words, especially considering the woman I was talking to, and she reacted as I might have done.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Although I suppose you could say—Oh, it’s too complicated to explain! No,” she asserted, suddenly firm. “Nobody’s being kept against their will. This is the twentieth century, not some feudal state. But Jimmy’s touchy sometimes, and one thing he hates is to think his generosity is unappreciated. You’re an honoured guest, and for you to just shake his hand and take off, well, it seems gauche to him.”
“Faith, I have business to attend to.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“The repercussions would be considerable.”
“They will be here, too.”
“Such as what?” I demanded, suddenly a little touchy myself. “Will he put the rest of you in chains? Torture a few coolies in a fit of pique? Come after me with a pig spear? What repercussions are we describing, precisely?”
But she either couldn’t or wouldn’t say what he might do, and left shortly afterwards, glum at her inability to convince me to stay within the golden bars. Then an hour later, while I was sitting with a book in the shade of the garden, Gay found me, and asked me to stay as well.
I closed the book with a snap. “Gay, this concerted effort to keep me here is becoming a bit worrying. What is going on here?”
“Nothing at all, it’s only that Jimmy had plans for Sunday and is very disappointed to find them slipping away. He’s fond of you.”
“Fond or not, most people would be glad enough to see the back of an uninvited guest. I don’t wish to overstay my welcome.”
“But you’re here, and you interest him, and he’d like you to stay for a few days longer.”
I leant forward to look the woman in the eye. “Gay, I’m not one of Jimmy’s pets. I need to leave.” And so saying, I stood up and left the garden.
But before I was quite out of earshot, I thought I heard her say, “Good luck.”
Chapter Twenty
Dinner was a tense affair, ill attended and again composed of great numbers of greasy and over-cooked dishes. Our host drank heavily, although it did not affect him other than making him ever more morose, and Faith and Gay on either side of him worked hard at keeping him distracted. I made empty conversation with the people on either side of me while I pushed the food back and forth on my plate, until over the seventh or seventeenth course, I overheard Faith telling him about the magician we’d seen in the town.
“. . . so tall and mysterious looking, all in black with this incongruously cute little donkey standing in the background. He did the usual things, pulling coins out of the air and changing mice into sparrows, but then he called people from the audience to read their minds. I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, of course, but they seemed mighty impressed.”
For the first time all evening, the maharaja’s eyes rose from his glass as he snarled, “If you couldn’t understand what they were saying, how do you know what he was doing?”
Faith hesitated at the accusation, then rallied. “One could tell from the sequence of events. The magician would invite the audience to ask him something, and then one of them would come forward and he would talk for a few minutes and then hold his hand up in front of the other’s face with his eyes closed, and sort of hum for a bit and then he’d say something and everyone would sort of ooh and aah. Then he took a deck of cards and had the person choose one and tell him which it was he had in his hand. That sort of thing.”
“Not an astrologer?”
“I don’t . . . He didn’t have any charts or anything.”
“What else could he do?”
Juggle fire, pull coins from the turbans of Sikh boys, levitate his assistant, I thought.
“He made a stone hang in mid-air above his hand. And he took a turban from the head of one of the audience and cut it in half, then restored it.” From her tone of voice, Faith assumed these were tricks, although she couldn’t have said how. The maharaja, however, took them at face value.
“This magician, he is in the town?”
“He was yesterday.”
Abruptly, he stood up, his chair saved from crashing to the floor by the servant at his back. “We will go to see this man.”
“What, now?” Faith said.
“Why not? Gay, Thomas, you come with us.”
“May I come, too?” Sunny asked. “I adore magicians.”
“But of course,” the maharaja declared, and swept out of the room, servants and guests alike scurrying to catch him up. The rest of us stood or sat where we had been abandoned, looking at one another quizzically. Mrs Goodheart was the first to move, folding her table napkin and rising ponderously to declare, “I believe I’ve had enough dinner. I’ll wish you all good night.”
The spell broken, men hastily swallowed the contents of their glasses and rose to allow the ladies to depart. Most of them would make for the billiards room, along with a number of the women, but I followed Mrs Goodheart up the stairs. My light went out early, and silence fell.
I did not hear when the servant came, turning his key in the well-oiled lock and padding on bare feet across stone and carpet to glance briefly through the bedroom door at my sleeping figure, then padding back out to the corridor to sabotage my door lock and make my rooms a prison. I did not hear the maharaja and his gold-plated Hispano-Suiza filled with high-spirited guests drive back through the gates, bashing the stones of the narrow opening and spewing gravel across the carefully swept lawn. I did not hear the maharaja ask his servant if the deed had been done, nor did I see the two of them go to make ready quarters for me in a quieter portion of The Forts.
I did, on the other hand, hear the motorcar fly past me on its passage back from town, when the violent drop of one fast-spinning tyre into a pot-hole resulted in shouts and shrieks of laughter.
I witnessed none of these events within New Fort for the simple reason that I was not there. I left my rooms less than five minutes after entering them, having stopped there only long enough to pull on black trousers and a long dark pull-over. I wrapped a dressing-gown over the clothes and handed a note to the servant who lurked at my door, asking him to take it to Sunny Goodheart. When he had gone, I dropped the gown and grabbed my soft Simla boots, pausing only to dip my hands into the lamp’s soot and wipe it across my face. Then I slipped unseen down the stairs and into the dark gardens. With my boots on my feet and a handful of tiny pebbles in my pocket, I took up a position near the gates, crouching there for a few moments until the guards went to investigate the rattle of tiny stones in the shadows. I eased out of the gates and over the waist-high stone wall onto the rocky hillside. Easing down the faint, near-vertical path that I felt more than saw, inching on all fours from rock to shrub, the back of my neck crawled with awareness of the mysterious eastern half of the fortress, looming behind me in the darkness. As I moved with infinite care down the slippery slope, I fancied I could hear the ghostly echoes of screaming Mutineers, trapped and burning sixty-seven years before.
I reached the road at last, leg muscles quivering, two fingers ripped and bleeding from a rock, but undiscovered. I gazed south, where lay the town of Khanpur, then turned resolutely north. This was the first time that I’d been out unobserved, and I was not about to waste the opportunity. I strode briskly north, towards those beguiling
Little more than an hour later, I was hunkered behind the lip of a drainage ditch halfway between The Forts and Khanpur city while the maharaja’s laden Hispano-Suiza flew raucously past. I rose to watch the great head- lamps illuminate the stone drive, its driver blithely unaware that the disapproving eye of the Crown was about to turn upon his little kingdom. I watched the car stagger its way through the gates, then turned, finally, towards Holmes.
The city gates were shut for the night, so I went on to the
