Even in India, the news of France's defeat at the hands of the combined German armies had made quite a stir. Especially in one particular household nestled in the foothills of the high mountains. One which had built its prosperity by carefully marrying for taste as well as caste, and had built the ancestral lands, originally quite small, into a flourishing series of plantations to grow tea. But the scion of the household, who was too modest to style himself as a false Maharaja, as many in similar circumstances were doing in those days - was too crafty to be merely soil and muscle for his British lords, for they were not his masters, even though they thought themselves so. He had carefully cultivated contacts in many nations other than Britan, and dealt in commodities more potent than even the rich Pekoe chai of that district. He had done so under the cover of dealing in Oolong's from Tai-Wan, and of being a dealer gold and silver across the roof of the world. In point of fact, it was the oppy flower, as much as the tea bush, that was the foundation of his success. He had indulged a bit in his youth, at the same time he had had a carefully hidden affair with a woman from German lands - one who had taught him the language, and fed him on the dreamy poetry of Schiller and Goethe, the dreamy novels of Hoffman and Holderlien - as well as developing in him a taste for women who could hold their own in every way.
It had, oddly, been part of his ruthlessness - his admiration for everything artistic, delicate and impractical made him all too well aware of what Goethe had said before - shoot your tragic hero to save yourself. And so he had: building his commercial empire, always at one step removed so that he only touched the gold. And as well in educating his daughters in European manners and styles - but also accounting, business and commerce, so that they would not allow a white elepahnt husband to squander what he had carefully built up. And also meticulously preparing for the day when he would no longer be able to hold the reins over such a team of horses as his wealth relied upon.
He loved his daughters, dearly and passionately, for each one, he felt, was another perfect image of the angelic figures carved on the old temples - but this very romantic nature made him practically aware that in the eyes of the laws of his land, time, and place, to be a woman was to be somewhat beneath a sacred cow in legal rights - the cow, at least, was protected by custom and stricture.
So in a life which had spanned love, literature, politics, art and had been one of almost unbroken success, the one great failure of this nearly great man, came on a day when a warm breeze had just begun blowing from the south. He had been standing at the great double width doorway that lead to his balcony, surveying the carefully and lovingly tended garden below, watching his daughters play human chess, with the servants as the pieces, he sighed, for a moment letting his romantic self come foward - perhaps because it was in that brief instant when one servant had been dismissed and the next was to arrive. In that one brief moment where he could luxuriate in the feeling of his silks, in the breath of a breeze that is not yet too warm, in the scent of the flowering hedges that filled the room like perfume, in the coolness and smoothness of the white marble that tiled the floor, and the black marble inlay that formed designs on the ceiling.
He sighed, remembering his first love, and in that sigh, the stroke exploded in his brain. He toppled, having grown heavier in his success. There he was found shortly, and he was taken to bed. He could just barely speak, and could not move his right arm at all. Soon afterward it was found that he had been selling the same tea to both Prussian and French interests - sure that the war would drag on and he could juggle the contracts. His elephantine son in law, whose sole talent was dying his white hide darker, was dispatched to London, and thence to Paris, to deal with the situation. But after two months, he had ceased to write, and no one knew where he was at all.
It would not be possible to tell every story of the intrigues that this set off. Fortune left exposed is like dry grass, every spark hopes to land and tear across it like fire. Relatives too distantly related to even have words for their relationship began to chatter and plot. In fact, they began to plot before the eldest had even heard the news of her father being stricken. Haydn wrote a mass in time of war, and a celebrated novelist told us of love in the time of cholera, let me, please, begin the tale, of winter in the time of sun.