Fortunately, Lord Frederick didn’t know enough to realize that he had just been insulted. He strutted happily along behind their escort, slowing by the instinct of long practice in the light of those candles that made his gold watch fobs glitter to their best advantage. Like a peacock, decided Alex critically, brightly plumed from a distance, but inclined to peck when one got up close.

“Keep an eye on . . . ,” James murmured, tipping his head in Lady Frederick’s direction, before following along behind Lord Frederick into the durbar hall.

Typical, thought Alex. Simply bloody typical. Once again, he was the one left holding the leash.

Resigning himself to the inevitable, Alex extended an arm. “Shall we?”

Lady Frederick eyed his arm as she might a dead snake. “I don’t need a keeper.”

“That’s what you said before you jumped into the river.”

“I doubt there are any bodies of water in the durbar hall,” retorted Lady Frederick, marching along ahead of him. Alex was reminded more than ever of Lizzy’s cat. Had Lady Frederick had a tail, it would have been sticking straight up in the air.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t treacherous depths.”

Lady Frederick looked up at him sideways. “Do you have treachery on the mind, Captain Reid?”

“I’m not the one I’m worried about,” he said frankly.

Lady Frederick regarded him scornfully. “I shouldn’t think you would be. After all, you know exactly what you’re planning.”

Exactly what did she think he was planning? Other than making sure she left the palace alive? Even without mysterious marigolds roaming about, there was Tajalli’s father, plumping for the restoration of the French force in Hyderabad; the new Nizam, providing a target for schemers and fortune hunters across the realm; and Mir Alam, rotten with old grudges and new leprosy. Or was that old leprosy and new grudges? Either way, the combination was about as conducive to civil peace as a Montague and Capulet reunion dinner.

“What do you think I’m planning?” Alex demanded, but he had lost his opportunity. The durbar hall opened up before them and he had the rare opportunity of seeing Lady Frederick well and truly speechless.

Even Alex, who had attended the durbar time and time again, had to admit it was an impressive sight. The Nizam preferred to hold his durbars by dark. It was a practical measure, avoiding the heat of the day, but the resultant forest of candles created an artificial wonder-land of the durbar hall, turning the proceedings into a page from a Deccani manuscript, too brilliant to be real. The hall was an architectural fantasy, the walls covered with trompe l’oeil scenes, so that parrots seemed suspended in flight above the heads of the courtiers and peacocks opened their mouth in eternal cry from beneath wide-leafed trees where the mango were perpetually in season.

Next to the lifelike guise of the paintings, the courtiers themselves seemed no more than an artist’s illusion, a piece of Eastern decadence for a European collector to marvel at. The light of the thousand candles in their tall silver stands oscillated off their rich silks and jewels, flirting with creamy shadows along the long ropes of pearls hanging around the necks of the nobles, shimmering along priceless lengths of gold brocade, cascading off diamond-set turban ornaments, and setting ruby armbands smoldering like the acquisitive glint in a merchant’s eye.

It wasn’t the jewels that held Lady Frederick’s attention, but the guards who stood sentry along the sides of the durbar hall, long, steel-tipped staffs propped against their soldiers. Their uniforms were similar to those worn by Madras sepoys, a long red coat over a pair of baggy trousers. They were all women.

“The Zuffir Plutun,” said Alex, with a nod towards the lady guards.

“The Victorious Brigade,” Lady Frederick translated, looking thoughtfully at the guards, as though she suspected them of being an optical illusion.

“Did you think I had made them up?”

Lady Frederick adopted her most inscrutable expression. Alex took that as a yes.

A cupbearer presented Alex with a small agate cup of coffee, tongue-scaldingly hot from the brazier that the Nizam kept burning in the center of the durbar. Slightly uncertainly, the cupbearer offered a twin of his cup to Lady Frederick. Looking as nonchalant as though she had been drinking at durbars all her life, Lady Frederick lifted the cup to her lips.

Alex curled his fingers around the polished surface, which was deceptively cool. “You might want to — ”

Lady Frederick knocked back the contents.

“ — sip that,” finished Alex, as Lady Frederick’s face turned an interesting color of puce.

Her throat worked convulsively as she swallowed the burning liquid, grounds and all.

“I’m fine,” she said hoarsely, giving him a look that dared him to contradict her.

Alex blew lightly at the surface of his own cup before taking a very small sip. “The Nizam likes his coffee hot,” he said helpfully.

Lady Frederick gave him a look of death. “I know.”

“Would you like another cup?” Alex made as though to summon the cupbearer. Never let it be said that he hadn’t behaved like a gentleman.

“Not to drink,” said Lady Frederick, in a tone that left no doubt as to where she would have liked to pour it.

The chuckle welled up in Alex’s throat before he had time to clamp it down again. He turned it into a cough, but not quite quickly enough.

A reluctant grin curled the corner of Lady Frederick’s lips. She had a coffee ground stuck between her two front teeth, giving her a charmingly gapped-tooth expression.

Alex held out his cup. “You can have mine, if you like,” he said. “It ought to be cool by now. At least, cooler,” he amended.

Lady Frederick started to reach for it, and then drew back her hand, as thought she had thought better of it. “No. Thank you.”

Alex glanced down at his cup, but he didn’t see anything suspect about it. There were no drowned flies floating on the surface, or even particularly large coffee grounds impersonating dead flies. It was a perfectly potable cup of Turkish coffee. More potable, Alex suspected, than the beverages pretending to that name being served in London. On the other hand, had he just bolted a cup of boiling coffee, he wouldn’t be too keen on the beverage either.

At the front of the diwan khaneh , the Nizam’s master of ceremonies, Mama Champa, was leading Lord Frederick up to the dais, her gilt-edged white robe and pink choli making Lord Frederick’s English evening dress seem even more drab in contrast. In addition to being the Nizam’s master of ceremonies, she was also a commanding officer of the Zuffir Plutun. The little push she gave Lord Frederick had enough force behind it to send him staggering to his knees before the ruler. Which, of course, was exactly where Mama Champa had wanted him.

Tall blue poles had been placed to either side of the Nizam, the blue lights lending an unhealthy tint to his already sallow complexion. Even the jewels and silks with which he had decked himself couldn’t hide the unhealthy hang of his jowls, the lines of dissipation in his face that made him look old beyond his years. Alex thought wistfully of the old Nizam, a dignified old warrior with a knack for political maneuvering and a taste for mechanical curiosities. The old Nizam had looked better at seventy than Sikunder Jah looked at thirty-five.

The old Nizam also hadn’t had Mir Alam hanging over his shoulder like death in a morality tale.

Mir Alam looked like hell, Alex thought dispassionately. He had always been slightly built, but now, besieged by disease, his narrow frame seemed to have caved in upon itself like a crone’s clawed hand. The fair complexion of which he had been so proud, token of his Persian ancestry, was blotched with open sores that turned his once-pleasant-featured face into something resembling a blob of raw meat, rendered even more hideous by the cavern in the center of his face where his nose used to be, collapsed in upon itself from the disease that was eating him from the inside out.

But even in those days when his body had been whole, there had been something unsettling about him, a cold-blooded lack of fellow feeling so profound as to be somehow inhuman. All ambition and no heart , James’s assistant, Henry Russell, had said with a shudder, adding that he’d sooner be sewed into a sack with a cobra than rely on Mir Alam’s mercy. Jack, who had a sneaking fondness for literature, had come up with an even more apt epitaph for Mir Alam. The Deccani Iago , Jack had called him, back before — well, before.

No need to let himself be distracted by Jack. Alex forced himself to concentrate on Mir Alam, Mir Alam who sat like a serpent poised to strike, the pipe of a golden hookah coiling snakelike from his mouth.

Alex recognized that hookah. It had, until very recently, belonged to the former First Minister, Aristu Jah, who seldom went anywhere without it. It had been a source of endless speculation among the younger wags of the court whether he brought it to bed with him, and if so, what role it played.

The hookah ought, by rights, to have been with Aristu Jah’s widow, not dangling from Mir Alam’s lips.

That did not bode well.

Alex could hear Lord Frederick’s startled grunt as Mama Champa shoved him down into the proper prostrate position. A few courtiers snickered behind their hands. The snickers turned to snorts as Lord Frederick bumbled his way through the elegant Persian oration James had crafted for him, blithely butchering vowels and changing minor words. Not that it mattered, reflected Alex cynically. The Nizam wasn’t listening anyway. Alex saw his eyes wandering off to the cane screen that concealed his current concubines.