by M. M. Kaye
In his calmer moments he knew that the idea was mad, but the heat and the discomfort and the deadly days were beginning to make him a little mad, and his temperament had never been created for endurance. He had seen Alex sitting on the coping of the well late one evening, and it had suddenly occurred to him how simple it would be to thrust him in. It could be done so easily in the dusk. One quick movement of the arm, and the man would fall backwards down the long dank slippery shaft and drown in the black water below.
Lou, who had been watching him, had read the thought in his face as clearly as though it had been written there in block capitals. And seen, too, the moment when it occurred to him that there was a rope and a well-wheel, and five other people who would hear the fall and the splash and who would not stand by and see a man drown. Carlyon had turned abruptly away to walk restlessly up and down the narrow paths, but Lou had not forgotten that look. She had warned Alex later that same night, and he had laughed at her.
‘My dear Lou! You’re letting your imagination run away with you. I agree that he would probably enjoy seeing me dead. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t feel the same if I were in his shoes. But feeling like murdering someone and actually doing it are worlds apart. I should have been hung ten times over long before this if I had laid violent hands on all the people whom I have felt that I wouldn’t mind hitting with a meat-axe.’
Lou said: ‘I’d agree if I thought that he was entirely sane. But I don’t think he is any more.’
Alex had merely shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the subject, and Lou had spoken to Winter, who had been frightened. She had begun to watch Carlyon instead of Alex, and both men had noticed the fact. Alex, who knew her, knew that she was frightened, and Carlyon, who did not, imagined that she was coming round to thinking more kindly of him, and the thought encouraged him in the belief that if only Randall could be got rid of she might yet turn to him.
There had been a fourth major assault on the Residency towards the end of the first week in September, and the refugees in the Gulab Mahal had listened to the sound of it with the same hope and dread with which they had listened to the din of the earlier assaults: but this one too had failed. Since then there had been nothing more than the usual desultory firing, broken occasionally by the boom of an exploding mine or an exchange of shells, and once more the siege had bogged down to a question of dogged endurance.
The weather was growing cooler and the heat was no longer a grinding torment but a discomfort that could be endured, and sometimes after a day of drenching rain the night air held a hint of chilliness; a promise of the cold weather to come.
Alex’s roof was now pleasantly cool once the sun had set. It was high enough to catch the light breeze that awoke at sundown, and it became, because of this, a more popular gathering-place for his fellow-fugitives than the garden, for the breeze discouraged the mosquitoes and gnats and other winged pests which haunted the humid shade of the orange trees. They had all been there one evening after a strangely silent day on which there had been an eclipse of the sun.
The eclipse had lasted for three hours and had bathed the city in a weird brown-tinted gloom where the shadows lay pale and wan, and during that time the firing had ceased and men had stood silent in the streets to watch the shadow of the moon creep across the fiery disk until it had blotted it out. Even afterwards there had been little firing, and the day had seemed curiously quiet and heavy with tension.
Alex’s bed had been dragged out into the open, and the three women were sitting on it, talking in undertones while the men walked idly to and fro, when Winter had seen the same expression on Carlyon’s face that Lou had seen once before in the garden.
Alex had been sitting on the parapet, looking out towards the hidden Residency where the occasional gun-flashes showed behind the trees and the intervening buildings. There had been no one near him and Winter had seen Carlyon look at him and had known what Lou meant. Only this time Alex was not sitting on the coping of a well. This time there was a clear drop of thirty feet or more below him, and iron-hard earth instead of well water. Carlyon moved quietly towards him, and Winter rose swiftly and running after him caught his arm. He had swung round, his purpose entirely plain on his contorted face, and she had stood looking up at him, her fingers tight on his arm and her wide, frightened eyes holding his and trying to force him back into sanity by an effort of will.
Alex had heard the light running step and had turned too. He could not see Carlyon’s face, but he could see Winter’s, and also her clutching fingers on Carlyon’s arm; and he was suddenly aware of what she had thought the man had been going to do. He remembered then what Lou had said, and he glanced down at the drop beneath him and felt his stomach contract and a cold sweat break out on his forehead. He stood up quite slowly and moved unhurriedly away, and Carlyon shivered as though he were awakening from a momentary trance. The tension went out of his muscles and the fixed stare from his eyes, and Winter’s hand dropped from his arm.
She made some light and trivial remark on the subject of the eclipse without knowing what it was that she had said and without hearing his reply: and then Lou was standing beside Carlyon and had drawn him away, and Winter sat down very suddenly on the parapet where Alex had been sitting a moment ago.
Her knees were trembling and she had to clench her teeth hard to prevent them from chattering. There was a curious humming sound in her ears and she felt very cold. She did not hear Alex walk towards her, but a hand dropped on her shoulder and she knew without turning whose it was. He held her shoulder in a warm and comforting grip, and after a moment or two she lifted her own hand and laid it over his. She did not turn because her eyes were full of tears and she did not want Alex to see them, but the trembling of her body stilled, and presently Alex gave her a small reassuring shake and released her.
He was more careful after that, and he did not again approach too near to the edge of the roof when Carlyon was present. He saw even less of Winter than usual in the following week for she did not once appear in the garden in the early morning, and for three evenings running she did not join the others on the roof. He had asked Lou for the reason, and Lou had replied shortly that she was not feeling very well but that it was nothing to worry about, while Winter herself, taxed with it on her reappearance, had said lightly that the heat and an over-ripe papiya that she had eaten had been responsible.
Alex had accepted the explanation, and might have continued to do so for some considerable time if it had not been for an unexpected storm that had blown up out of a clear sky some four nights later.
He had been sleeping out on the open roof, and the first intimation he had received of the storm was when he was awakened by what appeared to be a tub of cold water emptied over him. This was not the warm rain of the hot weather, but the colder rain of autumn, and there was a wind behind the rain, driving it against him and chilling him to the bone. He was drenched almost before he was awake, and the roof appeared to be awash with water.
It had been awash often enough before during the monsoon, but then the rain had beaten straight down upon it, and he had slept under cover and not in the open. Tonight the wind blew the rain straight into the narrow porchlike pavilion where the chiks had been rolled up, so that it was as cold and wet as the open roof.
‘This is where I catch pneumonia,’ thought Alex exasperated, wrestling in the pitchy darkness to release the sodden chiks. He became aware of someone else on the roof, and Winter’s voice calling his name through the lashing of the wind and the rain and the infuriating flapping of the chiks.
‘Alex - Alex - where are you?’
‘I’m here,’ shouted Alex. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get on back! Where are you?’
He groped for her in the blackness and caught a wet arm, and as he did so the brief, fiendish blast of wind that had driven the storm before it died out as quickly as it had arisen, and there was only the rain falling steadily onto the roof with a soft splashing sound as though it were falling into a
lake.
Alex said furiously: ‘Winter, are you mad? You’ll be drenched. Get on back to your room!’
He heard her laugh a little shakily and she said: ‘I’m drenched already. And I won’t go down unless you come with me. You can’t stay up here for the rest of the night. You’ll only get ill again, and we’ve had enough trouble with you already.’
‘You sound,’ said Alex, ‘regrettably like a nurse I used to have when I was about six. All right, I’ll come. Be careful of those stairs. If we fall down them in the dark we shall break our necks.’
The room that had once been Sabrina’s seemed hot after the coldness of the wet windy roof, and there was an oil-lamp burning. The flame wavered in the draught and the painted plaster trees and birds and flowers seemed to move with the moving light as though they had been alive, and the curve of the rose-coloured ceiling was full of soft shadows so that it was difficult to tell how high it was.
Alex took the cloth that Winter handed him and rubbed himself dry with it, removing his wet loin-cloth and appropriating a length of turquoise blue muslin - evidently a head-veil - to replace it. He sat down on the carved and painted bed and looked about the room, charmed by the gay, childish grace of the formalized patterns and the clear colours which, though rubbed and worn in many places, were still jewel-bright. And then he looked at his wife.
Her hair had been unbound for the night and she was wringing the water out of it and twisting it up out of the way in a heavy shining knot at the back of her head. Her arms were lifted, and the brief cotton sari she wore wrapped lightly about her was drenched with rain and clung wetly to her body, outlining and revealing every rounded curve of a figure that was no longer the reed-slim one he had known.
Winter finished knotting up her hair and said: ‘There’s another resai over there. Will you mind sleeping on the floor?’
He did not answer her and she turned to look at him, and saw that he knew. There was a white shade about his mouth and his eyes were wide and very bright, and she stood quite still, looking back at him gravely, her gaze steady and a little apprehensive.
After a long minute Alex spoke as though speaking were difficult. He said: ‘Is it mine?’
‘Yes.’
He held out a hand to her and she came to him as slowly as if she were walking in her sleep, and Alex reached up and drew her down into his arms and said in a voice that she had not known he possessed: ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Oh my love - my little love!’ He laughed suddenly; a laugh that broke on a dry sob, and held her away from him so that he could look into her face.
‘And to think,’ said Alex, ‘that I have been keeping my hands off you for weeks - for months! - because I was afraid of this.’
His hands stripped away the sodden sari and his fingers pressed through the heavy wet waves of hair, and then his mouth closed down on hers, blotting out thought.
50
They were allowed three days of unclouded happiness. Three days and nights of complete and unalloyed rapture and contentment, made the more sweet by being snatched out of the ugly mire of blood and fear and frenzy that fouled half India.
They had come into possession of a kingdom, and Sabrina’s room was an enchanted garden a thousand miles removed from the harsh realities of the warring world outside. They had so much to talk of and to tell. So much to ask and to remember and to forget. And so much to give that needed no words for its expression.
They went up to the roof-top only after the others had gone, and lying in the crook of Alex’s arm, counting the stars that shimmered and blinked and blazed in the tented velvet of the sky, Winter no longer heard the firing from the Residency or the night noises of the city, but only Alex’s quiet breathing and the steady beat of his heart under her cheek.
She was entirely and completely happy with a happiness that many touch once but do not hold. At Ware she had longed for the Gulab Mahal as a child cries for the moon, and on so many nights and through so many years she had wished on a star. Now she did not need to wish for anything any more, because all that she could ever have wished for had been given to her - together with every star in the sky. She knew now that whatever happened, and however much pain or horror or parting the future might hold, she had touched every one of those stars and held the moon in her hand, and that if she died tomorrow she would die content.
They had seen little of anyone else during the three days that followed the night of the storm. Only Ameera and Hamida and Lou. Alex had not seen Ameera before, except as a veiled figure on the night of his wedding.
‘But thou art the husband of my cousin now, so for a time I will forget that I am of India, and a Mussulman, and be of my mother’s people, who keep no purdah,’ said Ameera smiling at him.
Alex had looked from one face to the other and seen the similarity of the de Ballesteros blood, and had laughed and said: ‘Thou art not of India only, Begum Sahiba. The West is there also.’
Ameera shook her head so that her earrings jingled. ‘Nay, that is not so. There may come a time when it is possible for one person to be of both, but that time is not yet, and I do not think that my children’s children will see it. Their children, perhaps. I shall be dead then, and shall not know. But those who are, as I am, of the East and of the West, must cleave only to one if they wish to avoid unhappiness. To stand with a foot in each is to be neither: and I have chosen the East. It is only when the blood of one alone runs in the veins that those such as my cousin can be happy in both, for then there is no war, pulling both ways. Thy son too, when he is born, may love this land and its people as his mother does, and, I think, as thou dost also. But it will be for love alone, and not because of any tie of blood.’
Lou had come in search of Winter on that same day and had found Alex there. She had looked relieved and said: ‘So you’ve told him, have you? I wondered how much longer you were going to be about it. Is it—’ She bit the sentence off abruptly and blushed hotly for perhaps the first time in her adult life.
‘No,’ said Alex shortly, answering the unspoken question. ‘It’s mine.’
Lou drew a deep breath of relief. She said: ‘I thought it might be, because you didn’t come back that night and— But I was afraid it was Con’s and that was why she wouldn’t tell you.’
Winter said: ‘How long have you known, Lou?’
Lou laughed. ‘Probably almost as long as you have. It wasn’t difficult, living as we did.’
Alex said: ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Oh, you!’ said Lou, and left them.
They had not seen any of the others, and did not know that their absence had driven Carlyon to the ragged fringes of desperation and rage. While he had been able to see them - one or other of them - and to note the fact that their behaviour towards each other was almost that of strangers, he had been able to feed on the hope that Winter had perhaps only married the man as a way out of a difficult situation.
But now they had both removed from his sight, and they were somewhere together, and he could not endure it. Everything that had happened to him since his arrival in this appalling, barbaric, abomination of a country was Winter’s fault. Winter’s and Randall’s! The discomfort and the tediousness that he had endured on the journey from Calcutta, and in Delhi. The rage of disappointment and the wound to his vanity and egotism. The sleepless nights and the gnawing, unsatisfied hunger for a woman who had escaped him. The illness and the heat and the horrors of the mutiny. The weeks of hiding in jungles and hovels, the fear that lived night and day at his elbow, and the long torture of confinement and inactivity; day after day after day of Lapeuta and Dobbie, and the all too brief daily sight of Winter - as lovely and disturbing and desirable as ever and always out of reach. Of Randall, always watching.
Winter and Randall! They were all right. They suffered no hardships and knew nothing of the tortures he endured. Hidden away somewhere and locked in each other’s arms, durance and monotony and fear meant nothing to them. He himself was the only one who really suffered, and the
others were all in league against him, ranged in the opposite camp: allies of the dark-skinned, sly-faced jailers who held him prisoner …
And then after three days Alex and Winter had come down to the garden again, and together, and even in the soft uncertain dusk Carlyon had been able to read Winter’s face.
They could all read it, and the others had looked at her and smiled, because she was young and lovely and in love. She did not touch Alex or stay very near him. She did not need to. But even the dullest and least imaginative of minds could sense and almost see the bond of love and belonging that linked them, and as Carlyon watched her the rage of the last three days - and of all the days that had gone before - boiled up in him like a seething bubble of lava breaking through the thin crust of a volcano. The fumes of it rose to his brain so that he saw her through a red mist of rage as the sole author and architect of all his misfortunes.
She had been standing less than a yard away from him, her face clear in the pale moonlight, and he had leapt at her and caught her by the throat, shouting a torrent of accusations and obscenities, shaking her to and fro as his hands choked the breath from her in a strangling, agonizing, frenzied grip.
Alex had reached them first and had hit him between the eyes with all his strength, and he had released Winter and staggered back, and then come at Alex, screaming senseless, futile words.
They had overpowered him at last and dragged him, still struggling and shouting, back to the room he shared with Lapeuta and Dobbie, and Alex had carried Winter up to the painted room and held her in his arms while Ameera and Hamida put cold compresses on her bruised and swollen throat.