Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell? So opens the hugely successful ‘Kashmiri Song’, set to music in 1902. Yet who today remembers the poet who penned these haunting words? In Fate Knows no Tears, a romantic novel rich with the colour and pageantry of colonial India, Mary Talbot Cross recreates the life of Violet Nicolson, who found fame as the poet Laurence Hope. Through the pages parade a host of famous & infamous individuals. Violet Nicolson, courageous, outspoken and dangerously attractive, lived through times of dramatic change in both India and England. Her own life was no less challenging or exciting. For five years she shared her soldier husband’s adventures on the wild mountains of what is now Pakistan. Later, in Central India, her embrace of native customs and the behaviour previously indulged by Nicolson’s regimental colleagues became the stuff of scandal; there was even talk of a native lover . . .
