by M. M. Kaye
There had been a brief period, while his interest in his wife had lasted, when Winter too had eaten food that made her unaccountably ill, although the Commissioner appeared to suffer no ill-effects. And she had remembered Hamida and been frightened. But who in the house would want to get rid of her? Hamida had been different, for she had been a rival servant and her presence would have deprived the woman whom Conway had employed to look after his wife of profitable employment. No, it could not have been poison! She was allowing her imagination to run away with her.
Her illness had kept Conway out of her room for several days, and when she had recovered she had been careful to eat only from those dishes that Conway must also eat from. She had despised herself for doing so, but at least she had not been taken ill again - and Conway had returned to her bed.
Two days later she had had a narrow escape from a more unpleasant death. She had been about to take a bath in the small bathroom that led out of her dressing-room. It was in the oldest part of the house, a room with walls three feet thick and a vaulted stone ceiling which made the smallest sound echo eerily. The bath, a tin affair that was filled from buckets, stood in a shallow depression with a raised brick rim from which a sluice ran out through the thickness of the wall. At night the room was lit by a single oil-lamp that stood on a wooden bracket by the door, and on this occasion the lamp had been burning unevenly, blackening the glass. Winter had picked it up to adjust the wick, and the action had saved her, for she would never have seen the cobra whose raised head swung two feet above its coils until it was too late. But the movement of the lamp threw its menacing shadow, enormously exaggerated, on the wall behind the bath.
The slow sway of that shadow caught her eye, and she stared at it for a moment in bewilderment before she saw the thing that threw it - the slim, gleaming terror with its flickering tongue and spread, speckled hood that reared up beside the bath. She had not screamed, but her hand had moved involuntarily and the wick that she had been turning down had flared and gone out, leaving her in the black darkness with the hissing, angry snake. She had backed away, groping for the door, and after what had seemed an eternity she had found it, and turning the handle, stumbled into the dressing-room.
The cobra had been killed, but there had been no satisfactory explanation as to how it had got into the bathroom. It must have come through the sluice that took off the bath water, said Conway. But that was hardly possible, since the high verandah that surrounded the house raised the floor level of the rooms over three feet above the ground in the front and nearer five at the back, where the ground fell away in a slight gradient. In addition to which the verandah did not extend further than one wall of the bathroom. The other two walls, together with one wall of the dressing-room, were blank and windowless and backed onto a shallow gutter and open ground where a fig tree flourished luxuriantly, nourished by the bath water. The exit of the sluice jutted out in a stone lip from which the water fell clear of the wall into the gutter, and no snake could have come that way unless it had received assistance. It might, of course, have come up the steps of the bathroom verandah on the opposite side and entered by the doorway; though that seemed even more unlikely.
Winter was more shaken than she would have admitted. But there had been no more such incidents, and it did not occur to her that the fact that Conway had lost interest in her and had taken to sleeping in his own room again could have had anything to do with this.
27
Mr Barton did not allow the fact that he was now married to alter his way of life to any great extent, and his more raffish friends were frequent visitors at the Residency. Mrs Cottar, acidly witty, and Mrs Wilkinson, plump, pouting and feline, were often to be seen there, with or without their husbands, and the Tuesday parties of which Mrs Cottar had spoken were not discontinued. Winter played hostess at any of the Commissioner’s parties that might be considered official entertaining, but she had refused to preside at the long sessions of gambling and drinking that constituted these particular entertainments, and on Tuesdays she would retire early to bed with the plea of a headache.
Conway had attempted to take her to task on this score and to insist on her remaining, on the grounds that her early retirement was an insult to his guests. But here he had found, as he had found over the question of Hamida, that his young wife was not to be browbeaten. She would perform the duties of the Commissioner’s wife to the best of her ability, but these duties did not include lending her countenance to such questionable and noisy entertainments as the Tuesday parties.
She made no friends among the British community in Lunjore, and she did not like the Residency servants; in particular her ayah, Johara, the sister of the woman in the bibi-gurh who, so Conway had informed her - his eyes sliding away from hers - was the wife of his butler, Iman Bux, whom he had permitted to occupy the quarter. But she was given no opportunity to dismiss them. The capacity for gaiety and warmth and happiness that had shown itself, although shyly, on the long voyage from England, and the laughter that Ameera had released, had been cut off like flowers in a black frost, and Lunjore society found young Mrs Barton a cold little thing.
Mrs Gardener-Smith did indeed claim that her daughter Delia was Mrs Barton’s greatest friend, and Delia was often to be met with at the Residency. But if the truth were known she came there more on Colonel Moulson’s account than Winter’s. Winter had been surprised and disconcerted to find that Delia was becoming one of the ‘Tuesday Crowd’ at the Residency, for she had not thought that Mrs Gardener-Smith would permit it, and she was sure that Colonel Gardener-Smith–a silent, elderly, earnest man, wrapped up in his beloved Regiment - would not wish his daughter to attend such affairs.
Winter liked Colonel Gardener-Smith. He reminded her a little of her Great-Uncle Ashby, whose bookish tastes had insulated him from real life. Colonel Gardener-Smith’s narrow absorption in his Regiment and its welfare gave him much the same immunity from outside interests.
The Colonel had lately succeeded in putting into practice a long-cherished scheme for improving the lot of his sepoys’ families: the opening of a school for their children, run on European lines, and a medical centre for both parents and children. He had hoped that his wife and daughter would interest themselves in these admirable ventures, but Mrs Gardener-Smith and Delia had displayed nothing but dismay at such an idea, and the scheme itself was proving a disappointment. Colonel Gardener-Smith had lately discovered that his philanthropic venture was regarded by his sepoys as a subtle method of destroying their caste, and he had no hesitation in laying the blame for this attitude at the door of Colonel Packer, the commanding officer of the 105th Bengal Infantry Regiment stationed at Lunjore.
Colonel Packer, a bigoted Christian, placed his duty towards his God above that of his duty as an army officer. An admirable attitude with which no one could quarrel, save on the score that as his interpretation of these duties conflicted, it would have been wiser for him to resign his command.
Colonel Packer’s duty towards God impelled him to make every effort to spread the Gospel to the heathen, and he was at present engaged in an earnest attempt to convert his entire Regiment to Christianity: a project that Colonel Gardener-Smith, together with almost every other thinking British officer and every sepoy in Lunjore, regarded with hostility and dismay, and that had caused Captain Randall, in the name of the Commissioner of Lunjore, to send a strongly worded protest to the Commander-in-Chief, General Anson, suggesting that Colonel Packer should either be restrained from ‘spreading the Word’ or instantly removed from his command.
Colonel Gardener-Smith refused to see that the suspicion with which his own schemes towards bettering the lot of his sepoys was regarded was anything more than a reflection of the alarm and dismay that Colonel Packer’s assaults upon the religion of his men had produced among the native regiments stationed in Lunjore, and he did not abandon hope of popularizing both school and medical centre.
In these circumstances he had too much on his mind to pay overmu
ch attention to the social activities of his wife and daughter, and though he could not like Colonel Moulson, the man was, as far as he knew, a tolerably efficient commanding officer, a gentleman by birth and apparently possessed of adequate private means above his army pay. He could, therefore, see why Eugenia considered him eligible, but he had no fears that his daughter Delia would ever seriously consider marrying the fellow. She was far more likely, if he knew anything of young women, to fall in love with some penniless sprig of an ensign rather than with a man of Moulson’s age!
In point of fact Colonel Gardener-Smith knew nothing of young women, least of all his daughter. Delia was not in the least in love with Colonel Moulson, but she was intrigued and flattered by his attentions and had every intention of marrying him. He had as yet made no declaration, but she was sure that given time and the opportunity he would do so. She intended to give him both, and as he was most often to be found in the Commissioner’s company, she developed a fondness for young Mrs Barton’s society, and was often to be seen driving over to the Residency.
Winter had endeavoured to warn Delia’s mama of the style of the Tuesday parties, but Mrs Gardener-Smith had been either genuinely or intentionally obtuse. She was persuaded, she said, that dear Delia could come to no harm at any party where Winter was her hostess. And after all, the dear child was young, and young people could not be expected to attend only formal parties with senior officials.
‘Colonel Moulson is not young,’ said Winter. ‘And neither are Mr Cottar or Major Mottisham. You do not understand. You see I - I do not attend these parties myself, and I would prefer them not to be held in my house. But they were established before - before I married Mr Barton, and he wished to continue them.’
Mrs Gardener-Smith had smiled tolerantly, for an explanation for Winter’s embarrassed disclosure had just occurred to her. The little bride was jealous of the attentions that Delia was receiving from the Commissioner and his friends! Quite understandable, since Delia, in Mrs Gardener-Smith’s eyes, was by far the more beautiful of the two. The cards of invitation continued to go out from the Residency and Mrs Gardener-Smith continued to permit her daughter to attend the Tuesday-night parties. And Winter made no further attempt to interfere.
She had made one friend within the walls of the Residency. Zeb-un-Nissa, the nine-year-old grand-daughter of Akbar Khan, the gatekeeper. Nissa was a frail little creature whose enormous dark eyes had a curiously blind look as though they looked through people and not at them. She was reported to be subject to fits and to have second sight, and the servants were afraid of her.
She was a solitary child who spent much of her time among the roots of the big banyan tree near the Residency gate, watching the birds and squirrels, who appeared to have no fear of her and would feed from her hand and take grain from between her lips. Winter had noticed a flock of green parrots fluttering about the roots of the tree early one morning, and had gone out to see what had attracted them. She had stayed to talk to Nissa, and the two had become fast friends.
Winter had asked permission for the child to help in the house, with the idea of training her to be her personal servant in place of Johara, but the suggestion had not been well received, and she suspected that the main opposition came from Johara’s sister, Yasmin. Nissa’s mother, a frightened-looking, slatternly woman, had seemed only too pleased, and Akbar Khan had salaamed deeply and thanked the gracious Lady-sahib for her kind interest in his all too unworthy grand-daughter, but expressed regret that the child was not strong enough for the work. Nissa did not enter the house, but Winter spoke with her often in the garden, and they would wave to each other when Winter passed the banyan tree on her daily rides.
She became less actively unhappy as the weeks passed, and a dull resignation took the place of the raw wound in her heart. There was still India, and that alone, in the ruin of her dreams, had not betrayed her. She would ride out every evening and in the early morning before the sun rose, galloping across the plain and along the banks of the distant river, or riding through the dew-wet crops where the peafowl screamed at the dawn and skeins of wild geese honked overhead on their way to the jheels of Hazrat Bagh and Pari.
The glory of the sunrise over the limitless plains and the wide, winding river; the quiet beauty of the evenings when the sun sank with incredible swiftness, dyeing the river and the long silver sandbanks, the city and the plain and every tree and cane-brake to a warm, glowing apricot; the swift, opal twilight, and night unfolding like a peacock’s tail, green and blue and violet, flecked with the last gold of day and spangled with stars - these were things that comforted Winter and held for her a never-failing enchantment, daily renewed.
The wide land, the wide river and the enormous sky were beautiful to her. The vastness soothed her. The sense of space - of the plains stretching away and away to the deserts of Bikaner, the blue waters of Cape Comorin and the jungles and valleys of Nepal; wrinkling up into the foothills, to rise in range after range to the white barrier of the Himalayas where the remote passes led into the unknown land of Tibet, into Persia and the Pamirs and the great plains and lakes and ranges of Central Asia - the Kara-Koram, the Hindu Kush, Tien Shan and Turkestan; Balkash and Baskal; the white wastes of Siberia and the yellow leagues of China. Here there was none of the sense of being shut in and enclosed behind high walls that she had sometimes experienced at Ware. The mile-wide rivers and the enormous mountain ranges seemed less of a barrier than the neat English hedges and the trout stream that had separated the paddocks from the park.
There was a fatalism too about the East that appealed to her, and the filth and squalor and cruelty that everywhere underlay the beauty did not in any way lessen her love for the land. The city was ugly and foetid and full of sights that were unbelievably horrible to Western eyes, and Winter’s eyes did not miss them. But she loved the city too. The heaped colours of fruits and vegetables and grain in the bazaar. The rich smell of mustard oil and masala, of musk and spices and ghee. The shops of the potter and the silversmith. The stalls that sold glass bangles as fine and light as silk and as fragile as a dried leaf, in glittering, sparkling, burning colours - red and blue and gold and grass-green. The silk shops with their gay bales piled high in the shadows. The drifting, jostling crowds and the great, lazy Brahmini bulls, sacred to Shiva, who shouldered through the narrow streets taking toll of the baskets of the vegetable-sellers.
White women were seldom to be seen in the city, and on the rare occasions on which they went there they went in carriages and escorted by white men. But Winter would go with only Yusaf, the syce, and at first the crowds would collect to giggle and stare and follow her, peering and whispering. But she went so often that they became used to her and to the fact that she spoke their language with an idiomatic fluency that they had rarely met with in others of the sahib-log. She came to have many friends and acquaintances in the city. Unexpected friends and strange acquaintances who would have horrified and disgusted her husband had he known of it. But then Conway took little interest in his wife’s doings, and did not know or care where she went.
Alex knew, and though it had at first disturbed him that Winter should go so freely and so far afield about the countryside and the city, he had come to the conclusion that her greatest safety might one day lie in such friendships, and he had withdrawn the unobtrusive watch he had set on her.
He too, when he was not out in camp, rode every morning before sunrise, and Winter had sometimes caught a distant glimpse of him, though she was unaware that he often rode where he could keep her within sight and see that she came to no harm. He had heard the story of the cobra in the bathroom and had drawn his own conclusions. The woman in the bibi-gurh, the ex-dancing-girl who had once flaunted Kishan Prasad’s great emerald, feared a rival, and she or her relations had attempted to remove that rival.
His complete helplessness in the matter filled Alex with a sick fury, but he had taken what steps he could. He had spoken to Iman Bux, whom he knew to be an ally of the woman’s,
and had informed him that should any more such accidents befall the Memsahib, or if he heard again that she had fallen ill from something she had eaten, exceedingly unpleasant consequences would descend upon the heads of several members of the household, and not all the Commissioner’s influence would avert them:
‘And I think it is known that I am a man of my word,’ said Alex softly. Iman Bux, looking into those merciless long-lashed eyes, had quailed visibly, and instead of pouring out a flood of injured and bewildered protest had found himself mumbling instead: ‘It is known.’
But the fact that there might be nothing more attempted against the Commissioner’s bride in the house did not preclude the possibility of some accident being engineered while she was out of it, and Alex was uneasy at the way in which her husband permitted her to ride abroad daily with no other escort than a syce. He had eventually succeeded in getting a nominee of his own into that post. With Yusaf to ride behind her he knew that she would come to no harm, and after that Winter seldom saw him when she rode before sunrise or at sunset.
She was happier when she was away from the house. The house held Conway, who had once been a child’s dream of all goodness and romance and was now a horrible parody of that knight in armour. Or there would be strangers there - people whose faces were by now only too familiar to her, but who remained strangers. Men and women with overloud voices and overloud laughter, who still made her feel stiff and young and gauche and cold with distaste. Josh Cottar, that coarse, rich vulgarian who had made a fortune out of beer and army contracts, Major Wilkinson, red-faced, glassy-eyed and maudlin, and others of their ilk. There would be Johara too, Yasmin’s sister, with her sly eyes and veiled insolence. And sometimes, in the twilight, there would be a slim fair girl who wore an oddly outdated dress.
Winter did not see this girl often, and then only when she was particularly overstrained or weary. But there were many occasions when she knew that she heard someone who was not there. This house was different from other houses. While there were lights in the rooms, and her husband or the servants or any guests moved about them, they were just rooms. A background for the people who occupied them. But on the rare occasions when she was alone it was different. Then the empty rooms held someone else. Winter would walk through an open doorway into a silent room and there would be someone else there. Someone whom her entrance had alarmed. It was not she who was frightened, but that other one, who could - she was sure of it - feel her unhappiness and desperation and strain, and was disturbed by it. Sometimes she would even hear voices. Not whispering, but as though they came from a long way away and yet were no farther than a few paces from her. Once she had thought she heard a few words, clearly spoken: ‘There is someone here who is unhappy. As if - as if it were me!’ An odd thing to imagine.