I closed the book with a snap. “Gay, this concerted effort to keep me here is becoming a bit worrying. What is going on here?”

“Nothing at all, it’s only that Jimmy had plans for Sunday and is very disappointed to find them slipping away. He’s fond of you.”

“Fond or not, most people would be glad enough to see the back of an uninvited guest. I don’t wish to overstay my welcome.”

“But you’re here, and you interest him, and he’d like you to stay for a few days longer.”

I leant forward to look the woman in the eye. “Gay, I’m not one of Jimmy’s pets. I need to leave.” And so saying, I stood up and left the garden.

But before I was quite out of earshot, I thought I heard her say, “Good luck.”

Chapter Twenty

Dinner was a tense affair, ill attended and again composed of great numbers of greasy and over-cooked dishes. Our host drank heavily, although it did not affect him other than making him ever more morose, and Faith and Gay on either side of him worked hard at keeping him distracted. I made empty conversation with the people on either side of me while I pushed the food back and forth on my plate, until over the seventh or seventeenth course, I overheard Faith telling him about the magician we’d seen in the town.

“. . . so tall and mysterious looking, all in black with this incongruously cute little donkey standing in the background. He did the usual things, pulling coins out of the air and changing mice into sparrows, but then he called people from the audience to read their minds. I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, of course, but they seemed mighty impressed.”

For the first time all evening, the maharaja’s eyes rose from his glass as he snarled, “If you couldn’t understand what they were saying, how do you know what he was doing?”

Faith hesitated at the accusation, then rallied. “One could tell from the sequence of events. The magician would invite the audience to ask him something, and then one of them would come forward and he would talk for a few minutes and then hold his hand up in front of the other’s face with his eyes closed, and sort of hum for a bit and then he’d say something and everyone would sort of ooh and aah. Then he took a deck of cards and had the person choose one and tell him which it was he had in his hand. That sort of thing.”

“Not an astrologer?”

“I don’t . . . He didn’t have any charts or anything.”

“What else could he do?”

Juggle fire, pull coins from the turbans of Sikh boys, levitate his assistant, I thought.