The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (17 page)

At the front of the
diwan khaneh
, the Nizam’s master of ceremonies, Mama Champa, was leading Lord Frederick up to the dais, her gilt-edged white robe and pink
choli
making Lord Frederick’s English evening dress seem even more drab in contrast. In addition to being the Nizam’s master of ceremonies, she was also a commanding officer of the Zuffir Plutun. The little push she gave Lord Frederick had enough force behind it to send him staggering to his knees before the ruler. Which, of course, was exactly where Mama Champa had wanted him.

Tall blue poles had been placed to either side of the Nizam, the blue lights lending an unhealthy tint to his already sallow complexion. Even the jewels and silks with which he had decked himself couldn’t hide the unhealthy hang of his jowls, the lines of dissipation in his face that made him look old beyond his years. Alex thought wistfully of the old Nizam, a dignified old warrior with a knack for political maneuvering and a taste for mechanical curiosities. The old Nizam had looked better at seventy than Sikunder Jah looked at thirty-five.

The old Nizam also hadn’t had Mir Alam hanging over his shoulder like death in a morality tale.

Mir Alam looked like hell, Alex thought dispassionately. He had always been slightly built, but now, besieged by disease, his narrow frame seemed to have caved in upon itself like a crone’s clawed hand. The fair complexion of which he had been so proud, token of his Persian ancestry, was blotched with open sores that turned his once-pleasant-featured face into something resembling a blob of raw meat, rendered even more hideous by the cavern in the center of his face where his nose used to be, collapsed in upon itself from the disease that was eating him from the inside out.

But even in those days when his body had been whole, there had been something unsettling about him, a cold-blooded lack of fellow feeling so profound as to be somehow inhuman.
All ambition and no heart
, James’s assistant, Henry Russell, had said with a shudder, adding that he’d sooner be sewed into a sack with a cobra than rely on Mir Alam’s mercy. Jack, who had a sneaking fondness for literature, had come up with an even more apt epitaph for Mir Alam.
The Deccani Iago
, Jack had called him, back before—well, before.

No need to let himself be distracted by Jack. Alex forced himself to concentrate on Mir Alam, Mir Alam who sat like a serpent poised to strike, the pipe of a golden hookah coiling snakelike from his mouth.

Alex recognized that hookah. It had, until very recently, belonged to the former First Minister, Aristu Jah, who seldom went anywhere without it. It had been a source of endless speculation among the younger wags of the court whether he brought it to bed with him, and if so, what role it played.

The hookah ought, by rights, to have been with Aristu Jah’s widow, not dangling from Mir Alam’s lips.

That did not bode well.

Alex could hear Lord Frederick’s startled grunt as Mama Champa shoved him down into the proper prostrate position. A few courtiers snickered behind their hands. The snickers turned to snorts as Lord Frederick bumbled his way through the elegant Persian oration James had crafted for him, blithely butchering vowels and changing minor words. Not that it mattered, reflected Alex cynically. The Nizam wasn’t listening anyway. Alex saw his eyes wandering off to the cane screen that concealed his current concubines.

At James’s prompting, Lord Frederick proffered the ceremonial gift that James had so carefully chosen. Passing off the present to a waiting functionary, the Nizam handed him in return a jeweled turban ornament, a cluster of emeralds and sapphires in the shape of peacock feathers. Lord Frederick promptly tried to stick it in his cravat, clearly believing it to be a sort of outré stickpin. Another friendly push from Mama Champa bowled him into the proper salaam, and then, thank the stars, the interview was over.

Only it wasn’t.

At a slight gesture, Mir Alam’s servant removed the point of his hookah from his mouth. Bending slightly, so that his mouth was level with the Nizam’s ear, Mir Alam murmured something to his master. Whatever it was made the Nizam sit up a little straighter, scanning the room in a way that made more than one courtier take a hasty step back. Alex didn’t blame them; the Nizam’s tastes ran much towards Nero’s. Or was it Caligula’s? It was Jack who had been the bookish one.

Mir Alam whispered something else in the Nizam’s ear, redirecting his attention, with the sort of veiled impatience governesses use for their charges. Alex went as cold as a dead Roman emperor as the Nizam followed the swing of Mir Alam’s finger—straight to Lady Frederick, who was idly and unconcernedly running her tongue experimentally along the edge of her burned lip, as though testing the new scar tissue.

The Nizam gestured Lady Frederick forward with an imperious flick of his wrist.

Alex felt Lady Frederick stiffen beside him, looking from one side to the other as though to say,
Who me?
No fools, the courtiers on either side of them backed away, leaving Lady Frederick and Alex alone in a pool of harsh tallow light, while Mama Champa progressed purposefully in their direction.

“Just curtsy,” whispered Alex out of the side of his mouth, experiencing a powerful urge to strangle Mir Alam with his ill-gotten hookah. “Curtsy and try to look humble.”

Lady Frederick cast him a haughty look. “I have been to court, you know,” she whispered back, rising regally to her full height. “If I can manage Queen Charlotte, I can manage him.”

Alex rather doubted that, but it was too late to do anything about it. Lady Frederick was already on the move, striding to the front of the room with the careless confidence of an accomplished rider about to take a fence. Without any help from Mama Champa, she sank to the floor, prostrating herself before the Nizam’s feet. She was, perhaps, a little too prostrate, but no one seemed to mind, not least the courtiers clustered around Alex, who were rating the properties of her nether regions, or at least such as could be discerned beneath the concealing fabric of her dress.

As the Nizam considered the view, Mir Alam leaned forward and murmured something in his ear. It was like watching a puppet show. All that was needed were the strings.

Instructing Mama Champa to raise Lady Frederick to her feet, the Nizam slurred out a question in an indistinct voice that suggested that he had been hitting a hookah of his own before the durbar.

“Where is my
nuzzar
?” piped up the translator, his voice reedy in the hushed silence. “Have you no gift for me?”

At the Nizam’s elbow, his Prime Minister’s eyes were bright sparks in the ruined mass of his face as he waited for the new English envoy’s wife to stammer her way into a gaffe, a gaffe that would embarrass the English embassy, a gaffe that could be trotted out as a bargaining chip by the Nizam’s chief minister on future occasions. It was like watching two baggage carts about to collide and knowing there was nothing one could do to stop it.

Just as Alex was on the verge of barging forward and interceding, faux pas or not, Lady Frederick took matters into her own hands.

She lifted her eyes to the Nizam in a skillful mimicry of humility. “I would not,” she said, in a voice that carried to the farthest reaches of the hall, “do you the dishonor of appearing before you empty handed.”

Mir Alam looked pointedly at her hands. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, empty.

Lady Frederick waited out the translator’s anxious murmur before striking a pose worthy of a nautch dancer, both hands extended palm up in the classic gesture of supplication.

“But what might so insignificant a creature as myself possibly offer that would be worthy of so great a ruler?”

The courtiers on either side of Alex had their own opinions on that matter, mostly of the sort better not overheard by the lady’s husband. Too skinny, opined the man on Alex’s left, comparing her figure unfavorable to that of Nur Bai’s, one of the city’s more expensive courtesans.

Lady Frederick had to speak very loudly to be heard over the assorted whispers and murmurings. “Not riches, for those you have in plenty. Nor wisdom, of which Your Majesty has more than I by far.”

The translator hurried to relay her words to the Nizam, while those courtiers who spoke some English spread their own mangled translations through the crowd.

Like an actress anticipating her cue, Lady Frederick stood poised, waiting for the din to die down.

It worked. Bit by bit, the chatter fell off, the translations ceased, and all eyes turned to the still, poised figure at the front of the room. In her unadorned white satin, she made the brocades of the courtiers look fussy and loud, turning priceless jewels into little more than trumpery bazaar ornaments. Bathed in blue light from the candles by the Nizam, she seemed to crackle with a cold energy, unearthly, uncanny, and more than a little imperious.

Alex couldn’t help but receive the distinct impression that she was enjoying every moment of it.

In the hushed silence, Lady Frederick brought one hand to her breast. As one, the cream of Hyderabad stared, expectant, at Lady Frederick’s chest. When her hand came away, she held a single blossom from the nosegay at her bodice. It was a white bud, half-opened. It was also beginning to wilt from the heat of the room, the one false note in an otherwise masterly tableau.

Lifting it high enough for all the curious members of the durbar to see, Lady Frederick held the blossom out to the Nizam.

She spoke very slowly and clearly, allowing the translator time to follow. “Having found nothing else worthy of you, I offer you this humble flower, which I have carried close by my heart, in token of the warm regard I feel for Your Majesty and in the hopes that our friendship shall blossom like the rose.”

The only noise was the low tones of the translator behind the Nizam’s chair, hastily gabbling back Lady Frederick’s speech into the Nizam’s ear. The courtiers ceased their chatter, all eyes on the Nizam as they waited for his reaction. Only Lady Frederick appeared unperturbed, her arm unmoving as marble as she extended the flower to the Nizam.

The seconds ticked by, marked by the guttering of the candles and the crackle of the brazier. Alex could feel the sweat beginning to trickle down his neck.

Alex looked to Mir Alam, but the minister was staying his hand, watching with the same fixed attention as the other bystanders, his assumptions betrayed only by the slight smile that played around the corners of his mouth. He had rolled the dice; now he was waiting for them to fall.

As she held her pose for one minute, then another, and another, almost imperceptibly, Lady Frederick’s arm began to tremble.

What would she do if the Nizam refused her? What would they all do?

A sigh went through the room as the Nizam extended his hand to accept the token from Lady Frederick’s hand. The sigh savored more of disappointment than relief. It would have been much more amusing for all concerned had the new envoy’s wife been summarily savaged by lions.

Lady Frederick dropped her arm and sank into a deep European curtsy. Damp darkened the fabric beneath her sleeves in discrete circles, like shadows on the moon.

Balked of a bloodletting, the courtiers had begun to breathe again and to return to their own private intrigues when Mir Alam’s voice rustled through the renewed chatter like a snake in the grass.

Speaking as though for the Nizam’s ears alone, but pitching his voice high enough to carry, he said, “Does not the rose fade?”

Alex mentally damned Mir Alam and all his progeny to the tenth generation. From the look on Lady Frederick’s face, she was entertaining similar fantasies, many involving exceedingly pointy pitchforks and boiling pots of Turkish coffee.

Rising from her curtsy, Lady Frederick gave a brisk shake of her skirts, the only sign of nervousness she betrayed. Her smile was very fixed and very bright as she batted her eyelashes at the Nizam’s chief minister. “The petals may indeed fade, but the fragrance lingers on. Like the goodwill between our countries.”

It was a well-aimed barb, designed to remind all concerned that she had the might of England behind her, backed by infantry, elephants, and an expansionist Governor General who was prone to invading first and asking questions later.

The implications weren’t lost on Mir Alam, who closed his mouth tightly over whatever else he had been about to say and took a subtle step back from the Nizam’s chair, like a tennis player conceding a match. A match, but not the game. Whether she knew it or not, Lady Frederick had just made a powerful enemy.

Alex suppressed a groan. Just what they needed.

The Nizam, on the other hand, had already reached the limits of his boredom. As he turned to say something to a courtier behind him, Mama Champa waved Lady Frederick away from the dais, and gestured to her counterpart, Mama Barun, to begin herding courtiers towards the gardens for the nautch that was to follow the durbar. In gaily colored groupings, chattering like the parrots painted on the walls, the courtiers began to drift towards the gardens, already intent on the next intrigue, the next scandal, whatever it might be.

Only Mir Alam continued to watch Lady Frederick, the pipe of the hookah dangling like a snake from his lips.

Taking her arm, Alex hauled her away, manhandling her into the stream of courtiers heading out of the durbar hall.

“You would have done better to have stayed in the Residency,” he said softly, in English.

Neatly twisting her arm out of his grasp, Lady Frederick said flippantly, “I thought the Nizam was rather a dear, actually.”

“You have an odd definition of ‘dear,’ ” said Alex grimly. “He’s as mad as a hatter and he wields the power of life and death in this part of the world.”

“Our military escort—”

“Is all outside. And Calcutta is a very long way away.”

Lady Frederick’s lips pursed as she considered. “I’m glad he liked my flower,” she said.