She sighed. “Margaret grew up in India. It made her—I don’t know quite how—seem much older than I was. As if all the things she’d seen and done and learned gave her a different sort of maturity from mine. And heaven knows, I’d grown up quickly myself, in a household where political intrigue was mother’s milk!”

“Did she come from a family with status? Money?”

“No, although from what I know of her father, he had aspirations, and he used to tell her as a child that England was her hope. If the family could just return to England, they’d be fine. If they could find the money for passage, they’d be fine. I don’t know what golden rainbows he saw for her, or why, but he made her hungry for a way of life she wasn’t going to have unless she married well. In the end, both her parents died of malaria, and she came without either of them. There was a younger sister too, who died near Suez of a fever several men brought back to the ship after going ashore. Margaret arrived in England alone, with no one to call family but distant cousins she’d never met She finished her education at the same school I was sent to; there was a family in Gloucester who provided a scholarship. They’d been missionaries or some such, and often did such things in the hope that it might make the recipient think of taking up the same burden. Well, they reckoned wrong with Margaret! She thought the heathen were quite happy with their own ways and would profit very little from being persuaded to try ours. Buddhism, she told me, made life a long series of chances to try to do better and see oneself more clearly. She didn’t care for Hinduism as much—she said it was as class-conscious as the Church of England. In my opinion, these beliefs—Hinduism and Buddhism—put far too much emphasis on the fate of the individual rather than on the good of mankind as a whole. It sustained a sort of—I don’t know—selfishness. I saw that from time to time in Margaret too, as if she’d been infected by it.”

“It seems she’d have made a perfect assistant for Simon. With her deep knowledge of the East.”

But Elizabeth Napier evaded that question very neatly. “I’m no judge. It wasn’t a subject she usually cared to speak of. Most people had no idea she’d lived anywhere but England.”

“She spoke of India to Captain Shaw.”