The Game

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.”