Shadow of the Moon (93 page)

‘Has she been christened?' asked Mrs Hossack one day.

‘
Christened
?' Lou looked up from bathing Amanda in a small metal basin. ‘No, of course not. How could she be?'

‘There's Mr Dobbie,' said Mrs Hossack. ‘He's a clergyman so he could do it. She should be christened. It's safer.'

‘Safer? What do you mean,
safer
?' demanded Lou impatiently.

‘Supposing she should get ill, and die - you would not want her not to be saved,' said Mrs Hossack.

Lou had glared at her, clutching the child. ‘She isn't going to die! What nonsense you talk, Ida!'

But the thought of having the child christened had taken possession of her. Not because she paid any attention to Mrs Hossack's lugubrious views, or that she believed that an unbaptized child would be refused admittance into Heaven. It was the thought of Edward English's parents that weighed with Lou. They might have their own ideas as to names. The child was going to be christened Amanda, and also Cottar. The surname of English would be hers by law.

Fired with this idea Lou had approached Mr Dobbie, who had instantly agreed to perform the ceremony. Lou had long ago cut up her petticoat and various other articles of underwear to make napkins and other necessities for the child, and now she made a christening robe from her pantalettes and saw nothing humorous in the action.

Amanda Cottar English was christened ‘in the presence of this congregation' on Alex's roof in the late evening; Alex, Winter and Mrs Hossack standing as godparents. The ceremony brought a considerable portion of relief to Lou. It seemed to make Amanda more her own, and the claims of the misty and faraway Englishes - Lou was not aware that Edward had been orphaned for several years - faded and became less alarming.

But its repercussions were unexpected.

48

The fact that there was a clergyman available who was qualified to perform Holy Offices had dawned suddenly upon Lord Carlyon.

It was surprising that it had not done so before, for Mr Dobbie had held frequent services ever since their arrival. But it had not occurred to any of them that he could also officiate at other ceremonies of the Church. It did so now, and Carlyon had managed to get Winter to himself in the garden two evenings later.

It had rained heavily that day, but now the skies were clear and the garden smelt fresh and fragrant in the dusk. They had all gone out to walk under the orange trees because Alex had suffered a relapse and had been feverish all day, and Dr O'Dwyer had decreed that he must have quiet.

Moonlight had filled the garden with pale shadows before the last of the twilight had faded, and Carlyon had stood among the orange trees and once again asked Winter to marry him. Not at some future date when they could escape from this house and from Lucknow - if they should ever escape - but now, at once. Tonight or tomorrow. Dobbie could marry them …

‘I haven't anything to offer you now. I'm just a penniless prisoner. But when we get away it will be different. Then I can—'

Winter put a hand on his arm, checking him. ‘Don't! please don't.' Her voice was quick and distressed and her face in the soft moonlight was troubled. ‘If - if I loved you it wouldn't matter if you could never give me anything but yourself. But I don't, and so I cannot marry you.'

‘Why? Why not? You need someone to look after you; to protect you. I would take care of you. I love you - I can't live without you! What does it matter whether you love me now or not? You would one day. I could make you. Barton is dead. Give me the right to take care of you. Winter - Winter—'

He had caught her hand, and she drew back quickly: ‘I am sorry. I cannot. Thank you for - for wanting to, but—' She seemed to think the words were inadequate, and stood before him twisting her hands together as though she were trying to think of something less hollowly polite and baldly negative. But the moonlight showed him that there was a sudden abstracted look in the wide, black-lashed eyes, and he was seized with an angry and wounding conviction that she was not thinking of him at all, but of something or someone else.

He reached out and caught her hand again, gripping it by the wrist in a hard grasp that she could not break, and said hoarsely: ‘Is there anyone else? Is that why you won't marry me? It was Barton before - who is it now? Is
it Randall? I've seen the way you look at him sometimes. You were in the jungle with him for weeks, weren't you.'

His rage boiled up until it seemed that it must choke him. Some part of his brain, standing coldly aloof - some part of the bored and cynical Arthur Carlyon of the London drawing-rooms - told him that he was making a vulgar, jealous and melodramatic scene; but he could not stop himself:

‘It is Randall, isn't it? What is he to you? Are you his mistress? Do you spend your nights with him on that roof? Is that why you persuaded your black relatives to let him sleep up there instead of with us?'

He saw the shadowy reflection of a succession of emotions cross the face that the strengthening moonlight threw into sharp relief against the darkness of the orange trees: disgust, anger, contempt, and finally - and surprisingly - pity. As though she could understand the cruel pain that was responsible for that torrent of insult, and could sympathize with it. She stood quite still, waiting for him to finish, her eyes grave and steady. But it was the pity in them that hurt most and which drove him to the final stupidity.

He released her wrist and caught her swiftly into his arms as he had done once before in Delhi, and kissed her with angry violence. Kissed her mouth and eyes and throat again and again and as though he could not stop.

She had not struggled or cried out. Perhaps she had known that it would have done little good to do either. She had stood entirely still, enduring his bruising kisses as though she had been a lay figure without life or emotion, and her very immobility had brought him to his senses as nothing else could have done. He released her at last and stood back from her, breathing in hard gasps. She had not spoken, and after a moment she had turned and walked unhurriedly away between the orange trees of the walled garden, her pale-coloured Indian dress showing like a moth among the shadows, and the Indian jewellery she wore making a soft chinking sound that died away into the dusk.

Mrs Hossack, who was walking up and down with her small son in her arms, said: ‘Mrs Barton, I wanted to ask you if—' But Winter had passed her without hearing her and had gone into the house and up the long narrow flight of stairs. She drew the muslin veil over her head and across her face as Ameera and the other women did on the rare occasions on which they moved outside the women's quarters, and passed along a narrow enclosed verandah and up the final flight of stairs that led to the roof where Alex lay.

The moonlight and the last touch of twilight made the open roof seem very bright after the dark passages and stairways, and the rain had cooled it so that it smelt pleasantly of washed stone.

Alex's bed had been dragged out into the open, presumably by Dr O'Dwyer. He was lying on it with his back to her, wearing only the scanty cotton loin-cloth that alone made the heat of the day bearable, and his body looked painfully thin and very brown against the pale-coloured
resai
that did
duty as a mattress. He heard the chink of Winter's jewellery but he did not turn, and she came to stand beside him, looking down at him and wondering if he were asleep. After a moment or two, as she did not speak, he said ungraciously: ‘Well, what is it?'

The irritation in his voice gave her a sudden qualm, and for a moment her resolution faltered. Her hands gripped together tightly and she took a deep breath and forced herself to speak calmly:

‘Alex, will you marry me?'

Alex did not move for an appreciable time, and then he turned slowly and looked up at her. It seemed to him that there was a tight band made of some hot metal round his forehead, and he could not think at all clearly.

‘What did you say?'

‘I asked you if you would marry me,' said Winter steadily.

‘Why?'

She sat down on the edge of the low bed and as she did so the muslin veil slipped back and off her shoulders, and the clear moonlight showed red marks on her throat. The hand she raised to catch at the veil was bruised too about the wrist with the plain prints of the brutal grip that had held it.

Alex reached out and caught her hand, holding it with thin hot fingers, and looked at those marks; and Winter, noticing them for the first time, jerked it quickly away.

Alex said thickly: ‘Carlyon?'

‘Yes. No. I mean - it doesn't matter.'

He sat up and found that it tightened the band about his head by several notches. It should surely be impossible to feel so ill and so angry at one and the same time? Separately perhaps, but not together. He said: ‘Yes, I'll marry you. And what's more, I'll do it now. Go and tell Dobbie I want to see him. And wait a minute - give me some of that opium—'

Winter never knew what he had said to Mr Dobbie, but whatever it was it appeared to have persuaded Mr Dobbie to accede to the unexpected request for an immediate marriage. Lou knew, because Lou had come in search of Winter and had heard a murmur of voices from the roof. She had almost reached the top of the stairs when she had heard Alex say: ‘Very well, then, I'll have her without. And you can take that on your conscience! It won't be on mine.'

Lou had turned round and come down again, looking thoughtful.

Winter had been married at night and by moonlight, as Sabrina had been. And like Sabrina, with no preparation at all and in a wedding-dress that did not even belong to her.

She would have worn Ameera's scarlet and gold wedding-dress with its wonderful fringed and tasselled head-veil, but out of deference to the doubtful and anxious Mr Dobbie she had worn instead a dress of heavy white silk, yellowed by the years and scented with the
neem
leaves and tobacco in which
it had been kept, that had belonged to Ameera's mother, Juanita de Ballesteros.

There had been a lace mantilla too; once white but now as yellow as the silk and as fragile as the lace on the wedding-dress that had been Anne Marie's and which Sabrina had worn when she married Juanita's brother, Marcos, in the chapel of the Casa de los Pavos Reales twenty years ago. It had in fact been the self-same mantilla that her mother had worn on that night, though Winter did not know it.

The moon that looked down on that strange wedding looked down also on the ruined, looted, burned-out shell of the Casa de los Pavos Reales and the blackened, grass-grown paving stones of the terrace where Marcos and Sabrina had stood together on that other moonlight night to watch their guests ride away. But the scent of the orange-blossom and the lemon trees remained, and was as sweet on the hot air as it had been on that long-ago night.

The scent of orange-blossom rose too from the walled gardens of the Rose Palace, and reached the flat roof-top where Winter stood in Juanita's white dress and felt Alex's parched, fever-hot fingers push a heavy ring of beaten gold and silver onto the finger that had once worn Kishan Prasad's glowing emerald. The ring too had been one of Juanita's, a gift from her mother Anne Marie, for none of the Europeans had possessed such a thing - any trinkets they might have had having been either taken from them or parted with in exchange for food long ago.

Alex had worn Mussulman dress, borrowed for the occasion from Dasim Ali, and had only managed to keep on his feet with the assistance of opium and one of the pillars that divided his room from the roof. He had stood with his back to it, and had looked so entirely un-English in the moonlight that poor, worried Mr Dobbie had suffered yet another qualm.

Up to now it had been young Mrs Barton who had always seemed to Mr Dobbie to look like an Indian. He had never seen her wear anything but Indian dress, and he had never quite followed the intricacies of her relationship with the Indian woman - or women - in the Gulab Mahal. But tonight, wearing the long full-skirted stiff silk dress with its old-fashioned neck - and sleeve-line, her black hair drawn back and rolled in a heavy chignon at the back of her small head and the folds of the lace mantilla falling demurely about her, she looked like any young lady arriving to be married in one of the more fashionable London churches, and it seemed entirely wrong, thought Mr Dobbie unhappily, that he should be marrying her to a Mohammedan.

But to Winter there had been nothing strange about this wedding. It was the fulfilment of the promise that the Gulab Mahal had always stood for - that old Aziza Begum had given to her and Zobeida reaffirmed so often - that once she returned to it, all would be well.

She stood in the warm white moonlight and looked down at a ring that had once been Anne Marie's as once, long ago and on just such a night, Sabrina too had done. And like Sabrina she was suddenly aware of an uplifting sense
of timelessness - as if all Time were one, and she would live for ever in the future in Alex's children and hers, as she lived in the past with Marcos and Sabrina; with Johnny and Louisa …

But her wedding had not ended peacefully as Sabrina's had done.

They had all been gathered there on the roof, their shadows black in the moonlight, and the fantastic skyline of the Lucknow palaces like a purple pattern at their backs: Lou Cottar and Mrs Hossack, Captain Garrowby, Dr O'Dwyer, Mr Climpson, Mr Lapeuta and Lord Carlyon. Even Ameera and Hamida had been there, standing in the darkness behind the lowered
chiks
that screened the interior of the pavilion from the roof, in deference to the fact that Ameera was in
purdah
and could not be seen by strange men.

The guests had come forward to offer congratulations and good wishes at the end of the brief ceremony, and Carlyon had confronted Winter and said in a deliberate drawl: ‘Am I permitted the privilege of kissing the bride?'