Shadow of the Moon by M. M. Kaye Page B

balcony outside the window, and Sabrina, waking, heard the water hiss upon the hot stone. The sky beyond the window was already green and a star hung low over the roof-tops. But the air was no cooler and she gasped for breath. As the room darkened Juanita lit a small oil-lamp. The shadows made a mist under the curved ceiling so that it was difficult to tell how high it was, and the moulded reliefs of trees and birds and flowers which decorated the walls appeared to move in an unfelt breeze. Aziza Begum, seeing that she was awake, brought her the child once more.
    â€˜What shall you call her?’ asked Juanita. ‘She is half a day old and should have a name.’
    Sabrina looked at the tiny, white-skinned creature that lay beside her, and was suddenly reminded of a fairy-story that someone - was it Aunt Emily? - had told her one winter’s day at Ware. A story about a queen who had sat at the window on a snowy day, spinning with an ebony spinning wheel, and had wished for a daughter with skin as white as snow and hair as black as ebony.
    â€˜Winter,’ whispered Sabrina.
    â€˜
Winter
? But that is not a name,
cara mía.
She must have a beautiful name.’
    â€˜It is a beautiful name …’ Juanita did not realize how beautiful! She had never seen the snow and the dark December woods. She only knew the harsh,flaming colours of this sun-scorched country, and the heat was not an intolerable burden to her as it was to Sabrina, pressing her out of life. She did not know what it was to long for grey skies and fresh winds and the cold touch of falling snowflakes.
    Sabrina turned her head on the hot pillow and looked out at the moonlight beyond the open window, and as she looked it seemed to her that the white dome of the mosque and the moonlit walls and the black shadows of the orange trees were snow-covered fields and winter woods, and she began to talk in a clear light voice.
    It was winter and the snow was falling, and Sabrina wept because Charlotte had locked her into the hot schoolroom and she could only see through the barred windows the white park where she was forbidden to play. She could see it so clearly: the snowy levels dotted with leafless trees, sloping up to the barrier of the dark woods that ringed the park. She struggled to reach it, but hands held her back. And then all at once the hands fell away and the door was open. She ran out of the room and along the familiar passages and down the wide staircase. The wind blew about her, smelling of the winter woods, and now she had reached the snow and it was cold and shining and wonderful, and she was not hot any more but cold, cold, cold.
    Zobeida and the Begum fetched padded quilts and tucked them about her shivering figure as the fever mounted, but Sabrina did not feel them, and towards morning she died.
    The sky beyond the balcony paled with the dawn, and presently the sun rose, filling the quiet airless room with harsh light and throwing a curved shadow across the wall from the mosque outside the gardens of the Gulab Mahal.
    Juanita, remembering how Sabrina had feared that shadow, rose from her knees, and crossing softly to the window, closed the heavy shutters against the burning day.

4
    Marcos did not die of the cholera. He was, as Aziza Begum had said, both young and strong. He returned home, but by that time Sabrina had been two weeks in her grave, and Sir Ebenezer Barton, who accompanied by Mrs Grantham had hurried to Lucknow on receiving the news of his niece’s death, had arrived at the Casa de los Pavos Reales.
    Sir Ebenezer, also widowed, had grown suddenly old. Stricken by the loss of his Emily, and disheartened by the policy of the Governor-General and the Court of Directors, of which he could not approve, he had decided to return to Calcutta to wind up his affairs before finally retiring to England. He was sorry for Marcos, who had lost father, mother and wife in so short a space of time, and was now left with an infant