His Highness was not what I might have expected in a maharaja, and further removed still from the folksiness of a “Jimmy.” A small man, shorter even than Nesbit (and, I thought, irritated at being forced to look up into my face), the maharaja resembled an Oxford undergraduate—the athlete rather than the aesthete, with fashionably bagged trousers, a white knit pull-over, and an astrakhan cap pulled over black hair. His lower lip was full, a faint intimation of the family habit of debauchery, and his dark eyes were lazy with the same self-assurance I had seen in the photograph on Nesbit’s wall, speaking of a bone-deep aristocracy that relegated the House of Windsor to the status of shopkeepers: This was the most important man in his particular world, and he assumed those around him agreed. There was nothing in his manner or his dress (apart from the cap) that spoke of India, certainly nothing in his lack of concern about castely impurities that permitted him to take the hands of strange women, nothing other than a faint dip and rise in his accent and the old-penny colour of his skin.

Mrs Goodheart looked confused; Sunny, on the other hand, was bedazzled. I couldn’t help speculating about Mrs Goodheart’s opinions on inter-racial marriages.

The aeroplane would hold the four of us and our smaller bags, with the maharaja at the controls. We would leave behind a small mountain of Goodheart possessions and my solitary trunk, guarded by a uniformed chuprassi until the plane came back for them.

We settled into the padded seats, Thomas beside the maharaja, with Mrs Goodheart on one side and Sunny and I on the other. The noise made speech impossible, which was just as well. Mrs Goodheart turned pale as the plane roared and bounced and then leapt skyward. Her knuckles remained white the entire way as her hands clenched the arms of her chair, holding her from falling to the ground below; once when the air dropped away beneath us, I feared she was going to faint. Sunny did not notice, but spent the entire forty-five minutes in the air with her head craned and turning, to see the hills, the glimpse of road, the brilliant white peaks that seemed at arm’s reach, the occasional pocket of lake. Goodheart seemed even less concerned, moving easily into his seat and paying more attention to the actions of our highly capable pilot than to our height, our movements, or the scenery. Thomas Goodheart, I thought, had flown before.