The Game

“Oh, don’t tease it!” she pleaded. “The poor thing, it’s—”

Her interruption had caused the maharaja’s attention to shift, with the result that his hand dipped inside the cage. The small creature, wild with the terror of this perceived attack, leapt to defend itself. In a tan blur, the thin body flew up and attached itself to the dove, biting down furiously. With a bellow of pain, our host shook his hand hard. Puppet and creature slapped into the side of the cage, and the animal lay there, stunned, unable to defend itself from the bare, blood-smeared hand that snatched it up by the scruff of the neck and hauled it from the cage.

The creatures outside had vanished, the holes in the ground looking empty and bereft.

The maharaja held up the creature, studying its faint struggles. And then he snapped its neck.

Sunny fled outside, Thomas and Mrs Robbins moving to comfort her while Mr Robbins protested. “I say, was that really necessary?”

But the maharaja’s eyes followed Sunny, as they had been on Sunny since the moment he drew the creature from its cage. He had done it deliberately, I realised incredulously, just as he had showed me the Englishman-eating tiger and the obscene mechanicals. He had forced the captive to bite his hand precisely in order to demonstrate cruelty to this girl, little more than a child, who thought him “dreamy” and romantic.

Tossing the limp body into the cage, he strode out into the sunlight in pursuit of the girl and her comforters. There he apologised, he explained, he charmed, until poor Sunny found herself agreeing reluctantly that an animal that bit couldn’t be permitted to live, too confused by the varying faces of our host to remember that he himself had tormented the poor creature into attacking. He was most solicitous the rest of the tour, allowing her to feed a baby elephant, giving her and Mrs Robbins wide hats so they might walk through the aviary with its flashing tumble of colours and screeches, and finally making her the present of a sleek infant mongoose, an endearing slip of a creature that snuffled into the girl’s neck and hands before curling up in her pocket to sleep.

By the time we retraced our steps around the Fort and through the gates, even Sunny’s protective older brother appeared to have forgotten, or forgiven, the dull crack of the spine within the maharaja’s fingers.

After the morning’s unsettling events, I was tempted to remain in my rooms, thinking. However, the idea of a long walk, and of being free of The Forts for several hours, was too appealing, so with the sun high in the sky, Faith and I swung out happily from the gates. I paused to lean over the waist-high stone wall that separated the upper section of the drive from the precipitous hill. There was, I noticed, a vestigial sort of path leading straight down to the main road, duplicated on the other side by an almost imperceptible smooth line leading up the other side to the gate of the eastern fort. Worn by guards too hurried to follow the winding road, I thought; certainly no threat to the security of New Fort itself.

When we had doubled back to the main road, a movement behind us caused me to look back.

“Hell,” I said. “There’s someone coming after us.”

Faith glanced over her shoulder and kept walking. “Just one of the guards. Don’t worry about him.”

“But I don’t want a guard.”

“You don’t have a choice. If you’re Jimmy’s guest, he has you looked after.”

The man, red-turbanned and uniformed, complete with a sidearm in a belt-holster, had stopped dead when I came to a halt and looked back at him. When I reluctantly started up again, he followed at the same distance.

“Maybe we’ll lose him in the bazaar,” I told Faith.

“You’d better hope for his sake we don’t,” she answered.

“The maharaja takes guarding his guests seriously, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“All right. I wouldn’t want the fellow to lose his job.”

“Or his head,” she added. She was joking, of course. I turned my back on the man, physically and mentally, and determined to enjoy the outing.

Snow-capped peaks lay on three sides of the valley that was Khanpur, brisk contrast to the near-tropical crops that grew alongside the road, the sugar cane and new-planted melons. Men worked the fields, women swayed beneath loads of copper water-jugs and cloth-wrapped bundles, children wielding cane switches urged goats and cattle from the cultivated land, and Faith and I strode alone talking, our armed escort an unvarying two hundred yards to the rear.

Faith had been here for a little more than three months, she and Lyn having met the maharaja in Paris the previous September. He had seen Lyn’s work at a gallery and showed up one day at their door, toured their studio, and commissioned them to do some projects for him in Khanpur. The only problem was, once they got here, one hindrance after another had fallen across their path. The maharaja had not been here when they arrived; then he’d returned, but been too busy to consult with them. And when he’d finally been able to bend his attention to their projects, it turned out that what he had in mind was some sort of collaboration between what they were accustomed to doing and a traditional Indian style. And Faith had to admit, learning Indian techniques of painting and sculpture was fascinating, and no doubt valuable for the future, and the maharaja was extremely generous with his hospitality and advance payments for works not even begun. She shouldn’t complain, and she wasn’t, exactly, but she could wish she didn’t get the feeling that she and Lyn would sink up to their knees here and grow old eating lotus and sleeping beneath silk bed-sheets.

Listening to her, I wondered if all native princes were surrounded with as many hangers-on as Khanpur’s seemed to be, stray novelists and feckless wanderers caught in the honey-trap of palace life. Thank goodness, I said to myself, I should soon be on my way.

The capital of Khanpur was a walled and dusty town of perhaps six thousand souls, fields nearly to its gates, blessedly free of the stench of human waste—as Geoffrey Nesbit had said, the country was noted for the advanced state of its sanitation. The buildings were the usual jumble of Moghul masterpieces and tacked-on petrol-tin shanties, but the dogs wandering its crowded streets had a modicum of flesh over their ribs, and few of the children were completely naked.

As two Englishwomen, we were the immediate target of every salesman in the town, and offers for carpets and jewellery came fast and heavy. The beggars more or less left us alone, perhaps because of the red-turbanned figure who, once inside the gates, had moved up until he was close to our heels. We did our best to ignore his presence. Faith led me to the Palace proper, where the maharaja’s womenfolk lived—his two wives, dozen concubines, and eight or nine children, according to Nesbit. We could see little but high walls and, in glimpses through the iron gate, trees and the occasional patch of brilliant white marble, so we kept moving through the upper city, into ever-narrower alleys, more or less following our noses until we came to the bazaar itself.

Because Khanpur was well away from the tourist routes, the bazaar offered little beyond the wants of its inhabitants, its luxury goods running more along the lines of astrakhan caps and golden brocades than carvings of Shiva and mass-produced bronze Ganeshas. Faith paused at a silk merchant’s to finger a length of iridescent green fabric; my attention was caught by an ash-smeared holy man seated nearby: I myself had only been in Khanpur little more than forty-eight hours, and it was unreasonable to expect Holmes this soon; still, I examined him closely.

“I loved the garment you wore yesterday night,” Faith said, as oblivious of the shopkeeper’s lively attentions as she was of my inattention. “I was thinking of having one made for Lyn. What do you think of this colour?”

“Sorry?” The near-naked sadhu had a matted beard and wore his hair gathered into a snake’s nest atop his head; he sat motionless on a scrap of what had once been a leopard skin, a brass begging bowl next to one of his folded knees: No, it was not Holmes in disguise. I turned back to Faith, retrieving her words from the back of my mind. “That colour would be beautiful. And the maroon over there would do wonders for you.”

In the end, she bought lengths of both, arranging that they be sent to New Fort. “Jimmy has a tailor who can sew pretty much whatever a person wants,” she told me. “I’ve seen him produce an evening gown from a pencil sketch.”

We bought a bangle here, a handful of dried mulberries there, following the curving streets down towards the river, Faith talking while I studied every passing veiled woman over five and a half feet tall, but again, none of them were Holmes. Eventually the buildings fell away, revealing an open square of pavement with a few weedy trees. A shrine occupied one corner, its deity unidentifiable under the heaps of wilting marigolds and the smears of blood-red dye; in the opposite corner a silent circle of men stared down at a cow, which lay panting in a manner that did not