Shadow of the Moon (91 page)

Winter had felt the blood drain away from her heart. Was it true? Had they always meant to separate them - putting the men to death and allowing the women to live? Would she ever see Alex again? She had tried to force her way out and had been thrust roughly back again, and the cart had jolted forward on that long nightmare journey.

They were given little food and insufficient water, and Lou Cottar's face aged with every crawling hour. Mrs Hossack, cradling her small son, had wept and moaned with a hopeless and despairing monotony, and Miss Keir had suffered from bouts of sickness that added to the stench of the broiling, steaming cart. They had given the best of the food and almost all of the water to the two children, and Lou had made a paste of boiled rice and water and fed it to the baby with her finger-tip.

The scarcity of food had been bearable, but the lack of water in that terrible heat had been a torment that had only been partially relieved on the second day when Janet Keir began to shriek and rave and tear frantically at the side of the cart, and Winter had flown at the escort with a flood of words that she was not even aware that she knew. Daunted by this blazing-eyed virago who could curse them so efficiently in their own tongue, the men had produced at the next stopping-place not only water but milk; though little enough of either.

There had been no sign of the other cart again, and the terrible days had crawled past without their knowing whether the men were dead or not, or where they had gone. Winter nursed Lottie's baby when Lou fell at last into a brief exhausted sleep, and longed for the Hirren Minar as a lost soul might long for Paradise. But the Hirren Minar was only a scorched and blackened pile of stone standing gaunt and exposed among a waste of charred stumps and layers of sodden ash, and Lottie was dead and her grave lost among that desolation. And if this terrible journey lasted much longer
Lottie's baby would die too. Perhaps they would all die - perhaps Alex was already dead.

The sun was sinking again in a blaze of blood-red light that pierced through the chinks of the cart and its covering, but the darkness brought no relief. Winter's mouth was dry and her tongue swollen, her throat parched with thirst. Her head and her body ached with one vast throbbing ache that seemed to beat like a gong in her brain, and the heat was like an iron band about her neck, tightening slowly and inexorably so that soon she would not be able to breathe. The ugly scar that Alex's hunting knife had made on her arm burnt as though it were an open wound again, and the choking stench of the cart made her famished stomach cringe with nausea.

How many days had they been in the cart? How many times had the sun gone down? She could not remember. They had had no food that day, and they had been given water only once and in the early part of the morning. Even Mrs Hossack moaned no more, for her parched throat could produce no sound, and the children who had wailed weakly all day were silent. Miss Keir too had ceased to writhe and mutter and beg for water, and lay still at last. Was she dead? or was she only asleep like Lou - or was Lou dead too?

Winter became dimly aware that the cart was passing through crowded streets. Light and voices and noise pressed about it and somewhere guns were firing; guns and a ceaseless, distant crackle of musketry. There was a smell of cooked food. A pungent aromatic scent of
ghee
and dung-fires and
masala
; of roasting
chunna
, hot dust and decaying matter; of sandalwood and sewage and burning oil - the scent of an Indian bazaar.

The noises fell away and at last the cart stopped with a creaking jolt, and there were more voices. Rough voices, angry voices, shrill voices, whispering voices; and then the stout cloth that was bound over the end of the cart was unfastened, and the four dazed, semi-conscious women were dragged out to stumble and fall to the ground, their legs giving way under them.

There was a man with a drawn sword in his hand, shouting, and another man with a musket, and Winter thought numbly: ‘They are going to kill us,' but it seemed a matter of supreme indifference. And then someone ran to her and lifted her, and the voices and the lights and the shouting men spun together in a circle and turned into darkness.

47

Winter awoke to find herself lying on a low bed in a strange room. It was still dark, but the greying sky beyond the window gave enough light to show the outline of the room.

She felt clean and cooler than she had felt for a very long time. It must have been raining again. She lifted her aching head with difficulty and saw the dark shape of an earthenware pitcher on the pale-coloured matting on the floor. The sight of it re-awoke her raging thirst and she groped for it, and lifting it drank, and drank again, as if she could never drink enough; and lay back and tried to think, and found that she could not …

She could think of nothing at all. A grey fog of utter hopelessness filled her mind, and she closed her eyes and lay still, feeling that greyness engulf her. Alex had gone - everything had gone. There was nothing to live for any more - not even Lottie.

The light brightened slowly, turning from the first pallid whisper of dawn to the clear glow that precedes the sunrise, and the silence gave place to familiar sounds; faint and few at first, but gathering in number and volume. A rustle and a twitter of birds and the hoarse cawing of a grey-headed plains crow. The chatter of a squirrel and the creak of a well-wheel. A conch blowing in a distant temple and a muezzin crying the call to prayer from the minaret of a mosque: ‘
Prayer is more than sleep - than sleep!
' Minas whistling and parrots talking, a ring-dove cooing softly and monotonously, and a distant murmur of voices.

The brightening light beat against her closed eyelids and the grey fog in her brain lifted and shredded away like mist drifting off the river in the early morning, and slowly and almost imperceptibly the pain in her heart lessened and peace took its place.

She felt but did not see the first dazzling rim of the sun lip the edge of the far horizon, but the glow behind her closed eyes brightened and she opened them on the same vision that she had seen once before when she had lain in the river by the Hirren Minar and had wished for death. The rose-pink sky and the formal patterns of leaves and flowers and birds. The vision that had once before drawn her back from despair, and the dream that had glowed before her mind's eye for so many cold years … the moon out of reach. But this time it was real. This was the Gulab Mahal—

She lay quite still, not stirring; barely breathing. Thinking confusedly that she was asleep - or dead. It could not be true. When at last she moved it was to stretch out a hand and touch the green parrot on the wall beside her.

Firishta - it was Firishta! The old, long-forgotten name from her childhood
returned to her. So he was not a real bird after all. She had thought that they were real - the flowers and trees and birds who lived and moved against a rose-pink sky. They were not alive and they had never been alive. They were carved and moulded in painted and polished plaster. Why had she not remembered that? But it was still Firishta. And it was, incredibly, wonderfully, the Gulab Mahal.

She was safe at last. She had come home.

From somewhere in the distance there came the sound of gunfire, but she did not hear it. She rose and walked slowly about the room in a waking dream, running her hands over the dear familiar flower patterns, caressing the painted birds and beasts. She did not know that this was the room in which she had been born and in which Sabrina had died. She only knew that every foot of it was familiar and beloved. She saw the crescent-shaped shadow steal across the floor, and remembered it too, but did not fear it, as Sabrina had done, for it was linked with love.

She did not know how she had come there, or know that it was the Talukdar of Pari's determination to play safe that had been responsible. The Talukdar was a cautious man, and in the unlikely event of the British returning to power he did not wish it to be said that he had sent his captives to certain death. He must cover himself, and he remembered what his men had told him of the woman who was no
Angrezi
and who claimed kinship with the wife of Walayat Shah of Lucknow. He would send them to the care of Walayat Shah, and thus his hands would be clean. Walayat Shah might spare the woman if she were indeed blood-kin to his wife, and although he would undoubtedly hand over the remainder of the party to those who would make a public spectacle of their death, the woman at least would be able to testify that he, the Talukdar, had only acted for the best.

The heavy curtain over the doorway rustled and lifted, and Winter turned at the sound and saw that it was Ameera. They clung to each other and wept and did not speak for a long time, and then Ameera held her off at arm's length and looked at her.

‘It is true then,' said Ameera. ‘I thought it a dream. So thou hast come home at last - but in no auspicious hour. Dost thou know that I have spent the night upon my knees before my husband, begging for thy life and for the lives of those with thee? He would have turned all from the door, but Hamida was in the courtyard and she saw thee and ran to me. At first I did not believe; and then I knew that it could be no chance that brought thee here. This surely was written. For hadst thou come two days ago, or even one, I could not have saved thee. My husband was hot against thy people, and he hates them still and would rid himself of all whom the Talukdar of Pari sent hither. But because of the word that was brought from Cawnpore, he will hold his hand.'

So it was Sophie who had saved them - Sophie and all those women who
had died in such fear and agony in the
bibi-gurh.
And if Sophie had known that the manner of her death would play a decisive part in saving Alex Randall's life, she would, being Sophie, have for her part been content to die.

For all the captives from Pari had arrived at the Gulab Mahal, though they had been brought for safety's sake by different roads. And all had been given shelter, because Walayat Shah, who had at first refused to take the responsibility of sheltering men whom he would gladly have seen dead, had listened to Ameera's pleading and remembered Cawnpore. He had had no thought of gaining from it, as the Talukdar had had. It did not occur to him that by giving them shelter he might claim immunity and reward from the Army that was known to have defeated the Nana Sahib's forces and retaken Cawnpore. He looked upon it, quite simply, as a penance laid upon him by God that he should risk his own life, and that of his sons and the whole household, in order to protect the lives of a weary handful of hated
feringhis
. He knew that if it should become known in the city that he was housing these people their lives, and probably his own, would not be worth a moment's purchase. Yet he took them in.

They were lodged in a secluded wing of the Rose Palace, adjoining the zenana quarters. Their rooms were hot and cramped, but the one on the ground floor, allotted to Lou, Mrs Hossack, Miss Keir and the two children gave onto a large private garden that was separated from the rest of the garden by a high wall, and was full of orange and loquat trees and a tangle of roses and jasmine. Six of the men shared a room immediately above it, and above that again, reached by a steep narrow stair, was an isolated square of roof, screened from the view of the zenana roofs by a wall and a pavilion that enclosed one end of it, where they had put Alex, who, as a sick man, it had been thought best to segregate from the others instead of having him share their cramped quarters. Walayat Shah having no desire to find all his unwelcome guests falling sick.

A split-cane
chik
hung over the open side of the little pavilion by day, and it was appallingly hot. But the gruelling heat of the day was compensated for by the coolness it afforded by night, and Alex lay there day after day on a narrow
charpoy
, listening by the hour to the firing as the siege of the Residency dragged on, and longing, as he had done in the first days at the Hirren Minar, to be gone - and for news.

Winter had been given Sabrina's room as by right, and she had begged that Lou might share it instead of being penned in the far smaller apartment on the ground floor with Mrs Hossack and Janet Keir. Three of the most trusted servants of the household had been put in charge of the
feringhis
, who had been given native dress to wear in place of their own ragged garments, and were not permitted to go even into the secluded garden except between sunset and dawn. They were kept in complete segregation from the other inhabitants of the Gulab Mahal, and they had little fault to find with this, since they lived in daily and hourly fear of discovery and death. They
knew that it was not in Walayat Shah's power to protect them should their lives be demanded by the rebel leaders or the rabble of the bazaars, and they felt safer behind closed doors and in each others' company, despite the heat and the cramped quarters.

The continuous rattle of musketry, punctuated by the boom of guns, that all through the day and for a large part of every night came clearly to their ears, was both a continual reminder to them of the peril in which they stood, and that they were not the only British in Lucknow. They could hear the crash of exploding mines as the mutineers tunnelled towards the defences of the Residency and the stubborn beleaguered garrison ran out counter-mines and blew up their galleries; and whenever there was a lull in the firing they shuddered and waited and prayed for it to begin again, for fear that silence might mean that the Residency had fallen at last.

The garrison in the Residency had numbered barely a thousand combatant British and seven hundred loyal Indian troops when the crisis had arisen, and they were hampered by the presence of well over a thousand women, children and non-combatants, as well as by lack of adequate food, by sickness and appalling problems of sanitation and the disposal of the dead. The position they held had never been intended for purposes of defence. The hurriedly constructed and inadequate fortifications were flimsy in the extreme, and the forces surrounding it numbered twelve thousand fighting men, many of them British-trained sepoys, backed by the rabble of the city. It could not have withstood a single concerted assault that had been pressed home, but the mutineers possessed no leader of real ability. The attacks were never delivered in sufficient strength, and the siege dragged on.

Alex had made one unexpected friend in the Gulab Mahal. Dasim Ali, uncle of Wali Dad who had been Juanita's husband, and great-uncle of Ameera.

Dasim Ali, who had once admired the blonde Sabrina, was now an elderly gentleman whose beard was dyed scarlet with henna, and his shrewish wife Mumtaz was the senior lady of the pink palace. Mumtaz was as bitter against all
feringhis
as Walayat Shah, and disliked her husband's great-niece Ameera as much for her foreign blood as for her beauty. But Dasim Ali was a placid and pleasant person who harboured no bitterness towards anyone - except on occasions towards God, who had granted him no sons.

He had wandered up one evening to the roof-top where Alex lay, and had looked vaguely surprised at finding it tenanted by a sick man. He had not realized in the dusk that this was one of the
feringhis
, and would probably not have realized it even in the daylight. He had greeted Alex courteously, and when it had finally dawned upon him whom he was addressing, he had been pleased to be amused.

After that he paid frequent visits to Alex's roof-top, where they would play chess and discuss a multitude of subjects from a point of view that would not have occurred to the average Westerner. Dasim Ali would also
bring Alex the news of the city and the progress of the siege, together with such scraps of news as trickled in from beyond the borders of Oudh.

Winter too made friends in the Gulab Mahal, and she was the only one who went freely to the women's quarters. Dressed in Ameera's clothes and wearing Ameera's jewels, with her blue-black hair in a heavy plait and her slim feet bare or in a pair of Ameera's flat, curl-toed slippers, she would have passed anywhere as an Indian woman of good family, or from the hills, where women's skins are fairer than they are in the hot plains. Even Dasim Ali's sour and shrewish wife ended by grudgingly accepting her presence, and had once even condescended to instruct her in the art of making a certain sticky sweetmeat of which the children of the Gulab Mahal were particularly fond.