‘I wasn’t able to attend your parade, Colonel, for I was called away. I thought I should report in person. Forgive my rather dusty attire.’

There was none whose company Hervey found more agreeably rewarding than Surgeon Milne’s. In a regiment, it was said, one gentleman subordinate to another, the senior never mentioned it, and the junior never forgot it. The surgeon – a physician, indeed, formerly of some standing in Aberdeen – was Hervey’s subordinate, but in his professional calling he was without rank (Hervey himself had joked that he was ‘peerless’). This alone, in a society in which rank was of the essence, made his company welcome; otherwise it was forever a business of talking upwards or downwards. But it was more than just professional relief: Milne had saved Kezia from the ‘puerperal melancholy’, nursing her back to health after her collapse three years before.

‘I’m just come from the Fort, and Sammy has brought us coffee. Sit you down.’

Milne took his coffee and sat in the gilded chair taken booty from the palace in Coorg, while Hervey settled into his green plush the other side of the writing table.

‘Cholera in one of the villages beyond the Nungambakkam Tank. Francis, the senior medical officer, took me to see. Not a pretty sight. Nor smell indeed. But it’s a native matter. It shouldn’t enter the lines. We did what we could.’

Hervey grimaced. There were few things that could be of greater concern to a commander of men than cholera nearby, even if the other side of the Nungambakkam water. ‘We’ll not need sulphur pots then?’

Milne shook his head. ‘But I’ve told Collins to make ready. It would be well to exercise south of the Nungambakkam meanwhile.’

Hervey nodded. ‘Is that the worst of it?’

‘Two deaths from snakebite in the native lines, and a third indirectly. One of them – one of the grass-cutters – this morning, in just three hours.’

Hervey shook his head. There was no escaping it in India, no matter where, or how exalted – as the encounter with Allegra in the stillroom had (almost) proved. But three hours … ‘One of Corporal Johnson’s “good” snakes, evidently.’

‘Colonel?’

‘He’d heard it somewhere: “the good ones kill quickly, the bad ones take days.” Who were the other two?’

‘A most intriguing case, a woman and child found dead this morning on their charpoy by the husband, a chowkidar returned from watch. We couldn’t at first fathom why she’d died, nor the child, till we found two puncture wounds to the ankle, so small as to want a glass to see them. She must have been bitten while she slept; probably didn’t even realize, then passed the poison in her milk sometime in the early hours. The child hadn’t been dead long.’

Hervey shook his head again. A mother poisoning her own child – of all the ways that Nature inflicted death in this country … ‘I confess I shudder each time I think of Allegra’s brush with the cobra.’ Had Annie not been so bold – and Serjeant Stray not so swift with the sabre – Allegra would now be laid in native earth (like her father, though he at least had succumbed in battle).