by M. M. Kaye
March brought with it a steadily rising temperature, dust-storms, and the monotonous, maddening call of the köil, whom the British had nicknamed the ‘brain-fever bird’. It also brought Sir Ebenezer Barton and the dispensation that Marcos had written for to Rome.
Sir Ebenezer found his wife looking sallow and careworn after the sorrows and anxieties of the past two months, and much in need of a change of air. Emily, he thought, not only appeared tired and ill but as though she had suddenly aged ten years. He was both alarmed and angry, and spoke sharply to Sabrina, whom he held solely responsible for her aunt’s anxieties and indifferent health. He would, he said, arrange for an immediate removal to the cooler air of the hills, and this time there would be no nonsense as to Sabrina refusing to accompany them.
Sabrina, thus rudely awakened from her absorption in Marcos and his affairs, was stricken with remorse, for with the selfishness of those who are young and in love she had given little attention to her aunt’s state of mind and health during the past months. Aunt Emily certainly did not look well; the heat was making her unusually listless and a few months spent in the pine-scented air of the hills would undoubtedly improve her health and spirits. But Emily would not consent to leave Sabrina behind in Lucknow.
If Anne Marie had still been alive it would have been a different matter, as it would have been entirely suitable for Sabrina to stay in the house of her future mother-in-law. But now she could not stay at the Casa de los Pavos Reales, and Emily refused to consider Juanita’s house as a suitable place for a young unmarried girl to remain for a visit of more than a few days at the most: ‘No, I have not forgotten that Juanita is Marcos’s sister, and should you ever marry him’ (Emily persisted in regarding it as a matter of doubt) ‘you will of course be able to make your own decisions on that score. But at present you are under my care and your uncle’s protection and you must be guided by us.’
In this Juanita had unexpectedly - and most unfairly, thought Sabrina - supported Lady Emily.
‘You do not understand, cariño. Our menfolk do not think as yours on these matters. No, no - it is different for me. My mother and my husband’s mother were friends before we were born, and my husband and I played together as children. I am of two worlds, but you are only of one.’
‘When I marry Marcos I shall be of two also,’ said Sabrina, ‘England and Spain.’
Juanita shook her head. ‘When you marry Marcos you will still belong only to one: to the West. To Europe. I belong to the East also, for I was born in the women’s quarters of an Indian palace - in this house of Aziza Begum’s who was my mother’s dear friend and is my husband’s mother. But even were I to agree to your remaining here with me, my husband’s mother would not permit it. Already she is troubled because my husband’s uncle, Dasim Ali, follows you with his eyes and makes excuses to call upon his nephew my husband when he knows that you will be visiting here at the Gulab Mahal. Go to the hills, Sabrina chérie, and Marcos can visit you there. Soon a letter from the grandfather will come, and you will be married and all will be well.’
‘But Marcos cannot leave Lucknow,’ said Sabrina forlornly. ‘There are so many things to be seen to. So much to be done. He could only get away for a few days, and I cannot bear to leave him.’
‘It will only be for a little while,’ comforted Juanita. ‘Time goes swiftly.’
‘Not when you are unhappy,’ said Sabrina, voicing the age-old discovery as though it were new.
A kinswoman residing in Lucknow, a Mrs Grantham, had already left for the cool of Simla, and although there were other British women in the city, Sabrina had never been intimate with any of them. They thought her charming, but were uneasy as to her association with the young Count from the Casa de los Pavos Reales, who was, after all was said and done, a Spaniard - a ‘foreigner’, whose sister had married an Indian.
Many of the Company’s men, exiled from their homeland for long years at a time, had admittedly taken Indian brides, and many more had contracted less permanent alliances. But the reverse was of rare occurrence and therefore tended to arouse considerable comment and hostility. The British matrons who, with their daughters, dined and danced and drank tea in company with Lady Emily Barton, would not be likely to welcome her niece for a prolonged visit, so it seemed that Sabrina would have no recourse but to leave for the hills with her aunt. But even as preparations for their departure were made, the question was decided otherwise.
On a hot evening towards the end of March, while a dry wind rattled the dying leaves of the bamboos and neem trees, and the pariah dogs of the city bayed a sultry yellow moon rising through the hot dusk, the letter they had been awaiting for so long arrived from England.
It was short and to the point. On no account whatsoever would the Earl of Ware consent to the marriage of his grand-daughter to this expatriate Spaniard who had settled in the East. He had no intention of allowing Sabrina to throw herself away on any man, however wealthy or well born, who was not only a foreigner but had made his home in such a barbarous and uncivilized spot. As for Emily and his son-in-law, to whose care he had entrusted his grand-daughter, the Earl could only think that they had gone out of their minds to entertain any thought of such a preposterous marriage Sabrina would return home instantly. In the event of her refusing to do so and of persisting in this outrageous folly, she would be cut out of his will and cut off from all future contact with him or his family. This was his final word upon the subject.
‘Well, that settles it I am afraid,’ said Sir Ebenezer to his wife. ‘We will have to cancel our plans for your stay in the hills, and you, my love, will have instead to take Sabrina home: at least the voyage will benefit your health. I only wish that I could accompany you myself, but I am afraid that pressure of work forbids it.’
Emily, exhausted by the heat, the problems of packing and moving to the hills, anxiety on Sabrina’s behalf and awe of her father, gave way to an unexpected attack of hysteria and took to her bed - she would not leave Ebenezer! Sabrina must of course return to Ware - had she not said so from the first? - but she herself refused to desert her husband in order to act as escort to her niece. Both Mrs Tolbooth and her daughter, and Sir Hugh and Lady Bryan, were shortly leaving for England, and she was persuaded that either family would be only too happy to undertake the care of Sabrina.
But Sabrina had no intention of being sent home to England in the care of Mrs Tolbooth, Sir Hugh and Lady Bryan, or indeed of anyone else. She had promised her aunt and uncle that she would wait until her grandfather’s views on her marriage to Marcos de Ballesteros were made known, but she 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 cast off 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.
‘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 beginnin
g 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.
‘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 her own 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 warm, shining happiness and an assurance of immortality.
‘Jesu dominus or a pro nobis.’ The words of the blessing echoed softly under the domed roof of the small chapel, and then Sabrina was signing her name on a paper that she could not read in the pale candlelight. There was dust upon the paper, the drifting all-pervading dust of the Indian plains, and the quill-pen scratched harshly in the stillness. Marcos also wrote his name, and the two young officers and the cura, and Juanita.
‘Now you are really my sister,’ said Juanita.
‘The Condesa Sabrina de los Aguilares: my wife, mía esposa,’ said Marcos, and kissed her, laughing.
They drank wine in the great drawing-room where the portraits of dead and gone Condes and Condesas, brought from Spain, looked down upon that light-hearted bride and the few guests who had attended her wedding. The two young officers toasted the bride and groom, and Wali Dad, who had brought Juanita from the city but had not attended the ceremony in the chapel, made a speech in flowery court Persian which only his wife and the cura understood, but which everyone applauded.
Sabrina and Marcos walked through the patio and stood on the wide terrace in the warm moonlight among the shadows of the lemon trees, watching the wedding guests ride away. The moon that had been rising above the mango–topes when Sabrina had ridden to the Casa de los Pavos Reales was already low in the western sky, and despite a first hint of the faraway dawn the air was cool, and sweet with the scent of orange blossom. And once again that strange sense of being one with all time and all living swept over Sabrina. One day this great house would crumble into ruin and be no more than the little heaps of timeworn stones that marked where some forgotten city had stood, like those among which her horse would sometimes stumble when she rode out over the plains or along the river bank. But she, Sabrina, would go on into time, as through Johnny and Louisa she went back into time …
‘I shall live for ever and ever,’ thought Sabrina, exalted. ‘But however long I live I shall never again be as happy as I am now.’
* * *
Wali Dad’s father, who had been Conde Ramon’s friend, died that spring, and Sir Ebenezer and Lady Emily left for the cool air of Simla where Emily’s health improved and Sir Ebenezer attended those endless conferences that were to result in the disaster of the first Afghan War.
In England, at Ware, the primroses that had barely come into bud at the time of Sabrina’s wedding gave place to crocuses and daffodils and tulips. Hawthorn whitened the hedges, and the chestnut trees in the park were bright with spires of blossom that vied with the bunting and streamers that decorated the approaches to the castle in honour of Huntly’s wedding. Huntly’s bride Julia looked classically beautiful upon her wedding-day, and Huntly appeared adequately happy. Charlotte, for her part, felt smugly satisfied: Huntly was safely married to the bride of her choice, while Sabrina, that constant thorn in Charlotte’s flesh, had contracted a mésalliance with a young Spaniard and been disinherited by her grandfather. There was only one thorn left in Charlotte’s bed of roses; the fact that her three daughters were still unmarried. And judging from their looks, thought their grandfather, likely to remain so.
The Earl had aged considerably of late. Emily’s letter, informing him that Sabrina had taken matters into her own hands and contracted a runaway match without his approval and against his express wishes and commands, had dealt him a cruel blow. He had been an autocrat all his days, and with the exception of his son John and his grand-daughter Sabrina, no one had ever seriously taken issue with him - with the result that it never occurred to him that anyone would ever do so.
Emily’s letter had come overland via Egypt and had reached 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, beauti
ful, 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 her favour 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 into the dust-devils that danced across the scorching plains - until the next rain would fall and turn it back once more into liquid mud and green, steaming jungle.
