Shadow of the Moon (73 page)

Winter was not visible, for Ditta Mull had hurriedly dropped the heavy split-cane
chiks
before the open entrance at his shop. He peered out anxiously on hearing Alex's voice and grasped feverishly at his sleeve: ‘Take her away, Huzoor!' begged Ditta Mull. ‘By the back way. I do not know what madness has taken hold on the city this morning. There is a tale that— But no matter. I fear that some may do her harm because she is the wife of the Commissioner Sahib. Already there have been stones flung at my shop. It is not our own people. They know her well. But there are others -
budmarshes
from Suthragunj and Shahjehanpur and Bareilly who have been stirring up trouble in the city with wild tales. The Memsahib is with my wife and children. She wished to leave, fearing the people might harm my shop on her account, but I would not let her. It is well that thou hast come! I will tell the Memsahib.'

He hurried away through a dark doorway in the back of the shop, wringing his small fat hands and making little moaning noises, and returned a minute or two later with Winter. She was perfectly calm, and quite uninterested, thought Alex furiously - irrationally swinging from the extremes of fear to the limits of exasperation - in the dangers of the situation. She frowned a little at the sight of him, but refused to leave without a large quantity of rose-coloured sari silk that she had previously selected. She watched Ditta Mull wrap it up in a length of muslin, his hands shaking like leaves in a wind, and having accepted and paid for it, said with a touch of impatience: ‘Do not show them that face,
Lala-ji
. If they see that thou art afraid, then they too may behave foolishly. But not otherwise.'

She handed the package to Alex who received it in grim silence, and went out under the lifted
chik
into the fierce glare of the sunlight. The crowd had ceased to shout and sway and had become silent, gazing curiously at the split-cane
chik
that concealed the interior of the shop, and at the impassive Maulvi who stood at the foot of the steps outside it. As Winter stepped out into the sunlight a mutter rose from them and swelled ominously, but she appeared unconscious of it and Alex saw her look up to smile at someone in a second-storey window at the far side of the narrow street, and sketch the Hindu gesture of salutation with one hand.

The crowd, instantly diverted, turned as one to see who it was whom the Memsahib had greeted, and saw a small plump child hanging out over the edge of a fretted window ledge and beckoning. Winter shook her head at it and called out: ‘Have a care, Bappa, or thou wilt surely fall. I cannot come today, but I will come soon.'

‘Tomorrow?' shrilled the child.

‘Not tomorrow. Perhaps next week.'

The brief conversation changed the mood of the crowd as Alex's jest had changed the mood of the mob in the Sudder Bazaar, but he could feel the dangerous pendulum-swing of their emotions with every nerve in his body, and knew how little it would take to sway them towards senseless savagery. Was Winter unaware of it? She seemed to be. He heard her murmur a polite and conventional greeting to the Maulvi, and then she was in the saddle and moving off down the packed street, controlling the nervous impatience of Furiante with apparent ease.

The next fifteen minutes seemed endless to Alex, riding behind her and frequently separated from her by the shifting, jostling crowds. He heard her speak to a dozen people as they edged their way through the streets, her voice light and gay. He noted as they passed that more than half the shops were closed and shuttered - sure sign of panic. That despite the intense heat, the narrow stifling streets and alleyways were as full of people as though it had been a fair day or a festival, and that the people talked in whispers and muttered in undertones.

The Maulvi left them abruptly at the turn into the wide stretch of the Sudder Bazaar that ended at the Rohilkhand Gate, and vanished down a side street. Three hundred yards to go … Two hundred … One hundred … Fifty. Slowly; keep to a walk … A man was holding forth excitedly to a dense knot of people as thick as a swarm of bees, and scraps of sentences separated themselves from the sullen murmur of the crowd. ‘… with two heads! My cousin's wife's brother saw it … it is a sign! What else but a sign? Their days are accomplished …!' Muttered curses and a man spitting loudly and contemptuously as they passed. A low-caste woman shouting at the frightened, furious syce: ‘
Hai, ghora wallah
, do they feed thee on bone-dust now that thou hast taken service with the sahib-
log
?'

And then they were through the gate and out on the open empty glaring road that led across the plain to the cantonments, and Furiante had broken into a canter and then into a gallop. Winter had attempted to slow him after the first hundred yards or so, but Alex had brought his whip down on the horse's quarters and they had flashed at full gallop under the shadows of the trees that lined the cantonment roads. He reined in at last before the gate of his own bungalow and waited for the syce to come up with them. He had not spoken once since he entered Ditta Mull's shop, and he did not speak now. He put up a hand and wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and knew that his hand was shaking.

Winter said uncertainly: ‘You're very angry, aren't you? But I did not know that there was trouble in the city. I know you told me to keep away from it. I'm sorry. But you should not have come for me. I do not think that they would have done me any harm. They were more likely to harm you.'

This was precisely what Alex himself had thought, and his anger against himself for not having had the moral courage to leave her to take her chance kept him silent.

Winter looked at him doubtfully and added: ‘It was - kind of you to come. Thank you.'

‘You have nothing to thank me for,' Alex said brusquely. ‘I probably endangered your life, and that of everyone else in the cantonment, by going there.'

The syce cantered up, dusty and sullen but still clutching the package of rose-coloured silk, and Alex observed him tight-lipped, and then turned back to Winter. He said: ‘The city is out of bounds until further notice, and I should be obliged if you would curtail your rides in future, and keep only to the cantonments and the
maidan
.'

‘But—'

‘That is an order,' said Alex, and turned into his own gateway.

He had ridden out at sundown that evening to the ruined tomb of Amin-u-din on the far bank of the river, but Gopal Nath had not been there. There had been no one there but the bats and the lizards and a flock of green parrots, for Gopal Nath was lying face downwards among the high grass at the edge of the grazing grounds with his throat cut from ear to ear, and the work that the jackals and the hyenas began that night was completed the next day by the kites and the vultures and the remorseless heat, so that twenty-four hours later no one could be sure who those reddened, scattered bones had once belonged to.

Alex had ridden home in the last of the brief twilight knowing that it was no use to wait any longer, and later that night he had gone out over the back wall of the bungalow compound where the loquat trees made a belt of shadow, and near some tamarisk scrub at the edge of the cantonments had been met by Yusaf and two skinny village ponies.

There had been a party at the Residency that night. The last of the Tuesday parties, although no one there knew that it would be the last. It had been a late one, and Alex, returning at four o'clock in the morning with the sky already greying to the dawn, heard the voices and laughter of the guests as they drove away from the Residency, before he fell into an exhausted sleep.

Lottie was almost thirty miles nearer to Lunjore that night. At Meerut General Hewitt and Brigadier Wilson, with a strong force of British troops at their command, still remained in a state of helpless inaction, and on the Ridge at Delhi only the putrefying bodies of six officers, still piled one upon the other in the abandoned cart that had dragged them from the shambles of
the Kashmir Gate, were the only British who remained to tell of all those who, two short days ago, had lived and laughed in the now gutted and empty cantonment.

A dispatch rider from Suthragunj on a lathered horse arrived in Lunjore at noon on Wednesday. He had waited only long enough to deliver the sealed letter he carried to the Commissioner's head
chupprassi
, and to water his horse, before setting out on the return journey. Alex had not been told of his arrival, and the Commissioner, handed the letter on a salver by Iman Bux during luncheon, had stuffed it into his pocket, unread, and forgotten about it until the following morning. It had been nearly midday when he read it at last, and then he could not at first take in the baldly worded statement it contained.

His first reaction had been incredulity. The thing was a hoax - a ridiculous practical joke! It must be, because it could not possibly be true. Yet it was written on official paper, and he knew that scrawled signature. The blood seemed to leave his heart and drain out of his body. His pale eyes bulged with shock and the paper dropped from his nerveless hand and slid to the floor, where the draught from the punkah sent it fluttering lazily across the drawing-room carpet like a bird with a broken wing.

It had been Winter who had picked it up and Winter who had sent for Alex. He had arrived to find the Commissioner gulping down his third glass of brandy, and under its influence returning to his first view of the situation. ‘Hoax,' said Mr Barton thickly. ‘Can't be anything else.'

‘I'm afraid not, sir,' said Alex, running his eye down the single sheet of paper. He looked at the quivering bulk that slumped upon the sofa, glass in hand, and said curtly: ‘Where is the man who brought this? When did it arrive?'

The Commissioner swallowed the remainder of the brandy in his glass and poured himself out a fourth peg, slopping the liquid onto the carpet. ‘Can't be expected to deal with everything!' he said loudly and defensively. ‘How was I to know it was important? Might have been an invitation to a shoot f'r all one knew. Put it in m' pocket. Forgot it. Very natural.'

‘It arrived during luncheon yesterday,' Winter said quietly. ‘I think that the man left almost immediately.'

Alex said nothing. He looked at his chief with a contempt and exasperation which he made no attempt to disguise, and turned and went out of the room.

‘Damned impertinence!' said Mr Barton querulously, and finished his fourth brandy.

Less than an hour later a hurriedly convened conference of a dozen appalled men met around the Commissioner's dining-room table to discuss the emergency arising out of the incredible - the impossible news - and to decide what measures, if any, might belatedly be taken to safeguard Lunjore from the mutiny and massacre that had overtaken Meerut and Delhi. Alex had
urged the supreme measure of disarming the regiments, but the suggestion had been treated as an outrage.

‘If I should ever be ordered by the General to insult my men in such a manner,' declared Colonel Gardener-Smith roundly, ‘he would first have to disarm me, and after me, every one of my officers!'

‘Your suggestion, Captain Randall,' said Colonel Moulson, ‘is not only beneath contempt, but one which it is not your place to advance.'

Alex gave a faint shrug of his shoulders. ‘I am sorry, sir. Then may I suggest that we send the women and children to Naini Tal immediately? Today if possible. There may still be time.'

There was an immediate outbreak of protest. If disaffection was rife, travelling would be dangerous and difficult. The women were safer where they were. An adequate escort could not be spared. To send them to the hills now was to run too great a risk.

‘To leave it until it is too late will be a greater one,' said Alex. ‘The mutinies at Meerut and Delhi were premature. I am sure of that. As I have already told you, I have reason to believe that a date for a general outbreak has been set for the end of this month; and that belief is not only supported by information, but confirmed by the behaviour of the city. There is still time to send the women and children to safety.'

‘We cannot do it,' said Colonel Gardener-Smith heavily. ‘It is too late.'

‘It is
not
too late!' said Alex passionately. ‘At least there is a chance.'

‘Perhaps. But it is a chance that we cannot take. At this stage it is surely a matter of vital importance not to show any sign of panic. You must see that.'

‘I doubt it,' said Colonel Moulson with a sneer. ‘It is a thing that Captain Randall has never been able to see. And I agree with you, Colonel. It is of course out of the question for any of the women to leave. Their departure at this juncture would be taken as a clear sign that we had lost our nerve, and I am sure that I speak for the majority when I say that this is far from being the case.'

‘I agree. I entirely agree,' said Colonel Packer. ‘To show panic may precipitate the very crisis we seek to avoid. We must place our trust in the Lord. His rod and His staff shall not fail us.'

‘Possibly not, sir,' said Alex drily. ‘But will the sepoys? Are we to take it that the sight of our women and children being sent to safety will unsettle the regiments to the extent of driving them to mutiny? I had understood that you believed them to be loyal?'

‘The loyalty of my Regiment,' said Colonel Gardener-Smith quietly, ‘has never yet been called in question, and to send my wife and daughter away would amount to a public declaration that I had lost confidence in their loyalty. That I will not do. At this time it is doubly necessary not only to show confidence, but to avoid any action that can be construed as alarm.'

‘Which means,' said Alex with shut teeth, ‘that no precautionary measures
whatever can be taken, for fear that any change in the present routine may be translated as panic.'

‘You exaggerate, Captain Randall,' said Colonel Gardener-Smith coldly. ‘Reasonable precautions will of course be taken.'