The Keepers of the People

The butterfly. In the first hours of Althea's life in the palace a white butterfly comes in at the casement towards the candles, and at her cry Ralph catches it and throws it out, and wonders afterwards why he took the trouble. Then he tells her, idly, that the Varandals hold that a butterfly coming to a man and a maid means they will grow lovers. She is thirteen. The omen is still in force on the last page, unfulfilled and not withdrawn: "Althea's hour may come."

Indra and the mantle. The god the first Prince robbed is not a deity of living Hindu devotion but the Vedic sky-warrior, the thunderer, the killer of Vritra — the oldest and most martial choice available. That is likelier to be research than accident. Jepson names Kafiristan three times, and the pre-Islamic religion of the Hindu Kush had been brought to English attention two years before this novel by Sir George Scott Robertson's The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush (1896), a book everyone interested in that frontier had read. The date sharpens the point: Kafiristan itself was conquered and forcibly converted by the Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in 1895–96, immediately before Jepson wrote. Varandaleel is the valley that did not fall — a deliberate counterfactual, walled up and kept, with its archaic god intact because a European stole the god's coat and wore it.

The names. Nearly all of them are doing work. Ruth is the woman of the Book of Ruth who said whither thou goest, I will go, and she crosses Asia to do it. Vashti is the queen of Esther i, who would not come and be displayed before the king's guests and was put away for it — Jepson's Vashti is displayed, bargained for and given away, and cannot say a word in her own cause. Agnes is agnus, the lamb; she is the one who is sacrificed, on a sentence spoken over the wine. Latchimi is Lakshmi, the goddess of beauty and good fortune, shut in a garden. Raleigh is the Elizabethan who went looking for El Dorado, in a book whose engine is a Russian looking for one. And Althea carries two things at once: the Greek althainein, to heal — which is precisely what she does for Prince Ralph, and what the poet in the Park says she is doing for him — and Lovelace's To Althea, from Prison, whose famous lines about stone walls not making a prison sit exactly over a girl who escapes a house that was a prison into a palace she is not allowed to leave.

Silence, laughter, and the tower. The novel's three recurring sounds. The mutes cannot speak; the people laugh; and twice, at the crisis and at the end, somebody climbs the great tower to listen to a country. What can be heard from the tower is the only evidence the Princes accept that they are right.