All this pleased Bunda Ali greatly, especially as with his position came a salary of eight hundred Arcot rupees a year (his servants received from him three rupees a month, and were most content).

And now, while the regiment was away in the west of the country on a mission of which he was not made privy (for he had no need of knowing), he was availing himself of the opportunity to travel to the place of his birth, with his wife and new-born daughter, to celebrate the wedding of his eldest to the man he had found for her some years before.

It was not the worst time of year to be making a journey. There was the better part of a month yet before the onset of the hot weather that would oblige them to travel by night. His little party had been on the road for three weeks – a well-made road at first, one of the dak roads that the Honourable East India Company made and maintained so that hircarrahs with their postbags, as well as troops and guns, might pass quickly between Fort St George and the garrison towns of the presidency. But once in the Northern Circars, they had left the dak road for the unmade track that headed north-west to Chintalpore, seat of the Rajah of Chintal, and then onwards to Haidarabad, for although the northerly route by Rajahmundree had the merit of being in Company territory, that by Chintalpore would save them many days.

In fact, to be precise, Chintalpore was the seat of the Ranee of Chintal: the rajah had died several years before, and, there being no male heir, the title had passed – though not without violent dispute – to his daughter.

Chintal in the time of the old rajah had been a proud and peaceable place, if troubled periodically by the Nizam of neighbouring Haidarabad. Hervey had himself observed one of these incursions – had taken up the sword, indeed, on the rajah’s behalf – during his first sojourn in India fifteen years before. Since then, with the succession of Nasir-ud-dawlah, Haidarabad had not troubled its smaller neighbour very much, having quite enough troubles of its own, yet not sufficient to tempt the Nizam to the distraction of a foreign war. Chintal had no permanent Resident of the Company, however, merely an agent, Fort William’s interests being overseen from Nagpore, and since the death of the rajah there were many in the princely state who had come to wish there were, for where there was a Resident there was an interest, and where there was an interest there was the Company’s Peace – now, in practice, the King’s Peace, since the recent act of Parliament made the Company an instrument of colonial government rather than of trade.

Kothapore, but a league or so from the fork in the dak road that took the traveller from the Company’s Peace to that of the Ranee, was a place of no great size, just an old fort with its outlying bustees (and mean dwellings they were at that, for in the hot season the land here was barren waste), but it served nevertheless as a naka, a customs post. Bunda Ali had no goods on which duty must be paid, but even so, he knew he must part with a good many rupees. The maidan was common ground; travellers could pitch their tents, fold their cattle, draw water from the wells and bathe in the stream, but the pahra, the watch, would want their dues. Not dues by right, but because they bore arms and stood between the traveller and his journey. And they might make trouble otherwise – tell him there was no fresh bread to be had or grain for his horses, or else search his belongings interminably, or tell him the maidan was needed for an official party. It was the way of the country – baksheesh.