Portside Out, Starboard Home

• A Duffy Whitmore Adventure •

Chapter One: The Sounding of the Horn

It was shortly after luncheon—cold roast beef, curried mango, and a pale local beer that smelled faintly of bananas—when Lord Thornton, known to his intimates and long-suffering valet as “Ruffles,” declared the voyage must commence by horn.

We were gathered on the aft deck of Eurycleia, Ruffles’ newly refitted steam yacht, now perilously top-heavy with carved teak balustrades, an ornamental prow shaped like Odysseus mid-swoon, and a mahogany bar cart that had been bolted, for reasons architectural, to the floor of the bridge. The bar cart had not yet served a single drink, but it had been “very handsomely varnished,” and Ruffles considered it vital to the maritime spirit.

The horn in question had been purchased, allegedly, from a railway collector in Pretoria and was said to have once adorned a ceremonial locomotive that shuttled Boer dignitaries to state picnics. It sounded, when finally located and tested by Kamau, like a wounded elephant being slowly persuaded up a stairwell.

“It’s rather more… mournful than I’d hoped,” Ruffles murmured. “Still, there’s dignity in melancholy. Sound it again, Kamau. And let the cook know the soufflé can be postponed.”

Kamau, unflappable as ever in white linen, gave a barely perceptible nod. He pressed the ivory button mounted beside the bridge and once again Eurycleia gave forth a basso-profundo lament that startled a flock of ibises and sent Lady Nicholas fumbling for her traveling salts.

“I should have taken the overland route,” she said to no one, or possibly everyone. “These colonial vessels are never properly balanced. There’s a strange lean. I felt it last night in my ankles.”

“Madam,” Kamau intoned, “we have adjusted the ballast to accommodate your cabin’s collection of English soaps.”

“She brings twenty-three,” I whispered to Rory, “including one in a glass dome labeled For Nervous Skin.”

Rory Maher, resplendent in a linen suit borrowed from Ruffles and slightly too wide at the shoulders, grinned and pulled from his satchel a small velvet pouch. “A gift,” he said. “For Khush. Sandalwood hearts. Carved by a man in Fort Jesus. He said they’ll bring me luck.”

“You’ll need more than luck,” I said, but gently. Rory was in love again, and I had not the heart to remind him of the previous entanglement in Zanzibar, involving a betrothed violinist and three very cross uncles.

Trevor Finch-Bligh arrived last, wearing a pith helmet at a questionable angle and brandishing a damp brochure from the Bombay Antiquarian Society.

“Fascinating,” he announced. “The bas-reliefs are almost certainly older than previously dated. The temple has a cyclopean drainage system. Imagine—water still flows, after all this time.”

He said “cyclopean” as though we were meant to gasp, and I nearly did.

“Gentlemen,” said Ruffles, who had reappeared in a silk cravat and now gestured toward the shore. “We depart. For Bombay. To deliver my vision to Mr. Singh-Libani, furniture man of unimpeachable taste and great personal integrity.”

“Indeed, sir,” Kamau said quietly. “I have taken the liberty of forwarding the plans in advance. The prototype is expected within three days of our arrival.”

Lady Nicholas appeared, trailing mosquito netting like a bridal veil and sipping from a small crystal vial. “Port side,” she said. “As we travel east, I insist upon it. The air on the starboard makes my gums itch.”

Rory leaned toward me. “Does she know it’s the same air?”

“She knows,” I said. “She just doesn’t believe it.”

And so we cast off. Eurycleia, that reluctant Odyssean swan, groaned and shifted into motion, the horn giving one final sobbing farewell to Mombasa’s ochre shores.

I stood at the rail, notebook in hand, preparing my opening remarks for the Geographic Society Review, imagining already the footnotes I might add regarding ritual shamanic fermentation, or perhaps the peculiar mores of furniture diplomacy. The sun was gold. The sea was indigo. And somewhere ahead, between the spice markets and crumbling temples of Bombay, our respective destinies waited—eccentric, overgrown, and very likely late for dinner.

Chapter Two: The Laughing Men of Libani

Bombay rose from the sea like an overcooked pudding—crumbling at the edges, faintly spiced, and steaming gently under a lid of monsoon haze.

Our arrival at the wharf was greeted by a man in a white Nehru jacket holding a sign that read LORD THORNTON’S FURNITURE. Behind him, six porters attempted (with limited success) to wrangle Ruffles’s packing crates onto a creaking ox cart. Each crate bore the embossed label CALYPSO’S HIDEAWAY – GAZEBO COLLECTION: One Dining Chair (Baroque/Homeric) – Handle with Vision.

“Glorious,” Ruffles beamed, alighting from Eurycleia with the air of a man preparing to open Venice. “We are expected.”

Kamau cleared his throat softly. “The showroom is at Mr. Singh-Libani’s private compound, sir. His personal furniture atelier. I’ve arranged a rickshaw convoy.”

This was met with mixed results. Lady Nicholas refused the first two rickshaws on the grounds that they “smelled of effort” and instead consented to be drawn in a curtained palanquin by two men wearing gloves and expressions of spiritual fatigue.

I was placed with Trevor, who attempted to read aloud from the Guide to Indo-Aryan Motifs in Sacred Architecture as we bounced through the streets. Rory, mercifully, rode ahead, clutching his velvet pouch and rehearsing lines of a love poem that began “O Khush, thy cheeks are like ripe guava—”

“We may lose him in a market,” Trevor muttered. “Should we?”

The Singh-Libani compound was a whitewashed villa surrounded by mango trees and very polite dogs. Inside, the scent of wood polish and cardamom hung like an invitation to tea. Mr. Singh-Libani himself appeared, dressed in crisp cream and sandals of such alarming quality that Lady Nicholas mistook him for a maharajah.

“Lord Thornton,” he bowed, hands pressed together. “It is… my honour.”

Ruffles lit up like a debutante. “My dear Singh-Libani! I trust the plans arrived safely?”

“They did,” Singh-Libani said, with a composure that should have warned us. “The prototype has been completed. We are… most curious to hear your thoughts.”

He led us through a shaded courtyard into a long room filled with sunlight, plants, and five Egyptian men, each in a seersucker suit, who were gathered around an object draped in calico. They spoke rapidly in Arabic, punctuated by wheezing chuckles.

Singh-Libani gestured. “Behold.”

Kamau, for the first time in my memory, blinked.

The cloth was whisked away.

There it stood: the chair. Tall, arched, and baffling—its legs curled like a Corinthian goat, the back carved in high relief with the face of Calypso, who seemed to be winking. The armrests resembled Homeric scrolls mid-unfurl. It gave the overall impression of having been designed during a thunderstorm by an epileptic classicist.

There was a pause—long, profound, spiritual.

Then the Egyptian sourcing agents collapsed into helpless, wheezing laughter.

“By the gods,” one managed, wiping tears from his moustache. “It is—how do you say?—an epiphany! A philosophical chair!”

“Bwana must never grasp what their laughter truly means,” Kamau murmured to me, his gaze politely avoiding the spectacle before us.

Ruffles, who had been gazing reverently at the chair, turned. “What was that?”

“I said,” Kamau said gently, “they are overwhelmed by the spiritual force of your design.”

“Quite so,” Ruffles beamed. “One must risk ridicule to achieve the sublime. Calypso’s Hideaway will be the toast of the Indian Ocean.”

Singh-Libani, ever the gentleman, offered tea. Lady Nicholas declined, claiming her stomach had “gone sideways,” and requested bicarbonate.

Trevor wandered off to study a rosewood table, murmuring something about sacred geometry. Rory whispered that he’d found a quiet garden bench on the far side of the compound, and was preparing to write Khush’s name in verse.

“Should I compare her to a monsoon bloom?” he asked me.

“Compare her to something with more shade,” I advised. “Monsoon blooms rot.”

I was left alone in the prototype room for a moment. I sat, cautiously, on the chair. It creaked with unexpected grace. Somewhere in its absurdity was—something. Not comfort, exactly. But presence.

The Egyptians had left a note on the table. Kamau snatched it up before Ruffles could see. Later, he showed it to me:

“May the gods preserve us from this aesthetic terror. It will haunt our dreams.”

That night, on the veranda of our hotel, Ruffles sketched plans for a new chair, this one inspired by Circe. “More curves,” he murmured. “More sorcery. Less goat.”

Kamau brought him his drink and nodded sagely. “Yes, Bwana. Very good.”

And Bombay slept on.

Chapter Three: The Temple of Dancing Time

Trevor insisted we rise before dawn. He arrived at my door wearing a damp linen shirt and the expression of a man who has recently communed with a sacred termite mound.

“The light, Duffy,” he whispered hoarsely, “is unrepeatable at first blush.”

“Mine is quite repeatable,” I replied, still horizontal. “It blushes every morning at exactly six.”

But he was determined. Rory, freshly shaved and still dazed from the tragic discovery that “Khush” was attending a wedding in Jaipur and had left him a note (“Back in three weeks—don’t wait!”), had agreed to join the temple expedition as a sort of emotional distraction. Kamau—who had been up since four, ironing everyone’s socks for reasons never explained—packed water, a map, a parasol, two flasks of something called ‘tonic wine,’ and a faint warning.

“The temples,” he said, “are not known for shade. Please do not lick anything.”

It was a half-mile ride by cycle-rickshaw and a further walk along a broken causeway bordered by vines and the sounds of unseen birds making unplaceable clicks. The temple emerged slowly from the foliage—stone upon stone, a collapsed corridor, roots crawling like drunken serpents over bas-relief.

“Here we are,” Trevor whispered, reverent. “The Temple of the Dancing Princesses.”

The air was oddly cool inside. The carvings were unmistakable—twelve female figures in mid-step, arms outstretched, draped in silks that once must have been painted in vivid colour, now worn pale as bone. They were caught in a moment just short of motion.

“Look at them,” Trevor breathed. “Each one is slightly different. Their hands—see the angle? That suggests choreography. A story. Possibly an invocation.”

Rory, squinting: “They look like they’re doing yoga.”

Trevor didn’t blink. “They’re waiting.”

We stood for a while in silence. It was a rare moment: the heat held at bay by thick walls, the city sounds lost behind the trees, time folding inward like a paper fan.

And then, it happened.

Trevor reached for his camera.

There was a flicker.

Later, he would describe it as “a temporal shudder,” “a retinal loop,” and once, privately to me, “a metaphysical flirtation.” The sun pierced through the vines just so, and for a moment—just one—the dancers turned. Not fully, not like a film, but like a shadow thrown sideways, as if someone had whispered to them from beyond the wall.

One of them—Trevor swore this with a hand on his chest—smiled.

Rory, unhelpfully, said, “I think my lens just fogged.”

Trevor stumbled backward, nearly colliding with a monkey that had crept in to watch. “I… saw them. They moved. Duffy. Rory. They moved.”

“Alright,” I said gently. “Let’s go sit down.”

We returned to the hotel with Trevor unusually quiet and Rory clutching a flower he’d found wedged in a cracked altar (“It looks like the one Khush wore behind her ear”). Kamau met us at the entrance and sized up the situation immediately.

“Mr. Finch-Blythe,” he said evenly, “you’ve clearly suffered a hallucination in this, the hottest season in Bombay. It was undoubtedly the shimmering heatwaves that brought the dancers to life. Tomorrow morning at first light, when the air is cool and refreshing, we’ll cycle out again and view the stillness of the dancers, who, after all, are carved in stone.”

Trevor opened his mouth. Kamau continued, gently but firmly:

“Bwana would prefer you not speak with reporters about a new crinkle incident—Bwana needs to rest.”

He led Trevor indoors.

Rory and I lingered on the veranda. He was staring at the flower.

“Do you think,” he said slowly, “that things from one time can accidentally fall into another?”

“I think,” I replied, “you’re asking the wrong person.”

He nodded. “Good. I’ll ask the flower.”

⸻

Chapter Four: Khush in Bloom

Rory took to his notebook with the determined air of a man writing his own obituary in verse.

We were seated in the garden of our hotel, a dusty colonial relic called The Grand Bhowani, which had once hosted Sir Richard Burton on his way to Mecca, and now hosted a string of German backpackers convinced it was haunted. An enormous marabou stork loitered beside the fountain like a disapproving chaperone.

“I’ve written three stanzas,” Rory announced. “But I’m stuck on a rhyme for Khush.”

“Ambush?” I offered. “Or possibly hush?”

He scowled. “I’m trying to honour her.”

“Well then, not gush.”

Trevor, still dazed from his crinkle experience, was reading a medical manual on tropical hallucinations. He muttered something about “heatstroke-induced kinetic perception.” Kamau appeared at his side with lime water and a quiet nod.

“Mr. Maher,” Kamau said, with the tone of a man about to remove a ticking object from a child’s hands, “I understand you have arranged for a henna artist this afternoon?”

Rory beamed. “Yes! I’m having Khush written across my forearm. It’ll be bold—scripted like Sanskrit fire.”

Kamau was silent for a beat. Then he said, delicately, “You may wish to consider an alternative phrasing.”

“But it’s her name.”

“In a sense,” Kamau agreed. “However, in older usage—particularly in sacred temple contexts—the term Khush was reserved for women attached to devotional performances… in a certain capacity.”

Rory blinked.

“She was a dancer?”

Kamau coughed lightly. “A consecrated one. It is not a term used lightly in polite company. Were you to arrive at her family home with that on your arm, they might assume…”

“I’m a deviant?”

“They might assume you are enthusiastic.”

Rory dropped his pen. “What should I write, then?”

Kamau glanced upward. “Perhaps something like Anandita—‘joyful one’. Or Vasanti—‘of the spring’. Something symbolic. Poetic. Non-litigious.”

Rory sighed and crossed out a stanza. “Spring, then. Fine. She is like spring.”

“She left for a wedding in Jaipur,” I reminded him.

“Spring returns,” he muttered.

⸻

That afternoon we attended the Festival of Mango Blossoms at the Hanging Gardens. Ruffles insisted on wearing a white suit with a lapel carnation and was followed by a cluster of women from the Belgian Consulate, all of whom had heard of the chair and wanted to see the man mad enough to design it.

Lady Nicholas refused to attend unless a physician accompanied her. She claimed the local pollen triggered her “cosmic asthma,” an ailment no doctor on the subcontinent had yet identified.

At the festival, a local troupe of dancers performed a retelling of the Ramayana using shadow puppets and live peacocks. It was confusing, beautiful, and ended with a goat eating the central prop.

Trevor stood in the back, whispering comparisons to the temple reliefs. “It’s the same gestures,” he said. “See that—she’s summoning time.”

“I believe she’s indicating the goat,” Kamau murmured.

Rory, freshly inked with the word Vasanti, had taken to standing beneath a banyan tree and composing final lines aloud:

“O spring, O joy, O fragrant leaf—

Return to me, and end my grief…”

“That’s not awful,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I borrowed it from a shampoo bottle.”

That night, Duffy—that is to say, I—sat on the veranda with my notes, attempting to make sense of the spiritual choreography of Bombay. I’d found a shaman listed in an ethnographic journal, out on the outskirts near Elephanta Island, who was reportedly open to visitors. Tomorrow, I would call.

Kamau passed by and paused. “A word of advice, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Do not go into any hut unless invited twice. And never drink anything thicker than tea.”

I looked up. “How do you know what I was going to do?”

Kamau gave the faintest smile. “Because you are going to do it anyway.”

Chapter Five: The Shaman’s Invitation

I had, it must be said, taken every reasonable precaution. I wore a cravat soaked in citronella, carried quinine tablets in a silver pillbox, and had carefully underlined the relevant entry in Ethnographic Reports: Coastal India, 1911–1931. It read:

“The shaman of Elephanta Island receives travellers on the third day of the waxing moon. Tea is customary. No gifts required unless prompted by the sacred goat.”

That was clear enough for me.

The ferry to Elephanta was late, listing slightly, and filled with crates of marigolds and one stern woman who sold coconut water in porcelain cups. I shared my bench with a young German linguist who claimed the shaman had once “reversed her inner river.”

By the time I arrived on the island, the sun had climbed to a theatrical height and my shirt clung to me like a wet accusation. A boy led me up a forested trail. At the top stood a thatched hut with coloured flags, an iron bell, and the faint smell of burnt sugar and something more… animal.

A man emerged from the shadows, wrapped in saffron cloth, face painted with white lines. He regarded me with the tranquil disinterest of someone who has seen rather too many Europeans asking spiritual questions with not nearly enough preparation.

I bowed. He nodded.

“I have come,” I said in slow English, “to learn of your practices.”

The shaman motioned me inside.

At this point, I must admit, my notes grow erratic.

It was Kamau who intervened.

Having anticipated my movements with eerie precision, he arrived at the hut a quarter-hour later, disguised in a loose cotton shirt and carrying a satchel of supplies from the hotel’s pantry, including a tin of chicory, a dried mango, and a collapsible camp kettle once owned by Lord Curzon.

Inside the hut, he found me seated cross-legged, blinking at a carved mask while the shaman rummaged in a corner for what I had just agreed to ingest—some sort of syrup being boiled over coals with three unidentifiable roots and what I feared might be a spider.

Kamau acted swiftly.

“I apologise for the intrusion,” he said in rapid Hindi, “but the gentleman is not to be trusted with his own digestion. Would you allow us a short… interpretive ritual instead?”

The shaman shrugged. Kamau offered the dried mango. A compromise was reached.

Outside, beneath a neem tree, Kamau arranged three stones in a triangle, burned a stick of hotel sandalwood, and instructed me to sit cross-legged and breathe “as though reciting a prayer to a ceiling fan.”

Then he began to chant—not in Sanskrit or any known tongue, but in what I later recognised as phonetic nonsense derived from the Eurycleia’s engine manual.

I fell into a kind of trance. The wind rustled the trees. A peacock cried. A monkey attempted to steal my shoe and was gently discouraged by a hotel parasol.

When it was over, Kamau poured us both tea.

“You have undergone the Ceremony of the Third Breath,” he informed me.

I blinked. “I felt something.”

“That was the chicory.”

I made notes with trembling fingers. Kamau thanked the shaman, bowed, and led me back down the trail before I could sign up for anything requiring leeches or nudity.

Back at the Bhowani, Ruffles was sketching a chandelier inspired by “Nausicaa’s longing,” Lady Nicholas was quarantining herself from humidity, and Rory had taken to sighing into his mango lassi.

Trevor, for his part, had begun to suspect that his camera contained a spirit.

And I, with a fresh notebook and a head full of warm symbolism, began drafting my article for the Geographic Society Review:

“I have tasted the Third Breath and seen the unseen. The mask gazed at me with ancestral memory. The tea left my molars vibrating. The essence of shamanic unity is not in the mind, but in the gut.”

Kamau read this over my shoulder and murmured, “Let us hope they publish it in the humour section.”

Chapter Six: Lady Nicholas Dines with Disaster

There was, from the beginning, an unspoken sense of doom about the whole affair.

Calypso’s Hideaway, Ruffles’s most recent obsession, was not yet a restaurant, nor even a building—it was a concept prototype, temporarily assembled on a quiet stretch of the Bombay shoreline. The real Calypso’s Hideaway was intended to be constructed as a folly on the landscaped grounds of The Meringue, Lord Thornton’s estate in the Wanjohi Valley of Kenya. There, amidst manicured lawns and formal gardens already dotted with whimsies—an obelisk to a forgotten spaniel, a Greco-Roman tea dome, a sunken amphitheatre for one—Calypso’s Hideaway would rise in full baroque glory: a Homeric grotto reimagined in sparkling shellwork and faux gemstones, its curved walls and vaulted ceiling designed to resemble the interior of an enchanted sea-cave, with dining furniture (also of Ruffles’s design) meant to evoke both classical form and tropical indulgence.

But here in Bombay, the prototype—part pop-up, part fever dream—was being trialled for proof of concept. Ruffles had invited a select group of travellers and pilgrims to sample the cuisine and the ambiance. It was, he said, “a controlled taste environment,” though nothing about it felt particularly controlled.

“I want oysters served from a clamshell en brochette,” he said at the planning meeting, which consisted entirely of himself and a bewildered Parsi chef named Daruwalla. “And sorbet from a sea sponge. I’ve had the bar staff trained in Ithacan toasts.”

“Ithacan is extinct, sir,” Kamau murmured.

“Then revive it,” Ruffles replied.

Trevor, still brooding over the metaphysical dancer incident, had declined the invitation. “My digestion can’t handle symbolic furniture,” he said. Rory came out of sheer loyalty, though he appeared increasingly drawn to the notion of returning to the temple for “one last look.” He had written a new verse beginning, “Thou art my banyan-blossomed fate…”

Lady Nicholas, of course, had accepted the luncheon invitation immediately and with conditions. She arrived precisely at one o’clock, dressed in cream muslin with a parasol the size of a small schooner, and announced to the waiter that she would be dining “against the wind.”

She took her place in the prototype chair with something approaching suspicion.

“I feel a slope,” she said. “Am I leaning?”

“No,” Ruffles beamed. “You’re reclining.”

“There’s a pressure on my left hip.”

“That’s the Ionic curve.”

“I don’t want an Ionic curve. I want a flat English seat and a cucumber sandwich.”

But the food had already begun. A starter of pickled jackfruit on a banana chip was served, followed by chilled curry soup in half a coconut. Then came the main course: spiced quail with Homeric stuffing, which no one could define.

Halfway through the quail, the chair betrayed her.

It was unclear whether the fault lay with the cushion, the damp air, or an unfortunate interaction between the Ionic curve and Lady Nicholas’s corsetry, but a leg gave way—not all at once, but with a slow, theatrical creak—followed by a sideways tilt, a gasp, and a frankly astonishing thump.

“My good leg!” she cried. “It’s gone numb!”

Ruffles leapt forward. Kamau was already there, applying smelling salts and extracting Lady Nicholas from the wreckage with the deftness of a man accustomed to spontaneous furniture collapse.

Daruwalla, ever the professional, continued pouring sea-sponge sorbet into clamshells.

“I warned you,” Lady Nicholas moaned. “There is something wrong with the curvature. It pulls one toward the eastern axis. And I felt a cat watching me.”

She was carried, with great ceremony, to the waiting motorcar and driven back to Chillum, where she immediately drafted a telegram to her solicitor in Surrey:

“FALLEN FROM GREEK CHAIR STOP SUSPECT MALICE OR DESIGN STOP INITIATING INQUEST INTO IONIC PROTOTYPES STOP”

Ruffles, despondent but defiant, ordered a whisky soda and set about sketching Circe’s Bistro Bench, which he insisted would be “far more grounded—pun intentional.”

Kamau removed the broken chair with a glance that said, very clearly: Never again.

The cats reappeared that evening and took up residence in the gazebo.

No one tried to stop them.

Chapter Seven: The Crinkle Revisited

Trevor insisted on returning at dawn. He’d barely spoken in three days, save to mutter about bas-reliefs, time distortions, and “an expression of longing beyond the reach of centuries.”

Kamau arranged the bicycles.

“I will accompany you this time,” he said simply.

Rory, whose romantic fervour had cooled to a manageable ache, came too—ostensibly to sketch the temple’s pillars, but truly, I suspect, to keep Trevor from climbing anything unstable or proposing to a statue.

I stayed behind, researching coastal folklore and failing to explain to the Geographic Society editor why my article now contained phrases like “ritual misdirection,” “engine chant,” and “symbolic chicory.”

The temple complex at that hour was golden and empty, with long fingers of sunlight reaching across the moss-covered flagstones. The air was cool and still. Cicadas had not yet begun their tirade.

The dancers were just as before—stone-silent, arms poised, lips nearly parted.

Trevor stood before them, breathing heavily. “This is the moment. The light’s identical.”

He raised his camera.

It happened again—but this time, they weren’t alone.

From a narrow corridor at the temple’s rear—a place none of them had noticed on the first visit—came the sound of footsteps. Not the careful tread of a tourist, nor the eager bounce of a local guide, but a purposeful, heavy rhythm. Sandals on stone. And then, a voice:

“You should not be here.”

Kamau turned sharply.

From the corridor stepped three men. They wore pale robes, sun-faded but ancient in cut, and each carried a long staff tipped with a crescent blade. Their faces were painted—white across the brow, red below the cheekbones. They were not smiling.

Trevor lowered the camera.

“Pilgrims?” he asked, hopefully.

“Guardians,” said Kamau, softly. “Temple guardians. This site may not be as abandoned as the Archaeological Survey suggested.”

The tallest of the men lifted his staff.

“You were warned,” he said. “No images. No questions. No witnesses.”

Rory stepped forward, hands up, his sketchbook tucked under one arm. “We didn’t mean offence. We’re just—well—travellers.”

“Go,” the man said, in the ancient tongue.

Trevor’s foot slipped as he stepped back. The camera hit the ground with a shattering crack.

Kamau moved then.

It was not a movement of panic, but of precision—his hand darted to the pouch on his hip, producing not a weapon but a handful of fine sand, which he flung into the air before the guardians could step forward. In the confusion—brief but effective—he turned to Trevor and Rory.

“Run.”

They didn’t hesitate.

They reached the bicycles winded and scraped. Kamau arrived last, his shirt torn at the shoulder, his eyes unreadable.

Only when they were cycling hard down the dusty path toward the edge of the jungle did he speak.

To no one in particular, he said:

“What’s this? I had not foreseen this threat, here, in the shadow of the Dancing Princesses…”

Trevor, still white-faced, managed: “Who were they?”

“I believe,” Kamau said, “they were meant to stay in stories. But someone remembered them. And that is enough.”

That night, back at the Bhowani, no one spoke of the temple.

Ruffles was busy commissioning a mosaic of Circe turning a waiter into a duck.

Lady Nicholas was dictating a note to her cousin about the “treacherous geometry of Grecian chairs.”

But at the edge of the garden, under a lamplit palm, Kamau sat alone, inspecting a strip of linen where a blade had nicked him.

In the distance, a peacock cried.

And in the corridor of a ruined temple, beneath a carved canopy of dancers who may or may not move when no one is looking, the guardians returned to stillness.

Chapter Eight: Starboard Home

Eurycleia let out a low, weary moan as we boarded—less a horn than a groan of reluctant awakening, like a dowager roused for morning calisthenics.

We were leaving Bombay.

Lady Nicholas arrived last, trailing a cedar-scented steamer trunk and a list of grievances that had grown by one new item: “sun-induced toothaches.” She inspected her quarters, frowned theatrically, and summoned Kamau with a brass handbell she claimed had once belonged to Lord Elgin.

“Kamau, this is not starboard,” she announced. “I booked a starboard cabin for the return journey.”

Kamau did not blink. “This is starboard, madam. We’ve simply changed direction.”

“Oh,” she said, after a pause. “Then I shall require a portside breakfast. Something… steadier.”

She retired with a bottle of tonic and two issues of Tatler, one of which had been accidentally scorched during the prototype luncheon.

Rory was alone, standing at the stern’s fantail, leaning on the railing as the Bombay skyline faded into a softened smear of memory. One by one, he dropped his poems—each a leaf of unreciprocated love—into the breeze. They fluttered briefly, then scattered like confused gulls on the trade winds.

The Eurycleia was bound for Mombasa once more, her bow cutting clean through a calm sea. A full moon rose, silver and ponderous, glinting across the water like a thousand overturned teaspoons.

Trevor and I were seated in the lounge, halfway through our second drinks, when Ruffles appeared in the doorway with a certain theatrical gravity.

“We’ve a small boat signalling distress,” he said. “I may require your assistance when we pull alongside.”

We followed him out to the starboard deck. The air was mild and still.

“See the vessel?” he asked, pointing into the dusk. “Five hundred yards ahead. North-northwest.”

Kamau, at the helm, was already studying it through Ruffles’s oversized military binoculars, inherited from an uncle who’d once mapped parts of Abyssinia in a cloud of cigar smoke and malaria.

“One hundred yards,” Kamau murmured. “Fifty…”

Suddenly, a black flag went up—jerky, unmistakable, and comically overdone.

“Pirates!” Kamau called out.

Ruffles did not hesitate. “They’ll come starboard. Prepare to defend. Heave the Calypso Lounge over the rail—first. Then the Odysseus Throne Chair. That’ll sink ’em!”

The pirates, emboldened, had thrown their boarding hooks. Two clanged against the deck rail. Ruffles barked orders like a mad admiral in an aesthetic war. The prototype furniture went overboard with a mix of violence and design critique.

Trevor, as the Throne Chair splashed down, observed, “I say—of what sort of wood was the Calypso Collection made?”

“Dense,” Ruffles replied, brushing sawdust from his cuffs. “Unforgiving. Just like Homer.”

In the moonlight, the pirate craft rocked, then rolled, then vanished beneath a froth of bubbles and vaguely perfumed foam. The hooks slackened. The crisis was, it seemed, over.

Straightening their jackets and dusting off their trousers, Ruffles gave his cuffs a firm tug.

“A gin and tonic wouldn’t go amiss.”

“Right-o,” I said. “Whisky soda for me.”

A short while later, the gentlemen had resumed their rightful station: sun-kissed and mildly intoxicated. All was as it had been.

The sea sparkled in the moonlight, just the hush of waves and the occasional slap of canvas against the mast. I stood on deck with Kamau, who had finally removed his jacket and leaned silently on the rail.

“Did we interfere with something?” I asked him. “At the temple complex?”

He didn’t answer straightaway. Then he said, very quietly:

“Sometimes you don’t break the thread. You just tug it loose.”

“What about the guardians?”

“They will go back to sleep. Until someone else forgets to be careful.”

We stood for a while longer, listening.

Far off, from the dark behind us, came one last echo—whether peacock, or memory, or something in between.

Finis (Or at least, for now…)

—Duffy Whitmore