The Game

There followed a list of times, most of them for meals—tea, I saw, was being served now on the upper terrace, wherever that might be; the next bell that came would indicate drinks, followed an hour later by dinner, which was followed by the notation “Dress: Casual.” I turned the page and found a description of the palace, with the interesting sights in the vicinity and suggestions of places to go in the town, all written in an ornate English that had me smiling.

There was even a map.

It was an odd document, I thought, one more suited to an hotel than to a private estate, and it said a great deal about the mind of the man behind it. Clearly, the maharaja was accustomed to entertaining large numbers of guests with highly disparate interests, and found it more convenient to present each with this cool, almost commercial document rather than convey the information in some more personal manner.

Well, it suited me nicely. I left my name-tag facing outwards, and took myself to the marble-and-gold bath to explore the intricacies of the Victorian hot water system.

The bell that rang the summons for the programme’s drinks-before-dinner event was no gong, but a small, silvery voice that approached, paused outside of my door, and continued on to the next guest. I finished arranging my hair, thrust my revolver into hiding beneath the feather bed, and checked the palace plan in the album. Map-reading proved unnecessary, for a uniformed chuprassi was squatting patiently in the hallway outside; he stood instantly to guide me to the room where the guests were gathering.

I stopped dead, brought up short as much by the intense beauty of the room as by the crowd it held; there had to be thirty people in the room already, drinks and cigarettes in their hands, the inevitable empty talk of the cocktail party on their tongues. Three flighty German girls nearby chattered madly about the lake-birds they had seen, two American men debated the relative merits of two makes of shotgun, a mixed trio of Italians seemed to be trying to sell a race-horse to another American—and that was the mixture within earshot. Only a handful of the guests appeared Indian, and none of those wore traditional dress. I was glad I hadn’t put on the lovely garment the Simla durzi had made for me—I’d have been as out of place as a caparisoned camel.

Sunny stood across the room, her face flushed with excitement and, I thought, with the drink she held. She spotted me an instant later and began to wave furiously, so that half the people in the room turned in amusement to watch me come in.

“Ooh,” she burst out, “isn’t this just the superest thing? Isn’t my brother just the darlingest?”

I looked up and around the jewel-box of a room, its walls and ceiling of creamy white marble inlaid with semi-precious stones, predominantly jade and lapis lazuli with spots of coral. The upper level was obscured by carved marble screens, designed for the use of the women in purdah, I supposed, and the colours made it feel as if one stood in a tropical sea, blue-green waters sparkling with the bright colours of the fish. “It certainly is impressive. What are you drinking?”

“It’s something called a White Lady,” she said, peering doubtfully into the glass. On the boat, I’d never seen her permitted drink stronger than a single glass of wine.

“Perhaps you should stick to the lemonade,” I suggested. “If you take it in a champagne glass, nobody’ll know.”

She giggled, and I decided it was probably too late to worry about her sobriety. “Where is your mother?”

“Feeling a bit under the weather,” she confided. “Mama went on a barn-storming ride once at a fair and the aeroplane landed sort of hard. Well, crashed, really. So she’s not too keen on them, anymore.”

“That’s understandable. Thank you,” I said to the uniformed entity who appeared at my side with a tray of champagne and gin fizzes. I took the wine. “Your brother, though—he seemed more experienced.”

“Oh yes, Tommy’s flown a lot.” Sunny giggled at nothing much, then leant forward to whisper, “Have you talked with His Highness yet?”

“No, I’ve been in my rooms.”

“Neither have I. Isn’t he dreamy?”

“He seemed very nice,” I agreed somewhat noncommittally; actually, I thought his brisk abandonment of his lady guests at the air field, and his absence at our arrival in The Forts, rather unusual.

“Do you know, are all these people house-guests, too?”

“I haven’t a clue. There are rather a lot, aren’t there?”

“I’ll never keep them straight,” she moaned, although having seen her in action on the boat, I thought they’d be eating out of her hand by evening’s end.

She turned to the young man at her side, while my eyes strayed to the gathering. They were a remarkably attractive collection of individuals, the majority of them male, most of them between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, although a handful had grey heads. Now that I was actually among them, I saw that there were a greater number of Indians than I had originally thought: I had moved among the country’s rural inhabitants for too long for my eyes immediately to interpret as Indians the man in Oxford bags and tennis sweater, or the young woman with crisply shingled hair and knee-length skirt who was smoking a cigarette in a long enamelled holder. Such was the young lady Sunny was now talking with, and to whom she introduced me, more or less.

“Mary, this is my new friend, she’s from the Punjab.” Sunny sounded infinitely happy that she could bring us together.

I held out my hand. “Mary Russell. How do you do?”

“Gayatri Kaur, call me Gay.” Her perfect upper-class English drawl was betrayed only by the faintest lilt of accent.

“What part of the Punjab?” I asked politely. Why on earth had I come here to make inane conversation that I’d never have put up with in England? Damn Geoffrey Nesbit, anyway.

“Farathkot, along the southern border of Patiala state. You know it?”

“Unfortunately, I’ve only seen the western portions of Uttar Pradesh. And Simla, of course, that’s where I stumbled on Sunny here.”

“If you have nothing to do, let me know. My uncle’s the raja, he’d be happy to put you up for a while.”

“Oh, well, thank you.”

“He adores Englishwomen. Nothing improper, you understand—none of his wives are English, not even his concubines—he just enjoys their company. A dear, really.”

“I’m sure,” I murmured, and drained my wine and looked around: When faced with Sikh Flappers, I felt a sudden need for a full glass.

My search for strong drink was interrupted by a ripple that travelled through the room, set off by the arrival of our host. Perversely, the “Dress: Casual” notice had passed him by, for he was resplendent in a gold brocade achkhan coat, high of neck and snugly buttoned to the waist with amethysts, its tunic skirts flaring to the knees of his white trouser-leggings. He didn’t look like an undergraduate now, not even one in fancy dress—no European could wear that exquisitely wrapped white turban with such aplomb, no mere scholar would possess those dark and captivating eyes.

In a word, dreamy.

The room surged gently towards him, leaving me with Gay Kaur beneath an archway. I asked her where she had gone to school, and listened with half an ear while I watched the maharaja work his way through the guests, shaking hands, gracing one after another with his flashing smile, laughing aloud at a remark made by Thomas Goodheart. The prince had a habit of speaking to taller men with his head slightly turned away, I saw, which forced the other to bend to his height. He also seemed to disconcert some of the people, particularly those most eager to put themselves close to him, and I watched him fix those seductive eyes on Sunny, take her eager hand, and lean close to whisper something into her ear. He turned away to the next person just as Sunny stepped back sharply, looking badly startled. What on earth had he said to her?

Just then his eyes scanned the wide room to where Gay and I stood, and the frown on my face seemed to catch his attention—either that or my height and the straw-coloured hair piled on my head. He shook off his admirers and stalked across the floor to us. His dark eyes were on me the whole way, unreadable in a face arranged for polite greeting, but once in front of me he continued on for another step and seized my companion’s face in both his hands to kiss her full on the mouth, taking his eyes from me only at the last instant. A shock ran through the room, but it was nothing to Gay’s reaction. She dropped her glass and her cigarette to push against his shoulders, squirming back from the embrace that went on for about three seconds too long for friendly greeting. I had just reached the reluctant decision to intervene when he let her go, laughing heartily. Gay’s face darkened with