Shadow of the Moon (84 page)

‘But if thy people do not take Delhi soon,' said Amir Nath, ‘they too will join with the others. There is no news of that yet, but there is talk that all the sahib-
log
are not slain, as was at first believed, and that an army marches from Ambala to retake Delhi. If that be true, and Delhi be taken, then many who now waver will stay quiet. Remain thou quiet also, and in hiding, until the worst is past. There have been many sahibs and memsahibs, and
baba-log
(children) also, who being driven out of hiding by lack of food and water have been taken and slain, or sent as prisoners to those who be no friends of the Company's Raj. To move now were to run all heads into a noose, for there is no safety east or west, north or south. Oudh also has risen, and it is said that Lawrence Sahib and all the
Angrezi-log
in Lucknow will soon be slain, and that the
Jung-i-lat Sahib
(Commander-in-Chief) is dead at Ambala …'

None of the news was reassuring, and it was obviously unwise to exchange the comparative safety of the Hirren Minar for the dangers of a cross-country flight to some district that might well prove to be in a worse state than Lunjore. And there would appear to be few safe places to make for, if any of Alex's informants were to be believed.

The tales that they told were all of disaster to the British. The whole of Oudh was in a ferment. In Cawnpore General Wheeler was constructing an entrenchment for the defence of the garrison and the European population. Delhi was still in the hands of the insurgents, and there was no news from Meerut. There had been trouble in Agra, and it was rumoured that the troops had mutinied at Allahabad and massacred the British. Punctually to the given day the sepoys in Barelli and Shajehanpur had mutinied, and Khan Bahadur Khan, a pensioner of the Company, had been proclaimed Viceroy of Rohilkhand. He had celebrated his accession by ordering the slaughter of all
the British who had been unable to escape from Barelli, and there had also been a brutal massacre of Europeans in Shahjehanpur.

Yes, there was news in plenty - and all of it bad. There was nothing to be done but to keep the women in hiding, and Alex chafed at the inaction and occupied himself with snaring birds.

Winter alone of the four occupants of the Hirren Minar had no need to pray for patience. She was, for perhaps the first time in her life, entirely content.

The heat did not affect her to the same degree as it affected Lottie and Lou Cottar, and the jungle and the river and the ancient, hidden ruin held a strange enchantment for her. They did not belong to the everyday world. They were something lost and forgotten and right outside reality. She shut her mind to the memory of all that had happened to her in Lunjore - to the heartbreak and bitter disillusionment that had awaited her there; to the long months of degradation and misery; to the horrors of the last day and to the thought of the worse things that might even now be happening in the world beyond the forest. She would not think of the past or the future. Only of the present. And the present was Alex.

It did not worry her that Alex hardly looked at her and rarely spoke to her, or that when he did it was generally with an unmistakable undercurrent of exasperation. She felt as though she had loved him all her life and knew everything about him, and ever since the night following their flight from Lunjore she had felt so completely a part of him that she could sometimes follow the processes of his thoughts as though they had been her own. Harsh experience had taught her to expect little of life, and now it contented her that Alex was alive and within reach of her, and that she could watch him and listen to his voice, and feel his presence even when she could not see him.

The only unpleasant times were when he would go out to get news from the villages. She had never asked where he went or whom he saw, but she was always frightened, with a sick shuddering fear, that he would not return. She would stay awake, pulling the makeshift but remarkably effective punkah that he had made from bamboo and dried grass so that Lottie could sleep in more comfort, and straining her ears to listen for the sounds of his return. Yet even these nights had their compensations, since it meant that he would sleep for part of the day, and then she could look at him without the need for concealment.

She noticed that he talked to Lottie far more than to either Lou or herself, and also that he had a special voice for Lottie. A voice that was gay and gentle and curiously reassuring. It could always reassure Lottie, and even to hear it was an assurance of safety to Winter.

Lottie and Lou Cottar, in spite of the appalling heat, still wore the dresses they had worn when they left Lunjore. Alex had brought back needles and thread from one of his night excursions, and they had mended them neatly. He had also, somewhat unexpectedly, brought a wine-coloured cotton sari
with a deep blue border and a matching cotton bodice, such as the village women wore, for Winter.

Lottie and Lou Cottar could not be persuaded to wear such things. They had discarded their petticoats, stays and pantalettes, but they clung to what they considered a civilized garment as though it gave them some assurance that this was only a temporary interlude that would soon give place to normality. To have thought anything else would have been to lose a part of hope; to give up a plank of the raft which supported them in an uncharted sea.

‘You're letting yourself go native, Winter,' snapped Lou Cottar one hot evening, in an unwonted outburst of irritation. She looked resentfully at the girl, and in the same moment thought how well the draped folds of the cheap sari became her, and how much more effective the silky, blue-black hair was when it swung in thick plaits almost to the knee, than when it was rolled up into the conventional heavy chignon.

Mrs Cottar had never considered little Mrs Barton to be particularly striking, but looking at her now she thought suddenly that she was beautiful; like something out of some Eastern fairy-tale - a princess from the
Thousand and One Nights
. Surprised at herself for the unexpected imagery of the thought, she said irritably: ‘You are the only one of us who does not look out of place in this God-forsaken hole - and who doesn't seem to mind being here.'

‘I don't,' said Winter dreamily.

Lou Cottar stared at her with an indignation that changed to sudden comprehension, and she said abruptly: ‘You're in love with him, aren't you?'

Not so very long ago Winter would have considered such a question an unwarrantable impertinence in the worst possible taste, while to answer it honestly would have been unthinkable. But this was not the civilized world they had known. This was Eden. She smiled at Lou and said: ‘Yes.'

‘Is he in love with you?'

Winter thought of the letter that Alex carried in the inner pocket of his coat. But then he might not even know that he still had it. She shook her head, and Lou said tartly: ‘Then he's a fool!'

‘I think he has too much on his mind to bother about anything like that,' said Winter reflectively. ‘Just now he can only think of me as a nuisance. I think he has always thought of me like that. A tiresome responsibility that he would like to be rid of if he could.'

‘Not only you,' said Lou with a twisted smile. ‘All of us. And I can't say that I blame him, because if it wasn't for us he could go. And if it wasn't for Lottie—'

She glanced towards the bed where Lottie lay asleep, and her thin features sharpened with anxiety. She said with suppressed violence: ‘That damned baby! It's hanging over us all like - like the monsoon. Something that you know is coming and that can't be stopped. Not that I couldn't do with the
monsoon and I suppose that will be here before we know where we are. But if only one could stop that baby! It's knowing that she has to have it and that there's no way out that gets on my nerves. What are we going to do if we can't get her away? We
must
get her away! How much longer has she got?'

‘About six weeks I think,' said Winter doubtfully. ‘Perhaps it's seven.'

‘Six weeks! Oh God - and here we are doing nothing.
Nothing
! What in heaven's name are we going to do if she has it here? Do you know anything about babies?'

‘No,' admitted Winter.

‘Neither do I. Not a damned thing. I've never had any of my own and I've never been interested in women who did. They look frightful and become dead bores. We've got to get her to some civilized place where there is a doctor. Why doesn't Alex do something? We
must
get her away!'

Alex, lying under a canopy of leaves in the hot, dry jungle grass and watching the shadow of a
sal
tree draw out across the clearing, was making the same calculations and coming to the same conclusion.

It was a conclusion that he had come to days ago, but he could still see no safe way of translating thought into action, since the reports he received were all the same: it was inviting death to travel anywhere, for neither the roads nor the by-paths, the villages or the towns were safe. There were bands of
budmarshes
, looters and mutineers all over Rohilkhand and Oudh and throughout the North-West Province, and to remove from Lunjore would be to leave the frying-pan for the fire. Only the Punjab, if the reports were to be trusted, remained unaffected, but to reach it meant a long, difficult and dangerous journey, and one which Lottie was in no condition to undertake on foot. She would have to travel in some sort of conveyance, and that meant going by road and not across country. The thing was impossible as yet.

Alex remembered with a sinking of the heart certain words from the Epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘…
then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape
.'

Six weeks … perhaps seven. But anything might have happened by then. Troops must be being hurried out from home or stopped on their way to China. Reinforcements must be coming. And once the tide had turned it would be possible to demand help from those who at present were watching the swing of the pendulum and unwilling to commit themselves one way or the other. For the moment Lottie was safer where she was.

‘That damned baby!' thought Alex with an exasperation and anxiety that equalled Lou's. ‘Why on earth do women have to—'

And then without warning a thought that had never occurred to him before struck him with the sudden violence of an unexpected blow over the heart. It wiped the problem of Lottie from his mind and substituted a far more
frightening one, and he forgot about the peacocks and let them mince past him unheeded while he stared blindly across the clearing seeing only a slim figure in a faded blue cotton sari.

‘No,' thought Alex desperately - ‘no! It couldn't happen. It was only once—-' He had not thought of Winter for days, except as one of three women who were, unavoidably and infuriatingly, his responsibility; and at the back of his mind there had lain an unjust and illogical anger because she had been the means of turning him aside from the course he had set for himself, and by so doing had been indirectly responsible for the death of Niaz. He did not want to think of her now, and with an abrupt movement he buried his head in his arms as though by doing so he could blot her out of his mind and from his conscience. ‘Oh God, not this!' thought Alex as he had thought once before at Hazrat Bagh when she had cried in his arms because of a wild goose. ‘Not this - not now. I can't stand it …'

The sudden movement caught the bright eye of a king crow who was balancing on a bough of the
sal
tree, and it cried a warning that sent the peacocks hurrying away through the jungle. But Alex lay still and did not move for a long time.

That night he took a graver risk than he had yet taken, and went into the city, riding a thin village pony that he had procured with the assistance of the apprehensive Kashmera. ‘It is not safe!' urged Kashmera. ‘The Huzoor is too well known in Lunjore.'

‘There are few who will recognize me now,' said Alex, and it was perhaps true. His face was thinner and there were no longer any curves in it; only hollows and angles - and lines.

‘Tie up the jaw as though it were wounded,' advised Kashmera. ‘It is an old trick, but it serves.' He had fetched some rags from the hut, and Alex drew the blade of his knife slantwise in a shallow cut on one side of his chin, stained the cloth with it and bound it up roughly.

‘That is better,' approved Kashmera. ‘Perhaps after all thou wilt return. Leave the horse by the cane field. He will not stray.'

That night was the twelfth of June, but the news that Sir Henry Barnard had fought and won a battle at Badli-ki-serai on the road to Delhi, and that once again there were British on the Ridge, and Delhi itself besieged, had not yet reached Lunjore.

There was elation in the city, for the reports and rumours that had been received were all of successful risings and of Europeans and British garrisons murdered or besieged, and it lacked only ten days to the twenty-third of June - the centenary of the Battle of Plassey which an ex-clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, had fought with three thousand men against an army of sixty-eight thousand, and in winning it had won half India. The rule of the ‘Company Sahib', said the prophecy, would last for a hundred years from the date of that battle, and now that day was near …

The talk of the bazaars only served to convince Alex that he still could not
move the women. He had bought food and tied it in a corner of cloth, and ridden back in the bright moonlight with angry despair in his heart.

‘Is there no news, Alex?' demanded Lou Cottar the next morning, following him out into the jungle and facing him among the hot shadows of the
sal
trees. ‘You must have heard
something
. Even if it is bad news we would much rather know than be kept in the dark.'

‘All the news is bad,' said Alex shortly. ‘It's no good. We can't leave yet.'