Somewhere back in those terrible passes, among the butchered thousands who had paid the price of Lord Auckland’s folly, Marcos de Ballesteros had died as Sabrina had imagined herself in her last hours - face downward in the cold and glittering snow. And his corpse, with those other thousands of mutilated corpses that rotted in the passes, were the seeds from which sprang the rank growth of rebellion that was in time to deluge all India in blood. For the power and the prestige of the Company had been humbled to the dust. Their troops had been defeated in battle and herded and butchered like sheep, and their bones lay bleaching in the sun and wind to bear witness that the mighty ‘John Company’ was mortal. All along the Border and throughout the length and breadth of India the news spread swiftly, and many men sharpened their swords in secret - and waited.
In the little pink palace in Lucknow Juanita wept for her brother, clutching his orphaned daughter in her arms until the child too wept aloud in bewilderment and alarm.
When her first grief had spent itself she wrote to Sir Ebenezer, addressing the letter to his house at Garden Reach near Calcutta because she did not know his address in England, and enclosing papers relating to the de Ballesteros estates that Marcos had left with her, instructing her to send them to Sir Ebenezer should anything happen to him. She wrote in March, but Sir Ebenezer had sold his house and sailed for England nearly two years previously, and summer had gone and the leaves were falling by the time the letter reached him.
He read it with difficulty, for his sight was failing and his knowledge of the French language was limited. And when he had finished it he rose stiffly and went to a heavy mahogany desk that stood against one wall of his study, and unlocking a small drawer, removed the packet that it contained and stood weighing it in his hand. It was the same packet that Marcos de Ballesteros had given him two and a half years ago at Pavos Reales, and it contained Marcos’s will and Sabrina’s last letter. He had hoped that the necessity of delivering them to his father-in-law would not arise, because he had his doubts as to the Earl’s reception of the news that his grand-daughter’s only child had been orphaned and that he was expected to take her in charge.
Sir Ebenezer had seen Emily’s father only once since his return from India, and the old Earl had made no mention of Sabrina, and had been taciturn to the point of rudeness. But Sir Ebenezer did not know his father-in-law as well as Sabrina knew her grandfather, and Sabrina had been right when she had told Emily that whatever she did and however angry he might be with her, he could not stop loving her.
The Earl was well into his seventies, but he did not look his age. He read Sir Ebenezer’s brief covering note at the dinner-table where the package had been delivered to him, and his face hardened. Sabrina’s marriage had infuriated him, but though he had raged and threatened and vowed never to see or speak to her again, at the back of his mind there had lurked the thought that one day she would return and beg his forgiveness, and that all would be well again.
The news of her death had come as a crippling blow. It was as if, in some strange fashion, Johnny too had died again, but this time in some final and irrevocable way. The fact that Sabrina had borne a child meant nothing to him, except inasmuch as it had increased his bitterness and resentment. The child was his great-grand-daughter, but it was in no way his or Sabrina’s: it belonged to this unknown foreigner whom Sabrina had married against his express command, and he was unlikely to see it or hear of it again.
He read Juanita’s letter to Sir Ebenezer telling of her brother’s death in the Afghan passes, and the will that Marcos had made in favour of his only child, in which he had concurred, in the tortuous legal phrases required by the law, with his wife’s desire that the child should become the ward of her grandfather.
The Earl untied the strings of the small brocaded bag that still smelt faintly of sandalwood, and his lip curled with distaste. The letter within it was sealed with a large circle of wax and impressed with curving Sanskrit characters, and he broke it with a silver fruit knife, flicking the broken pieces away as though they were unclean.
The letter was written in French, and the ink was blotted in places as though the writer had been crying and the tears had fallen upon the paper. The Earl read it once slowly, and then again. And suddenly there were tears on his own cheeks.
He sat there oblivious of them. Oblivious too of the startled and embarrassed glances of his family and the servants waiting at the table.
The Earl’s immediate reaction was that someone - preferably his daughter-in-law - must leave at once for India and fetch Sabrina’s child. But in this he had encountered unexpected opposition. Charlotte had not the least intention of undertaking such a journey, and said so categorically.
Very well then, Huntly and Julia should go. They were young and would enjoy the voyage and the chance of seeing new countries. But Sybella, daughter of Huntly and Julia, had been born only a month or two before Sabrina’s child, and her parents refused to leave her in order to embark on any wild-goose chase to the East.
The Earl, thwarted by his family and convinced by his doctors of the inadvisability of undertaking the voyage himself, was forced to appeal to his son-in-law Ebenezer for assistance in the matter, and Sir Ebenezer had been prompt and helpful. He had many friends in India and was sure that he could arrange for some suitable gentlewoman returning from that country to escort the child. He was as good as his word, but mails were slow and travel slower. The loss at sea of the first letters, followed by the death from typhus of a lady who had agreed to bring the child home, delayed matters considerably, and so it was not until the autumn of 1845 that Sabrina’s daughter, Winter de Ballesteros, Condesa de los Aguilares, arrived at Ware.
She was six and a half years old. And with her, to the mingled curiosity and consternation of Charlotte, Julia and the servants’ hall, came a dark-skinned attendant: Zobeida.
Save for one notable exception the small Condesa made an unfavourable first impression. She was a tiny creature, small-boned and, according to Lady Julia, sickly-looking. The white skin that had reminded the dying Sabrina of snow at Ware had ripened with time and the suns of the East to a warm ivory that her newly found relatives described as ‘yellow’. Her enormous eyes, the dark velvet-brown of pansies and over-large for her small face, and the rippling blue-black hair that already fell below her waist, were pronounced ‘foreign’, and they resented her sonorous Spanish title.
She was a silent child who spoke English haltingly and with a pronounced accent. The complete change of scene and environment, the contrast between the warm, colourful, casual life of the Gulab Mahal and the cold, gloomy rooms, Victorian discipline and stately routine of Ware, coupled with the bitter pangs of homesickness for the loving friends and the only home she had as yet known, reduced her to a state of dumb misery. Had she wept and displayed her fear and loneliness it might have aroused compassion and understanding even in the breast of so unimaginative a person as Lady Julia. But the child possessed a dignity and reserve beyond her years, and she would not weep and cling to these foreign strangers. Her silent, dry-eyed misery was taken for sullenness and her slow speech for stupidity, for her relatives were not as yet aware that the child spoke four languages, of which English, owing to the fact that it had been taught her by a woman of Franco-Spanish ancestry, was the least fluent.
To Charlotte and Julia the fact that Sabrina’s daughter was a plain, sallow and silent child proved a relief, for Charlotte had never outgrown the jealous dislike she had felt for Sabrina, and consciously or unconsciously she had communicated a considerable proportion of that dislike to her daughter-in-law. Neither woman had been unduly distressed by Sabrina’s fall from grace, or, later, by the news of her untimely death, but when they learned that the girl’s daughter was to come to Ware, both viewed her arrival with some anxiety.
Julia, like her mother-in-law, had a jealous nature, and her small daughter Sybella was the apple of her eye. Sybella was a beautiful child, and as it seemed that she would be an only child,
her mother’s ambitions for her were already unbounded. She did not relish the appearance of a rival, and from what she remembered of Sabrina, Sabrina’s daughter might well prove to be a formidable one. The subsequent arrival of such a notably unattractive child therefore relieved her anxiety. But her relief was of short duration, for the single exception to the disparaging view that her noble relations had taken of Sabrina’s daughter was provided by the Earl himself.
Between the old man and the small silent child there sprang up a strong bond of sympathy and understanding. He alone came to realize what the child must be suffering in heartache and homesickness, and young as she was she sensed the loneliness and need for affection that lay behind the old man’s forbidding exterior and irascible manner.
Johnny, Sabrina, Winter … Each in their turn had been the only one of the family who had never feared him, and here once again, in the third generation, he had found something to love, and Charlotte and Julia saw their worst fears realized.
Zobeida was yet another thorn in their flesh and they had done their best to get her sent back to her native country. Her outlandish appearance, her foreign speech, her silence and her single-minded devotion to Sabrina’s daughter galled Charlotte unbearably. ‘To be waited on hand and foot only tends to give the child an air of consequence that is unsuitable to one so young. What she stands in need of is an English governess who will be firm with her,’ Charlotte told her father-in-law. The servants’ hall too mistrusted the silent, dark-skinned foreign woman and complained that she ‘gave them the grue’.
But the Earl could not be persuaded to send her away. Her love for his small great-grand-daughter had been sufficiently deep and strong to enable her to face voluntary exile from her native land and her own people, and he could not but admire that. In any case, said the Earl, Winter would need a personal maid, and in his opinion one volunteer was worth three pressed men. So Zobeida stayed; growing more and more silent with each passing year and ageing with the strange rapidity of Eastern women. But though silent with others, she talked often to Winter in her own tongue, and always of the Gulab Mahal: ‘Some day,’ promised Zobeida, comforting the lonely and homesick child, ‘we will go back to the Gulab Mahal, and then all will be well with us.’
The next few years of Winter’s life were not entirely unhappy ones, though except from her great-grandfather and Zobeida, she received little affection or attention. But then she did nothing to merit it, for only when she was in the company of the two people who loved her did she display any qualities worthy of affection or attention. To everyone else she remained a plain and silent child, so unobtrusive as to be almost unnoticed.
Her Great-Uncle Ashby, that kindly and studious man, discovering that she had some knowledge of French and Spanish, encouraged her in the study of these languages, but since his choice of literature was frequently above the child’s head, she derived small amusement from it.
Herbert, Viscount Glynde, died when Winter was nine years old. He had been ailing for some years, although few people realized it, and when Charlotte at last awoke to the fact that her husband was seriously ill, the cancerous growth that had been the cause of his ill-health had gone beyond the reach of medical skill.
In her domineering fashion Charlotte had been very fond of Herbert, and his death came as a double blow; to her heart and to her ambitions. It had never occurred to her that she would not one day be Countess of Ware, and though she would have been genuinely horrified if anyone had accused her of desiring her father-in-law’s death, she had for many years looked forward with feelings of pleasurable anticipation to the day when her husband would inherit the title and estates. But now that day would never come. She would never be Countess of Ware: it would be Julia, now Viscountess Glynde, who would be that.
Bewildered and distraught by the death of her husband and her hopes, Charlotte’s health gave way and the doctors ordered her to Baden for a cure. She left for the Continent accompanied by her three plain daughters and did not return. Huntly, hurriedly summoned from Ware, arrived too late to see his mother alive and remained to attend her funeral, and on returning with his sisters, moved from the Dower House, which he and his wife and daughter had been occupying, to the castle, so that Julia could take up the reins that Charlotte had let fall.
For a few months after Charlotte’s death life seemed a little easier for the child Winter. No one worried her now or took the trouble to nag or lecture her for her own good. But her period of peace was short-lived, for the greater part of Charlotte’s hostility towards Sabrina had sprung from maternal jealousy, and now the same feelings began to animate Julia.
The fact that the Earl had shown no interest whatsoever in her daughter, apart from expressing disappointment on the score of the child’s sex, had not worried her unduly, since he was, as every member of his family was fully aware, embittered by what he regarded as Sabrina’s betrayal of him, and later profoundly shaken by the news of her death. But Julia had been confident that once his first grief and bitterness had passed he would awake to the realization that her sweet Sybella possessed all and more of the beauty he had so idolized in his son John and his grand-daughter Sabrina.
Julia herself idolized her only child. Had there been other children it is probable that her love would have remained within the normal bounds of maternal affection, but Sybella’s birth had been protracted and difficult and Julia had made a slow recovery only to learn that she would be unable to bear any more children. Like her mother-in-law Charlotte, she was ambitious, and it had been a bitter blow to learn that she would never be able to provide her husband with an heir, and that one day the title and estates would pass to some child of her husband’s uncle, Ashby. But Ashby showed no signs of marrying, and should he fail to do so the title and the entailed portion of the estate would pass out of the direct line, though there was a good deal of unentailed property which Julia was convinced must descend to Sybella. She was therefore unprepared for the strong bond of affection that developed between the aged Earl and Sabrina’s daughter, and it seemed to her nothing less than a deliberate affront that her own beautiful child should fail to hold first place in Ware’s affections, owing to the presence of this pallid, silent, Anglo-Spanish brat.
Anything that hurt Sybella hurt Julia, and a slight to Sybella was a slight to herself. She could not forgive Sabrina’s child for stealing what she considered to be her daughter’s birthright, and her resentment began to make itself felt in numerous small ways.
The child herself did not know what she had done to earn the new Viscountess’s dislike. She was merely aware of it and did her best to keep out of her way; though this was no easy matter, as she and Sybella shared schoolroom and governess, music and dancing lessons and the weekly visit of the drawing master.
Winter possessed a quicker brain and a livelier intelligence than Julia’s daughter, but she learned early that for some reason it annoyed Lady Glynde if she did her lessons quicker or better than Sybella, and so she deliberately lagged behind her slower-witted cousin, until the governess and tutors, who had at first been delighted with the precocious quickness of the child, felt disappointed with her and decided that she was, after all, somewhat stupid.
She was a lonely child, driven in upon herself by the circumstances of this new life; her only companions the silent Indian woman and the old man crippled by years and gout. It was therefore not surprising that her memory painted India as a place of wonder and beauty where the sun always shone and where people did not live in vast chilly rooms full of ugly dark furniture, but in gardens full of strange and beautiful flowers and tame birds. ‘One day,’ Aziza Begum had said, taking tender farewell of the weeping child, ‘you will come back to the Gulab Mahal and we shall all be happy again.’ Zobeida too longed for her homeland, and kept it alive in Winter’s memory, re-telling the tales that Aziza Begum had been wont to tell of an evening seated on the flat roof-top of the zenana quarters and looking out across the beautiful, garish city of Lucknow.
Thes
e tales Winter would relate to the old Earl, sitting opposite him in a tall oak-backed chair, her small feet dangling well clear of the floor, and translating direct from the language of Zobeida and Aziza Begum so that they assumed a strongly Biblical flavour. Her eyes would grow enormous and her small pointed face glow with colour, and her warm, hoarse little voice become a slow chant:
‘ … so he built him a great City all of red sandstone and white marble from Jaipur, with palaces and towers and courtyards; and around it a great wall higher than many palm trees. But the Gods turned their faces from him, for the rains failed and the wells ran dry and the river lay many koss away, so that the cattle died of thirst and the crops withered in the fields. Then said the people: “Let us go from here. The City is accursed.” And they went away. And the sand crept in upon the City and buried it, and it became as though it had never been—’
Once Julia had interrupted one of these sessions, and the old Earl, nodding towards the small figure in the great chair, had remarked unexpectedly: ‘Going to be a beauty one day: like her mother.’
Julia had turned swiftly, conscious of a sudden pang at her heart. But the colour had faded from Winter’s face and the glow from her eyes, and all that Julia saw was a plain, sallow-skinned child sitting very still with the stillness of a hedge-bird when a hawk hovers overhead. A feeling of intense relief that she did not pause to analyse flooded Julia, and she laughed her brittle tinkling laugh that always reminded Winter of icicles falling onto frozen ground, and said, ‘What nonsense, Grandpapa! She is not in the least like Sabrina.’