random relatives covertly inspected him and congratulated him on his sudden engagement, and talked a lot of rot about India. Now Mrs. Wetherby had written him several letters, full of baffling bits of advice about the wedding, and, last week, to tell him that Rose’s father had come down with a bad case of bronchitis after her ship had sailed. “But probably better to keep this to ourselves,” she’d written. “They are very close and she has so much on her plate.” For some reason, the words “on her plate” had annoyed him, too, making him feel as though she regarded him as some sort of unpleasant green vegetable that would soon have to be faced and gobbled down. And if he was such an unknown quantity, why had these two sensible, fond people let the marriage go ahead? In certain moods he almost blamed them for it.
He stood up in the bath: a tall man with a fine, sensitive face; wary eyes; strong sloping shoulders and the long muscular legs of a horseman. He was far better looking now at twenty-eight than he had been when he first came out to India six years ago. Then, he was a tall boy just one year out of Sandhurst, skinny in spite of all the punishing exercise, the yard drills, the riding, the expeditions in mock deserts with thirty-pound weights on his back, all things designed to take the softness out of young men.
“Sir, please.” Dinesh stood smiling at the door, a towel in his hand. He’d come to Poona three years ago, a refugee from a flooded farm in Bengal. Jack had first met him quite by chance in the house of a friend in Delhi, and had been struck, as was everybody, by the open radiance of his smile. Dinesh counted this job as his one blinding stroke of good fortune in a life full of tragedies. A sign that his karma, his wheel of fortune, had taken a turn for the better.
Dinesh and Jack were a team now. The fact that Jack was a young officer with an Indian, rather than a British, Cavalry regiment and could—after quite a slog, for he was not a natural linguist—converse with Dinesh in almost fluent Hindustani was a point of pride with Dinesh, who, like many good servants, was a snob who looked down on the other servants in British regiments who had to speak English to their sahibs. They had been through so much together, some of the finest moments of their lives—the parades, the equitation school in Secunderabad, the yearly camps in the mountains where Dinesh, as thrilled as Jack had been by the adventure, had cooked for him over one of dozens of little fires that sprang up as soon as night had settled. He’d served with a reverence and a passion that both humbled and worried Jack, for the wheel was turning again. All of Jack’s servants—Dinesh and his wash man, his cook and her young daughter—were acutely aware of their various positions in the house; they watched each other like hawks for any changes in the pecking order. The arrival of Rose, no question about it, would ruffle their feathers, and Jack hadn’t found the words to explain that to her yet.
He walked into his bedroom. In the plain, low-ceilinged room an ancient fan ground away over his single bed with a mosquito net above it. There was a rush mat on the floor and on the bare walls only one faded landscape of the Lake District, left by the last tenant. He’d asked the regiment’s stores for a double bed six weeks ago, but things moved very slowly here; he’d have to remind them again.
On the bamboo chair in the corner of the room Dinesh had laid out a pair of linen trousers and a white shirt, all beautifully pressed. Against the wall Dinesh had draped a red cloth—it had taken him hours to do it when they’d first arrived—like an upright altar, against which he had hung whistles and spurs, the Sam Browne belt and sword.
Beside his bed his servant had placed a silver bowl full of Eno’s fruit salts, in case he should need them after a heavy night at the mess and, touchingly, as if to say, “I am going to try and like her,” he’d surrounded the photograph of Rose with a garland of marigolds, as if she were a goddess.
Now Dinesh came out of the shadows thrown by the hurricane