Shadow of the Moon

by M. M. Kaye

  ‘You can’t avoid a certain amount of pain, dear,’ said Alex, ‘but there isn’t anything to be frightened of, and it will be here soon.’

  ‘He,’ said Lottie. ‘Not “it”.’

  Winter heard Alex laugh, and thought again: ‘He has a special voice for Lottie. Dear Alex - darling Alex—!’

  The long morning wore away, and the appalling heat filled every corner and crevice of the Hirren Minar as though it had been a tangible thing; a weight which could be lifted from the shoulders if only the body had possessed sufficient strength.

  That day, when they needed it so badly, the hot wind failed and the air was as still as brass. Lou and Winter took it in turns to pull the bamboo punkah and to sponge and fan Lottie, while Alex sat by her, talking to her; pulling against her as she clung to his hands, dragging at them and screaming. The sweat ran down their faces and blinded their eyes, and Winter and Lou flinched and gasped at every scream, but Alex’s voice remained steady and reassuring and Lottie’s eyes clung desperately to his - as desperately as her hands.

  Once Lou had dropped the wet cloth she had been holding and jumped to her feet, her eyes wide and staring in her white sweat-streaked face and her hands pressed frantically over her ears to keep out the sound of that terrible screaming. ‘I can’t bear it!’ she gasped. ‘I can’t bear it—’ She had started to run from the room and Alex had released one hand and caught her arm in a crushing grip, forcing her back. He had not spoken, but Lou had looked down into his face and experienced as violent a shock as though he had struck her. She stood staring at him, trembling and gasping, and then her tense muscles had slackened and the blood had rushed up into her face, and she said: ‘I’m sorry.’ Alex’s fingers relaxed, and she had looked down dazedly at the marks they had left, and stumbling back to her place had picked up the cloth and continued to bathe Lottie’s writhing body.

  But before the morning was out Alex knew with a sick despair that he would not allow to show in his face that he was fighting a losing battle.

  Lottie’s meagre strength ebbed with the day, and Alex gave her brandy and cursed both man and nature for allowing any woman born with that narrowness of hip to conceive. He could not see how it was possible for the child to be born at all - let alone be born alive. And yet it was so nearly born. But the afternoon had gone, and Lottie’s strength with it. She could do no more. He would have to do the rest himself. He looked at Lou and saw that her hands were shaking, and he turned his head and spoke over his shoulder to Winter: ‘Hold her for me.’

  Lottie’s daughter was born just as the sun touched the level of the tree-tops; and long before the gold had left the sky Lottie was dead. She had survived the birth, and she might have lived if she had fought to do so; but she had neither the strength nor the desire to hold on to life.

  She had spoken only once. Lou had washed the tiny, whimpering creature and laid it against Lottie’s thin shoulder, and Lottie’s sunken eyes had opened slowly and painfully and she had looked at it. A last ray from the sinking sun had pierced through the bamboo screen and touched its small head, and Lottie’s bloodless lips had curled in the shadow of a smile.

  ‘Red hair,’ she whispered. ‘Like Edward’s. Take care of him, Lou.’ And then she had died.

  Lou had wept, but Winter had not cried for Lottie. Lottie was with Edward, and she had loved Edward so much. That tiny red-headed morsel of humanity, if it lived, might have comforted her, but it would never have made up to her for the loss of her Edward, or wiped out that picture of him dying cruelly before her eyes. She washed Lottie’s light little body and dressed her again, and went out to the river before it became too dark to see, leaving Lou with the child.

  Alex was sitting on a fallen block of stone among the jungle grass near the entrance to the Hirren Minar. He had his head in his hands, and in the dusk he had been almost invisible against the background of the bamboos that towered up behind him.

  Winter stood watching him for a moment or two, and then she went to him and put her arms about him, and laid her cheek against his hair. He turned his head against her shoulder with a tired sigh and his arms came round her quite gently. He leant against her for a long time without moving or speaking, as though he were too tired to wish to do either, while the dusk deepened about them and the evening star shone bright in a soft green sky.

  Alex stirred at last, moving his head so that his lips lay against the curve of her throat, and his arms tightened about her, drawing her close. And then a peacock screamed from beyond the bamboo-brake - a harsh, grating cry that seemed to echo the gasping screams that had rung in their ears all that hot agonizing afternoon - and she felt his body jerk almost as though he had been abruptly awakened from sleep. He pushed her away from him suddenly and violently, his hands coming up to grip her arms and wrench them away, and he stood up swiftly and said in a voice that was as hard and as rough as a steel file: ‘No, I’m damned if I will! Not after today. I won’t let that happen to you. I won’t, do you hear. Go on - get back in there before I—’ He bit the sentence off, swung round and disappeared into the dusk.

  He had returned an hour later and fetched the heavy-bladed knife that was used for cutting through thick jungle, and gone out again. It had taken him the best part of the night to dig a grave that would be deep enough to protect Lottie’s little body from marauding animals, but he had managed it at last.

  They had buried her in the clear pearly light of the early morning, an hour before the sun rose, and Alex had said as much as he could remember of the service for the burial of the dead over her grave. He remembered a good deal of it, for India was a country where that service was used with depressing frequency. Afterwards he had gone off to bathe in the river at a spot higher up the bank, leaving the narrow beach by the tree to Winter and Lou, and had not returned until an hour after the sun had risen.

  The upper room of the Hirren Minar was clean and swept and tidy, and yesterday and all the nerve-racking torture of those long, hot, agonizing hours seemed a year away. Winter had handed him food which she had kept hot for him in a covered cooking-pot among the embers of a fire, and he had eaten it and watched Lou who was feeding the baby with water in which she had boiled a little rice. She dipped a clean rag in the liquid and gave it to the tiny creature to suck, and there was a look on her face that Alex had not thought it possible for Lou Cottar to wear. A soft, absorbed wonder. He observed it with interest and a certain astonished amusement - Mrs Josh Cottar, of all people!

  Lou said thoughtfully and with entire seriousness: ‘You’ll have to get me some milk. I wonder if we could keep a goat?’

  Alex finished his meal and came over to look at the skinny, wrinkled little object with the fluff of reddish-gold down on its head that had cost Lottie her life, and looking at it he had a sudden warm feeling of achievement. He had not been able to save Lottie, but he had at least saved this minute scrap of new life from dying before it had lived, and all at once that seemed a thing as well worth doing as the saving of a province. He touched the tiny waving hand, and felt it close about his finger with the instinctive and unexpected tenacity of a sea anemone.

  Alex laughed and said: ‘You shall have your goat, Lou, if I have to steal it. What are you going to call her?’

  ‘Amanda,’ said Lou promptly.

  ‘Good Lord! Why? Did Lottie—?’

  ‘No,’ said Lou. ‘Lottie was sure it was going to be a boy. She never knew it wasn’t. It’s just that I think Amanda is a nice name for her. It means “worthy of love”.’

  Alex stroked the downy head with a forefinger and Lou looked up at him and smiled. ‘Still three women on your hands, Alex.’

  ‘Four,’ said Alex with a grin. ‘You’ve forgotten the goat. And I can clearly see that a goat is going to be more trouble than the rest of you put together.’

  It was a prophecy that was to prove lamentably correct.

  Alex had slept most of that day and had gone out at sunset. He had returned at dawn dragging an exceedingly voca
l goat procured for him with suspicious ease by Kashmera, whom Alex suspected of having stolen it. The goat had been loath to accompany him, and he had been compelled to carry it for the first part of the way.

  Lou and Winter had attempted to milk it, collectively and severally, and had been reduced first to desperation and then to helpless mirth in the process. Alex had refused to help. He said that he considered that he had discharged his part in the affair by procuring the animal, and that he was damned if he was going to turn gopi. They must learn to deal with it themselves.

  They had done so, and the baby throve. It was astonishingly tenacious of life, and survived the untutored treatment to which it was subjected, as it had survived the horrors and hazards of that pregnancy and premature birth. The goat gave far more trouble. It evinced a desire to stray and could be trusted to eat its way through any and every rope. Alex constructed a strong door of thick bamboo poles to replace the flimsier curtain of grass over the entrance to the Hirren Minar, and they kept the goat in the lower chamber at night.

  It had awakened them the second night by bleating plaintively and monotonously, and when at last it had ceased they had heard a rasping, scratching sound, and Alex, who had been sleeping on the open roof, had looked down over the ruined parapet and seen by the clear starlight and a waning moon the beautiful black-barred body of a tigress who crouched before the bamboo door, clawing at it with a taloned paw. The tigress had heard the movement above her and had looked up, her eyes glinting like green moons, and she had stared at him for a full minute before leaping away into the thickets.

  Alex had strengthened the door, lashing a double layer of bamboo poles the thickness of his arm across and across it, and the next night the tigress had been back again. He heard the scrape of her claws, and lifting a lump of earth that he had taken the precaution to bring with him dropped it on her from above. There was a sharp and un-tigerlike yelp and she had bounded away into the jungle.

  ‘Why didn’t you drop something heavier?’ demanded Lou, who had been an interested spectator.

  ‘Because I have no desire to have a wounded tiger in this bit of the jungle,’ said Alex. ‘They are unpleasant things to have around.’

  ‘But it will only be back tomorrow night.’

  ‘Probably. But it won’t get through that door. There’s that baby of yours starting now. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Who wouldn’t be a bachelor?’

  Lou had laughed and hurried back to feed the wailing child, and the next night they had been awakened at moonrise by a leopard snarling and tearing at the bamboo door. But apart from these disturbances the long, burning, breathless days were peaceful enough.

  The jungle dried and shrivelled and turned brown about them, and the river shrank; but still the monsoon delayed. They never spoke of Lottie, as they never spoke of all those whom they had known in Lunjore, or of anything that had happened there. Their life went on as before, except that now there was the baby to look after in place of Lottie, and Lou had lost her restlessness.

  Lou had never liked children. She had not wanted any of her own, or been in the least disappointed when none had been born to her; she had looked upon it as a blessing. But somewhere, unsuspected by anyone, least of all by herself, there must have lurked an unquenchable spark of the maternal instinct; and now, unexpectedly, it had sprung alight.

  Perhaps Lottie, dying, had been able to sense its presence and its potential strength, for it was not to Alex or to Winter that she had spoken. She had said: ‘Look after him, Lou,’ and Lou had taken the child and looked at it with a sudden awe-struck and exultant sense of possession.

  That sense of possession had grown stronger every day, and now she did not mind how long they stayed in the Hirren Minar. She was afraid of moving from it. They were safe here and they must not take any risks. She could even bear the intolerable heat better because the child seemed to take no harm from it, but she waited and panted and prayed for the rains. If only the rains would break!

  ‘Alex, how much longer will it be?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Alex. ‘Any day now.’

  The news from the outside world, if it could be believed, was not encouraging. Sir Henry Lawrence had fought a disastrous action at Chinut and had been heavily defeated, and now he and the British in Lucknow were closely besieged in the Residency. General Wheeler and the Cawnpore garrison were reported to be at their last gasp in the torn and shattered and pitifully inadequate entrenchments that they had scratched up out of the earth, and where they had fought and died and held out under the glaring heat and the blizzard of shot and shell since the sixth of June. In Jhansi the Rani had urged on her people to revolt, and had offered terms to the Europeans who had taken refuge in the fort. The terms had been accepted, and they had surrendered - only to be seized, bound and slaughtered; men, women and children together. Not one had been spared in that cold-blooded butchery.

  Mutiny had broken out in Allahabad where the sepoys had murdered their officers and massacred all Christians, and the only news that seemed to hold out hope was that the British still clung to the Ridge before Delhi, although their force was as yet more besieged than besieging.

  ‘Wait yet awhile,’ urged Kashmera, as he had urged so often before. ‘Thou art safe in the jungle.’

  But the jungle had finished with them, and it would not let them wait.

  45

  Alex had been setting a snare at the entrance to a small clearing some fifty yards from the Hirren Minar when he smelt smoke.

  He had not been feeling at all well that day. His head ached and he thought angrily that Lou or Winter had disobeyed orders and lit an early fire. Then all at once he realized that the hot wind that was rustling the dry grass and dead leaves was blowing towards the Hirren Minar, and not away from it. There must be someone else in the jungle, and upwind of him. He left the snare and returned swiftly, pulling the grass back over the path that he had taken, and ordered the two women, who were about to leave for their evening bathe, to get back into the upper room.

  ‘Pull up the ladder and keep a revolver handy,’ said Alex peremptorily. ‘And drag the slab over that hole. I’m going to have a look round. Don’t move until I come back.’

  He had disappeared and they had waited a long time, making no noise and listening to the interminable croon of the hot wind and the monotonous rustle and clank of the dry bamboos. Presently Winter had lifted her head and sniffed as Alex had done.

  ‘Smoke! So that’s why— Lou, suppose it’s some of the others? It might be. We can’t have been the only ones to get away.’

  ‘More likely charcoal-burners,’ said Lou in a whisper. ‘If it were men hunting for us they wouldn’t warn us by lighting fires.’

  Alex had returned half an hour later and called up to them that they could come down. He looked strained and uneasy. The smoke had come strongly on the wind, but the wind was dying now with the dying day, and soon it would be dark enough for him to verify his fears.

  Lou, carrying the baby, had made straight for the river, but Winter had stopped and looked at Alex with anxious eyes: ‘What is it? What are you afraid of? Is it men?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Alex with an uneasy movement of his shoulders. ‘We could probably deal with them - or avoid them.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  Alex’s eyes were searching the sky to the south-west. There had been clouds in the sky all day; dirty copper-coloured clouds which he had hoped might mean rain at last. But was there something more than clouds there? He said: ‘I think the jungle is on fire somewhere over there. It may burn out, but— Oh well, we shall soon know.’

  The wind died and the smell of smoke died with it, but later, as the sky darkened, a pink wavering glow that was not the sunset grew steadily brighter until it drowned out the last of the daylight and spanned the horizon from north to south.

  Alex watched it from the roof of the Hirren Minar. ‘It may miss us,’ he thought. ‘Or it may burn out before it reaches us.’ But he had litt
le hope of it doing either. So little hope that he made a bundle of those few things that seemed to him urgently necessary, and carried them down to the river bank.

  Presently the wind rose again, and now it brought with it not only the smell of smoke, but drifting ash. Soon there would be sparks, and the forest was tinder-dry from the scorching June days. He returned to find the two women standing on the open roof watching the sky, their faces clearly illumined by the distant glow. They turned together to face him, and once again, as on that day in the jungle when they had fled from Lunjore, their eyes were wide and strained but devoid of panic, and he knew that the anxiety in Lou’s was not for herself, but only for the child she held.

  Looking at them Alex was conscious of a confused mixture of emotions that included gratitude, relief, tenderness, a passionate admiration, and a disgust of himself because he had once considered them as nothing more than millstones round his neck and a tiresome responsibility of which he wished he could rid himself. He found that his voice was a little difficult to control and said with unnecessary curtness: ‘Can either of you swim?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Winter, who had spent a few weeks every summer at Scarborough - Lady Julia considering the sea air good for growing girls.

  ‘A little,’ said Lou Cottar. ‘But - but Amanda—’

  Alex said: ‘We’ll have to make some sort of raft. Just in case. Get me all the ropes you can, Lou, and give that child some food. Light the lamp, Winter - and get a fire going below. We’ll have to see what we’re doing.’ He disappeared down the ladder and they heard him hacking down the heavy bamboo door that he had built to protect the goat.