Shadow of the Moon by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online

had not promised to abide by those views. Now that her grandfather’s letter had arrived, offering her the choice of giving up Marcos or being castoff and disinherited, there was no further need for delay. She could not stay with Juanita, and as Aunt Emily’s health necessitated her removing to the cool of the hills, Sabrina solved the problem quite simply by marrying Marcos.
    She would have liked Aunt Emily to be at her wedding, and dear Uncle Ebenezer too, but since she did not wish to involve them in any unpleasantness with her grandfather, she left a note pinned to her pincushion in the traditional manner, and slipping out of the house had her horse saddled and rode away to Marcos.
    They were married in the little chapel of the Casa de los Pavos Reales in the presence of two young officers of the 41st Bengal Cavalry, friends of Marcos’s on their way to rejoin their Regiment after a leave spent shooting in the
terai
, and of Juanita, who had been hurriedly summoned from her home in the city.
    Sabrina wore a dress of Anne Marie’s that she and Juanita had found stored away in a camphor-wood chest in Anne Marie’s rooms, for she had brought nothing with her except the clothes she stood up in and the pearls that Marcos’s mother had given her on the night of her Birthday Ball.
    â€˜I cannot be married in a riding-habit,’ said Sabrina with a light laugh. ‘It looks too - too urgent. As if we had suddenly decided to be married, in a great hurry. But we have known from the beginning that we would get married one day, and it is only the circumstances that have made it appear sudden and hurried.’
    The dress was of a cut and fashion of over a quarter of a century earlier. The white satin of which it was made had yellowed with age, and the lace overskirt with its knots of pearls was as fragile as skeleton leaves. They had found it laid away among a dozen or more outmoded gowns of a similar cut, and did not know that it had been Anne Marie’s wedding-dress. Juanita added a white lace mantilla that Marcos had brought back from Spain as a gift to his mother, and clasped the triple row of pearls about Sabrina’s throat.
    â€˜Now you look like a bride, and very beautiful. I know that it should not be a white dress, because of Mama and Papa. But I am so sure that they would not have had you wear mourning for them when you marry Marcos. We cannot be sorrowful on such a day. The
cura
is waiting. Come and get married.’
    Someone had put jasmine and white roses in the chapel, and the
cura
had lighted candles on the altar. The ring that had also been one of Anne Marie’s slipped onto Sabrina’s finger; a broad gold band set round with small pearls. Anne Marie’s fingers had been plumper than Sabrina’s and the ring was heavy and a little loose. Sabrina looked down at it - this symbol of her marriage to Marcos that had belonged to Marcos’s mother - and as she looked at it she was aware of a strange feeling of timelessness and of the continuity of life. It was as if she realized for the first time that she and Marcos, who were young and gay and with all their life before them, must one day die as herown father and mother and Anne Marie and Don Ramon had died. That life was not long at all, as it appeared when one was young and impatient, but very short and very swift, like the shadows of the clouds racing silently over the unheeding earth. But that this was not a sad thing, because all time was one. She seemed to see it stretching back behind her and away ahead of her. Anne Marie who had been young once had worn this ring, and now she was dead and her son’s wife wore it; as one day a daughter of Sabrina’s would wear it in her turn. Anne Marie was still here in Marcos and Juanita, as she would be in their children and grandchildren …
    Henry and Selina - Johnny and Louisa - Sabrina and Marcos … All time was one, and Sabrina was suddenly filled with a