The Game (31 page)

“Again, congratulations, Miss Russell,” he said.

I stared up at my host, trying to make sense of his words. I lay sprawled at the prince’s feet, filthy, scraped, and sore, my hair in my face and my topee nowhere to be seen. After a moment I shifted my gaze to the impaled animal against my boots, and the world abruptly rushed back in, tumbling about me in all its size and complexity. I felt like whooping with exhilaration.

By God, pig sticking was indeed a game of games.

The maharaja helped me to my feet and said in a mild voice, “It’s not generally recommended that an amateur attempt spearing a pig on foot.”

“Yes, I can see why,” I told him. “But your horse wouldn’t stand still.”

“The pig would have bled to death soon enough. But I have to say, I’m glad to have been witness to that manoeuvre.”

The beaters came up then, exclaiming and, it seemed to me, abjectly apologetic, even terrified, although I was not sure if it was over the danger to me, or to their master. I was not even certain why they were apologising. Did we imagine they ought to have battered the vicious creature to death with their blunt sticks? One of them gave me a pristine linen cloth with which to clean my bloody face and spectacles; another brought the mare, holding her firmly; a third knelt that I might use his knee to step up. I needed the help, despite the mare’s lack of stature, and on the way back to the road I was glad, too, that I was not riding the hard-mouthed gelding. I felt weak as an infant.

Pig sticking, it seemed, was over for the day, although the cheetahs were being readied for coursing, and three large enclosed bullock-drawn carts rattled and jerked with the motion of whatever the cats’ prey was to be. I apologised, and told my host I preferred to return to The Forts, thank you. Taking my leave, and with a pair of mounted servants at my back, I rode—slowly, slowly—back to the castle and crept upstairs to submit my bruises and bashes to the ministrations of my hot-water geyser.

Chapter Seventeen

I
was greatly tempted to remain chin-deep in hot water until mid
night, but after an hour I forced myself to leave the comforting porcelain nest. As I dried myself with the thick towel, I discovered a number of sensitive patches, and moved over to look at my exterior in the glass. Oh, my.

A long gouge across my collar-bone recalled where a branch had snapped into me, and the butt of the spear had left an angry swelling the area of a man’s hand where it had braced against the hollow of my left shoulder. There was a smaller welt on the outside of my right arm that I couldn’t remember incurring, and several interesting bruises (as well as a general tenderness) where my backside had met the hard earth. I pulled on long sleeves, and with difficulty got my hair into place.

The day’s hand-lettered itinerary said that tea would be served, again on the terrace. With longing glances at the soft bed, I left my rooms: The rest of the party would be away until dinner, and I badly wanted another conversation with my host’s distant cousin before his return.

To my disappointment, Gay Kaur was not there. Nor was Sunny, although her mother was, stolid and flowered and looking restored to herself as she lectured an older Indian gentleman about the Spirit World and her Teacher (one could hear the capital letters). Giving her wide berth, I settled with my cup near a conversational cluster made up of four men and two women whom I had seen previously but not actually met. I nodded a greeting, but did not interrupt.

Their topic was politics. One of the men was a Moslem, who had things to say about Jinnah’s suitability as a Prime Minister, but inevitably Gandhi and his Congress Party dominated the talk. It became increasingly heated, so much so that I thought it was about to become out of control until one of the women rose to her feet. She was a small woman, but she dominated the gathering with ease.

“I shall ask that you two be tossed into the fountain if you can’t keep your heads,” she said. “I propose a change of topic. You’re Miss Russell, aren’t you?” she asked, turning to me. “I’m Faith Hopkins. This is my friend, Lyn Fford, and these argumentative gentlemen are Harry Koehler, Trevor Wilson, Vikram Reddy, and Taran Singh.”

Hands were shaken, and my chair incorporated more fully into their group. No less than four of the names had rung bells in my mind: those of the two women, Wilson’s, and Koehler’s, although of these, only the face of Koehler the American seemed familiar as well.

I started with Trevor Wilson, fairly sure of myself there. “The writer, aren’t you?” He was a novelist, best-selling in the years immediately after the War. Even I had read one of his books, and I read very little fiction.

“I used to be.”

“But it couldn’t be that long since you’ve published, could it?”

“Nineteen months and counting. I’m the maharaja’s secretary. It doesn’t leave me much time for my own work.”

Wilson sounded grim, and I began to say something vaguely encouraging, realised that pretty much any statement I produced would sound patronising, and turned instead to the man whose face tweaked my memory. “Mr Koehler, isn’t it? I believe we’ve met somewhere, although I can’t at the moment remember when it was.”

He turned rather pale and gazed into his tea cup as if it might suddenly hold a shot of something harder. “Oh no, no, I don’t think so. I’d have remembered meeting you.”

I searched his features for clues, but couldn’t retrieve anything more than the vague sense of having seen him in person, across some busy and crowded room. A train station, perhaps? It would come to me, I thought, then went back to the first woman. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” I told her, “but your name is familiar.”

She laughed. “Not surprising. Lyn and I were all over the headlines a year or so back.”

“The newspapers, yes. Something about the Archbishop of Canterbury, wasn’t it?”

“He eventually became involved, yes.”

The other woman, Lyn, took pity on me. “Faith and I tried to marry. We registered with our parish church, banns were posted, and it wasn’t until we showed up on the day that the priest figured out that Lyn wasn’t a man.”

“If you’d been wearing the morning suit I got you, we’d have managed it,” Faith said with a rueful shake of the head, which launched them on a story in two voices, a narrative of ecclesiastical derring-do and upper-class humour. It sounded like an oft-told tale, but none the less amusing for its worn edges, and I remembered some of the details as she went along. The two were artists, of a sort—one a sculptor of huge ugly bronze masses, the other the creator of bizarre canvases thick with
objets trouvés
. I thought they had moved to Paris, after which they had not been heard of again.

By common consent, our conversation skirted the topic of politics. Reddy, it turned out, was a playwright who had produced two critically acclaimed plays, the second of which had spent some months on Broadway in New York, before being hired to come here and produce something for the maharaja. He had been here for two years, with nothing to show for it but a lot of paper and a fading presence on Broadway. I didn’t find out who Taran Singh was, aside from being an opponent of Jinnah’s Moslem League, before the sporting contingent arrived, fresh from their horses and smelling of sweat and gunpowder.

I excused myself to go and change for dinner, but I did not go directly to my rooms. Rather, I walked, deep in thought, through the dusk-washed gardens. The mild exercise helped loose my muscles, and the distraction loosed my mind as well, because as I bent to smell a flower I abruptly remembered where I’d seen the face of Harry Koehler.

It was a trial. I’d been there by coincidence, meeting Holmes for dinner (he in a frivolous mood, with a gardenia in his lapel—Ah! The memory had been freed by aroma), and as we left the court-room where he’d been watching a trial, we’d got caught up in the press of people leaving the next room. At their centre had been Koehler, testifying for the defence in a case involving the sex-lives of aristocrats and the embezzlement of a great deal of money. Holmes had pointed him out to me, with the dry comment that the man was one of the best-paid witnesses in London.

So what was he doing in Khanpur?

I stirred myself from my thoughts and was picking my way through the dark garden towards the lighted walls of the palace when the darkness nearby suddenly moved. “Who is there?” I asked sharply.

In response, a flame snapped into being, settling at the end of a cigarette being held by Gay Kaur. “Oh, Miss Kaur, you startled me.”

“Sorry, I was just enjoying the garden. Care for a smoke?”

“Thanks, no, never got the habit.” I felt for the edge of the bench her flame had illuminated, and eased down beside her.

“I hear you made a great success at the pigs,” she said.

“Purely by accident. And I’m black-and-blue all over.”

“Yes, it’s a fairly ferocious sort of entertainment.”

“Your cousin is very good at it.”

“People like us have to be good at something.”

There are a number of ways to approach a statement like that, but in the end, I decided to let it lie, and come in at an angle, trusting to the darkness to encourage confession. “The maharaja seems to have a variety of friends. I mean to say, men with single-minded passions often surround themselves with people of similar interests. But here I’ve met a novelist, a playwright, two avant-garde artists, and of course the Goodhearts.”

“Jimmy’s pets.”

“Pardon me?”

“Jimmy likes to collect interesting people. Animals, too, of course—he’ll probably show you his zoo tomorrow, although he prefers to take people there under a full moon—but he’s forever bringing home some odd character from his travels and giving him a job. Usually something the person is most unsuited for. I suppose it’s more amusing that way.”

“I don’t think I understand,” I said, although I was beginning to catch a glimmer.

Gay drew in from her cigarette, the sudden flare of light showing her pensive face, then let out a cloud of fragrant smoke. “We’re spoilt children, all of us, and it can be difficult for someone in Jimmy’s position to think of 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.