by M. M. Kaye
Charlotte gave the project her enthusiastic support, but Sabrina herself was in two minds upon the matter. She was devoted to her Aunt Emily and found the prospect of a voyage to India both exciting and agreeable; on the other hand, there was Dennis Allington. She was not at all sure that she was not in love with Dennis, and she suspected that the whole idea of a year’s stay in India was solely designed to part her from him.
While she wavered, Captain Allington himself decided the matter; and with it her future …
It had happened at a ball at Ormesley Court where Sabrina, having torn the lace flouncing of her dress during a country dance, had retired to get it repaired. Hurrying back to the ballroom she had taken a short cut through a side corridor and come suddenly upon Captain Dennis Allington kissing Mrs Jack Ormesley.
To do the Captain justice he had not intended to kiss Mrs Ormesley, whom he had been conducting to a salon where refreshments were being served. But as they passed through a small corridor which happened at the moment to be deserted, Mrs Ormesley had tripped on the trailing end of her long lace scarf, and would have fallen had Captain Allington not caught her. Not being a man to waste such an opportunity he kissed the lady, who returned his embrace with every appearance of enjoyment, and he would have thought no more of the incident had he not lifted his head to encounter the frozen gaze of the Honourable Sabrina Grantham.
On such small trifles do fate and the future depend. If Sabrina had not torn six inches of flouncing from the hem of her dress, or if Mrs Jack Ormesley’s scarf had been six inches shorter, Emily would have sailed for India alone instead of being accompanied by her favourite niece.
Sabrina had been enchanted with India. She possessed a gay and uncritical nature, and everything, from the long and tedious voyage round the Cape to their arrival in the teeming port of Calcutta, delighted her. Dennis Allington and his perfidy were soon forgotten, and long before the end of the journey was reached Sabrina would have found it difficult to recall his features in any detail.
She enjoyed her customary success in Anglo-Indian society, but did not find herself in love again with any of the officers and officials who danced attendance upon her.
‘I must be getting old, Aunt Emily,’ said Sabrina in a panic. ‘I haven’t been in love for a year!’
It was 1837, and she was twenty-one.
Her grandfather had already written demanding her return, but since Emily’s health had not been too good of late, Sabrina did not feel that she could leave her. Nor, in fact, did she wish to leave, for India still held a potent charm for her. Her Uncle Ebenezer, as a prominent member of the Governor-General’s Council, would go on stately tours during the cold season, accompanied by his wife and her niece, and it was during an official visit to the court of the King of Oudh that Sabrina had met Juanita de Ballesteros.
Juanita’s father, the Conde de los Aguilares, was a wealthy and eccentric Spanish nobleman who as a young man had travelled much in the East. Arriving in Oudh almost half a century earlier he had been greatly attracted to the country and the people, and in particular to a nephew of the ruling King. The two young men, Spaniard and Mussulman, had become fast friends. They were curiously alike in both features and temperament. Perhaps because the blood of a dark-eyed daughter of Islam, from the days of the Moorish conquest of Spain, had been transmitted down the ages to this son of Castille and Aragon.
Ramon de Ballesteros, Conde de los Aguilares, never returned to Spain. Oudh became his home, and the rich, barbaric, colourful kingdom his country. The King of Oudh made him a grant of land on the banks of the River Goomti, and there, surrounded by groves of orange and lemon trees and green, formal gardens, he built a house; a vast Spanish castello in the heart of India.
The Casa de los Pavos Reales, the House of the Peacocks, merged into the Eastern scene with the same ease and grace as its owner - Spanish architecture, with its cool open courtyards and splashing fountains, its high rooms and secretive balconied windows, being to a large extent the legacy of a conqueror from the East.
In due course the Conde married; not, as might have been predicted, a daughter of the royal house of Oudh, but the only child of a French émigré who had fled with his family from the bloody holocaust of the Revolution, and had subsequently taken service in the Army of the East India Company.
Anne Marie de Selincourt was a gentle dark-eyed creature who could not remember the country of her birth. She had been barely a year old when her parents had fled with her from France, and having lived ever since in the East, the Hindustani and court Persian of Oudh were as familiar to her as the Tamil and Telegu of the south, or the English tongue and her own native French. She settled into the colourful polyglot life of her husband’s great house on the Goomti and never realized its strangeness. Her friends were the slender, olive-skinned, dark-eyed wives of the princes and nobles of Oudh, and her fourth child, Juanita, was born in the house of Aziza Begum, wife of her husband’s great friend, Mirza Ali Shah.
‘She shall marry the son of an Emperor and wear pearls on her head, and ride on an elephant in a golden howdah,’ said Aziza Begum to Anne Marie, rocking her own small son in her arms; and the two young mothers had laughed together over the heads of their sleeping children.
Only two of Anne Marie’s seven children survived their infancy; her son Marcos and her daughter Juanita. The others fell early victims to cholera and typhus, those two deadly plagues of the East. When Marcos was fourteen years old his father dispatched him to Spain in order that his son might complete his education in his native land, and Marcos did not return for nine years. By then he was a slim young man with the dark, hawk-like handsomeness that is so frequently seen among the great families of Aragon and Castille, and his sister Juanita had married her childhood playmate, Wali Dad, son of Ali Shah and Aziza Begum.
The marriage had aroused considerable opposition from both Christian priests and Mohammedan maulvis, but had in the end received the consent and approval of both families. Aziza Begum’s slender figure had grown corpulent and unwieldy with the advancing years and her blue-black hair was streaked with grey, while the unrelenting heat of the Indian summers had shrivelled the young Anne Marie to a thin little woman with a nutcracker face and prematurely white hair. Their husbands were elderly grey-beards, their children grown men and women, and Aziza Begum was already grandmother to half a dozen plump brown babies. But though they and the world had changed, the old friendship between the two families had not. Handsome young Wali Dad, Aziza’s first-born, fell in love with Anne Marie’s gentle dark-eyed daughter: his parents had never denied him anything, and why should they deny him this? ‘There is no God but God,’ said Ali Shah to the maulvis, ‘but is not Hasrat Isa (Jesus Christ) also numbered among the Prophets? And are not Christians also “Children of the Book"?’
‘One of our own line was a Moorish maiden,’ said the Conde Ramon. ‘And Ali Shah is my oldest friend and Oudh the country of my adoption. If the young people desire it, I will not refuse my consent.’
Sabrina Grantham, visiting Oudh with her aunt and uncle in the spring of 1837, met Juanita de Ballesteros, wife of Wali Dad, at a banquet in the women’s quarters of the Chutter Manzil Palace in Lucknow.
It was strange that two women of such dissimilar background and temperament should have found so much in common, but between Sabrina and Juanita there sprang up and flourished an instant and deep affection. They were young and of an age; each found the other different and stimulating and romantic, and they were friends from the first moment of their meeting: Sabrina, blonde and grey-eyed, with a skin like milk, wearing the trim-waisted, full-skirted fashions of the day with their absurd flower and ribbon and feather-decked hats as if they had been designed solely to accentuate her beauty, and Juanita, whose creamy magnolia-petal skin and large brown eyes lent a piquant touch of European charm to the graceful Eastern costume that she habitually wore.
Emily, who had remained staunchly insular, was at first both shocked and disgusted at the idea of a
‘white woman’ married to an Indian and living in what she persisted in referring to as a ‘harem’. But she could not help being charmed by Juanita and her handsome gay young husband, her elderly and eccentric father and her gentle little mother; and as the long warm days of March merged into the heat of April, she allowed Sabrina to spend more and more time at the Casa de los Pavos Reales or in the Gulab Mahal* - the little pink stucco palace in a quiet corner of the city, where Juanita lived.
When April gave place to May and the heat danced and shivered on the walls and domes and minarets of Lucknow, Sir Ebenezer with his wife and niece retreated to the hills, taking Juanita with them: not because the heat held any terrors for her, but because she was expecting her first child, who would be born in the autumn, and as her health had not been too good of late it was felt advisable to send her to the cool of the hills. There was also an additional consideration. Trouble was brewing in the city.
The rulers of Oudh had been among the most corrupt of Eastern potentates - though this had not deterred the East India Company from lending troops to the King, in return for a large subsidy, in order to help him keep his dissatisfied subjects in a proper state of subjection. The present ruler, Nasser-ood-din Hyder, was easily the worst of a long line of evil men, and he had already been exhorted by Sir William Bentinck to mend his ways. But neither warnings nor threats had weighed with the King, and at long last the Court of Directors of the East India Company had taken action. They had sent a dispatch to Colonel John Low, the Resident of Lucknow, authorizing the temporary assumption of government in Oudh by the Company. But Colonel Low, certain that such a move would be misunderstood and bitterly resented throughout India, had begged instead that Nasser-ood-din should be deposed and replaced by another ruler selected from among the royal line. The strictest secrecy had been preserved, but the East has a sixth sense in such matters. Suspicion and speculation were rife, and all Oudh seethed with rumour and counter-rumour …
The Conde Ramon had of recent years withdrawn himself more and more from the world outside the high white walls that bordered his estate, and save for a handful of old friends, of whom only a few were European, he lived a life of retirement and seclusion. But even into this quiet backwater there crept ripples of fear and unease, so that when Lady Emily Barton had suggested that his daughter accompany their party to the hills, he had accepted the invitation with gratitude and urged his young son-in-law to agree to Juanita’s departure.
It was cool among the pine trees and rhododendron forests of the hills, and here life appeared to move at a more peaceful and leisurely pace than in the teeming plains. Beyond the folds of the foothills rose the higher ranges; line upon line of wild, jungle-clad hills with behind and above them the changeless snows, their white, ethereal peaks unmoved by Time or the hurrying feet of History. Yet history was being made and the times were changing.
Far away in a small rainy island at the other side of the world a King died, and a young girl scarcely out of the schoolroom, who was to give her name to one of the greatest periods of British history and in time to be proclaimed Empress of all India, ascended the throne of Great Britain. The Victorian age had begun.
* * *
When the monsoon rains broke over the burning plains of India, Juanita would have returned to Lucknow. But Wali Dad and her mother-in-law Aziza Begum forbade it. ‘Stay yet awhile, beloved,’ wrote Wali Dad, ‘for there is evil work afoot in this city and I am uneasy as to what is toward. Though my house is dark without the light of thy presence, nevertheless the thought that thou, my Heart and my Life, art safe from all danger, is of great comfort to me. When this evil is past I will come and fetch thee away.’
So Juanita stayed in the hills while far below, in the hot, humid capital of Oudh, Colonel John Low pleaded by dispatch and letter for the replacement of Nasser-ood-din by another of the royal house, rather than the annexation of his kingdom by the Company.
Colonel Low, like many of his contemporaries in the ranks of ‘John Company’, was alarmed and dismayed at the direction the affairs of the Company had taken. The Honourable the East India Company - ‘John Company’ - was a company of merchants and traders. They had come to India to buy and sell, and trade and profits were what they desired. They did not want an Empire. Yet slowly and insidiously, or so it seemed, an Empire was being thrust upon them.
In the days of the Great Moguls a British ship’s surgeon had successfully treated the badly burned and beloved daughter of the Emperor Shahjahan, and when asked what he wished for in reward, had requested permission for the British to trade in Bengal. Those first small trading posts had flourished and paid rich dividends, but in their very success they had aroused the envy and resentment of other traders from beyond the seas.
The French, the Arabs, the Dutch and the Portuguese were also rivals for the golden prizes of Indian trade, and the British merchants, in order to protect their factories and their lives, had been forced to arm themselves and to hire mercenaries. They had in time succeeded in defeating their rivals and in establishing a monopoly of trade, but as their interests grew and expanded, and more and yet more factories and warehouses were built, the need for larger forces for their protection grew also; for the times were troublous ones, and India a medieval medley of small and warring states riddled with corruption, trickery and intrigue. The ‘Company of Merchants’ made treaties with many of these petty kings, and on behalf of their allies fought with others, while their arms, of necessity, kept pace with their profits. The Genie of Force had been let out of the bottle and it became impossible to replace it. Instead of reaping a harvest of gold, as they had in the early years, the Directors of the East India Company found themselves pouring out treasure upon what had become no less than a vast private army, and acquiring, in order to protect their trade, a huge and ever-enlarging Empire.
It was Robert Clive, one-time clerk in the service of the Company, who conquered India and propounded the revolutionary theory that if a country is taken over from its rightful owners, then it must be governed for the greater benefit of those owners and not merely to the advantage of the conquerors; and the erstwhile merchant adventurers found themselves, to the dismay of many of their members, dealing more and more in territorial administration and less and less in trade. Their armies policed the land and they appointed Governors and Residents and Political Agents to dispense law and justice to this vast country to which they had come to barter and remained to conquer, and their profits dwindled away.
‘No man goes so far as he who knows not where he is going,’ said Oliver Cromwell. The men of ‘John Company’ had not known where they were going, and they had travelled a long and far road from the days of the seventeenth century and those first small trading settlements on the coast of Coromandel. They had defeated Tippu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, and divided and apportioned his territory. They had defeated the Mahrattas and the Gurkhas, and deposed the Peishwa and added his lands to the Presidency of Bombay. Was the ancient Kingdom of Oudh now to go the same way, and its rule pass from the hands of its royal house into those of the Company? Colonel Low, for one, was resolved to do all he could to prevent it.
The whole question of India, he considered, was getting out of hand, for the greater the Company’s territorial power and possessions, the less profit in terms of trade. ‘John Company’ was not only losing money, but was heavily in debt, and it was out of the question that they should take over the sole government of Oudh. Besides, he did not believe that the people of Oudh, though they had little love for their vicious kings and would welcome the fall of Nasser-ood-din, would approve of the rule of a foreign company in his stead. They would only see it as another example of Western aggression and the barefaced theft of more territory, and there would be riots and up-risings - and once more the profits of trade would be swallowed up in unprofitable wars. Yet Nasser-ood-din must be deposed.
But even as Colonel Low pondered the question, one aspect of his problem was solved for him. On a hot night in July Nasser
-ood-din Hyder died by poison; and immediately all Oudh was in a ferment. The succession was in dispute and the streets of Lucknow surged with gangs of lawless troops ready to strike in support of their particular nominee, and only the firmness and courage of Low and a handful of British assistants saved the seething city from a bath of violence and blood. Eventually, with the consent of Lord Auckland the Governor-General, an aged and crippled uncle of the late King ascended the throne of Oudh. The city quietened, and Juanita returned to the pink stucco palace in Lucknow.
Juanita’s brother was back from Spain: a tall stranger whose gay laughter awoke unaccustomed echoes in the quiet of the Casa de los Pavos Reales.
The warm, drenching rains of September washed the city clean, and October brought in the brilliant days and cool nights of the Indian cold weather. The Bartons returned to Lucknow where they were to spend a month with the Resident, and Sabrina, paying a call at the House of the Peacocks with her Aunt Emily, met Marcos de Ballesteros.
It was of course inevitable that they should fall in love. Marcos, dark-haired and romantically handsome, with his gay laugh and the novelty and charm of one newly come from that most charming of countries, Spain, and Sabrina Grantham who had, surprisingly enough, not been in love for over a year, and who was so small and slim and blondly beautiful.
‘My niece, Sabrina—’
‘My son, Marcos—’
They had stood looking at each other in the cool white hall of the Casa de los Pavos Reales where the orange trees grew in tubs as they do in Spain, and where the sunlight, filtering through the lemon trees planted about the house, filled the hall with a green, aqueous light.
Marcos too had read Milton, and the same lines that Ashby had quoted so many years ago at the cradle of the infant Sabrina rose now in the mind of the young grandee of Spain:
‘Sabrina!’ thought Marcos, staring at her entranced. “‘Sabrina fair - listen where thou art sitting, under the glassy, cool translucent wave” Yes, she is like a mermaid. A water nymph.’