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After being helped into the roundhouse of the Lord Hawkesbury at Madras, Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum—or, as they were now known, Katherine Aurora and William George Kirkpatrick—had to endure six long months on board ship, most of it out of sight of land.

During the voyage they found themselves under the watchful eyes of a posse of four guardians: the motherly figure of Mrs Ure; an equally well-rounded though rather younger (and unnamed) Indian ayah; Mrs Perry, the elderly wife of one of James’s bandsmen; and another faithful Hyderabadi manservant of James whom the children knew from the Residency. As they rounded the Cape, crossed the Equator and headed for the temperate climes of the north, and as the returning English passengers began to relish the familiar sensation of the cool Atlantic climate, the utter strangeness of the bleak, foreign, northern world they were heading towards must have slowly dawned upon the children.

For those Company servants who had spent many years in India, the barren chill of England held in the cold embrace of winter often came as an unexpected shock: after a decade in the East, and after months of longing for an imagined Britain of Eden-like beauty, the Scottish artist James Baillie Fraser had been horrified to find that ‘the brown of winter shrouded all, a gloomy welcome to the returned wanderer … all about seemed as desolate as a deserted city’.¹ To those brought up in the light and warmth and colour of India, who had never before felt the cold, or seen the thick impenetrable murk of an English fog, the February half-light would have seemed all the more unnerving and uninviting.

The reception that awaited the party at their place of disembarkation ‘some four or five miles from Portsmouth’ could well have compounded this feeling of loss and despair. According to the somewhat condescending George Elers, a captain in the 12th Regiment of Foot, who happened to be travelling home on the same boat:

Poor Mrs Ure who had her own infant and the care of Colonel Kirkpatrick’s children—together with a faithful old black man (who was very fond of them), a black nurse, and an English maidservant—felt herself in a very helpless and unprotected state; she had, she said, property in shawls, jewels and other valuables to the amount of upwards of £2000 (and the Custom House officers were expected on board at any minute), and all this property was liable to be seized.^iq We were only allowed to take one trunk each on shore. She began to cry and bewail herself, so I told her to be comforted, that I would not leave her until I saw her safe in London with her friends, and would save all her property if I possibly could, but she must place the whole of it, with the key, under my care.

I had but twenty guineas in my purse to take me to London, and I asked if she had sufficient to pay her expenses to London, for that I should want a good deal to bribe the Customs House officers so as to get her trunk passed. She told me she had plenty of money, and she begged me to arrange everything for her. I then got a large boat and got my black and white party safe on board …

When the boat grounded on the beach at Portsmouth, I leaped on shore. The Customs House officers seized our trunks and wheeled them off to the Customs House. Some of the officers seeing the poor fat black nurse, handled her very roughly, thinking from her large size that she had shawls concealed about her person. She poor creature, not speaking a word of English and not understanding their motives, got dreadfully alarmed... ²

Elers bribed the officers with a massive twenty guineas of baksheesh and in due course delivered the children to the London townhouse of the Handsome Colonel in Fitzroy Square, an area of the capital perennially popular with returned nabobs and old India hands. The children’s uncle William was there to meet them too, luckily perhaps, as it is unclear how much English they would have understood at this stage, and after their parting from the bilingual Mrs Ure, William’s linguistic gifts may well have been much needed. Less than a month later, the two Muslim children were baptised Christian on 25 March 1806 at St Mary’s church, Marylebone Road.³ Another last link with India was severed.

The children grew up at Hollydale, the Handsome Colonel’s rambling country house near Keston in Kent, with frequent visits to Exeter to see their uncle William and all their West Country cousins. But inevitably they ‘pined for their native surroundings’; and they were forbidden from writing to their mother, grandmother or any of their Indian family, who in turn ‘wrote pathetic appeals to send them [back] out … probably it was feared that, if once they went there, the call of the blood might make complications’.⁴ Sadder still, ‘in after years the daughter told her own children how long she and her brother had pined for the father and mother they remembered, and longed to get away from the cold of England to Hyderabad, and were sad at hearing that they were not to go there again, which was all they could understand of their father’s death’.⁵

It was a childhood marred by more of the emotional and physical upheavals that had already scarred their young lives. The first trauma was the increasing incoherence of their uncle William, with whom they seem initially to have spent much of their holidays.⁶William Kirkpatrick had retired to a relatively small but elegant townhouse in Exeter, an easy carriage drive from Sir John Kennaway, his ‘oldest and most esteemed friend’.⁷ Southernhay House lay in the lee of the crumbling Norman towers of Exeter Cathedral, the centrepiece of the smart new development of Southernhay, which prided itself on being to Exeter what the Royal Crescent was to Bath. The house lay in the middle of the two wings of the crescent, the only detached residence in the whole development. With its pair of side-wings, fluted classical pillars and a pedimented portico, it stood assertively in the middle of the other flat-fronted Georgian townhouses with their fan windows and wooden shutters, somewhat like a miniature redbrick version of the Hyderabad Residency re-erected in Devon. It was also remarkable in the English townscape for one single Oriental flourish that distinguished it from everything around it: a pair of twisted old Indian palm trees standing sentinel in front of the house, presumably planted by William to make the children—or indeed himself—feel at home amid the oaks, chestnuts and holly trees of Southernhay Green.^ir

William was now an invalid. He had never recovered from either his bowel complaint or his ‘rheumatic gout’, and by 1809 he was confined to a chair. Judging by the pain he suffered and his increasingly erratic handwriting, he may have been taking large quantities of laudanum to help soothe his condition.⁸ But despite his illness, and the laudanum, he worked prolifically at his Oriental studies. He helped select a library for the Company, and wrote an account of his travels in Nepal.⁹ Increasingly, however, he became obsessed with the figure of Tipu Sultan. Before William had left India, James had in September 1801 sent him a huge wagonload of documents which had been taken from Tipu’s chancellery in Seringapatam.^is These documents William now worked up for publication in his 1811 volume Select Letters of Tippoo Sultaun, carefully sifting and selecting his material with a view to showing Tipu in the most fearsome light possible.¹⁰

As the decade progressed, William’s interests seem to have centred more and more on Tipu’s astronomical and astrological learning. William’s letter books in the India Office contain a series of fascinating letters that he wrote to Mark Wilks, Lord Clive’s Private Secretary during the Clive Enquiry into James’s love life, who had gone on to become Resident in Mysore, and the author of a series of important studies of both Mughal metaphysics and the political history of Tipu’s reign.¹¹ William’s correspondence with Wilks deals with increasing singlemindedness on Tipu’s astrological system, and seems to hint at his growing conviction that Tipu had correctly forecast the time of his own death by a series of esoteric astrological calculations.

In November 1809 Wilks sent William the answer to his query as to the exact moment—according to Tipu’s new Mysore calendar—of Tipu’s birth ‘in the year Angeera on the 17th of the month Margeser. Angeera is the 6th of the cycle and corresponds to 1752-3.’¹² From William’s last letters emerges an extraordinary picture of a man, clearly aware that he is dying, taking larger and larger doses of laudanum, obsessively studying the Mysore system of astrology, and all the while (one grows increasingly to suspect) making calculations, casting horoscopes, and believing that he is onto something, that he really does hold, almost within his grasp, some sort of universal Philosopher’s Stone. Whether William, in the haze of an opium addiction, really was trying to calculate the date of his own death in the same way that he clearly believed Tipu had succeeded in doing, must remain a matter of speculation; but it is certainly a possibility.¹³

A few weeks before he died in the summer of 1812, William sold all his possessions from his Exeter townhouse;^it and on 22 August he overdosed on laudanum ‘near London’, aged fifty-eight.¹⁴

It remains uncertain whether the death was a suicide or not.

Another tragedy followed close on William’s overdose.

A month later, while the family was still in mourning, the eleven-year-old Sahib Allum, or William George, as he was now known, fell into ‘a copper of boiling water’ and was disabled for life, with at least one of his limbs requiring amputation.¹⁵ A letter in shaky old man’s handwriting from the Handsome Colonel to Kitty (as Katherine was now known), written immediately after the accident, survives in the archive of their descendants. It shows the closeness of the relationship that had developed between the grieving grandfather and his ten-year-old Anglo-Indian granddaughter:

My dear Kitty,

Many affected mourners are joined with you for the calamity which has recently taken place in our Family, but you & I will bewail it together when we meet, for I cannot weep upon paper. I send you a small present which I hope will be to your Taste, and apprise you that I shall send a carriage for you on ye 28th to meet your poor brother. I remain, my dear Kitty

Your affectionate grandfather
Jas Kirkpatrick
Hollydale, 8 Sept 1812¹⁶

It is the last letter to survive from the Handsome Colonel. Having outlived all but one of his sons he died six years later, in 1818, at the grand old age of eighty-nine.¹⁷ After the funeral, Kitty and William George were shunted off yet again, this time to live in rotation with their various married cousins, William Kirkpatrick’s daughters: first Clementina, Lady Louis; then Julia, who had married Edward Strachey (Mountstuart Elphinstone’s friend and former travelling companion who had stayed with James at the Hyderabad Residency in 1801); and finally Isabella Buller, who had moved back to England from Calcutta with her husband Charles, become a fervent Evangelical, and set up house on Kew Green. William George begins to fade from the picture at this point: a dreamy, disabled poet, obsessed with Wordsworth and the metaphysics of Coleridge, but sufficiently active (and attractive) to marry at the age of twenty, and to father three girls.

As William George disappears into the background in the 1820s, Kitty begins to takes centre stage. She was already attracting attention as a woman of quite remarkable beauty—as well as one, thanks to her father’s generous legacy, of unusual means. In 1822, when Kitty was aged twenty, she met the new tutor Isabella Buller had hired to teach her two sons. He was a young, unknown and struggling Scottish writer and philosopher, three years her senior. His name was Thomas Carlyle. And it was through his pen that Kitty comes suddenly into dazzling focus.

Carlyle had arrived in London off the boat from Edinburgh in the spring of 1822. It was his first visit to the city, and, as he wrote years later in his Reminiscences:

That first afternoon, with its curious phenomena, is still very lively with me … Then … dash of a brave carriage driving up, and entry of a strangely complexioned young lady, with soft brown eyes and floods of bronze-red hair, really a pretty-looking, smiling, and amiable though most foreign bit of magnificence and kindly splendour, who [was] welcomed by the name ‘dear Kitty’.

Kitty Kirkpatrick [was] Charles Buller’s cousin … her birth, as I afterwards found, an Indian romance, mother a sublime Begum, father a ditto English official, mutually adoring, wedding, living withdrawn in their own private paradise, a romance famous in the East... ¹⁸

Carlyle heard a great deal about Kitty that first week in London. He was staying with his childhood friend, the fiery Evangelical preacher Edward Irving, at 7 Myddelton Terrace. As Irving was too poor to furnish his own house, two of his most ardent admirers had done so for him at a cost of £500, a princely sum in those days. The two ‘rich and open-handed ladies’ were Mrs Buller’s sister, Julia Strachey, and her cousin, Kitty Kirkpatrick.¹⁹ Both were religious—Julia Strachey especially so—and attracted to the Evangelical Clapham Sect, ‘whose pious members, it was said, would ask each other at intervals “Shall we Engage?” and drop to their knees’.²⁰ Irving, with his gaunt features and black broad-brimmed hat, was one of the Sect’s star performers, and crowds numbering in the thousands would eagerly squeeze into the Caledonian Chapel to await one of his breathless three-hour sermons.

Over the months that followed Carlyle saw more and more of Kitty, and became increasingly fascinated with her lovely voice, her sense of humour, ‘a slight merry curl of the upper lip, the carriage of her head, the quaint little things she said, and her low-toned laugh’.²¹ Soon after their first meeting, Carlyle was invited over to Shooter’s Hill, the Stracheys’ country house. ‘I remember entering the little winding avenue,’ he later wrote, ‘and seeing, in a kind of open conservatory or verandah on our approaching the house, the effulgent vision of “dear kitty” buried among the roses and almost buried under them … the before and after and all the other incidents of that first visit are quite lost to me ... ’²²

Although Carlyle was already involved in an intense (though at this stage largely epistolary) relationship with the formidably clever and acerbic Jane Welsh of Haddington, East Lothian, whom he would later marry, the young philosopher clearly fell a little in love with Kitty. Soon after he got to know her he wrote to Jane:

This Kitty is a singular and very pleasing creature, a little blackeyed, auburn haired brunette, full of kindliness and humour, and who never, I believe, was angry at any creature for a moment in her life. Tho’ twenty one and not unbeautiful, the sole mistress of herself and fifty thousand pounds, she is as meek and modest as a Quakeress … Good Kitty, would you or I were half as happy as this girl. But her Mother was a Hindoo Princess (whom her father fought for and scaled walls for); it lies in the blood, and philosophy can do little to help us.²³

Jane, predictably enough, grew to become deeply jealous of this constant talk of Kitty in Carlyle’s letters. ‘I congratulate you on your present situation,’ she wrote, acid dripping from every stroke of her pen,

with such a picture of domestic felicity before your eyes, and this ‘singular and very pleasing creature’ to charm away the blue-devils, you can hardly fail to be as happy as the day is long. Miss Kitty Kirkpatrick—Lord what an ugly name! Oh pretty, dear, delightful, Kitty! I am not a bit jealous of her, not I indeed—Hindoo princess though she be! Only you may as well never let me hear you mention her name again … Oh thou Goose! Are you mad? Has Miss Kitty Kirkpatrick turned your head?²⁴

Jane’s jealousy became all the more acute when Kitty, Carlyle and the Stracheys set off on a trip to Paris in the autumn of 1824, during which, according to Carlyle’s later account, Julia Strachey seems to have tacitly pushed the two together.²⁵ Jane’s response when she heard about this trip was characteristically forthright: ‘Paris? Art thou frantic? Art thou dreaming? Or has the Hindoo Princess actually bewitched thee that thou hast brought thy acid visage into this land of fops and pastry cooks, where Vanity and Sensuality have set up their chosen shrine?’²⁶

Two years later, with Kitty still very much at the centre of Carlyle’s life and letters, Jane continued to shoot off jealous darts in her direction: ‘Your ‘’Rosy-fingered Morn”, the Hindoo Princess, where is she?’²⁷ Or: ‘There is Catharina Aurora Kirkpatrick for instance, who has £50,000 and a princely lineage, and “never was out of humour in her life”; with such a “singularly pleasing creature” and so much fine gold you could hardly fail to find yourself admirably well off.’²⁸

As Jane Welsh was all too aware, Kitty was indeed a woman of considerable means, and Carlyle was only a tutor. But ironically, despite the former’s Indian blood and the latter’s subsequent fame, marriage to Carlyle would have been regarded as inappropriate for Kitty, due to the perceived disparity in class and status between the two, though they were clearly and openly attracted to one another.^iu As Kitty later explained to one of her friends (taking a swipe at Jane in the process), ‘He was then the tutor to my cousin, Charles Buller, and had made no name for himself; so of course I was told that any such idea could not be thought of for a moment. What could I do with everyone against it?^iv Now anyone might be proud to be his wife, and he has married a woman quite beneath him.’²⁹

In 1828, Isabella Buller’s eldest son Charles wrote to tell Carlyle the news of the latest tragedy in Kitty’s life: the death of her beloved brother William George at the age of only twenty-seven: ‘We have some expectation of seeing Miss Kirkpatrick soon, but she is in great trouble,’ wrote Buller. ‘Her brother William, perhaps you already knew, died in May after a painful and lingering illness. His poor young wife has gone mad and Kitty, after all this, has been in a very wearisome dispute with her sister respecting the care of her brother’s children.’³⁰

A year later, possibly on the rebound, Kitty finally found the love, support and stability that had always eluded her, in the person of a nephew of Sir John Kennaway, the dashing Captain James Winslowe Phillipps of the 7th Hussars.^iw They married on 21 November 1829.³¹ Carlyle, himself now clearly jealous, dismissed Phillipps (quite inaccurately) as ‘an idle ex-Captain of Sepoys’;³² but the marriage was a passionate one, and in Phillipps’ love letters to Kitty, still in the possession of their descendants, he assures her that ‘How sincerely & devotedly I love you, words cannot express’.³³

Shortly after this, Carlyle began work on his celebrated though almost unreadable (and indeed now little-read) novel Sartor Resartus (’The Tailor Retailored’). This deeply enigmatic book—even by the standards of the other work produced by the Sage of Ecclefechan—aimed to take on the great issues of Faith and Justice through the curious guise of a History and Philosophy of Clothing by the German Professor of Things in General, the ‘Visionary Pedant’ Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. At the centre of the narrative of the book lies the story of Professor Teufelsdröckh’s relationship with the aristocratic Zähdarm family and his fascination for Blumine, who having made the Professor ‘immortal with a kiss’ then ‘resigned herself to wed some other’. Teufelsdröckh meets Blumine at an ‘Aesthetic Tea’ in the garden house of Frau Zähdarm, where she sits embowered in a cluster of roses. She is a brunette (‘dusky red’), young, hazel-eyed, beautiful and somebody’s cousin, ‘a many-tinted radiant aurora … this fairest of Orient Light bringers … his whole heart and soul were hers’.³⁴

At the time of publication, and for about forty years after, while the book was still being eagerly read, there was a fierce debate as to the identity of Blumine, with Jane Welsh Carlyle, Margaret Gordon (Carlyle’s first love) and Kitty Kirkpatrick all canvassed as potential candidates.³⁵ No one in the Strachey family, however, had any doubt. As Lady Strachey remarked to her son George on reading it, ‘The book is as plain as a pikestaff. Teufelsdröckh is Thomas [Carlyle] himself. The Zähdarmes are your uncle and aunt Buller. Toughgut is young Charles Buller. Philistine is Irving. The duenna cousin is myself. The rose garden is our garden with roses at Shooter’s Hill, and the Rose Goddess [Blumine] is Kitty.’³⁶ According to George Strachey, ‘That “Blumine” personified Miss Kirkpatrick has always passed in the family for a certainty, requiring no more discussion than the belief that Nelson stood on the column in Trafalgar Square.’³⁷

Kitty herself clearly had no doubt that she was Blumine. Indeed she was once heard to take on an embarrassed Carlyle with the forthright words: ‘ ‘’You know you were never made immortal in that manner!” … where upon they both laughed.’³⁸

Six years after finding herself the romantic heroine of one of the most bizarre novels to be written in Victorian England, in May 1841 Kitty was visiting Mrs Duller, a childhood friend, when she was taken to tea with one of Mrs Duller’s country neighbours who lived in a grand Berkshire mansion named Swallowfield, to the south of Reading. She had never been to the house before, nor did she know the owners. She could therefore have had little inkling of what she would find inside.

To Mrs Duller’s amazement, Kitty walked through the front door of the house and promptly burst ‘into floods of tears … and was much affected’. On the stairs, instantly recognisable, was the portrait of her and her brother painted by Chinnery just before they left India, thirty-six years earlier.

Swallowfield, it turned out, was the house of Henry Russell, now Sir Henry Russell, a name Kitty may have dimly remembered from her childhood. Russell himself was away in London on business that day, and his second wife, a French woman named Clothilde, gave the ladies tea and promised to find out from her husband how it was that he had somehow acquired the Chinnery portrait.^39ix Russell eventually wrote to Kitty explaining that it had been given to him after Khair un-Nissa’s death in 1813, and promised that he would leave her the picture in his will; but he did not offer to hand it over immediately, and seems to have made no attempt to meet the woman whom he must have remembered as a little girl in the Residency mahal. His reticence was hardly surprising; after all, there was clearly a limit to how much of the truth he could tell Kitty.

Russell had been back in England for nearly twenty years, having left India in deep disgrace with the Company, but with the redeeming compensation of having hoarded away a phenomenal fortune for his premature retirement. Fearing he might be humiliatingly removed from office, he had resigned as Resident at Hyderabad in 1820, after nine years in the job. Though he did not know it, even as he packed up and headed off towards Masulipatam for the last time, a set of furious letters were in transit from the Court of Directors in London ordering ‘that Mr Russell be immediately removed from the Residency of Hyderabad and that he not be employed again at any other court’.⁴⁰

The ostensible reason for Russell’s summary removal was the death of two brigands whom, without any reference to the Nizam’s government, Russell had ordered to be severely flogged; both men had died the following day from the brutality of the wounds inflicted on them. This was however something of a pretext: Russell had become a major embarrassment to the Company, and was widely suspected of massive corruption and bribe-taking, something that the astonishing fortune with which he returned to England would seem to bear out: having come into the job of Resident with total savings of £500, he managed to ship home a fortune of £85,000, which he had impressively succeeded in accumulating in just nine years on an annual salary of £3400.⁴¹

During his time as Resident, Russell had presided over a dramatic souring of relations between the East India Company and the Hyderabad durbar. Despite a personal fondness for Hyderabad, Russell was always personally ambitious, and in a bid to impress his masters in Calcutta he had imposed a series of damaging new treaties on the Nizam, forcing him to pay for ever larger and more unnecessary numbers of British troops at a total cost of forty lakh rupees a year—a sum which amounted to nearly half the entire tax revenue of Hyderabad. This vast fortune all went to pay the salaries of the enlarged Subsidiary Force and Russell’s new Hyderabad Contingent, for which the Nizam had no use and over which he had in reality little control. Unlike the treaties James had signed, which at least initially were hugely useful to Hyderabad, and which did much to preserve its independence, Russell’s not only provided no tangible benefit to the Nizam, they severely undermined and threatened the entire financial stability of his dominions.

Count Edouard de Warren was a French soldier of fortune working for the Nizam and a relation by marriage of Russell’s second wife.^iy He had however little liking for the gross injustices over which Russell presided:

Thus we see the ruler of a country larger than France … the finest jewel in the broken crown of the Moghuls … entirely deprived of his liberty, held in utter check-mate, without a soldier of his own worth the name, barely able to count on the loyalty of a few hundred mercenaries, the dregs scraped from distant lands—Sikhs, Arabs, Afghans—who look like robbers lounging at his palace gate, dressed in rags and sporting wretched weapons—is it any surprise then, that the Nizam spends the entire year shut away in his harem, seeking to forget that he is a prince, by drowning himself in vicious pleasures? … [Such is the hatred now felt for Europeans in the city] that no European can normally enter Hyderabad dressed in European costume, whether on foot, on horse or in a palanquin, without exposing himself to the insults of yogis, the execrations of fakirs and the real risk of physical harm from the mob.⁴²

None of this surprised de Warren, as the British in Hyderabad, especially the soldiers, were now in the habit of behaving with disdain and extreme rudeness to their hosts. He was especially horrified by the behaviour and lack of manners of the British officers at a levée given by the new Minister, Raja Chandu Lal:

The entertainment was above reproach … but as a European I was disgusted and ashamed by the lack of refinement, indeed the gluttony, shown by English officers of all ranks and ages: they threw themselves on the French wines, especially the Champagne, with intemperate greed which must have seemed doubly despicable to our native hosts, so sober, grave and courteous, so full of human dignity. Yet again, it was these northern conquerors who were the real barbarians. Even the Resident was aware that his party was transforming itself into a herd of swine, and before the metamorphosis was complete, hurriedly rose from the table and brought the meal to an end.⁴³

One person de Warren felt particularly sorry for was Fyze’s son, William Palmer. A great deal of Russell’s money had come from his secret and illegal partnership in Palmer’s extraordinarily successful bank, which by 1815 had grown to become the most successful business operation in India outside British control. Henry and William had initially been friends as well as business partners, and Russell had often dined at Palmer’s rambling mansion, known as Palmer’s Kothi. There he would pay his respects to Fyze (or the Sahib Begum, as he always referred to her), who had moved in after the old General had died in 1816. Fyze was eventually buried by her son in a pretty Muslim tomb surrounded by gardens and a small mosque a little to the north of the Kothi.^iz But Russell, worried that his illegal financial links with the bank would be exposed, had eventually fallen out with Palmer, and put in train a series of restrictions on Palmer’s business that eventually brought about its complete and disastrous collapse soon after he left Hyderabad.

De Warren was disgusted by the way Russell and the other British had treated Palmer, and wrote an affectionate description of him in his book L’Inde Anglaise, in which he contrasted the starchy manners of the Residency with the elegance and refinement of Palmer’s mansion:

At the Residency, the manners are stiff, cold and polite, and conversation choked in half-whispers, as in a European court; but nearby is the more oriental court of the Palmers, where reigns the politeness of the Persians, the dignity of the Moghuls, the hospitality of the Arabs. At William Palmer’s table, there are always some 20 places laid for any visitors who might chance to come by, and at the head of the table presides Palmer himself, who in spite of the original sin of being half-caste, is ennobled by his own genius. Small in stature and as black as the servant standing behind his chair, he calmly smokes his hookha while running his eye over papers written in the Persian or Nagari script and stacked next to the luncheon he barely touches. His two charming nieces sit next to him and do the honours of his table. While they entertain the English guests, the elite of the three cantonments, he receives the humble salutations of the greatest nobles of the city. The learned Pandit, the pious Mulla, the proud Amir all bow with deep reverence before this frail old man.

Messrs Palmer have long served as intermediaries between the Nizam and the British government in India, loyally serving both as the Rothschilds of the Deccan. In any crisis, their honestly acquired wealth came to the rescue of the protectors as well as of the protected. And how were they thanked? Just what one would expect from an ungrateful world: the two governments came to an agreement to strip them bare of their assets … and the Palmers lost all their money. Today they have nothing left but a meagre allowance paid at the caprice of [the Minister] Chandu Lal—which is neither reliable nor regular. What they have in undiminished quantity and quality is their honour—the respect of whites as well as of natives will follow them to the grave.

De Warren went on to give a description of the life led by William Palmer and his younger brother Hastings. It is one of the last accounts that would ever be penned of the hybrid white Mughal lifestyle: when de Warren’s book went to the press in 1845, British and Indians were drawing fast apart, and Palmer’s lifestyle had already become something of an anachronism, a survival from an earlier age. De Warren’s tone, with its mid-nineteenth-century racial stereotypes, is another indication of how fast the world was changing:

The private life of the leaders of this family is overtly epicurian … Their European education has made them sceptical deists; their oriental upbringing has habituated them to an extreme refinement; their mixed blood has made it impossible for them to find wives who could also be intellectual partners, and so drives them back to unadulterated oriental sensuality. So they each have their harems filled with women of all ages and colours and creeds, all married and divorced according to the whims of favour, but all kept honourably and generously. Their progeny would do honour to King Priam—I have seen there children of all ages and shades. This family has still been able to hold its own against the prejudice that pursues it relentlessly, but woe to them the day William Palmer should die! Only he can face out public opinion, to overwhelm prejudice by the prestige of his genius, his learning, his independent and liberal ideas, his long-term renown, the memory of his boundless generosity, of his immense hospitality in the years of good fortune, which led to his being called ‘Prince of Merchants’, a title shared with his half-brother in Calcutta.

But William is a frail and elderly man, worn out by the climate and his private griefs. He will not accept the reality of his poverty, nor put a limit to his generous impulses, and still takes care to relieve the miseries of the poor while poverty itself invades his own home. His superb gardens are untended, trees collapse out of sheer old age and are not replanted; the pools without water; even the house itself is crumbling and may well not outlive its aged master. I last visited the garden and its cypresses in 1839 at the moment when I was leaving India for the last time. Poor Palmer, only these trees will remain after you, and the English whom you have so often hospitably received at your table will repay your generosity by heaping scorn and insults on your children, blocking and refusing them entry into society.⁴⁴

Russell had played his part in Palmer’s downfall, and in the inquiry which followed the failure of the bank, which ruined more than 1200 of its investors (who all lost everything), he had not only failed to come to Palmer’s defence, he had also resolutely denied having any connection whatsoever with the bank. He even went so far as bribing, at a cost of £60, the printers of the official inquiry report, The Hyderabad Papers, in order to make sure that the link between him and Palmer was never published.⁴⁵

It must therefore have been something of a surprise to Russell when in 1841, two years after de Warren’s last glimpse of Palmer’s crumbling mansion, and a year after Kitty’s surprise visit, a letter from Palmer should arrive at Swallowfield. It must have been even more of a surprise that the subject of the letter—after twenty-one years of silence—was none other than Sharaf un-Nissa.

After the death of Khair un-Nissa, her mother Sharaf un-Nissa had hoped that Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum would continue to keep in touch with their Hyderabadi family. At Khair’s death they had, after all, inherited not only all Khair’s jewels, the value of which was conservatively estimated at £12,000, and which Sharaf had initially put aside for them, but also considerable estates across the Nizam’s dominions. As Russell wrote soon after Khair’s death, Sharaf un-Nissa’s

own notion seems to be that the children when they grow up will come to take possession of their property … I am disposed therefore as far as it depends on me to leave the inducement for the boy at least to visit his grandmother a few years hence. His fortune will be such as to make it unnecessary for him to follow any profession for a livelihood, and when his education has been completed, I don’t see how he could employ two or three years better than by coming to India.⁴⁶

Since then, however, things had not gone according to plan. Not only had the children been forbidden from keeping in touch with their grandmother, ^ja as Palmer’s letter to Russell revealed, the family’s huge and lucrative estates had all been summarily confiscated by the Minister, Rajah Chandu Lal, more than a decade earlier, following the death of Nizam Sikander Jah. For the last twelve years, it now emerged, Sharaf un-Nissa had been living off the charity of William Palmer. Now that Palmer was himself on the verge of destitution, he had suggested that Sharaf had no option but to write a begging letter to Russell, the man who had not only destroyed her beloved daughter three decades earlier, but had also played his part in ruining Palmer himself. Sharaf un-Nissa duly wrote to Russell asking him to use his influence with the Minister, as she was now utterly without means and, having sold her last piece of jewellery, had no one else to appeal to. As she explained through a Persian letter-writer:

Now in these days I am in debt and helpless. If I were to describe my situation, it would only upset you. In the past 12 years since my jagirs were confiscated, I have had to sell everything that was in my home just in order to be able to buy food for myself—the barest provisions necessary for mere survival—so as not to die. Now there is nothing left. I have nobody to turn to, other than God Himself! This is no longer the time for forgetfulness and neglect. What more can I write, except my prayers ... ⁴⁷

The tone of utter desperation pricked Russell’s generally far from over-active conscience, and he wrote back by return, offering to do all he could. In a covering letter to William Palmer, Russell thanked him for getting in touch despite all that had passed between them:

I assure you that I take it very kindly of you to have written … After the changes of one and twenty years the Begum would have found it difficult to obtain access to me in any other way, and I should have had no means of conveying my answer to her … The Begum desires nothing more than the common right of being protected in the enjoyment of that property which originally and personally belonged to her … What has already been done cannot be recalled but I may, and if I can I will, devise some security for the future. There is no one for whom I have a stronger respect and affection than for Shurfoon Nissa Begum, and there is no effort I will not make to mitigate any difficulties that may press upon her.⁴⁸

He went on to describe his own growing health problems: a series of ‘paralytic seizures’, and a severe infection in his eyes that had left him all but blind. Via Palmer, he then sent the old lady the first news of her granddaughter that she had received for many years:

Col. Kirkpatrick’s daughter, Mrs Phillipps, is well & happy. She lives in Devonshire & I unfortunately missed seeing her owing to her Residence being in a different part of the country when I was there on a visit to my sister last year. She was with Mrs Duller on a visit to a relation in our neighbourhood, and at Swallowfield when I happened to be in London. As to the 2000 Rupees which you say is pressing upon her [Sharaf un-Nissa] and which would remove her difficulty I must beg of you to pay it for me. I still have a small account with Binny’s House at Madras and I have no doubt they will cash the bill upon me for the amount.

He saved a more personal request for last:

I am sorry to see a confirmation of what I had before heard of the Begum having disposed of some of her jewels. Among them was a teeka [forehead jewel] of diamond which I will be sorry from old association to see pass into the hands of a stranger. Should you be able to ascertain delicately whether that was one of the things disposed of & if it was possible to trace it, I should be thankful to you to repurchase it & send it to me …

The tika he refers to must, presumably, have belonged to Khair un-Nissa, and been a jewel he would have known well on the forehead of his old lover. It is always difficult to divine motives, and especially so in this case. Was this the sexual vanity of an old man? Or can one imagine that Russell was perhaps regretful, or remorseful—or even, at some level, still a little in love with the memory of Khair un-Nissa, and the times they had spent together in Calcutta some four decades earlier, in younger, happier days when his future was still bright and his reputation still un-compromised? Russell was, after all, always a weak, rather than a bad man. But it was too late, in every sense, to recapture that moment or to undo what had been done. William Palmer made discreet enquiries, but answered that sadly ‘the teeka was sold many years ago—& there is no trace left of it’. He added: ‘Your assistance came very timely to the poor Begum; she is in great distress. Everything of value has been sold; and a silver chilumchee [basin] was sold through my means a short time back to meet some immediate exigencies. The other things which came with the chilumchee, silver articles of small value, necessitated a breaking up of all that belonged to her establishment... ’⁴⁹

On hearing this, Russell then did one more thing for the old lady. He finally got directly in touch with Kitty, by return, and told her that her grandmother was in dire need.

Shortly after her visit to Swallowfield, Kitty had had another chance encounter: on a visit to Exmouth in 1841, she had happened to meet the wife of the newly appointed Assistant to the Resident at Hyderabad, Captain Duncan Malcolm, the nephew of James Kirkpatrick’s former Assistant, John Malcolm.

Now, alerted by Russell, and using Malcolm as an intermediary and Persian translator, Kitty managed to re-establish contact with Sharaf un-Nissa, the grandmother with whom she had not communicated for nearly forty years. There followed a remarkable and extremely emotional correspondence between the two women, one writing in English from Torquay, the other from Hyderabad dictating in Persian to a scribe who wrote on paper sprinkled with gold dust and enclosed in a kharita, a sealed bag of gold Mughal brocade.

Sitting in her villa in Torquay, looking out over the breakers of the same grey northern sea which had brought her to England in 1805, Kitty wrote:

My dear Grandmother,

I received many years ago, your kind letter of condolence with me on the death of my beloved brother. I was very grateful to you for it, tho’ by my not having answered it, I am afraid that you may have thought that I little regarded it. But indeed I did, & the more so, because I felt that you too mourned for him I loved so well & that you too were connected with him by the binding ties of blood.

Two years after his death I was married to a nephew of Sir John Kennaway’s. My husband is of my own age & is a Captain in the English army.

I have four children living, my eldest daughter is 11 years old. She is exactly like my husband. I have a boy of 8 years & a half, then another girl of 7 and a half who is exactly like my mothers picture & one darling infant of 19 months. I have had seven living children-1 sweet boy and two sweet girls are gone, but I am blest in those that survive. My boy is so striking an image of my father that a picture that was drawn of my father as a little boy is always taken for my boy. They have a good intellect & are blest with fair skin. I live in a nice pretty house in the midst of a garden on the sea coast. My dear husband is very kind to me & I love him greatly.

I often think of you and remember you and my dear mother. I often dream that I am with you in India and that I see you both in the room you used to sit in. No day of my life has ever passed without my thinking of my dear mother. I can remember the verandah and the place where the tailors worked and a place on the house top where my mother used to let me sit down and slide.

When I dream of my mother I am in such joy to have found her again that I awake, or else am pained in finding that she cannot understand the English I speak. I can well recollect her cries when we left her and I can now see the place where she sat when we parted, and her tearing her long hair—what worlds would I give to possess one lock of that beautiful and much loved hair! How dreadful to think that so many, many years have passed when it would have done my heart such good to think that you loved me & when I longed to write to you & tell you these feelings that I was never able to express, a letter which I was sure would have been detained & now how wonderful it is that after 35 years I am able for the first time to hear that you think of me, and love me, and have perhaps wondered why I did not write to you, and that you have thought me cold and insensible to such near dear ties. I thank God that he has opened for me a way of making the feelings of my heart known to you.

Will this reach you & will you care for the letter of your grandchild? My own heart tells me you will. May God bless you my own dear Grandmother.⁵⁰

The letter ends with a postscript requesting that Sharaf un-Nissa send a lock of her daughter’s hair. Sharaf un-Nissa replied in Persian, enclosing the lock of Khair un-Nissa’s hair she had kept all that time for Kitty (‘a portion of it is plain, the rest is made up’), and saying that when she heard that Kitty was still alive,

Fresh vigour was instilled into my deadened heart and such immeasurable joy was attained by me that it cannot be brought within the compass of being written or recounted. My Child, the Light of my Eyes, the solace of my soul, may God grant you long life!

After offering up my prayers that your days may be lengthened and your dignity increased, let it be known to you that at this moment, by the mercy of God, my health is excellent, and I am at all seasons praying for her welfare at the Threshold of the Almighty. Night and day my eyes are directed to my child.

In compliance with what my child has written, the wife of Captain Duncan Malcolm invited me to her house and told me of the welfare of my child, and of the children of my child. Night and day my eyes are directed to my child. The letter written to me by you is pressed by me sometimes to my head and sometimes to my eyes … If I can procure a female artist I will send my child my portrait. My child must send me her likeness and those of her children ...⁵¹

The correspondence continued for six years. Spectacles (three pairs in all), pills, money, locks of hair and photographs headed off for Hyderabad; illuminated manuscripts, elaborate pieces of calligraphy and Persian poems came back. On one occasion Kitty recalled:

I have a distinct picture of you in my memory as you were when I was a little child, giving you I am afraid a great deal of trouble. I remember one day when I suppose I had been very naughty you whipped me with your slipper & I was very angry. How often I have been obliged to administer the same correction to my children & then I tell them [‘]when I was little my grandmother was obliged to whip me’.

This they listen to with great attention & ask me about my grandmother, so I tell them all about you that I can remember. I wish you could see the darling faces of my children especially of the one that I am sure is so like my mother, only not near so beautiful. I have such a dear merry faced little boy who would delight you, in many things he is so like my dear brother. Whilst my brother lived I could talk of you & my mother to him & we could compare our recollections of all we had left in India …

Kitty communicated her suspicions about Russell’s role in her mother’s life to Duncan Malcolm, asking him to find as discreetly as he could whether the Chinnery had really been meant to go to Russell, or to her. This Malcolm tactfully declined to do, remarking in his covering letter that ‘The old lady’s memory is not good and in this matter I am inclined to trust more to Sir Hy’s statement than to your grandmothers account of the transaction of which she does not appear to have a very clear recollection.’^jb

Kitty also asked her grandmother to send her a full account of her parents’ meeting and marriage, which Sharaf duly dictated and sent to Torquay. One thing she could not produce, however. Kitty had laboured all her life in the unenviable position of being regarded as illegitimate. This was because in his will, James Kirkpatrick had referred to both Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum as his ‘natural children’: contemporary legal terminology for the children of unmarried parents. One of Kitty’s principal concerns when writing to her grandmother had been to try to get Sharaf to find a certificate from the Nizam, or a mujtahid which formally proved that some sort of legal marriage ceremony had taken place between James and Khair. Sharaf un-Nissa was happy to put on record a formal signed description of James’s marriage, but she was unable to produce any document from the time which put the matter beyond legal doubt.

Help on this did, however, come from the rather unexpected quarter of Sir Henry Russell. He had heard of Kitty’s worries and the pain they gave her, and feeling that he was one of the last people alive who knew the truth, he finally decided to put the record straight. On a trip to the West Country, he went to see Kitty in Torquay, but finding himself alone with her, and overcome with embarrassment, could not bring himself to broach the subject. Just as before with Kitty’s mother, he fell back on his younger brother Charles. Charles was now the rather grand Chairman of Great Western Railways and the MP for Reading,⁵² and Henry wrote to him to ask if he would talk to Kitty. He explained that on his visit he had

hesitated, and was restrained by delicacy from seeming to meddle with a matter which might be said not to belong to me … Mrs. Phillipps has always passed for an illegitimate child; and is so designated in her father’s will; though her birth was as legitimate as yours or mine. Col Kirkpatrick ascribed to her that relation which he supposed her to stand. He knew that he had been married; but he did not think that his marriage was [legally] valid. He supposed, as I did until my father set me right, that a Mahometan marriage was to a Christian null and void; and I conclude he was afraid of invalidating his bequest to his daughter if he designated her in his will by a term which he thought the law would not accord to her.

When, or from whom, I first heard of the marriage, I do not now remember, I think it was soon after Col Kirkpatrick’s death in 1805, and that it was told me by his Moonshee Uzeez Oollah, who accompanied me to Calcutta, went on soon after to Benares and I believe the family until the 1960s when, after 120 years in Britain, it sailed east again. It now hangs in the boardroom of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. finally died there. Certainly I did not hear it from Col Kirkpatrick himself. It was not a subject I ever heard him speak of; nor did I hear in the first instance from Mrs Phillipps’ mother, Khyr oon Nifsa Begum, nor from her grandmother, Shurf oon Nifsa, though they both of them often confirmed it to me; and I have and still have such complicit reliance on their word that I am as firmly satisfied that the ceremony which they described did take place, as if I had witnessed it myself.

In 1843, Kitty told her grandmother that William George’s eldest daughter was about to go to India and that she planned to visit Sharaf un-Nissa when she got there. This produced an immediate and excited reply:

My heart cannot contain the joy it feels in hearing that the daughter of Sahib Allum is about to visit Hindostan with her husband, and I will without fail cherish that child as the apple of my eye … May the pure and exalted God speedily lift up the veil of separation from between us, and bringing us all together in person make us happy and gladden us with a meeting.⁵³

It is unclear whether Sharaf un-Nissa ever got to see her great-granddaughter; but she certainly never saw her granddaughter Kitty again. Four years later, Henry Russell received another letter from William Palmer. It was dated 27 July 1847:

My dear Sir,

I fear the intelligence I have to communicate will distress you. For Shurf oon Nissa Begum died on the 21st Inst [of this month] of dropsy. She was not attended by an English doctor but at her age (over eighty) it would have availed little to arrest the termination common to all. I do not know whether you recollect a relation of hers, Mahmood Ali Khan. He resided with her. There was a mutual confidence & good understanding between them which made him appear (he was her relation) as the son of her adoption. Mahmood Ali Khan married his daughter to Soliman Jah^jc and the connection so formed has given to Soliman Jah a pretence to put guards on her property, preparatory to its sequestration. Mahmud Ali Khan writes to me that he is distasteful to his son in law & apprehends he will suffer ill usage at his hands. There is no remedy for this. The Govt is too much disordered to give any protection to individuals...⁵⁴

Almost exactly ten years later, on 10 May 1857, the great Indian Mutiny broke out in Meerut, north of Delhi.

By that time, the world that gave birth to Kitty Kirkpatrick had disappeared; indeed it had been dead for the best part of two decades. All the white Mughals had long been in their graves: Sir David Ochterlony had died (in Meerut, as it happened) in 1825, heartbroken at a humiliating rebuke from his masters in Calcutta; his friend and protégé William Fraser (whom Lady Nugent had castigated as ‘being as much Hindoo as Christian’) was assassinated ten years after that in 1835.

The last survivor of the world of James Achilles Kirkpatrick was probably William Linnaeus Gardner, who as a young man had married his Cambay Begum, converted to Islam, and been present as a Hyderabad mercenary in the Nizam’s forces at the surrender of the Corps de Raymond in 1798. After years of fighting for different Indian princes, Gardner had finally entered British service in 1803, founding his own regiment of irregular cavalry, Gardner’s Horse. His final posting, bizarrely enough, was as deputy to Hindoo Stuart who, despite his many eccentricities, had been given command of the largest cavalry cantonment in central India, at Saugor. It must have been a rather unusual outpost of the East India Company military establishment, commanded as it was by a pair of European converts to India’s two rival religions.

Here, throughout the early 1820s, Stuart continued to fight his losing battle to allow his sepoys to wear their caste-marks and their own choice of facial hair on parade, being again reprimanded by the commander-in-chief. His retort that ‘A stronger instance than this of European prejudice with relation to this country has never come under my observations’ had no effect on his superiors.⁵⁵ Stuart’s military career thus ended under something of a cloud. As his deputy Gardner put it, ‘Poor General Pundit! He is in hot water with almost everyone.’⁵⁶ The last glimpse of Stuart in Gardner’s correspondence is of him setting off to Calcutta, his Indian bibi beside him, his buggy followed by a cavalcade of children’s carriages ‘and a palkee load of little babes’, already a figure who seemed to have survived from a different, more tolerant and open-minded world.

In his last years of retirement, Gardner settled down on his wife’s jagir at Khasgunge near Agra. His son James had married Mukhta Begum, who was the niece of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah as well as being the sister-in-law of the Nawab of Avadh, and together they fathered a noble Anglo-Indian dynasty, half of whose members were Muslim and half Christian; indeed some of them, such as James Jehangir Shikoh Gardner, seem to have been both at the same time. Even those Gardners who were straightforwardly Christian had alternative Muslim names: thus the Rev. Bartholomew Gardner could also be addressed as Sabr, under which name he became a notable Urdu and Persian poet, shedding his clerical dress in favour of Avadhi pyjamas to declaim his love poems at Lucknavi mushairas.⁵⁷

Already a museum-piece by the 1830s and the subject of occasional wide-eyed articles in the north Indian press, William Gardner died on his Khasgunge estate on 29 July 1835, at the age of sixty-five. His Begum, whose dark eyes he had first glimpsed through the gap between two curtains in Surat thirty-eight years earlier, could not live without him. As Fanny Parkes wrote,

my beloved friend Colonel Gardner … was buried, according to his desire, near the [domed Mughal] tomb of his son Allan. From the time of his death the poor Begum pined and sank daily; just as he said she complained not, but she took his death to heart; she died one month and two days after his decease. Native ladies have a number of titles; her death, names and titles were thus announced in the papers: —‘On the 31st August, at her Residence at Khasgunge. Her Highness Furzund Azeza Azubdeh-tool Arrakeen Umdehtool Assateen Nuwab Mah Munzil ool Nissa Begum Dehlmi, relict of the late Colonel William Linnaeus Gardner. The sound of Nakaras and Dumanas [kettle drums and trumpets]^jd have ceased.’⁵⁸

During the Mutiny, Gardner’s Anglo-Indian descendants, like those of all the other white Mughals, were forced to make a final choice between one or other of the two sides—though for many the choice was made for them. Some families, such as the Rottens in Lucknow, and Mubarak Begum, Ochterlony’s widow in Delhi, chose the rebels (or, if you like, the freedom fighters). After an attack on their property, the Gardners were forced to take refuge first in Aligarh then in the fort of Agra, and so ended up on the side of the British—though given a free hand they might just as easily have lined up behind their Mughal cousins in Delhi and Lucknow.^je

The Mutiny led to massive and vicious bloodshed, with great numbers of lives lost on either side. Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was before; the trust and mutual admiration that the white Mughals had tried to cultivate was destroyed for ever. With the British victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that followed it, the entire top rank of the Mughal aristocracy was swept away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India; at the same time the wholesale arrival of the memsahibs, the rise of Evangelical Christianity and the moral certainties it brought with it ended all open sexual contact between the two nations.

In Hyderabad there had been less fighting than in the war-torn north—though there was a half-hearted attack on the Residency by a party of Rohilla horsemen; but the same bitterness and polarisation occurred. William Palmer, one of the last figures to attempt to bridge both worlds, ended up opting for the British. Though he had initially been brought up a Muslim, had married a variety of Muslim wives, and had lovingly cared for his Muslim mother, Fyze Baksh Begum, he ended his days consciously and defiantly a Christian. A year before his death, disillusioned and bankrupt, he wrote a sad letter to an old friend and former comrade-in-arms, Major Francis Gresley, who had retired to England. ‘My old age,’ he wrote,

eighty-six years old, has left me destitute of friends. I am so infirm that I cannot walk from one apartment to another without some support, and have been almost blind for the last ten or twelve years … I continue to take an interest in the persons and events around me … [but] the arrogance and superciliousness of the Mohammedans, and their almost avowed hatred of us have made them detestable to me. There is not a man among them who would not cut our throats, and Briggs [one of the Residency staff] has quaintly expressed himself to

the effect that he never sees a Musselman without fancying he sees his assassin. The Residency staff, I understand, now carry loaded pocket pistols about with them.⁵⁹

It was as different a world as could be imagined from that of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, with his family parties in the old-city townhouse and merry nights with Tajalli Ali Shah and the poets of Hyderabad; his evenings spent fishing with the old Nizam for the tame carp in the palace ponds, and afternoons flying pigeons with the Minister in his garden.

William Palmer died on Monday, 25 November 1867. The British Resident, Sir Richard Temple, was one of the few to attend the funeral. But he left early, anxious not to miss the beginning of the Chaddarghat races.⁶⁰

Kitty’s husband, Major Phillipps, died in 1864; Kitty survived him. Before she too died, she paid a last visit to Carlyle in his Cheyne Row house, about which visit he quoted from Virgil the lines ‘Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae’ (I feel the traces of an ancient flame). Shortly afterwards he wrote to her:

Your little visit did me a great deal of good; so interesting, so strange to see her who we used to call ‘Kitty’ emerging on me from the dusk of an evening like a dream become real. It sets me thinking for many hours upon times long gone, and persons and events that can never cease to be important and affecting to me … All round me is the sound as of evening bells, which are not sad only, or ought not to be, but beautiful also and blessed and quiet. No more today, dear lady: my best wishes and affectionate regards will abide with you to the end.⁶¹

Kitty lived on quietly in Torquay, finally passing away in 1889 in her house, the Villa Sorrento. Four years afterwards, her cousin Sir Edward Strachey wrote up the first account of James’s marriage to Khair, and of Carlyle’s fascination with Kitty, for the July 1893 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine, ending the piece with Kitty’s death: ‘She was ten years my elder,’ he wrote, ‘but I remember her from girlhood to old age as the most fascinating of women.’⁶²

With the deaths of William Palmer in 1867 and Kitty Kirkpatrick in 1889, an era can truly be said to have come to an end. Although one died in Hyderabad and the other in Torquay, both were buried in Christian cemeteries, with unambiguously Christian inscriptions commemorating them. There was no longer any room for crossover or ambiguity. The day for that had passed.

Their deaths effectively brought to a conclusion three hundred years of fusion and hybridity, all memory of which was later delicately erased from embarrassed Victorian history books, though Khair’s posthumous elevation into ‘a Hindoo Princess’ gave the story of her affair with James an element of ‘Oriental Romance’ that allowed it to escape the informal censorship that erased so many other similar stories.⁶³ It would take another seventy years, and the implosion of an empire, before the two races were again able to come into close and intimate contact.

Even today, despite all the progress that has been made, we still have rhetoric about ‘clashing civilisations’, and almost daily generalisations in the press about East and West, Islam and Christianity, and the vast differences and fundamental gulfs that are said to separate the two. The white Mughals—with their unexpected minglings and fusions, their hybridity and above all their efforts at promoting tolerance and understanding—attempted to bridge these two worlds, and to some extent they succeeded in doing so.

As the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa shows, East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so again.