The Game - Laurie R. King [106]
“Do you want to see them work?”
“Oh no,” I said, more hastily than I had intended.
He laughed. “Not those, no. He was a dirty old man, my grandfather. Here, let me show you one I rather like.”
He slipped through a part of the room I hadn’t got to yet, ending up not far from the door. Before him stood a particularly magnificent carved wooden plinth about waist height, on which stood a foot-tall mechanical contraption and a perfect little celadon bowl holding half a dozen old-fashioned coins. The maharaja took one of them and pushed it through a slot on the wooden base.
With a creak that I at first thought was the protest of disuse, the machine began to move. But it was not a creak, it was a mechanical simulation of a roar, because the creature was a tiger. Its tail wagged and its legs began to carry it forward to where a man in red uniform lay. It stopped—a marvelously complex piece of clockwork, this, considering its obvious great age—and bent to the man, seizing him in its great jaws. The man kicked, the tiger’s tail wagged, the geriatric roaring went on.
The maharaja was watching me watch his tiger, and although it was too dim in there to be sure, I thought the man smiled.
“This is magnificent,” I told him, my voice rather louder than it needed be. “I’ve seen something of the sort, in London.”
“Tipoo’s Tiger, in your Victoria and Albert Museum. A smaller, less sophisticated version. My grandfather saw it, liked it, and had this made. Two years after the Mutiny, in fact.”
That took me aback. A man who had made a clear gesture of loyalty to the British, and had been lavishly rewarded for his brutal but effective actions, less than two years later commissions a piece showing a British soldier chewed to bits by an Indian tiger.
“Did your grandfather show this to many of his English visitors?” I asked.
The man at my side laughed, pleased that I had understood the underlying jest. “Not many, no. Come, it is too nice a day to be closed in this stuffy room.”
Stuffy, I thought as I followed him out the door, it was not. Uncanny, perhaps. Even macabre.
The sun was a welcome antidote.
Four others waited for us in the gardens, watching as a servant scattered food over the lotus pond to bring a school of exotic white and golden carp to the surface. It was not until I saw my fellow guests that it struck me how odd the means of my retrieval had been. Why have me go first to the room of mechanical toys, when the others had clearly been told to gather near the pond? And beyond that, why had a servant not fetched me back here, instead of the prince himself? I could only assume that my host had wanted me to see his grandfather’s machines, and me alone; and moreover, he had wanted to see my reaction to them.
I did not know what this meant. Perhaps, I told myself, it was just that he’d wanted to keep Sunny Goodheart’s innocent eyes from the erotic devices and the small furry creatures, for Sunny was one of those at the pond. Or maybe it was something about me that promoted me above the others. As an honorary member of the pig-sticking fraternity, were my sensibilities hardened beyond those of most women? I decided to prod, gently.
“Your Highness, why—”
“Please, call me Jimmy.”
“Jimmy, then. Why not display the machines more openly? It’s an extraordinary collection.”
He continued walking, until I thought he was not going to answer. Then, just out of earshot of the others, he said, “I am a public figure. I like to keep some things to myself, and a few chosen friends.”
Then the others were with us, Sunny, her brother, the Kentish polo-player (whose name was, I thought, Robbins), and a tall, silent woman I had seen but hadn’t realised was his wife. We walked across the courtyard to the gate, where we were joined by three merry salukis, and a pair of armed guards fell in behind us. The dogs raced ahead down the road that circled New Fort, their plumed tails adding a touch of gaiety, although the maharaja ignored their antics entirely. At the base of the hill we continued around, as I had done the first day, although instead