by M. M. Kaye
For a time it seemed as though the shock of Zobeida’s death had seriously affected the child’s health. She crept about the castle, white-faced and shivering, and spent long hours in her great-grandfather’s room, sitting on a low stool beside him, but seldom speaking. The old man’s heart ached for his darling, but he knew that this sort of sorrow has to be endured, and that in the end the sharpness of even the greatest grief becomes blunted. Had he not proved this himself? When the news had come that Johnny was dead he had thought himself an old man prematurely aged by grief, who would never care deeply for anyone or anything again. And yet Johnny had died … how many years ago? He could not remember - a lifetime ago it seemed - and he had loved Johnny’s daughter, Sabrina; and now he could do nothing to assuage the grief of her child, sorrowing for the loss of a foster-mother and friend.
After Zobeida’s death Winter turned more and more to her make-believe world of the future. The years might be passing slowly, but at least they were passing: only a few more of them and Conway would come home and marry her. She would pull out the little ring on its worn loop of ribbon and look at it and feel comforted. It was her talisman and her magic lamp; as was the thought of the Gulab Mahal of which Beda had so often spoken, where one day they were to return so that they might live happily ever after. But Beda would never go there now, and Winter grew afraid that now Beda was dead she might forget the language that had been as a mother-tongue to her. As Conway’s wife she must be able to speak it so that she could be of help to him in his work, and so that she would not be a stranger in the Gulab Mahal. Thereafter she spoke it to herself daily, translating into it whole chapters from her school books.
She wrote long letters to Conway Barton, telling him of her small doings and asking news of him and his work, but Mr Barton’s replies were disappointing. They were apt to be full of complaints about his superiors, and Winter would burn with resentment against these stubborn and mean-minded officials who could oppose so good and kind a man. Conway’s superiors were, it appeared, an envious lot who were jealous of his outstanding talents and judgement and did their best to keep him from preferment.
Mr Barton was still occupying the post of Commissioner of Lunjore, a district bordering on Oudh, which he had originally obtained through the influence and reputation of his Uncle Ebenezer. He had expected to be promoted before now to some more prominent position, and did not hesitate to accuse several senior political officers and various members of Council of envy, malice and all uncharitableness in that he had not.
It was a day in which influence in high places formed an excellent substitute for talent. But Sir Ebenezer neither could nor would do anything more for his nephew, since Conway Barton possessed a love of two things that have never yet failed to ruin those devotees who have worshipped them to excess. Drink and Women.
For a time his strength of body and natural health stood him in good stead, but eventually indulgence and dissipation began to take their toll, aided and abetted by climate and the conditions of life in the East. The prospect of being able to retire to England and enjoy a vast fortune did nothing to assist him, for his ambition had been solely confined to amassing riches, and this was now within his grasp. He would gain what he wanted by the easier route of marriage, and so need no longer trouble himself with work. Time was all that now lay between him and the fulfilment of his ambition, and he intended to see that it passed as pleasantly as possible.
Conway Barton despised all coloured races and was wont to refer to them impartially as ‘niggers’. But his distaste for a brown skin did not appear to extend itself to those women of the country who in turn occupied the small bibi-gurh, or women’s house, that he had built behind the Residency, and he did not realize that with every day that passed his body came to mirror more clearly his many debaucheries. He put on weight and became fat and slothful, and because he abandoned the practice of taking active exercise in the open air, his once tanned skin became pale and puffy and his yellow hair thinned.
He would squint down at his spreading stomach and say that he feared he had put on a little weight, but that it was nothing that the cold weather, a few hours in the saddle and a cut in diet would not cure, and that he would take himself in hand and start getting back into good shape next week. But the first steps were never taken and the unhealthy fat accumulated on shoulders, stomach and jowl like snow drifting down upon the sharp angles of roof-top and gable, padding them out into gross curves.
His work deteriorated with his figure, but the fact that he was Sir Ebenezer’s nephew saved him from much interference. And Fortune was kind to him in that it sent him as an assistant Alex Randall, one of those younger men, protégés and pupils of Sir Henry Lawrence; soldiers who had perforce become administrators - some of them the best administrators the world has ever seen.
Randall was content to do the work and let his chief take the credit: an arrangement that suited Mr Barton admirably. The Commissioner relapsed deeper into sloth and dissipation, and with it his delusions of grandeur and the power and position that wealth would bring him grew daily greater; nourished by the unwholesome drugs, opium and hashish, that he had begun to toy with. It was from this dream world that he was abruptly brought back to reality by the arrival of a letter from the Earl of Ware.
Winter would be seventeen in the following spring, wrote the Earl in a wavering senile hand, and although he had not intended that she should marry for some years to come, he felt himself to be failing fast. The doctors held out small hopes of his surviving for another year, and he wished Conway to return as soon as possible so that he might have the happiness of seeing his dear child safely married before he died.
So the day had come! Fortune lay at last within Mr Barton’s grasp and all that he needed to do was to send in his resignation or, to hasten matters, demand sick-leave on the score of ill-health (and indeed he did not feel at all the thing these days), and as soon as it could be arranged, which would probably not be before the cold season, he would take ship for England.
The Commissioner heaved himself out of his chair and rolled across the living-room towards his office. And as he neared the door he saw a face …
It was a fat face, sallow and puffy, with pendulous jowls and heavy dark pouches under pale, protuberant eyes; the hair above it was thin and straggling, as was the long ragged moustache, much stained with nicotine. His own face, looking back at him from a glass-fronted cabinet that a trick of the light had turned into a looking-glass.
Mr Barton stopped dead, staring at that reflected face with a sort of horror. It was rarely that he saw himself in a looking-glass - the idle luxurious life of the East having made it virtually unnecessary for him to do so, since he was shaved, bathed and dressed, his hair combed and his nails cut by soft-footed, deft-handed servants. On those few occasions when he did glance at himself in a glass, he saw only the reflection of what he expected to see there. The Conway Barton of a dozen, or even four years ago: a little older perhaps - that was not to be wondered at - but still, not too bad. Not too bad. But now he had been taken off guard, and because he had not expected to see his own reflection he had thought for a moment that it was some stranger that he saw, and had not immediately realized that what he was looking at was his own face.
He stood where he was, swaying a little and breathing heavily, staring at the glass-fronted cabinet. After a full five minutes he walked unsteadily across the room and into his bedroom, and unhooking the looking-glass that hung on the wall above his dressing table, carried it over to the window and stared down into it.
Thoughts were churning round in his head. Some of them familiar ones. ‘If I give up drink and all this rich greasy food, and take cold baths and walk and ride every day, I could get fit again by the cold weather. I could do it.’ But he knew he could not. He knew that he no longer possessed the will-power. He knew too, as he stared down at his reflection in the glass, that if he were to present himself as he now was to his betrothed and her guardian, they would almost certai
nly show him the door. He was seeing himself for the first time as others saw him; as the seventeen-year-old Winter would see him, and even the senile, half-blind Earl of Ware.
What a fool he had been! What an unutterable fool to take chances when such a dazzling future was at stake. If he were to return to England now he might lose it all. And yet if he did not go— Conway Barton flung the looking-glass from him in a spasm of futile rage and it smashed against the wall and strewed the carpet with a score of glinting fragments that winked up at him, reflecting a score of gross, middle-aged men with fat white faces and bulbous red-rimmed eyes.
He could not go to England! To go would mean losing the fortune that he had come to look upon as already his own. Yet how could he possibly ignore the Earl’s summons? Then all at once a solution presented itself and he laughed aloud. A cackling, half-hysterical laugh of relief. Of course! - if the mountain cannot come to Mahomet, Mahomet must come to the mountain. He laughed again, and uproariously, at the pleasantry.
The girl must come out and marry him here. He would write to Ware. He would think of some plausible excuse. Once let her arrive in Lunjore, alone and without friends, and the marriage could be hurried through before she had time for thought. She would be far from Ware and with no one to turn to except possible shipboard acquaintances. It would be easy. She was young - she would barely be seventeen - and to return alone to Ware, unmarried, when she had left it with her bridal clothes and her trousseau, en route to her wedding, would be unthinkable. He would write at once. Letters to Ware and to his solicitors. Alex Randall should take them. And, better still, Captain Randall should escort the bride back to Lunjore, for although some respectable female returning to the East would be found to act as chaperon, a male escort to protect her would establish confidence. And who better than his trusted personal assistant?
Mr Commissioner Barton repaired to his office, and having stimulated himself to the effort by a large glass of rum and brandy, wrote steadily. A terse letter to his solicitors; a more lengthy and explanatory one to Lord Ware; another, requesting her assistance and relying on her good offices, to Lady Julia, and finally an affectionate and affecting letter to Winter herself, hinting at ill-health incurred through zeal towards duty, and the patriotic necessity of remaining at his post in anxious and troublous times when it would be inadvisable for the guiding hand to be summarily removed from the helm.
Mr Barton regarded this last epistle with considerable satisfaction. It conveyed just the right note of pathos and manly devotion to duty, and should serve to remind his betrothed that womanly duty as well as inclination should send her flying to his side.
It was late by the time the letters were finished and sealed, and the Commissioner summoned the attendant who squatted native-fashion just outside the door and bade him send a messenger to Captain Randall’s bungalow requesting that officer’s immediate presence. After which, well pleased with his handling of a difficult situation, he called for more brandy and drank deeply, congratulating himself upon the fact that although his outward appearance might have suffered some temporary change for the worse during the past five years there was still, thank heaven! nothing wrong with his brain.
6
The chill wind that was driving tattered regiments of cloud across a watery moon brought with it a sudden and vicious spatter of raindrops and a hint of snow. It jerked unexpectedly at the folds of a long military cloak that wrapped the solitary rider on the moor road, and wrenching it back sent it flapping out behind him like the wings of some monstrous bat.
Captain Alex Randall swore into the cold night and reining in his horse gathered the heavy folds about him again, gripping the slack beneath his arm. He rose in his stirrups and peered ahead into the wind-torn darkness, but could see no sign of light or human habitation. The moon, momentarily shaking itself free from the millrace of the clouds, showed nothing but a desolation of moorland across which the lonely road cut a pale track like the wake of a ship running before the wind.
A fresh gust of rain whipped out of the darkness and set Medusa jerking at her bit and sliding on the rough roadway, impatient to be off. Randall gave the mare her head and rode forward into the driving wind.
It was on Medusa’s account that the Captain was on the road at this late hour. He had hoped to reach Ware before dark, but just beyond Highelm the mare had cast a shoe, and a passing yokel having informed him that the next smithy lay over ten miles ahead, he had had no choice but to turn back and get the damage repaired by a smith in Highelm.
There had been a considerable delay before a new shoe could be fitted and Medusa ready for the road again, and the smith, inquiring as to Captain Randall’s destination, had advised against a resumption of his journey that day. There was, he affirmed, an excellent coaching inn in Highelm, and the road to Ware lay over a lonely stretch of moor, unpleasant enough by daylight in bad weather, but certainly to be avoided by night, with the sky darkening to storm clouds, a rising wind, and the threat of snow before morning. Only last week, said the smith, a London doctor, hastening to his Lordship, had been overtaken by darkness on the moorland road and had perforce to spend the night in his stationary coach owing to the loss of a wheel - his coachman having mistaken the lie of the road in the darkness: ‘An’ ‘e might ‘av’ saved hisself the journey. It’s for Thursday we hears. There’s bin many goin’ past this day.’
The smith, a well-meaning man, had urged Captain Randall to spend the night at ‘The George’ and resume his journey on the morrow, but Randall was not to be persuaded. His distaste for his errand was sufficiently great for the prospect of further delay to be unpalatable, and the sooner he was finished and done with it, and away again, the better. He thanked the smith for his well-meant advice but persisted in his intention of continuing on his way, and night had overtaken him while some eight to ten miles still lay between him and the tall towers and florid battlements of Ware.
The rain that drove under Captain Randall’s hat-brim and trickled icily down his neck was turning to snow. Intermittent gusts of gradually thickening flakes streamed out of the darkness, touching his face with a thousand soft, furtive fingers and clotting in the folds of his cloak, and he began to think regretfully of the warm beds and roaring fires of ‘The George Inn’, and to regard his chances of reaching Ware that night with a less optimistic eye. His hands, encased in heavy gauntlets, were so frozen that he could barely feel the reins, and his booted feet ached with cold. He flexed his numbed fingers and smiled wrily into the darkness.
How many times during the last ten or eleven years had he not longed for the sight of grey skies and the smell and bite of east winds blowing across English soil? How many times, in the merciless grinding heat of an Indian summer, lying panting under a flapping punkah that merely disturbed but could not cool the molten air, had he not yearned in imagination for the ice and frost and snow of an English winter? Well he had them now, and he should be satisfied. But perhaps the blazing suns of the last twelve years had thinned his blood, for the icy wind that disputed his passage chilled him to the bone and his whole body ached with cold and fatigue.
To distract his thoughts from his physical discomforts he turned them to the counter-irritant of his present mission, and for perhaps the hundredth time, and with a deepening sense of exasperation and distaste, mentally reviewed the events that had led to his riding along this moorland road by night and in the teeth of a rising gale towards the great house of Ware.
Almost twelve years ago, in the autumn of 1844, Alex Mallory Randall, having completed his training at the Honourable the East India Company’s Military College at Addiscombe and celebrated his eighteenth birthday, had embarked for the shores of India. He had served with distinction in that vast and turbulent land, and it was a day in which young men possessed of ability and ambition could find ample scope for their talents and energy in the colourful cauldron of ‘John Company’s’ rapidly expanding Empire.
Alex had fought at Ferozeshah and Sobraon and at Chillianwalla
h - that disastrous shambles that had cost Lord Gough over two thousand four hundred lives and had been claimed as a victory by both Sikhs and British. He had been fortunate enough to catch the eye of the irascible Commander-in-Chief himself, and had been rewarded by a brevet to the rank of Lieutenant. As a result, he was removed almost immediately from regimental duty and set to work in an administrative capacity under the eye of that great administrator, Henry Lawrence.
Lawrence’s passionate love and understanding of the country and its peoples was untainted by the lust for conquest, and he expected - and got – as gruelling a standard of work from his subordinates as he himself gave to the task before him. Under his tutelage Alex had been in turn surveyor, road-builder, and magistrate, and had helped to govern and control vast expanses of lawless territory at an age when many a man is licking stamps or running errands. His handling of a swift and ugly crisis on the North-West Frontier had led to a second brevet, but he had not been permitted to return to his Regiment, and had once more found himself employed in a capacity that was more political than military.
His immediate superior in his present appointment was Mr Conway Barton, Commissioner of Lunjore, and Alex Randall had not taken to his chief. There were too many aspects of Mr Barton’s character and habits that failed to commend themselves to him, but the two men had worked together reasonably amicably. Alex avoided his chief’s company as far as possible and, as that gentleman was only too willing to transfer the bulk of the work to his junior’s shoulders, went his own way to a large extent, unhampered by much interference.