Nizams Daughters

carry it — beyond the exercise yard — he could not yet judge.

A trumpeter sounded ‘Walk-march’ and the rissalahs left the maidan in fours, the quarter-guard remaining at attention throughout, only their lance pennants making any movement. The jemadar in command of the guard, his charger’s saffron throat plume as brilliant as the displays in the rajah’s aviary, lowered his sabre to salute the standard as it passed, carried proudly by a veteran nishanbardar, and dust swirled knee-high in spite of the best efforts of the bhistis to damp it down. As he turned back for the palace he saw the raj kumari watching from the shade of a huge parasol carried by a bearded giant of a sepoy. ‘Good morning, Your Highness,’ he said, taking off his straw hat and bowing, keen to put the ardour of the previous day at some distance by a display of formality. ‘Have you been watching long?’

‘Yes, Captain Hervey — I have been admiring the horses especially. I think your Mr Selden has much to be satisfied with. He has transformed my father’s stables. And I understand that he has worked the same wonders with your leg.’

Hervey smiled. ‘I think it was in no danger, madam; but yes — he is very sure with his potions and stitches.’

The silk breeches had given way to a chaste saffron saree, recasting the raj kumari as a figure of nobility rather than of sensuality — but a figure of no less appeal. ‘Will you walk with me a while?’ she asked. ‘I would speak with you of certain things.’

Despite his intent on formality, there was little he would rather have done.

They strolled together in the water gardens. A host of Java sparrows, red-vented bulbuls, flycatchers and wagtails — and several others of which the raj kumari did not know the name — were drinking and preening in the fountains before the growing heat of the morning sent them to seek the shade. She turned to him suddenly. ‘Why did Mr Selden leave your regiment, Captain Hervey?’

‘Oh,’ he said, more than a little alarmed, hoping the expression of surprise might also give him time to find a satisfactory answer.

She dropped her gaze, helpfully.

After what seemed an age he found the words. ‘You know that the climate here is more to his liking. He was sorely troubled by fevers.’

The raj kumari looked at him directly and raised her eyebrows. ‘So it is not true that he was… obliged to leave, following… shall we say, an indiscretion with a fellow officer?’

Hervey blanched. His dismay at the hint of the vice — and from the lips of the raj kumari — was partially eclipsed by his admiration for her remarkable facility with the language. But as stated, the detail of the concupiscence was untrue.

The raj kumari was not inclined to afford him time to consider. ‘Captain Hervey, do not be abashed: such things are not regarded as of any great moment here.’

Hervey knew that his continued silence would only serve to condemn, yet he could not bring himself to confirm any part of her supposition. ‘Forgive me, madam,’ he tried, ‘but it is a practice which we abhor. Such accusations are not to be made lightly.’

‘Then we may suppose, Captain Hervey, that your coming to Chintal was not occasioned by vice?’

Hervey boiled, and would have let his rage show had he not had to weigh the consequences for his charge from the duke. ‘Madam, such a thought gives me great offence — more than I can say. I beg that you speak no more of it!’

The raj kumari looked, for an instant, genuinely contrite, but soon regained her self-possession. ‘Very well, Captain Hervey,’ she smiled; ‘I shall not.’

He bowed.

She was as good as her word, but he could not know how pleased she was that his reply had permitted her to strike the notion from her mind at last. ‘Captain Hervey, do you recall your disappointment with the diversion at your first night here in the palace?’

‘No, madam,’ he replied cautiously, ‘I do not recall any disappointment.’

‘The cobra — it was not as you had imagined.’

He smiled. ‘Disappointment? Perhaps — in that I had imagined the cobra to be a much larger serpent. But I had a very healthy regard of it, I may assure you!’

When the raj kumari smiled, though it invariably presaged her own pleasure, the effect was always great — no matter with whom. ‘I am resolved to take you to the forest to see the hamadryad. There is a serpent of which you will stand in awe,’ she promised, nodding emphatically.

‘Madam,’ he began hesitantly, ‘… the jungle — do you think it would be wise?’

The raj kumari laughed. ‘Captain Hervey, you cannot be afeard? Not you — not the fighter of boars in deep caverns!’

He had heard that mocking tone before, and Henrietta’s smile flashed before him. ‘Sometimes discretion is to be preferred,’ he said softly, hoping she might see the difficulty.

She chose not to. ‘Lakshmi shall be our protector, Captain Hervey. We shall first make an offering at the temple.’

He had but a moment to decide.

It took an hour to reach the little village on the forest edge where the sampera, the snake-catcher, lived. Hervey was not especially afraid of the hamadryad, for he supposed they would view it from a safe distance. Rather was he chary of any return to the tumult of senses of the day before. Evil thoughts came as a temptation: he could not be condemned for the thoughts themselves. But if he indulged them — dwelt on them, took pleasure in them, or, worst of all, opened himself to them — then he stood condemned. Avoidance, he had learned, was always more effectual than resistance.

The village was a more than usually mean settlement. What passed for the main street also served as an open drain, in which lay repellently the domestic ordure of the ryots — a sad, tired-looking people squatting on their heels by fires of cow dung. Even the children were subdued — boys all, for infanticide was still a practice of the poorest. They were only three — the raj kumari, Hervey and the raj kumari’s syce. Despite the obvious status of the party, however, the ryots made no show of deference or even greeting. It was more than the repose of the afternoon, for it was far from hot, even by his own reckoning. He judged the torpor spiritual.

She wore the Rajasthani breeches again, and with the sweat of her pony’s flanks having its way, she was once more an image of allure as powerful as any of the temple carvings he had lately stared at in disbelief. But Hervey was now master of himself — of that he was certain.

An older man stepped from one of the earthen huts and made namaste, greeting her in what Hervey supposed was some dialect. He could get no sense of what then passed between them, but the raj kumari’s familiarity with the place and the man was apparent. At length she turned to him and explained. ‘The sampera says there is a hamadryad in the forest nearby and she is seeking a mate. He saw her this morning.’

‘How does he know the snake is the female?’

‘He knows,’ she replied, with sufficient inflexion to suggest that there was some mystic power in his knowing. She told the syce to take the horses and beckoned Hervey to come with her across the open ground between the village and the forest edge, to the diminutive temple of the village’s protecting deities. Here she placed three silver rupees in a bowl at the foot of an image of Lakshmi and motioned Hervey to do likewise. Then the sampera, singing a dreary, repetitive mantra the while, led them into the darkness of the thick- canopied jungle.

Hervey’s encounter with the forest of his worst imaginings was come at last. He walked gingerly, stooping slightly, in the manner of one expecting to be assailed at any second. He searched the ground each time — albeit momentarily — before placing his foot down. He glanced about unceasingly, as a tiny bird at water. He searched with his eyes and his ears — and he saw nothing but green, and heard nothing but the faint rustle of his own steps. In front of him the raj kumari trod softly but without the same hesitation, and ahead of them the sampera moved as silently as if his feet did not touch the ground. They walked for a quarter of an hour along an old gaur track, the going easy, the track wide and clear of the bines which so easily arrested progress elsewhere. Here and there they had to crouch a little to pass below the branch of a tree that had fallen or bowed under its own weight, but there was little undergrowth even off the track, for the light barely filtered through the canopy of teak, tamarind and sal