The Empress of India

by Michael Kurland

  To that man’s left sat a heavy, angular elderly lady whose dark green satin gown, bespeckled with diamonds, was too heavy by far for the climate—but the proprieties must be observed. A large diamond ring ornamented each of her forefingers, and from the rope of pearls encircling her neck descended an even larger diamond. For variety’s sake, a pair of large sapphires were pinned to her ears, but the diamond theme was recaptured by the tiara nestled in her tightly curled hair.

  To her left, directly opposite Margaret, sat a short, slightly tubby, distinguished-looking Indian gentleman with dark eyes and pitch-black hair that came to an exaggerated widow’s peak and lay so perfectly flat on his head that it seemed to have been painted on, or perhaps glued in place. He wore an elaborately embroidered white and tan kurta—the knee-length garment that looks like a cross between a frock and a jacket—and his gold-rimmed glasses had oversized, round lenses which gave him a look of perpetual astonishment.

  And then an empty chair. And then, to Margaret’s right, completing the circle of the table, was a young woman in an unassuming light blue gown. Her hair was blond and not quite under as much control as might be wished, her eyes were a mild, impassive blue in a face of such perfection that men might think of angels, or, perhaps, of other things. A plain gold bracelet was her only adornment aside from what nature had provided.

  As the waiters ladled the thick yellow mulligatawny soup from a great silver tureen into the waiting bowls, the French-looking gentleman cleared his throat. “Permit me to make the assumption that it would be proper, considering the occasion, if we were to introduce ourselves back and forth to one and another,” he said, looking around the table. “I believe we have been seated all hobbilty-cobbilty to permit of such informality. And I do not have the objection if it falls upon me to begin. Myself, I am named Professor Gerard August Demartineu. I have done the traveling about India for a time now, and I have discovered much of interest. I find that I have a great admiration for the Indian people, and a great respect for what I see that you English are attempting to do to them. Or is it for them? These English conjunctions are of the utmost difficulty to acquire.”

  The older lady turned a stern gaze at Demartineu. She gave the clear impression that stern gazing was nothing new to her. “You speak with an accent,” she accused him. “Are you some sort of foreigner?”

  “Ah, but, madam,” Demartineu said to her, “are we not all foreigners here?”

  “Humph!” the lady replied.

  “Except, of course, for my friend Mamarum Sutrow,” he continued, indicating the short man in native garb on the lady’s other side.

  “Alas,” the little man said, “I myself would be counted as a foreigner in this place. I am most originally from Kalat, even beyond Sind, and one would have to pass through many kingdoms of various sorts and sizes before reaching my homeland.”

  “There, you see,” Demartineu told the lady. “We are indeed all foreigners here.”

  Margaret smiled. “Everyone is a foreigner in this world,” she said. And she quoted:

  “ ‘Into this Universe, and Why not knowing

  Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;

  And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,

  I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.’ ”

  The young woman to her right clapped her hands together. “The Rubáiyát!” she cried, her voice full of sighs and youth. “How wonderful, and yet how sad.”

  “Even so,” Mamarum Sutrow said, breaking into a broad smile. “Omar Khayyám. Another foreigner. Translated from the Persian by an Englishman named Fitzgerald.”

  “And it’s true,” the young woman said, her eyes shining. “As true as only poetry can be true. We are—all of us—foreigners, visitors for a time to this world, and then we pass beyond. As Omar said, ‘The Wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop, / The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.’ ”

  The older woman looked at the younger and her faced cracked into what might have been a smile. “I remember having a passion for The Rubáiyát, it must be a quarter century ago. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. . . .’ It is, indeed, so beautiful and so sad. But I found its constant allusions to drinking rather off-putting; as though drunken carousing could solve anything or provide solace for the ills of the world.”

  “It serves as well as most other things, madam,” Demartineu said. “One or two glasses of wine make the world seem brighter, and a few more glasses make it go away entirely, if only for a while.” He dropped his spoon into the soup bowl as it was being taken away. “The soup was good, yes? I have high hopes for the fish.”

  “Was Omar really referring to wine?” Margaret asked. “I always thought that Fitzgerald translated it as wine for his English audience, but that, as Muhammadans are strictly forbidden to drink alcohol, Omar probably was actually referring to the smoking of kef or bhang.”

  “Ah, yes,” Demartineu said. “The leaf and bud of the Cannabis sativa. It could well be.” He looked over at Sutrow. “What do you think, Mr. Sutrow?”

  The little man shook his head. “I have never read the original,” he said, “and I would not venture an opinion. Although I admit that the lady’s notion might be a good one.”

  “Well,” Demartineu said. “We are pleased to share the table with a lady with a good notion, who has so far remained nameless.” He rose to his feet and bowed to Margaret.

  “Pleased to meet you, Professor,” she said, extending her hand across the table. “My name is Margaret St. Yves. My father is an officer in the Lancers.”

  “Oh, yes.” Demartineu bowed over her hand and then released it. “Brigadier General Sir Edward St. Yves, I.C., commanding officer of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers. The boss man, your father. I myself would not like to have a general for a father, I think. He is too accustomed to giving orders, and too used to having them obeyed. It would, I think, fray on one, that.”

  “I believe that Father has stopped trying to give me orders,” Margaret said. “Or, perhaps, I’ve just stopped noticing.”

  “Oh, I’m sure not,” Demartineu said, his eyes wide. “I cannot but imagine that you, so lovely and well mannered, are the dutiful daughter.”

  “Perhaps so, Professor,” Margaret said, nodding her head to acknowledge the compliment, “but sometimes one has a positive duty to ignore one’s parents, don’t you think? It’s for their own good. If one is too obedient, then the slightest disagreement is cause for endless worry and discussion. Whereas if one disagrees with one’s parents on a regular schedule, then they come to expect it and think no more about it.”

  Demartineu stared thoughtfully at her for a long moment, and then chuckled. “Ah, Miss St. Yves, I fear that you are having me along, is this not so? You are making of the sport with this old professor.”

  “Not at all, Professor,” Margaret said, smiling at him.

  “And you, mademoiselle,” Demartineu said to the young Rubáiyát fan, “will you do us the favor of an introduction?”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I am Lady Priscilla Montague. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” She extended a hand.

  With another bow, Demartineu took her hand, pressed it slightly, and released it. “Ah!” he said, raising a forefinger of enlightenment. “The viceroy, is he not also a Montague?”

  “My father,” she explained.

  “Do you hear that, Mr. Sutrow?” Demartineu asked, reaching behind the bejeweled lady to poke his friend in the arm. “We are surrounded by the younger generation of the British Raj; and a charming younger generation it is.” The bejeweled lady frowned at him, and he smiled broadly back at her. “And you, madam, would you do us the supreme honor of identifying yourself. Please?”

  Madam looked at him. “I will tell you my name,” she said. “But under no circumstances are you to consider this an introduction.”

  Demartineu looked at her sadly. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You, perhaps, put more of the burden on the term ‘introduction’ than
I had intended. Rest yourself assured that I have not the intention to invite myself to weekend at your house, or borrow the money.”

  There was a pause while Madam tried to decide whether she had just been insulted. “I am the Dowager Duchess of Tynesdale,” she announced finally. “You may call me ‘your ladyship,’ or ‘my lady.’ ”

  Demartineu beamed at her. “I shall, my lady,” he said. “I shall do so constantly. My word.”

  “Hmmph!” she said.

  After the fish came platters of curried lamb, deep dishes of stewed chicken, sliced pork roast with mangoes, and a baked egg and cheese dish with a reddish brown sauce that tasted much better than it looked. The side dishes that appeared at one’s elbow every twenty seconds or so included a variety of vegetables in the mildest possible curry, a smaller selection of vegetables in a significantly stronger curry, an assortment of vegetables lightly fried, and a potpourri of cabbages briefly boiled, along with three different sorts of bread, one of them stuffed with onions. The conversation faltered and slowed as the diners allowed themselves to be overwhelmed with food.

  Margaret had drunk the soup, nibbled the fish, and now found herself almost unable to eat. She pushed some food around on her plate so as not to appear conspicuous. “Tell me, Professor Demartineu,” she said after a while, “just what is it that you profess?”

  “What is it that I—” Demartineu paused and stared across at her for a moment. “Oh, I see it now. English, it is such a remarkable tool. You can say just about anything in English, and it means what it means. In French, if you assemble words in any but the correct manner, they lose their meaning and you are speaking the nonsense. I myself am adept at speaking the nonsense.”

  “You are, perhaps, a professor of French?” Margaret asked.

  “Not at all,” Demartineu said. “Well, perhaps in a way. I am—I have been, let me say—a professor of the drama, of the theater. I do not, you understand, teach how to do it; how to write the plays or how to act. That would be useful, perhaps, and no university student desires to be taught anything useful. I used to profess, as you say, at the Université de Languedoc.”

  “How interesting,” Lady Priscilla said.

  “You think so?” Demartineu asked. “Why, then, perhaps it is. I instructed the youth of France on the works of such artists as Molière, Racine, Corneille, and Beaumarchais, as well as your Shakespeare and Marlowe. I gave a seminar on the works of the too-little esteemed Jean-François Regnard, including deep dissections of Attendez-moi sous l’orme, Le Légataire universel, and what is perhaps his masterwork, Le Joueur. I have an abiding knowledge of the lives and works of many French and English playwrights who have been dead these past two centuries and more. With the modern world, I am not so familiar.”

  The dowager duchess produced a lorgnette from her reticule and peered through it at Demartineu. “Tell me,” she said, tapping him on the back of the hand with her spoon. “It is a matter of some interest to me. Do you think Shakespeare wrote his own plays?”

  “On that I have no opinion, my lady,” he said, snatching his hand away. “I have heard of this dispute that goes about in some literary circles in your country, that perhaps Shakespeare did not write the plays to which he is attributed. That, perhaps, Sir Francis Bacon wrote them instead.” He shrugged. “It does not matter. We have the plays, and whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare, or Bacon was Shakespeare, or perhaps someone else entirely was Shakespeare, this Shakespeare was indeed a master playwright, second only, perhaps, to Molière.”

  “Well!” the dowager duchess sat up straight and glared down at the French professor. “It certainly does matter. To perpetrate a fraud upon the English people, indeed upon the people of the world, for the past two hundred and fifty years, would be disgraceful, and should be set to rights as soon as possible.”

  Margaret leaned back, folded her hands carefully in her lap, and looked down at her plate. She would resist all temptation to goad the duchess on. Besides, the duchess did not look as though she required goading. It was a good thing, Margaret thought, that the duchess had not noticed Demartineu’s reference to Shakespeare as being second to Molière, or there’d be blood on the table.

  Demartineu shook his head sadly. “I do not agree, but I sympathize,” he said. “I, too, was once involved in a dispute over the provenance of the works of a long-defunct playwright. It seems that whenever genius is displayed, someone must leap to his feet and claim that there is no genius, merely humbug.”

  “Humbug?” Margaret looked across the table. “And was it humbug in this case?”

  “I do not think so,” Demartineu told her. “The playwright in question was the great Molière himself. A Professor Hanoutaux of the École des Arts in Paris published a monograph in which he asserted that he had determined, without a doubt, that the comedies of Molière were actually written by the tragedian Pierre Corneille. Without a doubt, mind you. The fact that they were attributed to Molière and only Molière during his lifetime, the fact that Molière himself acted in several of them; these were of no consequence. Molière was only an actor and, according to Professor Hanoutaux, could not possibly have the richness of vocabulary necessary to write his own plays. I ask you, what does an actor possess if not richness of vocabulary?

  “He cited Plautus, a Roman playwright, as having a great influence on both Molière and Corneille; which is undoubtedly true. What that might prove, I know not. Hanoutaux examined scenes from L’Amour Médecin and Sganarelle, where he claimed to find proof of his thesis. Particularly convincing, he felt, was the paltry output of Corneille. Why did Corneille write so few plays of his own? Because he was busy writing plays for Molière. His reasoning was flawed, and his examples proved nothing.

  “I replied in a monograph of my own. I pointed out that the reason Corneille wrote so few plays was because he was a slow writer. He wrote tragedies—El Cid, you will recall, was one of his. It is slow work, writing tragedies. One must cry a lot. I pointed out several other errors of logic and gross misunderstandings in Hanoutaux’s monograph. He was crushed.”

  “What did he do?” Margaret asked.

  “What could he do? He challenged me to a duel, of course.”

  “No!” Lady Priscilla’s hand went to her mouth. “Really?”

  The dowager duchess sniffed. “Dueling,” she said firmly, “is against the law.”

  “This is so,” Demartineu acknowledged. “Even in France, for these past thirty years it has been forbidden. Nonetheless, there is no other way for men to settle questions of honor. And, in France, every dispute concerns a question of honor. You say the Earth goes around the Sun; I say the Sun goes around the Earth—a duel will discover the truth. You say Napoleon was the savior of France; I say he was a scoundrel and his reign was a disaster. We will meet on the field of honor to decide which of us is right.”

  “So, did you accept?” Margaret demanded.

  “But yes, of course. Not to do so would have been unthinkable.”

  “What happened?”

  Demartineu leaned forward. “You must understand,” he said, “that in France today a duel is more of a, how you say, ritual than a blood sport. There are rules and formalities. What is going to happen is preordained, and understood by all.”

  He held up one finger. “First, the challenge.”

  Another finger. “Then the acceptance.”

  Another finger. “Then the meeting of the seconds, and the choosing of the weapons, the time and the place.”

  Yet another finger. “Then the seconds ask the duelists whether an apology is acceptable. ‘Cannot we avoid this senseless bloodshed?’ is the usual formula.”

  All five fingers. “The refusal. ‘Honor must be satisfied!’ ”

  Demartineu raised both hands for a second, and then dropped them back down onto the table, and continued his description fingerless. “Then the morning of the duel dawns. By tradition it should be cold and drizzly, but if that is not achieved, the affair will continue nonetheless. The dueli
sts go separately to the field of honor with their seconds. A doctor arrives in a third carriage, which awaits somewhat to the side of the festivities. It is all very tense and dramatic.”

  “Yes?” Lady Priscilla asked breathlessly. “And?”

  “One last time one of the seconds asks each of them: ‘Will you not apologize? Will you not accept his apology?’ ‘No,’ each replies firmly. Honor must be satisfied.

  “They stand facing each other. The referee drops a handkerchief between them. If the weapons are épées, the duel begins at that moment. If pistols, the formalities continue. They wheel about and walk off ten paces each. Then they wheel back and stand, rock still, facing each other. ‘You may begin,’ the referee calls.”

  “And?” asked Lady Priscilla.

  “Each fires into the air, over the head of the other. Honor is satisfied. Everyone breathes a great sigh of relief, and they all go home.”

  “So,” Margaret asked, “that was your duel?”

  “No,” Demartineu said. “That was every other duel in France for the past twenty years, with very few exceptions. But the gods of risibility were circling about me in this occasion.” He raised a finger again, but dropped his hand back to the table after a second. “My second, an old friend and one of France’s better known actors, communicated with Professor Hanoutaux and his second, the Viscount de Someplace-or-other. The viscount told my second, in strict confidence of course, that Professor Hanoutaux had determined to kill me. He was not going to fire over my head, but into it. Alors, what could I do? I did not wish to kill the professor, but I certainly did not wish for him to kill me.”

  “What did you do?”