Shadow of the Moon

by M. M. Kaye

  Quite suddenly her anger and despair fell away from her, for if a crisis was indeed brewing in India her own difficulties were trivial, and she could not, at this juncture, add to the problems and anxieties that the times were laying upon the shoulders of all men by creating a public scandal in Lunjore and Lucknow. Conway intended to return to Lunjore at the end of the month, and she would go with him and arrange to leave for Simla or Naini Tal towards the middle of May. That at least could create no scandal, and Conway could not very well refuse to let her go. She must do nothing until then; except the hardest thing of all. To wait …

  It was mid-afternoon and the quietest time of the day. Few went abroad while the sun sucked the moisture from the earth and the marrow from men’s bones, and all who could do so lay still in the shade and waited for the cool of the evening. The river and the stone-flagged terrace lay empty in the sun-glare, and the far bank was deserted. A mile or so upstream the city shimmered in the heat-haze, and there was no cloud in the sky and nothing moved except the soundless river and a solitary boat that drifted down with the stream.

  It was a flat-bottomed country boat with a matting roof curved above it to keep out the sun, poled by an ancient rheumy-eyed man in the scanty garb of a fisherman, and it drifted closer and closer into the bank until it bumped gently against the stone wall of the river terrace and its prow grated on the water-steps. It was a small enough sound but astonishingly loud in the hot, silent stillness of the afternoon, and Winter moved to the balustrade and looked down.

  A woman’s partially veiled face peered out from beneath the matting screen and looked cautiously up and down the empty reaches of the river, eyes narrowed against the sun-glare, and then glancing upwards, saw Winter. The eyes widened suddenly and a dark claw-like hand beckoned. There was something so furtive and yet so urgent in that gesture that Winter turned involuntarily to look behind her. But the terrace and the park beyond it were deserted, and not even a butterfly moved in the blinding sunlight.

  She went quickly to the water-steps, holding her wide skirts clear of the hot flagstones, but at the top of them she hesitated for a moment. There was no one within sight or call, and she did not know who was in the boat. The hand beckoned again imperiously and Winter descended the steps slowly and stooped to peer under the shadows of the curved matting. The face that looked up at her dropped its chuddah for a brief moment. It was Hamida.

  Winter gathered up her skirts and holding them about her scrambled into the darkness of the tent-like enclosure. There was a clink of silver bracelets and a scent of attar-of-roses, and a soft, slender hand that was not Hamida’s stretched out of the gloom and caught her bare arm.

  ‘Ameera! Is it thou?’

  ‘It is I, querida—’ Ameera spoke in halting Spanish. ‘Luck is indeed with me, for I did not think to find you here. Hamida was to fetch you from the house. I came at this time because I knew that there would be few abroad at such an hour, and I cannot stay long.’

  She spoke with a soft, breathless haste that made Winter say sharply: ‘What is it? What has happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing as yet. But I cannot come to see you again. It is not safe, either for you or for me. And if it were known that I have come now—’

  The sentence broke off into a shiver and all at once the hot dimness of the little matting shelter, the bright stillness of the land and the wide, slow-flowing river were full of fear, and even the sly chuckle of the water under the wooden boat seemed a sound full of menace.

  Winter took Ameera’s hand between her own small cool palms and held it tightly. ‘Tell me what has happened.’

  Ameera sank her voice to a whisper: ‘I must not come again, but I could not - I did not dare send word for fear that it would not reach you, or that you would not believe. You must go, querida. Quickly! Very quickly. There is danger here for all of your blood. No, not in Lucknow only, or in Oudh, but in all India. I have heard …. things. Things I dare not tell you. But it is true what I say. Only yesterday there was found a proclamation posted by the gate of the Jumma Masjid in Delhi, saying that the Shah-in-Roos (the Tsar) would send an army that would sweep all the British into the sea and—’

  ‘Yesterday?’ said Winter. ‘How can you know that? It is two hundred miles and more to Delhi.’

  ‘There are ways,’ whispered Ameera. ‘Ill news travels swiftly, and there is much ill news; therefore I come to tell you that you must not go to the hills but to the sea, and take ship and return at once to your own country.’

  ‘This is my country.’

  ‘It is not - it is not!’ said Ameera passionately. ‘I am of this land, but you are not! But for love of you, because we two played together as children and because your father was brother to my mother, I betray my countrymen by warning you to go.’

  Winter said slowly: ‘Dear, you must tell me more. I cannot go just for this. I - I am married. There is my husband - can you not tell me—’

  ‘I can tell you nothing - nothing! Already I have said too much. I also love my husband, though his heart is turned away from me because of my mother’s blood that runs in my veins - do you think I would not rid myself of it if I could, for his sake? He will turn to me again, of that I am sure. How could I live if it were not so? But men are not as we are. For us, they are all of life. But for them love is but a small part of living, forgotten when the kissing is done. My husband thinks first of his own people and his own Padishah and of his own wrongs. If he knew that I had told you aught, he would kill me - even me, who am the mother of his sons, and whom he loves.’

  Winter’s eyes, accustomed now to the gloom after the sun-glare of the terrace, could see that Ameera’s face was drawn and haggard with fear and anxiety, and that the same fear was on Hamida’s face too. But she had to know more. She had to know when, but there was little trace of the West in Ameera who had once been ‘Anne Marie’; her love and her loyalty lay with her husband’s people, and she would not tell more than she must …

  Winter said carefully, trying to keep the urgency from her voice: ‘I will try to go, but it will not be easy to leave soon. We do not return to Lunjore until the end of this month, and I had planned to go to the hills by mid-May.’

  Ameera said: ‘No! not to the hills! To England. Even the hills may not be safe.’

  ‘It will take three weeks to reach Calcutta,’ said Winter slowly.

  ‘That I know. Did I not say that you must leave at once? Before the first week of May is out.’

  Winter’s fingers released the slim hand she held, and she said as though frightened: ‘But is it safe to travel? If there is danger, would it not be safer to stay where there are regiments?’

  ‘No harm will come to you before the last day of May. But after that there will be no safety anywhere - least of all where there are regiments! You will go? Promise me you will go.’

  Winter drew a long breath and found that the palms of her hands were wet: a wetness that had nothing to do with the airless heat of the small boat. She had got what she wanted. She leant forward and kissed Ameera swiftly: ‘I will try, querida. But if my - my husband will not go, then I cannot.’

  ‘Then go to the hills. It may serve … I do not know. And now I must go. Already I have stayed overlong. Good-bye, querida—’ She lapsed into Hindustani: ‘Farewell, Little Pearl. Do not forget me. I will make prayer to my God and to Bibi Miriam (the Virgin Mary) also, who was a woman and may hear me, for thy sake and thy safety.’ The tears were running down her cheeks and she clung to Winter for a moment and then tore herself free and thrust her away. ‘Go now - go quickly! It is late. Hamida, tell the manji to make haste!’

  Winter stood on the water-steps in the hard sunlight and saw the old man thrust off with his pole, backing the narrow boat into the stream. She raised her hand in farewell, and then the boat had swung and the old manji was poling it away upstream towards the city.

  The little ripples lapped and hissed softly against the hot stone steps, and Winter watched the small boat through a
mist of tears until the sun-dazzle on the water blotted it out. Something moved on the terrace above her and she whirled about, her heart in her throat. But it was only a peacock rustling his splendid tail along the flagstones.

  Her sudden movement and the swish of her hooped skirts startled the bird, and lifting his tail clear of the ground he scuttled for the shelter of the bamboos with undignified haste. But the momentary panic he had caused her served to remind Winter - if she had needed reminding - that Ameera had risked her life to bring that warning. It was a horrible thought, and it sent a small, icy prickle of fear down Winter’s spine. She shivered in the afternoon heat and turned back again to the river, peering under the palm of her hand. But the boat had gone and the river ran quiet and undisturbed from bank to bank and nothing moved upon it save a corpse that drifted down on the stream turning lazily with the current, and a slow-moving mud-turtle who crawled up out of the water to bask with his basking fellows on the edge of a sand bar.

  Had anyone seen Ameera’s boat stop at the water-steps? There were so many eyes in India. But Ameera had been right: now that the hot weather had set in this was the safest time of day. Safer than the night, when every tree and shrub and shadow could hide a pair of eyes. No, there was no one on the river terrace, and no one in the gardens or the park. Only herself and the peacock. It was absurd to feel afraid. And yet she was afraid.

  Winter stood on the deserted terrace and looked out across the wide river and the wide land beyond, as her mother Sabrina had stood on an evening almost eighteen years ago: and was seized as Sabrina had been by a sudden horror of India. Of the savage, alien land that lay all about her, stretching away for hundreds of miles and yet hemming her in; of the dark, secretive, sideways-looking eyes and the tortuous, unreadable minds behind the bland, expressionless faces. Of Nila Ram, who had cut off his young wife’s hands …

  ‘I must be careful,’ thought Winter. ‘I must be very careful. Not for my sake, but for Ameera’s.’

  If only Alex were still here. She wondered if she could write to him, and then knew that she could not take the risk because she had no means of ensuring that her letter would not be read, and if she appeared to be in possession of dangerous information, Ameera would be suspected of having given it to her. She was not frightened for herself. Perhaps because she was too young to be able to visualize death in connection with herself, or perhaps because her life at present did not seem to contain much that made it worth living, But Ameera had so much to live for, and she was afraid for Ameera as she could never be afraid for herself.

  ‘I must be careful,’ repeated Winter, speaking aloud to the empty sun-soaked spaces of the river terrace: ‘… careful’ whispered the echo from the curved stone wall that bounded its far end.

  She did nothing for three long days. Forcing herself to inactivity and her face to smiles, for fear that her actions or her expression should be watched by someone who might have had knowledge of Ameera’s visit. She wrote no letters and paid no visits. She received and entertained her husband’s guests, and gave no outward sign that might be interpreted as alarm or disquiet: feeling like a traitor to her own race because she did not run at once to Sir Henry with that vital information.

  On the fourth day her chance came when she and her husband attended an evening party at the Residency. It was a very large party, and shamianahs had been erected on the lawns, and the trees hung with coloured lanterns. The band of one of the regiments stationed in the cantonments provided music while the guests, who numbered several hundred and included almost all the British residents and a large proportion of the nobility and gentry of Lucknow and its environs, moved about the gardens chattering, laughing, admiring the illuminations, partaking of a large variety of refreshments, and watching the performance of a troupe of jugglers.

  Perhaps the most spectacular guest, and certainly the one who aroused most interest, was Dundu Pant, the Nana of Bithaur, who attended the party accompanied by an impressively large retinue.

  The Nana was a man who cherished a grievance against the British, the Government having refused to recognize him as the legal heir or to allow him the pension granted to the Peishwa, Baje Rao, who having no son had adopted him under Hindu law. But he did not appear to have allowed his grievances to sour him. He was most friendly and affable towards the British guests, with several of whom he seemed to be on excellent terms, and Winter saw him in animated converse with Sir Henry Lawrence. He was a fat man, strangely dark-skinned for a Mahratta, and very splendidly dressed; and he wore a pair of large diamond earrings which flashed and glittered in the light of the coloured paper lanterns. Alex, had he been present, would not have recognized the earrings - the ones he had seen had been rubies - but he would have had no difficulty at all in recognizing the wearer.

  The Chief Commissioner had been surrounded by a ring of guests wherever he moved, and it was clearly impossible to have any private conversation with him. But Winter had managed to speak with George Lawrence. She had asked him to show her the rose garden and had put her hand on his arm and walked away with him, talking with unusual animation. There were strollers in the rose garden too, but far fewer of them, so it was possible to speak here without being overheard.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ said Winter, her hand urgent on his arm. ‘It is Sir Henry I wished to speak to, but the people follow him about so, and as I do not wish to go apart with him, you must tell him.’ She looked up into her companion’s face and said: ‘Please will you smile as though I were telling you something of no matter?’ - and laughed herself as she spoke.

  George Lawrence smiled an obedient and somewhat puzzled smile, and managed to retain it, though with some difficulty, through the next few minutes. He listened attentively while Winter walked beside him, smiling as she talked, and breaking off to admire the roses and the lanterns or comment on the music or the illumination, whenever any other guests passed within earshot. He found the resulting information a little confusing, but realized at least that young Mrs Barton was in deadly earnest, although he was inclined to treat her story with some reserve. There had been so many rumours of late, and this was just one more - and apparently one that had been brought by an over-excited Indian woman who by some curious twist of fate was first cousin to this girl who walked beside him. He was not inclined to take the information as much more than another straw that showed the way in which the wind was blowing, but he promised, nevertheless, to relay it to Sir Henry.

  ‘You must not tell it to him where you can be overheard,’ begged Winter earnestly. ‘And he must tell no one who it came from. It is true - tell him that I am sure that it is true! Ameera risked her life to tell me, and I am risking hers by telling you. Tell him that.’

  She looked up into his face and smiled as she spoke, but her eyes were wide and bright and full of a desperate urgency.

  ‘I will tell him,’ promised George Lawrence. ‘But you must not allow yourself to become over-anxious, Mrs Barton. We hear many of these rumours. There has been a deal of dissatisfaction in Oudh, for the annexation was pressed through without sufficient thought, and the original policy was needlessly harsh. But Sir Henry is changing all that, and I feel sure that this cloud will blow away as others have done. You have not been out in India very long, I think; but when you have experienced some of our hot weather, you will notice that there are days when the clouds gather until the whole sky is covered with them, and it seems that it must rain. Yet they disperse without a drop falling. It will be the same with this you will find. It will pass.’

  It will pass … It has passed …

  In cantonments and offices, in Residencies and British bungalows, in Government Houses and Council chambers and in the home of the Governor-General himself, wherever the British met to talk, those soothing words were spoken again and again. The brief flare-up at Berhampur in February and the uglier and more recent outbreak in Barrackpore had died down without leading to any further demonstrations, and men who had been smelling the wind uneasily re
laxed again, and concurred with the popular conviction that the peak of the general unrest had passed, and that any serious danger (if there had ever been any, which the majority were inclined to discount) was now over.

  Winter received no further news of Ameera, but Lottie wrote from Delhi. Edward had been transferred there from Meerut on special duty, but they were not living in the cantonments, as they had been lent a delightful house inside the city, not far from the Kashmir Gate:

  ‘I fear Mama is a little disappointed that we would not reside with Papa and her,’ wrote Lottie, ‘but I see so little of Edward that I like to have him to myself when he is off duty. Sophie is away on a visit to friends in Cawnpore, and will be returning on the fifteenth of the next month. It is really not so very hot as yet, and I begin to think that reports as to the heat of the plains have been greatly exaggerated, although I am told that this is quite an exceptionally cool year, and many old hands say they have known nothing like it before. If it gets no worse I do not believe I shall be greatly incommoded. I wish you will come and stay with me. It would be so delightful to see you again. You must come next cold weather, and only think! I shall have a little Edward to show you then! I cannot bring myself to believe it. Mama sends you her love …’

  Winter read the letter and thought again of Ameera … and of George Lawrence. Which of them was right?

  Lottie’s news disturbed her, because she had thought that Lottie at least was safe. There were well over a thousand British soldiers in Meerut, forming the strongest European garrison in the North-Western Provinces, and surely any woman would be safe there? But Delhi—