Sabrina closed her eyes and lapsed into a coma, and Zobeida crouched beside her fanning her tirelessly all the long hot day. Late in the afternoon she moved her head and said one word: ‘Water.’ She drank thirstily but with difficulty. Aziza Begum brought her a tiny, swaddled bundle and laid it beside her, but Sabrina’s eyes were closed and she paid no heed.
She lay motionless on the low Indian bedstead and her mind wandered back to Ware in winter-time; to keen biting winds and a white expanse of snow against which the yew trees and the leafless woods cut sharp black silhouettes; to icicles fringing the leaden gutters at a roof’s edge, and to frost patterns on a window-pane; to grey skies and softly falling snow. In imagination she touched the snow and felt its crisp coldness; plunged her arms in it and held handfuls of it to her burning cheeks. If only she could lie quite, quite still - if she did not move or breathe - perhaps she could will it to be true.
The tiny creature beside her moved and uttered a thin cry, and the weak sound seemed to penetrate through the mists that were clouding her brain. She turned her head, forcing open her heavy eyelids, and looked at the child who lay beside her.
It was so small that it seemed more like a doll than a living infant, and it was not red as most new-born babies, but milk-white, with hair like curling black silk. Sabrina’s arm tightened weakly about the small bundle, and the shadow of a smile curved her mouth.
‘Is she not beautiful, your daughter?’ said Juanita.
‘Like winter—’ whispered Sabrina.
‘Like what, querida?’
‘Winter. At Ware. Snow and dark trees … winter …’ Her voice failed and her eyes closed again; but she was not asleep.
The heat of the small room played upon her exhausted body like an invisible flame. Outside the shuttered window the sun beat down upon the city like a giant hammer, and beyond and around the city walls lay the scorching plains, stretching endlessly away to the burning horizon. Somewhere out there lay Marcos. Marcos - Marcos! Was he dead already? Perhaps he would never know that he had a daughter … a baby who looked as white and as small as a snowflake.
A sudden sharp fear - a purely maternal fear - took possession of Sabrina. If Marcos were to die - if she herself were to die - what would become of the child? Emily will take care of it! … But Emily was dead. Juanita? No - No! thought Sabrina, agonized. Not this life for my baby!
Grandpapa! He would take care of her child. He loved her. Those angry letters meant nothing; it was only Grandpapa in a rage. Sabrina was aware of a quivering sense of urgency. Of time running out like sand between her fingers. She must send a letter to Ware, at once, before it was too late. She set her teeth and summoning up all her will-power, dragged herself up onto the pillow. There was a quick rustle of silk and Juanita was beside her.
‘What is it, cara mía? Lie still.’
‘I must write a letter,’ whispered Sabrina. ‘A letter to Ware … I must write at once.’
‘Tomorrow, hija - tomorrow—’
‘No,’ said Sabrina desperately, struggling feebly against the restraining hands. ‘Now. At once.’
‘Then I shall write it for you,’ said Juanita soothingly. ‘You shall tell me what to say. See, I will sit beside you and write.’
So Juanita wrote at Sabrina’s dictation; writing down the words that came so slowly and with such difficulty in that soft gasping whisper. She wrote in French, for although she spoke English well and fluently, she could not write it with ease. And looking at Sabrina’s face, and the faces of Aziza Begum and Zobeida, she was afraid, and the tears that she would not let Sabrina see fell and blotted the written words.
‘Look after her,’ begged Sabrina of her grandfather. ‘If anything happens to me or to Marcos - if we are not here to care for her - I leave her to you. Dearest Grandpapa, look after her for me. I do not know how to write a will, but this letter is my will. If Marcos dies I leave everything to my daughter, and I leave my daughter to you.’
When she had finished, the Begum and Zobeida lifted her, and with Juanita steadying her hand she signed her name to it. Juanita folded the paper and addressed it and put it away, and Sabrina smiled at her. It was as if a great weight had been lifted off her mind, and she closed her eyes and slept.
At sundown Zobeida opened the shutters and sprinkled water on the stone balcony outside the window, and Sabrina, waking, heard the water hiss upon the hot stone. The sky beyond the window was already green and a star hung low over the roof-tops. But the air was no cooler and she gasped for breath. As the room darkened Juanita lit a small oil-lamp. The shadows made a mist under the curved ceiling so that it was difficult to tell how high it was, and the moulded reliefs of trees and birds and flowers which decorated the walls appeared to move in an unfelt breeze. Aziza Begum, seeing that she was awake, brought her the child once more.
‘What shall you call her?’ asked Juanita. ‘She is half a day old and should have a name.’
Sabrina looked at the tiny, white-skinned creature that lay beside her, and was suddenly reminded of a fairy-story that someone - was it Aunt Emily? - had told her one winter’s day at Ware. A story about a queen who had sat at the window on a snowy day, spinning with an ebony spinning wheel, and had wished for a daughter with skin as white as snow and hair as black as ebony.
‘Winter,’ whispered Sabrina.
‘Winter? But that is not a name, cara mía. She must have a beautiful name.’
‘It is a beautiful name …’ Juanita did not realize how beautiful! She had never seen the snow and the dark December woods. She only knew the harsh, flaming colours of this sun-scorched country, and the heat was not an intolerable burden to her as it was to Sabrina, pressing her out of life. She did not know what it was to long for grey skies and fresh winds and the cold touch of falling snowflakes.
Sabrina turned her head on the hot pillow and looked out at the moonlight beyond the open window, and as she looked it seemed to her that the white dome of the mosque and the moonlit walls and the black shadows of the orange trees were snow-covered fields and winter woods, and she began to talk in a clear light voice.
It was winter and the snow was falling, and Sabrina wept because Charlotte had locked her into the hot schoolroom and she could only see through the barred windows the white park where she was forbidden to play. She could see it so clearly: the snowy levels dotted with leafless trees, sloping up to the barrier of the dark woods that ringed the park. She struggled to reach it, but hands held her back. And then all at once the hands fell away and the door was open. She ran out of the room and along the familiar passages and down the wide staircase. The wind blew about her, smelling of the winter woods, and now she had reached the snow and it was cold and shining and wonderful, and she was not hot any more but cold, cold, cold.
Zobeida and the Begum fetched padded quilts and tucked them about her shivering figure as the fever mounted, but Sabrina did not feel them, and towards morning she died.
The sky beyond the balcony paled with the dawn, and presently the sun rose, filling the quiet airless room with harsh light and throwing a curved shadow across the wall from the mosque outside the gardens of the Gulab Mahal.
Juanita, remembering how Sabrina had feared that shadow, rose from her knees, and crossing softly to the window, closed the heavy shutters against the burning day.
4
Marcos did not die of the cholera. He was, as Aziza Begum had said, both young and strong. He returned home, but by that time Sabrina had been two weeks in her grave, and Sir Ebenezer Barton, who accompanied by Mrs Grantham had hurried to Lucknow on receiving the news of his niece’s death, had arrived at the Casa de los Pavos Reales.
Sir Ebenezer, also widowed, had grown suddenly old. Stricken by the loss of his Emily, and disheartened by the policy of the Governor-General and the Court of Directors, of which he could not approve, he had decided to return to Calcutta to wind up his affairs before finally retiring to England. He was sorry for Marcos, who had lost father, mother and wife in so shor
t a space of time, and was now left with an infant daughter to care for, but his own grief for Emily left him with little sorrow to spare for others, and he did not even wonder what Marcos would do with the child. He offered to do anything he could to help, but the words were purely automatic and he was surprised when Marcos took him seriously.
But there was something that Marcos wanted - a Commission in the Company’s army.
To remain in Lucknow, at Pavos Reales where he had spent his brief year of happiness, was suddenly intolerable to him, and he wished to get away from Oudh at least for some years. There was always work for the Army, and Marcos yearned for change and hard work and, if possible, hard fighting. Anything - anything but the torment of staying here at Pavos Reales where, for him, Sabrina’s lost, lovely ghost haunted every room and corridor and courtyard of the great house.
Sir Ebenezer did not question this decision, and since he still had considerable influence in the Company and with the Governor-General, he promised to arrange matters. Before he left he witnessed Marcos’s will, which he took away with him, together with a brocade-enclosed packet that Juanita had given to Marcos and which contained Sabrina’s last message to her grandfather.
‘If anything happens to me,’ said Marcos, ‘I would beg you to see that both documents are delivered to Lord Ware.’
Sir Ebenezer nodded. Except with Emily he had always been a man of few words. But he was also a man of his word. He did not forget his promise to Marcos, and not long afterwards Marcos found himself gazetted honorary Aide-de-Camp to General Sir Willoughby Cotten, the officer in command of troops advancing upon Kabul.
Away to the north of Oudh, in the Land of the Five Rivers, Ranjit Singh, Lion of the Punjab, lay dying. He had burnt the candle of his life at both ends, and in its bright flame had welded the Sikhs into a nation and carved out an Empire that stretched from the Holy City of Amritsar to Peshawar in the shadow of the Khyber Pass. But in the last week of June he died. His prematurely senile body was burned on a pyre of rare woods, and four queens and seven of his most beautiful slave girls followed him into the flames. And with him perished Lord Auckland’s treaty with the Sikhs, for with his passing there was not one left among them who cared what became of the Army of the Indus …
Marcos placed his daughter in the care of his sister Juanita. Zobeida had already taken on the duties of nurse, and a wet-nurse, Hamida, a strong and healthy slave-woman whose latest infant had been still-born, had been engaged to feed the child. Marcos installed a reliable caretaker and overseer at the Casa de los Pavos Reales, put his affairs in order and rode north to join the Army of the Indus. And in that same month of July there landed in Calcutta, from the Camden, a tall, black-haired cadet of Bengal Infantry, not yet seventeen; John Nicholson, who was destined to be worshipped as a god and become a legend in his own lifetime.
Early in August the Army of the Indus reached Kabul, and after thirty years of exile Lord Auckland’s aged puppet, Shah Shuja, rode into the capital city of Afghanistan while his people stood in sullen silence. Marcos reached Kabul by way of the Khyber Pass with the advance guard of a motley army under the leadership of Shah Shuja’s son, and on arrival asked permission to resign his duties as an Aide-de-Camp in favour of more active employment. This was instantly obtained, for all through that year and the next Dost Mohammed conducted a series of guerrilla forays, and endless punitive expeditions were sent against him, and against those chiefs who had refused to accept the sovereignty of Shah Shuja. But the death that Marcos courted avoided him, though fatigue and cold and the fever of fighting often provided temporary anodynes to ease the pain of loss.
In the pink stucco palace in Lucknow city Sabrina’s daughter grew and thrived. Her nickname among the household was Chota Moti - ‘Little Pearl’ - because of her whiteness and because Winter, her given name, had no meaning for them and its syllables were harsh to their ears.
The child would lie in the room that had been Sabrina’s, her eyes on the colourful walls where formalized trees and flowers in the Persian style were moulded in high relief in chunam, a polished cement that had the appearance of coloured marble. As soon as she could crawl she would spend hours running her small hands over the flower designs, tracing their stylized curves with a tiny finger. They were her first toys and her first memory, so that in later years her recollection of her earliest days was that they had been spent in a fantastic garden in which she had played and eaten and slept surrounded by wonderful flowers and curious, beautiful birds that were so tame that she could touch them and stroke them.
Every animal and every bird in those colourful friezes had had its own name, and there had been one that was her especial favourite - the first within reach of her small clutching hands. A stylized parrot with a wise expression, who held one claw upraised as though he were commanding attention. He was called Firishta, after a celebrated Muslim historian who had lived in the days of Akbar and Jehangir, and the Begum would pretend that it was Firishta who told many of the tales of dead Moguls and heroes that the children loved to hear, prefacing them with ‘Firishta says—’ so that always, to Sabrina’s daughter, Firishta was alive and could speak. When she was older, and the days were hot, she would stand by the pink plaster wall, pressing her small cheek against Firishta’s cool smooth greenness, and talk to him as though he were a friend and a playmate.
Juanita made some attempt to dress her niece in European clothes, but in comparison with the loose silk and muslin garments worn by the other children of the Gulab Mahal, these appeared so stiff and uncomfortable that the Begum roundly told her that since the child was treated in every way as Juanita’s own daughter, it was absurd to swaddle her small limbs in this foreign fashion. Time enough for that when her father removed her from their care and she went to live at the Casa de los Pavos Reales. The attempt to dress Sabrina’s daughter in European style was therefore abandoned, and she wore instead the loose silken trousers, thin, short-sleeved, knee-length tunic and gauzy deputtah that was a replica of the Begum’s own costume, to which Zobeida added tiny bangles of silver that were the delight of the child’s life.
Zobeida adored her. Her own children, the fruits of an early marriage to one of the manservants in attendance upon the Begum’s husband, had both been still-born, and their ne’er-do-well father had been killed in a street brawl. She looked upon Sabrina’s child as though it had been her own, and transferred to it all the loving devotion she had given to its mother. The Little Pearl became the petted darling of the Gulab Mahal, but it was ‘Beda’ whom she loved most dearly, and ‘Beda’ to whom she ran when hurt or in need of comfort.
Her playmates were Juanita’s two children, Khalig Dad and the little Anne Marie who was a year and a half her senior and had been named after Juanita’s mother. Anne Marie the Second, despite her name, had not inherited her looks from her mother’s side of the family. She was all Wall Dad: golden skin and eyes like sloes, a mouth like a curled rose-petal and hair as black as jet. ‘She is her father again - and as I also, when I was but a child,’ said the Begum complacently. ‘My son had great beauty, as also had I, his mother, when I was in the bloom of my youth. Hai mai! but that was long since, and I grow old. It is good to see my children’s children growing up about me. As for thee, Little Pearl, thou also art a grandchild of my heart, and were it not inauspicious I would tell thee that when thou art grown thou wilt be a very moon of beauty!’
The Begum would take the two small girls into her capacious lap and sing them songs and feed them with unsuitable fruits and sweetmeats, whereby they suffered frequent pangs of colic and indigestion to the no small alarm of Juanita and Zobeida. But while life in the Rose Palace went its peaceful way, the storm clouds gathered over far-off Afghanistan.
Dost Mohammed had fought a victorious battle and followed it up by voluntarily surrendering himself to Sir William Macnaghten, the British Envoy, who sent him under strong escort to India. Here he was received with the Honours of War and granted a substantial pension, and the Direc
tors of the East India Company, convinced that now the ex-Amir was in their hands his country would be less unsettled, and disliking the prospect of continuing to lavish a million sterling a year on bribing the allegiance of the Afghan people, decided upon retrenchment. Sir William was forced to economize in the only possible way - the cutting off or curtailing of the subsidies that alone had kept the tribes quiet - and as a result of this policy in the space of a few months the entire country was hostile, and urgent warnings of ill-feeling among the tribes came in from every outpost.
Early in November the storm broke. Alexander Burns and his brother were hacked to pieces by a screaming mob, and soon all Afghanistan was aflame. The distant outposts were attacked and their defenders massacred. General Sale was besieged in Jalalabad and Colonel Palmer in Ghazi. Food became short, there was no hope of relief, and Lord Elphinstone, the senile and incompetent Commander who on Lord Auckland’s insistence had replaced Sir Willoughby Cotten, was totally incapable of the prompt and daring action that alone might have saved the doomed Army. Akbar Khan, son of the Dost, murdered Sir William Macnaghten, and General Elphinstone remained supine and took no action to avenge the Envoy’s death. Instead, a treaty was made with the chiefs by which the British forces were to be allowed to leave the country under a guarantee of safe conduct, Akbar Khan promising to send a strong Afghan escort to see them safely through the passes.
The retreat began early in the New Year, and more than four thousand fighting men, with twelve thousand camp-followers including many women and children, trudged wearily out of the cantonments towards the snow and the bitter cold of the barren hills that lay between them and the fortress of Jalalabad where General Sale still held his besiegers at bay. But once among the steep defiles of the passes Akbar Khan’s escort deserted them, leaving them to the vengeance of the hostile tribes.
Hundreds died of exposure in the intense cold, and those who dropped by the way and did not die met a less merciful death from mutilation at the hands of the tribesmen. At some time during that long martyrdom Akbar Khan, with an eye to the future, offered his protection to those few Englishwomen who were still alive, together with their husbands and General Elphinstone. They had no option but to accept, and they turned back with him. The remainder fought their way forward against the snowdrifts and the murderous tribes, and on the thirteenth day of January a sentry on the ramparts of Jalalabad saw a solitary rider, emaciated, ragged, blood-stained, drooping with exhaustion on a starved and exhausted horse. It was Dr Brydon - the sole survivor of the sixteen thousand souls who had set out from Kabul on that tragic retreat.