The Game - Laurie R. King [81]
It dropped so low above the train station, I could see the distinctive corrugation of its siding—although even its elegant shape identified it as a product of the German Junkers company, building passenger aeroplanes now that potential war-planes were forbidden to them. This one wagged its long wings over our heads in passing. It flew on south for a minute or so before rising sharply into a high turn, then dropping down to come back at us. Children went scurrying—not, as I thought, in terror, but to slap and shove a pair of cows from a stretch of nearby road. As soon as the beasts had been encouraged from the track, the aeroplane aimed itself at the roadway, touched down lightly, and taxied up in our direction, coming to a halt before the nearest telegraph lines a quarter of a mile away. Its propeller coughed to a halt, and in a minute a man kicked open its door and jumped from its wing to the ground.
Thomas Goodheart’s reaction made me look at the approaching figure more closely. The young American straightened and started down the road, walking more briskly than I had seen him move before. When they came together, the pilot grabbed Goodheart’s hand and pumped it, slapped his arm, and continued towards us. The coolies and tonga drivers paused in their work, the railway workers turned to watch; this could only be the maharaja of Khanpur, come to greet his guests.
He bent over Mrs Goodheart’s hand, not quite kissing it. “Mrs Goodheart, thank you for gracing my home with your visit. I feel as if I know you already, Tommy’s spoken of you with such affection. And you are the sister, Sybil. Welcome, Miss Goodheart.” He took Sunny’s outstretched hand before turning to me. “And Mrs Russell, you, too, are welcome. Any friend of Tommy’s—I’m glad he felt free to ask you.”
Not that Thomas Goodheart had done anything more than bow to his mother’s pressure, but I wouldn’t mention that, not to a man with eyes as filled with speculation as his. I merely thanked him, laid my fingers briefly within his hard hand that bore the distinctive callus of reins, and pulled away.
His Highness was not what I might have expected in a maharaja, and further removed still from the folksiness of a “Jimmy.” A small man, shorter even than Nesbit (and, I thought, irritated at being forced to look up into my face), the maharaja resembled an Oxford undergraduate—the athlete rather than the aesthete, with fashionably bagged trousers, a white knit pull-over, and an astrakhan cap pulled over black hair. His lower lip was full, a faint intimation of the family habit of debauchery, and his dark eyes were lazy with the same self-assurance I had seen in the photograph on Nesbit’s wall, speaking of a bone-deep aristocracy that relegated the House of Windsor to the status of shopkeepers: This was the most important man in his particular world, and he assumed those around him agreed. There was nothing in his manner or his dress (apart from the cap) that spoke of India, certainly nothing in his lack of concern about castely impurities that permitted him to take the hands of strange women, nothing other than a faint dip and rise in his accent and the old-penny colour of his skin.
Mrs Goodheart looked confused; Sunny, on the other hand, was bedazzled. I couldn’t help speculating about Mrs Goodheart’s opinions on inter-racial marriages.
The aeroplane would hold the four of us and our smaller bags, with the maharaja at the controls. We would leave behind a small mountain of Goodheart possessions and my solitary trunk, guarded by a uniformed chuprassi until the plane came back for them.
We settled into the padded seats, Thomas beside the maharaja, with Mrs Goodheart on one side and Sunny and I on the other. The noise made speech impossible, which was just as well. Mrs Goodheart turned pale as the plane roared and bounced and then leapt skyward. Her knuckles remained white the entire way as her hands clenched the arms of her chair, holding her from falling to the ground below; once when the air dropped away beneath us, I feared she was going to faint. Sunny