by M. M. Kaye
Yes, there was news in plenty - and all of it bad. There was nothing to be done but to keep the women in hiding, and Alex chafed at the inaction and occupied himself with snaring birds.
Winter alone of the four occupants of the Hirren Minar had no need to pray for patience. She was, for perhaps the first time in her life, entirely content.
The heat did not affect her to the same degree as it affected Lottie and Lou Cottar, and the jungle and the river and the ancient, hidden ruin held a strange enchantment for her. They did not belong to the everyday world. They were something lost and forgotten and right outside reality. She shut her mind to the memory of all that had happened to her in Lunjore - to the heartbreak and bitter disillusionment that had awaited her there; to the long months of degradation and misery; to the horrors of the last day and to the thought of the worse things that might even now be happening in the world beyond the forest. She would not think of the past or the future. Only of the present. And the present was Alex.
It did not worry her that Alex hardly looked at her and rarely spoke to her, or that when he did it was generally with an unmistakable undercurrent of exasperation. She felt as though she had loved him all her life and knew everything about him, and ever since the night following their flight from Lunjore she had felt so completely a part of him that she could sometimes follow the processes of his thoughts as though they had been her own. Harsh experience had taught her to expect little of life, and now it contented her that Alex was alive and within reach of her, and that she could watch him and listen to his voice, and feel his presence even when she could not see him.
The only unpleasant times were when he would go out to get news from the villages. She had never asked where he went or whom he saw, but she was always frightened, with a sick shuddering fear, that he would not return. She would stay awake, pulling the makeshift but remarkably effective punkah that he had made from bamboo and dried grass so that Lottie could sleep in more comfort, and straining her ears to listen for the sounds of his return. Yet even these nights had their compensations, since it meant that he would sleep for part of the day, and then she could look at him without the need for concealment.
She noticed that he talked to Lottie far more than to either Lou or herself, and also that he had a special voice for Lottie. A voice that was gay and gentle and curiously reassuring. It could always reassure Lottie, and even to hear it was an assurance of safety to Winter.
Lottie and Lou Cottar, in spite of the appalling heat, still wore the dresses they had worn when they left Lunjore. Alex had brought back needles and thread from one of his night excursions, and they had mended them neatly. He had also, somewhat unexpectedly, brought a wine-coloured cotton sari with a deep blue border and a matching cotton bodice, such as the village women wore, for Winter.
Lottie and Lou Cottar could not be persuaded to wear such things. They had discarded their petticoats, stays and pantalettes, but they clung to what they considered a civilized garment as though it gave them some assurance that this was only a temporary interlude that would soon give place to normality. To have thought anything else would have been to lose a part of hope; to give up a plank of the raft which supported them in an uncharted sea.
‘You’re letting yourself go native, Winter,’ snapped Lou Cottar one hot evening, in an unwonted outburst of irritation. She looked resentfully at the girl, and in the same moment thought how well the draped folds of the cheap sari became her, and how much more effective the silky, blue-black hair was when it swung in thick plaits almost to the knee, than when it was rolled up into the conventional heavy chignon.
Mrs Cottar had never considered little Mrs Barton to be particularly striking, but looking at her now she thought suddenly that she was beautiful; like something out of some Eastern fairy-tale - a princess from the Thousand and One Nights. Surprised at herself for the unexpected imagery of the thought, she said irritably: ‘You are the only one of us who does not look out of place in this God-forsaken hole - and who doesn’t seem to mind being here.’
‘I don’t,’ said Winter dreamily.
Lou Cottar stared at her with an indignation that changed to sudden comprehension, and she said abruptly: ‘You’re in love with him, aren’t you?’
Not so very long ago Winter would have considered such a question an unwarrantable impertinence in the worst possible taste, while to answer it honestly would have been unthinkable. But this was not the civilized world they had known. This was Eden. She smiled at Lou and said: ‘Yes.’
‘Is he in love with you?’
Winter thought of the letter that Alex carried in the inner pocket of his coat. But then he might not even know that he still had it. She shook her head, and Lou said tartly: ‘Then he’s a fool!’
‘I think he has too much on his mind to bother about anything like that,’ said Winter reflectively. ‘Just now he can only think of me as a nuisance. I think he has always thought of me like that. A tiresome responsibility that he would like to be rid of if he could.’
‘Not only you,’ said Lou with a twisted smile. ‘All of us. And I can’t say that I blame him, because if it wasn’t for us he could go. And if it wasn’t for Lottie—’
She glanced towards the bed where Lottie lay asleep, and her thin features sharpened with anxiety. She said with suppressed violence: ‘That damned baby! It’s hanging over us all like - like the monsoon. Something that you know is coming and that can’t be stopped. Not that I couldn’t do with the monsoon and I suppose that will be here before we know where we are. But if only one could stop that baby! It’s knowing that she has to have it and that there’s no way out that gets on my nerves. What are we going to do if we can’t get her away? We must get her away! How much longer has she got?’
‘About six weeks I think,’ said Winter doubtfully. ‘Perhaps it’s seven.’
‘Six weeks! Oh God - and here we are doing nothing. Nothing! What in heaven’s name are we going to do if she has it here? Do you know anything about babies?’
‘No,’ admitted Winter.
‘Neither do I. Not a damned thing. I’ve never had any of my own and I’ve never been interested in women who did. They look frightful and become dead bores. We’ve got to get her to some civilized place where there is a doctor. Why doesn’t Alex do something? We must get her away!’
Alex, lying under a canopy of leaves in the hot, dry jungle grass and watching the shadow of a sal tree draw out across the clearing, was making the same calculations and coming to the same conclusion.
It was a conclusion that he had come to days ago, but he could still see no safe way of translating thought into action, since the reports he received were all the same: it was inviting death to travel anywhere, for neither the roads nor the by-paths, the villages or the towns were safe. There were bands of budmarshes, looters and mutineers all over Rohilkhand and Oudh and throughout the North-West Province, and to remove from Lunjore would be to leave the frying-pan for the fire. Only the Punjab, if the reports were to be trusted, remained unaffected, but to reach it meant a long, difficult and dangerous journey, and one which Lottie was in no condition to undertake on foot. She would have to travel in some sort of conveyance, and that meant going by road and not across country. The thing was impossible as yet.
Alex remembered with a sinking of the heart certain words from the Epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘… then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.’
Six weeks … perhaps seven. But anything might have happened by then. Troops must be being hurried out from home or stopped on their way to China. Reinforcements must be coming. And once the tide had turned it would be possible to demand help from those who at present were watching the swing of the pendulum and unwilling to commit themselves one way or the other. For the moment Lottie was safer where she was.
‘That damned baby!’ thought Alex with an exasperation and anxiety that equalled Lou’s. ‘Why on earth do women have to—’
> And then without warning a thought that had never occurred to him before struck him with the sudden violence of an unexpected blow over the heart. It wiped the problem of Lottie from his mind and substituted a far more frightening one, and he forgot about the peacocks and let them mince past him unheeded while he stared blindly across the clearing seeing only a slim figure in a faded blue cotton sari.
‘No,’ thought Alex desperately - ‘no! It couldn’t happen. It was only once—-’ He had not thought of Winter for days, except as one of three women who were, unavoidably and infuriatingly, his responsibility; and at the back of his mind there had lain an unjust and illogical anger because she had been the means of turning him aside from the course he had set for himself, and by so doing had been indirectly responsible for the death of Niaz. He did not want to think of her now, and with an abrupt movement he buried his head in his arms as though by doing so he could blot her out of his mind and from his conscience. ‘Oh God, not this!’ thought Alex as he had thought once before at Hazrat Bagh when she had cried in his arms because of a wild goose. ‘Not this - not now. I can’t stand it …’
The sudden movement caught the bright eye of a king crow who was balancing on a bough of the sal tree, and it cried a warning that sent the peacocks hurrying away through the jungle. But Alex lay still and did not move for a long time.
That night he took a graver risk than he had yet taken, and went into the city, riding a thin village pony that he had procured with the assistance of the apprehensive Kashmera. ‘It is not safe!’ urged Kashmera. ‘The Huzoor is too well known in Lunjore.’
‘There are few who will recognize me now,’ said Alex, and it was perhaps true. His face was thinner and there were no longer any curves in it; only hollows and angles - and lines.
‘Tie up the jaw as though it were wounded,’ advised Kashmera. ‘It is an old trick, but it serves.’ He had fetched some rags from the hut, and Alex drew the blade of his knife slantwise in a shallow cut on one side of his chin, stained the cloth with it and bound it up roughly.
‘That is better,’ approved Kashmera. ‘Perhaps after all thou wilt return. Leave the horse by the cane field. He will not stray.’
That night was the twelfth of June, but the news that Sir Henry Barnard had fought and won a battle at Badli-ki-serai on the road to Delhi, and that once again there were British on the Ridge, and Delhi itself besieged, had not yet reached Lunjore.
There was elation in the city, for the reports and rumours that had been received were all of successful risings and of Europeans and British garrisons murdered or besieged, and it lacked only ten days to the twenty-third of June - the centenary of the Battle of Plassey which an ex-clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, had fought with three thousand men against an army of sixty-eight thousand, and in winning it had won half India. The rule of the ‘Company Sahib’, said the prophecy, would last for a hundred years from the date of that battle, and now that day was near …
The talk of the bazaars only served to convince Alex that he still could not move the women. He had bought food and tied it in a corner of cloth, and ridden back in the bright moonlight with angry despair in his heart.
‘Is there no news, Alex?’ demanded Lou Cottar the next morning, following him out into the jungle and facing him among the hot shadows of the sal trees. ‘You must have heard something. Even if it is bad news we would much rather know than be kept in the dark.’
‘All the news is bad,’ said Alex shortly. ‘It’s no good. We can’t leave yet.’
Lou said: ‘But we must go soon! Can’t you see that if we don’t, Lottie may—’
‘Do you think I haven’t thought of that?’ interrupted Alex brusquely. ‘Don’t be a fool, Lou! At the moment there would appear to be nowhere to go to. She may have a bad time of it if she stays here, but she’ll certainly die - and so will the rest of us - if we are mad enough to attempt a cross-country trip just now. The jungle at least will do us no harm.’
But he had spoken too soon, for the jungle that had seemed to befriend them suddenly showed its claws.
They had gone down to the river that evening, all four of them, as they did every evening, because it was cooler there and there were always clothes and cooking-pots to be washed and fishing-lines to tend. Winter had not seen the cobra until it lashed at her, hissing, as she bent to disentangle the edge of her sari that had caught on a thorn. Her foot touched the cold coils, and the fangs bit into her left arm just above the elbow.
Alex had been less than a yard away from her and he had swung round as she cried out, and had seen the snake slither across her path, and the two small punctures on the smooth tanned skin. The next second he had leapt at her and caught her; his fingers tight above the wound, forcing the blood down, and his mouth against it, sucking at it with all his strength.
Lou had come running and had beaten the grass with a stick, and then snatched up a petticoat that was to be washed and ripped at it frantically, tearing at it with her teeth. It tore at last and she wound a strip of it above Alex’s straining hands and pulled it tight in a tourniquet.
Alex lifted his head and said hoarsely: ‘Permanganate - on the ledge at the left back - quickly,’ and Lou turned and ran, stumbling and tripping among the grass and thorn and creeper, while Lottie wrung her hands and wept.
Alex jerked the knife he carried from its sheath, and caught Winter to him, holding her hard against him so that she could not move, his hand a vice about her wrist. He said: ‘It’ll hurt. Don’t move,’ and cut the wound across deeply, twice.
He felt her teeth clench on the thin stuff of his shirt and her body twist to the pain, but she did not cry out and he dropped the knife into the grass. The blood poured down her arm and his in a red tide and he lifted her and carried her swiftly back to the Hirren Minar.
Lou Cottar met them a dozen yards from the entrance with the little tin of permanganate crystals clutched in her hand, and they had filled the wound with them, and had got Winter up the rope ladder. Alex had let the arm bleed and she had looked at it with a frown of pain and said in a dazed whisper: ‘It will make such a mess on the floor.’
‘We can clear it up,’ said Alex with white-lipped brevity. ‘Lou, for God’s sake get back to Lottie!’
He had bound it up eventually and given her as much opium as he dared, and later, when Lou and Lottie had returned and he had realized that she would not die, he had gone out and been exceedingly sick behind the impenetrable thicket of bamboos.
Winter had run a high fever that first night and Alex had held her clutching hands while she twisted and turned and muttered unintelligibly, and Lou Cottar bathed her burning body with cool water. ‘Is she going to die?’ Lou had asked once. There had been a break in her voice, and her face had been barely more than a pale blur in the darkness beyond the line of moonlight that lay between the broken archways.
‘No. She’ll be all right in a few hours,’ said Alex with more confidence than he felt. ‘Give me that cloth and go and lie down, Lou. If you crack up too, I swear I’ll go out and shoot myself!’
Lou had laughed on a sudden breath of relief and had obeyed him, and Alex had taken the slender fever-racked body into his arms and held it close, his cheek pressed to the burning forehead. The moonlit night had been breathlessly hot and Alex’s own body was wet with sweat, but his hold seemed to soothe her, and after a while he felt her slacken and lie still in his arms, and knew that she was asleep at last and that the fever had broken.
‘My love!’ thought Alex, moving his mouth against the hot smooth skin and the damp waves of silky hair that were as dark as the darkness about him. ‘My little love …’
Quite suddenly the gnawing restlessness that had lived with him hourly during the last weeks fell away from him, and he no longer cared what became of anyone else - or of India - as long as Winter was safe. He could wait patiently now. She was no longer a burden and a responsibility, but part of his heart, as she had always been. What did it matter if they had to wait
here in hiding for months - or years? ‘Only after this,’ thought Alex, ‘I must not kiss you again or touch you again, because if I do I shall only take you again - I couldn’t stop myself - and it may be months, or a year, before we can get away.’
He thought of Lottie and shivered. One day the news would be better. He had no doubts on that score, because what he had once told Kishan Prasad had been true. Even if every European in all India were killed, the British would send, if necessary, every man they had, to avenge them. It would not be so much the loss of territory or prestige that would bring them, and nerve them to fight with stubbornness and fury, but the murder of their women and children. They would not forgive that, or rest until they had avenged it.
One day, perhaps very soon - or if the mutiny was really widespread, perhaps later than he had thought - the British would be in control again and it would be safe to leave the jungle. They could get away then … get married. Barton was dead. It was only a question of waiting.
44
Winter had recovered quickly and suffered remarkably little ill-effect from the incident. The wound that Alex’s knife had made had healed cleanly and given the minimum of trouble, and though the fever and loss of blood had kept her on her back and feeling absurdly weak for several days, she had soon been about again.
She saw very little of Alex after that, and suspected that he was deliberately avoiding her, but she knew that some tension in him had relaxed and that he was no longer impatient or irritable. She was aware, too, that he had developed a habit of watching her under his lashes. He would lie on the river bank in the evening while she and Lottie and Lou washed the clothes and cooking-pots, and she would look up and find his gaze on her, and feel as always that familiar contraction of the heart.