Free Shadow of the Moon by M. M. Kaye

years.
    Sabrina sat holding the letter in her hand and staring dry-eyed before her. She was looking back down the years to Ware and seeing Aunt Emily’s face in the candle-lit nursery, teaching a three-year-old Sabrina her first prayers. At Aunt Emily tying her sash for her first party; protecting her from Aunt Charlotte’s incessant nagging; reading her fairy-stories and telling her tales of her father’s youth … A whole vista of Aunt Emilys like figures reflected in opposing sheets of looking-glass, stretching away and away, endlessly repeated in an endless corridor. All of them kind; all of them loving …
    And suddenly Sabrina was afraid, with the fear that grips a sleeper when he dreams that he walks through the door of a familiar house and finds that the rooms are changed and strange and deserted, and that his dream has turned into a nightmare.
    There had been no news of Marcos or Wali Dad beyond a brief note dispatched from the village where they had spent the first night of their journey. The lack of news did not worry Juanita or the Begum, who knew only too well the state of the roads and the difficulties of sending word through the dâk from out-of-the-way stations. But it worried Sabrina, and during the long hot hours of the sleepless nights her imagination would conjure up pictures of horror and calamity, and she would remember the overseer who had died of snake-bite. Marcos too might be bitten by a snake - attacked by a tiger - murdered by the wandering devotees of Thugee - fall a victim to fever or cholera or the plague, or die terribly of hydrophobia. The India that had once seemed to her so glamorous and beautiful a country began to wear a different aspect, for she knew by now that underneath that glamour and beauty lurked undreamed-of depths of cruelty and terror, just as the graceful minarets and gilded domes of the palaces rose above narrow, filthy streets and the squalid hovels of the poor.
    On the far side of the high wall that bounded the garden of the Gulab Mahal, and immediately fronting her window, stood a mosque. It was an unpretentious little mosque built of whitewashed brick and plaster, its bulblike dome crowned by an iron horned moon that is the symbol of Islam. The sun rose directly behind it, and with every dawn, while the air was still faintly cool from the long hours of darkness, Sabrina would see it framed by the curve of the open window and silhouetted darkly against the saffron sky. And when, too soon, the sun rose, it would cast the curved shadow of that horned moon across the floor of her room.
    The shadow would creep slowly across the matting as the sun rose into a brassy sky, and sometimes at night Sabrina would awake to find it lying black in the moonlight. It came to symbolize for her all the fear and loneliness ofthose long days, and that growing sense of being alone in an alien country and surrounded by people of an alien race. It was a threat and a warning. A token of the inescapable and grinding heat of the coming day. Heat that sapped the strength from Sabrina’s body and the power of connected thought from her brain.
    She had not visited the Casa de los Pavos Reales since Marcos had left, but one breathless evening, after a day in which no wind had blown and the heavy curtains of wet
kus-kus
roots had only served to make the hot rooms of the Gulab Mahal more stifling, she was seized by a sudden desire to see it again and to walk through the gardens and along the river terrace. May was at best a burning month in the plains, but now a heat-wave held all Oudh in its grip and the mercury mounted steadily. But out at Pavos Reales it would be cooler. The trees and the open spaces and the terrace by the river would not hold this sweltering, remorseless heat as the city did.
    Juanita offered to accompany her, but Sabrina preferred to go alone. Marcos had left a carriage for her use at the Gulab Mahal, and attended by Zobeida she was driven through the narrow,