Under the Jeweled Sky by Alison McQueen Page A

and he would be left behind, bereft. Had he been a son of the Maharaja, with fine clothes and big certificates from fancy schools and universities, he would be able to march right up to her in front of everybody and ask if she would like to go for a drive or for cocktails. The British always had cocktails, and so did the Indians as far as he could see, at least some of them did, the ostentatious ones who came to visit and went on shooting parties and such like. He had seen them, him peering out from hidden panels, watching them fawning around the Maharaja, who, admittedly, stuck to the fruit juices and never touched alcohol. It wasn’t right that Jag should be in this position, that he should somehow be made to feel that he was not good enough or did not deserve to become the kind of man he intended to be. He did not want to clean out the elephant stalls and wash clothes and copy pages of obsolete texts when he already had so many ideas of his own. Important ideas. He would find a way to change things, to show his father that the world was a different place now and that he was no longer a boy who must be corralled into the same pen as his ancestors. He wanted more from his life, more than he had ever imagined possible. Above everything, he wanted her.
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    Inside the palace, whispers traveled the corridors on a matter even more alarming than the day’s politics. The source of the trouble came as no surprise to anyone. The First Maharani was up to her usual tricks, this time spreading malicious gossip about the Maharaja’s new bride, saying that she looked like a monkey and that the Maharaja had been tricked into the arrangement. All this and more she shared with her ladies-in-waiting while her maids enrobed her in a brocaded sari of Benares silk and placed the heavy bangles on her wrists. By the time she had finished dressing, every one of her servants knew that the Maharaja’s intended was covered in fur, and that she had been born that way as a result of an ancient curse in the family’s bloodline. The fur had been painfully threaded from her face and hands so that her image could be taken and shown to the Maharaja, but by the time of the wedding it would all have grown back. The comb had become still in the hands of her maid as the First Maharani speculated on the moment His Highness would glimpse his new bride, saying that he would probably die of a heart attack when he realized he had taken a monkey as a wife. Then her own son, the Maharaja’s firstborn, would accede to the throne, and she, as Dowager Maharani, would have wife number three paraded through the streets naked like a zoological exhibit. Not that she had ever seen her, of course, but nobody ever took any notice of such immaterial details, particularly not in the zenana , where the women of the palace remained in purdah , locked in a deathly monotony of confinement, peering at the world through delicately latticed portals. Each of the maharanis had their own apartments, with their own complement of staff, trained in the nature of their particular foibles. The First Maharani, for example, liked her food rich and sweet, and her chef had perfected all her favorite dishes during his years of service to her. The Second Maharani, on the other hand, never ate meat and only rarely ate fish. Naturally, her chef was very thin.
    News of the monkey bride spread through the palace like wildfire, first through the zenana , causing the Second Maharani to faint dramatically into the waiting arms of her maid. The screams of anguish from her ladies-in-waiting could be heard all the way to the durbar hall, closely followed by the rushing of feet bearing a message for Dr. Schofield to come straight away.
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    â€œDescribe to me her symptoms.” Dr. Schofield spoke through the pink alabaster fretwork, his face respectfully averted from the hidden lady-in-waiting who relayed his instructions from voice to voice from