Not to take a closer look would have been impossible for Fitcher: he stepped over and peered closely at the page – the illustration was hand-drawn and it featured a long-leafed plant that was unfamiliar to him. The text beneath was in French and Latin and he could make almost nothing of it.

‘Is this eer doing then?’

‘Oh no! I did only the drawings, sir – nothing else.’

‘And the rest?’

‘It is the work of my … my uncle. He was a botanist and he taught me everything I know. Alas he died before he could finish the manuscrit, so he left it to me.’

Fitcher’s eyebrows began to quiver with curiosity now: the community of botanists was so small as to be almost a family; every member had some acquaintance with the others, either in person, or by name and reputation. ‘Who was he then, this uncle of eers? What was his name?’

‘Lambert, sir. Pierre Lambert.’

A half-throttled cry burst from Fitcher’s throat and he sank into the chair. ‘Well … I … Monzoo Lambert! … did’ee say he was eer uncle? What was your relation to him?’

Once again the gardener began to stammer and stutter. ‘Why, sir … he was the brother of my father … so I … I am his nephew, Paul Lambert. His daughter, Paulette, is my cousin.’

‘Is she now?’

Although Fitcher Penrose was, by his own account, something of a misanthrope, he was by no means unobservant: suddenly things began to fall into place – the guilty surprise with which the ‘boy’ had crossed his arms over his chest, the flower-strewn bedroom. He looked again at the illustration on the open page and made out a signature.

‘Whose was the drawing, did ee say?’

‘Why sir, it is mine.’

Fitcher bent low over the page. ‘But the signature, if I’m not wrong, says not “Paul” but “Paulette”.’

*

Apart from Bahram himself, Vico was the only other person who knew that the Anahita was carrying three thousand chests of opium in her after-hold. Bahram and Vico had gone to great lengths to keep this a secret, fudging the bills of lading, rotating the stowage crews, and disguising some of the crates. To let the facts be widely known would have been imprudent on many counts, making insurance more difficult to obtain and increasing the risks of piracy and pilferage – for this shipment was not merely the most expensive cargo that Bahram had ever shipped; it was possibly the single most valuable cargo that had ever been carried out of the Indian subcontinent.

Bahram was one of the very few merchants who had the connections and reputation to assemble such a shipment, being almost without peer in his experience of the China trade: rare was the Indian merchant who could boast of travelling to Canton more than three or four times – but Bahram had made the journey fifteen times in the course of his career. In the process he had built, almost single-handedly, one of the largest and most consistently profitable trading operations in Bombay: the export division of Mistrie Brothers.