Shadow of the Moon (5 page)

‘I cannot be married in a riding-habit,' said Sabrina with a light laugh. ‘It looks too - too urgent. As if we had suddenly decided to be married, in a great hurry. But we have known from the beginning that we would get married one day, and it is only the circumstances that have made it appear sudden and hurried.'

The dress was of a cut and fashion of over a quarter of a century earlier. The white satin of which it was made had yellowed with age, and the lace overskirt with its knots of pearls was as fragile as skeleton leaves. They had found it laid away among a dozen or more outmoded gowns of a similar cut, and did not know that it had been Anne Marie's wedding-dress. Juanita added a white lace mantilla that Marcos had brought back from Spain as a gift to his mother, and clasped the triple row of pearls about Sabrina's throat.

‘Now you look like a bride, and very beautiful. I know that it should not be a white dress, because of Mama and Papa. But I am so sure that they would not have had you wear mourning for them when you marry Marcos. We cannot be sorrowful on such a day. The
cura
is waiting. Come and get married.'

Someone had put jasmine and white roses in the chapel, and the
cura
had lighted candles on the altar. The ring that had also been one of Anne Marie's slipped onto Sabrina's finger; a broad gold band set round with small pearls. Anne Marie's fingers had been plumper than Sabrina's and the ring was heavy and a little loose. Sabrina looked down at it - this symbol of her marriage to Marcos that had belonged to Marcos's mother - and as she looked at it she was aware of a strange feeling of timelessness and of the continuity of life. It was as if she realized for the first time that she and Marcos, who were young and gay and with all their life before them, must one day die as her
own father and mother and Anne Marie and Don Ramon had died. That life was not long at all, as it appeared when one was young and impatient, but very short and very swift, like the shadows of the clouds racing silently over the unheeding earth. But that this was not a sad thing, because all time was one. She seemed to see it stretching back behind her and away ahead of her. Anne Marie who had been young once had worn this ring, and now she was dead and her son's wife wore it; as one day a daughter of Sabrina's would wear it in her turn. Anne Marie was still here in Marcos and Juanita, as she would be in their children and grandchildren …

Henry and Selina - Johnny and Louisa - Sabrina and Marcos … All time was one, and Sabrina was suddenly filled with a warm, shining happiness and an assurance of immortality.

‘
Jesu dominus or a pro nobis
.' The words of the blessing echoed softly under the domed roof of the small chapel, and then Sabrina was signing her name on a paper that she could not read in the pale candlelight. There was dust upon the paper, the drifting all-pervading dust of the Indian plains, and the quill-pen scratched harshly in the stillness. Marcos also wrote his name, and the two young officers and the
cura
, and Juanita.

‘Now you are really my sister,' said Juanita.

‘The Condesa Sabrina de los Aguilares: my wife,
mía esposa
,' said Marcos, and kissed her, laughing.

They drank wine in the great drawing-room where the portraits of dead and gone Condes and Condesas, brought from Spain, looked down upon that light-hearted bride and the few guests who had attended her wedding. The two young officers toasted the bride and groom, and Wali Dad, who had brought Juanita from the city but had not attended the ceremony in the chapel, made a speech in flowery court Persian which only his wife and the
cura
understood, but which everyone applauded.

Sabrina and Marcos walked through the patio and stood on the wide terrace in the warm moonlight among the shadows of the lemon trees, watching the wedding guests ride away. The moon that had been rising above the mango–topes when Sabrina had ridden to the Casa de los Pavos Reales was already low in the western sky, and despite a first hint of the faraway dawn the air was cool, and sweet with the scent of orange blossom. And once again that strange sense of being one with all time and all living swept over Sabrina. One day this great house would crumble into ruin and be no more than the little heaps of timeworn stones that marked where some forgotten city had stood, like those among which her horse would sometimes stumble when she rode out over the plains or along the river bank. But she, Sabrina, would go on into time, as through Johnny and Louisa she went back into time …

‘I shall live for ever and ever,' thought Sabrina, exalted. ‘But however long I live I shall never again be as happy as I am now.'

* * *

Wali Dad's father, who had been Conde Ramon's friend, died that spring, and Sir Ebenezer and Lady Emily left for the cool air of Simla where Emily's health improved and Sir Ebenezer attended those endless conferences that were to result in the disaster of the first Afghan War.

In England, at Ware, the primroses that had barely come into bud at the time of Sabrina's wedding gave place to crocuses and daffodils and tulips. Hawthorn whitened the hedges, and the chestnut trees in the park were bright with spires of blossom that vied with the bunting and streamers that decorated the approaches to the castle in honour of Huntly's wedding. Huntly's bride Julia looked classically beautiful upon her wedding-day, and Huntly appeared adequately happy. Charlotte, for her part, felt smugly satisfied: Huntly was safely married to the bride of her choice, while Sabrina, that constant thorn in Charlotte's flesh, had contracted a
mésalliance
with a young Spaniard and been disinherited by her grandfather. There was only one thorn left in Charlotte's bed of roses; the fact that her three daughters were still unmarried. And judging from their looks, thought their grandfather, likely to remain so.

The Earl had aged considerably of late. Emily's letter, informing him that Sabrina had taken matters into her own hands and contracted a runaway match without his approval and against his express wishes and commands, had dealt him a cruel blow. He had been an autocrat all his days, and with the exception of his son John and his grand-daughter Sabrina, no one had ever seriously taken issue with him - with the result that it never occurred to him that anyone would ever do so.

Emily's letter had come overland via Egypt and had reached him in less than eight weeks, and only a few days before Huntly's wedding. It was followed shortly afterwards by one from Sabrina, but his rage and grief were still at white-heat, and he had enclosed her letter in another covering and returned it to her with the seal unbroken.

3

The furnace heat of the Indian summer closed upon Oudh like a steel trap from which there was no escape. But the high white rooms of the Casa de los Pavos Reales, with their thick walls and shuttered windows and the patios with their fountains and orange trees, had been built for coolness, and Sabrina did not suffer too greatly from the heat that first summer; though she grew pale from the enforced inaction of the long months.

In the early morning before the sun rose, or in the late evening after it had set, she would walk in the gardens with Marcos or ride with him in the park-like grounds that surrounded the house. But even at those hours of the day the stifling heat was almost unbearable and she was thankful to return to the dim, shuttered rooms where the swinging punkahs and the tinkling splash of the fountains at least gave an illusion of coolness.

Marcos, born in the East and educated among the sun-baked plains and fierce heats of Aragon, remained to a large extent impervious to the rising temperature. His father had left vast estates, for the Count had from time to time acquired land in outlying parts of Oudh, and as Marcos spent the greater part of each day in the saddle, Sabrina would often have been lonely that summer had it not been for Juanita.

Juanita and her baby daughter, and her husband Wali Dad, were frequent visitors at the Casa Ballesteros; but Aziza Begum never came. ‘I am too old and too fat to go abroad,' said the Begum to her daughter-in-law, ‘and your brother's wife speaks our tongue but haltingly. Also it fills my heart with sorrow to walk in the house of the friend of my youth who is dead - as my youth also is dead.' But often during the long hot evenings, if Marcos were away for the night, Sabrina would visit the Gulab Mahal, and as the moon rose into the dusty twilight the women would sit out on the flat roofs of the zenana quarter looking out across the minarets and white roof-tops, the green trees and gilded cupolas of the evil, beautiful, fantastic city of Lucknow, while Aziza Begum cracked jokes and shook with silent laughter, stuffed her mouth with strange sweetmeats from a silver platter, or told long, long stories of her youth and of kings and princes and nobles of Oudh these many years in their graves.

At first Sabrina did not understand more than one word in ten of the old lady's conversation, but she had a quick ear and a lively intelligence and would spend hours of the long sweltering days lying on a couch under a swaying punkah at Pavos Reales, learning the language from Juanita or Wali Dad or the wizened old
munshi
whom Marcos had engaged to teach her. Aziza Begum complimented her upon her progress, and as a mark of her
favour sent a woman of her household, Zobeida, to be Sabrina's personal servant.

Zobeida was the daughter of a zenana slave; dark-skinned and sturdily built, with a quick brain, light deft hands, willing feet and a steadfast heart; and Sabrina grew to love her and to depend upon her as though she had been some faithful nurse from the days of her childhood. A love that Zobeida reciprocated with the protective devotion of a mother for her child.

With the arrival of the monsoon rains the deadly grip of the hot weather relaxed its hold a little. The warm rain fell from a dun-coloured sky in sheets of water that turned the parched dust to rivers of mud, and brought a fantastic wave of green, growing things where only yesterday there had been nothing but burnt grass. Then the hot winds would blow again and the mud cake over, and the sun blaze savagely down, turning the caked mud to iron and covering it again with a thick layer of dust that would whirl up into the dust-devils that danced across the scorching plains - until the next rain would fall and turn it back once more into liquid mud and green, steaming jungle.

But while the plains gasped in the grip of the hot weather, in the hills, among the pines and deodars of Simla, the Governor-General, encouraged by the irresponsible advice of men whose lust for power and conquest had made them deaf to the dictates of prudence, justice or common sense, had decided to declare war on Afghanistan.

It mattered little to Lord Auckland and his favoured advisers that Dost Mohammed, the Amir of Afghanistan, was the chosen ruler of a people who infinitely preferred him to that elderly weakling, Shah Shuja - the ex-ruler whom they had driven from his kingdom many years before. The Governor-General's advisers distrusted a man of the Amir's ability, who had proved that he could both think and act for himself. They considered it a vital matter of policy that Afghanistan should be an ally of Britain, and suspecting that Dost Mohammed might intrigue with Russia, decided to force the rejected Shah Shuja back on his unwilling people, in the belief that gratitude and self-interest would bind him to the British. With the object of making an ally of Afghanistan they began by making her a foe, and went to war with the Amir in order to avoid the remote possibility of his declaring war on the British. With this end in view they concluded a treaty that amounted to nothing less than a pact of mutual aggression with the dying Ranjit Singh, ‘Lion of the Punjab' and ruler of the Sikhs.

In November, with the onset of the cold weather, the grandiloquently named ‘Army of the Indus' assembled at Ferozepore before marching on Afghanistan, and Sir Ebenezer Barton, sick at heart at what he considered to be a war of unparalleled injustice and stupidity, resigned his seat upon the Council and retired to Lunjore, a small state upon the western borders of Oudh, to spend the winter months as the guest of the Resident, who was an old and valued friend.

Business connected with his mother's family called Marcos south that
winter, and as the roads were rough and travel both difficult and uncomfortable, he went alone.

At any other time Sabrina would have insisted on accompanying him, but she was pregnant and subject to frequent attacks of nausea. And realizing that should she insist on going she would not only cause him considerable worry and alarm, but perhaps jeopardize the life of the unborn child, she gave way with as good a grace as she could muster, and agreed to spend the intervening weeks until Marcos's return with her Aunt Emily and her uncle at the Residency at Lunjore.

The Residency was a rambling house that had once been part of a much larger building; the summer residence of a local princeling. A former ‘John Company' official had altered it to a great extent, pulling down those parts of it that had formed the zenana quarters and retaining only the larger reception rooms to which he had added considerably. The house stood in extensive grounds on the edge of the jungle from which it was separated by a deep nullah that formed a natural barrier and defence on one side, while on the other three the original fort-like ramparts had been replaced by a high wall of whitewashed stone in which only the massive gateway still remained to mark the fact that this had once been a semi-royal residence.

Despite her grief at being separated from Marcos, Sabrina was delighted to see her aunt and uncle again. They had parted from her in some anger after a brief interview following her wedding, but had made their peace by letter when the cool airs and quiet of Simla had restored Lady Emily to better health and a more tolerant frame of mind. ‘After all, it is the child's own life,' decided Emily. ‘She has the right to choose her own path. Papa is not God, and he cannot expect to alter the course of people's lives just to suit himself.' And she had sat down and written an affectionate letter to Sabrina that had gone a long way towards healing the hurt caused by the return of her own letter, unopened, by her grandfather.

‘He does not really mean it, Aunt Emily,' explained Sabrina, discussing her grandfather's conduct with his only daughter. ‘He hates not getting his own way. Well so do I, so I can sympathize with him a great deal. I got my way about Marcos and Grandpapa did not, and so he is in a rage about it. But one day I shall go back to Ware and, you will see, everything will be all right again. I am so fond of him, and I know that he cannot stop loving me just because I have disobeyed him.'

Emily was not so sure, but she kept silent. She was considerably disturbed by her niece's appearance. Sabrina was painfully thin and there were faint hollows in her cheeks and under her grey eyes, and no colour in her face. Her white skin had a strange look of transparency which reminded Emily uncomfortably of a story that she had once heard about Mary Stuart, the ill-fated Queen of Scots. Legend had it that when the Queen drank wine it could be seen passing down her throat, and though Emily, an eminently sensible woman, had always considered the story ridiculous, now she was not
so sure. Sabrina's little neck and her white, thin arms and shoulders had a curiously delicate and transparent look that her aunt did not like.

‘We must feed her up,' said Sir Ebenezer robustly when Emily spoke of her niece's appearance. ‘Plenty of good food and rest; that is what she needs. She'll get both in this house and soon be as right as a trivet.'

Emily duly set about tempting her niece's appetite with the connivance of the Resident's Goanese cook, but the early days of Sabrina's pregnancy were proving troublesome ones, and she could eat little. The baby was not expected until late in June, and it was as yet only December; but Sabrina was racked by constant bouts of nausea and weakness which the doctor could do little to alleviate. And she did not like the Lunjore Residency.

This dislike was presumably only another manifestation of her condition, but the big house with its wide verandahs and high, echoing rooms seemed to her not only unfriendly, but in some inexplicable way actually hostile. It was different from other houses, but she could not tell why.

From the first moment that she had stepped over the threshold of the Casa de los Pavos Reales, Marcos's house had seemed to welcome her, and the feeling of a personal identity that almost every house possesses in some degree had been, in Pavos Reales, a friendly one. But it was not so in the Residency of Lunjore.

Perhaps her nerves were on edge. Perhaps it was because she was missing Marcos, or because of the baby; but she not only disliked the house, but was at times even afraid of it. While there were lights in the rooms, and her host the Resident, her aunt and uncle or the servants or any guests moved about them, they were just rooms: a background for the people who occupied them. But on the few occasions when she had been alone in them it was different, for then the empty rooms would seem to her to be full of whispers - and of dead people.

The garden was no better, for the dead were there too. And once, riding home in the bright morning sunlight from the open plain and the distant river, she thought that she saw the figure of a girl running swiftly towards her across the narrow wooden bridge that spanned the nullah behind the house; a girl in a strange hooped dress. Peri, the gentle chestnut mare, saw her too and shied violently, nearly throwing Sabrina. But it was only a trick of the sunlight and the wind-blown shadow thrown by a tall cluster of bamboos …

Zobeida, sensing her young mistress's unease, took to sleeping on a palliasse at the foot of her bed, and though Sabrina was ashamed of her fears she found Zobeida's presence comforting and did not dissuade her. To Emily, who had caught her once standing stiff and frightened in the dusk, she had said confusedly: ‘There is someone who is very unhappy here. As if - as if it were
me
!'

Early in January Marcos returned from the south and took Sabrina home to the Casa de los Pavos Reales. He too, as Emily had been, was startled by Sabrina's thinness and pallor. Until this visit to the south he had never been
away from her for longer than forty-eight hours since their marriage, and so had not noticed the change in her, for it had come about by imperceptible degrees. Now, seeing her again after an absence of several weeks, it struck him forcibly and with alarm.

‘It is only the baby,' Sabrina assured him. ‘I am really quite well, I promise you. And the sickness is so much better. The doctor says it is only natural, so you must not be alarmed. Once I am home again in dear Pavos Reales I shall be quite well again - you will see. It is only because I have missed you both so much.' And certainly once she was back in the House of the Peacocks her spirits rose and some of the lovely colour returned to her cheeks.