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

distressed by Sabrina’s fall from grace, or, later, by the news of her untimely death, but when they learned that the girl’s daughter was to come to Ware, both viewed her arrival with some anxiety.
    Julia, like her mother-in-law, had a jealous nature, and her small daughter Sybella was the apple of her eye. Sybella was a beautiful child, and as itseemed that she would be an only child, her mother’s ambitions for her were already unbounded. She did not relish the appearance of a rival, and from what she remembered of Sabrina, Sabrina’s daughter might well prove to be a formidable one. The subsequent arrival of such a notably unattractive child therefore relieved her anxiety. But her relief was of short duration, for the single exception to the disparaging view that her noble relations had taken of Sabrina’s daughter was provided by the Earl himself.
    Between the old man and the small silent child there sprang up a strong bond of sympathy and understanding. He alone came to realize what the child must be suffering in heartache and homesickness, and young as she was she sensed the loneliness and need for affection that lay behind the old man’s forbidding exterior and irascible manner.
    Johnny, Sabrina, Winter … Each in their turn had been the only one of the family who had never feared him, and here once again, in the third generation, he had found something to love, and Charlotte and Julia saw their worst fears realized.
    Zobeida was yet another thorn in their flesh and they had done their best to get her sent back to her native country. Her outlandish appearance, her foreign speech, her silence and her single-minded devotion to Sabrina’s daughter galled Charlotte unbearably. ‘To be waited on hand and foot only tends to give the child an air of consequence that is unsuitable to one so young. What she stands in need of is an English governess who will be firm with her,’ Charlotte told her father-in-law. The servants’ hall too mistrusted the silent, dark-skinned foreign woman and complained that she ‘gave them the grue’.
    But the Earl could not be persuaded to send her away. Her love for his small great-grand-daughter had been sufficiently deep and strong to enable her to face voluntary exile from her native land and her own people, and he could not but admire that. In any case, said the Earl, Winter would need a personal maid, and in his opinion one volunteer was worth three pressed men. So Zobeida stayed; growing more and more silent with each passing year and ageing with the strange rapidity of Eastern women. But though silent with others, she talked often to Winter in her own tongue, and always of the Gulab Mahal: ‘Some day,’ promised Zobeida, comforting the lonely and homesick child, ‘we will go back to the Gulab Mahal, and then all will be well with us.’
    The next few years of Winter’s life were not entirely unhappy ones, though except from her great-grandfather and Zobeida, she received little affection or attention. But then she did nothing to merit it, for only when she was in the company of the two people who loved her did she display any qualities worthy of affection or attention. To everyone else she remained a plain and silent child, so unobtrusive as to be almost unnoticed.
    Her Great-Uncle Ashby, that kindly and studious man, discovering that she had some knowledge of French and Spanish, encouraged her in the studyof these languages, but since his choice of literature was frequently above the child’s head, she derived small amusement from it.
    Herbert, Viscount Glynde, died when Winter was nine years old. He had been ailing for some years, although few people realized it, and when Charlotte at last awoke to the fact that her husband was seriously ill, the cancerous growth that had been the cause of his ill-health had gone beyond the reach of medical skill.
    In her domineering fashion Charlotte had been very fond of