Shadow of the Moon (51 page)

Alex knew, and though it had at first disturbed him that Winter should go so freely and so far afield about the countryside and the city, he had come to the conclusion that her greatest safety might one day lie in such friendships, and he had withdrawn the unobtrusive watch he had set on her.

He too, when he was not out in camp, rode every morning before sunrise, and Winter had sometimes caught a distant glimpse of him, though she was unaware that he often rode where he could keep her within sight and see that she came to no harm. He had heard the story of the cobra in the bathroom and had drawn his own conclusions. The woman in the
bibi-gurh
, the ex-dancing-girl who had once flaunted Kishan Prasad's great emerald, feared a rival, and she or her relations had attempted to remove that rival.

His complete helplessness in the matter filled Alex with a sick fury, but he had taken what steps he could. He had spoken to Iman Bux, whom he knew to be an ally of the woman's, and had informed him that should any more such accidents befall the Memsahib, or if he heard again that she had fallen ill from something she had eaten, exceedingly unpleasant consequences would descend upon the heads of several members of the household, and not all the Commissioner's influence would avert them:

‘And I think it is known that I am a man of my word,' said Alex softly. Iman Bux, looking into those merciless long-lashed eyes, had quailed visibly, and instead of pouring out a flood of injured and bewildered protest had found himself mumbling instead: ‘It is known.'

But the fact that there might be nothing more attempted against the Commissioner's bride in the house did not preclude the possibility of some accident being engineered while she was out of it, and Alex was uneasy at the way in which her husband permitted her to ride abroad daily with no other escort than a syce. He had eventually succeeded in getting a nominee of his own into that post. With Yusaf to ride behind her he knew that she would come to no harm, and after that Winter seldom saw him when she rode before sunrise or at sunset.

She was happier when she was away from the house. The house held Conway, who had once been a child's dream of all goodness and romance and was now a horrible parody of that knight in armour. Or there would be strangers there - people whose faces were by now only too familiar to her, but who remained strangers. Men and women with overloud voices and overloud laughter, who still made her feel stiff and young and gauche and cold with distaste. Josh Cottar, that coarse, rich vulgarian who had made a
fortune out of beer and army contracts, Major Wilkinson, red-faced, glassy-eyed and maudlin, and others of their ilk. There would be Johara too, Yasmin's sister, with her sly eyes and veiled insolence. And sometimes, in the twilight, there would be a slim fair girl who wore an oddly outdated dress.

Winter did not see this girl often, and then only when she was particularly overstrained or weary. But there were many occasions when she knew that she heard someone who was not there. This house was different from other houses. While there were lights in the rooms, and her husband or the servants or any guests moved about them, they were just rooms. A background for the people who occupied them. But on the rare occasions when she was alone it was different. Then the empty rooms held someone else. Winter would walk through an open doorway into a silent room and there would be someone else there. Someone whom her entrance had alarmed. It was not she who was frightened, but that other one, who could - she was sure of it - feel her unhappiness and desperation and strain, and was disturbed by it. Sometimes she would even hear voices. Not whispering, but as though they came from a long way away and yet were no farther than a few paces from her. Once she had thought she heard a few words, clearly spoken: ‘
There is someone here who is unhappy. As if - as if it were
me
!
' An odd thing to imagine.

But one night there had been other whispers.

It had been early in the new year and Winter had awakened feeling cold. She slept alone in the wide bed, for Conway had taken to sleeping in his old room once more and seldom visited her. Rain had fallen during the day, but towards sunset the sky had cleared and now the moon rode high and shone into the windows of her room. Winter sat up and reached for the quilt that normally lay folded at the foot of her bed, but it was not there and she remembered that she had taken it into the dressing-room earlier that evening.

She slipped out of bed, shivering, and pulling a light Cashmere shawl about her shoulders, crossed the room and pushed open the door of the dressing-room. She had left the quilt on the couch by the bathroom door and her hand was upon it when she became aware of the whispers, and stood still, listening: thinking for a moment that it was once again those ghostly, half-heard voices that she had imagined so often before.

The sibilant sound held something of the faint, hollow clarity of an echo and seemed to come from the bathroom, the door into which had been left open. Winter stood clutching the quilt, shivering and a little frightened, until quite suddenly she realized that the voices were speaking in Hindustani and that the ghostly echoing quality was accounted for by the wide stone sluice pipe that carried off the bath water. Someone was squatting on the far side of the bathroom wall, safely out of sight and hearing of anyone within the house, but unaware of the fact that the exit of the sluice was acting as a speaking tube so that it seemed as though a soft, echoing voice whispered under the curved roof of the bathroom.

Winter heard the bubbling sound of a hookah, and supposed that it must be Dunde Khan, the night-watchman, whiling away the long hours with a wakeful friend from the servants' quarters. She had a sudden childish impulse - the first young or gay impulse she had experienced in three months - to creep into the bathroom and wail down the sluice pipe. The windowless wall would be in black shadow, and such a sound, coming out of nothingness, would startle old Dunde Khan considerably. She dismissed it reluctantly, visualizing the household aroused by a piercing yell of panic, and was turning away when the soft, disembodied voice whispered again in the silence:

‘He will be riding Chytuc or Shalini, for the Eagle has cast a shoe. And either one will show up far against the crops—'

Winter stood still, her attention suddenly arrested. Those were Captain Randall's horses. Was it Alex Randall whom the men in the darkness by the blind wall were speaking of? She waited, listening intently, and then a second voice spoke, less distinct this time but still audible:

‘But what of Niaz Mohammed Khan? It is seldom that Randall Sahib rides without him.'

‘That has been arranged. By now I think he will be suffering from a little sickness. Only a little - it would be unwise to arouse suspicions - but enough to keep him to his bed tomorrow. And the syce has a poisoned hand. I think the Sahib will ride alone.'

Yet another voice spoke, but this time the speaker must have been further away, for Winter could not catch the whispered words. She found that she was shivering again, but not with cold, and she crept forward into the darkness, feeling for each step and with a hand outstretched before her. The window shutters were closed and there was no gleam of light in the dead blackness of the bathroom. The matting whispered under her bare feet, and then her foot touched the raised rim that surrounded the space where the bath stood and from where the sluice led out. She crouched down so that her head was nearer the level of the pipe, and started as a voice appeared to speak almost in her ear:

‘And what if he does not ride by way of Chunwar?'

‘He will. There is a report that the canal bank has been breached by Mohammed Afzal for his fields, and sitting by the office door I heard him tell the Commissioner Sahib that he would go on the morrow, when he rides at dawn, to see if the report be true. And as all know, to ride to Chunwar he must cross the nullah near the
dhâk
trees. There is no other way for a horseman. It will be thought an accident.'

‘But - but if I should fail—' The voice had a shiver in it, either from cold or fear.

‘Thou wilt not fail. A child could not. Remember, there will be Mehan Lal also. And afterwards there will be witnesses to tell that the Sahib's horse took fright, which all will believe, for did not he fall from his horse not three months agone and lie sick with a cracked head? When a man has been
dragged by a foot that is caught in the stirrup of a bolting horse it is difficult to tell which injury caused his death. I have seen one such in my time.'

Another voice growled: ‘Why not a gun or a knife, and be done? There are two score times a day when a man might bring him down with either.'

‘And be caught! No. Besides, we want no open killing. If he be killed openly it might be that word would go out that Lunjore is a place of trouble, and then, who knows, an
Angrezi
regiment might be sent here, and that we do not want. He must not be killed unless it be made to look an accident. That is the order that has been given.'

There was a pause in which the hookah bubbled again, and a faint scent of tobacco smoke drifted into the cold blackness of the bathroom. Winter heard a man clear his throat and spit, and then the voice with the shiver in it said: ‘Why is this necessary? It is but one sahib, and there are many.'

‘There be many fools to one wise man,' grunted the first speaker. ‘Up by Peshawar way they say that there are many sahibs - but only one Nikal Seyn (Nicholson). It is the same everywhere and with all men. If those who see where others are blind be removed from the path, the matter is thereby made easier.'

‘But - but this is a good man—' Another voice, further away and almost inaudible. ‘He knows our ways, and though at times he is hot and very angry, he is just. He righted the matter of the crop tax, and Baloo Ram has said—'

‘
Fool
!' - the epithet echoed hollowly in the cold room - ‘it is not those who spit upon us and treat us as dogs and slaves who are of danger to us, for they do but light a fire for their own burning. It is men such as Randall Sahib, who speak our tongues as one of us, and who have many friends amongst us and are seen to do justice to all men, who are a stumbling block in the path; because many of our people will listen to their words and many more follow them to the death, taking up arms even against those of their own blood. It is these who must first be slain.'

There was a murmur of agreement and again the purr and bubble of the hookah. Winter's teeth began to chatter with cold but she clenched them tightly and continued to crouch in the darkness, straining her ears to listen. But something had evidently startled the group outside, for she heard sounds of hurried movements and an unintelligible mutter, and after that for a long time there was silence and she did not know whether the men had gone or were still crouching against the wall. Then there was a sound of footsteps, an asthmatic cough and the rattling of a chain from beyond the shuttered window at her back, and she realized that it was old Dunde Khan, the night-watchman, making his rounds, whom the men by the wall must have heard approaching.

She waited for perhaps a quarter of an hour longer, huddled in her shawl and numb with cold, but she heard no more voices, though the night was so silent that she could hear the sound of her own breathing and the rustle of a mouse that scuttled across the matting in the darkness. At last she stood up
stiffly and crept back to bed, closing the dressing-room door softly behind her. She had forgotten about the quilt and she did not go to sleep, but dragged the blankets up about her and sat with her chin on her knees, shivering and thinking and waiting for the dawn.

Chunwar … That was a village to the south of the city. She had ridden out that way before, though she did not often ride in that direction, for the first mile or so was crop-land threaded by water-courses, and to walk a fresh and restless horse along the narrow paths between the crops or along the crumbling edge of irrigation channels was tedious. Beyond that there lay several miles of open dusty plain dotted with
kikar
and
dhâk
trees; rough, stony ground, full of unexpected potholes and dry nullahs.

The nullah that the man had spoken of cut diagonally across the plain a mile or so short of the village which lay behind a thick belt of trees. It was more a wide, steep-sided ravine, and riding to Chunwar from the direction of the cantonments there was only one practicable place where it might be crossed; where the narrow, rutted cart-track ran. The ravine was full of trees and scrub and high grass, and someone - perhaps several men - would be waiting there for Captain Randall to pass. It would be easy enough to unhorse a man in such a place, for they would see him coming from a long way off across the plain. A rope or a wire laid across the steep path and suddenly jerked taut. A man dropping from an overhanging bough onto the shoulders of a horseman passing beneath. There would be a dozen ways. And when they had dragged him off and stunned him, his foot would be jammed into a stirrup and his horse lashed forward to drag him at a gallop across the sharp stony plain.

Winter had a sudden vision of Alex Randall's brown, clean-cut face torn and battered into a shapeless mass of blood and dirt, and she shuddered as she stared into the darkness. The hours crawled past and the moonlight left the window and then the verandah beyond, and the room was dark and very cold. The cold began to make her drowsy, but she dared not sleep for fear that she should awake too late and not be in time to stop Alex from riding to his death.

At long last a hint of grey crept into the blackness, and a cock crowed from somewhere behind the servants' quarters at the far side of the compound. Winter lit a candle and began to dress herself hurriedly; her fingers clumsy from cold and weariness and a sudden fear that perhaps after all she might be too late. The thought terrified her and she ran through the quiet house and shook awake the sheeted, corpse-like figure of one of the house servants who slept in the hall at night, and told him to tell her syce that she wished her horse brought round immediately.