Shadow of the Moon (70 page)

‘I was a fool not to have sent in m' papers before,' grumbled the Commissioner, mopping at the sweat that trickled down his thick neck. ‘I don't believe that dam' man Canning is coming on tour this year after all. Pretty fool I shall look if he don't - stewing through another hot weather for nothing! Should have gone a month ago. No - take that damned coffee away and give me a cold drink. Hair of the dog!'

He mixed champagne and brandy and started the day with a ‘Raja's peg'.

Alex sat at his desk in the room that he used as an office, and listened with only half his attention to the droning voice of the head clerk who was reading out a lengthy and involved petition. ‘We have only one chance,' thought Alex, ‘and that is that the ringleaders will not be able to hold 'em until the day they have set. They're too worked up. Some ass will put his foot in it somewhere, and there will be a premature explosion which will sound the alarm. But if it does go off on time, and all over India, they can write our obituaries now …'

In far-away Calcutta a senior Member of the Supreme Council finished reading Sir Henry Lawrence's telegraphed report on the mutinous behaviour of the Oudh Irregulars, and picked up his pen. ‘
The sooner this epidemic of mutiny is put a stop to, the better
,' wrote the Member of the Supreme Council. ‘
Mild measures won't do. A severe example is needed … I am convinced that timely severity will be leniency in the long run
…'

In a large bungalow in the Cantonment of Meerut, forty miles to the north-east of Delhi, Colonel Carmichael Smyth, the commanding officer of the 3rd Light Cavalry, sat at breakfast. ‘The sentence was entirely just!' said
Colonel Smyth. The Colonel was a man whose views were identical with those expressed by the senior Member of Council, and hurrying back from leave to set an example, he had ordered that fifteen picked men from each troop were to parade on the following morning to learn to use the new cartridges. ‘I'm not standing any dam' silly nonsense from
my
men!' said Colonel Smyth.

The ninety men were duly paraded - and eighty-five of them had refused to handle the caste-breaking cartridges. They were immediately tried by court-martial and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, and a parade of all troops had been ordered by the aged divisional commander, Major-General Hewitt, to watch the sentence put into execution. For hour after hour, in the broiling sun on the Meerut parade-ground, the regiments stood in stony-faced silence to watch eighty-five picked men of a picked regiment stripped of their uniforms and fettered one by one with the iron fetters that they would drag with them through ten dreary years of captivity; and when at long last the ordeal was over, the terrible, clanking file of manacled men were marched away in the bright merciless sunlight, calling and crying to their comrades: ‘Is this justice? Because we will not lose our caste so that none of our own will speak with us or eat with us, must we suffer this fate? Is there no justice? Help us, brothers! Help us!'

‘Entirely just!' snapped Colonel Smyth, helping himself to scrambled eggs. ‘Harsh? Nonsense! These mutinous fools need a sharp lesson. This will serve to stop the rot.'

‘Wait, brothers! Wait … wait. Have patience. Remember the auspicious day! It is too soon!' urged the agents of Ahmed Ullah the Maulvi of Faizabad; of Dundu Pant the Nana of Bithaur; of Kishan Prasad …

‘Art thou of the
rissala
?' shrilled a harpy in the Street-of-the-Harlots in Meerut city to a group of prospective clients as night fell. ‘The 3rd
Rissala
, sayest thou? Then thou canst not enter here. Out - out! We do not lie with cowards! Where are thy comrades who eat dirt and walk in chains?
They
were men! But thou—! Chicken-hearts - children - cowards all!
Pah
!' She spat in derision, and a chorus of jeering painted faces applauded her from a dozen latticed windows and balconies, screaming like peacocks: ‘Out! Out! - we lie with no cowards! If ye indeed be men and not the boneless babes we take you for, release your brothers from bondage!'

Their taunts and jeers pursued the men of the 3rd Cavalry through the hot, crowded, snarling bazaars of Meerut city, driving them from rage to a murderous frenzy.

Winter dipped her pen once more into the standish and added a date below the address that she had already written at the top of the blank sheet of letter-paper: ‘
Sunday, May 10th 1857. Dear Lottie
…'

37

The night was hot and very still. So still that every small sound of all the small sounds that go to make up silence separated itself from its fellows, and emphasized that stillness. The cheep of a musk-rat; the dry scrape of a scorpion crawling up the wall; the flitter of a bat's wings in the dark verandah; the drone of the mosquitoes and, from very far away, the echo of a jackal-pack which howled on the plains beyond the river.

Winter lay and listened to those sounds, and could not sleep. Once she thought that she heard whispering voices, and remembering the night that she had listened in the bathroom, she slipped noiselessly out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom door. But there were no voices. Only the dry whisper of dead and dying
neem
leaves that drifted down through the hot, windless air and came to rest on the parched stone of the roof or the dry, brittle grass.

‘There are no tom-toms in the city tonight,' thought Winter, listening by her open window. ‘And no conches. This is the first night for almost ten nights that I have not heard them. Perhaps it is the heat. It has not been really hot until now—'

Somewhere in the dark recesses of the house a clock struck one. Three more hours before she could dress and go out to ride by the river. Would it be cooler by the river? It was so hot here, and so airless. Because the noise of the flapping punkah had irritated her she had sent the punkah-coolie away, saying that she could sleep better without it. But when he had gone she wished that she could call him back, for the sweltering, breathless stillness that had closed down upon the room with the cessation of the slow sway of the punkah had been worse than the nerve-racking monotony of that creak and flap.

‘I will go up to the roof,' she thought, turning restlessly away from the window. ‘It will be cooler up there.' She groped for her slippers in the darkness, shook them mechanically for fear they harboured centipedes or scorpions, donned them, and slipped her arms into the wide sleeves of the muslin wrap that lay at the foot of her bed. There was a dim light burning in the hall, and a slow regular snuffle and snore came from a corpse-like figure who lay rolled in a thin cotton
chuddah
near the front door. Winter walked softly past it, and lifting the
chik
went down the verandah and up the steep flight of stone steps to the first level of the flat-topped roof.

It was certainly cooler here, but the brickwork and the stone were still warm to the touch, and the wall supporting the second and higher-level roof gave off waves of stored heat. She made a half-circuit of the lower level and
came to where six stone steps led up to the larger area that covered the high main rooms of the Residency.

A shadow moved on the stonework and she looked up, startled, to see a small white figure standing above her by the narrow parapet that surrounded the upper roof. It was Zeb-un-Nissa.

Winter called up to her in a whisper, but the child did not answer or make any movement to show that she had heard. She was staring out across the garden and the distant bulk of the Residency gateway towards the south-west, and her face and body looked curiously rigid, as though she were straining to catch some far-away and almost inaudible sound.

‘I believe she's sleep-walking,' thought Winter, suddenly anxious. She waited for a moment or two, looking up at the child's tense face, and then went up the steps very softly so as not to frighten her, for she had heard that it was harmful to waken a sleep-walker too suddenly. Zeb-un-Nissa did not move. Her eyes were wide and fixed, and standing beside her Winter could see that her small face was drawn with fear. She laid a gentle hand on the child's thin arm and spoke softly: ‘Nissa—'

Zeb-un-Nissa did not start or turn, but she moved her head a little and looked at Winter as though she were perfectly aware of her; her eyes full of horror. ‘Hark!' she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Dost thou not hear them?' She began to shiver, and Winter put an arm about the frail little shoulders and drew the child against her: ‘What is it,
piara
? (darling) What is there to hear?'

The child pulled herself free and turned again to the parapet, clutching at the stone with small claw-like hands and listening to some sound that Winter could not hear.

‘It is the mem-
log
- the memsahibs. They are screaming. Canst thou not hear them scream? Surely thou canst hear them - there be children also … Listen! -
Listen
! They are killing the mem-
log
. Thou canst hear the sword cuts … and the flames. There! that was a child! - hark to its mother shriek!
Ai
!
Ai
!—' She wailed aloud and put her hands over her ears, cowering down below the parapet and weeping. ‘I cannot bear to hear them scream! … They are killing the mem-
log
… they are killing the mem-
log
!'

Winter dropped to her knees and gathered the small wailing figure into her arms. ‘Nissa - Nissa! There is no one screaming. It is all quiet. Listen - there is no sound. It is only a dream,
piara
. Only a bad dream. There is no killing—'

She had heard no sound behind her, but a shadow fell across them, black in the moonlight, and she turned swiftly, her heart in her mouth, to see Akbar Khan, the gatekeeper, salaaming deferentially behind her. His face was dark against the moon and the night sky, but Winter could see the gleam of his teeth and the glitter of his eyes, and though her first momentary panic had died at sight of him, an odd flicker of fear went through her, making her pull the child closer.

‘Her mother missed the unworthy one from her bed,' said Akbar Khan softly. ‘She has been sick with a fever these few days past and she must have left her bed while her mother slept. I am sorry that the child should have troubled the Lady-sahib.'

‘She has not troubled me,' said Winter. ‘Let her be. She can sleep in my room for what is left of the night.'

‘Nay, nay!' said Akbar Khan, shocked. ‘The Lady-sahib is the fount of all goodness, but it would not be seemly. And her mother is anxious, and sent me in search of her.'

Winter felt the frail body in her arms stiffen and writhe and become rigid, and then quite slowly it relaxed. Nissa sighed as her head nestled down against the shoulder that supported it, and looking down at the small face and feeling the shallow, even breathing, Winter realized that she had fallen asleep.

Akbar Khan reached down and took the child from her. ‘It was a fit,' he said placidly. ‘She has always been a sickly child, and I fear that the time of her release is near. Her mother will grieve; but what is written is written.' He cradled the thin body of his grandchild comfortably in his arms and said: ‘Her mother will be very honoured that the gracious Lady-sahib troubled herself with the child. Shall I call a servant to light the Lady-sahib back to her room?'

‘No,' said Winter curtly. ‘I will remain here. Tell Zeb-un-Nissa's mother that I will come tomorrow to see how the child fares.'

‘The Lady-sahib is my father and my mother,' murmured Akbar Khan politely, and went away, his bare feet making no sound on the warm stone.

Winter watched him go and she shivered in the hot night air; a shiver that was not caused by cold but by uneasiness and foreboding. Akbar Khan had always been courteous and placid, and his greeting to her whenever she passed through the gateway contained no trace of the veiled insolence that she had sometimes detected in the manner of Conway's other servants. But tonight there had been something in his manner that frightened her. No - not in his manner; there had been nothing wrong in that. In what then? In the fact that he himself had for some reason been afraid? In the glitter of the eyes in that shadowed, bearded face as they had stared down at the wailing, muttering figure of his little grand-daughter? No, she was being foolishly imaginative. But he had told a lie when he had said that Nissa had been sick for some days. That at least was not true, for she had seen Nissa daily at dawn.

What did the child think that she had heard? It was a dream, of course. She had been dreaming. And yet she had not behaved as Winter imagined that a sleep-walker would do. She had appeared to be aware of Winter, and awake; caught up in horror, but awake.

The servants said that Akbar Khan's little grand-daughter had second sight, and they were afraid of her. And there had been that day when she had said - or seemed to say - that Alex would come to no harm; and he had come to
no harm. But then she could not have known that he was in any danger. It had been a coincidence. ‘They are killing the mem-
log
, surely thou canst hear them scream?' Surely, in this waiting stillness, the sound of a scream would carry from the cantonments beyond the trees? But there was no scream - no sound. Only silence.

Almost against her will Winter went to lean on the parapet as Nissa had done, and strained her ears to listen. But she could hear no sound in the silence; not even a jackal's wail or the fall of a dead leaf. ‘She was dreaming!' said Winter aloud and firmly. But she shivered again, and drawing her thin beruffled wrap tighter about her, she left the roof and returned to the hot, dark, silent rooms and her hot, tumbled bed.

Alex heard her running along the verandah of his bungalow at eleven o'clock on the following morning, and knew who it was even before the startled
chupprassi
lifted the
chik
and she was standing before him, tense and white-faced, her hands clutching at the edge of his desk.

There were five other men in the office, but she appeared to be oblivious of them. Alex stood up swiftly and dismissed them with a brief word, and they melted out into the sunlight. Winter did not see them go. She said in a hard, breathless voice that she fought to control: ‘Alex, do something! They've killed her! I know they've killed her! Conway won't do anything. He says it's all nonsense. It's her grandfather - it's Akbar Khan. He did it. I know he did it! Alex, you can't let him do that and - and—'

Alex came round the desk and caught her by the shoulders and propelled her forcibly out of the office and into the living-room. He pushed her down into a chair, splashed a generous quantity of brandy into a glass and held it to her mouth while she drank it. Winter gasped and choked, but it took some of the shivering rigidity from her.

‘Now tell me.'

‘It's Nissa,' said Winter, tears standing in her eyes. ‘She - she had a nightmare last night. At least I think it was a nightmare. Akbar Khan said it was a fit—' She described the happening on the roof: ‘Then he took her away, and I went to see her this morning and - and they said she was dead. They didn't want me to see her, but I made them. Her mother was crying, and she tried to tell me something, but they pulled her away and said she was hysterical. I - I have never seen anyone dead before. Only Great-Grandfather, and he— But I don't believe - I think they smothered her—' Her voice broke suddenly on a shudder of horror.

Alex said quietly: ‘You can't know that.'

‘No. They said she had had another fit, and— I don't believe it! He heard what she said - Akbar Khan - and he was afraid. I know he was afraid. I knew it last night.'

Alex said: ‘I'll see what I can do.'

He walked back with her in the full glare of the blazing morning and saw
her go into the house, and an hour later he sent over a brief message asking if she would ride with him that evening.

Winter heard the wailing in the servants' quarters for half that hot afternoon, and later a small wooden box was carried out by a side door in the wall to the Mohammedan burial ground outside the city; but she did not see it go.

‘There is nothing we can do,' said Alex. ‘The child appears to have been subject to epileptic fits, and Dr O'Dwyer, whom I asked to look at the body, says that it is quite possible that she died as a result of one - with general debility and the heat as contributory causes. He was not prepared to take any further action on it. He said - and rightly - that there was enough tension in the place already without giving rise to any more alarm and excitement. I'm sorry, but that is all there is to it.'