Shadow of the Moon Read Online Free Page A

Force had been let out of the bottle and it became impossible to replace it. Instead of reaping a harvest of gold, as they had in the early years, the Directors of the East India Company found themselves pouring out treasure upon what had become no less than a vast private army, and acquiring, in order to protect their trade, a huge and ever-enlarging Empire.
    It was Robert Clive, one-time clerk in the service of the Company, who conquered India and propounded the revolutionary theory that if a country is taken over from its rightful owners, then it must be governed for thegreater benefit of those owners and not merely to the advantage of the conquerors; and the erstwhile merchant adventurers found themselves, to the dismay of many of their members, dealing more and more in territorial administration and less and less in trade. Their armies policed the land and they appointed Governors and Residents and Political Agents to dispense law and justice to this vast country to which they had come to barter and remained to conquer, and their profits dwindled away.
    â€˜No man goes so far as he who knows not where he is going,’ said Oliver Cromwell. The men of ‘John Company’ had not known where they were going, and they had travelled a long and far road from the days of the seventeenth century and those first small trading settlements on the coast of Coromandel. They had defeated Tippu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, and divided and apportioned his territory. They had defeated the Mahrattas and the Gurkhas, and deposed the Peishwa and added his lands to the Presidency of Bombay. Was the ancient Kingdom of Oudh now to go the same way, and its rule pass from the hands of its royal house into those of the Company? Colonel Low, for one, was resolved to do all he could to prevent it.
    The whole question of India, he considered, was getting out of hand, for the greater the Company’s territorial power and possessions, the less profit in terms of trade. ‘John Company’ was not only losing money, but was heavily in debt, and it was out of the question that they should take over the sole government of Oudh. Besides, he did not believe that the people of Oudh, though they had little love for their vicious kings and would welcome the fall of Nasser-ood-din, would approve of the rule of a foreign company in his stead. They would only see it as another example of Western aggression and the barefaced theft of more territory, and there would be riots and up-risings - and once more the profits of trade would be swallowed up in unprofitable wars. Yet Nasser-ood-din must be deposed.
    But even as Colonel Low pondered the question, one aspect of his problem was solved for him. On a hot night in July Nasser-ood-din Hyder died by poison; and immediately all Oudh was in a ferment. The succession was in dispute and the streets of Lucknow surged with gangs of lawless troops ready to strike in support of their particular nominee, and only the firmness and courage of Low and a handful of British assistants saved the seething city from a bath of violence and blood. Eventually, with the consent of Lord Auckland the Governor-General, an aged and crippled uncle of the late King ascended the throne of Oudh. The city quietened, and Juanita returned to the pink stucco palace in Lucknow.
    Juanita’s brother was back from Spain: a tall stranger whose gay laughter awoke unaccustomed echoes in the quiet of the Casa de los Pavos Reales.
    The warm, drenching rains of September washed the city clean, and October brought in the brilliant days and cool nights of the Indian cold weather. The Bartons returned to Lucknow where they were to spend amonth with the Resident, and Sabrina, paying a call at the House of the Peacocks with her Aunt Emily, met Marcos de Ballesteros.
    It was of course inevitable that they should fall in love. Marcos, dark-haired and romantically handsome, with his gay laugh and the novelty and charm of one newly come from that