Shadow of the Moon (2 page)

Emily was no Desdemona. It would not have made the smallest difference to her had he talked instead of stocks and shares or indoor plumbing. She was not interested in the East; only in Ebenezer. She found him lovable and dependable and knew that she could love him and mother him and lean upon him. She even thought him handsome.

Ebenezer, twelve years her senior and recently returned from a considerable spell in India, found in her his ideal woman. To him she appeared young without being ‘missish': a poised, serene Englishwoman. He had always been ill at ease with women, but not with Emily. With her he was at home and at rest. He actually thought her beautiful.

They were married from Ware in the autumn of 1825, and Emily drove away with her Ebenezer to a honeymoon tour of the Lake District, leaving Charlotte to take over the duties of hostess and chatelaine of Ware, and charge of Sabrina's education and upbringing.

Sabrina did not welcome the change. True, her grandfather continued to pet and spoil her, but she was unable to spend more than a small portion of her time in his company, since the larger part of her days was spent, of necessity, in the schoolroom and under the eye of nurses and governesses selected by her Aunt Charlotte.

In 1830 ‘Prinny' died; unregretted by his people and unmourned save by his stout and grasping inamorata, Lady Conyngham. William IV, ‘Sailor Bill', became King. And in the draughty Palace of Kensington a small, prim, composed little girl played with her dolls and went for walks with her German
governess, still unaware that she was heiress-presumptive of England and destined to lift the Monarchy out of the mud and ridicule to which her uncles had reduced it, to unbelievable heights of popularity and prestige …

When Sabrina was seventeen her grandfather gave a ball to mark her debut, and immediately Ware became the lodestone for every young gallant in five counties. Sabrina could have taken her choice of a dozen eligible offers, and Charlotte was not pleased.

Charlotte had seldom been pleased with Sabrina, and now she found it intolerable that her own plain, prim, well-mannered daughters should be entirely cast into the shade by her niece's golden loveliness and gay, inconsequent charm. To make matters worse the girl refused every offer made her in the course of the next two years; though this was not because she had never fallen in love. Indeed she fell in love only too often, but to her aunt's indignation and her grandfather's relief, she appeared incapable of remaining in love with the same man for longer than a week or so at the most.

To get Sabrina married and removed from Ware became Charlotte's relentless objective, and in the end it was Emily who unconsciously assisted her to attain it. Emily and the Earl and a certain Captain of Hussars …

The Lady Emily Barton, home on a visit to her father's house, was about to return to India to rejoin her Ebenezer - now a baronet and appointed to the Governor-General's Council. She had begged to take Sabrina with her for a year, and though at any other time the Earl would undoubtedly have refused, it so happened Emily's request had coincided with the appearance upon the scene of the first man in whom Sabrina had taken an interest that outlasted three weeks.

Captain Dennis Allington of the Hussars was handsome, dashing and experienced in the matter of women, and Sabrina, who found him dangerously fascinating, continued to allow him to dance attendance upon her, and treated him with more favour than she had previously shown to any of her suitors.

The Earl had become seriously alarmed. He knew Captain Allington to be a gambler and a spendthrift, with a reputation, where women were concerned, that would not bear investigation, and such a man was no suitable husband for his favourite grandchild. But when he attempted to take Sabrina to task she had been pert and saucy. Emily's invitation had therefore come at a propitious moment and the Earl grasped at it as a way out of his difficulties. He would send Sabrina away for at least a year: Emily could be trusted to take the greatest care of his darling, and Captain Allington out of sight would soon be out of mind.

Charlotte gave the project her enthusiastic support, but Sabrina herself was in two minds upon the matter. She was devoted to her Aunt Emily and found the prospect of a voyage to India both exciting and agreeable; on the other hand, there was Dennis Allington. She was not at all sure that she was not in
love with Dennis, and she suspected that the whole idea of a year's stay in India was solely designed to part her from him.

While she wavered, Captain Allington himself decided the matter; and with it her future …

It had happened at a ball at Ormesley Court where Sabrina, having torn the lace flouncing of her dress during a country dance, had retired to get it repaired. Hurrying back to the ballroom she had taken a short cut through a side corridor and come suddenly upon Captain Dennis Allington kissing Mrs Jack Ormesley.

To do the Captain justice he had not intended to kiss Mrs Ormesley, whom he had been conducting to a salon where refreshments were being served. But as they passed through a small corridor which happened at the moment to be deserted, Mrs Ormesley had tripped on the trailing end of her long lace scarf, and would have fallen had Captain Allington not caught her. Not being a man to waste such an opportunity he kissed the lady, who returned his embrace with every appearance of enjoyment, and he would have thought no more of the incident had he not lifted his head to encounter the frozen gaze of the Honourable Sabrina Grantham.

On such small trifles do fate and the future depend. If Sabrina had not torn six inches of flouncing from the hem of her dress, or if Mrs Jack Ormesley's scarf had been six inches shorter, Emily would have sailed for India alone instead of being accompanied by her favourite niece.

Sabrina had been enchanted with India. She possessed a gay and uncritical nature, and everything, from the long and tedious voyage round the Cape to their arrival in the teeming port of Calcutta, delighted her. Dennis Allington and his perfidy were soon forgotten, and long before the end of the journey was reached Sabrina would have found it difficult to recall his features in any detail.

She enjoyed her customary success in Anglo-Indian society, but did not find herself in love again with any of the officers and officials who danced attendance upon her.

‘I must be getting old, Aunt Emily,' said Sabrina in a panic. ‘I haven't been in love for a year!'

It was 1837, and she was twenty-one.

Her grandfather had already written demanding her return, but since Emily's health had not been too good of late, Sabrina did not feel that she could leave her. Nor, in fact, did she wish to leave, for India still held a potent charm for her. Her Uncle Ebenezer, as a prominent member of the Governor-General's Council, would go on stately tours during the cold season, accompanied by his wife and her niece, and it was during an official visit to the court of the King of Oudh that Sabrina had met Juanita de Ballesteros.

Juanita's father, the Conde de los Aguilares, was a wealthy and eccentric Spanish nobleman who as a young man had travelled much in the East. Arriving in Oudh almost half a century earlier he had been greatly attracted to the country and the people, and in particular to a nephew of the ruling King. The two young men, Spaniard and Mussulman, had become fast friends. They were curiously alike in both features and temperament. Perhaps because the blood of a dark-eyed daughter of Islam, from the days of the Moorish conquest of Spain, had been transmitted down the ages to this son of Castille and Aragon.

Ramon de Ballesteros, Conde de los Aguilares, never returned to Spain. Oudh became his home, and the rich, barbaric, colourful kingdom his country. The King of Oudh made him a grant of land on the banks of the River Goomti, and there, surrounded by groves of orange and lemon trees and green, formal gardens, he built a house; a vast Spanish
castello
in the heart of India.

The Casa de los Pavos Reales, the House of the Peacocks, merged into the Eastern scene with the same ease and grace as its owner - Spanish architecture, with its cool open courtyards and splashing fountains, its high rooms and secretive balconied windows, being to a large extent the legacy of a conqueror from the East.

In due course the Conde married; not, as might have been predicted, a daughter of the royal house of Oudh, but the only child of a French
émigré
who had fled with his family from the bloody holocaust of the Revolution, and had subsequently taken service in the Army of the East India Company.

Anne Marie de Selincourt was a gentle dark-eyed creature who could not remember the country of her birth. She had been barely a year old when her parents had fled with her from France, and having lived ever since in the East, the Hindustani and court Persian of Oudh were as familiar to her as the Tamil and Telegu of the south, or the English tongue and her own native French. She settled into the colourful polyglot life of her husband's great house on the Goomti and never realized its strangeness. Her friends were the slender, olive-skinned, dark-eyed wives of the princes and nobles of Oudh, and her fourth child, Juanita, was born in the house of Aziza Begum, wife of her husband's great friend, Mirza Ali Shah.

‘She shall marry the son of an Emperor and wear pearls on her head, and ride on an elephant in a golden howdah,' said Aziza Begum to Anne Marie, rocking her own small son in her arms; and the two young mothers had laughed together over the heads of their sleeping children.

Only two of Anne Marie's seven children survived their infancy; her son Marcos and her daughter Juanita. The others fell early victims to cholera and typhus, those two deadly plagues of the East. When Marcos was fourteen years old his father dispatched him to Spain in order that his son might complete his education in his native land, and Marcos did not return for nine years. By then he was a slim young man with the dark, hawk-like
handsomeness that is so frequently seen among the great families of Aragon and Castille, and his sister Juanita had married her childhood playmate, Wali Dad, son of Ali Shah and Aziza Begum.

The marriage had aroused considerable opposition from both Christian priests and Mohammedan maulvis, but had in the end received the consent and approval of both families. Aziza Begum's slender figure had grown corpulent and unwieldy with the advancing years and her blue-black hair was streaked with grey, while the unrelenting heat of the Indian summers had shrivelled the young Anne Marie to a thin little woman with a nutcracker face and prematurely white hair. Their husbands were elderly grey-beards, their children grown men and women, and Aziza Begum was already grandmother to half a dozen plump brown babies. But though they and the world had changed, the old friendship between the two families had not. Handsome young Wali Dad, Aziza's first-born, fell in love with Anne Marie's gentle dark-eyed daughter: his parents had never denied him anything, and why should they deny him this? ‘There is no God but God,' said Ali Shah to the maulvis, ‘but is not Hasrat Isa (Jesus Christ) also numbered among the Prophets? And are not Christians also “Children of the Book"?'

‘One of our own line was a Moorish maiden,' said the Conde Ramon. ‘And Ali Shah is my oldest friend and Oudh the country of my adoption. If the young people desire it, I will not refuse my consent.'

Sabrina Grantham, visiting Oudh with her aunt and uncle in the spring of 1837, met Juanita de Ballesteros, wife of Wali Dad, at a banquet in the women's quarters of the Chutter Manzil Palace in Lucknow.

It was strange that two women of such dissimilar background and temperament should have found so much in common, but between Sabrina and Juanita there sprang up and flourished an instant and deep affection. They were young and of an age; each found the other different and stimulating and romantic, and they were friends from the first moment of their meeting: Sabrina, blonde and grey-eyed, with a skin like milk, wearing the trim-waisted, full-skirted fashions of the day with their absurd flower and ribbon and feather-decked hats as if they had been designed solely to accentuate her beauty, and Juanita, whose creamy magnolia-petal skin and large brown eyes lent a piquant touch of European charm to the graceful Eastern costume that she habitually wore.

Emily, who had remained staunchly insular, was at first both shocked and disgusted at the idea of a ‘white woman' married to an Indian and living in what she persisted in referring to as a ‘harem'. But she could not help being charmed by Juanita and her handsome gay young husband, her elderly and eccentric father and her gentle little mother; and as the long warm days of March merged into the heat of April, she allowed Sabrina to spend more and more time at the Casa de los Pavos Reales or in the Gulab Mahal
^*
- the little pink stucco palace in a quiet corner of the city, where Juanita lived.

When April gave place to May and the heat danced and shivered on the walls and domes and minarets of Lucknow, Sir Ebenezer with his wife and niece retreated to the hills, taking Juanita with them: not because the heat held any terrors for her, but because she was expecting her first child, who would be born in the autumn, and as her health had not been too good of late it was felt advisable to send her to the cool of the hills. There was also an additional consideration. Trouble was brewing in the city.

The rulers of Oudh had been among the most corrupt of Eastern potentates - though this had not deterred the East India Company from lending troops to the King, in return for a large subsidy, in order to help him keep his dissatisfied subjects in a proper state of subjection. The present ruler, Nasser-ood-din Hyder, was easily the worst of a long line of evil men, and he had already been exhorted by Sir William Bentinck to mend his ways. But neither warnings nor threats had weighed with the King, and at long last the Court of Directors of the East India Company had taken action. They had sent a dispatch to Colonel John Low, the Resident of Lucknow, authorizing the temporary assumption of government in Oudh by the Company. But Colonel Low, certain that such a move would be misunderstood and bitterly resented throughout India, had begged instead that Nasser-ood-din should be deposed and replaced by another ruler selected from among the royal line. The strictest secrecy had been preserved, but the East has a sixth sense in such matters. Suspicion and speculation were rife, and all Oudh seethed with rumour and counter-rumour …