We settled into the padded seats, Thomas beside the maharaja, with Mrs Goodheart on one side and Sunny and I on the other. The noise made speech impossible, which was just as well. Mrs Goodheart turned pale as the plane roared and bounced and then leapt skyward. Her knuckles remained white the entire way as her hands clenched the arms of her chair, holding her from falling to the ground below; once when the air dropped away beneath us, I feared she was going to faint. Sunny did not notice, but spent the entire forty-five minutes in the air with her head craned and turning, to see the hills, the glimpse of road, the brilliant white peaks that seemed at arm’s reach, the occasional pocket of lake. Goodheart seemed even less concerned, moving easily into his seat and paying more attention to the actions of our highly capable pilot than to our height, our movements, or the scenery. Thomas Goodheart, I thought, had flown before.
After forty minutes, we flew over a town, a hillside collation of tile roofs near a white river, then continued on for a few minutes before we dropped lower, skimmed the tops of some trees (Mrs Goodheart moaned and squeezed her eyes shut), and then set down smooth as cream on a wide, long, tarmac runway, taxiing along it to a wide shed, in front of which waited two motorcars and several men. The landing strip even had lights marking its sides, I noticed. Near the hangar at the southern end were tied down a small fleet of aeroplanes, six in all, ranging from a battered RAF fighter plane to an enormous three-engined thing with wings that must have stretched nearly a hundred feet. It looked as if it had just come from the factory, and was still sheathed in gleaming metal, not yet having received the red-and-white paint that covered the others. Its sides, I saw as we flashed past it on the landing strip, were corrugated like the one we were in, the same distinctive duralumin siding of the Junkers corporation. The bigger version probably had a flight range of seven or eight hundred miles; a person would be well inside Russia before having to refuel.
We slowed and made our turn, little more than halfway up the long macadam strip. The northern end of the runway rotated slowly past my window, affording me clear view of the five substantial warehouses or
For a maharaja’s plaything, the air strip was a serious affair.
For someone storing goods best kept out of the British eye, those
The engine died and the propeller kicked to a halt, leaving our ears ringing furiously in the silence. “Welcome to Khanpur,” our pilot announced, and opened the door with a flourish.
Mrs Goodheart needed assistance across the wing and down the folding steps. On the ground, she gulped wordlessly at the cold air and allowed her son to settle her into the seat of the waiting sedan car, grateful beyond words to enter a vehicle that was not about to leave the earth behind. Sunny, when she reached the ground, turned a circle, hands clapped together, oohing at the setting. Goodheart, filled with cool insouciance, gave a glance to the high circle of white mountains before turning his attention to our host.
I waited, intending to thank the maharaja, but he was moving off with Goodheart in the direction of the sleek little racing car, while we ladies were placed in the roomier, more sedate Rolls. The two men got into the small car and tore away at high speed without a backwards glance. Our bags were placed in the back of the Rolls, and the driver, wearing a uniform of red and silver, his red-and-white turban microscopically perfect, got in and turned us in the great man’s wake. As we left, one of the men sitting next to the building tossed his cigarette to the ground and sauntered over to the plane, his skin and features European, his very posture proclaiming him an RAF man.
I looked back to see him climb into the plane, and I wondered what a one-time fighter pilot thought of fetching baggage for a maharaja.
The Forts, two miles south of the air field and five miles north of Khanpur city, were aptly named, a pair of high fortified walls crowning a pair of sharp hills bisected by the north-south road. The two halves Nesbit had called Old Fort and New Fort were clearly from different eras, that on the east an early Pathan hill fortification with walls ancient enough to appear fragile, whereas the larger, western, and well-maintained New Fort was pure Moghul, its small, tower-flanked gate reached by a narrow road that climbed from the hillock’s southern end to its eastern, every inch of it nicely exposed for the purposes of defence. Round towers surmounted by flanged caps like German helmets jutted out from the red, age-streaked stone walls every hundred feet or so, each one large enough to shelter a dozen archers. The big sedan car passed through the dividing chasm, turned sharply right to climb the narrow drive, and finally eased through the gate, where raw patches betrayed the passage of many incautious drivers.
With the name of the place and its master’s passion for hunting, I had expected it to be a cross between a hill fort and an all-male hunting lodge, with a veneer of comfort over a utilitarian base. Instead, we drove into an earthly Paradise.
As the mountains encircled Khanpur itself, so high, warm-red walls, built for military purpose, now gave shelter to a garden, several acres of closely planned and maintained lawn, flower, and tree. Its centre was half an acre of lotus pond with playing fountain and water birds; a trio of tame gazelles in jewelled harnesses tip-toed across the close-trimmed lawn sloping up from the water; bright birds sang in the trees that rose half as high as the three-storey walls. In places the pillars of the ground-floor arcade were overgrown with a riot of crimson bougainvillea that reached the open-air passageways of the second and even third levels.
The great building inside which we stood followed the outline of the hill, forming a skewed circle but for the flat eastern side, which contained the gates and faced the Old Fort across the road; late-afternoon sunlight glittered off fresh gilding around the east wing’s deep-set windows. Before us to the north, a wide terrace spilled flowers from pots the size of a man, and the arcade behind it gleamed with mosaics of lapis-blue and gold. To my left, the western wing was more or less obscured by trees, and a glance behind me at the south walls gave the only indication that the conversion of The Forts was not yet complete, for flaking paint and stained stone peeped from between branches of bamboo as thick as my forearm.
There was no sign of the maharaja, although his motorcar stood open-doored on the gravel drive. In his place, we were met by a man as grand as the uniform he wore, its snug trousers spotless white, the heavy silk brocade of his tunic dropping past his knees, the ends of his greying moustaches trained flawlessly upwards. To one side stood two men with leashed cheetahs, the cats’ collars flashing with rubies; both animals eyed the delicate gazelles with feline interest, the very ends of their tails twitching, twitching. Up on the terrace, half a dozen musicians had begun to play the moment we came through the gates. Behind these ceremonial figures, a platoon of lesser
When I had been shown the glories of the water closet and had illustrated for me the geyser controls over my bath and the resultant spouts of furiously hot water, the two men who had accompanied me to my rooms left me in peace, one of them pausing only to adjust, with ostentatious ceremony, the ornately worked album resting on the writing table beneath the window. When they had left, I went to see what the album’s significance might be, and found it to contain a magnificently calligraphed document with the day’s date at the top.
