A dimple showed in Winter’s cheek. ‘I do not think that Lottie will have noticed my absence,’ she observed demurely.
‘In that case I can only hope that she will also fail to notice the black eye I shall undoubtedly have by the morning.’
‘Oh!’ said Winter on a gasp. ‘Did I kick you? I was afraid I had. I am so very sorry.’
‘Considering all things, I feel I have escaped lightly,’ observed Alex with a grin. He leant down and pulled her to her feet, and they walked back through the quiet streets in companionable silence.
The hotel was in darkness and moonlight no longer flooded the courtyard. But though the arcade that surrounded it was a tunnel of black shadow, a lamp still burned in Winter and Lottie’s bedroom and made a faint square of warm light in the blackness. Winter came to a stop by the entrance to the courtyard and turned to face the shadow that was Alex:
‘Captain Randall—’
‘Condesa?’
The unfamiliarity of the formal title took her aback and she was silent for a moment, trying to make out his features in the darkness. She thought that he was smiling, but she could not be sure, and she had forgotten what it was that she had meant to say.
The moon was nearing the horizon, and the pale stars were gaining strength as it waned: they glittered in the square of sky above the courtyard, and a falling star drew a brief, brilliant finger of fire across the velvet blue. The night was so still that Winter could hear the distant murmur of the sea, the sound of Alex’s quiet breathing and the beat of her own heart, and she was aware of an odd breathlessness and a feeling of expectancy: as though she were waiting for something to happen.
The scent of jasmine and geraniums, parched earth and the salt smell of the sea, filled the shadows with a heavy fragrance that was as potent as the sound of distant music, and there was a strange magic in the hot night. A sparkle and an exhilaration; a narcotic and a spell. Quite suddenly, and with a queer stunned amazement, Winter was conscious of a fantastic, overwhelming impulse: an impulse to reach up in the dimness and take Alex Randall’s dark head between her hands and draw it down to her own. For a long moment it was almost as though she could feel his thick hair under her fingers … the shape of his head and the touch of his warm mouth. Then a cock crowed shrilly from somewhere behind the hotel, and the unexpected sound shattered the spell of the silent night, bringing her back to reality as though from a drugged sleep. A hot tide of incredulous horror engulfed her mind and her body in a burning wave of shame, and she whirled round and fled down the dark arcade as though she were pursued by the Furies.
Lottie was asleep, and Winter blew out the lamp and undressed in the dark, shivering with shock and self-loathing.
She could not understand herself. She had no affection for Captain Randall. She did not even like him! How could she possibly like anyone who had spoken against Conway as he had done? And yet a moment ago if he had made the slightest movement towards her she would have been in his arms. With a superstitious shudder she remembered that it was only the crowing of a cock, that age-old symbol of betrayal, that had saved her from translating thought into action, and betraying Conway. She was no better than Emma Bolton, a still-room maid whom Mrs Flecker had dismissed.
Winter and Sybella were not supposed to have known the reason for the girl’s dismissal, but Sybella had been pulling roses outside Mrs Flecker’s open window during a dramatic interview between the outraged housekeeper and the frantic Emma, and had retailed a garbled account of it to Winter: ‘She’s been kissing Thompson,’ reported Sybella, ‘and Mrs Flecker said she was a bad woman and no better than she should be.’
‘I am no better than she was,’ thought Winter, sick with shame and remorse. ‘Only a bad woman would have wanted to do such a thing … would even have thought of such a thing!’
She buried her face in her pillow and wept.
Alex remained for some time where she had left him. He heard the sound of her light running feet and the swift rustle of her skirts die away in the darkness, and leant against the wall staring blindly into the shadows. His thoughts were not pleasant, but they did not include Winter de Ballesteros: and when at long last he returned to his own room, sleep eluded him.
He lay on his back in the hot darkness and thought of India and the unregarded warning of men like Sir Henry Lawrence. Of the gross stupidities of men like Conway Barton. Of the whispered warnings of spies, of the sadhu whom he had seen in the grounds of the Residency at Lunjore, and the face of Kishan Prasad watching, with eyes that were avid and intent, the shattered men of the British Army flung back from the Redan, stumbling and dying in the mud and blood before Sebastopol.
He thought too of the faces of the three men whom he had seen only that night in a moonlit garden, and realized that he would have to speak to the Governor in the morning. Though he knew just exactly how much good (or how little) that would do, for the Peace Treaty having been signed in Paris there was nothing to prevent Gregori Sparkov, merchant and non-combatant, from visiting the island of Malta, or Mohammed Rashid, son of a French governess and a Persian princeling, from staying at the house of a Maltese Jew. And no reason at all why Rao Kishan Prasad, native of India, gentleman of leisure and passenger on the steamship Sirius, should not be seen speaking to either or both of them.
There were many men in India, among them ‘Lawrence’s young men’, who had learned to speak the languages and dialects of the country and to know and love and try to understand those of its people among whom they lived and worked, who sensed and smelt the approaching storm and saw the shadow of coming events crawl silently over the uneasy land, drawing closer and ever closer. But they were far outnumbered by the complacent, the smug, the conceited and the merely stupid. By senior officials in the service of the Company who pooh-poohed any talk of a general rising as either hysteria or the unfounded fears of a timorous and over-imaginative minority. By colonels of regiments, wedded to their men and their battalions through long years of service, who looked upon any such suggestions as grossly insulting to themselves and to the men under their command, and derided those who warned as cowards and agitators. Complacency reigned in high places and lay like a bandage over the eyes of those who did not wish to see.
Alex turned restlessly, as though by doing so he could turn his back on the thoughts that kept him from sleep. Kishan Prasad … Kishan Prasad was a victim of the Conway Barton mentality. A man of brains and breeding; imaginative, intelligent and sensitive, whose brilliance had gone for nothing because of the colour of his skin, and whose ambition and enthusiasm had been broken and corroded by a sadistic oaf who was his inferior in everything except mere brute strength.
Alex had suspected for a long time that Kishan Prasad was engaged in treasonable activities, and had reported as much to Mr Barton. The Commissioner had demanded proof, which Alex was unable to supply since it had been more a matter of instinct and rumour than of evidence. He had, however, suggested various measures that might serve to check any tendency towards subversive activity on the part of Kishan Prasad. But these had been ignored, and it was shortly afterwards that the fabulous emerald that Alex had last seen adorning Winter’s slim hand had passed into the Commissioner’s possession. Which might have been a coincidence, but was probably not.
Kishan Prasad had been permitted to come and go without hindrance, to visit the Crimea and to contact Russian and Persian agents provocateurs. And there was little or nothing that he, Alex, could do about it, unless he were prepared to commit murder. Why was it that a man could kill his fellow-men in the heat of battle or by the chill permission of the Law, and yet not be able to bring himself to shoot down in cold blood a single human being who was as dangerous and unpredictable as a loaded pistol in the hands of a child? Or as the lighted brand in the hand of a lunatic that he had used as an illustration to Winter?
Alex had heard something of Winter’s story from the Commissioner, and he remembered now that her father had died on the disastrous retreat from Kabul. His dea
th could be laid at the door of the irresponsible architects of the Afghan War, but also at the door of the senile weakling who had commanded the troops in Kabul. Lord Elphinstone’s obstinate incapacity must have been obvious to most if not all of his Staff. But since there was no legal way of removing him from command or of over-ruling his feeble and vacillating decisions, might not a well-placed bullet perhaps have saved sixteen thousand people from an agonizing death in those cold passes?
‘It is one of the things that one cannot do,’ thought Alex, arguing with himself as he had argued with Winter. ‘But why not?’ Because it was the gospel of Violence, and as such it could lead to worse things than the death of the innocent. As for Kishan Prasad, his actions were treasonable or laudable only according to who was regarding them, and in either case entirely understandable. The Briton who plotted against the Roman invader was undoubtedly looked upon as a hero by his compatriots and hung as a rebel by the Romans, and the Cavalier who spied for King Charles was hunted as a traitor by Cromwell’s men. If Kishan Prasad schemed for the overthrow of the Company’s Raj, did that make him a traitor, or a patriot?
‘And why in the name of hell,’ thought Alex in tired exasperation, ‘can’t I stop seeing the other man’s side of the question? Why can’t I believe, as Lawrence and Nicholson and Herbert Edwards do, in the divine right of the British to govern?’
Henry Lawrence and John Nicholson occupied adjacent pedestals in Alex’s private pantheon, but he could not believe what they believed. He worked for the same end, but for a different reason: because he believed, with a passionate sincerity, that it was better for England and for India and for the world that the British rather than the Russians should hold the land of the Moguls.
Contrary to general belief, Alex’s given name was not Alexander. His father had visited St Petersburg as a young man and while there made a life-long friend of a young Russian officer, and many years later, on duty in India, he had named his son after that friend. Alexis Lanovitch had stood godfather by proxy to the child, but the parson who had officiated at the christening had either been unable or unwilling to get his tongue round such a foreign-sounding name, and the infant had been baptized ‘Alex’ and not ‘Alexis’ Mallory, and as such had been entered in the register of the English church in the small Indian station where he had been born.
Later, as a boy of fifteen, Alex had travelled in Russia with his father, and the vast, secretive land with its limitless horizons had left an indelible impression on his mind and his imagination. To him Russia was the Enemy. An enemy to be feared above all others because the very vastness of her territory made her invulnerable to attack, as Napoleon had found to his cost. Russia had only to retreat before an invading army - to withdraw into that silent, brooding land that stretched away and away in endless steppes, forests, forgotten lakes and uncharted mountain ranges, eastward to the Bering Straits and westward to the borders of Poland. Six seas washed her shores; the Bering Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian and the Sea of Okhotsk. And within her confines Europe and Asia together could be placed and lost. Russia the cold-eyed, the patient: consumed by the hidden fires of her belief in her ultimate destiny as the ruler of the world …
Alex had never forgotten that year in Russia. Or that beyond the Khyber Pass lay the Kingdom of the Cossacks. ‘We have got to hold India,’ thought Alex. ‘We have got to hold it until it is strong enough to hold out by itself, and not for any of the reasons that gross fools like Barton will hold it for.’
Conway Barton— How much damage would the Commissioner of Lunjore have done during the past year? Men like Barton, mercifully in a minority, imagined that the mere fact of their being a member of a conquering race entitled them to be treated with servile awe and admiration, and the fact that their debaucheries and brutality, and their capacity to absorb bribes, were regarded with rage and contempt by the local population did not occur to them, because the anger and scorn was hidden behind lowered eyelids and bland, unreadable Eastern faces.
For the first time since she had turned and run from him, Alex thought of Winter de Ballesteros who was to marry the Commissioner of Lunjore. A girl in a million, thought Alex with a reminiscent grin. She had neither shrieked nor fainted when he had dragged her head-first off that wall, but had fought him instead like a young tiger-cat, and lain still while that huge rough-haired hound had pattered to and fro in the moonlight. She had helped to drag him back over the wall, had run with him until she could run no longer, and then, instead of treating him to tears or an attack of the vapours, she had laughed. She was a thousand times too good for a gross debauchee like Conway Barton.
Not that Alex believed any longer that the marriage would take place. It was quite obvious that the girl cherished some glorified mental picture of the man, based on the memories of an impressionable child; and equally obvious that the Conway Barton of 1856 would bear so little resemblance to this picture that one look would be enough to produce complete and shattering disillusionment.
Alex had imagined, once, that having made a long voyage to a country in which she had no friends or relations, she would be left with no alternative but to go through with the marriage, however distasteful it might appear upon arrival. But he was no longer of that opinion, for the Commissioner’s betrothed was plainly no milk-and-water miss. Despite her youth she clearly possessed both character and courage, and was probably quite capable of breaking off her engagement at the altar steps if necessary. He hoped so, for her sake.
Perhaps he should have kissed her tonight. Would it have made any difference if he had done so? There had been a brief moment in the darkness of the archway when he had known without any shadow of doubt that he had only to touch her to have her in his arms, and he did not know what had held him back. Certainly it had been no feeling of loyalty to the Commissioner of Lunjore, and that lovely, passionate mouth would have been sweet to kiss. Had it been some obscure instinct of self-preservation? A sudden fear of being caught up in some emotion from which there might be no escape?
Alex became aware that the square of sky beyond his window was no longer flecked with stars but paling to the clear light of a new day, and as the first faint murmurs of awakening life rose up from the harbour and the crowded city, he turned on his side and slept.
11
Winter awoke late on the following morning to find that Lottie was already up and dressed, flushed and shy and overcome with fluttering alarm at the recollection of her own temerity of the previous night.
‘I cannot think how I could have - have behaved in so un-ladylike a manner,’ gasped Lottie, pressing her hands to her burning cheeks. ‘Oh Winter, do you think he knew? That I had gone out because - because I knew that he was there, and not to - to view the flowers?’
‘Are you sorry that you went?’ inquired Winter bluntly.
‘Oh no!’ breathed Lottie on a heartfelt sigh. ‘He is all that is noble and good. I knew that I could not be mistaken. And— Oh, Winter … he loves me! He told me so. He intends to speak to Mama at the earliest opportunity, and to Papa of course as soon as we reach Calcutta. Do you suppose that it can be right to be so happy when one knows that one has behaved in a bold and forward manner?’
‘Lottie, you are a darling goose,’ said Winter kissing her, ‘but I fear I am the one to blame, and if you marry your Edward and live unhappily ever after, it will be all my fault. I behaved quite shockingly last night. I cannot understand it. I have heard tell of people going mad from sleeping in the moonlight. Do you think it can be true?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lottie. ‘I think we must both have been a little mad last night, for I do not know how you can have dared to walk in the streets unattended. You might have been molested. It does not bear thinking about! Did you meet with no adventures?’
‘No,’ said Winter briefly. She hoped that Lottie would not pursue the subject, and Lottie obliged her in this since she was far too taken up with her own affairs and the many perfections of Lieutenant Edward Eng
lish: ‘He is only a second son,’ explained Lottie, ‘but he has prospects, and a more than adequate competence in addition to his pay. It seems so mercenary to even think of money, but as I know that it will weigh with Mama and Papa, I cannot but feel glad that Edward is not without means. Edward says that he admired me from the very first moment that he saw me when we were embarking at the docks. It is strange to think that I did not even notice him. Oh, I do trust that Mama will not be difficult! Supposing I do not see him at all today?’
But Lieutenant English appeared to be possessed of the determination that so frequently accompanies red hair and freckles, and shortly after breakfast the Abuthnot party found themselves committed to a tour under his guidance.
Winter saw Captain Randall only twice that day. She had donned a wide-brimmed sun-hat and rejoined Mrs Abuthnot in the hall preparatory to setting out to see the town, and Mrs Abuthnot, similarly hatted and grasping a serviceable sunshade, her reticule and a palmetto fan, was talking to Captain Randall. Winter had checked for a fractional moment at the sight of him, and perhaps he observed that involuntary hesitation, for when she joined them he bowed unsmilingly, and after inquiring in a colourless voice but with a faintly derisive gleam in his eye if she had passed a comfortable night, excused himself and walked out into the hot sunlight.
The full daylight revealed a dark bruise on his cheekbone, and Mrs Abuthnot informed Winter that dear Alex had had the misfortune to collide with the open door of his bedroom cupboard in the dark, and that she had advised an instant application of arnica.
Later that morning they had caught another brief glimpse of him coming out of a side door of the Governor’s Palace, accompanied by a portly and somewhat pompous looking individual who was wearing military uniform and sweating profusely in the heat. In the hard sunlight his face looked tired and grim, and he had been listening with obvious impatience to his companion’s conversation. He had not seen the Abuthnot party, and having bowed curtly to the military gentleman, had turned and walked quickly away in the direction of the Strada Reale.