Along the back wall of the room a trace of gravel on the floor gave further evidence of the paucity of attentive servants in this place. (And as for their master, I thought, where was the maharaja, anyway? I’d been well after nine o’clock getting here, thanks to the unexpected distance between my rooms and this place.) Farther along, nearly in the corner, I came across the collection’s more, well, esoteric contraptions. The first startled me by appearing to be a man; this, on closer examination, proved to be what he was, a life-sized waxwork Englishman in the uniform of the Crimean War, complete with musket. I supposed he fired it when animated. He had been placed, possibly by accident, as if to stand guard over a cluster of glass-cased boxes, although these had neither gipsies nor swamis, and one glance made me glad I did not have the requisite tokens for putting them in motion. The women had skin that was uniformly pink and pearly, the men ranged from white to a darker shade of English pink, and all of them were comprehensively nude. I shook my head and turned to retrace my steps to the door, and nearly shrieked at the silent and unpainted figure ten feet away.

“Heavens!” I said, my heart pounding. “Your Highness, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“My grandfather’s collection. And I do wish you’d call me Jimmy.”

“They’re . . . extraordinary.”

“Do you want to see them work?”

“Oh no,” I said, more hastily than I had intended.

He laughed. “Not those, no. He was a dirty old man, my grandfather. Here, let me show you one I rather like.”

He slipped through a part of the room I hadn’t got to yet, ending up not far from the door. Before him stood a particularly magnificent carved wooden plinth about waist height, on which stood a foot-tall mechanical contraption and a perfect little celadon bowl holding half a dozen old-fashioned coins. The maharaja took one of them and pushed it through a slot on the wooden base.

With a creak that I at first thought was the protest of disuse, the machine began to move. But it was not a creak, it was a mechanical simulation of a roar, because the creature was a tiger. Its tail wagged and its legs began to carry it forward to where a man in red uniform lay. It stopped—a marvelously complex piece of clockwork, this, considering its obvious great age—and bent to the man, seizing him in its great jaws. The man kicked, the tiger’s tail wagged, the geriatric roaring went on.

The maharaja was watching me watch his tiger, and although it was too dim in there to be sure, I thought the man smiled.

“This is magnificent,” I told him, my voice rather louder than it needed be. “I’ve seen something of the sort, in London.”