The Viceroy's Daughters Read Free Page B

descend the steps to meet him.
    Simla, in the hills north of Delhi, was a different matter altogether. The wives and children of army officers and administrators in the Indian civil service came here to escape the stifling, enervating heat of the plains while their husbands sweltered below, escaping for short breaks to join them, and life was freer and less formal. Young officers flirted with grass widows during early-morning rides, picnics and dances; gossip was rife and the atmosphere frivolous.
    The nearest Curzon came to relaxation was at another viceregal refuge, Naldera, a camp seventeen miles from Simla where he could eat and work out of doors. The stream of orders, reports, diplomatic messages and reforms that flowed unceasingly from his pen were varied by letters to friends in England and a copious correspondence with his agent on the need to find a tenant prepared to pay the highest possible rent for No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. Eventually they settled on Joseph Hodges Choate, U.S. Ambassador to London, who offered two thousand pounds a year.
    India, with its superabundance of eligible single men, was a paradise for young unmarried women. When Mary’s sisters came to stay with the Curzons in 1899 the youngest, Daisy, became engaged to one of the viceroy’s aides-de-camp, Lord Suffolk’s eldest son (whom she married in 1904).
    Mary took her two young children back to England for a visit of six months in 1901, during which time she and Curzon wrote to each other almost every day. He also wrote to his daughters, loving little notes with exactly the sort of news they would like. “My sweet Simmy, Daddy is going to write you a line while he is sitting out under the trees at Naldera,” he wrote on June 10, 1901. “It is so hot that he has got no coat on. Little Fluffy is lying at my feet stretched out on her side pretending to be asleep. She never leaves me and has quite recovered her looks now that she is back in Simla. I am all alone now in the morning when I get up. No itty girls to come in and see me and help me to shave. Isn’t it sad? Kisses to Irene and Simmy from loving Daddy.” The letters continued in a stream, from Viceregal Lodge, Simla, and the heat of Government House in Calcutta (“When I came back here little Danny recognized me at once and he came trotting to me and never leaves my side at luncheon and dinner.”)
    In England Mary was feted, dining with the king and queen—of whom she became a close friend—and enchanting men like the future prime minister, Arthur Balfour, who described her as “intoxicating.”
    She was back in India for the Coronation Durbar (to proclaim Edward VII King-Emperor) held in India’s capital, Delhi, in 1902. The viceregal couple entered the city on an elephant, sitting in a silver howdah beneath the golden umbrella of state. The assemblage awaiting them displayed possibly the greatest collection of jewels ever to be seen in one place: each of the Indian princes was adorned with the most spectacular of his gems from the collections of centuries, while the English had been advised that protocol demanded their most splendid, opulent pieces. The only unplanned moment in the magnificence of the proceedings occurred when a fox terrier belonging to one of the bandsmen in a Highland regiment trotted across the great horseshoe-shaped arena, mounted the dais, leaped into the empty throne awaiting Curzon and began barking.
    Parades, march-pasts and polo culminated in the State Ball, where Mary outshone everyone in the famous Peacock Dress—cloth of gold embroidered with tiny peacock feathers, each eye an emerald, the skirt trimmed with white roses and the bodice with lace. She glittered with diamonds, pearls and precious stones: a huge necklace of diamonds around her throat, others of diamonds and pearls and a crownlike tiara, a pearl tipping each of its high diamond points. As she walked through the hall, Curzon beside her