by M. M. Kaye
So Sabrina moved from the Casa de los Pavos Reales to the pink stucco palace in Lucknow city, and watched Marcos and Wali Dad ride away under the flaming glory of the gold-mohur trees in Juanita’s garden, her eyes misted with tears.
Marcos, turning in his saddle for a last look as he rode under the arch of the gateway, saw her standing among the hard, fretted shadows of the garden, an incongruous little figure with her white skin and soft blonde curls in that flamboyant oriental setting, and wished with all his heart that he were not leaving her. But it would not be for long …
With his departure it was as if the shining world of beauty and contentment in which Sabrina had walked had shattered like some fragile and iridescent soap bubble at the touch of a rough hand. She missed him with an intensity that grew rather than diminished as the days wore on. She missed, too, the cool stately rooms of Pavos Reales and the quiet of the vast park-like grounds that surrounded it.
The Gulab Mahal - the ‘Rose Palace’ - was full of noise, and the rooms with their walls painted and carved or inlaid with vari-coloured marbles and shining pieces of mother-of-pearl, and their windows screened with stone tracery, were stiflingly hot. Below the innumerable carved balconies lay paved courtyards and gardens thick with mango and orange and gold-mohur trees, while beyond and all about the high wall that hemmed them in pressed the teeming city with its crowded bazaars and gilded mosques, green gardens and fantastic palaces.
The noise of the city beat about the pink walls of the Rose Palace night and day, filling the small, hot, stifling rooms with sound, as the unguents and essences used by Aziza Begum and the zenana women filled them with the heavy scent of sandalwood and attar-of-roses, and the cooking-pots of the kitchen courtyards filled them with the smell of the boiling ghee, curry and asafoetida.
Even the nights brought only a diminution of the noise; never silence. Tom-toms throbbed in the crowded mazes of the city, beating in counterpoint to the piping of flutes and the tinkle of sitars, the barking of pariah dogs, the crying of children, the clatter of armed horsemen riding through the narrow streets, or the drunken shouts of revellers returning from some debauch at the King’s palace.
With the passing of each slow day the heat became greater, and during the hours of daylight the walls and the roofs of the houses and the stone paving of the courtyards would steadily absorb the fierce rays of the sun, so that when night fell it seemed as though every stone and brick in the city gave off the stored heat in waves, as from the open door of a potter’s kiln.
Sabrina found it possible to sleep a little during the day, for a hot, dry wind frequently blew during the day-time, and then the doors and windows would be opened and hung with curious thick matted curtains made of woven roots, which were kept soaked with water. The hot winds blowing through the damp roots cooled the rooms and filled them with a not unpleasant aromatic odour. But often the wind did not blow; and always it died at sunset.
Sabrina’s thin body felt hot and dry and shrivelled with heat, and she began to long for the cool pine-scented air of the hills as a man parched with thirst longs for a draught of cold water, and to regret that she had not gone to the hills with Emily in March as Marcos had wished her to do. But she would never again go to the hills with Emily. Marcos had been absent just over three weeks, and May was half-way over when a brief letter arrived from Sir Ebenezer Barton. Emily was dead. She had suffered a return of the fever, wrote Sir Ebenezer, and had died two days later. Her distant relative, Mrs Grantham, had been with her. Sir Ebenezer’s handwriting, normally so clear and firm, wavered like that of an old man far gone in years.
Sabrina sat holding the letter in her hand and staring dry-eyed before her. She was looking back down the years to Ware and seeing Aunt Emily’s face in the candle-lit nursery, teaching a three-year-old Sabrina her first prayers. At Aunt Emily tying her sash for her first party; protecting her from Aunt Charlotte’s incessant nagging; reading her fairy-stories and telling her tales of her father’s youth … A whole vista of Aunt Emilys like figures reflected in opposing sheets of looking-glass, stretching away and away, endlessly repeated in an endless corridor. All of them kind; all of them loving …
And suddenly Sabrina was afraid, with the fear that grips a sleeper when he dreams that he walks through the door of a familiar house and finds that the rooms are changed and strange and deserted, and that his dream has turned into a nightmare.
There had been no news of Marcos or Wali Dad beyond a brief note dispatched from the village where they had spent the first night of their journey. The lack of news did not worry Juanita or the Begum, who knew only too well the state of the roads and the difficulties of sending word through the dâk from out-of-the-way stations. But it worried Sabrina, and during the long hot hours of the sleepless nights her imagination would conjure up pictures of horror and calamity, and she would remember the overseer who had died of snake-bite. Marcos too might be bitten by a snake - attacked by a tiger - murdered by the wandering devotees of Thugee - fall a victim to fever or cholera or the plague, or die terribly of hydrophobia. The India that had once seemed to her so glamorous and beautiful a country began to wear a different aspect, for she knew by now that underneath that glamour and beauty lurked undreamed-of depths of cruelty and terror, just as the graceful minarets and gilded domes of the palaces rose above narrow, filthy streets and the squalid hovels of the poor.
On the far side of the high wall that bounded the garden of the Gulab Mahal, and immediately fronting her window, stood a mosque. It was an unpretentious little mosque built of whitewashed brick and plaster, its bulblike dome crowned by an iron horned moon that is the symbol of Islam. The sun rose directly behind it, and with every dawn, while the air was still faintly cool from the long hours of darkness, Sabrina would see it framed by the curve of the open window and silhouetted darkly against the saffron sky. And when, too soon, the sun rose, it would cast the curved shadow of that horned moon across the floor of her room.
The shadow would creep slowly across the matting as the sun rose into a brassy sky, and sometimes at night Sabrina would awake to find it lying black in the moonlight. It came to symbolize for her all the fear and loneliness of those long days, and that growing sense of being alone in an alien country and surrounded by people of an alien race. It was a threat and a warning. A token of the inescapable and grinding heat of the coming day. Heat that sapped the strength from Sabrina’s body and the power of connected thought from her brain.
She had not visited the Casa de los Pavos Reales since Marcos had left, but one breathless evening, after a day in which no wind had blown and the heavy curtains of wet kus-kus roots had only served to make the hot rooms of the Gulab Mahal more stifling, she was seized by a sudden desire to see it again and to walk through the gardens and along the river terrace. May was at best a burning month in the plains, but now a heat-wave held all Oudh in its grip and the mercury mounted steadily. But out at Pavos Reales it would be cooler. The trees and the open spaces and the terrace by the river would not hold this sweltering, remorseless heat as the city did.
Juanita offered to accompany her, but Sabrina preferred to go alone. Marcos had left a carriage for her use at the Gulab Mahal, and attended by Zobeida she was driven through the narrow, burning streets where the heat appeared to be imprisoned between the houses as water between the banks of a river, and out to the open country where the House of the Peacocks lay surrounded by acres of parkland and groves of trees.
The grass was burned brown and the neem trees were shedding their dying leaves over the pathways, but the orange and lemon and mango trees were still richly green, and the scent of late-flowering oleanders mingled with the heavy incense of the hot dust. The dim, shuttered rooms were close and stuffy and the patio fountains were silent, but after the noise and heat and colour of the Gulab Mahal it seemed to Sabrina incredibly cool and peaceful, and she wandered through the quiet, darkening rooms, touching the heavy Spanish furniture and the fragile French ornaments with a caressing hand,
as though they were friends whom she was greeting - or bidding farewell.
There were still a few late roses by the river terrace, and fallen petals lay among the parched grasses and made small splashes of colour on the hot stone paving. The river was low and barred with the faint silver ripples of shoal water, and white, long-legged birds like a species of small heron picked their way along the warm shallows, ghost-like in the dusk. A peacock called harshly from among the bamboo thickets, its cry catching the echo from the curved wall at the far end of the terrace: Pea-oor! … Pea-oor! … Pea-oor! Sabrina had always loved to hear the peacocks cry at dusk and dawn at the Casa de los Pavos Reales, but tonight it seemed to her that the harsh call held a strange aching note of sadness.
From somewhere out on the plains beyond the darkening river the sound was taken up by the faraway long-drawn howl of a jackal: wild, wailing and unutterably lonely, and Sabrina was seized once more by the sudden uncontrollable spasm of fear that she had experienced when she had read the news of Emily’s death. A fear of India. Of the savage alien lands that lay all about her, stretching away for thousands of miles and yet hemming her in. Of the dark, secretive, sideways-looking eyes; the tortuous unreadable minds behind those bland expressionless faces. The incredible cruelties that were practised within the King’s palaces, of which the zenana women whispered. The stories that Aziza Begum would tell by starlight, sitting on the flat roof-top overlooking the crowded city - stories of battle and intrigue and murder. Of queens and dancing-girls and zenana favourites burnt alive on the funeral pyres of their lords. Tales of the savage sack of great cities:
‘… then went the Queens and the wives and the women to an underground chamber to make the Johar: dressed as though for a marriage feast and bearing with them their gold and jewels and all the treasure of the city. And the vaults were sealed, and they made therein a great pyre and were destroyed there: and the treasure also. Then those of their men who were left armed themselves and threw wide the gates and went out to do battle; and were slain, every one. Thus when Salah-un-din the Conqueror rode with his warriors into the city, Lo! it was a city of the dead, and hollow as the palm of my hand …’
And yet again:
‘The son of Mahmoud took Fateh Khan prisoner and put out his eyes with a jewelled dagger; but still he refused to betray the hiding-place of his brother. Then Mahmoud and his family cut him in pieces, first an ear and then his nose; his right and then his left hand; but Fateh Khan said naught except to ask that they should speed his death. Only when his beard, which is sacred to a follower of the Prophet, was cut off did he shed tears. Then did they cut off his feet, the one after the other, but still he would not betray his brother, and at long last they cut his throat and death released him …’
Thus Aziza Begum, telling the stories that made up the blood-stained history of the land. But though the one was a story several centuries old, the other was a tale of Sabrina’s own lifetime - of the slaying of the elder brother of that very Dost Mohammed against whom Lord Auckland’s Army of the Indus was advancing in the hills beyond Kandahar. India had not changed greatly because a handful of London merchants had brought much of her territory under subjection. She had been conquered before, many times, since the days when Sikander Dulkhan (Alexander the Great) had fought his battles on her soil and built his roads and tanks and left behind his nameless viceroys. Greeks, Huns, Arabs, Tartars, Pathans, Persians, Moguls - India had seen them come and had watched the fires of their power blaze bright and die again leaving nothing but ashes; and had gone on her way …
Some of all this was in Sabrina’s mind as she stood on the river terrace of the Casa de los Pavos Reales and watched a vast yellow moon rise through the hot dusty twilight.
Daylight does not linger in the East as it does in cooler lands, and the Eastern twilight is barely a breath drawn between day and night. One moment the river ran gold in the last reflected glow of the sunset, and in the next the moon had laid a shining pathway across its dark surface and Sabrina’s shadow lay black on the moonlit terrace. A jackal howled again, nearer this time, and although nightfall had brought little or no alleviation of the oppressive heat, Sabrina shivered as though with a sudden chill, and drawing the light scarf of Indian gauze closer about her, she turned back to the house.
The familiar white walls with their wrought-iron balconies and deep window embrasures looked as friendly and as peaceful as they had on that other night when she and Marcos, newly wedded, had stood on the terrace among the lemon trees to see their guests ride away across the moonlit park. But it was hotter here than it had been down by the river. The stone flags of the terrace burnt under Sabrina’s thin, flat-soled slippers, and she could hear the old coachman’s dry little cough and the restless stamp and click of the horse’s hooves on the hard ground, and realized that it was getting late and that they wished to return. But the thought of the small hot rooms of the women’s quarter at the Gulab Mahal filled her with revulsion and she lingered among the trees, reluctant to leave.
A shadow moved on the ground beside her and Zobeida touched her arm, and presently they were driving away down the long moonlit avenue, and the white walls of Pavos Reales were swallowed up by the trees.
‘Perhaps I shall never see it again,’ said Sabrina slowly, and did not know that she had spoken aloud.
The heat of the city met them like a blast from a furnace, but the streets and bazaars were uncannily quiet. It was too hot for speech or movement and men had dragged their string cots into the roadways and lay in the hard moonlight, sprawled and silent like the victims of some medieval pestilence.
There was a riderless horse standing just within the gateway of the Gulab Mahal. A tired horse, lathered with sweat, its head drooping and the white dust of the roads thick on its heaving flanks. It stood among the dappled shadows of the flame trees, but Sabrina knew it. She knew all the Pavos Reales horses, and this was Suliman, who had been ridden by one of the servants who had accompanied Marcos to the south.
Her heart leapt with a sudden wild joy and she stood up, swaying to the movement of the carriage as it jolted over the uneven paving of the courtyard.
But it was not Marcos. A messenger only, bearing letters, said the servant who opened the carriage door. Sabrina brushed aside Zobeida’s hand and sprang to the ground. A letter from Marcos at last! Perhaps to say that he would be back in a few days. Only a few more days to wait. She ran down the short passage and up the two steep flights of narrow ill-lighted stairs that led to Juanita’s rooms, laughing as she ran.
After the dimly lit stairways, Juanita’s room seemed to blaze with light and it was full of people. Aziza Begum was there with two of her daughters and several serving-women. Juanita herself was holding a letter in her hand, and her face was white and frightened.
Sabrina stopped on the threshold and stood quite still. Her mouth was still curved with laughter and for a moment it stayed that way, as if Juanita’s face had been Medusa’s head and had turned her to stone. Then her lips closed stiffly and she said: ‘Marcos—?’
Juanita ran to her, putting her arms about her and holding her close.
‘Do not look like that, querida. He will not die. Many recover. Do not look so!’
Sabrina put her aside, pulling herself free of the clinging arms, and spoke across the small, hot, crowded room to Aziza Begum:
‘What is it? Tell me.’
‘It is the cholera, my daughter. One of thy husband’s servants brought a letter from my son. He thought it best that we should know, so that—’ The Begum checked herself and then said: ‘But thy husband is a young man and strong. He will recover, never fear. There is no need for thee to be over-anxious, little heart. In a few days he will be well again. Many recover from the cholera who are not as young and as strong as he.’
But Sabrina did not hear her. She had heard only the one word - cholera! The swift, dreaded plague of the East. Marcos had cholera. Even now he might be dying - dead. She must go to him. She must go at once …
The heat of the small room pressed upon her with an almost tangible weight, but it seemed to her that her brain was suddenly very clear and cold. The only clear thing in this queer hot room full of oddly hazy faces and bright spinning colours. The only cold thing in this furnace-like city. She looked at the faces around her, trying to focus them. Dark anxious faces. Dark anxious eyes. Juanita’s blanched cheeks. They were kind. She knew that. But they would try and stop her. They would prevent her going to Marcos. But Suliman was tethered by the gate. If she could only reach him she could ride away to Marcos and they could not catch her.
She backed away from them very slowly. Juanita took a swift step towards her, her hand outstretched, and the roomful of faces seemed to surge up and forwards. Sabrina whirled round and ran towards the stairs. The steep dark stairway yawned below her feet and she heard footsteps running behind her and glanced over her shoulder. And then she was falling, falling - falling into a hot spinning darkness that reached up and engulfed her.
Sabrina’s daughter was born as the sun rose, after a night of agonizing labour, and Juanita, watching the white lips move, bent close to catch the whispered words:
‘Don’t… let… it… touch—’
‘No, no,’ comforted Juanita, not knowing of what she spoke.
‘The shadow—’ persisted Sabrina. She was too exhausted to turn her head, but her eyes turned, and Juanita following their gaze saw them rest on the curious curved shadow of the crescent moon that the early morning sun threw across the wall, and she rose quickly and drew close the heavy wooden shutters that should have been closed an hour earlier to conserve what little coolness the night had brought into the room.