“Don’t worry about it, Mother,” he reassured her. “Jimmy’s just a little touchy about having lost the Kadir Cup last year, some kind of technicality. Don’t much understand it myself; I s’pose I shouldn’t have said anything.”

After a while, Sunny went down to dabble in the water, and I stretched out on the silken carpet with my legs in the sun and my topee over my face, half listening to the conversations around me. The gramophone played, a few guests danced laughingly on the manicured grass, and I was nearly asleep when I heard my name, said loudly as if not for the first time. I pulled the topee from my face and sat up, looking into the dark unreadable eyes of the maharaja.

“I’m terribly sorry, Your Highness,” I said. “What was that?”

“The beaters have located the wounded pig,” he said. “I don’t like to leave it. Would you care to come?”

I was speechless. Six men at his disposal, two of whom were old hands, and he was asking me, a woman, and dangerously inexperienced at that.

One of the old hands had the same thought. “I’ve finished here, Jimmy,” Captain Greaves interposed. “I’ll go with you.”

“Thank you, Simon, but Miss Russell and I shall have no problem.”

“From what Goodheart said, it’s a big ’un, I’m happy to—”

“No.” It was said in a flat voice, no anger, but it laid another uncomfortable silence over the gathering, which I hastened to break.

“Certainly, I’m glad to be of help. Shall we go now?”

The servants had brought fresh horses with them. The maharaja had another Arab, a white gelding otherwise identical to the stallion, while I was given an ill-tempered little mare whose ears went back when I approached and who tried to shy against the reins the syce held. I checked her girths with care, since this was the kind of beast who holds her breath to keep the saddle from being secured, but I found them snugly secured. I glanced at the man holding her for me, and saw the humour in his eyes: Yes, she’d tried the trick on him.

“Thank you,” I told him, and mounted briskly.

Once I was in the saddle, the worst of the mare’s temper subsided, and she responded to my directions without much hesitation. We followed the road back to the tree, where the shikaris still waited, and took the spears they offered us. My host conferred with them, in a language that was not Hindi, then led me into the fields, in the opposite direction from that in which we had gone the first time.