Shadow of the Moon (85 page)

Lou said: ‘But we must go soon! Can't you see that if we don't, Lottie may—'

‘Do you think I haven't thought of that?' interrupted Alex brusquely. ‘Don't be a fool, Lou! At the moment there would appear to be nowhere to go to. She may have a bad time of it if she stays here, but she'll certainly die - and so will the rest of us - if we are mad enough to attempt a cross-country trip just now. The jungle at least will do us no harm.'

But he had spoken too soon, for the jungle that had seemed to befriend them suddenly showed its claws.

They had gone down to the river that evening, all four of them, as they did every evening, because it was cooler there and there were always clothes and cooking-pots to be washed and fishing-lines to tend. Winter had not seen the cobra until it lashed at her, hissing, as she bent to disentangle the edge of her sari that had caught on a thorn. Her foot touched the cold coils, and the fangs bit into her left arm just above the elbow.

Alex had been less than a yard away from her and he had swung round as she cried out, and had seen the snake slither across her path, and the two small punctures on the smooth tanned skin. The next second he had leapt at her and caught her; his fingers tight above the wound, forcing the blood down, and his mouth against it, sucking at it with all his strength.

Lou had come running and had beaten the grass with a stick, and then snatched up a petticoat that was to be washed and ripped at it frantically, tearing at it with her teeth. It tore at last and she wound a strip of it above Alex's straining hands and pulled it tight in a tourniquet.

Alex lifted his head and said hoarsely: ‘Permanganate - on the ledge at the left back - quickly,' and Lou turned and ran, stumbling and tripping among the grass and thorn and creeper, while Lottie wrung her hands and wept.

Alex jerked the knife he carried from its sheath, and caught Winter to him, holding her hard against him so that she could not move, his hand a vice about her wrist. He said: ‘It'll hurt. Don't move,' and cut the wound across deeply, twice.

He felt her teeth clench on the thin stuff of his shirt and her body twist to the pain, but she did not cry out and he dropped the knife into the grass. The blood poured down her arm and his in a red tide and he lifted her and carried her swiftly back to the Hirren Minar.

Lou Cottar met them a dozen yards from the entrance with the little tin of permanganate crystals clutched in her hand, and they had filled the wound
with them, and had got Winter up the rope ladder. Alex had let the arm bleed and she had looked at it with a frown of pain and said in a dazed whisper: ‘It will make such a mess on the floor.'

‘We can clear it up,' said Alex with white-lipped brevity. ‘Lou, for God's sake get back to Lottie!'

He had bound it up eventually and given her as much opium as he dared, and later, when Lou and Lottie had returned and he had realized that she would not die, he had gone out and been exceedingly sick behind the impenetrable thicket of bamboos.

Winter had run a high fever that first night and Alex had held her clutching hands while she twisted and turned and muttered unintelligibly, and Lou Cottar bathed her burning body with cool water. ‘Is she going to die?' Lou had asked once. There had been a break in her voice, and her face had been barely more than a pale blur in the darkness beyond the line of moonlight that lay between the broken archways.

‘No. She'll be all right in a few hours,' said Alex with more confidence than he felt. ‘Give me that cloth and go and lie down, Lou. If you crack up too, I swear I'll go out and shoot myself!'

Lou had laughed on a sudden breath of relief and had obeyed him, and Alex had taken the slender fever-racked body into his arms and held it close, his cheek pressed to the burning forehead. The moonlit night had been breathlessly hot and Alex's own body was wet with sweat, but his hold seemed to soothe her, and after a while he felt her slacken and lie still in his arms, and knew that she was asleep at last and that the fever had broken.

‘My love!' thought Alex, moving his mouth against the hot smooth skin and the damp waves of silky hair that were as dark as the darkness about him. ‘My little love …'

Quite suddenly the gnawing restlessness that had lived with him hourly during the last weeks fell away from him, and he no longer cared what became of anyone else - or of India - as long as Winter was safe. He could wait patiently now. She was no longer a burden and a responsibility, but part of his heart, as she had always been. What did it matter if they had to wait here in hiding for months - or years? ‘Only after this,' thought Alex, ‘I must not kiss you again or touch you again, because if I do I shall only take you again - I couldn't stop myself - and it may be months, or a year, before we can get away.'

He thought of Lottie and shivered. One day the news would be better. He had no doubts on that score, because what he had once told Kishan Prasad had been true. Even if every European in all India were killed, the British would send, if necessary, every man they had, to avenge them. It would not be so much the loss of territory or prestige that would bring them, and nerve them to fight with stubbornness and fury, but the murder of their women and children. They would not forgive that, or rest until they had avenged it.

One day, perhaps very soon - or if the mutiny was really widespread, perhaps later than he had thought - the British would be in control again and it would be safe to leave the jungle. They could get away then … get married. Barton was dead. It was only a question of waiting.

44

Winter had recovered quickly and suffered remarkably little ill-effect from the incident. The wound that Alex's knife had made had healed cleanly and given the minimum of trouble, and though the fever and loss of blood had kept her on her back and feeling absurdly weak for several days, she had soon been about again.

She saw very little of Alex after that, and suspected that he was deliberately avoiding her, but she knew that some tension in him had relaxed and that he was no longer impatient or irritable. She was aware, too, that he had developed a habit of watching her under his lashes. He would lie on the river bank in the evening while she and Lottie and Lou washed the clothes and cooking-pots, and she would look up and find his gaze on her, and feel as always that familiar contraction of the heart.

When the sun had set Alex would go off to set fishing-lines and traps while the three women bathed in the river, returning to eat the evening meal; and because he had taken to wearing nothing but a loin-cloth these days, his body was burnt as brown as his face and he could have passed anywhere for a Pathan. He had been out less for news than for food of late, and but for the relentless, exhausting heat the days passed peacefully enough.

Alex, like Winter, found the heat unpleasant but bearable. But to Lou, and more especially to Lottie, it was an interminable torture. They watched the skies daily for signs of the monsoon, and longed for rain; but though clouds would sometimes gather and they would hear thunder rumble along the horizon and see the heat-lightning flicker, no rain fell to temper the intolerable heat, and they lived for the early mornings and the late evenings when they could lie and soak in the coolness of the river.

Alex became afraid of the river, and he drove in stakes about the narrow curve of the little beach where they bathed, in case their continued use of it might attract the attention of a mugger, and that one day one of them might be dragged down by yellow-toothed jaws into deep water. But there was too much food in the river these days for the muggers to bother with live prey. The bodies of the British came down on the current, bloated and bobbing to the undertow, and once one had stranded by the little beach: a woman whose long hair had caught in the tree-roots so that her mangled corpse swung gently to and fro in the ripple as though she were swimming - or struggling.

Alex had sawn through her hair with his knife and pushed her off into the current, and the others, arriving five minutes later, had wondered why he was looking so unusually grim. He had not looked like that for some time past; he had looked relaxed and almost contented, and had taken to humming
under his breath as he set fishing-lines or devised further methods of keeping the temperature of the Hirren Minar within bearable limits. But that night he had gone to the city again, and when he had returned at dawn his eyes were once again hot with restlessness. For it seemed that the tide was turning at last.

The British whom the boasters in Lunjore had declared were all dead or swept into the sea were encamped once more upon the Ridge before Delhi. The Guides had marched from Mardan and were now with the Delhi force, and Hodson Sahib, the ‘
Burra Lerai-wallah
' (great in battle), was also there, commanding a regiment of horse that he had raised.

They would of course be defeated - annihilated! - it was only a matter of time: but all the same there was a noticeable breath of uneasiness in the bazaars. It was disconcerting to find that the sahib-
log
were not all dead. And it was said, whispered one man to an awed group in the Sudder Bazaar, that Nikal Seyn himself was riding for Delhi! Nikal Seyn, the sound of whose horse's hooves could be heard, so men said, from Attock to the Khyber, and whom many declared to be a god, and no man. The speaker had shivered and thrown a quick backward look over his shoulder as he spoke.

‘It won't be long now,' said Alex, his eyes blazing in the grey dawn light. ‘We shall have to stick it out here a little longer, but the monsoon must break soon, and then it will be cooler. And when Delhi is taken we'll be able to get away. A good many of the waverers will come over to us then, and we shall be able to get help on the road.'

Another ten days; perhaps a fortnight - or a month. But what did it matter now that the end was in sight? They could afford to wait a week or two more.

‘I suppose so,' said Lou, wiping the pouring perspiration from her face with the back of her hand. ‘We shall have to wait. I see that. We've been lucky - luckier than so many others. Perhaps the luck will hold.'

But it did not hold.

That same evening Lottie had strayed away to pick jungle berries, not twenty yards from the river bank, and she had heard someone moving through the bushes and had turned, expecting Lou who had been fetching water.

But it was not Lou. It was a bearded turbanless native in torn and soiled clothing, who carried a heavy bundle upon one shoulder and bore on wrist and ankle the marks that are made by iron fetters.

She was not to know that this was one of the criminals who had been released by the mob from the city jail, or that he had subsequently murdered a Hindu merchant and his family, and escaped with the loot to the jungle. But Lottie was under no illusions as to his intentions.

He had stared at her unbelievingly, and then his lips had stretched into an evil grin. A memsahib - a
feringhi
! His eyes glittered and he dropped the bundle he carried and drew a stained sword from its sheath. He moved
towards her quite slowly, crouching a little, the dry jungle grass rustling and crackling about him, and Lottie's mouth opened in a soundless scream. She made no attempt to turn and run, but stood frozen and still like a trapped rabbit, and she did not hear Lou coming up from the river. Neither did Bishul Singh,
dacoit
, for he could see nothing but the petrified face of the white woman before him and hear only the crackling of the undergrowth as he crept towards her.

Lou never moved from the Hirren Minar without a revolver, and she dropped the
chatti
, and as the man looked round, checked by the sudden sound, she pulled the gun from the sling she had made for it, and fired. The man jerked upright and his eyes and his mouth opened in a look of incredulous astonishment, and then he swayed, coughed, crumpled at the knees and fell sideways with blood pouring from his mouth.

‘No!' screamed Lottie. ‘No! No!
No
—!'

Alex had been reinforcing a bamboo ladder that he had made to replace the rope one that Lottie found it difficult to climb, and he had heard the shot and the screams, and dropped it and ran. He had taken one look at the man on the ground and at Lou who was holding the screaming Lottie, and said: ‘Where's Winter?' And then Winter had run through the bushes, white-faced and panting, and he had gripped Lou's shoulders and shaken her and said: ‘Were there any others?'

‘No. I don't know,' said Lou jerkily. ‘He was coming for Lottie with a sword. I shot him. Lottie - Lottie! - it's all right, dear, it's all right.'

Alex said: ‘Get on, get back - all of you. He may not have been alone.'

But Lottie would not go. She had struggled and screamed, and Alex had turned and taken her from Lou and carried her back to the Hirren Minar, holding her with her face pressed hard against his shoulder to muffle her screams. He had put her on her feet for one moment at the foot of the ladder, and she had turned and fled back, and when he caught her she had fought him, writhing and twisting and clawing at him, her thin distorted body suddenly possessed of surprising strength, so that it had been all he could do to get her back into the upper room.

Alex said: ‘Pull up the ladder, Winter. And close the entrance. Lou, give me the opium - and the brandy. It's all right, Lottie dear, you're safe now.'

But Lottie had screamed and shrieked and fought as she had screamed and fought at the Kashmir Gate at Delhi when she had seen a grinning bearded man leap at Edward with a sword, and had seen her husband fall, spurting blood from that terrible wound, and had been dragged away to be lowered over the battlements and fall into the dry ditch below. ‘Let me go! - let me go! They're killing him! Edward -
Edward
!' screamed Lottie. And then quite suddenly she had gone slack in Alex's arms and they saw with unutterable relief that she had fainted.

Alex laid her down on the narrow camp bed, and letting down the rope
ladder, ordered Winter to pull it up after him and went out into the twilight jungle.

He turned the dead man over, and recognizing him realized that he was probably on the run, and straightening up he stood still, listening for a long time, but could hear no sounds that suggested anyone moving through the jungle. Presently he made a cautious circuit of the immediate area but found no one, and returning to the corpse he dragged it to the river bank and pushed it off into deep water.

The bundle the man had dropped proved to be full of valuables. Silver coin, a large quantity of Indian jewellery, an assortment of bric-à-brac that could only have come from the looted bungalow of some European, and one object that told its own story: a woman's hand that had been hacked off for the sake of the rings it bore and which had presumably proved difficult to remove. Alex disposed of that gruesome and decomposed relic and carried the bundle back to the Hirren Minar. The money would come in very useful and he could only hope that Bishul Singh had not made an assignation with anyone to meet him on or near this spot. Judging from the value of the loot he thought it unlikely: it seemed more probable that the man had intended to keep it to himself.

There was an appalling smell of burnt feathers in the upper room of the Hirren Minar, and Alex climbed the ladder to find Lottie still unconscious and Lou and Winter, their faces no more than white blurs in the dusk, making desperate efforts to revive her.

‘Leave her alone,' advised Alex. ‘If she has remembered Delhi she is better off like that. We'd better light the lamp.'

They used the lamp as little as possible, partly to conserve their scanty stock of oil, but mostly because it necessitated covering the open archways with solid screens that Alex had made from bamboo canes, roots and dry grass, so that the light would not show. In the day-time, when the hot wind blew, they poured water on those screens, which helped to cool the room, but after sunset when the wind dropped the screens made it unbearably hot, and there was no breath of wind blowing tonight.

Winter went below to prepare the evening meal and Alex handed her a revolver without comment. He was still not entirely sure that the dead
dacoit
had been alone, and he did not know how far the sound of that shot and Lottie's screams would have carried.

Lou lit the small oil-lamp while Alex mixed brandy and opium with water. ‘It may keep her quiet for a bit when she comes round,' he said, and pushed the brandy bottle at Lou: ‘You'd better have some of that yourself. You look as though you need it.' They had been as sparing with the brandy as they had been with the oil, but Lou drank and felt grateful for the fiery liquid.

Lottie had not recovered consciousness for another hour, and when at last she had moaned and stirred they had been able to make her drink the
opium brew without much difficulty. She had sat up, propped against Lou Cottar's shoulder, and had stared up at Lou's face and at Alex and Winter, with eyes that had lost the dazed sweetness that they had worn for so long.

She said at last: ‘Edward is dead, isn't he? They killed him. I - I remember now. And they shot Mama - and - and Papa. Where is Sophie?'

‘Sophie is safe, darling,' said Winter. ‘She is in Cawnpore.'

‘They killed Edward,' whispered Lottie. ‘They - they cut him with their swords, and there was a man with a knife who'—'

Winter said: ‘Don't think of it, darling - don't.'

‘How can you stop yourself thinking of a thing like that? I should have stayed with him but they wouldn't let me. I should have stayed with him—' She turned her head against Lou Cottar's shoulder and wept, and Alex got up and went out.