At long last, the train slowed, and sighed, and came to a stop. Noses pressed
against the windows (all except the proud Thomas, who nonetheless watched with
great interest), we waited to see what manner of royal vehicle would come for
us. Sunny was hoping for camels and elephants, although I thought a Lagonda or
Rolls-Royce more likely and less crippling, considering we were still more
than fifty miles from Khanpur city.
What came for us was an aeroplane.
Chapter Fifteen
We heard it first, above the shouts of the coolies and the dyinghuff and hiss
of steam from the engine, a rising and directionless mechanical presence among
the wooded peaks. We peered and craned our necks, Thomas Goodheart no less
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than the lowliest of coolies, and then suddenly the noise had a source as a
wide pair of brightly painted red-and-white wings shot from behind a hill and
swept in our direction.
It dropped so low above the train station, I could see the distinctive
corrugation of its siding although even its elegant shape identified it as a
product of the German Junkers company, building passenger aeroplanes now that
potential war-planes were forbidden to them. This one wagged its long wings
over our heads in passing. It flew on south for a minute or so before rising
sharply into a high turn, then dropping down to come back at us. Children went
scurrying not, as I thought, in terror, but to slap and shove a pair of cows
from a stretch of nearby road. As soon as the beasts had been encouraged from
the track, the aeroplane aimed itself at the roadway, touched down lightly,
and taxied up in our direction, coming to a halt before the nearest telegraph
lines a quarter of a mile away. Its propeller coughed to a halt, and in a
minute a man kicked open its door and jumped from its wing to the ground.
Thomas Goodheart s reaction made me look at the approaching figure more
closely. The young American straightened and started down the road, walking
more briskly than I had seen him move before. When they came together, the
pilot grabbed Goodheart s hand and pumped it, slapped his arm, and continued
towards us. The coolies andtongadrivers paused in their work, the railway
workers turned to watch; this could only be the maharaja of Khanpur, come to
greet his guests.
He bent over Mrs Goodheart s hand, not quite kissing it. Mrs Goodheart,
thank you for gracing my home with your visit. I feel as if I know you
already, Tommy s spoken of you with such affection. And you are the sister,
Sybil. Welcome, Miss Goodheart. He took Sunny s outstretched hand before
turning to me. And Mrs Russell, you, too, are welcome. Any friend of
Tommy s I m glad he felt free to ask you.
Not that Thomas Goodheart had done anything more than bow to his mother s
pressure, but I wouldn t mention that, not to a man with eyes as filled with
speculation as his. I merely thanked him, laid my fingers briefly within his
hard hand that bore the distinctive callus of reins, and pulled away.
His Highness was not what I might have expected in a maharaja, and further
removed still from the folksiness of a Jimmy. A small man, shorter even than
Nesbit (and, I thought, irritated at being forced to look up into my face),
the maharaja resembled an Oxford undergraduate the athlete rather than the
aesthete, with fashionably bagged trousers, a white knit pull-over, and an
astrakhan cap pulled over black hair. His lower lip was full, a faint
intimation of the family habit of debauchery, and his dark eyes were lazy with
the same self-assurance I had seen in the photograph on Nesbit s wall,
speaking of a bone-deep aristocracy that relegated the House of Windsor to the
status of shopkeepers: This was the most important man in his particular
world, and he assumed those around him agreed. There was nothing in his manner
or his dress (apart from the cap) that spoke of India, certainly nothing in
his lack of concern about castely impurities that permitted him to take the
hands of strange women, nothing other than a faint dip and rise in his accent
and the old-penny colour of his skin. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]