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

and he broke it with a silver fruit knife, flicking the broken pieces away as though they were unclean.
    The letter was written in French, and the ink was blotted in places as though the writer had been crying and the tears had fallen upon the paper. The Earl read it once slowly, and then again. And suddenly there were tears on his own cheeks.
    He sat there oblivious of them. Oblivious too of the startled and embarrassed glances of his family and the servants waiting at the table.
    The Earl’s immediate reaction was that someone - preferably his daughter-in-law - must leave at once for India and fetch Sabrina’s child. But in this he had encountered unexpected opposition. Charlotte had not the least intention of undertaking such a journey, and said so categorically.
    Very well then, Huntly and Julia should go. They were young and would enjoy the voyage and the chance of seeing new countries. But Sybella, daughter of Huntly and Julia, had been born only a month or two before Sabrina’s child, and her parents refused to leave her in order to embark on any wild-goose chase to the East.
    The Earl, thwarted by his family and convinced by his doctors of the inadvisability of undertaking the voyage himself, was forced to appeal to hisson-in-law Ebenezer for assistance in the matter, and Sir Ebenezer had been prompt and helpful. He had many friends in India and was sure that he could arrange for some suitable gentlewoman returning from that country to escort the child. He was as good as his word, but mails were slow and travel slower. The loss at sea of the first letters, followed by the death from typhus of a lady who had agreed to bring the child home, delayed matters considerably, and so it was not until the autumn of 1845 that Sabrina’s daughter, Winter de Ballesteros, Condesa de los Aguilares, arrived at Ware.
    She was six and a half years old. And with her, to the mingled curiosity and consternation of Charlotte, Julia and the servants’ hall, came a dark-skinned attendant: Zobeida.
    Save for one notable exception the small Condesa made an unfavourable first impression. She was a tiny creature, small-boned and, according to Lady Julia, sickly-looking. The white skin that had reminded the dying Sabrina of snow at Ware had ripened with time and the suns of the East to a warm ivory that her newly found relatives described as ‘yellow’. Her enormous eyes, the dark velvet-brown of pansies and over-large for her small face, and the rippling blue-black hair that already fell below her waist, were pronounced ‘foreign’, and they resented her sonorous Spanish title.
    She was a silent child who spoke English haltingly and with a pronounced accent. The complete change of scene and environment, the contrast between the warm, colourful, casual life of the Gulab Mahal and the cold, gloomy rooms, Victorian discipline and stately routine of Ware, coupled with the bitter pangs of homesickness for the loving friends and the only home she had as yet known, reduced her to a state of dumb misery. Had she wept and displayed her fear and loneliness it might have aroused compassion and understanding even in the breast of so unimaginative a person as Lady Julia. But the child possessed a dignity and reserve beyond her years, and she would not weep and cling to these foreign strangers. Her silent, dry-eyed misery was taken for sullenness and her slow speech for stupidity, for her relatives were not as yet aware that the child spoke four languages, of which English, owing to the fact that it had been taught her by a woman of Franco-Spanish ancestry, was the least fluent.
    To Charlotte and Julia the fact that Sabrina’s daughter was a plain, sallow and silent child proved a relief, for Charlotte had never outgrown the jealous dislike she had felt for Sabrina, and consciously or unconsciously she had communicated a considerable proportion of that dislike to her daughter-in-law. Neither woman had been unduly