William the Conqueror begins in the punishing heat of a provincial club, where Scott and Martyn loaf through empty evenings until telegrams declare famine across eight Madras districts. The gardens are dead, the band plays stale waltzes, and men hide in fives courts hotter than Dutch ovens because empty time is the real enemy until work arrives. Jimmy Hawkins, a Punjab man of bundobust, takes charge; Scott is seconded from irrigation work after building canal sections he hoped would lead to the Luni Protective System, and Martyn is ordered to police trains moving starving refugees. William Martyn, who has kept house for her brother through debt, cholera, and a Delhi sore on her forehead, insists on traveling south with him despite every argument about propriety and danger. She wires Lady Jim herself, breaks up the bungalow in three hours, and treats the famine as another posting to be managed rather than a romance to be deferred.
Lady Jim agrees to host her, and the three Punjabis ride the mail south into a landscape of grain trains, burning sleepers, and bodies carried on irregular shoulders. Scott shares ice with Martyn in a compartment that was not supposed to hold them both; William serves tea from a campaign kit with the calm of someone who has learned to live at the end of a telegraph wire. Language changes on the rails, smells turn foreign, and each siding leaves another truck of living weight behind.
The club at the provincial station was the kind of place that made men understand why work was not a burden but a mercy. Gardens had burned brown before the heat reached its worst; the band rotated the same waltzes until members could predict each missed note by ear; and the fives courts, hotter than any building should legally have been, remained popular because at least there a man sweated for a reason. Scott had been waiting for clearance on the Luni Protective System designs since the winter, watching his canal section calculations gather dust while the dry season confirmed every prediction he had made about what insufficient drainage would do to the district.
Hawkins arrived at the club with the manner of a man who had not come to enjoy the band. He had done famine administration before, in two other districts, and his face in the telegrams-reading posture had a settled quality that the younger men recognised as meaning the next several months were decided. Scott's irrigation reassignment came in the second batch of orders, and he had packed his kit and reported before the full list of affected districts had been circulated.
