The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

Can it be that the man who bearded the potentates of Asia in their den would shrink from the demands of sending Arabella and Rudolpho through three misunderstandings and the trial of a false suitor before reuniting them in the last pages of the third volume?’

      ‘Stop, Miss Garraway, I beg you,’ Burnes said, laughing. ‘I am almost moved by your tale. Perhaps it is you who should write a novel – you, after all, have a great deal more than six weeks to write your masterpiece.’

      ‘I hope you are not suggesting that I do not have a great number of highly important calls on my time,’ Bella said, pretending to be angry. ‘But, I assure you, I could not write such nonsense – I could not write any novel, nonsensical or no – under any motive less pressing than to save my life. By the by, Mr Burnes, you will think me remiss for not thanking you directly for the gift of your book.’

      ‘It was the smallest task, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes said. ‘If you enjoy it, that will be thanks enough.’

      ‘I have already enjoyed it,’ Bella said as the tea came in. She got up and went to the window. Outside, two girls were rolling a hoop past; a man sat in a dark gig, his horse’s nose down in a bag of oats. ‘Perhaps you are right; perhaps I have too little to do, as all my sex. Or perhaps your book was more than commonly engaging. What occupation would you advise for a poor unmarried female? My sister writes to German philosophers, but I know I should burst out laughing before I had written a page. It is a great problem, is it not – how the virgins of England shall occupy their time?’

      ‘I should advise them all,’ Burnes said solemnly, ‘to acquire and read my book. Then they would be transported to unfamiliar worlds of thought, I should quickly grow rich, and virtue would flow from this universal unproductive idleness.’

      She answered him in the same vein, and the conversation lapsed for a moment. It was a fine spring day, almost summer in the promise of heat, and, standing there, she suddenly longed to be in the country, where her eyes could rest upon an expanse of green from her father’s house, where there was some relief greater than the Park and the small dusty square of green called Hanover Square, where dogs panted as if in the remotest desert.

      She was lost in thought for a moment, and Burnes startled her by saying, ‘When do you go to the country, Miss Garraway?’

      He might have been following her thoughts, although it was not an unnatural thing to ask in May, in London. ‘I imagine shortly after your departure, Mr Burnes. I doubt you could have found anything more queer on your travels than our house in Gloucestershire. It is truly something to make a Sultan stare. A moat, castellations, a swarm of savage peacocks, and everything inside so higgledy-piggledy. It is picturesque, as my sister says, to the point of shame.’

      ‘I’m sure that I should love it very much,’ Burnes said, now entirely serious.

      ‘Yes,’ she said, having nothing contrary to say. ‘Yes, I think I love it too. Tell me, which of your oriental potentates did you find the most agreeable? From your book, they all seem equally amiable, or almost all.’

      Burnes drew his chair a little closer to hers, set down his teacup. A light film of sweat was dewing his forehead; it must now be warm in the street. ‘On the whole,’ he said. ‘I think Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul.’

      ‘The Prince of Kabul,’ Bella breathed, turning to him with her luminous grey eyes. ‘How I envy you, to number such a tremendous personage among your acquaintance. The Prince of Kabul – it truly sounds like the black villain in a Christmas raree show. I see him, entering, stage left, his face and his intentions for the heroine both as black as pitch. Forgive me, Mr Burnes – I let my tongue run on to no purpose, and I recall now how kind the gentleman was to you from my reading of your book. And now here is my sister.’

      3.

      Bella, with relief, rose as her sister came in, gliding as ever, a ready smile on her face. The gliding was a characteristic of Elizabeth. She moved without any impediment to her path, as if, in the kindest possible way, any impediment which did not rapidly remove itself would be crushed beneath the wheels of this mildly smiling female Juggernauth. She was twenty, and, on the whole, got her own way with anyone from Goethe to the stillroom maid. Bella presented them.

      ‘How dull you must find London, Mr Burnes, after all your exciting travels.’

      ‘On the contrary, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes said. ‘I have met far more interesting and engaging people in London and, since the greater part of my travels was spent in great discomfort, thirsty and hungry and subject to a succession of trivial ailments, I am glad to exchange the romance of desert life for the unremarkable comforts of Park Lane.’

      ‘But surely, Mr Burnes,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘you must find London talk tiresomely dull after the company of your Indian nabobs and Emirs. After the barbaric court of a Maharajah, what possible entertainment can there be for you in an English lady’s drawing room?’

      Elizabeth was refusing to sit down, the better to clasp her hands and strike minor attitudes against the chimney breast. It was all very well, but Burnes, hat in hand, was beginning to look somewhat awkward standing there, like a footman awaiting his mistress’s pleasure. Bella merely looked amused.

      ‘To be frank,’ Burnes said, ‘so few of your Eastern princes have anything of interest to say.’

      ‘That cannot be true, Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. ‘Why, your book is full of interesting and extraordinary remarks passed by the princes you met. I do not believe you could write such an interesting book filled with the remarks of the ladies of London society.’

      ‘To be sure,’ Burnes said, subsiding with relief as Elizabeth finally sat down at the pianoforte, ‘their conversation seems extraordinary and full of fascination to us, who have only an imperfect knowledge of their culture, just as the meanest building put up in the Orient seems wonderful to us, as our eyes are not accustomed to what is commonplace.’

      ‘The meanest building of the Orient – the garden huts of Bokhara – a tremendous notion, sir,’ Bella said as Elizabeth started on one of Field’s nocturnes, not at all softly.

      ‘There are exceptions to what I say,’ Burnes said over the intensely genteel din. ‘As I was saying before Miss Elizabeth Garraway came in—’ gracious nod ‘—I found Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul, to be a remarkable man.’

      ‘I have not quite – reached as far as – him in my – perusal of your – book,’ Elizabeth said, in little gasps between Field’s trickier ornamental flourishes; both she and the music seemed to hiccough.

      ‘How did he immediately strike you, Mr Burnes?’ Bella said.

      ‘He has very bad teeth,’ Burnes said, smiling warmly and incidentally displaying his own very good ones, the fruits of a Scottish childhood eating nothing but roots and thistles. ‘His conversation is curiously intelligent and penetrating when he asks about us – I felt often that, after my visit, he must surely know far more about the British than this Briton, at least, had succeeded in discovering about him. But in the main, it is a curious, intangible, indefinable quality he has which makes him so remarkable. Do you know what I mean by charm?’

      ‘Of course,’ Bella said. ‘I am surprised to hear a Scotsman refer to it. I had thought it a strange and infrequent visitor to your nation. I know from the immortal Kant that properties and qualities may flourish without being named, but this is the first I have heard of the word being used without anything to attach it to. But I forgot, Mr Burnes, you have spent long in London, and Kabul, where they know, no doubt, all there is to be known of charm.’

      Even Bella feared this raillery might have gone too far, but Burnes seemed to take it in good part, merely replying, ‘I would never have thought from your appearance, Miss Garraway, that you had read the immortal Kant.’

      ‘Naturally not,’ Bella said. ‘I hear most of it from my sister, who is the great reader among us, and that seems to suffice for the normal demands of a lady’s conversation.’