Winter crouched down where she stood, seeing again in an ugly flash of memory the dark, contorted face of the man who had pursued and murdered the screaming Delia. Her finger tightened upon the trigger of the revolver as the high grass rustled and parted, and Alex walked out into the clearing.
For a moment she did not believe it. She had given him up for dead, and the sight of him - filthy, blood-stained, dazed but alive - was a greater shock by far than the sight of his dead body would have been. The revolver slipped from her hand and she stood up with a choking cry and took a swift step forward, the bundle of clothing falling unheeded to the ground.
Alex checked, swaying, and his hand moved automatically to the butt of his useless revolver. Through the haze before his eyes he saw a slim Indian girl confronting him in the dusk, the blue of her thin cotton sari and the blue-black of her long, unbound hair melting into the shadows of the darkening jungle behind her. Then the haze cleared - and it was Winter.
They stood staring at each other for a minute that seemed like an hour, and then Alex stumbled forward, and as she ran to him he dropped on his knees and she caught him, holding him to her, and felt his arms go about her in a desperate grip.
She held his head against her, rocking him as though he had been a child. His hair smelt of dust and sweat and the reek of black powder, and she pressed her fingers through it, whispering endearments that he did not hear, and listening to the terrible, grinding sobs that seemed to wrench his body to pieces. She could feel the heat of those tears soaking through the thin cloth and wetting her body, and she held him tighter, straining him against her, until at last they stopped. The racking shudders ceased, and presently he lifted his head and looked up into her face.
His eyes in the fading twilight held an odd, blind anger, and his arms lifted and pulled her down onto the grass. She felt his hands on the thin cotton of the sari, wrenching it away, and he hid his grimed and smoke-blackened face between her small firm breasts. Her skin was cool from the river, and smooth and sweet, and he kissed it with an open mouth, moving his harsh cheek and his aching head against it, holding her closer. Then his hands moved again, and for a fleeting moment the fear and the horror of her wedding night returned to Winter. But this was not Conway, drunken and bestial. This was Alex - Alex—
There was neither love nor tenderness in Alex’s hands or his kisses. They were deeply and desperately physical, and she knew that for the moment her cool body meant no more to him than an anodyne to pain - a temporary forgetfulness and release from intolerable strain. But it was enough that she could give him that.
Conway was dead - they were all dead. All those people who had lived and laughed in the cantonments at Lunjore and at Delhi. Mrs Abuthnot, Colonel Abuthnot, Delia, Nissa, perhaps Ameera too. The whole world was breaking into pieces and dissolving in blood and tears and terror. But here in the quiet forest there were only herself and Alex - Alex’s arms and his mouth and his need of her. Alex who was alive …
At long last his hold slackened, and he lay still. The sky darkened above them, turning from green to a violet-blue that was strewn with stars. The starlight and the thin moon made odd shapes out of the trees and the thickets and the tussocks of grass, and sometimes something rustled in the jungle or an owl hooted in the darkness. Once, very far away, a barking deer called a warning that a tiger was passing, and once a nilghai, the wild blue bull of the jungles, crashed through the dense undergrowth not a dozen yards away. But Alex slept the sleep of utter mental and physical exhaustion, and Winter held him in her arms and watched the stars and was not afraid of the night noises or of anything else.
She thought once, and fleetingly, of Lottie and Lou Cottar. They would think that she had lost her way or met with some accident, and Mrs Cottar would not dare to call her name or show a light, for fear that her failure to return might mean that there were men in the jungle hunting for fugitives. They would be frightened, but it could not be helped. Alex was asleep and she would not wake him even if she could.
His head was heavy on her breast and the weight of the arm that lay across her and pressed her down on the warm dry grass seemed to increase with every breath she drew, while her own arm beneath him had passed from numbness to prickling pain. But she did not move except to hold him closer, her cheek against his hair, and presently a breeze got up; a hot breath of wind that the river had cooled until it blew pleasantly through the jungle with a sleepy, soothing, rustling sound, dispersing the mosquitoes and night-flying insects and lulling her at last into a sleep as deep as Alex’s own.
Even the screeching of an owl from a sal tree on the edge of the clearing did not wake them. But five miles and more away, beyond the jungle and the nullah, a jackal howled in the gardens of the Residency and woke the Commissioner of Lunjore.
The Commissioner returned slowly to consciousness and to the all too familiar waking sensations of an aching head, red-hot eyeballs and a tongue that felt too large for the dry mouth that contained it.
He lay still for a while, feeling the nausea rise in waves. His head was lying on something lumpy and stiff. Not a pillow … what was it? He tried to turn his head and found that he could not do so, not because the shooting pain that the attempt sent through his skull discouraged such a movement, but because his cheek appeared to be stuck fast to some dried and gummy substance.
There was a roaring noise in his ears and he discovered that his arm was lying across a body - a woman’s body by the feel of it; frills and furbelows. Curls tickled his forehead and there was a smell of violets - Chrissie! Must have been drunker than he thought if he’d taken Chrissie to bed and couldn’t remember it! Bed? Why, he was on the floor! Chrissie must have been drunk too - damned drunk. Must ‘uv been a helluva party! What had happened to the others? He opened his eyes with an effort. Dammit, it was morning! - a pretty kettle of fish!
The room was full of a hot yellow glare that waxed and waned, wavered and grew bright again. Sun comin’ up. He shut his eyes again and realized that he must move. Wouldn’t do to be found in broad daylight huggin’ Chrissie Wilkinson on the floor. He lifted his head with a violent effort, wrenching it free from whatever had held it, and had a brief glimpse of Chrissie Wilkinson’s face and her tumbled over-bright curls before the pain of the sudden movement made him retch and retch again.
He vomited helplessly, aware, even through the agonizing waves of nausea, of the odd manner in which the hot sunlight beyond the windows wavered and flared. Presently the worst had passed and he lifted his head at last and propped open his aching eyes with his fingers. It began to dawn on him that it was not sunlight outside the window. It was not even daylight. It was night, and something was on fire. ‘Servants’ quarters,’ thought the Commissioner. ‘Blurry fools! - they c’n dam’ well put it out themselves!’ He stumbled to his feet and staggered across the room to the windows.
The servants’ quarters had been smouldering for many hours, for the servants, having looted what they could, had run away, and a piece of glowing charcoal from an abandoned cooking fire had fallen out onto a roll of matting. The flames had spread slowly, and it was the sudden and unexpected night wind that had fanned them to a blaze so that they set alight the whole row of tinder-dry huts.
The Commissioner stared dully at the roaring flames. The glare hurt his eyes and he supposed that by this time half the place was aroused and that the fire would soon be under control. He turned back to Chrissie Wilkinson. He must wake her and send her home. Wouldn’t do to have an open scandal. He noticed suddenly that he was not even in his own bedroom, but in his wife’s. Where was Winter? Nice thing if she were to walk in on a scene like this! He doubted if she would stand for it. He staggered back across the room and dropped on his knees beside the silent figure on the floor.
‘Gerrup, Chrissie. Wake up - party’s over. There’s a fire, and fellows will be comin’ in. Chrissie!’ He shook her. She felt very odd. Not warm and plump and soft as Chrissie had always been, but stiff - stiff and cold.
&nb
sp; A shudder ran through the Commissioner’s obese body and the shock seemed to clear some of the fog from his brain. He moved so that his shadow no longer fell on her, and saw then that she was dead. Not only dead, but appallingly injured. He put up a trembling hand to his face, feeling it and realizing that it was blood from those wounds that had dried and held his cheek to her breast. Had he killed her? He could not remember. He could not remember anything. Had he gone too far at last and murdered her in a drunken frenzy?
He whimpered her name, tugging at her cold body. ‘Chrissie! - Chrissie! No … can’t be true … I couldn’t— Chrissie!’ He tried to stand and finding that he could not he crawled to the door on hands and knees. Every door and window in the house stood wide and the glare of the burning buildings filled the rooms with hot light. He saw the shambles in the hall and pulled himself upright.
There was a body lying across the door at his feet, its face upturned to him: Alex’s servant, Alam Din. There was a broken sword in Alam Din’s hand, for he had tried to hold the door against the howling mob of killers, and had accounted for three before he had himself been killed and the door that he had defended battered down. Their bodies still lay where they had fallen, for the mob had not even paused to remove its own dead. The Commissioner held tightly to the door jamb and after a long time, shivering as though with ague, he crept forward, supporting himself against the wall.
The house was deadly still, and except where the light of the burning buildings illuminated it, dark with an impenetrable darkness. A darkness that hid many things, as the flickering flames revealed others. The corpse of a child that had been cut almost in half by a blow from a sword lay just inside the dining-room door, and across its body, as though to protect it, lay its mother, Harriet Cameron.
Harriet Cameron - what was she doing here? The Commissioner stared down at her with glazed eyes; she never came to his parties; too much of a prude. Harriet Cameron … This was a dream - a ghastly nightmare from which he would awake. This was delirium tremens at last! He would never touch another drink - never. He would reform; lay off drugs and women and drink - turn over a new leaf. God! what was that! … a head without a body! Captain Wardle’s head, grinning up at him from the stained carpet - white teeth gleaming in the fitful light, glazed staring eyeballs glinting - the headless trunk in its scarlet and gold uniform sprawled a yard beyond it …
The silent ruined rooms, the black shadows and the lighted spaces where the pulsating glow of the fire penetrated, were peopled by the dead. There was blood in every room, and bodies - and bodies. Stiff, cold bodies of women and children who had died with open screaming mouths and staring eyes, and whose mouths still seemed to scream silently while their dead eyes were fixed in horror. Elderly, faithful, loving ayahs who had thrown away their lives struggling to protect their small charges. Men, brown and white, whose faces still grinned with rage and the lust of killing.
Their staring eyes appeared to watch the Commissioner, and it seemed to him that they mouthed at him silently. He staggered out into the open to escape them, but they were there too. Of course this was a dream! That was why it was so quiet, why nothing moved except the wavering light and the shadows that wavered with it. But there were three things that he could hear quite clearly. The crackle of the fire, his own footsteps, and his own rasping, panting breath.
The parched grass of the lawns and the dead leaves crunched under his feet, and he stumbled over something that had once been Mrs Gardener-Smith. Her clothes had been stripped off her by looters, and the indecency of her ample body, dragged out from among the jasmine bushes among which she had striven to hide, struck him as wildly comic, and he went off into a shrill peal of laughter because the nightmare - or the brandy - should have conjured up so incongruous a picture as Mrs Gardener-Smith lying naked on his lawn.
But at the sound of that high, hysterical laughter something moved at last. Three ungainly, slinking shapes: hyenas, who drawn by the smell of death had braved the vivid light, and who now galloped away across the open lawn to the refuge of the shadows.
That movement, and the sound of his own laughter, brought an icy sweat trickling down the Commissioner’s body, and he fell on his knees beside the naked corpse and touched it with a shivering hand, gripping the cold flesh.
It was not a dream. It was real. This was all real. They were all dead. He staggered to his feet and stood swaying - listening. But the night and the garden and the darkened house were as silent as a new-made grave. There was only the sigh of the night wind and the crackle of the flames, and his own gasping breath. There was no one alive in all the world except himself - Conway Barton, Commissioner of Lunjore.
The appalling horror of that thought gripped him by the throat as though a hand had reached out of the darkness and clutched at him. The roof of one of the distant servants’ quarters fell in with a sudden uprush of flame and a shower of sparks, and the glow began to fade. The light was dying out, and when it went he would be left alone in the dark - alone with the silent, stiffening, rotting dead and the slinking hyenas. He shouted aloud, screaming for Ismail, for Iman Bux, for Winter, for Alex; but only the echoes answered him.
The light flickered lower and he began to run, stumbling, howling, shrieking. He tripped over a body that lay huddled on its face before the yawning darkness of the gateway, fell, and felt his hand touch another that lay in the shadows; scrambled up again, and still screaming, ran out into the dark road that led through the silent, deserted cantonments.
The sky was paling to the first light of dawn when Winter awoke and felt Alex move and draw away from her.
After a moment or two she opened her eyes slowly and sleepily, aware, despite the rough grasses below her and the numbness of her arm, of a feeling of miraculous restfulness and physical well-being. Alex had risen and was standing beside her, his profile dark against the greying sky, and although it was as yet barely light enough to distinguish more than the outline of his face, she knew that he was frowning.
He was not looking at her, and she lay and watched him with an aching, possessive love as the light grew and deepened and his features and the forest about him ceased to be flat silhouettes and became three-dimensional, emerging from the surrounding greyness and taking on form and shape. As the sky brightened she saw that the sleeves and breast of his torn coat were black with dried blood, and the sight brought her suddenly to her feet, clutching at his arm:
‘Alex! - you’re wounded!’
Alex turned his head slowly and looked at her, and her hand dropped from his arm. He said: ‘No. I’m all right.’
‘But - but you - you’re covered in blood!’
‘It isn’t mine,’ said Alex in a flat and entirely expressionless voice. ‘It’s Niaz’s. He’s dead.’
He looked down at the stained, discoloured coat, and began to remove it, stripping it off slowly and with difficulty as though his muscles were stiff, and letting it fall to the ground. The blood had soaked through to his shirt, and seeing it, he frowned with a faint distaste and turned once more to look in the direction of the river. He said after a moment or two, and without turning his head: ‘I’m sorry about last night.’
His voice did not express sorrow, or anything else - unless it was perhaps the same faint distaste that had shown in his face when he had looked down at his stained shirt - and Winter’s heart contracted with the familiar ache of pain that she had felt so often when she looked at Alex. ‘Are you, my darling?’ she thought. ‘Are you really? Don’t be sorry, my dear love. Anything but that! … my love, my dear love.’
She wanted desperately to put her arms about him and to tell him that she loved him, and that nothing in all the terrible things that had happened or would happen mattered more than that. But she knew that she must not do so. He did not want to hear it, and he would not understand it.
She disentangled the length of blue cotton from among the grasses and rewound it about her slender body. The movement brought life back to her numbed arm and wrenched a sobbin
g gasp of pain from her, and Alex heard the small sound and misinterpreted it. She saw him flinch, but he did not turn.
He said: ‘I’m going down to the river. I shan’t be very long. Stay here.’
He disappeared into the jungle, and Winter stood listening until she could not hear him any longer. She stooped then and picked up his discarded coat. He would need it, and she could soak the stains out. She shook the dried fragments of grass from it and as she did so something fell out of one of the pockets; a small folded square of paper. She picked it up and smoothed it out mechanically. It was her own note - the one she had written to him when she had returned from Lucknow, and which Yusaf had taken to him in camp. He had kept it. She stood looking at it for a long time and then she folded it again very carefully and replaced it.
It was growing lighter every moment and presently a bird began to twitter in the trees behind her. A hint of the terrible heat that the coming day would bring was already in the air, as though the unseen sun, still far below the rim of the horizon, had exhaled a fiery breath of warning. Winter knotted up her heavy tangled hair, and searched among the tall grass for the revolver and the bundle of linen. A jungle-cock began to cackle in the thickets and then once again, as on the previous evening, the stillness was broken by a babble of bird-song. A flight of parrots screamed out of the trees on their way to the river, and other jungle-cocks awoke and saluted the dawn.
Alex returned at long last. He had evidently bathed in the river, for he was clean again. The dirt and grime and powder stains were no longer on his face, and his hands and arms were free of dried blood. His hair was black and smooth from the water and he had washed out his shirt and trousers and put them on again. The saturated material clung to him wetly, moulding his slim, hard body, but it was already beginning to dry in the dry heat. He took the revolver and the bundle of clothing from Winter and said: ‘What have you done with Lou Cottar and Lottie? What were you doing out here last night?’