She was pleased, at least, that Mr St Alban had assigned two packhorses to her, so that she could bring some silks. She’d no jewellery though, just the pearl necklace given her after the business of the cobra (even now she shuddered each time she put it on, minded of that terrifying encounter with Eternity), and she supposed the Ranee would be spangled with all manner of precious stones.

In truth, at that moment she’d have been glad to return to Madras and take up embroidery.

Except that Georgiana was thoroughly enjoying the adventure, and she herself wanted very much to see a real palace. Besides, Colonel Hervey had asked them to be his eyes and ears when he couldn’t see and hear for himself.

No; she’d not just be Dorcas again.

They reached Chintalpore towards the middle of the afternoon, exactly as he’d planned: it was cool, and there were four hours of daylight left. Worsley’s lieutenant, with half a dozen dragoons and the Guntoor baboo as translator, had ridden ahead to make the arrangements, and found quarters laid out for them by the Ranee’s bodyguard in the old zenana (the women’s quarters) on the edge of the city, a place of security with its high-walled gardens running down to a canal which took water from the Godavari to the palace half a mile to the west.

They’d had a good view of the palace as they approached, and all agreed it was a sight to behold. Hervey told them how it had been built two centuries before to celebrate the birth of the rajah’s great-grandfather, whose own father had visited the water gardens of Italy and had wished for fountains of his own. But the Moguls, although they’d always prized the play of water, hadn’t been able to achieve the height of the fountains of Rome, and so he’d brought home with him a Venetian engineer.

The palace sat prettily on a shallow hill. There were several higher ones, but the engineer had chosen the site to produce the most spectacular cascades. It was imposing, therefore, rather than dominating, and when he, Hervey, had first taken up his sabre, the rajah had rued the compromise, for it was overlooked by three hills within cannon range. Since then, however, the palace had been much fortified, with bastions, a curtain wall and a vast moat.

He, himself, was not to be quartered in the old zenana, however, but as the guest of the Ranee, at the palace. He could hardly decline the hospitality, though he’d considerable qualms about accepting it while at the same time taking advantage to calculate how best to deprive her of her inheritance: The hand that mingled in the meal / At midnight drew the felon steel, / And gave the host’s kind breast to feel / Meed for his hospitality!

True, he’d done the same in Coorg. But at least in Coorg it had been a clear-cut affair: the rajah was an oath-breaker, a usurper, a tyrant, a murderer. He was yet to understand how the Princess Suneyla he’d known had become ‘Queen of Thugs’. Was there a single shred of evidence that an English court would accept; only the word of ‘approvers’ – thieves and murderers turned King’s Evidence to save their own skin? And whence, indeed, came this intelligence of her claim on Mysore? The more he thought of it, the more his unease.