Artifact by Gigi Pandian

everything’.”
    “I lost him, didn’t I?”
    “So did I. It wasn’t hard to do.”
    “Actually,” Lane said, “I don’t think you did. He only followed me after you came back to the library.”
    It took me a moment to recover my voice. “But I caught that cab.”
    “Twenty pounds says the first cabbie we ask has been given the order to follow another car at some point in his career.”
    “But—”
    “How else do you think he was back at the library to follow me?”
    I sunk into the plush chair next to Lane. It was stiffer than it looked. At least my bruised knees didn’t feel as sore as I had feared they might.
    “I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever figure this out,” I said, looking out the lobby window. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
    “One piece at a time,” Lane said, easing his lean body out of his chair. He offered me his hand. “I spotted a decent-looking pub down the street. I’ll buy you dinner and fill you in on the rest of what I found at the library.”
    Slinking into back corner tables was becoming all too common. I didn’t think twice about it when Lane led us to the farthest table in the back room of the Prince Alfred pub. Probably because the pungent smell of hearty bar food made my knees weak.
    “I found her,” Lane said, resting his elbows in satisfaction at the edge of the table.
    “The woman in the painting?”
    He nodded with that rare giddy look I was coming to recognize.
    “It’s Nur Jahan,” he said.
    The name was familiar.
    Lane’s eyes were locked on mine. I could see the excitement in them. Searching through all the dead ends, he’d found what he was after. I understood, and he knew that I did.
    A waitress stepped out from behind the bar and set two glasses down on our table with a clunk. The spell was broken.
    Who was I kidding? It had probably never been there in the first place.
    “Nur Jahan?” I said, studying the bubbles in my gin and tonic.
    “She was Jahangir’s favorite wife.”
    “Oh, his favorite wife.” I met his gaze. “Are you going to tell me another great Indian love story to supplement my underdeveloped appreciation for the love story of the Taj Mahal?”
    “You have a lot of contemporary biases for a historian.”
    “I don’t have to agree with what they did to understand it.”
    “He’s in the history books as one of the most powerful rulers of all time,” Lane said. “And it’s widely accepted that he was addicted to drugs. To the point of incapacity. Nur Jahan did a lot of the ruling while Jahangir was in power. She was a great deal ahead of her time as a feminist. I’m surprised you don’t know more about her.”
    “She wasn’t the one who signed the agreements with the East India Company. An unnamed woman in the corner of a painting couldn’t have come that far. Even if she did get to wear some jewels. But they both lived before things got really interesting. Ask me anything from the militarization of the Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 through the major turning point for British India at the Sepoy Uprising of 1857. I can answer the question blindfolded. I can also do pretty well with any information having to do with the British Raj leading up to Indian independence another century later, in 1947. Interesting about those dates, isn’t it?”
    Two heavy plates, heaping with hot food, clanked down onto our table. The scent of beer batter and vinegar was heavenly.
    “Everything the Mughals possessed had to go somewhere after they lost power,” Lane said. “Jahangir and Nur Jahan lived during the opulent height of the Mughal Empire. There are lots of more prominent paintings of Nur Jahan.”
    “Then why wasn’t she identified in the painting you found today?”
    “I’m getting to that,” Lane said. He paused to start on his meal.
    He was enjoying the drama of his delivery, I could tell. He savored the mushy peas on his plate more than was necessary. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing