Excerpt from The Strangler Vine by Miranda J. Carter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Frank was my personal compensation for Calcutta. I thanked God for him every day. We had arrived in Calcutta at the same time and moved out of the grim cadets' quarters at Fort William as soon as possible to mess together. The rowdier among our messmates regarded him as the most tremendous spoon: he drank barely a drop; he did not shoot or gamble or ride, all of which I did excessively. Nor did he visit nautches or keep a bibi—a native mistress. He cared nothing for what anyone thought and he was always goodhumoured, a quality I had thought I possessed until I had arrived in India. While Calcutta conspicuously exposed my own weaknesses, it brought out the best in Frank. His conscientiousness was a daily reproof to my impatience, my sore head, my occasional indulgences in the fleshpots of Calcutta, and my nightly gambling losses. (I was, like most ensigns, horribly in debt.) Despite this, I liked him enormously.

We turned into an unfamiliar street of small open cupboards that passed for shops, selling clay figures painted into the gaudy likenesses of the Hindoo gods: Shiva, Durga and the hideous Kalee, patron goddess of Calcutta, her red tongue lolling out of her grotesque black face, a necklace of heads round her neck.

'The potters' neighbourhood,' Frank said, happily.

Truth be told, I had arrived in Calcutta expecting to be as seduced by its ancient traditions and exotic scenes as Frank still was. At first the lush vegetation, the sight of a camel or elephant, had been an excitement. But as time passed the notions I had harboured about the beauty of the place, and my hopes of distinguishing myself, had been replaced by an intense and bitter homesickness for England and the realization that it was more than likely I would never see it again. The odds—well understood but never spoken aloud—were that most of us would die before ever we returned.

The one enduring romance I still found in India was in the glorious prose of Xavier Mountstuart. I had discovered Mountstuart as a boy in Devon, where I had attended a small school for the sons of the local gentry kept by the local vicar. One of his assistants had lent me a copy of Knight Rupert. I had been thrilled by it. My family were not readers, but Xavier Mountstuart's writings had inspired and transported me. I had devoured The Courage of the Bruce and The Black Prince, then graduated to the Indian writings: The Lion of the Punjab, of course, and the tales of bandits and rebels in the Foothills of Nepal. I had read of white forts and marble palaces and maharajas' emeralds; of zenanas and nautch girls in the Deccan; of the sieges and jangals. I had even read a short tract about Hindooism, vegetarianism and republicanism, which had left me a little confused. Mountstuart seemed to me the very acme of Byronic manhood. It was not simply that he was a poet and writer of genius, but that he had lived his writings. He was the reason I had come to India—something I had not, of course, confided to my father. He had approved of my going to India because, having bought a commission in His Majesty's army for my oldest brother and set up another (now dead) in the professions, there was no money left to do anything for me. In the East India Company's armies, positions were not sold but contacts counted for something, and since the family had a few Company connections, I had been sent off, cradling my precious volumes of Mountstuart's works.

Recently I had scraped together the wherewithal to purchase a brand-new copy of the first volume of Leda and Rama. This was causing a most tremendous furore in Calcutta for, under the guise of being a stirring, even immodest, romance about forbidden love and warfare between rival Indian kingdoms, it was a thinly veiled account of adulterous entanglements and corruption among some of Calcutta's most elevated worthies. People talked of nothing else. Mountstuart was no longer persona grata in the city's drawingrooms, but Society—from the most respectable elderly matrons to the most junior clerks—all wanted to read his book. Nothing so exciting had happened in an age.

Excerpted from The Strangler Vine by Miranda J Carter. Copyright © 2015 by Miranda J Carter. Excerpted by permission of Putnam Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.