Earlier in March he had seen a brief notice in the press, sandwiched casually in between the arrival of the Far Eastern mails and a paragraph relating to Lord Canning’s arrival in India, which had stated baldly: ‘Oudh is to be annexed, with General Outram as Chief Commissioner.’ There had been a longer one a week later: ‘An army of 16,000 men is now collected at Cawnpore, and in a few days will be pouring towards Lucknow. No resistance is expected, but Lord Dalhousie never leaves opportunities to the disaffected by any mistimed affectation of security. The King will be dismissed with a pension of a lac* of rupees a month.’
The Marquis of Dalhousie, Governor-General in India, had every reason to feel pleased with his achievements. He had added the Punjab and lower Burma to the British Empire, the Koh-i-noor diamond to the British crown, secured the western frontiers of India and brought to the country the blessings of civilization in the form of the railway and the telegraph. He had been succeeded in office by Lord Canning, who before he sailed had reminded the complacent Court of Directors of the East India Company that ‘in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man’s hand, but which growing larger and larger may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin.’
But that cloud, thought Alex uneasily, listening to the guns that celebrated the Peace Treaty and broke the Sabbath silence of the cold March night, had already arisen. He and many like him had been aware of it for some considerable time - a small, ominous stain on the clear blue sky of the East India Company.
Only two years previously Sir Henry Lawrence had written to Lord Stanley:
‘You ask me how long Oudh and Hyderabad are to last? It is the fashion to cry out for their annexation … and bad as we are I believe that we are better than any native ruler of the present age; but that does not justify us in picking their pockets. The Oudh treaty permits us to take over the management of their country, if necessary. We can protect and help the peasants without putting their rents in our pockets … I am however in a terrible minority. The Army, Civil Service, Press and Governor-General are all against me. I still say - look at our treaties. We have no right to make one day and break the next.’
Alex Randall, walking through the crowded, gas-lit streets where the people had gathered to cheer a Peace Treaty and the end of the long and costly Crimean War, thought of the words of Henry Lawrence and of the knot of servants and sepoys who had whispered together in the shadow of the banyan tree by the gate of the Residency at Lunjore: and was afraid.
As March gave way to April and spring warmed to summer, the problems and policies of the land that he loved continued to obsess him, and he became impatient to return. Lunjore touched the very borders of the newly annexed province, and there would be work to do: work that Mr Commissioner Barton was entirely incapable of performing, since his district, which took its name from its capital city, was largely inhabited by petty chiefs who had been involved in a rebellion some twelve years previously. The rebellion had been put down and the district brought under the control of the Company’s government, whose policy it was to discourage large landowners. It was a policy that had the full approval of Mr Conway Barton, and Captain Randall had done what he could to mitigate the hardships and injustices that the purblind pursuance of it had so often involved. With these and other things on his mind he had had no time to think about the problem of the Commissioner’s bride, and when reminded of it his only feeling had been one of impatience as he consigned Lady Ware’s letter to the waste-paper basket.
He himself had been equally dismissed from Winter’s mind. Conway’s promised bride entertained no doubts or forebodings as to the future. The long waiting was over. She had grown up at last and Conway had sent for her. She was to see India again - the enchanted country - and leave behind her the cold walls of Ware and the cold eyes of Sybella and Cousin Julia. Ware held nothing for her now that the only two people she had loved were dead. The old Earl lay in a marble vault below the mausoleum, while Zobeida, denied burial in consecrated ground by a bigoted clergyman, lay in a quiet corner of the park with only the wind in the alien yews to sing her lament.
Cousin Julia, with unexpected kindness, had sent Winter to the care of a relative in London who had been charged with the agreeable task of selecting the young bride’s trousseau. Lady Adelaide Pike, though elderly, was also sprightly, kind-hearted and excessively social, and Winter did not suspect that Julia’s decision to send her to London was prompted less by a desire to see her suitably provided with bride-clothes, than to remove her as speedily as possible from Ware.
Winter was still in mourning for her great-grandfather, but Lady Adelaide refused to allow such a circumstance to interfere with the round of social engagements: ‘After all, my dear, it is not as though you were a Grantham. And as you are shortly to be married, and we cannot purchase a trousseau in black, there is no reason why we should not be gay. You will find no such amusements in the East.’
She took Winter to hear Grise sing in Norma at the Royal Italian Opera House, Mrs Fanny Kemble give readings from Othello at Willis’s Rooms, and Marietta Alboni perform in Italian opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre. They attended balls and ‘musicals’, dinner-parties and luncheons, and drove in the Park. Dressed in forty yards of white tulle supported by a vast crinoline, and wearing a train of moiré gothique, sixteen-button gloves and three curled ostrich feathers in her hair, Winter drove to St James’s Palace to make her curtsey to the plain, dowdy, dumpy little woman who was Victoria, by the Grace of God Queen of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas.
England was gay that year. The war was over. The Treaty of Paris was celebrated with illuminations and fireworks, and the Queen reviewed her Fleet on the Solent and her Army at Aldershot. William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, was publicly hanged at Stafford before a packed crowd of thousands who had poured into the town to see a fellow-creature die, and the wearing of crinolines was attacked by the clergy, who pointed out that women ‘forgot, in loading themselves with such voluminous garments, that the gates of Heaven were narrow’.
Lady Adelaide Pike, undeterred by the straitness of that Gate, selected Winter’s trousseau with wide and ever wider-spreading skirts. Ball-dresses of tarlatan with five flounces edged with silk fringe and banded with velvet ribbons; of white tulle over white glacé, the tulle gathered up in festoons by chains of pearls and bouquets of white camellias; of white muslin barred with silver basket-work; of moiré antique in tea-rose yellow. Day-dresses in muslins, merinos, taffetas and light French barèges in delicate hues. Morning-dresses of grey cashmere, batiste, poplin and figured jaconet. Gloves of every shade and hue, mittens of black filet, absurd evening head-dresses of lace, flowers, pearls or ribbon. Ravishing chip bonnets of straw or terry velvet trimmed with feathers or blonde, and dozens upon awe-inspiring dozens of petticoats and pantalettes and other articles of feminine underwear.
It was an age of lavishness. Of enormous meals, enormous families, enormous, spreading skirts and an enormous, spreading Empire. An age of gross living, grinding poverty, inconceivable prudery, insufferable complacency and incomparable enterprise. Those dozens of petticoats and pantalettes deemed necessary to the feminine wardrobe were both a symbol of that lavishness and of the sweated labour in the crowded slums, where women wore away their fingers and their eyesight and their youth sewing such furbelows for a wage of a few ha’pence.
Early in June Winter journeyed to Suffolk under the care of Mrs Barlow, the distressed gentlewoman who occupied the post of companion to the new Countess of Ware, in order to pay a farewell visit to Conway’s uncle, old Sir Ebenezer Barton.
Sir Ebenezer would be seventy-seven that year, and his hearing and eyesight were failing. After a lifetime spent largely in the East, the winds and frosts and the long wet winters of England had shrivelled his once burly frame and racked it with rheumatism and sciatica. He kept to one room of the sprawling draughty Suffolk mansion to which he had brought Emily as a bride over a quarter of a century ag
o, and seldom left it. His mind too was wandering and he dwelt much in the past. Winter meant nothing to him, and when reminded of his nephew Conway he had remarked in a high cracked voice and with sudden energy: ‘Bad blood there. Bad blood. Takes after his mother’s side of the family. Thought the boy might avoid it - Joseph’s son you know - but what’s bred in the bone … What’s bred in the bone …’
His voice sank to a mumble and he did not mention his nephew again, but talked instead in a staccato mutter, difficult to understand, of the India of his youth and of friends and enemies and builders of Empire dead these many years. Once, in the twilight, he had addressed Winter as Marcos; seeing in those dark eyes and clean-cut features some echo of a face that had laughed at him in the hot dusk of a forgotten evening …
‘You know, Marcos,’ said old Sir Ebenezer, ‘Emily isn’t going to like this. No, she ain’t going to like it at all. And if you think that Sabrina’s grandfather will give his consent, you’re wrong, my boy. Quite wrong - eh, eh? To see someone you love only once in every six or seven years is not enough. There’s going to be trouble. A peck o’ trouble.’
On the night before she left, Sir Ebenezer had presented Winter with a square and much-worn morocco case that contained Emily’s jewellery. ‘She meant it for Sabrina,’ said Sir Ebenezer, lifting the lid with a trembling hand and stirring the glittering contents with one bony finger: “‘Give ’em to my girl,” she said. But Sabrina died too.’
The slow easy tears of old age crept down Sir Ebenezer’s withered cheek: for Emily? - for Sabrina? He screwed up his eyes and peered at Winter like an elderly tortoise: ‘They tell me you’re her daughter. You ain’t like your mother. A golden girl, she was. Take after y’father’s side of the family I suppose. So you’re going to marry Conway. Eh? - eh? You’ll need some gew-gaws when you’re married. I kept ’em for you: didn’t trust that hard-faced harridan, Julia. Better to keep ’em until the girl’s of age, I said. Eh? - eh? Emily never thought much of jewellery, but I liked giving ’em to her. She wanted Sabrina to have them. Sabrina never wore ’em, but you will. You will.’
He pushed the box towards Winter and said wistfully: ‘If I were ten years younger, I’d sail with you. I’d like to heave-to off the Sandheads again, and see the Hooghly once more and the houses by Garden Reach - and the fireflies and the fruit bats - eh? - eh? A wonderful country. A rich and wonderful country. Ring for Pir Khan, Marcos … I’m tired.’
The jewels in their heavy old-fashioned setting were magnificent: parures of emeralds and diamonds, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, jewelled combs and buckles. Flaunting and almost barbaric things that Ebenezer had loved to buy for his Emily, and which Emily had so rarely worn.
Julia had looked at them with frigid disapproval and Sybella with unconcealed envy. ‘Entirely unsuitable for a young girl,’ pronounced Julia coldly. ‘You had best send them to the bank for safe-keeping. It would be most unwise to take them with you. Such valuables are an invitation to robbery and violence.’
But Winter had taken them: Emily’s jewels, and the triple strand of pearls that Marcos’s mother, Anne Marie, had given to Sabrina over eighteen years ago on the night of her Birthday Ball. The pearls that a Vicomtesse de Selincourt had worn at the wedding of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Julia herself had taken the unprecedented step of travelling to London in order to see her young relative safely bestowed into the care of Mrs Abuthnot. She had stayed only one night, putting up at the Pulteney Hotel, and left the following morning to visit friends in Surrey. But she had stayed long enough to see the cab containing Sabrina’s daughter drive away in the rain towards the docks and the steam-packet Sirius that was to take her to Alexandria on the first half of her journey towards India.
* Pra-shād.
* A hundred thousand.
8
Mrs Abuthnot was kind, stout and talkative. She had been barely Winter’s age when she had married her George and first set sail for the East, and she was not yet forty. But the long years spent in India, the birth of seven children and death in infancy of five of them, had left their mark on her, and she might well have been ten or even twenty years older.
‘Ninety days dear,’ said Mrs Abuthnot describing that first voyage to Winter. ‘We sailed round by the Cape. It does not seem so very long ago, but I well remember that there was a Miss Marshall on board. She was going out to marry a young man called Lawrence … Sir Henry now. She died a year or so ago … such a loss … And now here am I going out yet again, and this time with two grown-up daughters. How time does fly!’
Lottie and Sophia Abuthnot, in contrast to their stout and voluble mama, were slim and shy and silent and, it was to be presumed, took after their papa, for they in no way resembled their mother; being small and fair where Mrs Abuthnot was an ample, though greying, brunette.
Sophie, the younger by three years, shared a cabin with her mother, while the eighteen-year-old Lottie was to share an adjoining one with Winter. The cabins were small and cramped and sparsely furnished, and the first days of the voyage had been anything but pleasant.
The early summer had been wet and cold, and the rain that had been falling as they drove to the docks had later given place to blustering gusts of wind that drove the dark banks of cloud before them and whipped the water of the Thames Estuary to a white froth of broken wave-tops. Lottie, Sophie and Mrs Abuthnot had retired to their berths while the ship was still in sight of Sheerness, but Winter had returned to the deck to watch the coast of England fade into the wet greyness of the evening.
Seagulls screamed and wheeled above the churning wake, and the acres of straining canvas overhead roared and sang to the rush of the wind, while spray drove over the bows in a fine, stinging veil of mist. It had been raining, thought Winter, on that long-ago day when she and Zobeida, cold, wet, and shuddering with sea-sickness, had landed at Southampton. She had not been seven years old … and now she was seventeen and sailing away again - sailing away to be married and to live happily ever after …
The ship rolled and pitched and a hissing spatter of spray stung Winter’s cheek, and she began to feel distinctly queasy. But she could not face the prospect of descending once more to the cramped cabin where Lottie Abuthnot, prone upon her berth, had already succumbed to the pangs of sea-sickness. The fresh air, despite the drenching spray, was preferable to the narrow reeking cabin, and clenching her teeth she turned instead to pacing to and fro.
The deserted deck heaved up and sank away again beneath her feet, and presently she began to regret her decision not to go below. She should have retired to her cabin while she still had the strength to do so, because now, quite suddenly, it was impossible to move. Impossible to do anything but cling to the wet rail, oblivious of the driving spray and the fact that the wind had whipped her cloak from her grasp and was billowing it out in imitation of the straining sails above her, or that her bonnet had fallen off and was now only attached to her by its ribbons.
Her head appeared to have swollen and to be full of whirling sparks, and she leant on the rail, wet, chilled and racked with nausea. She did not hear the footsteps behind her, and she would not have cared if she had. She was beyond caring. She only knew that arms were around her, holding her, and that she need no longer cling to the rail.
Someone lifted her as easily as though she had been a small child, and a man’s voice with a hint of a laugh in it said: ‘I suppose this is included in the duties of a courier?’ And then she was being carried down into heaving darkness to her cabin.
She was aware of the cabin door being thrown open, and above the creaking pandemonium of the labouring ship she could hear the alternate moans and retching of Lottie Abuthnot. Winter turned her head feebly away from the sound and buried her face against the shoulder of the man who carried her. She heard him say ‘Good God!’ in tones of half-humorous resignation, and then he had closed the door on Lottie’s woe and turned abruptly away.
A moment or two later he laid her down and Winte
r opened her eyes and looked up into Captain Randall’s face. He appeared to be amused, and she closed them again, and pressing a hand over her mouth managed with an enormous effort to say in muffled tones: ‘Please go away. I - I fear I am going to be very unwell.’
‘I’ve seen worse things,’ remarked Captain Randall philosophically, reaching for a basin. And presently it ceased to matter to Winter whether he went or stayed.
It had not, in fact, occurred to Captain Randall to abandon her at this juncture, for if the truth were known he did not look upon her as an adult. He had not stopped to think that she was now seventeen and on her way out to India to be married to the Commissioner of Lunjore, for Winter, small and wet and sea-sick, had looked nearer seven than seventeen.
It had been morning when she had awakened. A cold wet morning in which rain fell steadily and the ship creaked and shuddered and groaned as it thrust its way through the steep choppy seas, driven onward by a shrill wind.
The small cabin rose and fell alarmingly before Winter’s eyes and she shuddered and closed them again quickly. Presently, struck by a sudden thought, she opened them once again. This was not the cabin that she was to share with Lottie Abuthnot. She was in a strange cabin. Captain Randall’s, of course. He had brought her there yesterday evening because Lottie had been so ill, and he must have slept elsewhere; probably in the saloon. She could only be surprised that he had bothered to remove!