Shadow of the Moon (98 page)

And then in January she had heard news of him at last. Old Dasim Ali, who had friends everywhere, had heard by a roundabout route that there was a Sahib again in Lunjore who had brought back order to the district. He had been protected by a bodyguard of men provided by a Sirdar who had reason to be grateful to him, and with this backing he had taken control of Lunjore, put down the malcontents and set up courts again with native magistrates and judges and native police, so that life was gradually returning to normal. The rumour gave no name, but Winter did not need one. She knew that it must be Alex, and that he had been right to go.

All through January the insurgents had kept up their attacks on the Alam Bagh, but in mid-January the Maulvi had been wounded and driven back. Their inability to carry the Alam Bagh by assault, and the defeats inflicted upon them, disheartened the rebels, and they began to quarrel among themselves, and many drifted away, returning to their own towns and villages. But many more stayed and continued to attack, fighting with ferocity and valour, and towards the end of February a last and desperate assault was launched against the garrison. The Royal Begum of Oudh had accompanied the rebel army in person, together with her Prime Minister and many of the great nobles of Oudh, riding in state on gorgeously caparisoned elephants.

Winter heard the opening of the cannonade in the early morning, and it shook the walls of the pink palace and sent the startled crows and pigeons cawing and whirling above the roofs of the city. But the roar of the guns meant no more to her than the cawing of the crows, for her pains had started before dawn and the guns were only a dim and disregarded background to the ordeal of birth.

It was not an easy birth, and there had been times when Ameera and Mumtaz Begum and Hamida, and others of the women who were continuously in and out of the painted room, had looked at each other in fear and anxiety.
But Winter remembered a long, hot, agonizing day in the Hirren Minar, and Alex's voice talking to Lottie - explaining, encouraging, soothing; and it was as if he spoke to her now as he had spoken then to Lottie; telling her not to be afraid. And she had not been afraid.

Through the waves of pain she could see the pink sunset sky that was the walls of her room; the dear enchanted trees and flowers that swayed in a secret breeze against that sky, and the birds and beasts that had watched her own birth and been her first playthings.

The sun had set and the moon had risen. Ameera had lit the oil-lamp, and her shadow and Hamida's and other shadows of women moved and leapt upon the walls, and the ceiling was lost in a rosy mist as it had been on the night when Alex had come down from the roof, and on the night that he had left her. And then suddenly she had thought that he was in the room, and had screamed to him by name - a scream that rang out through the open windows and across the silent garden and awoke the echo that lived within the high, encircling walls - ‘Alex!'…
Alex!
…
Alex!
… And to the sound of that echo Alex's son was born.

It was March when the long-expected attack upon Lucknow began, and day after endless day the guns had roared in the city while the streets became battlegrounds and graveyards and charnel houses, and the dead littered every yard of the contested ground.

Colin Campbell's army - Highlanders, Sikhs, Punjabis, British and Indian regiments of Cavalry and Infantry, Peel's Naval Brigade and Jung Bahadur's Gurkhas from Nepal - had stormed the defences and flung themselves on the guns, fighting forward yard by yard through the red, reeking streets; through the storm of grape and canister and round shot and the choking smoke of burning houses; past fortified palaces and over the bodies of the grinning dead, driving the insurgents back from street to street, from building to building …

Curiously enough - or perhaps justly - it was Carlyon who was largely responsible for saving the Gulab Mahal from the sack and slaughter and destruction that overtook almost every house in that shattered city. Mr Lapeuta, Mr Dobbie and Lord Carlyon, Lou Cottar, Mrs Hossack and the children, had all reached safety. And they had told their stories, and told too of Captain Alex Randall's wife who had remained behind in the house and with the people who had sheltered them. And later, when the Delhi Column had joined Sir Colin Campbell's force and the army moved to the final attack upon Lucknow, Carlyon had used his considerable influence to urge that the Gulab Mahal should be granted as much protection as was possible in such circumstances. It had been promised him, and even in the frenzy of the fighting the promise had not been forgotten. With the terrible tumult of battle ebbing and surging like a furious sea through the city, rifle-butts had
knocked on the barred door of the Gulab Mahal and men's voices had shouted above the clamour, demanding entrance.

Winter had gone down to them alone, wearing Juanita's white dress, not knowing who it might be. She had heard the British voices above the din and had opened the gate, tugging at the heavy bars and locks with her small hands - for the gateman had run away in terror - and had opened it at last to see the smoke-blackened, blood-streaked faces that filled the once quiet street.

They were men of the Highland Brigade and half a dozen mounted sowars of Hodson's Horse, and there was an officer with them. A man on horseback who laughed down at her and dismounted to take her hand. ‘Do you remember me, Mrs Alex? I met you at Delhi - William Hodson.'

‘Yes,' said Winter, looking up into the white, battle-grimed, laughing face of the man whom Alex had said would always be twenty paces ahead, and thinking that no one who had ever met him would be likely to forget him: ‘I remember.'

‘I cannot stay,' said Hodson. ‘I came only to tell you that as far as possible this house will be protected. If you see Alex before I do, tell him that the astrologer in Amritsar was right! He will know what that means. But if we get these wretches on the run I may see him before you do.'

He sprang back into the saddle, saluted her, and wheeling his horse galloped away with his men behind him; his face as eager and his eyes as hot and bright and glittering as though he rode to meet a friend or a lover instead of the death that awaited him that day.

The Highlanders had stared at Winter open-mouthed, and had grinned at her. Friendly, amazed, half-shy smiles that had transformed them in an instant from furious, fighting animals with the red haze of killing on their faces, to kindly, ordinary men with wives and children and sweethearts of their own. Then the door had been barred again and an order signed by Sir Colin Campbell himself nailed to it, and while the fighting lasted a guard had stood at the gate and protected the Gulab Mahal from the looting and the frenzy of battle-crazed, blood-drunk troops until the worst of that delirium was past.

Food had become scarce again in the pink stucco palace while the fighting swayed to and fro through the city and none dared venture beyond the walls, and towards the end of the month, when the last resistance had been crushed and the terrible guns were silent, there was little food to be obtained in the broken, burnt-out bazaars, and the shattered city starved.

Winter grew very thin in those days - as did Ameera and Hamida, and many others not only in the pink palace but in all Lucknow. But the baby throve, and her anxiety was not on her son's account. It was, as it had always been, for Alex. For the fall of Lucknow had not brought peace to Oudh.

General Sir Colin Campbell, the Commander-in-Chief, had committed one of those incomprehensible tactical errors that mar the success of so many campaigns. He had prevented General Outram from cutting off the enemy's retreat, with the result that the greater part of the opposing army had escaped.
And old Dasim Ali, hearing that news, had shaken his head lugubriously and wagged his red beard. If only part of that army crossed into Lunjore, said Dasim Ali, it would go hard with Randall Sahib - if he were there, and still alive.

April brought with it once again a warning of the molten heat to come, and the small bare rooms of the Gulab Mahal seemed airless once more, and stifling. Food was still scarce and milk was still scarcer - but news was scarcest of all, and what there was of it was never reassuring.

The mutiny was being stamped out, and the savage reprisals that Alex had feared and predicted were accompanying that process - in the old and evil belief that only blood and savagery can repay and wipe out the stain of blood and savagery.

The British troops who had been rushed to the defence of the dying Empire of a ‘Company of Merchants Trading to the East' expected no quarter and gave none. They went into battle, shouting as their battle-cry
‘Remember Cawnpore! Remember Cawnpore!'
- and they remembered Cawnpore and killed without mercy and hung without mercy; condemning a man as often as not for the colour of his skin as from any proof of guilt.

But although it would be many months yet before peace was fully restored it was already plain that the prophecy that the rule of the Company would end a hundred years after Plassey was to be fulfilled. India had become too great a thing to be the private possession of a Trading Company. It would have to be taken over by the Crown; that long step forward that Alex had spoken of.

‘We have not won back Hind,' said Walayat Shah, ‘but it was the Company's Raj that we had hoped to pull down, and,
Shook'r Khooda
, we have succeeded in that! For now the Company's Raj will go, and their long reign of robbery and confiscation will be ended.'

Soon it would be May again, and the breathless, burning days that a year ago had seen the fuel catch fire would see it still burning fiercely, though with a dying flame, in Jhansi and Rohilkhand and Gwalior and Oudh. But there was still no news from Lunjore—

‘Surely if her husband were alive he would send word?' said the women of the Gulab Mahal. ‘It must be that he is dead.'

That thought was often clear on their faces and in their kind, troubled eyes, and one day it had been too clear to be borne, and Winter had answered it as though it had been spoken aloud:

‘No! It is not true. He is not dead. He will come for me some day. I have only to wait …'

And she had snatched up her son and carried him up to Alex's roof-top although the sun had not yet set and the heat shimmered on the hot stonework, and had strained her eyes in the direction of Lunjore as though her love and longing could reach beyond the horizon and pierce the distance and the dust-clouds and heat-haze that hid it from her sight.

The withered leaves of the trees below her rattled drily under the fingers of a little hot wind that blew through the garden. A wind that must have blown over Lunjore. ‘Some day,' thought Winter. ‘One day …'

They were words that she had been saying all her life. She had said them as a child at Ware. ‘Some day I shall go back to the Gulab Mahal—' And she had come back. Surely some day Alex would come back too.

The sun dipped down towards the horizon and bathed the shattered city in beauty, hiding its blackened, gaping scars, and Winter remembered what Hodson had said to her - Hodson whose star, as the astrologer in Amritsar had prophesied so many years ago, ‘would arise and burn bright among much blood', and who had died in the battle for the city - ‘
I may see him before you do.
' Had he too spoken prophetically ? Had he indeed met Alex?

Quite suddenly she could bear it no longer, and she turned and ran desperately, as she had run before, to the refuge of the painted room, sobbing and shuddering.

The reflected glow of the sunset filled it with a warm rosy light, touching the trees and the birds and the flowers into the same enchanted life that lamplight could give them, and the leaves and the petals welcomed her and the birds and the beasts nodded to her and Firishta watched her with a bright, friendly, reassuring eye.

She pushed the bed to one side and sank down on the matting with the child in her arms, and leaned her head against the cool carved plaster, pressing her cheek against the comforting curve of Firishta's round green head. Her eyes closed and gradually the helpless trembling of her body lessened as little by little the fear ebbed away from her.

The baby went to sleep in her lap and the glow faded from the room, taking the gay brightness from it and leaving it as cool and as softly colourful as an opal.

Outside the windows the birds were settling down to rest with noisy chatterings and cawings and a flutter of wings among the orange trees, and beyond the far wall of the garden the dome of the little whitewashed mosque with its iron emblem of the crescent moon cut a lilac pattern against the evening sky.

The hum of the city rose up about the Gulab Mahal, washing around it; and through it and above it Winter could hear all the familiar, friendly sounds of the house. The distant chatter of shrill feminine voices, children laughing, a baby crying, the aged gateman clearing his throat and coughing asthmatically, a clatter of cooking-pots and the creak of the well-wheel. The sounds mingled and mixed with the no less dear and familiar scents of water sprinkled on parched ground, of the spicy smell of Eastern cooking and the smoke of dung-fires, the scent of warm dust and sun-soaked stone.

The sounds and the scents seemed to weave a web about the painted room, isolating it in safety, and Winter drew a long slow sigh and felt the last of the shuddering fear leave her.

‘Some day,' she said, whispering the words against Firishta's green head. ‘One day—'

There were footsteps and a murmur of voices in the passage beyond the doorway, and then someone lifted the heavy curtain that hung before it, and she opened her eyes and looked up. And it was Alex.

Angrezi
British; English

Angrezi-log
British people

Ayah
child's nurse

Bairagi
Hindu holy man

Bakri
goat

Begum
Mohammedan lady

Belait
England

Beshak
assuredly

Bhil
grave dug by the Thugs for their victims

Bhoosa
straw

Bibi-gurh
women's house

Bourka
one-piece head-to-heels cloak, with small square of coarse net to see through

Budmarsh
rascal; bad man

Bund
irrigation bank

Bunnia
shopkeeper

Burra-lat-Sahib
Great-lord-Sahib (Governor-General)

Butchas
‘young ones' (children)

Charpoy
Indian bedstead (usually string or webbing)

Chatti
large earthenware water-pot

Chik
sunblind made of split cane

Chirag
small earthenware oil-lamp, used in festivals

Chowkidar
night-watchman

Chuddah
sheet or shawl

Chunam
a fine, polished plaster

Chunna
roasted gram (a form of grain)

Chuppatti
thin flat cake of unleavened bread

Chupprassi
peon

Dacoits
robbers

Daffadar
sergeant (cavalry)

Dâk
mail; post

Dâk-bungalow
posting-house; rest-house

Dâk-ghari
horse-drawn vehicle carrying mail

Dazi
tailor

Deputtah
head-scarf

Dhobi
washer of clothes; laundryman

Dhooli
litter; palanquin

Durbar
public audience; levee

Ekka
light two-wheeled trap

Fakir
religious mendicant

Feringhi
foreigner

Ghari
any horse-drawn vehicle

Ghee
clarified butter

Gopi
milkmaid

Gurra
earthenware water-pot

Havildar
sergeant (infantry)

Hookah
water-pipe for smoking tobacco

Howdah
seat carried on back of elephant

Huzoor
Your Honour

Ilaqa
district

Jaghirdar
landowner

Jehad
holy war

Jemadar
junior Indian officer promoted from the ranks (cavalry or infantry)

Jezail
long-barrelled musket

Jheel
shallow, marshy lake

Juggra
trouble; quarrel

Jung-i-lat Sahib
Commander-in-Chief

Kala hirren
blackbuck

Khansamah
cook

Khidmatgar
waiter at table

Khussee
short-handled axe, carried by Thugs

Koss
two miles

Koti
house

Kotwal
headman

Kutcha
makeshift

Lance naik
lance corporal

Lathi
long, heavy staff, usually made from bamboo

Lotah
small brass water-pot

Lughais
Thugs who were responsible for the burial of the dead

Machan
small platform built in a tree

Mahout
elephant driver

Maidan
parade-ground

Manji
boatman

Maro
! Strike! or Kill!

Masala
spice

Maulvi
title of a Mohammedan priest

Mem-log
white women

Mullah
Mohammedan priest

Munshi
teacher, writer

Nani
grandmother (diminutive)

Nauker-log
servants (literally, ‘servant-people')
Nautch-girl
dancing-girl

Nullah
ravine or dry water-course

Padishah
ruler

Pan
betel-nut rolled in a bayleaf and chewed

Parao
camping-site

Piara
darling

Puggari
turban

Pulton
infantry regiment

Punkah
length of matting or heavy material pulled by a rope to make a breeze

Purdah
seclusion of women (literally, ‘curtain')

Pushtu
the language of the Pathans

Resai
quilt

Rissala
cavalry (regiment)

Ruth
domed purdah cart, drawn by bullocks

Sadhu
Hindu holy man

Sahib-log
white people

Saht-bai
literally, ‘seven brothers': small brown birds which go about in groups, usually of seven

Sepoy
infantry soldier

Serai
caravan hostel

Shabash
! Bravo!

Shadi
wedding; marriage

Shahin
peregrine falcon

Shamianah
large tent; marquee

Shikar
hunting and shooting

Shikari
hunter, finder of game

Sirdar
Indian officer of high rank

Sowar
cavalry trooper

Subadar
chief Indian officer of company of sepoys

Syce
groom

Taklief
trouble

Talukdar
large landholder

Terai
a tract of land running along the foot of the Himalayas north of the Ganges

Tulwar
curved sword

Zemindar
farmer

Zenana
woman's quarter