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and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours’ time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad’s great speciality: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where he promised I would find ‘booxies booxies’.
    The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies’, as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom-cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam, by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick’s letters. The book turned out to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the Gulzar i-Asafiya. I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner, and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources. Their contents completely transformed what follows. b
    By 2001, four years into the research, I thought I knew Kirkpatrick so well I imagined that I heard his voice in my head as I read and reread his letters. Yet there still remained important gaps. In particular, the documents in the India Office gave no more hint than the original article in the 1893 Blackwood’s Magazine as to what had happened to Khair un-Nissa after Kirkpatrick’s death. It took another nine months of searching before I stumbled across the heartbreaking answer to that, in the Henry Russell papers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The tale—which had never been told, and seemed to be unknown even to Kirkpatrick’s contemporaries—bore a striking resemblance to Madame Butterfly. Day after day, under the armorial shields and dark oak bookcases of the Duke Humfrey’s Library, I tore as quickly as I could through the faded pages of Russell’s often illegible copperplate correspondence, the tragic love story slowly unfolding fully-formed before me.
    Finally, only a few months before I began writing, family papers belonging to the great-great-great-grandson of Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa turned up a couple of miles from my home in West London. This extended the story through to the no less remarkable tale of Khair un-Nissa’s daughter, Kitty Kirkpatrick. She had initially been brought up as Sahib Begum, a Muslim noblewoman in Hyderabad, before being shipped off to England at four years old, baptised on her arrival in London and thenceforth completely cut off from her maternal relations. Instead she had been absorbed into the upper echelons of Victorian literary society, where she had fascinated her cousins’ tutor, the young Thomas Carlyle, and formed the basis for the heroine Blumine, ‘a many tinted radiant Aurora … the fairest of Oriental light-bringers’, in Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus.
    This last set of family papers told the story of the series of remarkable coincidences which brought Kitty, as an adult, back into contact with her Hyderabadi grandmother, and the emotional correspondence which reunited the two women after a gap of nearly forty years. They were letters of great beauty and intense sadness as the story emerged of lives divided by