“Your cousin is very good at it.”
“People like us have to be good at something.”
There are a number of ways to approach a statement like that, but in the end, I decided to let it lie, and come in at an angle, trusting to the darkness to encourage confession. “The maharaja seems to have a variety of friends. I mean to say, men with single-minded passions often surround themselves with people of similar interests. But here I’ve met a novelist, a playwright, two avant-garde artists, and of course the Goodhearts.”
“Jimmy’s pets.”
“Pardon me?”
“Jimmy likes to collect interesting people. Animals, too, of course—he’ll probably show you his zoo tomorrow, although he prefers to take people there under a full moon—but he’s forever bringing home some odd character from his travels and giving him a job. Usually something the person is most unsuited for. I suppose it’s more amusing that way.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said, although I was beginning to catch a glimmer.
Gay drew in from her cigarette, the sudden flare of light showing her pensive face, then let out a cloud of fragrant smoke. “We’re spoilt children, all of us, and it can be difficult for someone in Jimmy’s position to think of ways to fill the day. Unless one is taken with administering roads projects and building schools, there’s basically nothing to do. My own father drank himself to death at the age of thirty-one, there’s another uncle who reached the age of forty and locked himself up in his palace to become what you might call a connoisseur of perversion. Jimmy himself spent a few years gambling in Monaco, then he turned to racing cars, and of course you’ve seen his aeroplanes. I think he found danger boring after a time, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, because he threw it all over and came home. He spent a couple of years setting up elaborate practical jokes on people, and getting a reputation for sorcery—the servants are still convinced he can walk through solid walls—and then got tired of those games as well. That’s when he began to restore The Forts, and a couple of years later he started the zoo. So far that’s kept him busy. I suppose African lions and Australian birds make for a more satisfying collection than Moghul miniatures or Japanese armour, or even motorcars and fast planes.”
“Are you saying that your cousin, what? Collects human oddities?”
She snorted delicately. “Those you’ve met, they’re nothing, they’re practically normal. He had a two-headed child for a while, although I think she died last year, and he found a pair of albino dancers in Berlin who can’t venture into the daylight. And you won’t have seen his village of imported dwarfs—it amuses him to put the smallest people he can find in charge of the lions and giraffes. The village headman is three feet tall, and used to be with Barnum and Bailey. Not that the circus was sorry to be rid of him—he’s got the foulest mouth of any creature I’ve ever heard. Jimmy thinks he’s hilarious. Or he used to; I think he’s beginning to find it all a bit tedious. He’s showing signs of looking around for something new.
“Oh, is that the bell already? Hell, I’ve got to dress.” She tweaked the end of her cigarette out of its holder and tossed it into the shrubbery, tracing an arc through the night, then left without saying good-bye.
Up in my rooms, I was faced with a problem. Evening wear generally exposes a fair bit of the arms and shoulders, and I did not think I had face-powder enough to conceal my dramatic bruises. However, fortune and Geoffrey Nesbit’s Simla tailor had provided me with an alternative to evening dress. I tied the trouser cord around my waist and slid the cool silk kameez over my head, draping the gauzy dupatta loosely across my shoulders and hair. I looked approvingly at my reflection, then noticed the silver charm, a discordant note in the elegance. I dropped it under the garment’s high neck, then after a moment’s thought, I fetched the amber necklace from my jewellery box and fastened it around my neck.
I studied my reflection in the heavy cheval-glass: much better. Bruises decently covered, exotically festive, and I couldn’t help it if I looked like a candidate for the maharaja’s harem. Perhaps I should paint a vermilion mark on my forehead, to remind everyone that I was already married. I laughed to myself at the fancy, and let the shawl fall away from my hair to rest on my shoulders.
To my surprise, the maharaja claimed me as his dinner companion, so that I was seated at his right hand. A second surprise came with the meal itself, which for the first time was of strictly Oriental fare, and almost Spartan by comparison with that of the previous night. Mutton pilau (without an eyeball in view) and brinjal curry, tangy curds, spoonfuls of hot red, cool green, and sweet-and-sour brown relishes, and many unidentifiable small dishes offered all the contrasts of salty and sweet, soft and crisp, and even cold with a tangy sweet-sour frozen sherbet, with piles of buttery stuffed paratha bread to chew on. A few of the guests ate with their fingers, most with fork and knife, and the general atmosphere was one of calm satisfaction.
During the meal, our host offered genial conversation. The cheetah coursing had gone well, the injured beater would recover (I thought the maharaja had made enquiries especially for me), and a bag of six pigs made for a decent morning’s work. Particularly our last, which he said was the biggest he’d seen that year, thirty-five inches at the shoulder and nearly two hundred fifty pounds.
“Good heavens,” I said. “No wonder I’m sore.”
“I shall send my masseuse,” he said. “I ought to have done so immediately, how thoughtless of me.”
“Oh no, a hot bath set it aright,” I assured him, and hastened to insert some general question about his zoo, which he was happy to answer, and we were off.
The maharaja was skilled at the art of dinner conversation, when it suited his fancy. Before long I found myself telling him about Oxford degrees and the education of women, and he asked some intelligent questions, and seemed even to think about what I had to say, unusual enough in an Englishman. Perhaps his boredom with danger and side-show curiosities was driving him to, how had Miss Kaur put it? “Administering roads projects and building schools” in order to assuage his ennui.
We were still on the topic when the final plates were cleared. Our host gestured for the glasses to be filled again, and as that was being done, he said to me, “We shall talk further about this, Miss Russell. It is time the women of my country were taught more than forming chapatis and making ghee.”
Then he rose with his glass held high and declared, “I should like to propose a toast. To Miss Mary Russell, the most beautiful Oxford bluestocking ever to take both first blood and a kill in the entire history of Khanpur.”
I blushed furiously at the unexpectedness of it, and accepted the applause from my companions. Then I stood and raised my own glass to say, “And to our host, as deft with words as he is with his spear.” I then sat down hastily.
When the meal was over, the musicians who had been playing softly in the background filed out, leaving their violins and flutes on their chairs. It appeared as if we were to follow them, the maharaja leading us to a room I had not been in before, somewhat smaller than the durbar hall he used for dining, but none the less ornate. Its floor was strewn with carpets, rich maroons and indigo colours that gleamed with silk, across which had been scattered cushions and couches, and the walls were alive with frescoes of hunts and life in palaces. The wall nearest me showed an elephant with a tiger climbing up its side, the men on the huge beast’s back fighting the cat off with spears. In the background, a pair of English soldiers in red coat were riding furiously away, one of them having lost his stirrups so that he was about to tumble off his horse. My eyes followed the paintings to the far end of the room, where the painted musicians were echoed by their living counterparts, setting up on a low stage. Now, instead of the familiar implements of chamber music, they were wielding drums and woodwinds and stringed instruments of peculiar construction and more peculiar sound. After a minute or two I decided that they were merely tuning up, not playing some spectacularly atonal piece of music.
The maharaja led me over to a floor cushion next to Sunny Goodheart, who greeted me as a long-lost friend in a desert wasteland. “Mary, oh, how completely great to see you. Oh, you’re wearing the necklace, how sweet! Tell me, was it thrilling, to spear that great beast? Are you going to have its head mounted for your wall?”
“No,” I said. “Thank you.” I had absolutely no wish to keep the nightmare object as a souvenir—and I could just imagine what Mrs Hudson would say if I walked into the house with that tucked under my arm.
“Oh, but you should,” she urged.
“It would be quite impressive,” the maharaja said. “Generally speaking, the tusks go to the man who took first blood off a beast, but in this case you’ve earned them.”
“If you want the head for your wall back in Chicago, Sunny, it’s all yours. Unless the maharaja has other plans for it.”
“Call me Jimmy, please,” he told me. “And although the unique circumstances of this particular animal make it tempting, I think I have about as many boars’ heads as the walls will take. Let me know if you change your mind, Miss Russell. Now, will you be comfortable here? Yes? Then enjoy your evening.”
Sunny watched the maharaja’s retreat to what appeared to be the men’s side of the room. A jungle of hubble-bubbles rose up there, the graceful bodies wound around with their flexible tubes that held the mouthpieces, although the women’s quarters had a pair of them as well, for those who cared to indulge. Gay Kaur, I noticed, had claimed a place near one of the instruments, as had the two Parisian artists Faith and Lyn.
“Mr Wilson told me it was dangerous to go after a wounded pig.” Sunny’s face was screwed up in worry.
“I’d have to agree.”
“The word he used was ‘foolish.’ ”
I couldn’t argue with that, but if the child was waiting for some promise that I wouldn’t do it again, she would not get one. After a minute, she sighed and moved on.
“Mary, what are those things?” she asked.
I followed the direction of her eyes, back to the jungle of burbling tubes. “Those are hubble-bubbles. Hookahs, they call them.”
“Oh, yes! The caterpillar in Alice smokes one!”
“Er, right.”
She lowered her voice, and her gaze. “Tell me … is it drugs?”
“Sometimes. Often it’s just another way to smoke tobacco.” I thought, all in all, that most of these in the room held nothing more intoxicating than pipe tobacco, although as the evening went on I did catch the occasional whiff of something stronger. “Sunny, are you enjoying your stay in Khanpur?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, although her tone was not one of unrelieved ecstasy.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, really. Mama’s wanting to go, and I have to say, although this has been just the most fantastic thing ever, it’s also a little, well, strange.”
The entertainments were a bit too grown-up for her, I thought; I could only hope that what was to come did not shock her bone-deep innocence further.
But in the end, the gyrations of the nautch girls were more athletic than erotic, and the three impossibly flexible Chinese contortionists who came onto the floor afterwards gave no reason to cover the child’s eyes. Sunny imbibed more champagne than she would have if her mother had been watching, but the fizzy wine brought no more harm than high spirits and the promise of a head-ache on the morrow, so I did not interfere. She laughed at the antics of the swirling-skirted women with the heavy kohl on their eyes and the chorus of bells on their ankles, sat up astonished at the three slim figures tying themselves into knots, and clapped like a child half her age when a boy with a black-and-white monkey came to do tricks. Then the nautch girls returned, to the somewhat raucous approval from the other side of the room.
Sunny glanced over at the burst of male laughter, old enough to know what they were reacting to, too inexperienced to know precisely why. Suddenly, I had to know the answer to a question.
“Sunny, what did the maharaja say to you that first night, that embarrassed you?”
It embarrassed her still, as a flush beyond that of wine crept down her neck. “It was just a silly joke. The kind of thing Daddy says to my girlfriends when he’s had too much to drink.”
“What was it?”
“Just a comment on my skin. Something about, he wondered if it was as soft all the way down.”
I glanced involuntarily over at where the maharaja was reclining, the mouthpiece of a hookah in his hand, his head bent to hear something Harry Koehler was saying.
“How much longer are you stopping here?” I asked her.
“I think Mama needs to go in a couple of days. Kumaraswami is expecting her by the end of the week. Tommy wants to stay on, but I’ll go with her. I don’t like to think of her travelling by herself,” she added virtuously, although I thought she would be glad to see the last of this place, with its uncomfortable nuances and scarcely comprehended activities.
I had to agree with Gay Kaur, that Khanpur was no place for the child. And when the evening’s entertainment came to an end, I made certain that Sunny did not give in to her temptation to linger with the adults, by standing myself and patting down a yawn.
“Time for us girls to get some beauty sleep,” I told her.
She looked around the beautiful room as the noise level rose sharply, the guests chattering as noisily as a flock of bright birds in a palm tree.
“Maybe in a bit,” she said. Her eyes swept over the exotic crowd, but then her anticipation faded, and she took a little step back.
I looked to see what had caused her to shy away—the maharaja himself, his eyes on us, working his way through the crowd. When he reached us, I found that I was between him and the girl, although I couldn’t say whether she had moved to seek shelter, or I to provide it.
“I hope you’ll join us, we have any number of games set up in the hall. Billiards, darts, cards.”
“We were just saying that we felt tired, but thank you.”
His eyes smiled at Sunny past my shoulder. “I hope you enjoyed today,” he said.
“Oh yes,” she said, a polite child again. “Very much, thank you.”
“Tomorrow you must see my zoo. And you, Miss Russell. Have I made a convert of you to the art of pig sticking?”
“It was extraordinary,” I admitted. All evening—in the bath, sipping my wine, watching the twirling dancers—I had found myself reliving that moment when, on the ground with the pig’s tusk touching my boot, the world had come rushing back in on me. I met his gaze and said, “I’ve never felt anything quite like it.”
His eyes held mine, and a look of—what? understanding? memory?—came into them. “The exhilaration of survival.” He said it so softly I didn’t think it was meant for me to hear. It was as if I had reminded him of something long forgotten.
And then he blinked, and the moment passed. “So I take it to mean that you will join us again.”
“I don’t know about that,” I told him. “I should think the sensation becomes less astonishing with repetition. It may be a thing that should be done once, and treasured for its uniqueness.”
I wished him a good night, and steered Sunny through the crowd of guests and servants to the door. She paused to look back in, half wistful, and we both saw the maharaja watching us.
On the stairway, she said to me, “He doesn’t seem entirely happy.”
“The maharaja? No, he doesn’t, does he?”
“But you’d think, with all this …” She gestured at the stones, the garden beyond, the world created for this one man’s pleasure.
I didn’t answer. I thought the maharaja had, in fact, looked at me with envy. And how else, if a man had arranged his entire life with the goal of excitement? He had conquered every danger he had set himself against—racing cars, aeroplanes, casino tables, dangerous game animals fought with sparse weapons; what thrills were there left to seek?
Chapter Eighteen
The morning found me
aching from scalp to soles, and I nearly asked the chuprassi who brought the tea tray to fetch me strong drink, or a nice dose of morphia. But then I noticed the thick white envelope tucked under the saucer, which proved to be a note written by the same elegant hand that produced the daily schedule:
His Highness will see you at nine o’clock for a tour of
Khanpur zoo. Please meet him in the toy room.
Under those circumstances, intoxication did not seem a good idea, so I waved the servant away and tottered into the bath-room to switch on the geyser. At least with a gentle walking tour of the maharaja’s zoo, I might avoid too much sitting on my black-and-blue posterior.
The bath loosened me enough to dress and take a gentle turn through the gardens, where the combination of motion and crisp, fresh air had me moving almost normally as I turned for the dining room. Half a dozen of my fellow guests were there, distributed among three tables. I waved to Faith and Lyn but chose a seat near the novelist Trevor Wilson, whose presence in Khanpur interested me. I eased myself onto the chair, murmured a greeting, and opened his discarded copy of the previous day’s Pioneer. When he’d had a few minutes to become accustomed to my presence, I pushed the paper away as if weary of the world’s problems.
“Mr Wilson, pardon me, but you’ve been here for quite a while, I believe you said? It’s just that I was thinking of taking a walk into the city this afternoon, and wondered if there was anything you could suggest that I see there?”
“I’m not much of one for sight-seeing,” he answered, then proceeded to list for me a dozen sights that should not be missed, encompassing as he did so a fairly comprehensive history of Khanpur. I kept my gaze on him as he spoke, nodding and exclaiming occasionally to keep him going. We spoke of Moghul ruins and inheritance rights for a while as I slowly worked the conversation around to what I was really interested in.
“So, how long have you actually been here?”
“Eighteen months, more or less.”
“I imagine you’ll have enough material for half a dozen books, by the time you leave.”