence would have deprived the woman whom Conway had employed to look after his wife of profitable employment. No, it could not have been poison! She was allowing her imagination to run away with her.

Her illness had kept Conway out of her room for several days, and when she had recovered she had been careful to eat only from those dishes that Conway must also eat from. She had despised herself for doing so, but at least she had not been taken ill again - and Conway had returned to her bed.

Two days later she had had a narrow escape from a more unpleasant death. She had been about to take a bath in the small bathroom that led out of her dressing-room. It was in the oldest part of the house, a room with walls three feet thick and a vaulted stone ceiling which made the smallest sound echo eerily. The bath, a tin affair that was filled from buckets, stood in a shallow depression with a raised brick rim from which a sluice ran out through the thickness of the wall. At night the room was lit by a single oil-lamp that stood on a wooden bracket by the door, and on this occasion the lamp had been
burning unevenly, blackening the glass. Winter had picked it up to adjust the wick, and the action had saved her, for she would never have seen the cobra whose raised head swung two feet above its coils until it was too late. But the movement of the lamp threw its menacing shadow, enormously exaggerated, on the wall behind the bath.

The slow sway of that shadow caught her eye, and she stared at it for a moment in bewilderment before she saw the thing that threw it - the slim, gleaming terror with its flickering tongue and spread, speckled hood that reared up beside the bath. She had not screamed, but her hand had moved involuntarily and the wick that she had been turning down had flared and gone out, leaving her in the black darkness with the hissing, angry snake. She had backed away, groping for the door, and after what had seemed an eternity she had found it, and turning the handle, stumbled into the dressing-room.

The cobra had been killed, but there had been no satisfactory explanation as to how it had got into the bathroom. It must have come through the sluice that took off the bath water, said Conway. But that was hardly possible, since the high verandah that surrounded the house raised the floor level of the rooms over three feet above the ground in the front and nearer five at the back, where the ground fell away in a slight gradient. In addition to which the verandah did not extend further than one wall of the bathroom. The other two walls, together with one wall of the dressing-room, were blank and windowless and backed onto a shallow gutter and open ground where a fig tree flourished luxuriantly, nourished by the bath water. The exit of the sluice jutted out in a stone lip from which the water fell clear of the wall into the gutter, and no snake could have come that way unless it had received assistance. It might, of course, have come up the steps of the bathroom verandah on the opposite side and entered by the doorway; though that seemed even more unlikely.

Winter was more shaken than she would have admitted. But there had been no more such incidents, and it did not occur to her that the fact that Conway had lost interest in her and had taken to sleeping in his own room again could have had anything to do with this.

27

Mr Barton did not allow the fact that he was now married to alter his way of life to any great extent, and his more raffish friends were frequent visitors at the Residency. Mrs Cottar, acidly witty, and Mrs Wilkinson, plump, pouting and feline, were often to be seen there, with or without their husbands, and the Tuesday parties of which Mrs Cottar had spoken were not discontinued. Winter played hostess at any of the Commissioner's parties that might be considered official entertaining, but she had refused to preside at the long sessions of gambling and drinking that constituted these particular entertainments, and on Tuesdays she would retire early to bed with the plea of a headache.

Conway had attempted to take her to task on this score and to insist on her remaining, on the grounds that her early retirement was an insult to his guests. But here he had found, as he had found over the question of Hamida, that his young wife was not to be browbeaten. She would perform the duties of the Commissioner's wife to the best of her ability, but these duties did not include lending her countenance to such questionable and noisy entertainments as the Tuesday parties.

She made no friends among the British community in Lunjore, and she did not like the Residency servants; in particular her ayah, Johara, the sister of the woman in the
bibi-gurh
who, so Conway had informed her - his eyes sliding away from hers - was the wife of his butler, Iman Bux, whom he had permitted to occupy the quarter. But she was given no opportunity to dismiss them. The capacity for gaiety and warmth and happiness that had shown itself, although shyly, on the long voyage from England, and the laughter that Ameera had released, had been cut off like flowers in a black frost, and Lunjore society found young Mrs Barton a cold little thing.

Mrs Gardener-Smith did indeed claim that her daughter Delia was Mrs Barton's greatest friend, and Delia was often to be met with at the Residency. But if the truth were known she came there more on Colonel Moulson's account than Winter's. Winter had been surprised and disconcerted to find that Delia was becoming one of the ‘Tuesday Crowd' at the Residency, for she had not thought that Mrs Gardener-Smith would permit it, and she was sure that Colonel Gardener-Smith–a silent, elderly, earnest man, wrapped up in his beloved Regiment - would not wish his daughter to attend such affairs.

Winter liked Colonel Gardener-Smith. He reminded her a little of her Great-Uncle Ashby, whose bookish tastes had insulated him from real life. Colonel Gardener-Smith's narrow absorption in his Regiment and its welfare gave him much the same immunity from outside interests.

The Colonel had lately succeeded in putting into practice a long-cherished scheme for improving the lot of his sepoys' families: the opening of a school for their children, run on European lines, and a medical centre for both parents and children. He had hoped that his wife and daughter would interest themselves in these admirable ventures, but Mrs Gardener-Smith and Delia had displayed nothing but dismay at such an idea, and the scheme itself was proving a disappointment. Colonel Gardener-Smith had lately discovered that his philanthropic venture was regarded by his sepoys as a subtle method of destroying their caste, and he had no hesitation in laying the blame for this attitude at the door of Colonel Packer, the commanding officer of the 105th Bengal Infantry Regiment stationed at Lunjore.

Colonel Packer, a bigoted Christian, placed his duty towards his God above that of his duty as an army officer. An admirable attitude with which no one could quarrel, save on the score that as his interpretation of these duties conflicted, it would have been wiser for him to resign his command.

Colonel Packer's duty towards God impelled him to make every effort to spread the Gospel to the heathen, and he was at present engaged in an earnest attempt to convert his entire Regiment to Christianity: a project that Colonel Gardener-Smith, together with almost every other thinking British officer and every sepoy in Lunjore, regarded with hostility and dismay, and that had caused Captain Randall, in the name of the Commissioner of Lunjore, to send a strongly worded protest to the Commander-in-Chief, General Anson, suggesting that Colonel Packer should either be restrained from ‘spreading the Word' or instantly removed from his command.

Colonel Gardener-Smith refused to see that the suspicion with which his own schemes towards bettering the lot of his sepoys was regarded was anything more than a reflection of the alarm and dismay that Colonel Packer's assaults upon the religion of his men had produced among the native regiments stationed in Lunjore, and he did not abandon hope of popularizing both school and medical centre.

In these circumstances he had too much on his mind to pay overmuch attention to the social activities of his wife and daughter, and though he could not like Colonel Moulson, the man was, as far as he knew, a tolerably efficient commanding officer, a gentleman by birth and apparently possessed of adequate private means above his army pay. He could, therefore, see why Eugenia considered him eligible, but he had no fears that his daughter Delia would ever seriously consider marrying the fellow. She was far more likely, if he knew anything of young women, to fall in love with some penniless sprig of an ensign rather than with a man of Moulson's age!

In point of fact Colonel Gardener-Smith knew nothing of young women, least of all his daughter. Delia was not in the least in love with Colonel Moulson, but she was intrigued and flattered by his attentions and had every intention of marrying him. He had as yet made no declaration, but she was sure that given time and the opportunity he would do so. She intended to
give him both, and as he was most often to be found in the Commissioner's company, she developed a fondness for young Mrs Barton's society, and was often to be seen driving over to the Residency.

Winter had endeavoured to warn Delia's mama of the style of the Tuesday parties, but Mrs Gardener-Smith had been either genuinely or intentionally obtuse. She was persuaded, she said, that dear Delia could come to no harm at any party where Winter was her hostess. And after all, the dear child was young, and young people could not be expected to attend only formal parties with senior officials.

‘Colonel Moulson is not young,' said Winter. ‘And neither are Mr Cottar or Major Mottisham. You do not understand. You see I - I do not attend these parties myself, and I would prefer them not to be held in my house. But they were established before - before I married Mr Barton, and he wished to continue them.'

Mrs Gardener-Smith had smiled tolerantly, for an explanation for Winter's embarrassed disclosure had just occurred to her. The little bride was jealous of the attentions that Delia was receiving from the Commissioner and his friends! Quite understandable, since Delia, in Mrs Gardener-Smith's eyes, was by
far
the more beautiful of the two. The cards of invitation continued to go out from the Residency and Mrs Gardener-Smith continued to permit her daughter to attend the Tuesday-night parties. And Winter made no further attempt to interfere.

She had made one friend within the walls of the Residency. Zeb-un-Nissa, the nine-year-old grand-daughter of Akbar Khan, the gatekeeper. Nissa was a frail little creature whose enormous dark eyes had a curiously blind look as though they looked through people and not at them. She was reported to be subject to fits and to have second sight, and the servants were afraid of her.

She was a solitary child who spent much of her time among the roots of the big banyan tree near the Residency gate, watching the birds and squirrels, who appeared to have no fear of her and would feed from her hand and take grain from between her lips. Winter had noticed a flock of green parrots fluttering about the roots of the tree early one morning, and had gone out to see what had attracted them. She had stayed to talk to Nissa, and the two had become fast friends.

Winter had asked permission for the child to help in the house, with the idea of training her to be her personal servant in place of Johara, but the suggestion had not been well received, and she suspected that the main opposition came from Johara's sister, Yasmin. Nissa's mother, a frightened-looking, slatternly woman, had seemed only too pleased, and Akbar Khan had salaamed deeply and thanked the gracious Lady-sahib for her kind interest in his all too unworthy grand-daughter, but expressed regret that the child was not strong enough for the work. Nissa did not enter the house, but Winter spoke with her often in the garden, and they would wave to each other when Winter passed the banyan tree on her daily rides.

She became less actively unhappy as the weeks passed, and a dull resignation took the place of the raw wound in her heart. There was still India, and that alone, in the ruin of her dreams, had not betrayed her. She would ride out every evening and in the early morning before the sun rose, galloping across the plain and along the banks of the distant river, or riding through the dew-wet crops where the peafowl screamed at the dawn and skeins of wild geese honked overhead on their way to the jheels of Hazrat Bagh and Pari.

The glory of the sunrise over the limitless plains and the wide, winding river; the quiet beauty of the evenings when the sun sank with incredible swiftness, dyeing the river and the long silver sandbanks, the city and the plain and every tree and cane-brake to a warm, glowing apricot; the swift, opal twilight, and night unfolding like a peacock's tail, green and blue and violet, flecked with the last gold of day and spangled with stars - these were things that comforted Winter and held for her a never-failing enchantment, daily renewed.

The wide land, the wide river and the enormous sky were beautiful to her. The vastness soothed her. The sense of space - of the plains stretching away and away to the deserts of Bikaner, the blue waters of Cape Comorin and the jungles and valleys of Nepal; wrinkling up into the foothills, to rise in range after range to the white barrier of the Himalayas where the remote passes led into the unknown land of Tibet, into Persia and the Pamirs and the great plains and lakes and ranges of Central Asia - the Kara-Koram, the Hindu Kush, Tien Shan and Turkestan; Balkash and Baskal; the white wastes of Siberia and the yellow leagues of China. Here there was none of the sense of being shut in and enclosed behind high walls that she had sometimes experienced at Ware. The mile-wide rivers and the enormous mountain ranges seemed less of a barrier than the neat English hedges and the trout stream that had separated the paddocks from the park.

There was a fatalism too about the East that appealed to her, and the filth and squalor and cruelty that everywhere underlay the beauty did not in any way lessen her love for the land. The city was ugly and foetid and full of sights that were unbelievably horrible to Western eyes, and Winter's eyes did not miss them. But she loved the city too. The heaped colours of fruits and vegetables and grain in the bazaar. The rich smell of mustard oil and masala, of musk and spices and
ghee
. The shops of the potter and the silversmith. The stalls that sold glass bangles as fine and light as silk and as fragile as a dried leaf, in glittering, sparkling, burning colours - red and blue and gold and grass-green. The silk shops with their gay bales piled high in the shadows. The drifting, jostling crowds and the great, lazy Brahmini bulls, sacred to Shiva, who shouldered through the narrow streets taking toll of the baskets of the vegetable-sellers.

White women were seldom to be seen in the city, and on the rare occasions on which they went there they went in carriages and escorted by white men. But Winter would go with only Yusaf, the syce, and at first the crowds would
collect to giggle and stare and follow her, peering and whispering. But she went so often that they became used to her and to the fact that she spoke their language with an idiomatic fluency that they had rarely met with in others of the sahib-
log
. She came to have many friends and acquaintances in the city. Unexpected friends and strange acquaintances who would have horrified and disgusted her husband had he known of it. But then Conway took little interest in his wife's doings, and did not know or care where she went.