Where were the turbaned men and veiled women, the exotic, unrecognizable instruments sketching an arabesque of sound unseen behind fretted shutters? She listened with resentment to the careful discourse of a refined string band playing another foxtrot and looked with disfavour at the white ties and white waistcoats, the long white gloves and pearl necklaces. ‘It’ll all be different when you get to Simla,’ people had said. ‘That’s where the action is!’ But where had that long, uncomfortable journey landed her? A change of address but a change of very little else. She had expected domes and minarets, mystery and romance, but Viceregal Lodge – built in the 1880s – was no more than some bygone architect’s careful and ponderous essay in the Elizabethan manner and there was plenty of that to be seen back home.
Edward Dalrymple-Webster surreptitiously extracted his watch from his waistcoat pocket. Ten o’clock. At least two more hours to go. Two more hours making conversation to this sulky girl. Two more hours desperately trying to elicit a response. ‘Get alongside, old boy!’ Nick Carstairs had said. ‘See what you can do! Tell you what – lure her out into the garden – I’ll switch off the lights and switch on the nightingale, what! And the rest is up to you.’
‘Beautiful girl,’ someone else had said. ‘Pots and pots of tin! Greatest heiress in the world bar three, they say.’
Well, rich, certainly. There was no denying that – but beautiful? Fair hair just a shade too far on the brown side to count as blonde, he would have thought. Thick and silky but cut fashionably short. And her eyes: large and lustrous but where one looked for an innocent shade of Anglo-Saxon blue one encountered an indeterminate green which could one moment rival the English Channel on a bad day and the next skewer a chap like a shard of green glass. Clever eyes that could express anything, apparently, with the exception of proper modesty.
He had done his best. He ran a finger round the inside of his collar which was damply collapsing. He had a spare collar, in fact he had two, but he wasn’t quite sure if he could be bothered to change. Desperately he tried again. What other topics were there? Polo? The weather? The heat? The clothes? The quaint natives? The scenery? Polo? He had exhausted, he felt, all available topics.
‘Where next?’ he asked with a bright smile and a show of passionate interest. Dash it – who cared where this blasted girl went next so long as it was nothing to do with him! No reply. He tried again. ‘Where next?’
She turned a cold eye on him. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
How he wished she wouldn’t say ‘I beg your pardon?’ to everything he offered.
‘Where? he said. ‘Where are you going next?’
She looked at him balefully. ‘My plans haven’t changed in the last ten minutes and as I told you ten minutes ago – Peshawar.’
He caught the eye of Nick Carstairs who passed by at that moment. ‘Miss Coblenz,’ he said, ‘is off to Peshawar!’ and to his relief and gratitude, Nick Carstairs sat down beside them.
‘Off to Peshawar, eh?’ he said vacuously. ‘Can’t think why. Terrible place! Only been there once in my life . . . never want to go again. Nasty dangerous place too if you ask me! Why don’t you stay here? Season’s only just started. Lots going on – race meeting at Annandale tomorrow, ragtime gymkhana the next day, jolly good little operetta the chaps have put together at the Gaiety. Stay here, Miss Coblenz, this is where the action is.’
‘Action’ – that word again! She took another sip of champagne and glowered.
Nick was burbling on. ‘There’s a topping treasure hunt on Tuesday and the Mysore Lancers have a Musical Ride on Thursday. Oh, no – you won’t find anything like that in Peshawar! They’d hardly let you out of the house over there and there’s nothing to see if they did. You mark my words!’
Charlie Carter, police superintendent, was eyeing her covertly. It had been his job to provide for her protection during her visit to Simla. An onerous task. But now, thank God, she was off to the frontier and would no longer be his responsibility. His opposite number in Peshawar could take over – and good luck to him! If they’d taken his advice (and they didn’t) they would not have allowed a girl worth so very much money to be exposed to the dangers of frontier life. He had indeed said as much but behind that glamorous façade, behind those little girl good looks there was, he had discovered, a will of iron. ‘I want,’ she had said, ‘to see the real India!’ And, for her evidently, the real India was not in Simla.