by M. M. Kaye
She wrote to Lottie, urging her for the sake of the coming child to go to the hills and to take Sophie with her:
‘You do not know how hot it can get in the plains, and it will be so bad for you at this time. You should think of the child. I expect to be going to the hills about the middle of May, and shall be so lonely there that if you will come and stay with me as my guests, and keep me company, you will be doing me a great kindness.’
She wrote also to Edward English and to Mrs Abuthnot, urging it upon them, and begging Mrs Abuthnot to accompany her daughters - they would all spend the hot months together in a bungalow among the pines and be cool and have pleasant times. But Lottie would not leave her Edward or Mrs Abuthnot her George. It was too kind of dear Winter, but they were sure that she would understand. Perhaps Sophie might pay her a visit later on?
Winter wrote again, and more urgently, but they were not to be persuaded. ‘Even if I told them all that Ameera had said, they would still not come,’ thought Winter, ‘because they would not believe it. Or they would hope that it was not true, and soon they would make themselves believe that it could not be. There is nothing I can do.’
On the last day of her stay in Lucknow she went again to the river terrace in mid-afternoon. It was hotter now than it had been on the day when she had last seen Ameera, and even the wide pith hat she wore could not prevent the sun from scorching her slim shoulders. The afternoon was as still and as breathless as that other afternoon had been. And as silent. Even the peacock had gone. There was only Winter, with her shadow black and foreshortened on the hot flagstones, and a little snake, sunning himself by the water-steps, who slid away with a dry rustle as she passed.
Conway had given a farewell party that last night. It had been a riotous affair that had lasted well into the small hours of the morning, and he had to be carried to the carriage in which they were to make the journey to Lunjore. He had expressly forbidden Winter to ride, saying that he had no desire to have her down with heat-stroke on the journey - nothing could be more inconvenient. But the sight of her husband’s brandy-sodden and inanimate bulk being disposed in the carriage proved too much for her, and she had ordered Furiante to be saddled.
She looked back over her shoulder at the Casa de los Pavos Reales as she rode away. At the orange trees and the lemon groves, the pomegranates and the tree-shaded levels of the park that had changed so little with the long years. And thought, as Sabrina had thought: ‘Perhaps I shall never see it again.’ But she did not think it with love and longing as Sabrina had done. The gracious, peaceful house did not mean to her what it had meant to Sabrina: it held no happiness and no memories. It was the Gulab Mahal that held those, but the Gulab Mahal was closed to her. It was still a fata morgana - a glimmering mirage. The moon out of reach.
The journey to Lunjore had been hot and tedious, and though the distance was not great they had taken four days to cover it, because the heat tired the horses. Conway had grumbled and cursed and complained, and solaced himself freely with brandy. The snows were melting in the ranges to the north and the river was higher than when they had crossed it coming to Lucknow. The bridge of boats rang hollowly to the clop of the horses’ hooves, and jerked and creaked and swayed to the wheels of the carriage: and then they were over, and Oudh was behind them.
35
It was evening, and the last day of April, when the Commissioner and his wife drove once more through the massive gateway of the Lunjore Residency, and barely two hours later they were dining with the same raffish company that had celebrated the Commissioner’s wedding.
They were all there, with the exception of Mr Josh Cottar who had departed to Calcutta on a business trip: Lou Cottar, Chrissie and Edgar Wilkinson, Colonel Moulson, Major Mottisham and half a dozen others. ‘Wrote ahead and invited ’em,’ said Conway. ‘Didn’t think that we’d take that extra day, but what’s the odds? Nothin’ like havin’ a celebration to welcome us home, eh?’
‘I assure you the place has been like a morgue or a Quakers’ Meeting while you have been away,’ said Lou Cottar. ‘I have had such a fit of the bore that I have yawned two more lines into my face, and heaven knows that it has enough already. I get asked to so few amusing parties when you are away, Con, for the majority of your female parishioners do not consider me quite respectable. Odd, is it not? Or else they do not trust their husbands! Though I cannot think why they should not, when their husbands are almost without exception dull enough to send one into a decline!’
‘Who are the exceptions, Lou?’ inquired the Commissioner with a chuckle. ‘Am I one?’
Mrs Cottar raised her brows at him. ‘Not any longer. But you do at least provide the only tolerably amusing parties in Lunjore.’
‘It wasn’t only my parties you found amusing once,’ said the Commissioner, reaching out to pat her arm. ‘Eh, Lou?’
‘Ah, but that was at least five years ago. Or was it more? You were a heavy, handsome brute in those days, and I believe I actually lost almost two nights’ sleep over you once.’
‘Shall I see if I can make you lose two more?’
‘You couldn’t do it. You’re gross, Con. You’re fat and bald and you drink a deal too much, and if it wasn’t for your parties I’d be tempted to drop you. But you’re a habit with me and I’m too idle to break it.’
The Commissioner glowered at her. ‘You’ve got the most poisonous tongue of any woman I know, Lou. By God, I don’t know why I put up with you!’
‘Because I’m a habit with you, and you’ve never been able to break yourself of bad habits,’ said Mrs Cottar. She laughed her low, throaty laugh and crossing to the piano, threw up the lid and began to sing a music-hall song to her own accompaniment for the amusement of the company:
‘Hamlet loved a maid,
Calumny had passed her.
She never had played tricks,
’Cause nobody had ask’d her!’
‘Nothing has changed,’ thought Winter. ‘It is just the same. It’s as though I had never been away to Lucknow …’
But that was not true. She herself had changed. The noisy, raffish party and the sight of her husband with his arm about Chrissie Wilkinson’s waist no longer had any power to hurt or disgust her. A night in the garden of the Lucknow Residency and an afternoon on the river terrace of the House of the Peacocks had changed all that, for now she too could feel the wind and hear the thunder.
If Ameera was right, all these people here might die within a few months - perhaps in less. The last day of May, Ameera had said - ‘and after that there will be no safety anywhere’. It was the first of May tomorrow. In English villages they would be going to bed early so as to be up with the dawn to pick flowers with which May Queens would be crowned and garlanded on countless village greens. The hedges and the orchards would be bright with blossom, and there would be cowslips and primroses in the woods and fields, and beribboned maypoles on the greens. May Day. Thirty days more. Was Ameera right? - or was George Lawrence? It will pass … it will pass … It has passed. Had it?
Winter did not ride the following morning. The horses needed rest, and she slept late, but when she had breakfasted she wrote to Alex.
It was a short letter and the first she had ever written to him. She gave it to a servant to deliver, but the man said that Randall Sahib was in camp among the outlying villages. ‘Then someone must take it to him,’ said Winter. ‘Send Yusaf to me.’ The man looked slantingly at her under lowered lids and went away to summon the syce. But the look had frightened Winter.
Quite suddenly, in that brief moment, the full meaning of what a major insurrection in this country would entail came home to her. She had never really visualized it in its entirety before. She had, indeed, imagined Ameera being killed or maimed as a punishment for having warned her, and she had visualized Lottie and kind Mrs Abuthnot and hero-worshipping Sophie being cut down by a howling mob. But these had been isolated pictures, and behind them had been a whispering voice that said: ‘We hear many of these rumour
s … it will pass.’ But now, standing in the big, cool drawing-room of her husband’s house, she thought for the first time of exactly what such a rising would mean. Of the handful of white people who held this vast country, and the dark, teeming millions who surrounded them and who lived cheek by jowl with them, watching their every movement and listening to their every word - and waiting. There was little privacy to be had in a land where a dozen servants were always within call, and where a punkah-coolie, a chupprassi, or a dazi sitting cross-legged before a pile of sewing, were as natural a part of every verandah as the matting on the floor.
She had trusted the servants in her father’s house at Lucknow, but she had still been careful for fear that they might be questioned by others. And if she had been careful there, she must be doubly careful here. She tore up the letter that she had written to Alex and burnt the pieces, and wrote another. It was not that she did not trust Yusaf, who was Alex’s own servant, but she preferred to take no chances. She handed the letter to him, telling him in a tone that was sufficiently clear to carry to the punkah-coolie and a loitering gardener who was cutting off the dead heads of the canna lilies in a flowerbed below the verandah, that a friend of the Captain Sahib’s whom she had met in Lucknow wished to come over for some shikar (shooting), and as the Sahib was in camp he must be informed in case he wished to return.
Yusaf had ridden with the letter, and Alex had read it late that evening by the light of a flaring oil-lamp. There had been only two lines, but he had read them and re-read them and then folded the paper carefully and put it into the inner pocket of his coat. He whistled softly and Niaz materialized out of the darkness. ‘We return tomorrow,’ said Alex.
Niaz raised his eyebrows, but made no other comment on the unexpected order beyond inquiring when they were to start.
‘Panch baji (five o’clock). That should do. No it won’t—’ Alex was speaking in English for the first time in over two weeks and was unconscious of it. ‘There is that business of Puran Chand’s. I can’t leave that in the air. The rest can slide …’
When he was on tour in the district Alex seldom had occasion to speak his own tongue, and was apt to find himself thinking and even dreaming in Hindustani. He reverted to it now: ‘Tell the Kotwal that I will see him at sunrise. There is still some work here that cannot wait. We will leave as soon as it is finished. Where is Yusaf?’
‘Huzoor?’ A second shadow moved out of the darkness and saluted.
‘Tell the Memsahib that I return tomorrow or the next day.’
Yusaf saluted again and slipped back into the darkness, and Alex returned to his tent and blew out the light that was attracting too many creeping and flying things to their doom.
Niaz had put up the camp-bed in the open, and lying on it later that night Alex stared up through the mosquito net at the blaze of stars, and saw a comet cross the heavens from east to west, not with the rush of a falling star, but slowly, dragging a long train of glowing light that appeared red rather than white or golden, and taking a full ten minutes to traverse the spangled ceiling of the sky. From a dozen yards to his left he heard Niaz move, and looking in his direction saw the silhouette of his lifted head and knew that he had seen it too.
‘They will say that too is a sign - or an omen,’ thought Alex, ‘and I am not sure that one can blame them for it.’
A red star, smearing a trail of blood from the east to the west. Were there such things as signs and wonders in the sky? A star had once brought Wise Men out of the East to search for that Sword that had come into the world so many centuries ago and had not yet been sheathed. That the heavens foretold the future was perhaps the oldest superstition in the world, and men had watched the skies for three thousand years and more, believing that their fate could be read there. In the hot weather many men slept out in the open, in roadways and on roof-tops and at the doors of their huts. How many of them would have seen the red comet, and how many - or how few? - would not regard it as a sign from heaven? An evil sign: not because of its colour, for red is worn in the East for rejoicing, but because the times and men’s thoughts were evil.
A hundred yards away a pariah dog thrust its gaunt nose at the sky and howled long and very mournfully, and the howl was taken up and repeated again and again in a barking, wailing chorus by all the dogs of the near-by village, as though they bayed the moon. Beyond the tank and the mango-tope where Alex’s camp was pitched, a light pricked the darkness; and another and another; and presently a conch brayed in the temple and a tom-tom beat. ‘They have seen it,’ thought Alex. ‘This is how legends are born.’
He heard Niaz mutter something in an undertone. It appeared to be uncomplimentary to the villagers. The red-tailed comet sank behind the mango trees, its reflection lingering for a moment longer in the dark waters of the tank, and as the glow faded from the sky the dogs stopped howling as though at an order. But the conch brayed and the tom-toms beat for hour after hour, and Alex heard them in his sleep, mingling with his uneasy dreams.
He did not start for Lunjore until early next afternoon when, leaving the servants to break camp and follow, he and Niaz rode hard through the heat of the day and into the dusty sunset and the brief green dusk. As the sun sank below the horizon they had stopped in order to eat and drink, for the Mohammedan fast of Ramadan had begun with the new moon, and while it lasted Niaz and all other followers of the Prophet might not eat or drink between sunrise and sunset. Alex too kept the fast when he was away from the cantonments and out among the villages, for he had found it to be good training, and there were times when he needed to keep it.
They had drawn rein at the edge of a tank, and as they dismounted a lone pigeon with a hawk on its tail flew low above their heads, twisting and turning in its flight, and flumped heavily into a large peepul tree on the far side of the tank. A flock of crows rose up from the peepul, cawing hoarsely, and the hawk flew off. Presently the pigeon, undisturbed by the narrowness of its escape, fluttered down onto a half-submerged slab of stone at the edge of the green scum-covered water to drink. But almost instantly it rose again with a noisy, startled flap of wings, as though something had frightened it, and they saw it circle upwards and then turn and make for the west where the glow of the setting sun was turning the dust veils to gold.
Alex looked across the tank with narrowed eyes, trying to see what it was that had startled the bird, and became aware that there was a man seated among the roots of the peepul tree. A naked ash-smeared sadhu who sat so still that he might almost have been part of the tree. The squirrels played about him, running casually to and fro, and a dozen birds who were making preparations to roost quarrelled and twittered within reach of his hand, as completely undisturbed by his presence as the crows and the parrots who perched in the boughs over his head. He had made no movement: Alex was sure of that, because had he done so he would have alarmed the other wild creatures about him. Yet the pigeon had been frightened. It was a trivial incident, but it occupied Alex’s mind to the exclusion of much else for the remainder of the ride.
It was dark by the time they reached the bungalow, and having taken a hot bath to remove the dust and sweat of the long ride, he changed into the white mess-jacket that was almost a uniform of the hot weather, and walked across in the starlight to the Residency.
The big house was ablaze with lights and there was a trap and a high dogcart standing on the wide drive. ‘Moulson again,’ thought Alex, ‘and Gidney and Mottisham, I suppose.’ He nodded to the chowkidar and went up the verandah steps. A servant lifted the chik before the hall door and murmured that the Huzoors were playing cards in the small ghol-kumra (drawing-room) and the Memsahib was in the big drawing-room.
Winter was sitting on a sofa in the centre of the room with the slow-moving punkah stirring the air above her. She had a book in her hands, but it was obvious that she had heard his voice in the hall. There was a suggestion of rigidity about her slight figure, and she was smiling. It was a pleasant smile; the smile an actress might have employed to indi
cate pleasurable surprise. But she was not as a rule, reflected Alex, walking leisurely towards her, much given to smiling, and it occurred to him to wonder if that smile was for his benefit or for Rassul, who had shown him in. Some instinct for danger made him return it, and as he took the hand that she held out to him he knew that he had been right, for her fingers were cold and not quite steady and they tightened warningly upon his for a moment before they were withdrawn.
She said gaily and on the same note of pleased surprise that was in her smile: ‘How kind of you to come so promptly! I hope it was not inconvenient? I was entrusted with a message from a friend of yours whom I met in Lucknow.’ Her gaze went past him and she spoke to the servant who lingered by the door: ‘Bring drinks for the Sahib, Rassul.’
‘Hukkum,’ murmured Rassul and the door closed softly behind him.
Winter said: ‘Do sit down, Captain Randall. Have you ridden far today? I am afraid my husband is busy just now. A card-party, you know. How much English do these people understand? I did not expect to see you until tomorrow.’ She laughed as though she had made some joke.
Alex’s eyes narrowed suddenly but he replied without the least hesitation: ‘There was nothing much to keep me, and camping is hot work in this weather. A good deal more than most people would think.’
He saw Winter’s quick breath of relief, and smiled. Had she really been afraid that he would misunderstand her and demand explanations? She threw an anxious glance at the two doors that opened onto the verandah. Chiks hung before both to keep the room from filling with bats and night-flying insects, but there were, he knew, at least three servants on the verandah. He shook his head very slightly, and the door behind him swung open silently and Rassul was back with a laden tray.
Winter said: ‘Yes, I thought it might be so. Mr - Brown wished to know if there was any good shooting to be had in Lunjore at this time of the year. He has a few weeks’ leave soon and was considering coming here. I told him that I could not possibly say, but that you would write.’