The Game (27 page)

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
chuprassi
s stood waiting to retrieve us and our bags, to show us to our rooms, to draw us scented baths and tea trays and finally to take up positions outside of our doors, awaiting our least wishes. I was given a suite of two rooms with its own small bath-room, the bath’s square-footage more than compensated for by the ornateness of its walls: It had enough mirror and gilt to send Bindra into a thousand ecstasies. I, on the other hand, was overjoyed to find that it had running water, both hot and cold. Someone in Khanpur’s past had been remarkably progressive when it came to the comfort of guests; I couldn’t imagine what it must have cost to install nineteenth-century plumbing in a sixteenth-century building.

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.

5 February 1924

Welcome, friend, to Khanpur.

While the riches of Khanpur are many, the demands on its guests should be few. For however long you may grace us with your presence, please feel completely at home here, free to participate in our many activities, or free to remain in your quarters in quiet meditation, or with a book from our library. Bells will be rung at the following times, but if you wish not to join us at table, please, merely turn your name-plate outside your door to face inwards, and we shall know not to make a setting for you.

And again, if there is anything we might do to serve you, you need only ask.

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 fury as she bent to snatch cigarette and holder from the floor.

“Jimmy, you’re such a bastard,” she hissed, jabbing the end of the cigarette back into the ivory, all of us ignoring the servant’s quick gathering-up of glass from around our feet.

“Cousin, aren’t you glad to see me?” he asked, and without waiting for her answer, turned at last to me. Fortunately with his hand, not his lips.