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By Root 1023 0

His mustache outlined the sumptuous upper curve of his mouth. Hannah couldn’t guess how old he was, given the fine-grained luminosity of skin that had been massaged and pampered since birth. He could have been forty-four as easily as twenty-four. He walked, and talked, with a kind of softness that belied the deeds of a warrior; she thought of Gabriel, the Marquis and the men of White Town, whose every adventure was retold, and enlarged on each telling. The Lion’s escapades were immortalized in local ballads, sung by every child. He didn’t swagger like Gabriel; he didn’t preen like Cephus. He invited her to his musical evenings—he played the flute—for what were the pleasures of war without the tranquillity of music?

“Are you comfortable? These quarters are too isolated perhaps—”

“Most comfortable, Your Majesty.”

“There are women’s rooms, but they are perhaps not suitable.”

“Wherever you choose. I am your guest for only a short while, I suppose.”

“You may stay here under our protection for as long as you feel comfortable. We do not place limits on our welcome.”

“Then how will I know when I am no longer welcome?”

The question seemed to confuse him, the firangi’s quest for contracts and assurances. “How does the Raja’s favorite war-horse know he is no longer fit to ride? When he is no longer fed the sweetest grass, when he is no longer groomed every day, when his tail and mane are no longer braided … when the Raja no longer visits him every day.”

“If His Majesty is kind enough to warn me, I shall braid my hair for such visits.”

“The successful ruler is the master of the art of surprise,” said Raja Jadav Singh. He clapped his hands and a retinue of servants brought a full service of tea and fruits and the sweet milk curd favored along the coast. An enormous bamboo cage holding a small colorful bird was suspended from a hook above her window. Elaborate rugs were unrolled underfoot.

“We pray you will stay with us,” he said. “The name of the bird is Horse-Tail”—he smiled—“a miniature peacock, bred only here, specialty of Devgad.” So saying, he faced the bird, clapped his hands twice, then spread them in two imaginary fans. The small blue bird raised his straggly tail and suddenly filled the cage with his massive display.

YEARS LATER, in Memoirs, she made a brief cryptic reference to what came to pass between the Lion of Devgad and the Brookfield Orphan. “An angel counseled me, a fantasy governed me: bliss descends on the derangers of reason and intellect.”

Cynics would say she didn’t take any of this seriously, she was slumming in a palace, she expected to die, or be rescued, or to leave. Until then, why not? Or she was suffering posttraumatic shock. Or he was an abusive male, and an absolute despot.

According to the record of Mughal miniature paintings, there was little privacy in the bedchambers of India’s havelis (mansions) and palaces. Attendants swarm around lovers, advancing aphrodisiacs and fanning peacock-feathered breezes. Legends grow around the gay gossip let slip by one child-attendant, and that child, decades later, relates the tale to an English traveler, who copies it down, half in jest, as though a proper English lady could ever—ever, even in England!—have done what the maid allegedly saw.

For what it’s worth: The Lady pushed the Lion of Devgad down on the carpet alive with lion hunters grasping griffins with amber manes. The Lion trembled under her touch at first, and then, as though he too was under a spell, submitted to her slow deliberate caresses.

The Memoirs say nothing of Raja Jadav Singh’s contemplative brows and panther-quick eyes, nothing of the horror or wonder Hannah may have felt on touching his war-scarred flesh. Only two images of Jadav Singh exist. One is as he appeared at battle’s end in the last of the Salem Bibi series of paintings, which I, dutiful asset hunter, tracked down in Salem’s Museum of Maritime Trade. The other is a likeness of him etched on a carnelian stone set into a ring of red gold. I own that ring now. On the carnelian, the Raja, caught in three-quarter profile,