The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [277]
In complexion he was fairer than most southern Europeans, for his lineage was impeccable (the royal house of Bhithor claimed descent from a god) but the pale golden tone of his skin was overlaid by an odd greyish tinge, and there were dark purple pouches, like bruises, under the cold, unblinking eyes. All in all, he presented a singularly unattractive picture, and the magnificence of his attire seemed to emphasize his physical shortcomings rather than detract from them.
Ash had been prepared for a good many things, but not this. The shock momentarily deprived him of words, and as the Rana remained silent it was left to Kaka-ji to step into the breach and fill the awkward pause with a graceful speech, to which the Rana replied a good deal less gracefully.
It was an inauspicious beginning, and the remainder of the morning did nothing to rectify it. The compliments proper to the occasion were duly exchanged – and at unconscionable length – and when at last they were over the Rana rose, and dismissing the assembled courtiers, retired to the ‘Hall of Private Audience’, the Diwan-i-Khas, accompanied by his Diwan, his senior councillors and the representatives of Karidkote.
The Diwan-i-Khas, unlike the Diwan-i-Am, was pleasantly cool. It consisted of a small marble pavilion set in the middle of a formal garden, and was surrounded by water channels in which fountains played – setting that not only charmed the eye and reduced the temperature to comfortable limits, but ensured privacy, as no shrub was large enough to conceal an eavesdropper, and even if by some miracle an intruder had been able to enter the garden unseen, the splash of the fountains would have prevented him from hearing anything that was said inside the pavilion.
A chair had been provided for Ash, but the Rana occupied a cushioned and carpeted dais similar to the one in the Diwan-i-Am, while the remainder of the company disposed themselves comfortably on the cool marble floor. Uniformed servants dispensed glasses of cold sherbet, and for a short time the atmosphere seemed pleasantly friendly and informal; but it did not last. No sooner had the servants withdrawn than the Diwan, acting as the mouth-piece of the Rana, proceeded to justify Ash's worst fears.
He had approached his subject obliquely and wrapped it up in a wordy cloud of compliments and polite phrases. But shorn of irrelevant verbiage, the matter was plain: the Rana had no intention of paying the full bride-price for the Rajkumari Shushila, or of marrying her half-sister Anjuli-Bai, unless the bribe for doing so was increased to over three times the sum that had originally been offered (and pocketed), for after all, the girl's birth hardly qualified her to be the wife of such an exalted personage as the ruler of Bldthor, whose line was one of the oldest and most honourable in all Rajputana, and the Rana had already made a great concession in even considering the possibility of marrying her at all.
To be fair to the Rana, the sum that Nandu had demanded as a bride-price for Shushila had been very large. But then in view of her rank, her outstanding beauty and her impressive dowry, she was a valuable commodity in the marriage market and there were others who would have paid as much, if not more, for such a wife: several of them princes of far more consequence than the ruler of Bhithor. Nandu, for his own devious reasons, had decided in favour of the latter, and the Rana's ambassadors had not quibbled over the price or demurred at paying half of it in advance – or at giving a written promise on his behalf to pay the remainder as soon as the bride arrived in Bhithor, because large as the sum was, it had been drastically reduced by the bribe demanded as the price of the Rana's consent to take Anjuli-Bai as