Shadow of the Moon by M. M. Kaye

Author:M. M. Kaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

27

Mr Barton did not allow the fact that he was now married to alter his way of life to any great extent, and his more raffish friends were frequent visitors at the Residency. Mrs Cottar, acidly witty, and Mrs Wilkinson, plump, pouting and feline, were often to be seen there, with or without their husbands, and the Tuesday parties of which Mrs Cottar had spoken were not discontinued. Winter played hostess at any of the Commissioner’s parties that might be considered official entertaining, but she had refused to preside at the long sessions of gambling and drinking that constituted these particular entertainments, and on Tuesdays she would retire early to bed with the plea of a headache.

Conway had attempted to take her to task on this score and to insist on her remaining, on the grounds that her early retirement was an insult to his guests. But here he had found, as he had found over the question of Hamida, that his young wife was not to be browbeaten. She would perform the duties of the Commissioner’s wife to the best of her ability, but these duties did not include lending her countenance to such questionable and noisy entertainments as the Tuesday parties.

She made no friends among the British community in Lunjore, and she did not like the Residency servants; in particular her ayah, Johara, the sister of the woman in the bibi-gurh who, so Conway had informed her - his eyes sliding away from hers - was the wife of his butler, Iman Bux, whom he had permitted to occupy the quarter. But she was given no opportunity to dismiss them. The capacity for gaiety and warmth and happiness that had shown itself, although shyly, on the long voyage from England, and the laughter that Ameera had released, had been cut off like flowers in a black frost, and Lunjore society found young Mrs Barton a cold little thing.

Mrs Gardener-Smith did indeed claim that her daughter Delia was Mrs Barton’s greatest friend, and Delia was often to be met with at the Residency. But if the truth were known she came there more on Colonel Moulson’s account than Winter’s. Winter had been surprised and disconcerted to find that Delia was becoming one of the ‘Tuesday Crowd’ at the Residency, for she had not thought that Mrs Gardener-Smith would permit it, and she was sure that Colonel Gardener-Smith–a silent, elderly, earnest man, wrapped up in his beloved Regiment - would not wish his daughter to attend such affairs.

Winter liked Colonel Gardener-Smith. He reminded her a little of her Great-Uncle Ashby, whose bookish tastes had insulated him from real life. Colonel Gardener-Smith’s narrow absorption in his Regiment and its welfare gave him much the same immunity from outside interests.

The Colonel had lately succeeded in putting into practice a long-cherished scheme for improving the lot of his sepoys’ families: the opening of a school for their children, run on European lines, and a medical centre for both parents and children. He had

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