Faith had been here for a little more than three months, she and Lyn having met the maharaja in Paris the previous September. He had seen Lyn’s work at a gallery and showed up one day at their door, toured their studio, and commissioned them to do some projects for him in Khanpur. The only problem was, once they got here, one hindrance after another had fallen across their path. The maharaja had not been here when they arrived; then he’d returned, but been too busy to consult with them. And when he’d finally been able to bend his attention to their projects, it turned out that what he had in mind was some sort of collaboration between what they were accustomed to doing and a traditional Indian style. And Faith had to admit, learning Indian techniques of painting and sculpture was fascinating, and no doubt valuable for the future, and the maharaja was extremely generous with his hospitality and advance payments for works not even begun. She shouldn’t complain, and she wasn’t, exactly, but she could wish she didn’t get the feeling that she and Lyn would sink up to their knees here and grow old eating lotus and sleeping beneath silk bed-sheets.

Listening to her, I wondered if all native princes were surrounded with as many hangers-on as Khanpur’s seemed to be, stray novelists and feckless wanderers caught in the honey-trap of palace life. Thank goodness, I said to myself, I should soon be on my way.

The capital of Khanpur was a walled and dusty town of perhaps six thousand souls, fields nearly to its gates, blessedly free of the stench of human waste—as Geoffrey Nesbit had said, the country was noted for the advanced state of its sanitation. The buildings were the usual jumble of Moghul masterpieces and tacked-on petrol-tin shanties, but the dogs wandering its crowded streets had a modicum of flesh over their ribs, and few of the children were completely naked.

As two Englishwomen, we were the immediate target of every salesman in the town, and offers for carpets and jewellery came fast and heavy. The beggars more or less left us alone, perhaps because of the red-turbanned figure who, once inside the gates, had moved up until he was close to our heels. We did our best to ignore his presence. Faith led me to the Palace proper, where the maharaja’s womenfolk lived—his two wives, dozen concubines, and eight or nine children, according to Nesbit. We could see little but high walls and, in glimpses through the iron gate, trees and the occasional patch of brilliant white marble, so we kept moving through the upper city, into ever-narrower alleys, more or less following our noses until we came to the bazaar itself.