by M. M. Kaye
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 a
gain 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.
Juanita did not come so often to visit her these days, for the birth of her own second child was imminent and she preferred to remain within the seclusion of her own house. But when Marcos was absent Sabrina spent much of her time at the Gulab Mahal, talking and laughing with Juanita and Aziza Begum and playing with her niece, Juanita’s black-eyed, dimpled first-born.
She was there on a golden morning in early February when Juanita’s pains began, and would have stayed with her but that Aziza Begum and Juanita herself would not permit it.
‘Send her away, my mother,’ whispered Juanita urgently, the sweat already pearling on her brow. ‘The English are not as we. They tell their maidens nothing of these things, and because it will go hard with her when her time comes, it were better she were not now made afraid.’
‘Arré! and who should know better than I?’ nodded the Begum. ‘Her time will indeed be hard. She is not made for the bearing of children. Hai mai! I will send her away, do not fear. Rest now, my daughter, and in a little while my son’s son lies in thy arms.’
Aziza Begum stuffed her mouth with pan leaves and waddled out to summon the carriage and reassure the anxious Sabrina. ‘Do not fear: it is but a time that comes to all women. And what woman amongst us all would forgo it had she the choice? Not one, my bird! - not one. For is not this the end for which we were born? All will be well here. I, who have borne many children, tell you so.’
To Sabrina the obese old woman who was Juanita’s mother-in-law had always seemed a grotesque figure; but now, suddenly, she saw her with new eyes. Saw the kindness and the shrewd wisdom in the bright eyes that peered out of that fat, wrinkled mask; the firmness and character that lay in those small plump hands; and, all at once, the vanished beauty and charm that had once been possessed by this corpulent and shapeless old woman who had been Anne Marie’s life-long friend.
Moved by a sudden impulse Sabrina put out her hand, and groping for those beringed fingers, clung to them tightly. The Begum embraced her. It was surprising how comforting that plump sandalwood-scented shoulder was to lay one’s head against. ‘Haste now, little daughter, and return to thy husband’s house, and I will send word when my son’s son is born.’ The old woman patted Sabrina’s shoulder and whisked away a sudden tear with the corner of her veil.
Juanita’s son was born before moonrise. A lusty, dark-haired creature with his mother’s fair skin and his father’s black eyes. ‘He is born in an auspicious hour,’ said the Begum. ‘Arré, arré, do not cry, thumbling! Thou shalt be a great king and have seven sons.’
As the cold weather neared its end and once again the days began to take on an uncomfortable warmth, Sabrina moved abroad less and less. Her slight figure was heavy now and distorted by the coming child, and she had suffered considerable unnecessary discomfort from the new tightly laced, small-waisted fashions of the day, until Juanita had persuaded her to adopt the Mohammedan form of dress for wear inside her own house. Lady Emily had been deeply shocked by the news of this innovation, but with the arrival of the hot weather Sabrina found the loose light silks of the Eastern garb unbelievably comfortable after the high, close-fitting bodices and innumerable petticoats demanded by the European mode.
The Bartons were moving to Simla once more, and Emily was anxious that Sabrina should accompany them. But Sabrina would not leave Pavos Reales, despite the fact that Marcos supported her aunt’s plan.
‘It is not good for you to remain here in the heat, querida,’ said Marcos. ‘Already the nights grow hot, and this is only the first week of March. April is a bad month in the plains, and May is worse. Go now with your aunt to the hills and I will join you there at the end of May. Se lo prometo!’
But Sabrina was obstinate. ‘Your mother did not go to the hills when her children were born, and neither did Juanita. Besides, my son will spend his childhood in this country as you did, so he must get used to such things as heat. It does not trouble you, and it is only because I was born and brought up in a cold country that I feel it. This is your home and mine, and I want my children to be born here.’ Yet in the end she had agreed to go: though not in March. Marcos had affairs that would keep him in Oudh until May, and she would remain at Pavos Reales until these were completed, and then remove to the hills with him.
So it was arranged, and the Bartons, who had been staying at Pavos Reales on their way to the hills, bade her an affectionate if anxious farewell and left for Simla.
It was often lonely at the Casa de los Pavos Reales during the early weeks of the hot weather, for Sabrina could no longer go riding with Marcos; and with Emily in Simla and Juanita unable to leave the Gulab Mahal, there were few visitors at the great house on the banks of the Goomti. Yet Sabrina did not find her solitude irksome. She loved the high, white-walled rooms, the beautiful portraits and carvings and tapestries that the old Conde had brought from Spain; the dark, glowing devildom of the magnificent Velasquez that hung on one wall of the vast drawing-room, and the scent of orange blossom and water on parched ground that drifted in from the patios. She loved the sound of horses’ hooves that told her that Marcos had returned, and their walks together in the late evening along the stone-paved river terrace.
She was very happy, with a quiet serene happiness that nothing could touch or spoil. It was as though there was a wall around her; a shining transparent wall through which she could see the outside world, but which protected her from its harshness as the glass of a greenhouse protects a rare and delicate plant from the cold east wind. She loved and was loved. She was adored, cherished and protected. The whole world, it seemed to her, was beautiful, and life stretched ahead of her like a green path bordered with flowers along which she and Marcos would wander hand in hand, gently, happily and without haste …
Far to the north, as April drew to a close, Shah Shuja with the British Envoy, Macnaghten, riding behind him, entered Kandahar. Dost Mohammed’s brother and his men had fled before the ponderous advance of the Army of the Indus, and the population of Kandahar gave the ageing Shah Shuja a riotous welcome that deceived Macnaghten into thinking that all Afghanistan was ready to welcome the puppet Amir and to depose Dost Mohammed - a conviction that the complete failure of a mammoth ‘Demonstration of Welcome’, staged two weeks later and virtually unattended by the disgusted Afghan population, apparently did little or nothing to erase.
In the last week of April Marcos had once more to leave for the south. Anne Marie’s father, on his retirement from the service of the East India Company’s army, had acquired land on the Malabar coast and settled down to the life of a planter. His estate had prospered and he had died a rich man. Anne Marie had been his sole heiress and the property had passed on her death to her children, Marcos and Juanita, but their grandfather’s old overseer, who had managed the estate for many years, had died the previous autumn, and it was this that had necessitated Marcos’s visit to the estate during the early part of the cold weather. He had installed a new overseer and had returned satisfied that the property would continue to be efficiently managed, but now news had been received of the new overseer’s death from snake-bite, and also of disaffection among the coolies employed on the estate.
Marcos and Wali Dad, discussing the matter, decided that their best plan would be to sell the Malabar estates and re-invest the money in Oudh, since the property was too far away to be administered except at second-hand and at long range (an arrangement which the present news had proved to be unsatisfactory), and the two rode south in the last week of April, promising to return by the end of May.
‘It will not be for long, querida,’ said Marcos, comforting Sabrina. ‘I shall be back before May is out, I promise you.’
But Sabrina would not be comforted. ‘Why must you go? Why cannot Wali Dad go alone? Marcos, you cannot leav
e me now! I could not bear it. I am afraid!’
‘Qué pasa? Afraid of what, my heart?’
‘I do not know. I only know that I cannot bear to let you go. Let Wali Dad go.’
‘We must both go, cara mía,’ said Marcos, his arms about her. ‘If only one were to go, it would have to be I. Wali Dad comes to help me. If he went alone the local officials and administrators might cause him trouble, for he is not of the south, but of Oudh. But once we have disposed of the estates we need never be worried by business in the south again. Does that not please you? I shall never again have the need to go more than a night’s journey away from you.’
‘You think more of the money than of me,’ wept Sabrina.
‘That is not true, querida. The property should indeed fetch a high price. But half of it is Juanita’s, and if we delay, troubles and bad management may destroy its value. Would you have me rob Juanita of a large portion of the inheritance our mother left her, because I would prefer to remain with my wife instead of taking an uncomfortable and tedious journey on a business matter? I cannot believe it!’
Marcos had intended to send Sabrina to the care of her aunt before he rode south, since there was now no reason for her to delay her departure to the hills. But Sir Ebenezer had written from Simla to say that Lady Emily had suffered a severe attack of malarial fever, and though now convalescent, the state of her health was still causing anxiety. Reading that letter, Marcos realized that there would be little use in sending his wife to the care of a sick woman, since Lady Emily would be in no case to look after her, and Sabrina herself in no condition to administer to the needs of an ailing aunt.
‘She must come to me,’ said Juanita. ‘I know she does not wish to leave Pavos Reales, and that it is cooler there. But it is not right that she should be alone just now. Loneliness is not good for her at such a time. Send her to me, Marcos. It will only be for a few weeks, and as soon as you return we will start for the hills. The child will not be born until late in June, and we shall be in the cool air many days before then. Have a care to my husband and return swiftly.’