Seven weeks had passed since that day beside the river, since Komarov’s death and their decision to continue the pursuit together. She was thinner now, browner, the lines of her face drawn a shade harder. He found it difficult to believe that he could ever love anyone else.
It had taken them more than a month to cross Afghanistan, eking out McColl’s emergency supply of silver coins. They had sometimes journeyed alone, sometimes with caravans, once even with a traveling cinema, rarely covering more than ten miles a day, but knowing that their quarry would be moving little faster. No one hurried in Afghanistan, a land where time was kept by the rivers and mountains, where humans still recognized forces greater than themselves. It had felt like time on loan from the rest of their lives, doing what humans had always done: eating, drinking, traveling, sleeping, and making love.
Then, one night in September, they had passed between the jaws of the Khyber with a Pathan caravan and seen the plains of the Punjab laid out below, a patchwork of greens fading into the east. Two evenings later they had boarded the train in Peshawar like people stepping back into civilization’s dream, with hardening faces, touches that felt merely physical, words that seemed bogged down in consonants.
Another three dawns had brought them to the Delhi station. McColl, turbaned and bearded, had walked out past a DCI man he recognized from 1915; Caitlin, tanned and veiled, had attracted even less attention. They had taken this room in a nearby serai. From its balcony they could see, in one direction, the station itself, forever smoke-signaling arrivals and departures, and in the other, looming above the ancient city, Shah Jahan’s Red Fort, stone at the heart of the British Empire.
McColl’s insistence that they rest for a day had less to do with physical need than his acutely felt reluctance to raise the curtain on the final act. That night, as they’d moved together in such effortless harmony, he’d had the sudden terrifying feeling that the two of them had crammed a lifetime’s love into only a couple of months.
And now the curtain was going up.
Until he met her, he had always thought people in love arranged their lives around that emotional fact. But Caitlin took the opposite view, that people should decide what they wanted from life and adjust their love lives to fit. This, she said, was what men did anyway, usually at the woman’s expense.
He could see her point, but…
He still had no idea whether or not she was going back to Russia or how he could live without her if she did.
As if in response to this thought, Caitlin opened her eyes. “Hello,” she said sleepily. For a moment she looked vulnerable, but the world soon took her back. She pulled herself up into a sitting position, her back against the balcony wall, and gave him a questioning look.
“Yes,” he told her. “We can stay with Harry. He’s expecting us in an hour or so.”
“I’ll get ready.”
Darkness had fallen by the time they started the short journey across the city. Caitlin still felt uncomfortable—not to mention vaguely ridiculous—wearing the veil, although after a month of doing so, she supposed she should be used to the damn thing. It wasn’t just the political insult it reflected; the cloth itself felt physically restrictive, as if it stopped her from breathing properly.
“It’s all in your head,” McColl had told her half seriously when she first mentioned it.
She had felt like kicking him, and apparently it had shown.
“When all you can see is the eyes,” he’d remarked, “it’s amazing how expressive they are.”
They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens now, gigantic palm fronds swaying above the tonga. “This is beautiful,” she murmured in Russian. As McColl had pointed out, two many Indians understood English for them to use it in public.
“Make the most of it,” he replied. “You may be stuck indoors for several days.”
“I know,” she said tersely. He had already explained that here in Delhi women—whether Hindu or Muslim—rarely went out alone. Even veiled, she would stick out like a sore thumb. “I sometimes think,” she added tartly, “that there’s a man inside you that likes the idea of the woman imprisoned at home.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said equably. “I just know how much trouble you have pretending to be someone you’re not. An admirable trait in itself but not a very useful one in these circumstances.”
“All right,” she said grudgingly. “Tell me more about where we’re going. Is it a big house? Who else lives in it?”
“It’s huge. And probably home to at least twenty people once you include the servants. Both of Harry’s parents died in the flu epidemic in 1919, and he’s the eldest of four brothers. They all live there, and at least three of them are married with children. As head of the family, Harry’s like a minor dictator—what he says goes, and no one would question his authority. Men or women.” McColl gave her a sideways glance. “I hope you’re not planning a full-scale agitation.”
“Not immediately,” she told him with a smile.
They drove past the Town Hall and into the bedlam of Chandni Chowk. On Caitlin’s side of the street, a line of customers in various stages of lathering, like frames from a moving picture, were awaiting a barber’s further attention. A man walked across the street in front of their tonga, holding two children with great delicacy, just a finger and thumb on each child’s wrist, guiding rather than pulling. She watched as they were swallowed by the throng on the sidewalk, fascinated. Such gentleness seemed more alien than any sight or smell.
“Your friend,” she asked McColl, “is he a member of the Indian National Congress?”
“Yes.”
“And he is rich. A lawyer, you said. Educated at an English school?”
“Winchester.”
“This National Congress party—is it an anti-imperialist party?”
“That depends on what you mean by anti-imperialist. They don’t like the empire they’re in.”
“Mmm. And are all the leaders rich people educated in England?”
“I don’t know,” McColl replied. “I don’t suppose there are many peasants and workers in the leadership, but most of those will be far too busy trying to keep their heads above water to attend conferences. From what I saw in Moscow, the Asian delegates at the Hotel Lux were mostly intellectuals from well-to-do families.”
“I suppose so,” she agreed. They had turned down a narrower street, past a row of shops whose insides glittered and shone.
“Goldsmiths,” McColl explained unnecessarily. “This is the Dariba Kalan.”
The name meant nothing to her. Their driver edged the tonga past a cow that was idly nosing through a pile of refuse, then continued down the narrow lane with its high walls and carved wooden doorways. Bright eyes in dark faces lifted to watch them go by, then returned to the business at hand.
McColl stopped the tonga at the end of the cul-de-sac and paid off the driver. Sinha was waiting in the outer courtyard, still dressed in the European suit, looking more than a little anxious. He was, Caitlin thought, extraordinarily handsome.
He closed the gate behind them before going through the process of a formal greeting, shaking McColl’s hand and offering Caitlin a namaskar, hands held together as if in prayer. “Some supper is being prepared,” he said. “But first let me show you your room.”
He led them through the archway, and up some winding stairs to a veranda that overlooked another courtyard, in which several seats were surrounded by a circle of tropical plants. An oil lamp above one doorway suffused the space with golden light, turning it into a mysterious grotto.