Jane Steele(50)

I barely remembered to flare my nose in dismay.

“This is Mr. Thornfield’s collection of Punjabi miniatures.” Mr. Singh either had not noted my pretended disapproval or did not care, for he smiled as he reached my side. “His eye for worth is exceptional, having been raised in Lahore. See this portrait of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the way the furnishings are patterned so lovingly, but his face most carefully rendered of all?”

“Mr. Thornfield is from Lahore?” I asked, latching on to undeniably the most intriguing word in this statement. “How is that possible, the East India Company only having arrived there some five years ago? Or so I read in the newspapers—I supposed Mr. Thornfield English.”

Again I sensed a tick of the clock before Mr. Singh spoke. “He was born there, to a British entrepreneur, but he studied medicine at the British and Foreign Medical School and then Charing Cross Hospital before he returned to the Punjab. Ah, you would not have known he belongs to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of London, of course. Yes, Mr. Thornfield is a man of medicine. This particular painting is moving for us—Amritsar, the Sikh holy city where our sacred book resides.”

It was a gilded palace at the end of a pure white pier surrounded by sapphire waters—an impossible place, a dream breathed from a dawn pillow.

“To have left this behind—you must miss it very much,” I mentioned, wisely refraining from commentary regarding homes from which I myself had fled.

“God has his seat everywhere,” Mr. Singh returned without inflection, as if quoting a text.

“I thought from the advertisement that Mr. Thornfield had been in the wars?”

An invisible shutter closed over Mr. Sardar Singh’s face. “Who has not been in a war? Yes, Mr. Thornfield trained as a doctor but obtained an army commission after military training at Addiscombe.”

Mr. Singh strode off and I pursued, anxious lest I had given offence on my second day. We turned left down a corridor, right down another, until I knew we stood before the billiards room, and he rested his fingers upon the door handles.

“Forgive me, I never meant to—”

Air burst into my face as the butler revealed the room; but I could not enter, such was my astonishment at the narrow fraction I beheld.

“After you, Miss Stone,” Mr. Singh demurred.

A steel palace, the inside of a diamond—how shall I best describe a billiard room transformed into a war display? Swords—straight, curved, broad, tapered—lined every wall, polished to a sheen echoing the pain of the blade itself. Their handles were inset with ivory carvings, their hilts embellished with golden flourishes, their points angled into queer triangles or hollowed into deadly sickle shapes. Shorter daggers hung above the liquor cabinet, and the hearth was festooned with weapons I could scarce comprehend—tri-pronged silver objects with needlelike points, axes so beautiful I could not fathom using them, bizarre metal circlets which gleamed at us like eyes. I had never viewed such a fascinating collection of murderous devices.

“Oh,” I breathed, delighted.

“Do they interest you?” Mr. Singh sounded pleased. “These are the weapons of the Khalsa, and I’m afraid we are all quite adept with them.”

“Mr. Thornfield has a cuff like yours,” I noted, too alight with inquisitiveness to care whether I was being rude.

“You are observant. Yes—he is a Sikh, just as I am.”

“However is that possible?”

“There is no Hindu; there is no Mussulman,” he answered, and I again had the impression he quoted scripture. “If there is no Hindu and no Mussulman, and all can form a single brotherhood, then there is no Christian either. I beg your pardon, as that is not a popular opinion in this country.”

I could reach only one conclusion: Mr. Charles Thornfield was improbably born in the Punjab, took medical courses, gained a military commission, and at some point embraced an entirely foreign culture. The master of the house (temporarily, anyhow) was the pitied and often despised sort who had allowed his Britishness to fade in the searing desert sun, politeness and gaslight and snobbery leached into the dunes. During my newspaper scoutings, I had often glimpsed accounts of such hapless folk, as we were forever at war with somebody: London was pockmarked with men who professed a respect for the Buddha, women who had converted to—horror of horrors—vegetarianism.

“I shock you, Miss Stone.”

I laughed. “You don’t, on my life you don’t. Which of these are you best with?”

Mr. Singh emitted a happy puff through his nostrils, pointing at one of the shining metal circlets. “That is a chakkar—a steel throwing ring honed into a blade. Members of the Khalsa used to hurl these at their foes before enemies rode within striking distance. Now experts are almost unheard-of.”

“Save yourself.”

“I am considered passable,” he demurred, but his eyes sparkled.

My attention snagged upon something still more extraordinary, and I approached where it hung above a rack of billiard cues. The object had a rosewood sword grip; where the blade was meant to emerge, however, a metal band was coiled in upon itself and tied with thick black leather, so that it resembled a hilt attached to a lengthy ribbon of steel wound into a tidy ring.

“What on earth . . . ?” I stretched to the tips of my toes to look more closely.