Jean rustled the magazine as a signal to her ayah to come and replace it on the table.
"Koi-hai, Lalun."
The young ayah leapt up far more quickly than usual, padding silently forward on her bare feet, eyes rolling white under masses of black and oily Madrassi hair. As she took the periodical she looked up twice at the white muslin sheets which served as a ceiling, as if expecting the wooden roof beams out of sight above them to come crashing down.
"What on earth is the matter with your girl, Jean?" Deborah Boxwood asked. "She seems as nervous as a cat on hot bricks."
"I daresay she's noticed the punkah-wallah as gone to sleep again and she's afraid she'll get the blame for it."
Jean was right. The long panel of bamboo framed fabric which hung just below the ceiling sheets wasn't moving, as it should have been to keep the air circulating in the room. Which meant in turn that the old man sitting cross legged on the verandah had fallen asleep in the afternoon heat instead of attending to his duty of continually pulling on the rope which kept the punkah swinging.
"I'll send Manga to deal with him," Carol said and clicked her fingers. The ayah who rose from her mat was by far the oldest of the servants, almost forty and only kept on because of her savage bad temper when dealing with other native servants failing in their duties. "Punka, juldi, Manga."
Manga bobbed her head and turned towards the door.
"There's no cord on it," Camilla observed.
"I beg your pardon?"
"There's no cord attached to the punkah – no wonder it's not moving."
All of the women looked up at the punkah. Camilla was right. There should have been a cord attached to one end of the punkah flap, a cord ascending up past the muslin sheets to the roof space, and to pulleys which led it sideways, through a gap in the upper wall and then down to the verandah.
Carol shook her head in disbelief at Indian inefficiency: "How tiresome. Now we'll… "
Her mouth stopped moving, lips agape in her tilted back head as the sound of tearing cloth came from above the pool. A knife blade had appeared in the muslin ceiling sheet directly overhead, slashing a gap a yard long in the fabric. The cut spread, both longways and across as the sheet was pulled on at the edges, opening up like a split sail in a gale. Each of the watchers was astonished to see, revealed in the gap, a young Indian boy lying on one of the roof beams, his legs wrapped around it with all the unthinking agility of a monkey, the shiny new knife in his hand matching the vivid white teeth displayed in a wide grin.
None of the woman had the faintest notion of what could be going on: puzzlement compounded by the sight of the punkah cord being held steady in the boy's hand, with a large round glass-like object hanging from the end of it.
The boy shouted, the cord began to run through his fingers, the object dropped, within eight feet of the surface of the pool before stopping again – and Camilla Hartley-Dexter screamed in fear.
What was hanging from four securing ropes at the bottom of the cord was a large transparent glass bowl, open topped and with steeply curved sides, like the ones used to keep goldfish in. But there was no water inside this bowl and the mass of wriggling bodies trying to climb the smooth sides were not gold in color but green. Small green snakes, each about six inches long and instantly recognizable as green kraits – the deadliest snakes on the entire subcontinent. All that was needed was for the bowl to continue its fall into the water and the whole mass of deadly and infuriated reptiles would be tipped out of their small prison into the larger confines of the pool. A fall and a release which could only mean a quick and agonizing death for anyone still inside the pool.
Jean Ellington was the first to recover at least part of her wits. She wriggled like one of the snakes herself as she tried to slide on her back over the pool's retaining wall while still keeping her eyes on the bowl hanging over them all like the sword of Damocles.
"Stop it, you fool – stop it!" Camilla screeched. "Look at him!"
Jean looked up, straight into the glistening eyes of the boy and those shiny white teeth – and the glittering steel of the knife blade now pressed against the cord hanging from the pulley below the beam he was lying on. The gesture, the meaning and the threat were all as clear and unmistakable as an aimed gun and far more terrifying. Amanda instantly stopped trying to get over the walclass="underline" furthermore, as the boy pointed a finger at her and then at the pool, she slipped back into the water without hesitation.
Normally, she might have been astonished and disgusted in obeying a native urchin. But nothing was normal with that tangle of writhing bodies and evil little heads pressing against the glass directly above her. Many terrible and fearsome things she could have borne calmly and courageously but an intertwined mass of venomous snakes were not among them. She was petrified with fear.
"Hallo, ladies. Another warm afternoon, isn't it?"
The wives gaped at the hut door and at Manga holding it open with a deep bow for His Royal Highness the Colonel Prince Ravi of Kultoon. He passed her a small leather purse which sent the ayah down on her knees in obeisance. But even that action was nowhere as astonishing as the fact that Prince Ravi was wearing nothing but a pyjamy tunic of pure silk around his muscular body, a tunic secured only by a loosely knotted sash at the waist. He strolled into the hut with all the casual assurance of a born aristocrat – and behind him came a crowd of men, the other officers of the Kultooni Irregulars, all dressed in the same half naked style as their Colonel. And all of them grinning in the same way at a shared joke. Some of them also had purses in their hands, which they threw down in front of the eye rolling ayahs.
The clinking and chinking noises as the purses hit the floor sent the Indian women into scrabbling seizures which were rapidly followed by worshipping gratitude, the servants all on their knees like Manga, arms outstretched and foreheads dipping down and down again in thanksgiving. The cavalrymen scarcely noticed the servants' reactions as they gathered in a line behind their Colonel, like spectators on the touch line of a polo field. And even the bowl of angry snakes could not keep the women's eyes away from the riding crops several of the brown skinned men were either holding or had dangling from straps around their wrists.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Your Royal Highness?" Carol Carnac-Smyth yelped.
The Prince reached out his hand and one of the younger officers put into it the heavy and ungainly shape of a Webley.45 pistol. Ravi pulled back the hammer with his thumb, lifted the barrel up and pointed it directly at the glass bowl. Then he moved it slightly to one side: there was a huge bang, the pistol recoiled in a chorus of screams and the smell of cordite spread around the room. Camilla Hartley-Dexter for one felt a sudden warmth in the water between her legs in reaction to the shot as she pissed herself in fear. The bullet must have passed within an few inches of the bowl and if it had hit it …
"Well, ladies," the Prince said calmly, "To answer the question, I thought we might have a really jolly jig-jig party. That is to say, you're the ones who get jig-jigged by all these fine fellows here -otherwise I might try a little more target practice. Think about it before you come to any rash decisions."
He handed the smoking pistol back to the junior officer then clicked his fingers. Things happened: unexpected things. A shower of silver coins fluttered down from above to land and float on top of the pool.
No, not silver coins: the same size, round as coins, silver in color but far too light to be metallic.
Jean Ellington picked one up and stared at the familiar words on it -the very same words she had first seen at school when one of the girls had shown the exact same kind of silverfoil packet to her friends in fits of giggles. What were being scattered into the pool were rubber contraceptive sheaths in their sealed packets, each one guaranteed free of defects by the manufacturers, The Imperial and Britannic Rubber Company, Adam and Eve Street, Market Harborough, Great Britain.