I looked, and saw a pale-haired, scrubbed-looking woman transformed by a wealth of Baroque colour riding her collar-bones. The uneven stones of the necklace, graduated in size from cherry-pit at the top to a baby’s fist at the centre, were the deep and cloudy orange of good amber, with tantalising slices of shimmering clear stone twisted through them. It looked like nothing I would wear; that, in truth, was a great part of its appeal. Nonetheless, I reached up to unfasten the clasp, and handed it to the man. Sunny, however, grabbed it first and dropped it beside the bangles, the opals, and the other pieces under whose spell she’d fallen.

“We’ll take all of these,” she told him.

“We’ll take none of them,” I corrected her, and when she began to sputter in indignation, I turned to the man and started the age-old bargaining rituals of the East.

In the end, I beat the price down so that the girl had the amber for nothing and saved a third of his original price on the opals. Pleased, she gathered up the heavy orange beads and pressed them into my hands. I protested, and tried to give them back to her, but when she started to look hurt, I thanked her, and subsided.

While she was making arrangements for the delivery and payment, I opened my fingers and gazed at the necklace. A gift from a rich girl to a new friend she imagines to be comparatively poor, although she is not. A rich girl whose brother is the subject of that friend’s suspicions, a girl whose brother may have tried to kill the friend and her husband. A rich girl who was even now being used, with cold calculation, by her friend.

Amber, when warm, gives out a faint aroma, the odour of slow time. I put the spilling double-handful up to my face, and inhaled its trace of musk, laced with the tang of betrayal. Sunny Goodheart gave me the necklace because it looked pretty on me; I accepted the gift because it would remind me of consequences.

We took lunch at one of the restaurants facing the Mall, and afterwards walked up for a look at the shivering monkeys on Jakko before I led her back to their hotel. There we found that Thomas had sent a telegram to Khanpur, and had already received a reply: Yes, I should be welcome to join the party. I told Sunny I would have my bags brought to their hotel first thing on Monday morning, trusting that the porters would have settled down from their insurrection and would be willing to take to the road, and before anyone could ask where I was staying, I invented an almost-missed appointment and hurried away.