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These rooms had been created for a sexually active and sensual woman, Keira decided—a woman who had been a courtesan, surely, rather than a consort? Was that why he had given her this suite? As a reminder of what he considered her to be?
She washed and changed quickly into a cotton top with short sleeves and a softly pleated skirt, and then made her way back along the corridor and down the stairs to the hallway, where Jay was standing waiting for her.
‘I thought we would eat here,’ Jay announced, indicating the fretted arched doorway of a restaurant just off the city’s main street.
‘They serve traditional local food, and I should warn you that it is quite spicy. If you would prefer to eat somewhere else…?’
Keira hadn’t thought that she was hungry, but just the smell of food wafting through the door was enough to make her mouth water.
‘No—here is fine,’ she assured him.
The restaurant was busy, with waiters wearing brightly coloured traditional clothes and intricately folded turbans that gave them a fierce warrior-like air, and diners seated on large cushions on the floor around low-level tables.
Everyone turned to look at Jay, no doubt because of his status as a member of the royal family. The waiters bowed low to him, and the restaurant owner, who was dressed in a European business suit, came hurrying forward to welcome them, offering them a higher table with chairs when he saw Keira.
But Keira shook her head. ‘Unless, of course, you would prefer that?’ she asked Jay.
His dismissive shrug said that it wasn’t a matter of any great concern to him how they sat, and he certainly had no trouble whatsoever adopting the traditional almost yoga-type pose she had assumed herself, with her legs and feet covered by her skirt.
‘We serve traditional smoked sule kebas here,’ the owner informed her, ‘and the vegetarian food of the Maheshwari of the Marwaris. But if I may, I would recommend our dal baati, which is a house speciality.’
‘Yes, please,’ Keira accepted with a smile.
She was certainly at ease with traditional India customs and food, Jay acknowledged, as he watched Keira eating her meal with obvious enjoyment.
The shops were just reopening after the heat of the day when they stepped back out into the wide tree-shaded avenue, just over an hour later.
Jay explained to her that the water supply came from artesian wells deep down in the earth, below the rocky plateau on which the city was built and that the seventeenth-century poet prince who had created the city had had underground storage systems built to provide water not just for his palace and his city but also for his gardens.
Listening to Jay, Keira could hear in his voice the pride in his ancestor. Their backgrounds were so very different. He could take pride in his parents and his upbringing, where all she could feel was shame. He was the son of a Maharaja; she was the daughter of a prostitute and a drug addict. He was a man and she was a woman, and when he touched her. But, no—she must not think like that.
Children in uniform were filing out of their school, walking together in pairs in a sedate crocodile.
‘My brother has instituted several reforms since he came to power,’ Jay told Keira as they watched the children. ‘One of which is to ensure that every child receives a good education. He says it’s the best investment there can be, as these children will be the future not just of our city but of India itself.’
They had reached the entrance to the bazaar and Keira stood still, its sights and scents enveloping her. Bright silks hung in the doorway of one shop, whilst intricately hand-beaten metalware lay heaped on the pavement outside another. A jeweller was throwing back his shutters to reveal the brightness of his gold to the late-afternoon sunshine. From inside a herbalist’s shop the pungent smell of his goods drifted out into the heat.
Children released from their crocodile darted up the narrow passageways, laughing to one another, whilst three young Hindu initiates passed by in their orange robes, their voices raised in chanting joy.
Several hours later, when they were in the shop of a fabric merchant, Keira had to admit that Jay had sourced his contacts well. The merchant had told them that he had cousins who owned and ran a factory in a small town, south-east of the city, a town Keira already knew was famous for its block-printed cotton. The town owed its success to the fact that a local stream possessed certain minerals in its water that set dye.
