Shadow of the Moon (67 page)

Had anyone seen Ameera's boat stop at the water-steps? There were so many eyes in India. But Ameera had been right: now that the hot weather had set in this was the safest time of day. Safer than the night, when every tree and shrub and shadow could hide a pair of eyes. No, there was no one on the river terrace, and no one in the gardens or the park. Only herself and the peacock. It was absurd to feel afraid. And yet she was afraid.

Winter stood on the deserted terrace and looked out across the wide river and the wide land beyond, as her mother Sabrina had stood on an evening almost eighteen years ago: and was seized as Sabrina had been by a sudden horror of India. Of the savage, alien land that lay all about her, stretching away for hundreds of miles and yet hemming her in; of the dark, secretive, sideways-looking eyes and the tortuous, unreadable minds behind the bland, expressionless faces. Of Nila Ram, who had cut off his young wife's hands …

‘I must be careful,' thought Winter. ‘I must be very careful. Not for my sake, but for Ameera's.'

If only Alex were still here. She wondered if she could write to him, and then knew that she could not take the risk because she had no means of ensuring that her letter would not be read, and if she appeared to be in possession of dangerous information, Ameera would be suspected of having given it to her. She was not frightened for herself. Perhaps because she was too young to be able to visualize death in connection with herself, or perhaps because her life at present did not seem to contain much that made it worth living, But Ameera had so much to live for, and she was afraid for Ameera as she could never be afraid for herself.

‘I must be careful,' repeated Winter, speaking aloud to the empty sun-soaked spaces of the river terrace: ‘…
careful
' whispered the echo from the curved stone wall that bounded its far end.

She did nothing for three long days. Forcing herself to inactivity and her face to smiles, for fear that her actions or her expression should be watched by someone who might have had knowledge of Ameera's visit. She wrote no letters and paid no visits. She received and entertained her husband's guests, and gave no outward sign that might be interpreted as alarm or disquiet: feeling like a traitor to her own race because she did not run at once to Sir Henry with that vital information.

On the fourth day her chance came when she and her husband attended an evening party at the Residency. It was a very large party, and
shamianahs
had been erected on the lawns, and the trees hung with coloured lanterns. The band of one of the regiments stationed in the cantonments provided music while the guests, who numbered several hundred and included almost all the British residents and a large proportion of the nobility and gentry of Lucknow and its environs, moved about the gardens chattering, laughing, admiring the illuminations, partaking of a large variety of refreshments, and watching the performance of a troupe of jugglers.

Perhaps the most spectacular guest, and certainly the one who aroused most interest, was Dundu Pant, the Nana of Bithaur, who attended the party accompanied by an impressively large retinue.

The Nana was a man who cherished a grievance against the British, the Government having refused to recognize him as the legal heir or to allow him the pension granted to the Peishwa, Baje Rao, who having no son had adopted him under Hindu law. But he did not appear to have allowed his grievances to sour him. He was most friendly and affable towards the British guests, with several of whom he seemed to be on excellent terms, and Winter saw him in animated converse with Sir Henry Lawrence. He was a fat man, strangely dark-skinned for a Mahratta, and very splendidly dressed; and he wore a pair of large diamond earrings which flashed and glittered in the light of the coloured paper lanterns. Alex, had he been present, would not have recognized the earrings - the ones he had seen had been rubies - but he would have had no difficulty at all in recognizing the wearer.

The Chief Commissioner had been surrounded by a ring of guests wherever he moved, and it was clearly impossible to have any private conversation with him. But Winter had managed to speak with George Lawrence. She had asked him to show her the rose garden and had put her hand on his arm and walked away with him, talking with unusual animation. There were strollers in the rose garden too, but far fewer of them, so it was possible to speak here without being overheard.

‘I have something to tell you,' said Winter, her hand urgent on his arm. ‘It is Sir Henry I wished to speak to, but the people follow him about so, and as I do not wish to go apart with him, you must tell him.' She looked up
into her companion's face and said: ‘Please will you smile as though I were telling you something of no matter?' - and laughed herself as she spoke.

George Lawrence smiled an obedient and somewhat puzzled smile, and managed to retain it, though with some difficulty, through the next few minutes. He listened attentively while Winter walked beside him, smiling as she talked, and breaking off to admire the roses and the lanterns or comment on the music or the illumination, whenever any other guests passed within earshot. He found the resulting information a little confusing, but realized at least that young Mrs Barton was in deadly earnest, although he was inclined to treat her story with some reserve. There had been so many rumours of late, and this was just one more - and apparently one that had been brought by an over-excited Indian woman who by some curious twist of fate was first cousin to this girl who walked beside him. He was not inclined to take the information as much more than another straw that showed the way in which the wind was blowing, but he promised, nevertheless, to relay it to Sir Henry.

‘You must not tell it to him where you can be overheard,' begged Winter earnestly. ‘And he must tell no one who it came from. It is true - tell him that I am
sure
that it is true! Ameera risked her life to tell me, and I am risking hers by telling you. Tell him that.'

She looked up into his face and smiled as she spoke, but her eyes were wide and bright and full of a desperate urgency.

‘I will tell him,' promised George Lawrence. ‘But you must not allow yourself to become over-anxious, Mrs Barton. We hear many of these rumours. There has been a deal of dissatisfaction in Oudh, for the annexation was pressed through without sufficient thought, and the original policy was needlessly harsh. But Sir Henry is changing all that, and I feel sure that this cloud will blow away as others have done. You have not been out in India very long, I think; but when you have experienced some of our hot weather, you will notice that there are days when the clouds gather until the whole sky is covered with them, and it seems that it must rain. Yet they disperse without a drop falling. It will be the same with this you will find. It will pass.'

It will pass … It has passed
…

In cantonments and offices, in Residencies and British bungalows, in Government Houses and Council chambers and in the home of the Governor-General himself, wherever the British met to talk, those soothing words were spoken again and again. The brief flare-up at Berhampur in February and the uglier and more recent outbreak in Barrackpore had died down without leading to any further demonstrations, and men who had been smelling the wind uneasily relaxed again, and concurred with the popular conviction that the peak of the general unrest had passed, and that any serious danger (if
there had ever been any, which the majority were inclined to discount) was now over.

Winter received no further news of Ameera, but Lottie wrote from Delhi. Edward had been transferred there from Meerut on special duty, but they were not living in the cantonments, as they had been lent a delightful house inside the city, not far from the Kashmir Gate:

‘I fear Mama is a little disappointed that we would not reside with Papa and her,'
wrote Lottie,
‘but I see so little of Edward that I like to have him to myself when he is off duty. Sophie is away on a visit to friends in Cawnpore, and will be returning on the fifteenth of the next month. It is really not so very hot as yet, and I begin to think that reports as to the heat of the plains have been greatly exaggerated, although I am told that this is quite an exceptionally cool year, and many old hands say they have known nothing like it before. If it gets no worse I do not believe I shall be greatly incommoded. I wish you will come and stay with me. It would be so delightful to see you again. You must come next cold weather, and only think! I shall have a little Edward to show you then! I cannot bring myself to believe it. Mama sends you her love
…'

Winter read the letter and thought again of Ameera … and of George Lawrence. Which of them was right?

Lottie's news disturbed her, because she had thought that Lottie at least was safe. There were well over a thousand British soldiers in Meerut, forming the strongest European garrison in the North-Western Provinces, and surely any woman would be safe there? But Delhi—

She wrote to Lottie, urging her for the sake of the coming child to go to the hills and to take Sophie with her:

‘
You do not know how hot it can get in the plains, and it will be so bad for you at this time. You should think of the child. I expect to be going to the hills about the middle of May, and shall be so lonely there that if you will come and stay with me as my guests, and keep me company, you will be doing me a great kindness.'

She wrote also to Edward English and to Mrs Abuthnot, urging it upon them, and begging Mrs Abuthnot to accompany her daughters - they would all spend the hot months together in a bungalow among the pines and be cool and have pleasant times. But Lottie would not leave her Edward or Mrs Abuthnot her George. It was too kind of dear Winter, but they were sure that she would understand. Perhaps Sophie might pay her a visit later on?

Winter wrote again, and more urgently, but they were not to be persuaded. ‘Even if I told them all that Ameera had said, they would still not come,' thought Winter, ‘because they would not believe it. Or they would hope that it was not true, and soon they would make themselves believe that it could not be. There is nothing I can do.'

On the last day of her stay in Lucknow she went again to the river terrace in mid-afternoon. It was hotter now than it had been on the day when she had last seen Ameera, and even the wide pith hat she wore could not prevent
the sun from scorching her slim shoulders. The afternoon was as still and as breathless as that other afternoon had been. And as silent. Even the peacock had gone. There was only Winter, with her shadow black and foreshortened on the hot flagstones, and a little snake, sunning himself by the water-steps, who slid away with a dry rustle as she passed.

Conway had given a farewell party that last night. It had been a riotous affair that had lasted well into the small hours of the morning, and he had to be carried to the carriage in which they were to make the journey to Lunjore. He had expressly forbidden Winter to ride, saying that he had no desire to have her down with heat-stroke on the journey - nothing could be more inconvenient. But the sight of her husband's brandy-sodden and inanimate bulk being disposed in the carriage proved too much for her, and she had ordered Furiante to be saddled.

She looked back over her shoulder at the Casa de los Pavos Reales as she rode away. At the orange trees and the lemon groves, the pomegranates and the tree-shaded levels of the park that had changed so little with the long years. And thought, as Sabrina had thought: ‘Perhaps I shall never see it again.' But she did not think it with love and longing as Sabrina had done. The gracious, peaceful house did not mean to her what it had meant to Sabrina: it held no happiness and no memories. It was the Gulab Mahal that held those, but the Gulab Mahal was closed to her. It was still a
fata morgana
- a glimmering mirage. The moon out of reach.

The journey to Lunjore had been hot and tedious, and though the distance was not great they had taken four days to cover it, because the heat tired the horses. Conway had grumbled and cursed and complained, and solaced himself freely with brandy. The snows were melting in the ranges to the north and the river was higher than when they had crossed it coming to Lucknow. The bridge of boats rang hollowly to the clop of the horses' hooves, and jerked and creaked and swayed to the wheels of the carriage: and then they were over, and Oudh was behind them.

35

It was evening, and the last day of April, when the Commissioner and his wife drove once more through the massive gateway of the Lunjore Residency, and barely two hours later they were dining with the same raffish company that had celebrated the Commissioner's wedding.

They were all there, with the exception of Mr Josh Cottar who had departed to Calcutta on a business trip: Lou Cottar, Chrissie and Edgar Wilkinson, Colonel Moulson, Major Mottisham and half a dozen others. ‘Wrote ahead and invited 'em,' said Conway. ‘Didn't think that we'd take that extra day, but what's the odds? Nothin' like havin' a celebration to welcome us home, eh?'

‘I assure you the place has been like a morgue or a Quakers' Meeting while you have been away,' said Lou Cottar. ‘I have had such a fit of the bore that I have yawned two more lines into my face, and heaven knows that it has enough already. I get asked to so few amusing parties when you are away, Con, for the majority of your female parishioners do not consider me quite respectable. Odd, is it not? Or else they do not trust their husbands! Though I cannot think why they should not, when their husbands are almost without exception dull enough to send one into a decline!'

‘Who are the exceptions, Lou?' inquired the Commissioner with a chuckle. ‘Am I one?'

Mrs Cottar raised her brows at him. ‘Not any longer. But you do at least provide the only tolerably amusing parties in Lunjore.'

‘It wasn't only my parties you found amusing once,' said the Commissioner, reaching out to pat her arm. ‘Eh, Lou?'

‘Ah, but that was at least five years ago. Or was it more? You were a heavy, handsome brute in those days, and I believe I actually lost almost two nights' sleep over you once.'

‘Shall I see if I can make you lose two more?'

‘You couldn't do it. You're gross, Con. You're fat and bald and you drink a deal too much, and if it wasn't for your parties I'd be tempted to drop you. But you're a habit with me and I'm too idle to break it.'

The Commissioner glowered at her. ‘You've got the most poisonous tongue of any woman I know, Lou. By God, I don't know why I put up with you!'

‘Because I'm a habit with you, and you've never been able to break yourself of bad habits,' said Mrs Cottar. She laughed her low, throaty laugh and crossing to the piano, threw up the lid and began to sing a music-hall song to her own accompaniment for the amusement of the company:

‘Nothing has changed,' thought Winter. ‘It is just the same. It's as though I had never been away to Lucknow …'

But that was not true. She herself had changed. The noisy, raffish party and the sight of her husband with his arm about Chrissie Wilkinson's waist no longer had any power to hurt or disgust her. A night in the garden of the Lucknow Residency and an afternoon on the river terrace of the House of the Peacocks had changed all that, for now she too could feel the wind and hear the thunder.

If Ameera was right, all these people here might die within a few months - perhaps in less. The last day of May, Ameera had said - ‘and after that there will be no safety anywhere'. It was the first of May tomorrow. In English villages they would be going to bed early so as to be up with the dawn to pick flowers with which May Queens would be crowned and garlanded on countless village greens. The hedges and the orchards would be bright with blossom, and there would be cowslips and primroses in the woods and fields, and beribboned maypoles on the greens. May Day. Thirty days more.
Was
Ameera right? - or was George Lawrence?
It will pass … it will pass … It has passed
. Had it?

Winter did not ride the following morning. The horses needed rest, and she slept late, but when she had breakfasted she wrote to Alex.

It was a short letter and the first she had ever written to him. She gave it to a servant to deliver, but the man said that Randall Sahib was in camp among the outlying villages. ‘Then someone must take it to him,' said Winter. ‘Send Yusaf to me.' The man looked slantingly at her under lowered lids and went away to summon the syce. But the look had frightened Winter.

Quite suddenly, in that brief moment, the full meaning of what a major insurrection in this country would entail came home to her. She had never really visualized it in its entirety before. She had, indeed, imagined Ameera being killed or maimed as a punishment for having warned her, and she had visualized Lottie and kind Mrs Abuthnot and hero-worshipping Sophie being cut down by a howling mob. But these had been isolated pictures, and behind them had been a whispering voice that said: ‘
We hear many of these rumours … it will pass
.' But now, standing in the big, cool drawing-room of her husband's house, she thought for the first time of exactly what such a rising would mean. Of the handful of white people who held this vast country, and the dark, teeming millions who surrounded them and who lived cheek by jowl with them, watching their every movement and listening to their every word - and waiting. There was little privacy to be had in a land where a dozen servants were always within call, and where a punkah-coolie,
a
chupprassi
, or a
dazi
sitting cross-legged before a pile of sewing, were as natural a part of every verandah as the matting on the floor.

She had trusted the servants in her father's house at Lucknow, but she had still been careful for fear that they might be questioned by others. And if she had been careful there, she must be doubly careful here. She tore up the letter that she had written to Alex and burnt the pieces, and wrote another. It was not that she did not trust Yusaf, who was Alex's own servant, but she preferred to take no chances. She handed the letter to him, telling him in a tone that was sufficiently clear to carry to the punkah-coolie and a loitering gardener who was cutting off the dead heads of the canna lilies in a flowerbed below the verandah, that a friend of the Captain Sahib's whom she had met in Lucknow wished to come over for some
shikar
(shooting), and as the Sahib was in camp he must be informed in case he wished to return.

Yusaf had ridden with the letter, and Alex had read it late that evening by the light of a flaring oil-lamp. There had been only two lines, but he had read them and re-read them and then folded the paper carefully and put it into the inner pocket of his coat. He whistled softly and Niaz materialized out of the darkness. ‘We return tomorrow,' said Alex.

Niaz raised his eyebrows, but made no other comment on the unexpected order beyond inquiring when they were to start.

‘
Panch baji
(five o'clock). That should do. No it won't—' Alex was speaking in English for the first time in over two weeks and was unconscious of it. ‘There is that business of Puran Chand's. I can't leave that in the air. The rest can slide …'

When he was on tour in the district Alex seldom had occasion to speak his own tongue, and was apt to find himself thinking and even dreaming in Hindustani. He reverted to it now: ‘Tell the Kotwal that I will see him at sunrise. There is still some work here that cannot wait. We will leave as soon as it is finished. Where is Yusaf?'

‘Huzoor?' A second shadow moved out of the darkness and saluted.

‘Tell the Memsahib that I return tomorrow or the next day.'

Yusaf saluted again and slipped back into the darkness, and Alex returned to his tent and blew out the light that was attracting too many creeping and flying things to their doom.

Niaz had put up the camp-bed in the open, and lying on it later that night Alex stared up through the mosquito net at the blaze of stars, and saw a comet cross the heavens from east to west, not with the rush of a falling star, but slowly, dragging a long train of glowing light that appeared red rather than white or golden, and taking a full ten minutes to traverse the spangled ceiling of the sky. From a dozen yards to his left he heard Niaz move, and looking in his direction saw the silhouette of his lifted head and knew that he had seen it too.

‘They will say that too is a sign - or an omen,' thought Alex, ‘and I am not sure that one can blame them for it.'

A red star, smearing a trail of blood from the east to the west. Were there such things as signs and wonders in the sky? A star had once brought Wise Men out of the East to search for that Sword that had come into the world so many centuries ago and had not yet been sheathed. That the heavens foretold the future was perhaps the oldest superstition in the world, and men had watched the skies for three thousand years and more, believing that their fate could be read there. In the hot weather many men slept out in the open, in roadways and on roof-tops and at the doors of their huts. How many of them would have seen the red comet, and how many - or how few? - would not regard it as a sign from heaven? An evil sign: not because of its colour, for red is worn in the East for rejoicing, but because the times and men's thoughts were evil.

A hundred yards away a pariah dog thrust its gaunt nose at the sky and howled long and very mournfully, and the howl was taken up and repeated again and again in a barking, wailing chorus by all the dogs of the near-by village, as though they bayed the moon. Beyond the tank and the mango-tope where Alex's camp was pitched, a light pricked the darkness; and another and another; and presently a conch brayed in the temple and a tom-tom beat. ‘They have seen it,' thought Alex. ‘This is how legends are born.'

He heard Niaz mutter something in an undertone. It appeared to be uncomplimentary to the villagers. The red-tailed comet sank behind the mango trees, its reflection lingering for a moment longer in the dark waters of the tank, and as the glow faded from the sky the dogs stopped howling as though at an order. But the conch brayed and the tom-toms beat for hour after hour, and Alex heard them in his sleep, mingling with his uneasy dreams.

He did not start for Lunjore until early next afternoon when, leaving the servants to break camp and follow, he and Niaz rode hard through the heat of the day and into the dusty sunset and the brief green dusk. As the sun sank below the horizon they had stopped in order to eat and drink, for the Mohammedan fast of Ramadan had begun with the new moon, and while it lasted Niaz and all other followers of the Prophet might not eat or drink between sunrise and sunset. Alex too kept the fast when he was away from the cantonments and out among the villages, for he had found it to be good training, and there were times when he needed to keep it.

They had drawn rein at the edge of a tank, and as they dismounted a lone pigeon with a hawk on its tail flew low above their heads, twisting and turning in its flight, and flumped heavily into a large
peepul
tree on the far side of the tank. A flock of crows rose up from the
peepul
, cawing hoarsely, and the hawk flew off. Presently the pigeon, undisturbed by the narrowness of its escape, fluttered down onto a half-submerged slab of stone at the edge of the green scum-covered water to drink. But almost instantly it rose again with a noisy, startled flap of wings, as though something had frightened it,
and they saw it circle upwards and then turn and make for the west where the glow of the setting sun was turning the dust veils to gold.

Alex looked across the tank with narrowed eyes, trying to see what it was that had startled the bird, and became aware that there was a man seated among the roots of the
peepul
tree. A naked ash-smeared sadhu who sat so still that he might almost have been part of the tree. The squirrels played about him, running casually to and fro, and a dozen birds who were making preparations to roost quarrelled and twittered within reach of his hand, as completely undisturbed by his presence as the crows and the parrots who perched in the boughs over his head. He had made no movement: Alex was sure of that, because had he done so he would have alarmed the other wild creatures about him. Yet the pigeon had been frightened. It was a trivial incident, but it occupied Alex's mind to the exclusion of much else for the remainder of the ride.