“That’s Queen Victoria,” Miss Bristol said to me-I was in step with her now-and she was referring to a real statue, pointing to a sun-bleached constipated-looking little lady of marble with crown and scepter sitting on her throne atop a squat pillar with a bright bed of flowers at her feet.

I frowned a little, shook my head. “Funny place to bury her.”

Miss Bristol looked at me in sharp confusion, but it only lasted for an instant and was replaced by as quick a smile. “Aren’t you a nasty one,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“I am,” I said cheerfully, “and it’s better you find out now.”

Behind the seated stone Queen was a cluster of pink colonial public buildings, three sides of a quadrangle surrounding the stern little monarch.

“That’s the Parliament Square,” she explained.

But we weren’t headed there. We had paused alongside the park, where a lineup of high-roofed horse-drawn carriages awaited passengers who probably weren’t coming today; the native drivers slumped in their seats, asleep under their tugged-down straw-hat brims, fanned by their horses who were lazily tail-swatting the air and flies.

One of the drivers was awake, however, a thin, very dark gent in loose white apparel with a brilliant red sash around his waist. He had a grooved, friendly face, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and was somewhere between forty and sixty. And his carriage seemed larger and fancier-with both a front seat and back, leather-covered, and red satin side curtains-than the other horsedrawn hacks around him.