VIII

On 6 August 1803 Nizam Ali Khan died in his sleep, at the age of sixty-nine. That same day Lord Wellesley declared war on the Maratha Confederacy, and sent his younger brother Arthur into battle. James had long predicted both events, and had dreaded the prospect of either.

For years he had worried about the Nizam’s death and the possibility of the major upheavals that might follow it. He had good reason to do so: almost every Mughal Emperor had come to power in a fratricidal bloodbath, and the same pattern had shown every sign of developing in the Mughal satellite of Hyderabad: when Nizam Ali’s father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had died in 1748, Hyderabad had been engulfed in fourteen years of disastrous civil war as the Nizam’s six sons fought for control. Moreover, Nizam Ali’s own progeny had already demonstrated their capacity for internecine anarchy: in 1795 and 1796 the Nizam’s eldest son Ali Jah, and his ambitious son-in-law Dara Jah, had both revolted. Although the two rebellions had been quickly crushed (and Ali Jah despatched in an apparent suicide, while under Mir Alam’s charge), fear of the Nizam’s sudden death had kept James in Hyderabad, or its immediate vicinity, for most of the previous two years. This worry was the reason he had been unable to go to Madras to see his brother William off to England—a meeting both knew might well have been their last.^gf

In the event, however, to the surprise of most observers, the transition of power was completely smooth. The Nizam had had another stroke in early June 1803, after which James had reported sadly to Calcutta that ‘his whole appearance is now [suddenly] emaciated in the extreme, his eyesight dim and drowsy, his countenance worn, his speech feeble and inarticulate, and his faculties in short greatly impaired’.¹ A month later, ‘Old Nizzy’s’ condition had worsened further: ‘The very dangerous state of the Nizam’s health continues to be such as to leave very little hope of his Recovery,’ James reported, ‘the Palsey having spread to his left side, and deprived him nearly of the use of his left arm and leg … ’² As the old man’s end was clearly approaching, James and Aristu Jah—who was the grandfather of the Crown Prince Sikander Jah’s wife and so, like James, firmly committed to his swift accession—were both able to make minute arrangements for ensuring a peaceful handover of power.

The Nizam finally passed away in the Chaumhala Palace in the early morning of 6 August, and was buried that evening beside his mother in the great marble forecourt of the Hyderabad Mecca Masjid.^gg The following day James was able to report to Arthur Wellesley that ‘nothing has hitherto occurred beyond that sort of stir and commotion in the capital usually attendant on such an event, and I have little doubt that I shall have it in my power to announce to you in the course of tomorrow, the Prince Secunder Jah’s peaceable succession’.³

This was indeed the case. Remarkably, the thirty-one-year-old Sikander Jah was able to take over the reigns of government without a single sword being removed from its scabbard. The following evening James picked up his pen to report: ‘I am just returning from witnessing and assisting in the ceremony of His Highness Secunder Jah’s installation on the vacant musnud [throne] of the Deccan. This was conducted in the due forms, but with little if any pomp or ceremony, owing to the very recent death of the late sovereign.’ To mark the accession of Sikander Jah guns were fired in the cantonments, from the city walls and from the parapets of Golconda, while (somewhat bizarrely) James gravely reported that ‘extra butter [was] served to the Europeans’ of the Subsidiary Force as part of the celebrations; but otherwise ‘the utmost tranquillity reigns, both within and without the city, and I see no probability of its meeting with the smallest interruption’.⁴

It was only in the period that followed the carefully stage-managed succession that James realised how much he found himself missing his old friend, the eccentric but kindly Nizam: ‘His memory will be ever dear to me,’ he wrote to William a week after the death. ‘His eldest son, the Prince Secunder Jah ascended the musnud on the 8th amid the universal acclamation of the people. I all along assured the GG [Wellesley] that the succession would be a peaceable one, and I think myself particularly fortunate that it has so turned out. I have reason to believe that some doubts on this head were entertained in other quarters, so that if my predictionhad not been verified, I should have been subjected to, and no doubt have met with, considerable reproach, if not something worse...’⁵

Privately, however, James had few illusions about Nizam Ali Khan’s successor. Five years earlier, in his first major report from Hyderabad, he had written to Wellesley of Sikander Jah’s ‘unpopularity and sordid avarice’, remarking that he was ‘not extolled for the brightness of his talents nor the strength of his judgement’, though he also remarked that, ‘inclined to corpulency though he may be, yet [Sikander] is not ungraceful … His deportment is easy and affable, and in his placid well-favoured countenance, mildness, diffidence and good nature, are conspicuously enough depicted.’⁶ This, it soon became clear, was wishful thinking: reports quickly began to circulate of the new Nizam publicly kicking his concubines and even attempting to hang various members of his family with silk handkerchiefs. Soon there were mutterings that he was suffering from bouts of insanity. According to Henry Russell, James’s assistant, Sikander Jah’s

expression is dull, melancholy and care-worn … and he looks much older than he is. He has been supposed in some degree insane, and certainly [his behaviour] has countenanced the suspicion … He is subject both to the delusion of his own fears and jealousies, and to the pernicious influence of those low senseless creatures that are about him …

The Nizam leads a life of almost total seclusion. He hardly ever appears in public, and seldom even sees his Ministers. What little intercourse he has with them is sometimes by notes, but generally by messages conveyed through female servants. His time is passed either in his private apartments where he sits quite alone, or with a few personal attendants of profligate character and low habits who flatter his prejudices, and poison his mind with stories of the treachery of his Ministers. He has no domestic intercourse even with his nearest male relations. Neither his brothers nor his sons ever visit him, except on the great festivals, and even then they are admitted to him in public, where he generally receives their nuzzurs [ceremonial offerings] and then dismisses them without speaking to them... ⁷

The days when James could rely on a friendly and sympathetic figure on the throne of Hyderabad were clearly over.

At the same time as the Nizam’s dominions were experiencing a moment of unexpected tranquillity, the Marathas territories to the north and west of Hyderabad were given over to a war of quite extraordinary violence.

Wellesley’s intricate manoeuvres to divide and subjugate the Marathas—the last great military force in India really able to take on the British—were now reaching their head. With the death of the great Minister Nana Phadnavis, as General Palmer put it, ‘all the wisdom and moderation of the Mahratta government departed’, and Wellesley could sit back in Calcutta and watch as the great Confederacy unravelled.⁸ In Nana’s absence, rival warlords conspired and intrigued against each other in a welter of mutual distrust.

The young Peshwa, Baji Rao II, had proved wholly unequal to the challenge of holding together the different factions that made up his power base. In particular he had alienated the powerful Holkar clan, watching with glee as one of the senior males of the family was trampled to death on his orders by an elephant. The dead man’s brother, Jaswant Rao Holkar, duly attacked Pune, and took the city by surprise.^gh Jaswant Rao fired the town and ravaged the vicinity so as to leave ‘not a stick standing at a distance of 150 miles’ from Pune.⁹ Fleeing the violence, the Peshwa was driven into exile in British territory at Bassein, a former Portuguese city a little to the north of Bombay, full of crumbling Jesuit churches and Dominican convents.

There Wellesley succeeded where General Palmer had failed, and forced the now powerless Peshwa to sign a humiliating Subsidiary Treaty. This document, known as the Treaty of Bassein, was ratified on 31 December 1802. With it, Wellesley believed he had at last succeeded in turning the Marathas into dependants of the British, with a huge British garrison installed, according to the terms of the treaty, to overlook the Peshwa’s palace in Pune, into which British arms would now reinstall him.

As soon as he heard the details of the treaty, James knew that this was never going to work, and he had the courage to speak out and say so. In an official despatch in March 1803 he warned that not one of the Maratha warlords—the real powers in the Peshwa’s dominions—would sit back and allow the English to control Baji Rao as their puppet and in this way attempt to subvert and undermine the Maratha Empire. Moreover he predicted that Wellesley’s actions would only succeed in uniting the Marathas where Baji Rao had failed, and that together the Maratha armies would mass in a great ‘hostile confederacy’ to fight the Company.

Wellesley was predictably furious at what he regarded as James’s impertinence, and wrote his most intemperate despatch yet to Hyderabad, saying that any sort of united Maratha resistance was now ‘categorically impossible’ and that Kirkpatrick was guilty of ‘ignorance, folly, and treachery’ in suggesting otherwise. But James held his ground, replying that his sources of intelligence indicated that ‘such a confederacy was highly probable’, that Jaswant Rao was even now on his way to reoccupy Pune, and that one of the leading Maratha chieftains, the Rajah of Berar, was planning to join him there. He also defended his action in sending notice of his intelligence to Arthur Wellesley and Colonel Close, arguing that it was his clear duty to ‘prepare men’s minds for an event which by coming unexpectedly might be apt to excite temporary alarm and inconvenience’. He concluded the letter by challenging Wellesley to sack him if he was wrong:

If the explanations I have here offered should fail of their expected effect, and the unfavourable impressions which his Excellency seems to have received of my character and conduct should unfortunately not be removed, it will rest with his Excellency to determine on the steps proper in such an event to be pursued. Whatever they may be, I shall be found I trust ready to submit to them with a resignation and a fortitude arising from conscious rectitude of intention.¹⁰

Having sent the despatch off, James sat down to await his removal from office, which he thought could not be far away. His job was, however, narrowly saved yet again when all his predictions about the Marathas proved entirely correct. Within eleven days of accusing James of being an incompetent fool, Wellesley had his secretary write to him again, this time (as James later told William) ‘apprising me, that the Gov Genl had selected me as peculiarly qualified for the task [of leading] an immediate Deputation to the Rajah of Berar’s Camp, for the express purpose of preventing if possible the very Confederacy which a few days before his Ldship pronounced to be impracticable, and which I was charged with folly and ignorance or something worse for stating the possibility of’.¹¹

It was however too late now to undo the damage Wellesley’s aggressive policies had done. In August, hostilities were opened, with five British armies converging from different directions on the huge and now united Maratha Confederacy. In a bloody five-month campaign, the Marathas were defeated in a succession of brilliant victories by Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, one of which, the Battle of Assaye, was reckoned by him the finest in his entire military career. But there was a huge cost. At Assaye alone, Arthur Wellesley left a quarter of his army dead on the battlefield; as one of his senior officers wrote to him soon afterwards: ‘I hope you will not have occasion to purchase any more victories at such a high price.’¹²

James Kirkpatrick, who believed the entire conflict unnecessary and misconceived, was more acerbic: ‘oceans of blood and treasure have been wasted in his [Lord Wellesley’s] pretended plan of general pacification which was [in fact] a mere pretence for the general subjugation [of India … the completion of which] we appear to be as far from as ever, and [which has] roused a restless uneasy spirit of dread and animosity against us’ amongst all the other Indian princes.¹³

As far as James was concerned this only added to the intense dislike he felt for his master, and he wrote to William (now reunited with his daughters in England and ‘taking the waters’ at Bath), of the ‘contempt and abhorrence’ with which he now regarded the Governor General.¹⁴ He added, in a rare show of anger with his beloved elder brother, ‘I am concerned to find that you retain your former sentiments regarding the public principles and conduct of a Certain Person [i.e. Lord Wellesley] as it must occasion a difference of political opinion at least between us, which there seems to be no prospect of reconciling.’¹⁵

He also told William of the callous manner in which Lord Wellesley had broken all his most solemn promises to General Palmer. Having eased the old General out of his Residency in Pune with the promise of a generous pension and a prominent position by his side in Calcutta, Wellesley had completely neglected and ignored Palmer since his arrival in Bengal. Not only had he failed to produce the promised job or indeed any sort of financial compensation, he had insulted him by failing to summon him even once for consultation during the course of the Maratha War, despite the fact that there was no Englishman in Calcutta, or indeed anywhere else in India, who knew the mind of the Peshwa or his warlords as Palmer did. As Palmer wrote helplessly to his old patron Warren Hastings, ‘Lord W has totally discontinued his levées, and as he has not invited me to dinner I have no means of access to him.’¹⁶

Throughout the course of the Maratha War James’s letters are full of concern for the General’s ‘cruel situation’ and his ‘continued slight and ill treatment, which afflict me much more than they frankly surprise me’.¹⁷

For James the sky darkened even further seven months later. For on 9 May 1804, his other great friend and ally in Hyderabad, the Minister Aristu Jah, died, and was buried the same day in his Suroor Nagar garden.

Unlike the Nizam’s death, which had been long expected, Aristu Jah’s end came as a complete surprise. Although he was a direct contemporary of Nizam Ali Khan, the Minister had always seemed far stronger and more active and robust; well into his mid-sixties he would take regular exercise, notably with his daily gallop on the fine Arab stallions whose breeding and maintenance he minutely oversaw. At the end of April he had caught a fever which for a week had looked serious, but after ten days he had appeared to be pulling through. As James reported to Calcutta:

after having been pronounced out of danger yesterday by his Physicians, [Aristu Jah] relapsed towards the evening, and after a continued fever and delirium during the whole course of the night, this morning early breathed his last. His remains have just been interred with considerable funereal Pomp, at the family Vault, about a mile from the City; the procession being attended by most of the principal Omrahs at Court and a vast concourse of Inhabitants.¹⁸

Worse yet for James, while he was still recovering from the shock of the loss of his friend, it became clear within a few days that Nizam Sikander Jah’s preferred candidate to replace Aristu Jah as Minister was none other than James’s bitterest old enemy, Mir Alam. Moreover, it soon became equally apparent that Mir Alam’s candidacy was fully supported by Wellesley from Calcutta.

The person responsible for Wellesley’s decision to support Mir Alam’s return to power was Henry Russell. Russell had been James’s Assistant in Hyderabad since the end of 1801 and, with James’s recommendation, had recently, at the age of only twenty-one, been promoted to the job of the Residency’s Chief Secretary. He had also become James’s main friend and ally among the British in Hyderabad: James wrote to William that ‘young Henry Russell continues as much as ever attached to me’, and was ‘my most valuable young friend’.¹⁹

Despite the nineteen-year age gap between them, the two men had much in common, and James found Russell a lively and interesting companion. Moreover, like James, Russell showed every sign of appreciating Hyderabadi culture, and he kept an Indian bibi by whom he had had a child of about the same age as Sahib Begum.²⁰ A picture of him at this period by an Indian miniaturist survives in a private collection. It shows an alert, neat, handsome young man with close-cropped hair and elongated muttonchop whiskers of a style very similar to those then being sported by Lord Wellesley. He is dressed in a hybrid uniform of an embroidered black jacket of a vaguely English cut, but below it he wears cool white Indian pyjama bottoms and Hindustani slippers.²¹

Russell had one major flaw, though James never mentions it, and it is apparent more in his own letters than in the comments others made about him. This was an unusual vanity and conceit about himself, his looks and his intelligence. The eldest of ten children, Russell was regarded as a child prodigy by his adoring father, and he grew up patronising his younger brother Charles, as he would later patronise his staff, his colleagues, his lovers and his wives. His early letters to Charles, written when he was eighteen and had only just arrived in Hyderabad, are very much those of an experienced man of the world (as he clearly saw himself) attempting to help his little brother fathom the mysteries of adult-hood.

In 1802 Charles had recently arrived in Calcutta, and Henry puts pen to paper to advise him: ‘I need not direct your attention to the ladies—follow my footsteps and you will be a favourite; the society of females improves the mind as much as the manners of a gentleman, but avoid becoming that detestable or rather negative, contemptible character “a ladies man”.’ He adds, ‘I passed most of the day in the society of a lovely little female friend for whose name and description I refer you to my late Chowringhee correspondence … Have you brought me nothing from Europe? [Not even] a fashionable article of dress?’

A month later, Henry takes his younger brother to task for failing to have mastered the art of flattering the women of Calcutta: ‘Flattery is only to be administered through the medium of a third person,’ he advises. ‘If you assure a woman that she is handsome she will doubtless believe you but she will not obtain a favourable impression of your sincerity (a virtue you must make a woman believe you possess whether you do or not). But if another man tells her that he has heard you deliver a favourable opinion both of her beauty and her understanding (the two weakest points of a female) she will be upon as good terms with you as she no doubt is with herself...’ This advice appears to have been of little use to Charles, as a month later Henry writes again in exasperation, ‘can it really be possible that a gentleman of your pretensions should not be able to discover a single person through whom to administer the flattery? ’²²

Although now permanently based in Hyderabad, Russell had happened to be in Calcutta visiting his father and stepmother when the news of the death of Aristu Jah reached Bengal. He had been immediately summoned to Government House and consulted by Wellesley about who the British should recommend as a replacement. Unable to resist such red-carpet treatment, Russell had dashed off a short report for the Governor General in which he mentioned in passing that Mir Alam—whom he had never met—was probably the most pro-British of the nobles of the durbar. Wellesley had seized on the line and used it to overrule the various detailed recommendations made by James Kirkpatrick in his despatch on the subject. Mir Alam was the only Hyderabadi noble Wellesley had ever met, and he made his decision in an instant. In the margins of Russell’s report he wrote: ‘This Paper is extremely creditable to Mr Russell’s Judgement, Diligence, and Knowledge of the affairs of the Court of Hyderabad. Meer Allum is the only person qualified for the office or disposed (according to our best information) to exercise it in the Spirit of the Alliance. He must therefore be recommended.’²³

Thereafter, supported by both the new Nizam and by Wellesley, Mir Alam’s appointment was assured. The decision was made even while the Mir was still under house arrest on his country estates, whence he had been banished by Aristu Jah and had yet to return to the city of Hyderabad.

There was however one major problem that no one had anticipated. Mir Alam had now been in internal exile for four years, and in that time had not once been seen in Hyderabad. What no one in the city (or in Calcutta) knew was that during that time the Mir had been very ill indeed. The leprosy which had first made its appearance in 1799 was now far advanced. On arrival in Hyderabad, the Mir turned out to be not only embittered, twisted and bent on revenge; he had also suffered a more or less complete physical collapse. On his first visit to greet the newly returned Mir, James was horrified, writing to William: ‘The man’s mental faculties appear to have nearly kept pace in decay with his Body, which with his fallen-in nose, is now the most hideous lump of corruption and deformity that was ever beheld.’²⁴

Nor was James the only one to be alarmed at the sight of the Mir. According to the Tarikh-i-Asaf Jahi,

[On his return to Hyderabad] Mir Alam had become hideously afflicted by leprosy, so much so that secretions oozed from his body. Many Indian and British doctors tried to cure him, but it was of no use. At last [at the suggestion of an ayurvedic doctor] a very dangerous and angry snake was brought and put on his bed, for it was said that if a snake bit a leper he would be cured. But the snake did not bite him. Instead, it took one look at the Mir and slithered away as fast as it could.²⁵

It was now, however, too late to do anything. Mir Alam was confirmed as the First Minister of Nizam Sikander Jah in a ceremony on 13 July 1804. It was not long before he demonstrated the degree to which he was willing to pursue his quest for vengeance on those who had, in his eyes, tricked and humiliated him four years earlier. On 20 October, James was horrified to hear that in the early morning the women soldiers of the Zuffur Plutun had surrounded the mansion of Aristu Jah’s senior widow, Sarwar Afza Begum, and then ransacked the place. As he reported to Calcutta:

Meer Allum in order to secure the good favour of His Highness told him that [Aristu Jah] had taken jewels worth 12 lakhs [which rightly belonged to the government]. These he said the Sarwar Afza Begum had [in her Residence], & that they should be confiscated. They could not be got easily and His Highness sent five guards of females with some of his asseels to the Begum’s house. Much violence was used. They dragged the Begum by her arms into the courtyard & dug up the floor, removed the jewels & took that with a list to HH. They found jewels estimated at 12 lacs & a pearlbuzuband [armband] belonging to the Begum [worth] one lakh, 35,000 gold mohurs, 50,000 pagodas, 7 lacs and 92 thousand rupees, gold vessels including one [bejewelled elephant] howdah with pearls estimated at one lakh [rupees] ...²⁶

Despite her pleas, the new Nizam did nothing to help Sarwar Afza Begum, who was his senior wife’s grandmother. Instead, to add to her sufferings, he publicly humiliated his wife, Jahan Pawar Begum, Aristu Jah’s beloved granddaughter, at whose wedding the old Minister had wept and who now, exposed and unprotected since the death of Aristu Jah, began to be subjected to the same indignities as Sikander Jah’s other women. He also remained silent as Mir Alam ransacked in turn the houses and personal properties of each of Aristu Jah’s closest political associates, starting with his deputy Rajah Ragotim Rai.^gi

By the middle of 1804, James’s position must have seemed weaker than ever. Not only was he still effectively persona non grata in Calcutta, in the space of twelve months he had lost his two closest friends and allies in

Hyderabad. In their place was the paranoid, sadistic and intermittently insane Sikander Jah, and James’s sworn enemy, the embittered and malevolent Mir Alam. Yet James’s position was actually a lot stronger than he might have believed.

Unknown to him, the Company’s Court of Directors in London increasingly shared his feelings about the unnecessary and wasteful belligerency of Wellesley’s policies, though their concerns were motivated more by the crippling cost of the Governor General’s constant wars than by any ethical or moral considerations: while Wellesley’s conquests had annexed a wider swathe of territory than had the whole of Napoleon’s conquests at the same time in Europe, the effect was only to increase the Company’s deficits, which at this point were running at around £2 million a year.^gj Indeed the Company’s overall debt, which had stood at £17 million when Wellesley first arrived in India, was now rising towards £31.5 million.^gk The news of the cost of Lord Wellesley’s colossal new Government House in Calcutta was the final straw. Under Wellesley, the government of India, declared the Directors, had ‘simply been turned into a despotism’.

The pressure was building up, and by the autumn of 1804 the final decision had been taken: Wellesley was to be recalled, and Lord Cornwallis sent out to India for a second term, at the advanced age of sixty-seven.²⁷ He left England towards the end of 1804, although it was not until May 1805 that Wellesley received the news from London that he had been dismissed from office.

One of the principal problems that had developed under Wellesley, as even his supporters acknowledged, was that no one now ever dared to cross the Governor General. As his brother Arthur put it to Henry Wellesley, the third of the brothers in India, ‘Who will speak his mind to the Governor-General? Since you and [John] Malcolm have left him, there is nobody about him who has the capacity to understand these subjects, who has nerves to discuss them with him, and to oppose his sentiments when he is wrong.’²⁸

Of his senior officials only one man had dared to stand up to Wellesley, and even before Cornwallis had arrived in Calcutta, the new Governor General had been fully briefed about James Kirkpatrick’s principled stand against the worst excesses of Wellesley’s expansionist policies. Cornwallis instructed his assistants to arrange an interview with the brave and sensible Resident in Hyderabad as soon as possible. He also let it be known that he wished to see old General Palmer, whom he rememberedwell from his first term in India and whom he had reason to believe had also stood up to Wellesley on the Maratha business.²⁹

After five years of investigations, hostility and isolation, James’s ideas of co-existence and his more conciliatory approach to British—Indian relations were suddenly being looked at with new eyes. True, Cornwallis was no liberal, and he had been responsible for beginning the erosion of the social and economic status of Indians and Anglo-Indians,^gl a process that had merely accelerated throughout Wellesley’s governor generalship. Nevertheless, the old Marquis did not believe in threats and belligerence as an instrument of policy, and saw no need for the sort of naked imperialism imposed by Wellesley; moreover he was appalled by the needless bloodshed and expenditure it had caused. His job, as he saw it, was to ‘avoid war [and] to establish perfect confidence [among Indian princes] in the Justice and Moderation’ of the British—the very policies James had pursued since becoming Resident at Hyderabad.³⁰

Though he did not know it, James’s future, contrary to all the indications, had in fact never been brighter.

As the dolls’-house model of James’s new Residency building was being completed in the mahal, the real mansion was slowly beginning to rise from its groaning foundations a short distance to the north. Month by month throughout 1802, James had corresponded frantically with his friend James Brunton in Madras, making the final arrangements for the workmen he needed to build his new house. At the beginning of November there was still no sign of them, and James wrote to Brunton begging news of their progress, as he said he was ‘very anxious for the arrival of the architect & mechanics’.³¹ By the end of the month the first of the builders had begun to appear up the road from the port of Masulipatam, but many of the more skilled craftsmen were still missing: ‘despatch hither immediately,’ he begged Brunton in one letter, ‘one Head Maistry Bricklayer, one ditto Carpenter and one ditto Smith … Their wages are certainly high, but then I conclude that they are each perfect masters of their respective professions, and the head Maistry bricklayer is a tolerable architect.’³²

Steadily, one by one, the skilled maistry craftsmen arrived, and by the beginning of 1803 they had set to work building foundations. Over the course of the year, successive layers of stonework slowly begun to rise from the cat’s cradle of scaffolding and the piles of raw stonework which now lay about the bungalows of James’s garden. Amid the cries of the mynah birds and parakeets calling from the Residency char bagh came the more insistent tap-tap-tap of chisels on stone, the cries of the coolies and their wives swaying along narrow wooden walkways, and the yelling of the bellows boys and hammermen trying to be heard above the noise of the forge.

As the pillars of the Residency portico slowly rose above the runnels of the Mahal and the Mughal garden, and as in due course the sculptors began to carve the arms of the East India Company on the great triangular pediment overlooking the new deerpark, filled now with elk and black buck, James looked on with ever growing satisfaction. Judging from his letters, the new Residency was an achievement of which he was hugely proud, though he always recognised how much he owed to his departed mentors, Nizam Ali Khan and Aristu Jah. In one letter to his old patron Sir John Kennaway he wrote how, having been awarded the land by the old Nizam with the assistance of Aristu Jah,

It would of course still have been out of my power to have converted their liberal grant to any permanent or splendid use, had they not with still greater liberality readily undertaken to defray the expense of all the improvements which ensued, and which will, I trust, remain a lasting Monument to their generosity and munificence. They are now sadly succeeded by two men who are the very reverse of their regretted Predecessors and vie with each other in meanness and penury.³³

It was to Kennaway that James wrote the fullest description of his Residency ‘improvements’. His brother William, he seemed to accept, was not an aesthete, and would not have appreciated the labours he had undertaken to turn ‘one of the most dreary spots [in Hyderabad] into one of the most delightful in the whole Deckan’.³⁴ Indeed in his letters to William, James describes his ‘improvements’ as rarely as he once described the progress of his amours. But Sir John Kennaway was a man of taste who understood the business of building a country house, as he had demonstrated on his return to Britain when he tastefully extended and beautified the exquisite Inigo Jones mansion of Escot near Exeter that he had bought with his Indian fortune.³⁵ James knew about this, and with Kennaway he was not ashamed to show his pleasure and pride in what he had brought into being: ‘It would be as little in your power to recognise the place where you once resided, as it is out of the power of all who now see it to withhold their surprise and admiration,’ he wrote proudly in October 1804, as the building was nearing completion.

Of the old plan, nothing now remains but the Hindoostanny Garden, which with great improvements, and an entire restoration of the Cypress Avenues that were cruelly condemned to the axe in my Brother’s time, now flourishes in renovated bloom. Thebârâhdurry [the Mughal pavilion] where you used to dine, together with the Mahl or Sleeping Apartment that were behind it on the other side of the square fountain (now an octagonal one) are levelled to the ground, and in their place a Grand Mansion, erected according to the Chastest Rules of Architecture, and two stories high, now rears its proud head on the site of the antient Mahl, and is surrounded in front, and on its Eastern and Western Faces, with Pleasure Grounds, and a paddock well stocked with Deer, of nearly a mile in circumference.

Of the magnificent new Residency House, he told Sir John:

I will just inform you, that the House which the last Minister built for me, has a Grand Salon with a Gallery and Painted Ceiling, a Portico to the North of nearly the same dimensions, a verandah to the south, with two grand public staircases, and twelve Private Apartments, the whole finished and furnished in a stile suitable to the magnificence of the Structure and the Rank of the Princely Donors. Besides the above numerated apartments, there is an arched ground floor, some of the apartments of which are particularly cool and pleasant during the hot winds.^gm

Before the North Front of the House, there is an extensive oval sheet of water, which is constantly full, and round which a wide gravel walk with lamps at proper distances meet and terminate at the foot of a most stately flight of granite steps that lead up to the portico.

As an accompaniment to this description—or rather as a corrective to its lameness—I propose furnishing you by the bye with views of all the Principal Buildings and Grounds at the Residency, which are even now being taken, by the Gentleman who most ably assisted me in laying them out.^36gn

This palace was to be James’s home, and he tried to persuade William to send his eldest daughter Isabella, now aged sixteen, out to him so that he could bring her ‘back with me to the Residency, which by that time will perhaps be one of the most delightful spots in India, as I think Isabella herself will allow when she has once seen it; and where I trust you will ultimately find yourself greatly mistaken in supposing that she cannot meet with an eligible match—while at all events, there can be no harm in trying the experiment’. James also insisted that he would pay Isabella’s Indian costs, whether she came to see him or just went to straight to Calcutta as part of the British ‘fishing fleet’ of girls who sailed out every year on the lookout for an eligible husband:^go ‘Isabella, you know, is my daughter by adoption, and as such I beg you will make her over entirely to my management. It shall be my business and my delight, to defray her expenses... ’³⁷

As the Residency rose higher and higher, and the prospect of actually moving into it grew closer, James began to think about how he would furnish his huge new mansion. He started by ordering an enormous carpet, sixty feet long by thirty wide, to be woven for the main durbar hall.³⁸ He also purchased an enormous chandelier which the Company had bought from the ever impecunious Prince of Wales, and which had once hung in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. At the same time, thinking of the entertainments he could hold in the house, James asked his Madras agent to try to find him a bandmaster and ‘twelve lads from the orphan school’ to be trained up as musicians.³⁹ He also got a job lot of music and musical instruments sent up, along with twenty cartloads of his much-missed potatoes, plus ‘a few armed peons to guard them on the road’, one of his odder consignments.⁴⁰

At the same time James continued sending orders to Europe for other more rare and valuable items that would allow him to fulfil his great dream of combining the lifestyle of a Mughal prince, the landed pursuits of a Georgian gentleman and the interests of a Renaissance man. Over the course of 1803 and 1804, these interests seem to become increasingly scientific, and James’s letters are suddenly full of requests for ‘a good Electrifying Machine with a curious apparatus such as would surprise and delight’ the nobles of the durbar, as well as a ‘box of chemical preparations’. The electrical apparatus apparently got lost in transit, but the ‘chemical box’ duly appeared.^gp

James’s interest in chemistry, however, seems to have been soon overtaken by his growing fascination with astronomy. He hatched an ambitious plan to build an observatory on the roof of the Residency, and towards the end of 1804 he asked William to send out to him ‘a capital telescope for astronomical observations … The terrace of my new house is a noble observatory, and there is a gentleman here who has inspired me with a great love and admiration of the noble science of astronomy.’⁴¹

^gq This was none other than James’s old friend and now relation by marriage, Khair’s first cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari. At the end of 1804, Shushtari had taken advantage of the death of Aristu Jah and Mir Alam’s return to power to come back to Hyderabad from Bombay (where he had been briefly engaged in the textile trade⁴²), to complete the writing of his great memoir, the Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam. Astronomy, like philosophy and jurisprudence, was one of the traditional accomplishments of Abdul Lateef’s polymathic branch of the Shushtari sayyids, and before coming to India he had spent several years studying the stars with one of his many learned cousins, Sayyid Ali Shushtari. Sayyid Ali, as remarkable a scholar as the rest of his clan, had been the chief astronomer in Baghdad when the young Abdul Lateef came to him for instruction.^gs

Shushtari came to recognise that not only were the British more knowledgeable than Persians on some astronomical matters, so, to his surprise, were the Indians: ‘Copernicus was more exact in astronomical observation than the traditional Muslim astronomers which makes the Muslim zij tables and our astronomers’ predictions less reliable. What appears to onlookers as the movement of the sun is in reality the movement of the earth … Moreover, the English reject the idea of astral influences … Even the Hindus have more knowledge than us in some matters of astronomy and mathematics’—a virtually unprecedented admission for the often Indophobic Abdul Lateef.⁴³

In some matters, however, Islamic astronomy was still well ahead of European learning, as other British amateur astronomers in India had learned to their surprise. Thomas Deane Pearse, who acted as Warren Hastings’ second during his famous duel with Philip Francis in 1780, developed an interest in astronomy in the late 1770s and regularly sent his observations to Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich.^gr In September 1783 a conversation with ‘a learned Musulman’ directed Pearse’s attention to a Persian text, The Wonders of Creation, which showed that Saturn (as Pearse wrote excitedly to the Secretary of the Royal Society in a long letter of the twenty-second of that month) was ‘possessed of what, till very lately, we were utterly ignorant of, I mean his satellites or ring. Hitherto only five satellites have been seen by Europeans, [but in this text] he is there represented as having seven … I am much inclined to believe that the [medieval Arabs] had better instruments than we have.’ The seventh satellite of Saturn was only formally ‘discovered’ by the astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) in 1789, six years after this correspondence.⁴⁴For the next few years Pearse’s letters contain intermittent references to his conversations with pundits and ‘learned Mussulmen’ on astronomical matters.^†

In a similar manner, although the exact details are now sadly lost, James and Abdul Lateef Shushtari seem to have been spending their nights on the Residency roof, busy comparing notes to see how Indian, Islamic and European astronomical systems could be reconciled, and what each could learn from the other. Certainly James’s letters between 1804 and 1805 become full of requests for such objects as ‘A Compleat Planetarium, Tellurian and Lunerian, all in brass showing the motions completely by wheel work, packed in a portable mahogany case’, and ‘a pair of 18 inch terrestrial and celestial globes’. But over and again his letters come back to the matter of the telescope, which he repeatedly tells William he should spare no expense upon, instructing him to take the very greatest care in shipping:

No pains indeed should be spared in the package of the [telescope] and on the skill and judgement employed in the packing of the speculum of the telescope depends entirely the value of this instrument, which will be useless and of course worth not one farthing if the least injury befalls the speculum either from damp or from any other cause … It is of great importance that these packages should be stowed in some very dry and commodious part of the ship in some snug corner of the gun room, for instance. Pray let this point be carefully attended to, and the packages recommended if possible to the particular care and charge of the Captain and Chief Mate, or of both together … [If properly packed the telescope will] enable me to descry clearly and distinctly the spots on the sun’s dish, and the mountains and even the volcanoes on the Moon, Jupiter’s bells and Saturn’s ring, as plain as you can see the cross on the top of St. Paul’s...⁴⁵

James seems to have been determined that not only would the Residency become a place where British and Mughal ideas of civilised refinement would be fused, it would also be a place where, albeit in a typically amateur Enlightenment way, the intellectual life of the two peoples might begin to meet and enrich each other, to the mutual benefit and fascination of both.

At about this time, James entrusted a small confidence to Sir John Kennaway: that despite his fears for the way India was going under Wellesley, and despite his professional difficulties, surveying his creation and the life he had made for himself in Hyderabad, he was now ‘as happy and comfortable’ as he could ever imagine himself being. In a rare letter to his elder brother George Kirkpatrick, with whom he had little contact,^gt he echoed his feelings of intense happiness and fulfilment, noting, as he signed off:

I shall just say that my health, though not very robust, is upon the whole as good as can be expected after a Residence of near 25 years in this Climate; that my circumstances (thanks to a bounteous Providence^guare flourishing beyond my most sanguine wishes; that my two children are daily improving in mind and body; and that I want nothing to complete my happiness, but the much coveted society of my absent friends and far removed but dearly beloved kindred and relations ...⁴⁶

Yet amid the now Eden-like idyll of the magnificent new Residency and its observatory, the elk and the grazing Abyssinian sheep, the laughing children playing with their ayahs, the gardens and the park, the Rang Mahal with its frescoed walls and its gently falling fountains—amid all this, there always lay a great unspoken sadness: the knowledge of the eggshell fragility of this creation, and the growing realisation that it could not last.

Towards the end of January 1805, James’s health had suddenly gone into rapid decline. In July, Dr Ure wrote out a medical certificate for James to send to Calcutta. It read:

This is to certify that Lieutenant Colonel Kirkpatrick, Resident at the Court of His Highness the Soubah of the Deccan, has been for the last eighteen months subject to severe Hepatic and Rheumatic Complaints, & although the disease of the Liver has always hitherto yielded to a course of Mercury, yet the attacks of late have been so frequent (almost every two months) and so much more difficult to remove than formerly that I solemnly & sincerely declare that according to the best of my judgement a change of air is essentially necessary to his recovery, and do therefore recommend that he may be permitted to go to the sea coast; & if necessary after his arrival on the coast eventually to proceed to sea.

George Ure Surgeon to the Residency at Hyderabad Hyderabad 13th July 1805⁴⁷

James hoped that a quick sea voyage would do the trick and restore him to health; but he feared that, realistically, it was unlikely to do more than ‘patch up my constitution to a certain degree’.⁴⁸ He was sufficiently worried to write a will, dividing his now considerable fortune between his children, his nieces and ‘the excellent and respectable … Kheir oon Nissah Begum’.⁴⁹ Moreover he realised that if the voyage failed to cure him, in the medium term the only other two options were dying (pretty promptly) in India, or retiring to England. His spirit might feel completely at home in India; but his wretched body, less malleable, seemed to need England.

In which case, he wondered, what would happen to his beloved Khair un-Nissa? Most Indian wives and consorts did not accompany their husbands back to Britain when they left the subcontinent at the end of their service, though there was no law preventing it. When the Mughal travel writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan visited London at about this time he described meeting several completely Anglicised Indian women who had returned with their husbands and children. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarrol, especially impressed him: ‘She is very fair,’ he wrote, ‘and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India.’ He added: ‘The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from sixteen to nineteen years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans.’⁵⁰

But other attempts to take Indian wives back to England ran into disastrous and tragic problems. Another Indian woman whom Mirza Abu Taleb Khan met and admired in London was Fyze Palmer’s younger sister from Lucknow, Nur Begum: ‘Noor Begum who accompanied General de Boigne from India … was dressed in the English fashion, and looked remarkably well,’ he wrote. ‘She was much pleased with my visit, and requested me to take charge of a letter for her mother, who resides at Lucknow.’⁵¹ But Khan was being discreet here, for he does not say what James and Khair knew well, and what he must have known too: that Nur’s marriage had not survived the transition to England, and though she might look ‘remarkably well’, her life was in ruins.

Within a few months of General de Boigne’s arrival in England in May 1797, Nur had been dumped out of sight in the tiny village of Enfield, outside London, with her two small children Anne and Charles, to which she voluntarily added the extra burden of the orphaned half-Indian son of Antoine Polier, General Palmer’s white Mughal friend from Lucknow who had been killed two years earlier, soon after his return from India, in the terror that followed the French Revolution. De Boigne, meanwhile, had taken up with a beautiful and spirited young French émigrée aristocrat (and, though he only discovered this later when it was too late, a completely unprincipled fortune-hunter), Adèle d’Osmond, whom he married in June 1798, thirteen months after arriving in England with Nur.

Nur’s household receipts, which survive in de Boigne’s family archive in Chambéry, make painful reading: at the same time that ‘Mrs. Begum’ (as she is referred to in the accounts) was expected to subsist on an allowance of £200 a year—with which she had to live, pay her rent, the children’s school fees and all other expenses—de Boigne was cruising around Britain spending, in a single weekend, £78 on necklaces, clasps, bracelets and earrings for his youthful new European wife.^gv Fyze and the General had been deeply dismayed to hear of Nur’s fate, and had told James about it. This cannot but have added to his worries about how Khair would fare if a return to England was forced upon him.

There was at least some hope that James’s uncertain health could recover; but there was another, greater, sadness in the air, and from this it seemed that there was no escape. Almost from the day of her children’s birth, Khair un-Nissa had known that they would be taken from her when Sahib Allum reached the age of five, and sent away over the Black Water^gw to England. There they would spend the rest of their childhood away from her, receiving an English education—an idea to which she was instinctively and bitterly opposed. James looked forward to the children’s departure with as much dread as she did, but thought that it had to be. In 1801, soon after the birth of Sahib Allum, he wrote to William: ‘I will certainly endeavour to send my little Hyderabadi to England as soon as possible: but it will go to my soul to part with him, to say nothing of the opposition I may expect to meet with on this point in another quarter in spite of any agreements.’⁵²

In sending his little Hyderabadi Muslim children to Britain without either of their parents, James was not (at least in his own eyes) acting heartlessly: on the contrary, he believed he was making a considerable sacrifice for the sake of his children. It was widely and probably correctly believed at the time that the only way Anglo-Indian children had the chance of making something of their lives was if they received a pukka English public-school education. English racism against ‘country born’ Anglo-Indian children was now becoming so vicious in India as to make this provision very necessary. Without it, their options were limited in the extreme, and they were condemned to sink to the margins, pushed away and ostracised by both British and Indian society.

One of the most moving testaments to this is General Sir David Ochterlony’s letters concerning his two daughters by Mubarak Begum. These were written around 1803, and in them he discusses the question of whether it would be better to bring the girls up as Anglo-Indian Christians and attempt to integrate them into British society, or instead to educate them as fully Muslim Indians, and to propel them as best he could into the parallel world of late-Mughal society. ‘My children are uncommonly fair,’ wrote Ochterlony, ‘but if educated [in India] in the European manner they will in spite of complexion labour under all the disadvantages of being known as the NATURAL DAUGHTERS OF OCHTERLONY BY A NATIVE WOMAN—In that one sentence is compressed all that ill nature and illiberality can convey, of which you must have seen numerous instances during your Residence in this country.’⁵³

If he were to make his daughters Christian and keep them in British company, argues Ochterlony, they would be constantly derided for their ‘dark blood’; but he hesitates to bring them up as Muslims, with a view to them marrying into the Mughal aristocracy, as ‘I own I could not bear that my child should be one of a numerous haram^gx even were I certain that no other Disadvantages attended this mode of disposal & were I proof against the observations of the world who tho’ unjust to the children, would not fail to comment on the Conduct of a father who educatedhis offspring in Tenets of the Prophet.’ The letter to Major Hugh Sutherland, another Scot in a similar position who had eventually opted to bring up his children as Muslim,^gy ends rather movingly: ‘In short my dear M[ajor] I have spent all the time since we were parted in revolving this matter in my mind but I have not yet been able to come to a positive Decision.’⁵⁴

A similar dilemma faced James. Six months after Sahib Allum’s birth, James had written to his brother in Madras asking him to take especial care to look after his other unnamed ‘Hindustani’ son when William arrived in England. In the course of the letter James reflects with pain on the racism then prevalent among the British in India, which he well knew to be especially harsh towards children of mixed race, and he writes of the worries this causes him for his young baby’s future.^gz At first he believed the solution to the problem lay in sending Sahib Allum to join his cousins in Britain, where colour prejudice was still much less prevalent than among Company servants in India: ‘I still retain the opinion I expressed to my father,’ he wrote to William in September 1801,

of [the Hindustani boy’s] future happiness and perhaps success in life, being best consulted by providing for him if possible in the country he is now in [i.e. England], rather than in his native one [India]. And that for the very same reason—namely the illiberal prejudices entertained [by the British in India] against children born of native mothers,be their colour ever so fair, their conduct ever so correct, or their spirit ever so indomitable.

In point of complexion my little boy here has greatly the advantage over his brother in England being as fair as it is possible I conceive for the offspring of any European female to be, and yet [here James scored out his first attempt to express himself][before beginning again:] he would I have no doubt, be exposed to the same illiberal objection and obloquy, should he ever be obliged to seek his fortunes in the country which gave him birth. Among other circumstances which render this child peculiarly dear and interesting to me is the striking resemblance which he bears to my dear father. He is indeed, in every respect, a most lovely infant ...⁵⁵

Over time, however, with the example of the Anglo-Indian Captain William Palmer’s growing power and success in Hyderabad before him, James seems to have reconsidered his assumption that his children’s future necessarily lay in Britain. Without an élite British education, and the éclat that brought, Anglo-Indian children would almost certainly suffer from the worst prejudices of both races, just as James feared; but with it, as Palmer’s career seemed to show, it might be possible for his children to use both sides of their racial inheritance to their advantage, and to be equally at ease in both worlds. With due preparation, in other words, their future might well lie in India.

For this reason, by the beginning of 1804 James had begun to write to the Handsome Colonel to find out if the old man was still active and energetic enough to add two more grandchildren to his collection, and to explain in some detail his hopes and ideas for their education: ‘On the subject of the girl’s education,’ he wrote to his father in October 1804,

I shall at present content myself with expressing a wish that it should be private—that is not carried on through the means of a boarding school. But with regard to the Boy, in whose infantine lineaments I delight in tracing your likeness, which to me appears very striking, he cannot perhaps be sent too early to a public seminary, where I shall be happy to learn that he emulates the good example which I have no doubt will be set him by his kinsman the young stranger announced to me in your letter.⁵⁶

This latter clause seems to be a reference to what must have been the last of the Handsome Colonel’s many illegitimate children, fathered—if this is the correct interpretation—while the old Lothario was in his early seventies. In the same letter, James explained that when he sent the children to England, ‘as my own state of health has long required a temporary change at least of climate, I propose if I can obtain leave of absence for the purpose, to accompany them myself to the Presidency in December or January next, and after seeing them safe on board, to take a cruise to sea, as the most likely means of recovering a sufficient stock of health to enable me to return to my station’.⁵⁷

Eight months later, by June 1805, James’s plans had solidified, and bookings had been made. Dr Ure had, like him, decided to send his two-year-old boy to England, but with the difference that in the Ures’ case, Mrs Ure was to go with the boy on the journey. James realised that this was an excellent chance for the children to be accompanied by a woman they knew and who also spoke Urdu. As he wrote to William:

They leave this, please God for Madras, early in August, to embark for England on board (I believe) the Hawkesbury Indiaman, which is expected to sail with the rest of the Fleet early in September. They will be under the immediate charge of Mrs. Ure conjointly with whom I have bespoken about half the [ship’s] Round House [the most comfortable and spacious berths in the ship] and they will besides have for their immediate attendant a very careful, attentive European Woman of the name of Perry, the wife of one of the musicians of my Band, and whom I have hired for the trip to England. Supposing the Fleet to sail in September, you may reasonably expect them all March next, that is in about three or four months as I guess after your receipt of this letter.⁵⁸

The original plan had been for James and Khair un-Nissa to escort the children to Madras, ‘whither their respectable and amiable mother insists on accompanying them’, as James explained to William.⁵⁹ Having said goodbye to the children, James and Khair would then travel on together to Calcutta for the marriage of William’s eldest daughter Isabella, who had not, as her father had feared, ended up a ‘returned empty’ but instead had been snapped up almost before she had left the gangplank by an ambitious young Company servant, Charles Buller.^ha Buller had just been appointed Secretary to the Revenue Board, an important and powerfulposition, and the wedding, which was clearly going to be quite a grand one, was set for 26 August.

But at the last minute there was a hitch: James appears to have been struck down by some sort of fever, in addition to which he seems to have suffered a recurrence of his hepatitis. Together, the two complaints relegated him to his bed and prevented him from travelling. Moreover, there was a political crisis brewing in Hyderabad due to the famine spreading across the Deccan that had followed close on the devastation left by Wellesley’s Maratha War. From his sickbed, James was determined to do what he could in the way of famine relief. As he reported in early August to an old childhood friend,

in addition to the hardships and calamities of war, we have now to struggle against the horrors of famine which has already desolated the greatest part of the Dekkan, and is now advancing with rapid strides to this capital where the scarcity has for some time past been so great as to amount nearly to downright want and starvation. Shocking as such calamities are, they do not of course materially affect the higher classes of society, but it must be a hard and unfeeling heart that can witness such scenes without sharing in the misery and woe which they occasion, or without feeling a wish at least to fly from them, when relief as in the present case, is nearly fruitless and unavailing.

Though thousands are daily fed from the fragments of my table, and from the pecuniary relief which is bestowed by my orders, still I am surrounded, whenever I go abroad, by multitudes of the most ghastly and pitiable objects of both sexes and of all ages that your affrighted fancy could picture...⁶⁰

As part of the famine-relief programme, the Nizam and Mir Alam had embarked, on James’s recommendations, on a grand programme of public works and construction as a way of providing employment and money to the starving famine refugees who now flooded into Hyderabad. As James explained to William:

By the much admired style of my improvements at the Residency, I have awakened a passion for architectural improvement in the Meer [Alam] and Secunder Jah, both of whom I have persuaded to lay out a little of their enormous hoards in public and private works, both within and without the City … [These are] of considerable extent and some degree of Taste, which at one and the same time improves the Interior of Hyderabad, and gives bread to thousands of Poor, who would otherwise have starved in these dreadful times of scarcity.

Among other works carrying on, and which are imitated on a humbler scale by rich Mussulman and Hindoo individuals, Meer Allum has constructed under the superintendence of an Engineer Lieut Russell^hb a canal which supplies the whole city with water and is about to repair the Hoossein Sagar Bank, and restore the ancient canal that brought water to it from the River. He has also nearly completed a neat square of upstairs houses in front of his own mansion with a stone tank in the centre, a mosque, hammaum [Turkish bath] and madrassah [religious school] on one face, and a wide and long street of shops with upper apartments leading to this square, the tout ensemble effect of which is striking enough.^hc

Secunder Jah has begun something on a similar plan around his old abode, besides having a large Garden House in hand, partly European and partly Asiatic, upon the site of an ancient Garden at Lingumpilly. I shall endeavour in conclusion to get him to build a Bridge at the Residency end of the City, by way of a match to the Bridge at the West or Upper end of Hyderabad.⁶¹

The famine crisis and his dangerously fragile health prevented James from leaving as planned throughout the early summer, and in the end Khair un-Nissa opted to stay in Hyderabad too, nursing her ailing husband—though James still hoped to recover sufficiently to rush to the coast and join the children in Madras for a few days before their scheduled embarkation in late August.

So it was in late June that James and Khair un-Nissa began sadly to pack up for the children and to make preparations for them to set off from Hyderabad. They were then just five and three years old. Their parting from Khair un-Nissa was a terrible thing. She well knew how slim the chances were of her ever seeing them again, and of how changed they would necessarily be—both in their ways and attitudes and in their love for her—if she ever did. For the children, who were now old enough to understand that they were soon to be taken away from everything they had ever known, it was more traumatic still. Forty years later, Sahib Begum could still recall every detail of the separation:

My mother has never had any rival in my affections. I can well recollect her cries when we left her & I can now see the place in w[hich] she sat when we parted—her tearing her long hair^hd—what worlds would I give [now] to possess one lock of that beautiful and loved hair. Since I have been a mother myself how often have I thought of the anguish she must have endured in seeing us forced away from her ...⁶²

In Madras, James arranged for the children to stay with his maternal uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs William Petrie, the former of whom had just been appointed as Senior Member of the Council there. Without telling Khair, he had also organised for another man to visit the Petries while the children were staying with them: the Anglo-Irish painter George Chinnery.

Chinnery, who went on to become one of the greatest of British Imperial artists, had been in Madras two and half years when he undertook James’s commission to paint a life-size portrait of the children for Khair. It was his biggest commission yet: probably his first full-length portrait since he had arrived in Madras to stay with his brother, and certainly his largest. Chinnery was a strange, volatile man, high-spirited and depressive by turns, and a certain emotional fragility seems to have been a family trait: his brother ended his life in a Madras madhouse.^he Thanks partly to his commission from James, Chinnery went on the following year to paint Henry Russell’s father, Sir Henry Russell senior, the portly and bewigged Chief Justice of Bengal. While doing so he found himself closely watched by Sir Henry’s attorney, the diarist William Hickey, who left a perceptive pen-portrait of the painter at work:

Mr Chinnery, like so many other men of extraordinary talent, was extremely odd and eccentric, so much so as at times to make me think him deranged. His health certainly was not good; and he had a strong tendency to hypochondria which made him ridiculously fanciful, yet in spite of his mental and bodily infirmities, personal vanity shewed itself in various ways. When not under the influence of low spirits, he was a cheerful, pleasant companion, but if hypochondriacal was melancholy and dejected to a degree.⁶³

James’s son and daughter cannot have been in Madras for longer than three weeks, and children are always notoriously difficult sitters. Yet the completed painting is one of the masterpieces of British painting in India. In the richest and most gorgeous of colours, Chinnery presents the two small children in their Hyderabadi court dress, standing at the top of a flight of steps engulfed by the swags of a huge dark curtain. Sahib Allum—an exceptionally beautiful, poised, dark-eyed child—wears a scarlet jama trimmed with gilt brocade, and a matching gilt cummerbund; he has a glitteringtopi on his head and crescent-toed slippers. Round his neck hangs a string of enormous pearls. His little sister, who is standing one step up from Sahib Allum, and has her arm around her big brother’s shoulders, is discernibly fairer-skinned, and below her topi is a hint of the red hair that would be much admired in the years to come.

Yet while Sahib Allum looks directly at the viewer with an almost precocious confidence and assurance, Sahib Begum looks down with an expression of infinite sadness and vulnerability on her face, her little eyes dark and swollen with crying. Chinnery clearly understood the intense sadness of separation that this family were going through: six months earlier his own brother had sent his three young children back to England, and he well knew the empty grief and silence that now filled the Chinnery house in place of their cries and laughter.⁶⁴

It was just after his children had arrived to stay with the Petries in late July that James learned the news of his sudden and rather unexpected popularity with the new regime in Calcutta.

In the middle of the month, the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, had landed at Madras. There he had been briefed by Petrie on the state of politics in India, and especially on James’s single-handed resistance to Wellesley’s more aggressive policies, particularly his creation and subsequent mishandling of the Maratha crisis. As Petrie duly reported to James, he had told Cornwallis how none of Wellesley’s senior officials had had the courage to question the Governor General’s policies, but ‘that impartial justice and the love of truth obliged me to make an exception in favor of the Resident at Hyderabad who was the only one of all the Diplomatic Corps who had ventured to speak his sentiments freely upon the consequences he apprehended from Marquis Wellesley’s Political system respecting the Mahrattas’.⁶⁵

Cornwallis landed at Calcutta to replace Wellesley on 30 July 1805. He immediately made it clear that he wanted none of the Imperial paraphernalia Wellesley had insisted was his right. As he landed, according to William Hickey who was in the crowd massed on the shore to greet him, the bluff old soldier ‘looked surprised and vexed at the amazing cavalcade that was drawn up to greet him’—carriages, an escort, bands, staff officers, ADC and servants. ‘Too many people,’ said Cornwallis. ‘I don’t want them, don’t want one of them. I have not yet lost the use of my legs, hey? Thank God I can walk, walk very well, hey!’

And walk he did. The following evening, according to Hickey, ‘while I was out taking my airing, I met Lord Wellesley in his coach and six, preceded by a party of Dragoons and a number of outriders, and in about ten minutes afterwards I met our new Governor General, Marquis Cornwallis, driving himself in a phaeton with a pair of steady old jogtrot horses, accompanied his Secretary, Mr Robinson, and without a single attendant of any description whatsoever’.⁶⁶

Less than a week later, soon after Wellesley had slipped off back to England,^hf James received a note from this same Mr Robinson, inviting him to come straight up to Calcutta to meet the new Governor General and to give him a full briefing. The note was written in a very different tone to the sort of despatches he had become used to receiving from Wellesley’s Bengal staff. Robinson assured James that:

His Lordship will … be very desirous of availing himself of your long experience, and intimate knowledge of the real state of the Nizam’s mind, in respect to the existing connection between the two Courts, as well as of the disposition of his Minister and principal advisers … [He hopes] to benefit by the continuance of the zeal for the public interest which, from the favourable terms in which you have been mentioned to him by Mr Petrie, he has every reason to suppose has ever been the rule of your conduct in the important station you have so long filled.⁶⁷

Robinson went on to hint that Cornwallis intended to bring about a radical change from Wellesley’s aggressive policies, saying that the new Governor General’s principal aim was to ‘establish perfect confidence in the Justice and Moderation’ of the British among Indian princes, and that ‘conciliation and kindness [were] the likeliest means of producing this impression on them’. He wanted ‘to avoid war’ and ‘to give every possible degree of facility’ to enable peace to return to India. With that view, he was planning to leave Calcutta as soon as was practicable to see for himself ‘the upper stations’ where the war against the Marathas had just burst into flame again. This was a new round of hostilities between the Company and the most powerful of the remaining Maratha leaders, Jaswant Rao Holkar, who at the end of August 1804 had succeeded in ambushing and wiping out a retreating British force on the modern Rajasthan-Gujerat border.^hg Among the others Cornwallis wished to meet ‘up the country’ was General Palmer, who had recently been put out to grass in the badly-paid position of commander of a garrison at Monghyr, on the banks of the Ganges in Bengal.⁶⁸

A copy of the letter was sent by Robinson to Petrie, who wrote by express to James advising him not to delay. This, he implied, was James’s big chance. Petrie had, he said, given Lord Cornwallis all his ‘confidential notes and memorandums which I have taken over the last 3 years … In that detailed narrative you are particularly mentioned … The Marquis at this interview more particularly than before, desired that you would come to Calcutta and [said that] if he had left the place that you should follow him up the country … in great confidence I give you my opinion that there will be great changes... ’⁶⁹

James was still very ill, and Dr Kennedy^hh advised him to stay in bed. But it was clear to James that his duty, both political and paternal, lay in getting to Madras as quickly as possible. His last piece of work before he left Hyderabad was to patch up some sort of peace with Mir Alam. The conciliatory letter he wrote has disappeared, but the Mir’s reply of 20 August acknowledges that James had supported him ‘on all occasions, in time of adversity, and in the hour of distress’. Because of this, Mir Alam gave his word that ‘I bind myself … to maintain and evince, during the remainder of my life, both in your presence, and in your absence … a regard to the claims of your amicable aid and assistance … I will never adopt any measure which may be inconsistent with the relations of friendship and attachment; or incompatible with your wishes.’⁷⁰ The Mir also asked James a favour: that while he was in Madras he should help him purchase a property belonging to the Nawab of Arcot that he, Mir Alam, wanted for his personal use. James agreed to do so.

A week later James kissed goodbye to his Begum and, gathering his strength, galloped off from Hyderabad at speed, hoping above hope that it might still be possible to get to Madras before his children set sail.

The road from Hyderabad to the port of Masulipatam was one of the most beautiful in the Deccan.

From the Residency it wound up past the great rounded boulders of the Banjara hills towards the tent lines of the Subsidiary Force cantonments. There it snaked alongside the gleaming new obelisks and pyramids of the Parade Ground Cemetery, where Kirkpatrick had buried his friend James Dalrymple five years earlier.

From there the land started to fall, and the road followed the Musi—in August a great, brown, churning torrent newly filled with monsoon rain—steadily down towards the coast, out of the dusty cottonfields around Hyderabad, towards the wetter, greener, muggier expanses of paddy that girded the coast. It was a strange, unearthly landscape that linked the two, the Deccan plateau with the Coromandel coast. At first James passed through flat, newly harvested cotton-scrub dotted with coconut and toddy palms, where the land would erupt suddenly and without warning into low ridges of rock, great spines of tumbled boulders rising like the humps of a camel out of the planisphere plains.

Early in the morning after a night of rain, the scent of flowering champa wafting from a roadside tree, James would find that a thin haze veiled the ground like a fine dupatta, blotting out the muddy road ahead but leaving a strangely disembodied forest of palm trunks rising out of the mist, silhouetting the half-naked toddy-tappers shinning up their trunks to harvest their gourds. Roadside caravanserais—strikingly solid and monumental after the floating world of the palms—lay empty but for colonies of monkeys scampering in from the road.

James had not been out of Hyderabad for nearly three years, and as he galloped on towards the coast his eyes and ears would have been sensitive to the contrast with the urban and predominantly Muslim world he had inhabited for so long. Here and there, beside lakes choked with the blossom of kingfisher-blue lotus flowers, he would see the canopy of a chattri, or the crumbling sati monument marking the burning-place of the wife of some long-dead Hoysala warrior. Occasionally he would pass a Hindu woman with a flower in her hair, or a crocodile of dark-skinned villagers with their short lungis tucked up above the knee, all a reminder of just how fragile and isolated an Islamic island the city of Hyderabad really was. For this was Telengana, a fragment of the rural Hindu world that existed before the Muslim invasions, and which, in these more remote outposts, seemed unchanged and untouched by five hundred years of Muslim rule.

At first, despite the rains and the muddy roads, the journey went well. The Krishna was the first major obstacle, for during the monsoon a crossing could sometimes be perilous; but James made it over without mishap. On 9 September, a week after James had set off, Henry Russell—left in charge at the Residency in his absence—picked up his pen to report the news from Hyderabad. He wrote:

I was glad to hear from Addison [one of the junior Residency staff], who arrived here the day before yesterday, that you had nearly completed your journey to the River, without having experienced any serious inconvenience from fatigue.

Noor ool Omrah [also] sent me a long account which he had received of your progress from his manager at Nilgoonda, and which conveyed the first intelligence that we had received of your having actually crossed the Kistnah [Krishna River].

I know not whether to wish you should still be at Madras when this letter arrives there. If the fleet should not have sailed for England, it will be gratifying for you to pass a few days with the little ones; but otherwise, I think it will be desirable for you to reach Calcutta as soon as possible.

Having just sent to the Mahl to say that I was writing to you, and to know if the Begum had any message to send—she has desired, in reply, that I will convey to you her Salaam; and that I will assure you she is perfectly well, and anxiously hoping to hear of your safe arrival at Madras.⁷¹

This was the last communication that would ever take place between James and his Begum. It is unclear exactly what happened after he crossed the Krishna, but he arrived in Madras much later than expected with his health in tatters, having missed the fleet by three days. When the town finally hove into view on 12 September, there was none of the hoped-for thicket of tall masts rising over the walls of the fort and the spire of St Mary’s church. The Lord Hawkesbury had set sail for England, with the rest of the convoy, on 9 September. On board, according to the passenger list published a week later in the Calcutta Gazette, were Mrs Ure and Master John Ure, Miss Katherine Kirkpatrick and Master William George Kirkpatrick. It was the first time that James’s children had been referred to by their new Christian names, names which they would bear for the rest of their lives. Never again would they be called Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum. The Lady of High Lineage and the little Lord of the World had shed their Muslim identities as finally and conclusively as a snake sheds its first skin.⁷²

James had missed his beloved children, and his body was badly weakened by the exertion of rushing to try to catch them in time. He had simply left too late, and with the roads boggy, with the incessant late-monsoon rains and the Krishna swollen to its full size, he had missed the chance to say goodbye.

He spent two weeks in Madras trying to regain his strength, but without much success. As there seemed to be no point in waiting any longer, on 22 September he went over to see the Nawab of Arcot, and carried out Mir Alam’s errand as he had promised.⁷³Despite his fraying health, he then pressed on to Bengal and his appointment with Lord Cornwallis. On 25 September he caught the Metcalfe to Calcutta.⁷⁴ By the time the ship docked to take on water at Masulipatam, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was very ill indeed.

And then, quite suddenly, nothing.

In a story powered by a succession of extraordinarily detailed and revealing sources—letters, diaries, reports, despatches—without warning the current that has supported this book suddenly flickers and fails. There are no more letters. The record goes dead, with James critically ill, delirious and feverish on the boat. The lights go out and we are left in darkness.

Now and again there is a tiny surge, and the bulb flickers briefly into life. A single item in a newspaper: according to the passenger list published in the Calcutta Gazette of 10 October, Dr Ure was with James on the boat. After saying goodbye to his own wife and children, he must have come across James in Madras, seen the state he was in, and offered to accompany him to Calcutta. Also on board, though probably less welcome, were Captain and Mrs Samuel Dalrymple: Sam was a cousin of Kirkpatrick’s late friend Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, and in the absence of a clergyman James had married the couple in Hyderabad four years earlier. But as a senior member of the Subsidiary Force, Captain Dalrymple was probably not that well disposed towards James, and his wife Margaret was renowned as one of the biggest shrews in Hyderabad: Mountstuart Elphinstone thought her ‘an affected, sour, supercilious woman’.⁷⁵ But she was probably too busy nursing her husband to give much offence on this particular journey: Samuel Dalrymple was also ill, and like James was ‘proceeding to Bengal on a sick certificate’.⁷⁶

The Metcalfe reached Calcutta on Monday evening, 7 October, and James was carried ashore, now clearly dying. He was taken to the house of his niece Isabella, whom he had probably never met before. The last-minute delay in Hyderabad meant that he had just missed not only his children’s departure but also Isabella’s grand wedding to Charles Buller, which had taken place in St John’s church shortly before.

Nursed by his niece and by Dr Ure, James clung on for another week—long enough to learn the bitter news that his last journey had been wasted: Cornwallis, pushing on into the interior of Bengal had also overdone it. He too had become critically ill, and died hours after meeting General Palmer, another loser in the great Indian lottery. As the General wrote to Warren Hastings:

The poor Marquiss desired me to meet him on the river, so as that he might have one day’s conversation with me. I proceeded from Monghyr to Bhaugulpore where I met him, but he was so exceedingly exhausted that he desired Robinson to tell me that he found it impossible to converse with me, and wished to spare us the distress of seeing him in that condition … He was carried on shore where he has daily become more exhausted. He has lain for the last two days in a state of stupor & total insensibility … Thus are our fair prospects of rescue from impending ruin, & the restoration of our national character of justice, good faith & moderation blasted in the bud.⁷⁷

By the time Palmer completed his letter on the following day, 5 October, Cornwallis was dead. James need never have bothered leaving Hyderabad; his whole journey had been in vain. On 14 October James recovered sufficiently to add a few codicils to his will, which, fearing the worst, he had secretly carried with him.⁷⁸ That night he fell into a coma. He died the early the following morning, 15 October 1805. He was aged only forty-one.

That same evening, as was the custom in Bengal, where putrefaction sets in fast, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was laid to rest amid the obelisks and mausolea of Park Street Cemetery. It was a hurried but formal funeral, with full military honours. The coffin was escorted by His Majesty’s 67th Regiment, and Major General Sir Ewen Baillie read an oration recording James’s ‘meritorious public character’ and the ‘important services’ he rendered to the Honourable East India Company.

But it cannot have been a very emotional affair. For James had died among strangers, away from everyone he loved, and far from everyone who loved him. His beloved wife, his two little children, his brothers, his friends, and his father: as he was laid in the muddy monsoon ground, not one of them even knew that he was dead. In place of tears, there was a cold military salute. The coffin was lowered, and the mud of the grave was filled in.

And that was that. Calcutta was inured to death: as one Company man commented, ‘We have known instances of dining with a gentleman [at midday] and being invited to his burial before suppertime.’ Nowhere else would a death have caused less stir. As the saying went, two monsoons was the average life-span of a European in Bengal; one year, out of a total European population of 1200, over a third died between August and the end of December. Every year at the end of the monsoon in October, the survivors used to hold thanksgiving banquets to celebrate their deliverance. In her diary for 1826 a newly arrived Company wife wrote: ‘Here people die one day and are buried the next. Their furniture is sold the third. They are forgotten the fourth...’⁷⁹

In James’s case there was no furniture, but there was, bizarrely enough, the ‘Electrifying Machine’ which he had ordered to amuse the nobles of the Hyderabad durbar two years previously. It had somehow got lost in the post, and disappeared off to the China coast. The week of James’s death, it suddenly reappeared on the quayside at the port of Calcutta. On 28 October, before a single obituary had appeared, the Calcutta Gazette contained a large advertisement:

TO BE SOLD AT PUBLIC AUCTION
ON SATURDAY NEXT
AN EXTENSIVE NEW AND VALUABLE
SET OF
APPARATUS FOR EXPERIMENTS ON
ELECTRICITY
MAGNETISM AND MAGIC
BELONGING TO THE ESTATE OF
THE LATE LT COL JAMES ACHILLES KIRKPATRICK

But there is no account of how much it went for; or to whom.⁸⁰

It was eighteen days before the news of James’s death reached Hyderabad. According to Henry Russell’s official despatch, it was announced to the durbar to ‘universal gloom’. There is no record of Khair un-Nissa’s reaction to losing her husband, but it can easily be imagined. She was, after all, still only nineteen, and James’s death meant that in all likelihood she would never again see her son and daughter. They would now be kept from her, and turned into little English children. This was the loss of everything she had ever worked for, or dreamed of. There was no future, and in such circumstances there could be no comfort.

Her last love letter from her husband—at least the last to have survived—was in effect James’s will. Here he makes it clear that Khair had no need of his money: ‘The excellent and respectable Mother of my two natural children, who is named Kheir oon Nissah Begum, being amply provided for by Jaghiers and other possessions, both hereditary and acquired, independent of her personal property and jewels, which cannot amount to less than half a lakh of rupees, I have not thought it necessary to provide particularly for her.’ But, James implies, this might be misinterpreted, possibly by Khair, possibly by their children, and possibly by his relations. So he added an unequivocal declaration of his love for her: ‘By way of proof however of my unbounded love and affection towards her, and as a last token of my Esteem and Remembrance, I hereby will and ordain the sum of ten thousand Hyderabad rupees to be paid to her out of my funds immediately after my demise.’

A further ten thousand rupees was apportioned to Khair un-Nissa should there be any residue left to the estate after the children’s legacies had been paid. But Khair did not need such proof of her husband’s love for her. Over and over again, James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive—or not—without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James’s fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times. Four entirely separate inquiries had been carried out into his affair with Khair. At each stage he could easily have washed his hands of his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.

That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling to.

And there, abruptly and tragically, the story seemed to end.

In the various short accounts of the romance that have been written over the last two hundred years, there have been a number of solutions proposed as to what might have happened to Khair un-Nissa. Some say she faded away and died of grief. Another version has it that she tried to follow her children to England, but was drowned off the coast of Sri Lanka. Another has her moving to Calcutta or Madras. None of this speculation seemed to be based on any hard documentary evidence.

Four years into the research for this book, I was still none the wiser as to what happened to Khair. After James’s death, there was not one single reference to her in the hundreds of boxes that make up the Kirkpatrick Papers in the India Office Library in London. This seemed surprising, as William Kirkpatrick’s papers are fairly extensive for the years following 1805; but despite spending weeks hunting down and checking through every scrap of paper in his files, there was still not one hint as to Khair’s fate. There was no clue either in James’s overblown and oddly inappropriate epitaph, erected by the orders of the grieving Handsome Colonel on the south wall of St John’s church in Calcutta (where it still remains^hi). The Kennaway and Palmer Papers are equally silent, as are the various Hyderabadi chronicles and histories which discuss the affair. Even Abdul Lateef Shushtari does not utter a word as to what happened to his young cousin. After James’s death, Khair un-Nissa just seemed to disappear, to vanish from history.

But there turned out to be one source I had forgotten to check. In the summer of 2001, I drove up to Oxford to the Bodleian Library, to have a quick look at the Russell Papers. This voluminous set of manuscripts was deposited by Henry Russell’s grandson, Sir Arthur Russell, after the sale of the family’s mansion in the dog days of Spam and rationing following the Second World War.

At first Russell’s papers were a slight disappointment. Although there was no shortage of huge volumes, all beautifully bound in blue leather, here too there was an inexplicable gap in the vital period between June 1805 and January 1806, filled only by a single letter from November. It was from Sir Henry Russell (senior) in Calcutta to his son Charles Russell in Hyderabad, and referred in passing to Kirkpatrick’s death as ‘the melancholy event that has lately happened’. But here again there was no mention whatsoever of the Begum.⁸¹

Then I found a passage about a trip Henry Russell made to Calcutta in April 1806, in connection with his duties as an executor of James’s will. Russell was a in a bad mood: ‘I have been annoyed with boils ever since I came here,’ he wrote to his brother Charles, and, vain as ever,

Transcendent art: whose magic skill alone
Can soften rock and animate stone
By symbol mark the heart, reflect the head
And raise a living image from the dead!
Cease from these toils and lend a chisel’s grace
To filial virtues courting your embrace.
These relate his pride, his transport and relief
A father’s tears, commemorate, with grief.
Still while their genial lustre cheers his breast
Emits a ray that points to blissful rest.
Hope built on faith, affections balm and cure
Divinely whispers ‘Their reward is sure.’

added: ‘[I] have therefore gone but little out.’ But on the opposite page was a passage that read plainly enough: ‘They left Cuttack with the poor Begum and the Moonshy a few days after me, and will probably arrive here about the 25th.’

It was like coming up for air. After four years of searching, here at last was a lead. The Begum was alive, and heading for Calcutta in the company of Munshi Aziz Ullah. But what was she up to? I read on as fast as Russell’s faded and often illegible copperplate would allow.

The shadows which seemed to obscure the documentation as James left Madras in September 1805, plunging the story into darkness at the most vital moment, dispersed as quickly as they had gathered. The detail was never so clear as it had been in the period before James’s death, with multiple sources from all sorts of different angles, and there remained a lot of unanswered questions. But after a month in the Bodleian, the outlines of an extraordinary story were quite clear. Moreover, Khair un-Nissa herself came into sharper focus than she ever had done in James’s discreet letters.

The year which followed James’s death still remained a complete blank. But from the autumn of 1806, Khair un-Nissa re-emerged into the centre of the spotlit stage. Having never left Hyderabad before, she was in the process of making what must have been for her an epic pilgrimage: a one-thousand-mile journey to the other end of India, at the most inclement time of year, to mourn at her husband’s grave. This seemed an unambiguous mark of her fidelity and devotion to James, and a final proof, if proof were needed, that her involvement with him was not just a political ruse dreamt up by her mother and Aristu Jah to entrap the Resident. She loved him, after all.

As the letters unfolded, it was clear that Khair was not alone on her expedition. Apart from the Munshi, Sharaf un-Nissa was coming too, though her mother, Durdanah Begum, now presumably in her seventies or even eighties, had opted to stay behind in the family deorhi in the old city. By good fortune, Russell was also in Calcutta at the time, and recorded everything in his letters. He travelled separately, and on separate business, but planned to meet the two Begums in Calcutta: two women beside whom he had lived, and whose notes and messages he had carried, but whose faces he had never yet seen.

There was another plan afoot too: Fyze and General Palmer were going to be in Calcutta to meet the two Begums, as was James’s niece Isabella Buller, to whom Khair had sent presents of opal jewellery, but whom she had never met. It sounded as if this expedition was like some sort of rebirth for Khair, an escape from the empty cage of the Residency mahal, with all its memories, and perhaps a part of a necessary exorcism.

There was certainly little indication at this stage, with Russell’s jaunty letters recording their progress, that the saddest and most tragic part of the whole story was still to come.