The Empress of India Read Free Page B

ancient stone buildings, squeezed next to wooden buildings of indeterminate age, with narrow alleys leading to other buildings, possibly of wood, and narrow doorways in walled-off areas with buildings constructed of God-knows-what and older than anyone would care to speculate.
    And the whole filled with street stalls selling just about anything you might possibly want, along with a variety of things that the visitor couldn’t begin to identify and a few things that he would avert his eyes from. There it was: a chaotic jumble of structures that assaulted the eye, twisting and turning along the constricted, improbable streets and alleys.
    That was extraordinary enough; but the odors! Cinnamon and allspice and coriander and turmeric and cow dung and camel dung and oranges and lemons and horse dung and more cow dung and cedarwood and sandalwood and olibanum, which we know better as frankincense, and sweet pastries and human excrement and the olfactory ghosts of curries long gone, and still more cow dung, and a thousand years of this and that and long-forgotten those. The odors assaulted the nose of the visitor, not all at once, but in an ever-changing mosaic of smells that shifted and combined and recombined as the visitor moved about the city.
     
    Margaret St. Yves, the only daughter of Brigadier General Sir Edward St. Yves, stood in the middle of Agincourt Street holding a large white umbrella over her head, and stared up at the house she’d be living in for the next few months. “I suppose one gets used to it after a while,” she said.
    General St. Yves looked over at his daughter from where he was supervisingthe transfer of trunks, boxes, cases, and other large, bulky items from the army goods wagon into the house. “I’m sure one does, m’dear,” he said. “Get used to what?”
    “The odor,” she told him. “The all-enveloping stench of—of—various things, some of them, I believe, unmentionable.”
    “Oh,” her father said. “Oh, yes. One does eventually get used to the odor. On occasion, as it changes in intensity and, ah, composition, one is strongly reminded of it. One never grows very fond of it, I’m afraid.”
    “One would think the rain would wash the smells away, but instead it seems to intensify them.”
    Her father looked up speculatively. “One would not call this a rain,” he said. “More of a heavy mist. When it rains around here, you know it.”
    “Well,” Margaret said, “it’s misting all over my bonnet, and I wish it would stop. And it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the heat. When it rains in Britain, the rain cools the air. Here the air heats the water.”
    “Yes, m’dear,” her father said. “Why don’t you go inside?”
    Margaret stepped sharply forward to allow an oxcart to clatter its way past them. “I prefer standing out here for now,” she told her father.
    “Of course, m’dear. Silly of me.”
    Brigadier General Sir Edward Basilberg St. Yves, Bart., I.C., D.S.O., was the commanding officer of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers. The Lancers were not at the moment in the Highlands, but had been stationed for the last four years in India, “upcountry,” as it was called by their English compatriots lucky enough to spend their winters in Calcutta. It got too bally hot in Calcutta during the summer, and the viceroy and all of official Anglo-India retired to the summer capital at Simla, high in the foothills of the Himalayas.
    For the last two years Margaret St. Yves had been upcountry with the Lancers. She had elected to join her father in India rather than staying with a pair of maiden aunts in Bournemouth, after her widowed Aunt Louise, who had taken care of her for the past ten years since her mother died, had decided to remarry. Louise was marrying a Livonian prince,and moving with him to his ancestral castle in Kurzeme. Neither the maiden aunts nor the mouth of the River Bourne had held much interest for Margaret, but India was unknown and