The rani’s advisers began talking all at once. It is one thing to establish an army of women in your own kingdom, but to send them across the seas to a foreign land—well, that is something else. Men who traveled outside of India were rarely welcomed back to their villages, often because they returned with radical ideas. They were considered tainted by their travels, as no one knew what sort of evils they’d be bringing back with them. So what Major Erskine was proposing was not just radical, it was very possibly dangerous.
I could see this conflict on the rani’s face. “You say the queen would absolutely grant an audience to my women?”
“If they had traveled across the ocean from Jhansi? Yes,” Erskine said.
“I would go myself. But there are pretenders to my throne who would not hesitate to claim the rights to my property if I did.” She looked at her father.
“It’s forty-five days to England by boat,” he said. “A thousand things could change by the time anyone reached her shores.”
“Have you forgotten what the raja said to me before he died?”
“Within reason,” her father said. “Is this reasonable?”
“I will send Sita and Jhalkari. If they agree to go.”
Everyone in the Durbar Hall looked to us, and a knot formed in my stomach that was so tight I was sure that if I pressed on it, I would actually feel it. It’s one thing to read about foreign lands, and another thing to go there. I thought about my father and Anu, who would be sick with worry imagining me on a voyage. I wondered how the rest of Barwa Sagar would feel. Would I ever be welcomed back home? It would depend almost entirely on the British queen’s response.
Jhalkari’s response was immediate. “I will go.”
Everyone turned to me, and I responded, “I will go as well.”
“They’d need escorts,” Moropant said. “At least a dozen men.”
“I will send Arjun,” the rani said. “Arjun attended an English boarding school. He understands English.”
“They can leave as soon as passage is arranged,” Major Erskine said eagerly. “Of course, they will all need training in British customs. But Dr. McEgan and his wife could see to that.”
Dr. McEgan was the British doctor who had confirmed for the rani that there had never been a plague in Jhansi. He was also the doctor the raja had angrily dismissed before his death.
There was new hope in the rani’s face. “What do you say?” she asked her father. “What about their reputations when they return?”
Suddenly, even Moropant seemed inspired. “If they can succeed where Umesh Chandra failed, I don’t see that it should matter if they’d traveled to the moon!”
Everyone laughed. There was no reason that this shouldn’t work. The ruler of England was a woman. So was the ruler of Jhansi. And now she was sending two female guards across the seas to plead her case.
“The lessons will begin at once,” the rani said.
The three weeks Jhalkari and I spent with Mrs. McEgan were extraordinary.
The rani arranged for our first meeting to take place after yoga. Even though I knew I should have been clearing my mind, I lay on my jute mat and couldn’t stop thinking of England. What would it be like to walk the streets of London? I tried to imagine the food and the sights, and couldn’t. The London of Shakespeare’s day was more than two hundred years in the past, so not even Shakespeare could prepare me for what we were about to see.
“And that’s why I’m here,” Mrs. McEgan said when she arrived at the Rani Mahal. She was dressed in the most extraordinary gown, with her stomach completely covered and her bosoms practically hanging out. Her waist appeared unusually small, and her entire dress was green, like the hat on her head and the trim on her boots. She peeled off her white gloves as soon as she entered the first-floor room the rani had prepared for us. And when she seated herself on one of the thirteen chairs that had been arranged in a circle for her arrival, she lowered herself with a slow and pretty grace I was sure I’d never possess. Like Jhalkari, I was wearing a red angarkha, with a pistol on my right and my sword on my left.
“So this is all of you?” She smiled, and I glanced at Arjun, to see what he made of this woman with her water-blue eyes and pale-as-butter skin. But like the nine other guards who would be traveling with us, he was averting his gaze, on account of Mrs. McEgan’s inappropriate dress. “Well, don’t sit there staring at the floor. Look at me!”
If the men had looked, they would have seen a young woman with honey-colored hair arranged in thick curls around her head. A smile took up most of her pretty face. But no one obeyed. Not even Arjun, who spoke English. She looked at Jhalkari and me.
“The men are embarrassed,” I explained. “They won’t look at a woman whose chest . . .” I indicated her bosoms with my eyes. Her face turned red, the same way Major Ellis’s used to. She reached for a shawl and covered herself. One by one, the men looked up.
“I had no idea. The women in Jhansi all show off their waists.”
“Perhaps the glimpse of a woman’s waist for you is the same as the glimpse of a woman’s breasts is to us.”