Chapter 3
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Three
Drums pulsed and trumpets blared. A cheer roared up as flower petals exploded from the rooftops—and Constance grinned with delight.
She was in India.
Her royal uncle—or first cousin once removed, if one wanted to be particular—had been as dashing, charming, and charismatic as she could possibly have dreamed.
The hug he’d given her had been full of genuine affection, as though there had never been any question over her welcome into this long-distant side of her family.
Constance couldn’t wait to get to know Vijay better, along with the rest of her Indian relatives—but first, she had a secret policeman to catch.
She scanned the surrounding buildings for a handy way to gain some altitude and spotted it in an incongruously familiar contraption attached to a European-style hotel across the way.
The iron fire escape was nearly hidden in the shadows of a narrow alley. Constance hurried over to it and made a jump for the ladder, which was tucked up against the lower landing. Her fingers fell just shy of the bottom rung.
“Stuffy!” she called out with an imperious wave as Neil pushed through the crowd to join her. “Give me a leg up!”
Neil looked from her to the ladder.
“Well?” Constance prompted impatiently, waiting for him to offer her a boost.
Neil’s eyes glinted with an uncharacteristic spark of mischief behind his wire-framed spectacles. He reached up, grasped the lower rung, and easily pulled it down.
His expression remained conspicuously straight—save for a telling twitch at the corner of his mouth.
Constance glared at him. “Are you calling me short?”
“I never said a word,” Neil protested innocently.
Constance considered this—and then curved her mouth into a smile. “I’m sure I can make it up to you later.”
She made sure that the words were rich with threat.
Neil blanched. After all, he knew better than most just how creatively she could make good on it.
She set her boot onto the bottom rung—pausing as Ellie conspicuously cleared her throat.
“Perhaps Neil ought to go first?” Ellie pointedly suggested.
Neil’s brow furrowed with confusion—until his eyes dropped to Constance’s skirt.
The tips of his ears turned pink.
Constance’s smile widened. Neil really was her favorite person to torment. He simply left one with so many marvelous ways to go about it.
With a burst of wicked triumph, she started to climb.
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Constance was surveying the festival from the rooftop when Neil hauled himself over the ledge.
“It’s a lot bloody harder to climb when you can’t look up, you know!” he complained, resting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath.
“Is it?” Constance returned innocently.
He joined her at the front of the building. Ellie hopped over the ledge behind them, and Constance took in the sprawl of the festival.
The sheer scale of Lord Jagannath’s party awed her.
The street was packed as far as she could see in every direction.
Even the men were dressed colorfully, decked out in long collarless kurtas in festive hues of emerald green or sunset orange.
Others accented their dhotis and shirts with bright-hued scarves or painted gold and crimson symbols on their foreheads as signs of their devotion.
Tilak, Constance remembered her grandmother calling those ritual marks.
Like most proper English heiresses, Constance had been raised Church of England.
She still attended services—if somewhat lackadaisically—but had always been fascinated by her grandmother’s Hindu faith.
Padma had made a point of making sure that Constance had at least some understanding of this part of her religious heritage.
Her Aai’s quiet rituals were a world away from the celebration roaring below. Music came from everywhere, mingling with the sounds of mantras. The smell of spicy chaat and syrupy pastries wove together with the musk of incense and crushed flower petals in the air.
Constance wondered if she had ever seen anything quite so splendid in her life.
Adam waited on the pavement below them, tossing another snack to his worshipful dog.
Returning her attention to the crowd, Constance easily picked out the khaki-clad policemen. Several of them walked alongside the chariots to guard them from interlopers, while others patrolled various places along the broad street.
She traced the movement of those distinctive uniforms through the crowd like tracking ants across the lawn.
Her attention snagged on a storefront to her left. The painted sign above the entrance was faded with age. It read Chemist in English, with the equivalent text in Odia script below.
Horses were tied in front of it in an area roped off from the crowd. A dozen or so policemen lingered nearby, smoking cigarettes. Others pushed out of the building as more moved to step inside.
“What about there?” She pointed out the place.
Neil leaned over the edge of the low wall to look—and Constance indulged in a frankly appreciative assessment of the lean lines of his figure through his tweed jacket.
And why shouldn’t she? She’d been born with eyes for a reason, and there was nothing wrong with the way Neil Fairfax had turned out.
“It looks promising,” Neil allowed. “But how can we be sure?”
Constance quickly schooled her features into an expression of placid innocence as he turned to address the question to her and Ellie.
“We get a bit closer, I suppose,” Ellie suggested.
They descended the ladder—a bit more awkwardly, as other festival goers had discovered the route and were using it to secure themselves a better view. Collecting Adam and his dog, they set out to forge their way across the road.
Constance sparkled with excitement, soaking up everything around her.
Vendors sold silver earrings and colorful cotton saris.
A group of devotees sang to the rattle of a tambourine.
A frankly gorgeous fellow dressed as Shiva, complete with tiger skin and topknot, laughed beside a gray-bearded sadhu with dreadlocked hair and a saffron robe.
A rainbow of languages rang through the air. Constance recognized both English and Odia among them. The others she could only guess at—perhaps Hindi or Telugu. One intimidatingly tall fellow with a thick black beard, turban, and scimitar was probably shouting in Urdu.
Young men dashed past her, laughing as they kept pace with the towering chariot. Others raised their hands in worship as the god moved by.
Adam stopped just shy of the chemist’s shop, scanning the groups of loitering uniforms and patient horses. Constance craned her neck to look for the pale-eyed fellow from the photograph and failed utterly to see over the crowd.
Being short was dashed inconvenient at times.
Beside them, a makeshift stage had been erected at the side of the road. Neil stumbled back from a display of acrobatics by the foot of it as the actors stepped out from behind a curtain.
Ellie went oddly still as her attention locked on the performance. Her distant look gave Constance an itch of unease.
Adam noticed it as well. His eyes narrowed with concern and he put a hand to Ellie’s shoulder. “Hey, you all right?”
“What?” Ellie shook her head as though surfacing through deep water.
“You went over a bit funny there,” he elaborated patiently.
Ellie brushed off her skirt uncomfortably. “It’s… nothing.”
Adam clearly wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t press. “I’ll take a closer look at that shop,” he declared instead and slipped into the crowd.
Constance looked to the stage to see what might have made Ellie go over so strangely. Familiar characters strode across the platform—a muscular warrior with long hair and the mala necklace of an ascetic. A fellow with stuffed cheeks and a pinned-on tail, carrying a mace.
An even more impressive actor held up a bow, a quiver of arrows hanging on his back. His skin was painted a distinct sky blue.
“Oh—it’s the Ramayana!” Constance exclaimed. She pointed at the familiar characters. “Lord Rama’s the blue one. And that’s Hanuman, his loyal monkey companion, with the tail. The skinnier fellow must be Rama’s brother, Lakshmana.”
The curtain shimmered, and another actor stepped into view—a woman with fair skin and a shimmering sari, her hair dressed with flowers.
“And that’s Rama’s wife, Sita,” Constance added dryly. “Standing around doing nothing.”
Constance had never been very impressed by Sita. She was supposed to be divine, just like Rama and his companions—an avatar of the goddess Lakshmi. But what did she actually do?
Nothing, so far as Constance could tell. She gave longing looks while Rama won her hand in marriage. Joined him like a piece of luggage when he was exiled to a demon-haunted forest. Then she let herself get kidnapped by the evil Ravana, sparking Rama’s epic battle with the demon king.
What kind of goddess allowed herself to be kidnapped?
Not one that Constance was very impressed by.
A final player pushed through the curtain, his broad shoulders weighed down with ten maniacal faces.
The extra heads were all made of papier-maché, cleverly scaffolded around the actor’s face—not that Constance could see it yet through the undulating sea of humanity.
She pushed up on her toes for a better look. The bodies parted, and she found herself staring at a stranger—straight-backed, silver-haired, and sun-weathered with an officer’s peaked cap and pale gray eyes.
The howling heads of the demon king framed the man so perfectly that for a moment, Constance was taken in by an illusion.
How odd, she thought, that the demon king of Lanka would be played by an old white man.
Neil grabbed her arm. “Hold on—isn’t that Borthwick?”
Constance blinked away her confusion as the figure of Ravana straightened, revealing that a young Indian fellow actually wore the costume, his face painted to match the scowling papier-maché masks braced on his broad shoulders.
It had been a trick of perspective. Borthwick, left behind, turned and slipped away into the mass of close-packed bodies.