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

him in less than eight weeks, and only a few days before Huntly’s wedding. It was followed shortly afterwards by one from Sabrina, but his rage and grief were still at white-heat, and he had enclosed her letter in another covering and returned it to her with the seal unbroken.

3
    The furnace heat of the Indian summer closed upon Oudh like a steel trap from which there was no escape. But the high white rooms of the Casa de los Pavos Reales, with their thick walls and shuttered windows and the patios with their fountains and orange trees, had been built for coolness, and Sabrina did not suffer too greatly from the heat that first summer; though she grew pale from the enforced inaction of the long months.
    In the early morning before the sun rose, or in the late evening after it had set, she would walk in the gardens with Marcos or ride with him in the park-like grounds that surrounded the house. But even at those hours of the day the stifling heat was almost unbearable and she was thankful to return to the dim, shuttered rooms where the swinging punkahs and the tinkling splash of the fountains at least gave an illusion of coolness.
    Marcos, born in the East and educated among the sun-baked plains and fierce heats of Aragon, remained to a large extent impervious to the rising temperature. His father had left vast estates, for the Count had from time to time acquired land in outlying parts of Oudh, and as Marcos spent the greater part of each day in the saddle, Sabrina would often have been lonely that summer had it not been for Juanita.
    Juanita and her baby daughter, and her husband Wali Dad, were frequent visitors at the Casa Ballesteros; but Aziza Begum never came. ‘I am too old and too fat to go abroad,’ said the Begum to her daughter-in-law, ‘and your brother’s wife speaks our tongue but haltingly. Also it fills my heart with sorrow to walk in the house of the friend of my youth who is dead - as my youth also is dead.’ But often during the long hot evenings, if Marcos were away for the night, Sabrina would visit the Gulab Mahal, and as the moon rose into the dusty twilight the women would sit out on the flat roofs of the zenana quarter looking out across the minarets and white roof-tops, the green trees and gilded cupolas of the evil, beautiful, fantastic city of Lucknow, while Aziza Begum cracked jokes and shook with silent laughter, stuffed her mouth with strange sweetmeats from a silver platter, or told long, long stories of her youth and of kings and princes and nobles of Oudh these many years in their graves.
    At first Sabrina did not understand more than one word in ten of the old lady’s conversation, but she had a quick ear and a lively intelligence and would spend hours of the long sweltering days lying on a couch under a swaying punkah at Pavos Reales, learning the language from Juanita or Wali Dad or the wizened old
munshi
whom Marcos had engaged to teach her. Aziza Begum complimented her upon her progress, and as a mark of herfavour sent a woman of her household, Zobeida, to be Sabrina’s personal servant.
    Zobeida was the daughter of a zenana slave; dark-skinned and sturdily built, with a quick brain, light deft hands, willing feet and a steadfast heart; and Sabrina grew to love her and to depend upon her as though she had been some faithful nurse from the days of her childhood. A love that Zobeida reciprocated with the protective devotion of a mother for her child.
    With the arrival of the monsoon rains the deadly grip of the hot weather relaxed its hold a little. The warm rain fell from a dun-coloured sky in sheets of water that turned the parched dust to rivers of mud, and brought a fantastic wave of green, growing things where only yesterday there had been nothing but burnt grass. Then the hot winds would blow again and the mud cake over, and the sun blaze savagely down, turning the caked mud to iron and covering it again with a thick layer of dust that would whirl up