The Game

THE GAME

a Mary Russell novel

by Laurie R. King

For the librarians everywhere,

who spend their lives in battle against the forces of darkness

Preface

It was a dramatic setting for a human sacrifice, give my murderer credit. He had drawn together the entire populace, crones to infants, in a dusty space between buildings that in England would be the village green, and all were agog at the sight. A circle of freshly lit torches cracked and flared in the slight evening breeze, their dashing light rendering the mud houses in stark contrast of pale wall and blackest shadow. The bowl of the sky I was forced to gaze up at was moonless, the stars—far, far from the electrical intrusions of civilisation—pinpricks in the velvet expanse. The evening air was rich with odours—the oily reek of the rag torches in counterpoint to the dusky cow-dung cook-fires and the curry and garlic that permeated the audience, along with the not unpleasant smell of unsoaped bodies and the savour of dust which had been dampened for the show.

I lay, bound with chains, on what could only be called an altar, waist-height to the man who held the gleaming knife. My sacrifice was to be the climax of the evening’s events, and he had worked the crowd into a near frenzy, playing on their rustic gullibility as on a fine instrument. It had been a long night, but it seemed that things were drawing to a finish.

The knife was equally theatrical, thirteen inches of flashing steel, wielded with artistry in order to catch the torchlight. For nearly twenty minutes it had flickered and dipped over my supine body, brushing my skin like a lover, leaving behind thin threads of scarlet as it lifted; my eyes ached with following it about. Still, I couldn’t very well shut them; the mind wishes to see death descend, however futile the struggle.

But it would not be long now. I did not understand most of the words so dramatically pelting the crowd, but I knew they had something to do with evil spirits and the cleansing effects of bloodshed. I watched the motions of the knife closely, saw the slight change in how it rested in my attacker’s hand, the shift from loose showmanship to the grip of intent. It paused, and the man’s voice with it, so that all the village heard was the sough and sigh of the torches, the cry of a baby from a nearby hut, and the bark of a pi-dog in the field. The blade now pointed directly down at my heart, its needle point rock-steady as the doubled fist held its hilt without hesitation.

I saw the twitch of the muscles in his arms, and struggled against the chains, in futility. The knife flashed down, and I grimaced and turned away, my eyes tight closed.

This was going to hurt.

Chapter One

Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one’s daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage.

On the first of January, 1924, I was enjoying a peaceful New Year’s evening with my partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes, in our snug stone house on the Sussex Downs, blissfully unaware that scarcely forty hours later I would be sprinting desperately for a train across a snow-covered railway siding. But on the first day of the new year, I was at peace and I was at home, with a full stomach, a tipsy head, and—most pleasant of all—warm feet. No fewer than three bottles of wine stood on the sideboard, in various stages of depletion. Holmes had just taken a connoisseur’s sip of the last to appear in our glasses, a dusty port twice as old as I. He sighed in satisfaction and stretched his slippers out to the fire.

“It is good to find that the French vineyards are recovering from the War,” he noted, although of the three wines, only the champagne had gone into its bottle since 1918.

I agreed, rather absently I will admit. As I took a swallow of the glorious liquid, it occurred to me that some part of the back of my mind was braced for a ring of the telephone or a furious pounding on the door. The visceral mistrust of leisure was perhaps understandable: Twice in the past six months the outside world had crashed in on us; indeed, we had been similarly seated before the fire one evening a scant two months earlier when an investigation literally fell into our arms, in the form of an old friend with a bloodied head. It was not yet midnight, and I had no faith in our stout oaken door to keep out surprises of the kind Holmes tended to attract.

However, pleasantly enough, no pounding fist came to trouble our companionship or, later, our slumber, and we rose early the next morning, fortified ourselves with one of Mrs Hudson’s hearty breakfasts (this one even more elaborate than usual, to make up for her being cheated of preparing the dinner for this, my twenty-fourth birthday), and bundled into our warmest clothes for the sleet-drenched trip to London. We rode the train in silence, taken up with our thoughts and with the newspapers, both as cheerless as the landscape outside the windows. Foot-and-mouth disease, the rising Seine, and doomsayers with apocalyptic predictions on both sides of the Atlantic, set off by the recent Labour victory.

Grimmer yet was the real reason for our visit to the great city. We had no end of business there, of course, from a long-delayed appointment with the bank manager to calling on a noble family in order to follow up on our most recently concluded investigation, but in truth, we were there to see Holmes’ brother Mycroft, whose health was giving, as the euphemism goes, cause for concern.

He was home from hospital already, although the doctors had strongly advised against it, and embarked on his own programme of therapy. I personally wouldn’t have thought a near-starvation diet of meat and red wine combined with long hours of vigorous calisthenics would be the best thing for a shaky heart, but not even Holmes’ arguments made much of an inroad on Mycroft’s determination. We had maintained a closer contact with him than usual over the past week and a half, none of us voicing the thought that each visit could well be our last. We hurried through the day’s business, I listening with half an ear to the urgent recitation of calamity that trembled over the head of my American possessions, thinking only that, affection for my father or not, the time had come to rid myself of his once-cherished properties across the sea. I kept glancing at my wrist-watch, until finally with a sigh my solicitor threw up metaphorical hands, gave me the papers that required my signature, and allowed me to escape.

When we arrived at Mycroft’s door, however, I had to admit that his self-prescribed fitness régime did not seem to be doing him any harm. He was up and around, and if he opened the door in his slippers and dressing-gown, he moved without hesitation and had colour in his face. There was also nearly a stone less of him than there had been on Christmas Day, which made his jowls flaccid and his eyes more hooded than usual.

“Many happy returns of the day, Mary,” he said, and to Holmes, “I believe you’ll find a corkscrew on the tray, if you’d be so kind.” After toasts came the inevitable discussion of the impending disaster that the new Labour government was certain to bring in. Predictions were rife that the institution of marriage was sure to be done away with, that rubles would replace the pound sterling, the Boy Scouts and the monarchy would be abolished, the House of Lords sold for housing flats—everything short of plagues and rains of frogs. There were strong rumours that the Prime Minister would refuse to step down to Labour’s minority vote, thus igniting a constitutional crisis if not outright revolution; the newspapers that morning had mentioned the concern of America, politeness thinly concealing Washington’s growing alarm. When I said something of the sort, Mycroft nodded.

“Yes, the Americans are becoming increasingly nervous about the Reds. They seem to envision a Socialist state that stretches from London to Peking, and don’t know whether to be more worried about the Bolsheviks succeeding, or about the chaos that will follow if they fail.”

When we had exhausted the various topics, we sat down to a meal only marginally less sumptuous than one of Mycroft’s usual, accompanied by what passed for small talk and polite conversation in the Holmes household, in this case an interesting development in forensic science from America and a nice murder that was baffling the authorities. Dessert was a small decorated cake, which none of us ate.

The pouring of coffee, offer of brandy, and fingering of cigars indicated that the meal was finished, business could be resumed. The talk circled back through the Labour victory and the huge problems facing a minority government, before Mycroft took a last, ritual mouthful from his cup, put it onto the table, and asked, “Have you been following the news from Russia?”

My head snapped up as if he’d hauled back on my reins—which in a way, he had: I knew him far too well to think his question innocent. “No!” I said sharply, before things could edge one syllable further down that slippery slope. “I absolutely refuse to go to Moscow in January.”

He made a show of shifting feebly in his chair, letting out a quiet sigh of infirmity before he looked up. “I said nothing about Moscow.”

“Siberia, then. Some place either deadly or freezing, or both.”

He abandoned the attempt at innocence. “I would go myself,” he tried, but at my disbelieving snort and Holmes’ raised eyebrow, he dropped that as well. All the world knew that Mycroft Holmes went nowhere outside his tightly worked circle if he could possibly avoid it: Dr Watson had once referred to Mycroft’s unexpected appearance in their Baker Street flat as akin to finding a tram-car running down a country lane.

It did, however, answer a question that had been in the back of my mind ever since the general election, namely, how would the radical change in government affect Mycroft? Mycroft’s rôle in the outgoing Tory government was as undefined as it was enormous; it seemed he intended to simply ignore the shuffling of office-holders all around him.

“What has happened, Mycroft?” Holmes asked, drawing my attention back to the until-now overlooked fact that, if Mycroft, in his condition, had been consulted on a matter by whichever government, it had to have struck someone as serious indeed.

By way of answer, the big man reached inside the folds of his voluminous silken dressing-gown and pulled out a flat, oilskin-wrapped packet about three inches square. He put it onto the linen cloth and pushed it across the table in our direction. “This came into my hands ten hours ago.”

Holmes retrieved the grimy object, turned it over, and began to pick apart the careful tucks. The oilskin had clearly been folded in on itself for some time, but parted easily, revealing a smaller object, a leather packet long permeated by sweat, age, and what appeared to be blood. This seemed to have been sewn shut at least two or three times in its life. The most recent black threads had been cut fairly recently, to judge by their looseness; no doubt that explained the easy parting of the oilskin cover. Holmes continued unfolding the leather.

Inside lay three much-folded documents, so old the edges were worn soft, their outside segments stained dark by long contact with the leather. I screwed up my face in anticipation of catastrophe as Holmes began to unfold the first one, but the seams did not actually part, not completely at any rate. He eased the page open, placing a clean tea-spoon at its head and an unused knife at its foot to keep it flat, and slid it over for me to examine as he set to work on the second.

The stained document before me seemed to be a soldier’s clearance certificate, and although the name, along with most of the words, was almost completely obscured by time and salt, it looked to belong to a K-something O’Meara, or O’Mara. The date was unreadable, and could as easily have been the 1700s as the past century—assuming they issued clearance certificates in the 1700s. I turned without much hope to the second document. This was on parchment, and although it appeared even older than the first and had been refolded no less than four times into different shapes, it had been in the center position inside the leather pouch, and was not as badly stained. It concerned the same soldier, whose last name now appeared to be O’Hara, and represented his original enlistment. I could feel Mycroft’s eyes on me, but I was no more enlightened than I had been by the certificate representing this unknown Irishman’s departure from Her Majesty’s service.

Holmes had the third document unfolded, using the care he might have given a first-century papyrus. He made no attempt to weigh down the edges of this one, merely let the soft, crude paper rest where it would lest it dissolve into a heap of jigsaw squares along the scored folds. I craned my head to see the words; Holmes, however, just glanced at the pages, seeming to lose interest as soon as he had freed them. He sat aside and let me look to my heart’s content.

This was a birth certificate, for a child born in some place called Ferozepore in the year 1875. His father’s name clarified the difficulties of the K-something from the other forms: Kimball.

I looked up, hoping for an explanation, only to find both sets of grey Holmes eyes locked expectantly onto me. How long, I wondered, before I stopped feeling like some slow student facing her disappointed headmistress? “I’m sorry,” I began, and then I paused, my mind catching at last on a faint sense of familiarity: Kimball. And O’Hara. Add to that a town that could only be in India. . . . No; oh, no—the book was just a children’s adventure tale. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, only where before it had connoted apology, this time it was tinged with outrage. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Kim, does it? The Kipling book?”

“You’ve read it?” Mycroft asked.

“Of course I’ve read it.”

“Good, that saves some explaining. I believe this to be his amulet case.”

“He’s real, then? Kipling’s boy?”

“As real as I am,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And yes, this is his amulet. I recognise it.”

“You know him?” I don’t know why this revelation startled me as if he’d claimed to have met a hippogryph; heavens, half the world considered Holmes fictional. But startle me it did.

“I knew him, long ago. We spent the better part of a year in each other’s company.”

“When?”

He smiled to himself. “While I was dead.”

I knew my husband and partner was not referring to some spiritualist experience of a previous lifetime. “When I was dead” was his whimsical term for the period beginning in the spring of 1891, when he disappeared at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, and for three years wandered the globe, returning to London only when a mysterious murder called him back to the land of the living. Knowing that Mycroft had preserved his Baker Street rooms for him during those three years, and knowing what Mycroft was, I had no doubt that at least a portion of that time, Holmes had been about the Queen’s business. Still, I had never heard the details.

I was not to hear them now, either. Holmes had already turned to his brother, and was asking, “How did these come to you?”

“Through the hands of a certain captain who has an interest in both worlds.”

“Not Creighton?”

“The man who currently holds the same position that Creighton did then, fellow by the name of Nesbit.”

“And the story that accompanied them?”

“So tenuous as to be nonexistent. An Afghan trader brings a rumour that a light-skinned native man is being held by a hill raja. Six months later, a camel caravan modifies the story, that the man was being held but took ill and died, asking that these, his last effects, be returned to his people. We did trace the amulet’s arrival to such a caravan, but no man could say who had carried it south, or whence it came.”

Holmes nodded, but said only, “I find it difficult to imagine that particular individual being held against his will.”

I broke in, with a request I did not think unreasonable, particularly as we seemed to be on the edge of being dragged into a case involving Kimball O’Hara. “I’d appreciate a little background information, just a few details about what you were doing when you knew the boy.”

Holmes glanced sideways at his brother, assessing his condition, then suggested, “Perhaps it would be best if we saved the tale for a later time.”

I started to protest, then decided that Mycroft’s colour was indeed not peak, and brought my curiosity under control, allowing them to continue.

Mycroft answered, “As you say, it takes some doing to imagine O’Hara in custody for more than a few days. He was—how did you put it to me? ‘Wily as a mongoose, slippery as a cobra, more deadly than either.’ ”

“If not in custody, then what?”

“The Bear is awakening.”

“‘The Bear,’ ” I said. “You mean Russia? But I thought our relations with them had settled down—don’t we even have a trade agreement now with the Bolsheviks?”

“Oh, yes, they’ve played on our attachment to India by accepting industrial supplies in exchange for little more than a verbal guarantee that they would cease their intrigue in the sub-continent. But then last May, Curzon had to threaten to withdraw trade unless they took their agents out. And, oh the surprise, they have not.”

“And you imagine the Bolsheviks might have laid hands on O’Hara,” Holmes asked, sounding dubious, “or got him in their sights, where the Tsar’s agents could not?”

“Not precisely,” Mycroft replied.

Holmes frowned. “A native agent, then, who worked his way inside O’Hara’s guard?” He seemed only a shade less doubtful about this possibility, but still Mycroft shook his head.

“Sherlock, I am not convinced the man is dead.”

“What, then? Not dead, not held, then—No,” Holmes said sharply as Mycroft’s meaning fell into place. “Kimball O’Hara would never side with the Russians against the Crown. Never.”

“Perhaps not side with them, necessarily, but use them? As a tool for India herself? The move towards self-rule—Gandhi’s swaraj—has adherents on all levels throughout the sub-continent, and between their systematic obstructionism and the actions of outright revolutionaries, the country is a powder-keg. One more atrocity like Dyer’s and the entire country will rise up, battering its own way between the British and the Bolsheviks. Neither of whom has much affection for Mr Gandhi. But even lacking outright revolt, the educated classes are pressing strongly for a voice in their own affairs. And the boy was always more native than white in his sensibilities.”

“Sensibilities, yes, but not in his loyalties. He would not turn coat against His Majesty.”

“Then perhaps he is truly imprisoned. Or dead.”

Holmes did not answer. Instead, he took up the much-folded papers from the table, holding them to the light, one by one, for a long and close study. He found no marks, no pinpricks, nothing to indicate a secret message to the outside world. He even turned the leather case outside-in, as if the stitches of closure might have been embroidered into a code, but there was nothing. And as I knew that Mycroft would have given the objects the same scrutiny, I did not bother doing the same: If neither Holmes brother had found a hidden message, it was unlikely that I should do so.

“Has Kipling been questioned?” Holmes asked.

“The last he heard of O’Hara was in 1916. A letter of condolence arrived some months after Kipling’s son was killed.”

“Who was O’Hara’s contact within the Survey?”

“O’Hara hasn’t worked with the Ethnological Survey for nearly three years, but at the time it was Nesbit, and before that, Apfield. You knew him, I think?”

“We met,” Holmes said, not apparently enchanted with the memory. He turned to me to explain. “The Survey of India is responsible for producing accurate maps of the country, but it is also the home of the Ethnological department, wherein lies Intelligence. Under cover of survey and census, the British government assembles the subtler kinds of information concerning secret conversations and illicit trade among the border states. When I was there, Colonel Creighton headed the Survey. A good man.” He finished packing the documents into their leather amulet case and slid the object back across the table to Mycroft. “You need me to go?”

“I don’t want to ask,” Mycroft said, which was answer enough.

“We’re off to India, then?” I said. Ah well; we’d had a pleasant holiday for nearly an entire week. And at least it wasn’t Russia: India was the tropics, which meant that my chilblains, begun in Dartmoor in October and not improved by two months in an underheated Berkshire country house broken by a cross-Atlantic trip for a missing ducal relative, might have a chance to heal. Still, I thought of the newspaper headlines I had read on the train, “Hindu-Moslem Bitterness—Riot in Calcutta Suburb,” and suppressed a sigh. “Do we have time to pack a bag?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Holmes said absently.

“Holmes!” I protested, but to my surprise, Mycroft came down on my side.

“The Special Express leaves Victoria at one-forty tomorrow afternoon. The P. & O. steamer meets it in Marseilles at midnight Friday. Plenty of time.”

Not precisely what I would term plenty of time, but better than taking off for the East in the clothes I stood up in. Which request, frankly, wouldn’t have surprised me.

We were even allowed to finish our coffee before having to race for a cab.

The late train for Eastbourne was standing at the platform when we reached Victoria, but for some reason it proved unusually popular, with the result that we did not have a compartment to ourselves. This meant that the tale of Kimball O’Hara had to wait until after the car had deposited us at our door, and we had retrieved our trunks from the attic, and we had begun to pack them. Mrs Hudson, although we insisted we could manage, wrenched the clothes from our hands and took out her copious supply of tissue-paper. I admitted defeat and, leaving her bemoaning the lack of time to repair and tidy the summer-weight garments retrieved from the back of the cupboards, I followed Holmes down the hall-way and into the laboratory, where I cornered him.

“Very well, Holmes, you may proceed.”

“About young O’Hara? Yes, an intriguing lad. You know his history, you said?”

“Born in India to Irish parents; mother died early; father drank himself to death, leaving Kim in the charge of a native nurse, who let him run wild so that he grew up in the bazaar.”

“Save that it was opium that killed O’Hara, not alcohol, the rest is correct.”

“As I remember it, when the boy was twelve or thirteen he finally came to the attention of the authorities, particularly the man who was in charge of the spy network operating along the Northwest Frontier. That was Creighton. He sent the boy to school for a while to learn his letters and numbers, before reclaiming him for the Intelligence service. Kim and some other agents foiled a Russian plot, something about treason among a group of hill rajas, and that’s where the book ends.”

“It was immediately after that tale’s conclusion that I met him. He was only seventeen, but already a full operative of the Survey. He had befriended an old Tibetan lama, and was returning him to his home when our paths coincided, and I joined them.”

“You mean you actually got to Tibet? I assumed that was one of Conan Doyle’s romanticisms. Wasn’t Tibet closed to outsiders until Younghusband’s expedition in, what was it, 1904?”

“That set off in the final weeks of 1903, and yes, all that time Tibet was closed tighter than a miser’s purse-string,” he said with satisfaction. “Which is why I needed to accompany the lama.”

“And you wanted to go to Tibet because . . . ?”

“Mycroft, of course.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

“This was 1892, when the Russian threat was at its height. The Tsar wanted India, the Viceroy wanted to know which pass the Cossacks would come pouring through, and I happened to be on hand. As was young Kimball O’Hara. I had joined with a group of explorers, calling myself Sigerson, and made a lot of careful notes and maps. O’Hara came to our camp one black night, begging food for his lama, this grubby dark-skinned lad with eyes that saw everything. As he was leaving, he allowed his shirt to fall open and reveal a certain charm around his neck which, combined with an exchange of phrases, told me that he, too, was engaged in the ‘Great Game’ of border espionage. He crept back to my tent at midnight and we had a long talk, and ended up travelling together for a time. Most of what we did is no doubt still under lock and key in some ministry office, but after the Bolshevik revolution, I had assumed that the need for guarding India’s passes had faded. However, it would seem that in Mycroft’s eyes, The Game persists, albeit against different players.”

He made to leave the room, but I had to protest, for his tale had been in no way adequate.

“But what was he like?” I persisted.

By way of answer, Holmes paused with his hand in a trouser pocket, then drew it out and dashed the contents onto the table nearest the door. A handful of small, disparate objects danced and rolled and threatened to fall to the floor, but no sooner had they come to a rest than he scooped them up again, and turned a questioning eyebrow on me.

We hadn’t done this particular exercise in a long time, but I had sufficient experience with Holmes’ ways to know what his action signified.

“You wish me to play Kim’s game?” I asked.

“The boy himself called it the ‘Jewel Game,’ but yes.”

It was a test of one’s perception, first of seeing, then of committing to memory. I was tired, and I couldn’t see what this had to do with my question, but obediently I began to recite.

“Three mismatched collar studs; a nubbin of India rubber; two paper-clips, one of them Italian; the cigar-band from Mycroft’s cigar; a gold pen nib; the button that came off your shirt two weeks ago that you couldn’t find, so that Mrs Hudson replaced all the shirt’s buttons at a go; the stub end of a boot-lace; a seed-head from last summer’s nigella; a penny, a halfpenny, and a farthing; two pebbles, one black and the other white; a tooth from a comb; and one inch of pencil.”

He smiled then, and headed back into the bedroom. “You and O’Hara will find you have much in common, I think.” When I protested that he hadn’t answered me, he put up his hand. “We shall have many days of leisure in which to recount fond tales of derring-do, Russell. But not tonight—we have much to do before we catch that train. And, Russ?” I looked up to find him outlined in the doorway, a pair of patent-leather shoes in his hand, his face as grim as his voice. “Make certain to pack adequate ammunition for your revolver.”

Chapter Two

We rose from our brief rest to a world of white, and the news that the trains to London were badly delayed. Nonetheless, we had my farm manager Patrick put the horses into harness and take us to the Eastbourne station, where we found that indeed, the London trains were not expected to reach Victoria until late in the afternoon. I glanced at my hastily packed bags and tried not to look too cheerful.

“That does it, Holmes. We shall have to wait until next week.”

“Nonsense. Off you go, Patrick, before you end up in a drift over your head.”

I shrugged at my old friend, who touched the brim of his cloth cap and picked up the reins. Holmes had already turned to the station master, a lugubrious individual long acquainted with this particular passenger’s idiosyncrasies, and, I thought, secretly entertained by them. Very secretly. “Are the telephone lines still up?”

“Not to London, Mr Holmes.”

“What about the telegraph?”

“Oh, aye, we’re sure to get a message through by some route or another.”

The two went off, heads together. I looked at the trunks, gathering snowdrifts to themselves, and took myself inside out of the cold.

A couple of hours later something intruded upon my attention: a pair of shoes gleaming at me over the top of the book I’d snatched from Holmes’ shelves on the way out the door. I blinked and straightened my bent spine to look up into my husband’s face. His grey eyes were dancing with amusement.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Russell, I am constantly filled with admiration at your ability to immerse yourself in the task at hand.”

I closed The Riches of Mohenjo-Daro and rose, in some confusion, only noticing when I was upright that the trunks had been brought in and arranged at my side, long enough ago that the snow had not only melted but dried as well. What was more, a tea tray someone had set by my other side bore a half-empty cup and a half-eaten biscuit. I could taste the biscuit in my mouth, but I had no recollection whatsoever of having consumed either.

“Glad I amuse you, Holmes. What have you arranged? An aeroplane journey to Marseilles? A sub-marine boat to run us to Port Said?”

“Nothing so exotic. The delay is due less to the quantity of snow than it is to something on the tracks the other side of Lewes. All other trains, though slow, are still getting through. Mycroft has arranged for the Express to wait for us in Kent.”

I looked at him with astonishment. “I should have thought a sub-marine boat easier to arrange than the delay of a train.”

“The Empire is but a plaything to the whims of Mycroft Holmes,” he commented, glancing around for a porter.

“The Empire, yes, but the Calais Express?”

“So it would appear, even with the Labour Party bearing down on the horizon.”

Not that the catching of it was a simple thing. It meant boarding an east-bound train, one of those locals that pauses at every cattle shed and churchyard, and which cowers in a siding every few miles that an express may thunder past in majesty. Not that anything much was thundering that day; I began to suspect that even Mycroft’s best-laid plans might leave us stranded in the middle of Kent.

Still, I had a book.

Either through mechanical problems or through some deep-seated class resentment of the driver (he’d probably cast his ballot for the incoming Socialists), our train stopped well short of the assigned station. This expression of class solidarity (if that is what it was) became somewhat derailed itself when Holmes summoned many strong men to haul our possessions over the slippery ground, to the puzzlement of the local’s passengers and the huge indignation of those on the Express. Class warfare at its most basic. Holmes did, however, tip the men handsomely.

The instant we had spilled into the waiting train it shuddered and loosed its bonds to steam furiously off for Dover. I understand that mention was even made in the next day’s Times of a puzzling stop in the wilds of Kent for a hasty on-load of essential governmental equipment. Mycroft’s decrees were powerful indeed.

The entire trip to Marseilles carried on as it had begun, rushed and uncomfortable. And dreary—it was on that train that we read of the death of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, an old friend of Holmes’ whose problems on Dartmoor had occupied our early autumn. Then the Channel crossing was rough, so rough that I spent the entire time braving the sleet-slick deck rather than succumb to sea-sickness, reaching Calais with nose, hands, and toes not far from frost-bite. Paris was flooded, its higher ground packed with refugees and their bags, the train crowded and all the first-class sleepers occupied by fleeing residents. We spent Friday with an aged Italian priest and his even more aged and garrulous sister, both of whom exuded clouds of garlic. The rain and snow persisted, slowing the journey so much that I began to doubt that we would actually arrive before the steamer had departed, but in the end, the boat, too, was held (for the train as a whole, not merely for the two of us), and when we reached the docks, our possessions were hastily labelled and carried on, divided between cabin and hold. We scurried up the ice-slick gangway in the company of a handful of other train passengers, slipping almost apologetically onboard the sleeping boat, witnessed only by P. & O. officials and, I thought, one or two other sets of eyes in the higher decks, their presence felt but unseen in the darkness.

Once in our cabin (this, at any rate, had no priest in residence) I crept into bed, praying that exhaustion would take my body into sleep before the pitch and toss of the boat asserted itself. To my relief, such was the case: The steam-roller of the past fifty-four hours rumbled over my recumbent body, and my last memory was of Holmes wrestling open the small port-hole, letting in a wash of frigid air scented with salt, and nary a hint of garlic.

I woke a long time later to a more subdued sea, a pallid attempt at sunshine, and the ting of a spoon against china. When I reached for the bed-side clock, my hand knocked against the water carafe; after a moment Holmes came through the doorway with a cup of tea in each hand. He set one on the table, and sat down on the other bed with his own. It was, I saw, nearly noon.

The tea had the bitter edge of a pot that has sat for a while, but it was still hot, which told me that Holmes, too, had slept late, and was only on his second cup. I slurped in appreciation, grateful that the bed wasn’t tossing beneath me. When the cup was empty, I threaded my glasses over my ears so I could see my partner.

“I suppose I shall be spending the next two weeks being force-fed some language or other?” I asked.

“Hindustani is the common tongue of the north, used by all traders. You won’t find it difficult.”

“Before we begin, I want to know more about this O’Hara person.”

“Not a ‘person,’ a young gentleman, despite his history and lineage. A sahib.”

“But he was only a lad when you knew him.”

“Even then.”

“That was, what, thirty years ago? Why hasn’t he made a name for himself in that time?”

“A man does not play The Game successfully for thirty years and more if he catches the eye of any but his superiors.”

“O’Hara has been a spy for the Crown for all that time?”

“O’Hara has been many things, but yes, he has been there when he was needed.”

“Tell me about—”

“Breakfast first, and a lesson in Hindi. Then I shall tell you old and happy, far-off things and battles long ago.”

He reinforced his edict by standing up and walking into the adjoining room.

I finished my tea, dawdled over my morning rituals, and joined him moments after our mid-day breakfast came through the door. As I came in, he looked up from the fragrant plate and said, “Begumji, hazri khaege?” Lessons had begun.

At first my mind tried to slide the new language sideways into its niche for Arabic, a tongue I had learnt under similar circumstances five years earlier, but by the end of the afternoon, it had grudgingly begun to compile a separate store-house of nouns and verbs in a niche labelled Hindi. With concentrated (that is, around-the-clock) effort, the rudimentaries of most languages can be grasped in a week or two, with childish phrases and a continual “Pardon me?” giving way to slow, stilted fluency a week later. By the end of four weeks, under Holmes’ tutelage, I had no doubt that my somewhat bruised brain would be dreaming in its newest tongue. And it went without saying, my accent would be identical to his, that is, negligible. By the time we landed in Bombay, I would be able to pass for a genial idiot; another fortnight, and I would merely sound stupid.

However, it seemed that Hindustani was not the only subject Holmes had in mind. When our plates were clean and I had satisfactorily recited the nouns and articles for all the objects on the tray, he swept the leavings to one side and laid a pair of tea-spoons and a linen napkin onto the table between us, and began a demonstration of sleight-of-hand.

Under the command of those long, thin, infinitely clever fingers, the silver came alive. It vanished and reappeared in unlikely places; it multiplied, shrank, changed shape, became near liquid, and finally sat quietly where it had begun. I knew his tricks—basic conjuring was a skill I’d begun to learn early in our relationship—but my young fingers had been no match for his. Still, I’d spent one summer conjuring with coins so, although the spoons were more difficult to palm and vanish, my grip was accustomed to the motions. Now I picked up one of the spoons and performed a few of his moves back to him, albeit more slowly and clumsily, and leaving out the multiplication trick since he had stashed the other spoons somewhere about his person. He looked on critically, grunted his approval, and produced the spare silver from an inner pocket.

I had been many things as first the apprentice, then the partner of Sherlock Holmes: gipsy fortune-teller in Wales, personal secretary to a misogynist colonel, Bedu Arab wandering the Palestinian desert, working girl, matron, and Sweet Young Thing. Now, we were going to India, where I supposed I might be asked to dance in a harem or take up a position on the street among the lepers. Or perform conjuring tricks.

“We’re to be Hindu magicians?” I asked.

“As Dr Johnson said, ‘All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.’ And as fire-breathing bears the hazards of flaming beards or self-poisoning with phosphorus or brimstone, and the more spectacular conjuring depends on equipment too heft for easy transport, we shall concentrate on prestidigitation.”

“But why?”

He settled back and steepled his fingers for a lecture; I poured myself another cup of coffee.

“We in the West have developed the unfortunate habit of training and arming insurgents, then dropping them when they become inconvenient. As a result, there is a certain lack of long-term trust on the part of the native inhabitants, even those who declare themselves our stout friends. And as a part of that lack of trust, we cannot always be certain that our ‘friends’ are telling us all they know. The Northwest Frontier of India has known spies for so many generations, even the least sophisticated of communities suspects any outsider of nefarious purposes. One of the perpetual dilemmas for the man wishing to come and go freely along the border territories has always been finding an acceptable disguise to justify his presence, so that he is not thrown into gaol, or summarily shot. Some players of the Great Game go as hakims, with patent cures for fever and eye infections to supplement rudimentary medical skills; others bluster their way as hunters, collecting heads and skins openly as they surreptitiously map an area. I’ve known wandering antiquarians, big-game hunters, and itinerant durzis—tailors—but each depends on specific skills. One wouldn’t care to be a durzi if one could not handle a needle, for example. O’Hara was note-perfect as a holy man, due to his long wandering in the company of a Tibetan lama. But for the man—or woman—with the necessary skills, one of the best disguises is that of a travelling entertainer. Native peoples expect a magician both to be itinerant and to behave in a mysterious fashion. And as long as there are no inconvenient coincidences, no village bullocks die or floods come to wash out the crops, the people are happy to accept most witchery as benign. I want you to practise your movements until you can do them backwards in your sleep.”

I could see already that we wouldn’t be spending much of the voyage up on deck, open to curious ears and eyes.

Too, this would clearly not be a visit among the exotic comforts of India. From the sounds of it, we’d be lucky to sleep under a roof.

Worst of all, this talk of “frontier” made my heart sink and my chilblains tingle: It did not sound as if the warm, frangipani-scented south was to be our destination.

It was not until tea-time that Holmes broke off the lessons, when my tongue and my fingers were both about to stutter to a halt. We went up to the salon for tea, and the genial drink coupled with the fresh Mediterranean air soothed me as if I’d been granted an afternoon nap. Afterwards, we bundled up and strolled the decks, where at last Holmes began the story of his meeting with the young Kim O’Hara—in Hindi alternating with English translations, a broken narrative rendered yet more difficult to follow by the necessity of switching to something innocuous whenever another set of ears came near. It was a method of discourse with which, by that time, I had some familiarity: I had known the man at my side for just under nine years, been his partner for five, his wife for three.

“It was in the spring of 1891 that I encountered Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, an encounter from which only I walked away. Watson, as you know, thought I had met my death there, and made haste to inform the rest of the world. I was indeed dead to the world for three long years. When I finally returned to London, I told Watson that my absence had been due to the ongoing investigation of the Moriarty gang, but in truth, my heart had grown weary of the game. When I set off for my meeting with Moriarty, I anticipated that our final confrontation might well cost my life. To find myself still standing on the edge of the Falls while Moriarty was swallowed by its turbulence—it was as if the sky had opened up and a shiny Christmas parcel had been lowered into my waiting hands. All it required was for me to tug at its ribbons.

“The temptation was enormous. I had by that time been working out of Baker Street for ten very solid years, and although many of the cases were of interest, a few of them even challenging, I had reached a point at which the future stretched long and dull ahead of me. I was, remember, a young man, scarcely thirty, and the thought of returning to the choking fogs and humdrum crime of London was suddenly intolerable. I stood with the Falls at my feet and gazed down the path leading back to Watson and duty, then up at the steep cliff that was my other option, and my hands reached for the cliff.

“Once at the top, setting my face to the East, I paused. In fact, I sat among the bushes and stones for so long, I saw Watson reappear in a panic on the path below me. I saw the poor fellow find the note I had left there, saw him . . . He wept, Russell; my loyal friend broke down and wept, and it was all I could do not to stand and hail him. But I was silent, not because I wished to cause him sorrow, not even because I had a thought-out plan of action. No, it was merely that I had been given the priceless gift of choice, and could not bring myself to throw it away.

“I made my surreptitious way back to London, and to Mycroft’s door. My brother was surprised to see me, and I venture to say pleased, but he was not in the least astonished—we are enough alike, we two, to distrust a death without laying our thumbs on the corpse’s pulse. And as it turned out, my very public demise had come at an opportune time for his purposes.

“What do you know of the conflict along India’s northern frontier?” he asked me.

“I know that war in one form or another has gone on for most of the last century, until the Bolshevik revolution five years ago. The Tsar wanted to extend the Russian borders across the mountains into Afghanistan and ultimately India, while we kept him out by a show of force and holding close watch on the passes. In the meantime, both sides have been mistrusted, manipulated, and often murdered by the countries in the middle; the Afghans particularly have made the trapping of outsiders a national sport.”

“In 1891,” Holmes resumed, “Kim O’Hara was seventeen years old and fresh from school when he was dropped straight into the thick of The Game. A pair of ‘hunters’ came out of the hills carrying, along with their rifles, trophies, and a collection of well-hidden survey equipment, secret messages from the Tsar to some hill rajas entertaining treasonous thoughts. O’Hara was at the time in the company of his lama, and used his rôle as the man’s chela, or disciple, to conceal his government work. The job was hard and nearly killed him, but he succeeded in capturing the relevant letter, and was rewarded by being turned loose for a time. His lama was dying and wished to breathe his last in Tibet—and the boy’s superiors knew full well that if they attempted to keep him from his duties as a disciple, he would simply slip the reins and vanish.”

“Tibet.”

“Yes. A country all too aware of its vulnerability and its desirability, and therefore closed with grim determination against the eyes of all foreigners, a place with the habit of executing anyone even suspected of secret doings, a place where no Westerner had ever set foot. Unfortunately, just four months earlier, a Survey agent had gone missing from a mission into the reaches of Tibet, and it was feared that he had been taken captive, and was being questioned, under fairly drastic means—certain pieces of inside information had come to public knowledge. It was feared that any agent known to this man was in danger of exposure.”

“So Mycroft suggested sending in someone whom the man could not have known,” I supplied. “You.”

“Correct again. The timing was coincidental—my own unlooked-for availability and their sudden and urgent need for a competent stranger. And although by the time I reached India, O’Hara and his lama had left the plains, I managed to join a Scandinavian expedition into the mountains whose path would coincide with theirs.”

“Wheels within wheels.”

“Quite an appropriate image, Russell. The Tibetans often pray by means of a wheel spun on the end of a stick, its body filled with written prayers. With prayers, or with any other piece of writing a man might wish to carry with him. A map, say, or the copy of a private letter.”

“So you persuaded a couple of Tibetan monks to take on a Norwegian explorer?”

“They were, as I mentioned, begging for their meal by the side of the road, as is customary for religious individuals in the East. I was in the habit of concealing a roll in the breast of my coat, for just such an eventuality, and slid inside it a wadded-up note suggesting that a ‘son of the charm’ might find a friend in the tent with the orange door. The boy came to me after his lama was asleep that night, bristling with suspicion, fingering in a most un-monk-like fashion the revolver he wore inside his shirt lest I prove an enemy—or worse, a colleague set on dragging him back to his responsibilities.

“I gave him food—the boy ate meat as if he was starving, which he may well have been—and tobacco, and we sat on our heels in the dark and talked. He was the most remarkable blend of hard and soft, cunning and naïve, schoolboy one moment, petty criminal the next. He was a prodigy, who’d played a similar Game in the streets before he’d even heard of Crown or Tsar—if Creighton had sat at a drawing-board to design the very tool for bearing the Survey’s eyes and ears, he couldn’t have come up with anything better than Kimball O’Hara. His only weakness was a distaste for lying to his friends, and even then, he would practice deceit joyously when it was part of The Game.

“In the end I managed to convince the lad that, far from wishing to pull him out of the mountains, I would urge him to go as far and as wide as he could with his lama—my sole request being that he take me with him. Two purposes had I: The more immediate was to find word of Creighton’s missing agent, but beyond that, I had been asked, if it came into my purview, to whisper into the Dalai Lama’s ear that, despite the alarming actions of certain importunate missionaries, England was in fact more interested in treaty than takeover. That we had no wish to rule Tibet, merely wished Tibet’s assurance that they would not side with Russia and allow The Bear to use their land to stockpile troops and matériel for an invasion of India.

“At that time, I had no real thought that I would be allowed within shooting distance of the Dalai Lama, much less close enough to converse. That possibility came much later.

“The boy didn’t want me. He was afraid I’d give them away, and bring some impossible-to-predict form of wrath down on his lama. However, he was greatly tempted, seeing that supporting my assignment might go some way towards obviating his rebellion against his Survey masters. O’Hara would freely have given his life for the lama, but it troubled him greatly to give up his future. In the end, the benefits outweighed the risk, and he agreed to take me with them.

“Because the old lama was growing feeble, he and the boy moved more slowly than our well-equipped expedition. So I remained a Norwegian for some weeks, and acquitted myself well enough to receive mention in the world press before the Scandinavians pulled back to the foothills in front of the snows. I went with them, then slipped away and doubled back to join O’Hara.

“Somehow or other he’d managed to assemble another set of monk’s clothing for me, complete with prayer-beads and the sort of tam-o’-shanter cap they wore.”

I paused in our peregrination of the foredeck to study Holmes, trying to picture him in the colourful fittings of a Tibetan monk. I could not.

“We wintered just below a pass, taking shelter in a monastery of like-minded individuals until the snows retreated in the spring.”

“That must have felt like a long winter,” I commented. If he’d fled England because he hungered for action, months in a snow-bound monastery must have been hugely frustrating.

But to my surprise, he leant forward to rest his elbows against the ship’s rail, a half-smile coming onto his narrow mouth as memories took his gaze to the horizon. “In some ways, yes. Certainly it didn’t take long to run out of objects to play the Jewel Game with. But those two, the young white boy raised as a street urchin and the ancient Buddhist scholar, made for the most extraordinary company I’ve ever encountered, Russell. The one bursting with youth and beauty, the other a sea of wrinkles, the one a guttersnipe and petty thief, the other a revered head of a monastery—but when they met, the old man laid a potter’s hands on the boy, and re-formed him in his image. The bond between them was so powerful, and so completely unlikely, it made one begin to believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. It was the only way to explain it, that they’d known each other many times over the ages.”

I stared; the strange thing was, I couldn’t tell if he was jesting.

He felt my gaze, and although he did not meet it, he straightened and went on more briskly. “In any event, the winter did grant me sufficient leisure to become word-perfect as a red-hat monk. I spent many hours teaching the boy certain skills he might need, if he chose to return to the road of the Intelligence agent, and in exchange he coached me until I could recite the lama’s prayers better than he could, could expound on texts and write simple charms. And long hours out-of-doors in that high altitude rendered my skin as dark as those around me. When the pass cleared, I could probably have strolled into Lhasa without them.

“But Lhasa was where the lama was bound, and Lhasa was where his chela, and now their companion, would take him.

“We crossed over into Tibet in late March, reciting our rosaries all the way. The snows were so high, I would have chosen to wait another fortnight, but the lama was impatient—for a man who had attained enlightenment, he could be remarkably susceptible to his desires—and O’Hara thought himself strong enough for both. In the end, I had the old man on my back for a number of very rough miles—and at fifteen thousand feet, that can be rough indeed. But we half-staggered, half-rolled down the other side, tipped our hats to the startled border guards and said a blessing on their unborn sons, and went our way.

“And there we were, inside Tibet, two British sahibs in a place where, had they known, the countryside would have swarmed up like an anthill and exterminated us, or at the very least thrown us out on our ears. But because the lama was known and loved, and because he vouched for his chela and the companion who had joined them some months before, no man questioned us, no official barred our way.

“I spent the rest of that summer and autumn there, during which time I succeeded in locating our captured agent—who was not actually within Tibet, but gaoled in a neighbouring kingdom—as well as planting amiable suggestions in certain important ears. I even managed two audiences with the Dalai Lama himself, who was much of an age with Kim, and although he hadn’t young O’Hara’s advantages in the wide world, he was nonetheless remarkably sensitive to nuance and willing to question his advisors’ assumptions about the British threat.

“In the end, young O’Hara left his lama long enough to help me break the agent free from his prison and to secret him into hiding near the border. I tried to convince the lad to come with me back to India, but he stood firm. He was utterly devoted to his lama, and he had given his word: He would not leave until the old man was finished with his chela’s services. Neither of us thought that would be past mid-winter, but I had no choice but to leave, and return the prisoner to his home. We parted there, on the road fifty miles from Lhasa, and never saw each other again.”

The wistfulness in Holmes’ voice, his faraway gaze over the water, the fact that he had neglected to interject the running Hindi translation for the past five minutes, all gave me the odd, sure sensation that a part of him regretted that he had not remained behind, deep in Tibet with the boy and his lama. It was a peculiar feeling, finding this entirely unsuspected stream flowing within a man I believed I knew so well.

And, as I could not then admit, not even to myself, the knowledge brought with it a faint trickle of jealousy of the apprentice Holmes had taught so assiduously, and come to admire so warmly, nearly a decade before I was born.

Chapter Three

Before the Port Said light grew on the horizon, our new shipboard community was well on its way to becoming an ephemeral village. In many ways, it was a duplicate of the society we had left behind: the aristocracy of First Class on the upper decks, the peasantry of enlisted men, clerks, and their families under our feet, with the true labouring classes either tidily concealed beneath P. & O. uniforms or else thoroughly hidden away in the bowels of the ship. Rigid social custom swayed not a millimetre in the dining rooms: One never spoke to a neighbour at table if one had not been introduced, and since there were few mutual acquaintances to proffer the necessary introductions, conversation was largely nonexistent. Holmes and I attended few of the dining room meals.

Other areas of the boat were less severely bound by the strictures of human intercourse. In the exercise room, for example, it proved difficult to maintain a dignified formality with the woman at the next stationary bicycle when both of you were sweating and panting and furiously going nowhere. And because of the limited population in our floating village, group events such as card games, mah-jongg, or table tennis tended to require a certain loosening of rules in order to maintain a pool of players, which broke the ice sufficiently to permit one to nod to one’s fellow player when one came upon him or her perambulating the deck the following morning.

However, as I used the ship’s gym rarely and played neither mah-jongg nor table tennis, I was permitted, in the brief periods of free time permitted me by my taskmaster, to remain firmly sheltered with my books. I had finished with the archaeology of Mohenjo-Daro and was sitting bundled on a sheltered deck chair with a translation of the massive and hugely complicated Hindu epic called The Mahabharata, when an unexpected voice intruded.

“So, what are you going as?”

I blinked up at the voice, which had come from a slim girl of perhaps seventeen who was dressed in an ever-so-slightly garish fur coat, a pleated skirt, a cloche hat over her bobbed hair, and a long beaded necklace. She was standing near the railing, trying to set alight the long cigarette she’d fitted into an even longer ivory holder; the wind was not giving her much joy with it.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked. I couldn’t think what she was talking about, nor did I think we had met.

She seemed unaware of the repressive overtones in my question, unduly taken up with the problem of getting the match to meet the tobacco before the wind blew it out. I thought she had not been smoking long. Come to think of it, her presence on such an inhospitable and deserted bit of deck might not be unrelated to her inexperience: hiding from a disapproving parent, no doubt. “The fancy-dress ball,” she explained, and then bent over the match to shelter it, nearly setting her fur coat on fire in the process. At last—success. With an air of accomplishment she let the wind snatch away the spent match, placed the ivory mouthpiece to her lips with two elegant fingers, sucked in a lungful of smoke, and promptly collapsed in a gagging, retching fit of coughs that left her teary-eyed and weak-kneed. I sat with my finger between the pages, watching to see that she didn’t stagger over the railings, but the fit subsided without my assistance. She hiccoughed once, swabbed her eyes, and tottered over to collapse onto the empty deck chair next to me, glaring accusingly at the cigarette that burnt serenely in its holder.

“Next time just hold the smoke in your mouth,” I suggested, “instead of pulling it all the way into your lungs.”

“Whew!” she exclaimed. “I mean to say, I’ve smoked before, of course, but I guess the wind . . .”

“Quite,” I said, and opened my book again.

“So, what are you going as?”

“Sorry? Oh, the fancy-dress ball. I didn’t realise they had one.” I might have done, had I stopped to consider the matter. Shipping lines invented all sorts of ways to keep their passengers from succumbing to the throes of boredom, and encouraging wealthy men and women to make utter fools of themselves was a popular ploy, not the least because it ate up hours and hours in the preparations. “I shouldn’t think I’ll be going.”

“Oh, but you have to!” she said, sounding so disappointed I had to wonder again if we didn’t know each other. But before I could ask, I noticed her burning tobacco sinking forgotten, dangerously close to her coat.

“Er, watch the end,” I urged her.

“Oh! Gosh,” she exclaimed, patting furiously at the smoldering fur and plucking the still-burning cigarette out of the holder, tossing it into the wind, which I hoped might be strong enough to carry the ember clear of the unsuspecting passengers below. “Maybe I’m not cut out for smoking.”

It was on the end of my tongue to reassure her to never mind, she’d pick it up with practice, but I kept the thought to myself. Why should I encourage the maintenance of a filthy habit?

“Mama wants me to dress as a Kewpie doll, but I was thinking of being an Indian dancing girl—you know, scarfs and bangles.”

A certain degree of negotiation was clearly in store for the girl and her mother. Who was she, anyway?

As if I had voiced the question aloud, she thrust the ivory holder into her pocket and stuck out her hand. “Sorry, I’m being rude. I’m Sybil Goodheart. Everyone calls me Sunny.”

“Mary Russell,” I offered in return.

“And of course, you’re just joking about not going to the ball. I’m so bad, I never can tell when someone’s pulling my leg. What are you going as?”

I gave up; the child was too persistent for me. “Perhaps I’ll just wear my pyjamas and go as the downstairs neighbour, come to complain.”

She clapped her hand across her mouth and giggled, blushing slightly, perhaps at the idea of a proper lady coming in her nightwear. For a Flapper, she was easily shocked.

“You’re an American,” I said. If the accent hadn’t told me, the brashness would have.

“From Chicago. You ever been there?”

“I passed through once, when I was young.”

“It’s got to be the world’s stinkiest city,” she declared. “What’re you going to India for?”

“Er, my husband and I have business there.” Impossible to give the deflating retort a proper Englishwoman would have wielded at the importunity of the question; poor Sunny would have gone behind the clouds.

“Is that nifty old—er, older man your husband?” she asked in astonishment. “I mean to say, Mama and I noticed him earlier when you were on the deck.”

“That is my husband, yes,” I told her. And if she delivered a third rudeness, I would smack her. Verbally, of course. “And you, why are you going out?”

“I’m a little late for the ‘fishing fleet,’ aren’t I?” she said with a most disarming grin. “Actually, we had meant to come out in October, but Mama had a message from the spirits saying it was inauspicious, so we waited, which in the end was fantabulous, because I got to meet Ivor Novello at a party in London.”

“‘The spirits,’ ” I repeated carefully.

Sunny inclined her head towards me and confided, “Hokum, isn’t it? But Mama has had some powerful experiences in her time, and who’s to argue? That is to say, I did argue at the time, because who wants to come all the way here and have to skedaddle away after a few weeks as soon as the weather gets hot? But Mama chose her time, and we will at least have a month to sight-see before we go to see her Teacher.”

There was no mistaking the capital letter on the noun. Knowing I was going to regret it, I asked her which teacher that was.

“His name’s Kumaraswami Shivananda, have you heard of him? No, most people haven’t. Mama met him when he was on a lecture tour through the States, and came to Chicago. He’s absatively keen for an old man—has to be at least forty, but has those dark eyes that seem to look right through you. Anyhoo, he channels the spirits, especially one he calls The Vizier, who was something big in ancient Egypt. The Vizier sent Kumaraswami on his world tour, to gather pupils and then teach them all about enlightenment through the body. Ever so much nicer than all those skinny, unhealthy-looking characters who tell you to renounce all sensation, don’t you think?”

“Is, er, Kumaraswami Indian, then, or Egyptian?”

“Oh, no, he’s from Pittsburgh. But The Vizier spoke to him one day in a séance and told him to change his name and go to India, so that was that.”

Keeping my face straight was a struggle, but I agreed solemnly that enlightenment through the body did sound far nicer than some of the ascetic disciplines I had heard of. Sunny smiled, not knowing what I was talking about, but happy to have found what she took to be a kindred spirit.

“Have you ever been to a séance?” she asked.

“I, er, I know people who have.”

“They’re bunk, really, but tons of laughs. Everyone sitting so serious and then the channeller begins making all these squeals and groans, and you have to sit there fighting not to giggle.”

At least I shouldn’t have to warn the child not to be too gullible, I reflected, somewhat relieved.

“Come meet Mama and Tom?” she urged, jumping to her feet as if there could be no doubt that I would instantly agree.

“I should be getting back to w—” I started, but she pleaded.

“Oh, just for a jiffy! They’re right below us waiting for tea, it would be ever so nice to show Mama I’ve made a friend so that when I want to go off and flirt with those tasty young officers she won’t worry.”

Who was I to shackle a free spirit such as Sunny Goodheart? And if she had originally intended to join the “fishing fleet” of eligible young women travelling to India to hook a husband, she would need all the help she could get to make up for three months of lost time. “I’d love to meet your mother,” I said, causing her to give a little jump of pleasure before she seized my hand and led me down the deck towards the stairs. It was impossible not to smile at the creature; despite her dress and her cultivated worldly airs, she struck one as little more than a child.

Mama, on the other hand, was formidable, and I vowed not to venture into the heavy waters of theology with a woman possessed of that determined jaw. I offered her my hand, did not bother to correct Sunny’s introduction of me as “Mrs Russell,” and then shook the hand of the tall young man who had been seated at Mrs Goodheart’s side. He had placed a bookmark in his collection of the works of Marx (an English translation) before unfolding himself from the deck chair, a process rather like that of a standing camel or an unfolding crane. He was at least three inches over six feet, taller even than Holmes, and thin to the point of emaciation. One might think he’d been ill, except his colour was good and his movements, although languid, showed no discomfort.

“And this is Tom,” Sunny told me. “My brother. He finished at Harvard last June and has been taking the Tour in Europe. He decided to include India, since Mama wanted to go. Tommy’s a Communist,” she appended proudly.

Personally, I couldn’t see much to be proud of, either in the political stance or in the young man himself. Tom Goodheart’s features were pleasing enough, and he appeared to have some wiry muscle under his European-tailored jacket, but even seated, he looked down his nose at one—not openly, but behind an expression so bland, one immediately suspected it of being a mask. I decided that he was a member of the supercilious generation—no doubt he fancied himself an artist or a philosopher, or both—and the attitude as much as the clothes the three wore told me that Communist or no, money did not go wanting in the Goodheart family. The swami from Pittsburgh, I decided, was on to a good thing.

“How do you do?” I said, and before Sunny could drag up a chair (and it would be she who dragged it, not her brother) I glanced at my wrist and began to apologise. “I’m terribly sorry, I just remembered that I promised my husband I’d meet him a few minutes ago, it went right out of my head. Lovely to meet you, I look forward to seeing more of you all on the voyage.”

And made my escape.

But in the end, there would be no escaping Mrs Goodheart. The following afternoon, the rapidly filling pouches of my brain threatening to burst and spill out all the verb forms and adjectives I had ruthlessly crammed inside, Holmes and I took a turn around the deck. It was, I found, very pleasant indeed, with a degree more warmth in the winter sun. As we strolled arm in arm, dodging nannies pushing perambulators and the marching khaki-shorts brigade, I was doubly grateful that our haste had forced us to bypass the inevitably heaving Bay of Biscay and pick up the boat in the relative calm of the Mediterranean. Had we boarded in Southampton, I should only now be recovering from sea-sickness.

Then I heard a voice from a shaded corner, and the biliousness threatened to return.

“Mrs Russell, how good to see you. Won’t you introduce us to your husband?”

Two-thirds of the Goodheart family, mother and son. I opened my mouth to correct the American matriarch, but despite her opening volley, she did not wait for introductions, merely thrust her many-ringed hand at Holmes and said, “Mr Russell, glad you could join us. We were just talking about you, wondering if you were going to hide out in your cabin the entire trip.”

“Actually,” I began, but this time Holmes broke in, taking a brisk step forward to grasp the woman’s hand.

“Mrs Goodheart, is it?” he said. “And this must be your son. Afternoon, young man, I hope you’re enjoying your voyage?”

Amused, I let my correction die unborn: It seemed that Holmes was to be “Mr Russell” for a time.

Mrs Goodheart ordered her son to find another chair; to my surprise, Holmes did not object. Instead, he settled into the deck chair at her side as if a leisurely contemplation of the sea in the company of a bossy American spiritualist was just the thing for a Sunday afternoon. Bemused, I subsided into the vacant chair on Mrs Goodheart’s other side and waited to see what Holmes was up to.

“Where is Sunny?” I asked the mother.

“She said she was going to try her hand at shovel-board. I would have stayed to watch, but I found the sun rather warm for my delicate complexion. She’ll be here in a while, I’m sure. And you, Mrs Russell—have you found some shipboard entertainment?”

Stuffing my head with Hindi verb forms and hurling tea-spoons back and forth at my husband, I thought, but said merely, “I’m not much of one for games, Mrs Goodheart.”

“Sunny will change that,” she said, with a somewhat alarming confidence. “Thomas my dear, tell the Russells what you’ve been doing in Europe.”

The languid young Marxist settled into the chair he had caused to be brought, and launched into a recitation of the Paris literary salons visited, the avant-garde artists met, the underworldly haunts flirted with, the firebrand politicians-in-exile drunk with. He had even met Lenin—well, not met, precisely, but they had been at a function in Moscow at the same time early the previous autumn, and had friends in common.

“And tell them about your maharaja,” Mrs Goodheart said, oozing with complacency.

“Oh, you mean Jimmy?” he said, magnificently casual. “Fellow I met last year—at the same party Lenin stopped by, in fact—turns out he’s a maharaja. Never know it by looking at the man, he’s as common as you or me” (Sherlock Holmes did not even blink at being dubbed “common”) “and interested in everything. We got to talking about the States, he wanted to know if I’d ever seen a herd of buffalo—he called them bison, turns out they already have a kind of buffalo there in India, very different animal, could get confusing. I had to tell him I’d personally only seen them in a zoo, but that I had a pal who lived out in the Plains and he had one he kept as a pet. Well, Jimmy—his name’s Jumalpandra, but that’s a bit of a mouthful—he got so excited, nothing would do but for me to cable my friend immediately and ask where Jimmy could get a few bison for himself.

“Turns out the fellow’s got a reputation as a sporting maharaja, travelled the world taking all sorts of big game, but he’s getting tired of the local varieties, the buffalos and tigers and such. So he’s started his own zoo, been buying up breeding stock of game animals from around the globe—lions from Africa, emus from Australia, panthers from South America. That’s why he was in Russia, to arrange for some wild boar to juice up the local variety. Any rate, he’d heard somewhere that bison were great sport. And as luck would have it, a friend of my pal could get his hands on three cows and a bull.”

Mrs Goodheart broke in. “And since Thomas here arranged it, the maharaja’s invited us to come and spend some time with him. In his kingdom,” she added, lest we think they were to be shelved in some Bombay hotel. “Khanpur is its name.”

A mild expression that might have been annoyance flitted across Tom Goodheart’s face, irritation at having the climax of his story snatched away, but before he could respond, a hugely contrasting swirl of pink and white merriment came dashing up the deck to confront us.

“Oh! Mrs Russell, how super! Have you ever played shovel-board? On a boat? You shove the little puck down the deck and it’s going perfectly and then the boat tilts a little and—oops! There goes your nice straight shot, so then you try to compensate on the next turn and the deck tilts the other way and there goes your shot to the other side. Oh, it’s ever so funny!”

“Sunny, this is Mr Russell,” her mother told her.

“Oh!” the girl squeaked. “So pleased to meet you. Your wife is such a darling, and such a sense of humour!”

“Oh yes,” Holmes agreed gravely. “Quite the joker is my wife.”

The girl turned to me again. “They’re going to have an egg race next. Wouldn’t you like to come and join?”

There was very little I would enjoy less than a shipboard egg race, but since one of those lesser pleasures was the idea of remaining within reach of Sunny’s mother and brother, I made haste to stand before we could be assigned some other task. “I won’t participate, but I shall come and cheer you on.”

Holmes would have to manufacture his own escape.

The old-fashioned egg race was every bit as fatuous as I had expected, the girls shrieking and giggling and bouncing on their toes for the benefit of the onlooking officers. One side of the deck had been roped off for the games, but the participants were somewhat thinner on the ground—or rather, on the boards—than they would have been during the autumn migration. Still, the girls made up for it in self-conscious enthusiasm during the first two heats of the P. & O.’s quaint idea of fun. After those, however, the paucity of numbers brought about a defiant change of house rules, and the relays became co-educational. The baritone voices were accompanied by a shift in the merriment to something resembling true competition, and if the men looked even more ridiculous than the women had in racing down the deck with spoon and teetering egg, everyone had a splendid time, and there was plenty of opportunity for jovial banter and a certain degree of innocent physical contact.

The change in noise, however, attracted the parental authorities of those girls young enough to view the game merely as pleasurable exercise linked with mild flirtation instead of early negotiations in the serious economic business of matrimony. Repressive suggestions were made, Mrs Goodheart decreeing that Sunny looked quite flushed and a rest might be in order before it came time to dress for dinner, and the egg-race orgy died a natural death. The young men straightened their collars and went back to their corners; the young women recalled their sophistication and lounged off for a cigarette, illicit or open, depending on the smoker’s age. Holmes and I seized the opportunity for retreat.

We made for the less occupied reaches of the deck, up where smuts drifted from the steamer stacks and the vibration from the engines far below bounced one’s feet on the boards. I had a coin in my hand, to practice flipping it across my knuckles. My fingers were remembering the drill and becoming more supple, the motions more nearly automatic.

“Why on earth did you wish to speak with those people, Holmes?”

“That is ‘Mr Russell’ to you.”

“Holmes.”

“I merely wished to examine the phenomenon of a wealthy and educated young American who embraces the cant of the Bolsheviks. I have some familiarity with his British counterpart, but I was interested to see if there were regional differences.”

“And were there?”

“None of import. The aristocracy amuses itself in many ways, among which is the pretence of being a commoner. You will note, however, that rarely is the claim accompanied by a renunciation of status or wealth.”

“I suppose it’s a harmless enough flirtation. Better than yanking a variety of exotic animals from their homes and shipping them halfway around the globe in order to shoot them.”

“Having granted them a long and prolific life before their demise,” he pointed out mildly. “And by comparison with the extreme behaviour of some of the native princes, the attitude of young Goodheart’s maharaja seems fairly tame. The boredom of the aristocracy reaches new highs amongst India’s hereditary rulers, and the lengths to which some of them go to escape it—well, let us say merely that ancient Rome might learn a few things about depravity.”

I might have explored that interesting topic, but a sudden thought made me glance apprehensively at the dancing boards under my feet. “You don’t suppose those beasts of his are in the hold of this ship, do you?”

“This is a P. & O. liner, Russell. They don’t even permit lap dogs.”

That was a relief. I had seen bison, and did not like to imagine what an irritated one could do to a ship’s hold.

We took our evening meal in our rooms, as well as breakfast on Monday, and by making immediately for the more insalubrious portions of the decks during the middle of the day, we avoided the Goodhearts until Sunny caught us strolling down the stairs at tea-time, her brother ambling along behind her.

“Oh! Mrs Russell, I’ve missed you so. I hope you haven’t been ill, I was looking for you at lunch. Hello, Mr Russell.”

“We’ve just been elsewhere,” I told her; Holmes murmured something vaguely apologetic and pulled a vanishing act. “Did you need something?”

“Oh, yes, I just wanted to ask if you were thinking of going ashore at Port Said tomorrow. Tommy and I are skipping off to see Cairo and the pyramids by moonlight, although Mama says it’s too strenuous a jaunt for her. The purser says we’ll rejoin the ship in Suez, he absolutely promises. Please, won’t you come?”

Moonlight? I thought. The moon would be but a tiny sliver, handsome enough in the desert sky but short-lived and less illuminating than a candle. Little point in saying anything to this young lady, however—the shipping line might not permit lap dogs, but Sunny was doing her best to make up for their absence, endearing herself to all and polishing off whatever odd scraps were put on her plate. I stifled an impulse to snap the order to Sit!

“No, thank you, Sunny. I may go ashore in Aden, but not here.” I had not yet seen the pyramids, but I did not wish to do so for the first time on a rushed day-trip in the company of a shipload of tourists. Call me a snob, but I prefer to take in the world’s grand sights when I can at least hear myself think. Not that I was killjoy enough to say so aloud.

Her round little face fell in disappointment. “I’m so sorry. Tommy was looking forward to it.”

Tommy, I thought, cared not a whit if I came, although at the memory of the fellow’s bland and disinterested mask, I experienced a vague stir of disquiet. Before I could pursue the thought, Sunny perked up again. “Well, maybe you’ll join Mama? There’s a group going ashore to buy pith helmets and such, sounds ever so fun.”

I rather doubted that, and could only imagine the sort of solar topees on offer at a shop catering to lady tourists fresh from England. Holmes would go ashore in Port Said to send a telegram to Mycroft; I’d ask him to buy me a sun-hat while he was there. “No, I’ll wait, thanks. You have a good time. And, Sunny? Please call me Mary.”

Her face blossomed again, simple soul, and she chattered for a while about maharajas and camels before bouncing off to consider the proper wardrobe for pyramid-visiting. I smiled at her retreating back: It would not be long before the one-woman fishing fleet was reeling in a whole school of handsome young officers on her line.

Chapter Four

After Port Said, the Suez Canal sucked us in. As the shadows grew long we drifted down its narrow length, exchanging impassive gazes with the goats, camels, and robed humans that inhabited its sandy banks. I sat on the upper deck with a couple of the oranges we had picked up in Port Said, reading the tattered copy of Kim I had discovered in the ship’s library, rediscovering the pleasures of a classic tale with unexpected depths. The story sparkled as I remembered it, the orphan boy free to attach himself to Afghan horse-trader and wandering holy man alike, learning the Jewel Game from the enigmatic Lurgan Sahib, meeting the Babu with his clumsy surface concealing his deep committed competence. I sighed when I finished it, and dutifully returned it to the shelves between Chesterton and Wodehouse. I perused the library’s other offerings, but its contents proved considerably less informative than the armload of books I had raided from Holmes’ shelves, and I went back to them.

I was slowly putting together a picture of India in my mind, the size and immense variety in land and people, its hugely complicated caste system, based originally on the distinction between Brahmin/priest, Kshatriya/warrior, Vaisya/artisan, and Sudra/menial. The lowest of these was called “Untouchable,” but in truth, it sounded as if no one was allowed to touch anyone else, for fear the other might be of a lower caste and hence ritually unclean. And since the original four castes had splintered into thousands—as well as having Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs, Christians, and a hundred others thrown into the mix—I thought the population must spend most of its energy sorting out where it stood on the ladder.

I read for hours, absorbing India’s long history of conquest and re-conquest, from Alexander to Victoria; the Moghul influence on the country, long and ongoing; the East India Company’s rule so violently cut short by the 1857 Mutiny; the subsequent authority of the British government, ruling directly those portions of the country not under the command of their native rulers. The Empire in 1924: a bit worn around the edges, perhaps, but still strong.

The night was desert-cool and brilliant, and Holmes and I settled beneath the crisp crescent of moon and sat until long after midnight, wrapped in our thoughts and memories. The next day the canal spat us out into the Red Sea, and the younger Goodhearts rejoined us, transformed into old Egypt hands by nineteen hours inland, clothed in a variety of peculiar garments including topees (they no longer used the outsider’s term “pith helmet”) of a shape unknown outside the souks of Cairo, constructed of some vegetable matter (pith, one presumes) that sagged as the weather warmed.

Which it did as we continued south. Cabin trunks went down to the hold in exchange for those marked “Wanted on Voyage,” and the shipboard community traded its English hats for rigid solar topees, casting off a few of its inhibitions along with the woollens. Wanton conversation broke out all over the ship, as formerly aloof ladies unbent so far as to offer comments on the weather and rigid-spined gentlemen exchanged opinions on cricket and horse-racing. The men’s dark serge suits changed to pale drill or linen (or, for the hopelessly flamboyant merchants known as box-wallahs, tussore silk) and male dinner-wear began to take on variations of the tropics, with white jackets or trousers but, oddly, never both. Women’s arms appeared even during the day-time, and some of the more daring members played short-skirted games of tennis on the top deck in the early mornings, until all the balls had vanished into the sea, after which they changed to the more controllable badminton. Decks sprouted awnings, making it more difficult to find a patch of sun, and beds were made up there at night—men on one side, of course, ladies on the other. The exercise equipment in the stifling shipboard gym went unused after mid-morning, and vigorous deck games were replaced by the more sedate shovel-board and quoits. Holmes and I spent the mornings in our rooms, palming coins, renewing our juggling skills, repeating and refining common phrases in my new tongue, until we were driven out by the mid-day heat. In the open, even in our less attractive chosen corners, magic tricks were set aside in favour of bilingual conversation and the relief of books. I was still working my way through The Mahabharata when a familiar shape plopped down beside me where I sat in the shade of a large crate.

“There you are!” Sunny exclaimed. “What on earth are you reading?”

I showed her the book, half irritated at the interruption, but also glad for it. An unrelieved diet of Holmes, Hindi, and Hindu mythology surely couldn’t be good for one.

“Good heavens, look at those names!” she said. “I can’t even pronounce half of them. What is this, anyway?”

“The great Indian Hindu epic, the battle between their great gods and demons, the founding of the people.”

“I think I’d rather read one of Mama’s Ethel Dells,” she said, handing it back to me.

“At this point, I think I might as well.”

She sat for a rare moment of stillness, studying the distant shore. “Isn’t the Suez Canal just the superest thing? Tommy says it saves weeks and weeks of sailing all around Africa, with storms and all. You English were so clever to have built it.”

It was slightly startling to be given personal credit for the project, and I felt an obligation to set her—and Tommy—straight. “Actually, the canal was here long before England was even a country. Ramses the Second was the first Egyptian to begin it, although it wasn’t completed until the days of Darius, about twenty-four hundred years ago. Not that it’s been open all that time. The silt blocks it, and a couple of times it was deliberately filled in for defence purposes, but we can hardly be given credit for thinking of the thing. Anyone who looked at a rudimentary map would be tempted to get out the shovels.”

“Well!” she exclaimed. “I never. And Tommy said . . . But aren’t you clever, to know these things? I should have gone to school, university I mean, but somehow it just never seemed to come up.”

“It’s not too late.”

“I suppose,” she said dubiously, but we both knew she never would. She spent perhaps thirty seconds mourning her lack of education, then held out one arm alongside mine, which was growing darker by the day. (For, whatever our disguises might be in the weeks ahead, I doubted that pale-skinned English lady would be one of them.)

“When Mama notices how brown you’re going, don’t be surprised if she has ten fits. Whenever she finds me sitting in the sun, she gives me a lecture about wrinkles until I put on my topee.”

“Topees make me feel as if I’m speaking inside a bucket,” I said.

She giggled. “Does your mother nag you, too, or does that stop as soon as you’re married?”

“My mother’s dead,” I told her.

Her expressive face crumpled. “Oh, I am so sorry. How stupid of me, I didn’t—”

I interrupted before she burst into tears. “Don’t worry, it’s been a very long time. So tell me, have you decided to be a Kewpie doll or a harem dancer?”

The fancy-dress ball was to be the following night, and the ship quivered with the thrill of anticipation, the ship’s tailors working round the clock, sworn to secrecy. Holmes and I planned on taking advantage of the evening’s empty cabins to begin juggling clubs. Wooden belaying pins when dropped make quite a noise.

My distraction worked. Sunny clapped her hands and leant towards me as if there might be spies lurking on the other side of the crate to ask, “Have you ever been to the cabarets in Berlin?”

I reared back to stare at the child, speechless. A Berlin night-club was not a thing I’d have thought Sunny’s mother would have allowed her daughter within a mile of.

“Er, yes.”

“Well, I haven’t seen one” (Thank goodness for small mercies, I thought.) “but Tommy told me about one girl who dances on stage with a big snake. And that made me think about the snake charmers in India, and, voilà!”

“Where are you going to get a snake?” I asked. Did snakes perhaps not come under the P. & O.’s pet-exclusion clause?

“Not a real snake, silly!” Sunny’s eyes danced. “I’m having the durzi make up a snake for me—durzi’s what they call tailors in India—and I’ll wear it around my shoulders. And I have a dress that matches its skin. Won’t that be fun?”

I thought that it might be more fun than she was prepared for, considering the number of young men on board. “It sounds . . . exotic. But, Sunny? Perhaps you shouldn’t mention Berlin in relation to the costume. Those night-clubs might be considered somewhat . . . risqué for a girl your age.”

“Okay. But what do you think of the snake idea?”

“I think you’ll have every young man on the ship slithering along the decks after you,” I said.

She giggled.

However, later that evening as we were dressing for dinner, Holmes astonished me as well. He chose a moment of weakness on my part, as he was brushing my long hair.

“Russell, I think it might be a good idea to go to this costume ball.”

“Holmes!” I jerked away from his hands to look up at him. “Are you feverish?”

“Russell, I did not say that I intended to go.”

“Oh no. If I have to go, so do you.” I took the hair-brush from him and turned to the looking-glass. “But why on earth should either of us wish to dress up with a room of drunken first-class passengers wearing bizarre clothing?”

“Thomas Goodheart.”

Holmes had continued to cultivate the young man’s acquaintance—I cannot call it a friendship, precisely—and the two spent a part of every day either lounging on the deck or in the depths of the all-male enclave of the smoking room, playing billiards, whist, or occasionally poker. My husband’s uncharacteristic sociability with the supercilious young American might have puzzled me had I not overheard some of their conversations, and known that, more often than not, the Communist Party and the politics of India were the chief topics of Holmes’ casual enquiries. Still, to Mr Goodheart I was clearly beyond the pale. Educated, free-thinking women were not his cup of tea, and he made no attempt at concealing that fact.

“Is Goodheart going? I shouldn’t have thought his convictions would permit him the frivolity of a fancy-dress ball.”

“His mother assures me that he will be attending.”

To observe the enemy, or to convert the bourgeoisie to earnest Bolshevism? “But why should his presence or absence at a fancy-dress ball be of the least interest to you?”

“I have found the lad peculiarly . . . self-contained. Remarkably so—I’ve seldom seen a man who gives away as little as this one. I believe he knows more than he tells.”

I considered the statement for a moment, but failed to make a connexion. “Sorry, Holmes, what does self-containment have to do with fancy dress?”

“A costume ball is all about masks and the freedom they confer on the wearers. I wish to see what the fellow looks like when he imagines himself concealed.” Seeing that I had my hair wrapped into place, he handed me a pin.

“Ah,” I said. “You wish to get him drunk and see what he lets slip.”

“Sometimes the old methods are the best,” Holmes said, although he looked somewhat abashed at the admission.

“You think Goodheart is some kind of a villain?”

“I think it possible, although it is far from clear whether his particular brand of villainy need concern us. Still, it is the sort of thing Mycroft likes to hear about, to pass on to his fellows. Assuming,” he muttered, “anyone in the incoming government will be interested in stray Bolsheviks.”

“Oh, very well, I shall go if you wish. But I don’t know what sort of costume we might pull together at this late date—all the Cleopatra masks and chimney-sweeper’s coats are sure to have been taken. And I do not think it at all appropriate to dress as Lady Godiva,” I said, picking up an extra and unnecessary hair-pin and jamming it in for emphasis.

“I have an idea,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, stifling a sigh. “I was afraid you might.”

A sari is not a carefree sort of garment. To a person accustomed to clothing that remains where it was put, the lack of any fastening more secure than gravity is, to say the least, disconcerting. A sari, I found when Holmes presented me with the thing, was little more than a remarkably skimpy blouse and an enormous length of impossibly slippery silk, which is arranged into intricate folds and tucked into what amounts to little more than a piece of string around one’s waist, after which the loose end (hah! It is all loose end.) is drawn gracefully up across one’s chest and over the opposite shoulder, where it then spends the entire evening yearning to slither to the floor, taking the rest of the garment with it. If the wearer were to suck in her stomach, many, many yards of silk would collapse into a lovely pool on the floor around her near-naked legs. And this was before I added the gossamer silk shawl over my head and shoulders.

The fourth time I tried the thing, standing before the glass afraid to breathe, I scowled at the reflection of Holmes behind me. “You had this planned back in Port Said and didn’t warn me.”

“Not planned, precisely. I merely thought it best to have the costumes, just in case.”

Holmes’ fancy dress, hanging in the wardrobe, looked by comparison a thing of Chanel-like comfort. He was attending as an Indian nobleman, with snug white trousers underneath a gold brocade jacket trimmed with chips of topaz. At the moment he was trying on the snowy white turban or puggaree (whose intricate folds, unlike those of the sari, had come pre-arranged on a hatmaker’s dummy). At its front was a spray of peacock feathers, which he eyed critically in the glass.

“Are you going to wear your emeralds?” he said suddenly.

Trying to avoid motion, I looked back at my reflection. The sari slid from my shoulder, and I snatched at it to avert the unwinding process, but too late. Half the tucks came crooked, and I cursed under my breath.

“I’ll trade you my necklace for your emerald stick-pin,” I told him grimly.

Ah, success! With the sari’s end secured to the under-blouse with Holmes’ tie pin, the danger of instant nudity retreated considerably. Then during the afternoon I hunted down the purser and, by dint of offering an enormous bribe, found a stray maid willing to come with a needle and thread to sew me into the folds and tucks.

And in truth, the emerald necklace looked magnificent nestled among the peacock feathers on the puggaree.

When the maid had scurried away with her needle and her payment, I sat down to arrange my hair. Indian women tend to wear theirs gathered into a heavy knot at the base of their necks, which was not a style I found easy to arrange without assistance. As I was struggling to contain my own hair, which was sufficiently long but lacked the malleability of black hair, Holmes came in. I glanced in the glass, and had to smile.

“You look regal, Holmes.”

He walked over to where I sat, and wordlessly removed the brush from my hand.

Where Holmes learnt to arrange a woman’s hair I never knew—never wished to ask—but he was remarkably proficient at it. It was, however, never easy to stifle the sensations caused by his strong hands in my hair, the palm smoothing the strands after the brush had passed through, the clever fingers working their way from one side to the other, gathering the heavy length in a controlling grip, tugging and smoothing and shaping. In this instance, lest something begin that put all our preparations to naught, I shut my eyes and thought of England, horrible and cold under the snow, wet and miserable and filled with political turmoil. His long fingers smoothed and twisted, sending delicious tingles down my spine, and cold England faded. But in a few minutes my hair was sleekly gathered in a secure but comfortable knot, and Holmes’ hands drew away, after a brief grasp on my shoulders and the salute of a kiss where the heavy bun now lay against my neck. I pushed away a shiver and reached firmly for my ear-rings, then draped the breath-fine silk scarf across my shoulders and slid my hand through the arm of my nobleman.

Dignity, I remembered as we drew near the ball-room, was not a necessary component of a dress ball. The ducal version we had attended just the month before had been bigger than this one, and more elaborate, but the passengers made up for numbers and style in sheer high spirits. I balked just inside the entrance, and Holmes spoke into my ear.

“I believe we shall both require a quantity of champagne to get through this. Wait here.”

Obedience occasionally has its place, particularly when it allows one’s husband to press through to the nearest tray-bearing waiter. Holmes took many admiring looks, from women for the most part, and amused me by appearing oblivious of all. He returned with two glasses of the fizzy stuff, which we lifted to each other, then poured down our throats.

One problem with fancy dress comes when one wishes to find a particular person whose disguise one does not know. I was quite certain that Sunny Goodheart was not yet here, since there was no sign of a snake, nor of the snake-dance line of males that was sure to follow as soon as she passed through the room. And although her brother’s height should have made him instantly recognisable, a number of tall hats and puggarees protruded above the heads, concealing their wearers’ stature. Holmes and I waited, drinking our wine, turning down dance offers from individuals of both sexes and (apparently) neither.

Then a ripple ran through the room, and I turned, already smiling, to see the snake charmer. And my suspicions were correct, it was an extraordinary costume, which on a less naïve and charming individual would have been instantly engulfed in a travelling rug and ushered briskly outside. As it was, Sunny looked like a child dressed in a harem outfit, her wriggles for fun, not seduction, her innocence shining out under the sinuous creature that lay across her shoulders. The dress was not quite as form-fitting as the snake’s skin, but was not far off. What saved it were the multiple layers of scarf she wore over it, gauzy and shifting. The effect was that of a snake shedding its old and lacy skin for the bright, snug new one beneath. I tipped my head to the man at my side and murmured, “If they’re aiming her at their maharaja, all they have to do is make sure there’s a fancy-dress ball.”

“Pardon?” asked a strange voice.

Startled, I glanced up at the person beside me, whose ears were somewhat higher than those of my husband, and who might therefore have missed my hugely impertinent words. It was Thomas Goodheart, but to my enormous consternation, it was also Sherlock Holmes—not he of the Sussex cottage but the figure of stage and, recently, screen, complete with deerstalker, absurdly large calabash pipe, and tweed cloak.

I gaped at the figure, my mind working furiously to understand the meaning of his costume. Tom Goodheart, in the meantime, allowed his glance to trail down my own length of silk. “You would look at home in Jimmy’s palace, Mrs Russell. Very, um, authentic.”

“I, er, thank you. You too. That is to say, not in the palace.” You’re babbling, Russell, I said to myself. Stop it. “Your sister’s costume is extraordinary.”

“Isn’t it just? I can’t imagine what my mother had in mind, allowing that. Still, it’s not as bad as it was before she added the scarfs and scrubbed off her rouge.”

“She’s a great girl,” I said.

“Yes, she’s all right. She’s very fond of you.”

What is it about the subtle signs between men and women? The words themselves were completely innocent and his eyes remained on my face, but some tiny pause before the word “fond,” some slight emphasis of voice or intensity of gaze, made it abundantly clear that Thomas was talking neither about his sister nor about mere fondness. For the first time, I became conscious of a streak of iron beneath the waffle, and caught a glimpse of someone older and considerably more determined under the rich boy’s bland features.

And then he was looking out over the crowd, and Holmes was there with another glass of champagne, and the sensation was gone completely. Thomas Goodheart was merely the superior older brother of a kittenish girl who had befriended me, a young man patiently enduring a rather boring party for the sake of his family.

But I did not think I had imagined the glimpse of iron, nor the meaning behind his words.

And I began to speculate whether the likes of a Berlin cabaret might not be considered downright wholesome by Mr Goodheart, if perhaps the lessons in depravity Holmes had mentioned might not apply to certain American aristocrats among the rajas.

Villain, I would now believe. But also, I had to agree, what sort?

Without realising I had done so, I found myself drawn slightly away from the stagey Holmes until my arm pressed against that of the maharaja’s ornate coat. Holmes glanced at me, surprised at my uncharacteristic demonstrativeness, then frowned slightly at whatever remnant of discomfort he glimpsed on my face. But it was gone in an instant, and I stood away and raised my glass in a toast to the festive gathering. Goodheart drained his glass, as did Holmes and I. I do not know about Holmes’, but this particular drink was nothing more intoxicating than ginger beer.

And so it continued throughout the evening, with every other glass he put into my hand containing sweet nothingness. Tommy, however, continued to down his bubbly wine, with the predictable results when the strength of that substance is underestimated. The young man became increasingly intoxicated, and although Holmes appeared to match him in consumption and in effects, I knew my husband well enough to see it for an act.

Goodheart’s drunkenness was not an act, although the slipping of his controls was not wild and overt. No, it came out in two ways, one of which he had already shown me, and which Holmes soon witnessed for himself. Holmes was enough of a professional to control his rage, and was also sure enough of his wife and partner’s strength and self-respect that he did not feel the need to protect her by a simian pounding of chest, or of Goodheart’s face. But it was an effort for him to stand by with smiling incomprehension and good will as Goodheart made one suggestive remark after another in my direction, and I was glad for his sake when the young man’s intoxication ripened and bore fruit in the form of a hobbyhorse.

“These people, they haven’t a clue,” he declared, sweeping his glass at the room. Holmes plucked it from his hand and substituted a miraculously full one, and Goodheart slurped it with a scowl. “They haven’t a damned clue. Pardon my French, Mary.” I had not given him permission to use my first name, but I was hardly going to object now.

“That’s true,” Holmes agreed emphatically, then drew his eyebrows together in exaggerated confusion. “What about?”

“The world,” Goodheart explained, pausing to belch lightly. Fortunately, he did not stop with the generalisation, but went on. “Look at them, prancing about like a bunch of aristo . . . , ’rishtocrats with the mob pounding on the gates. Like France, don’t you know? Haven’t a clue that there’s a mob out there.”

“With guillotines,” Holmes encouraged.

The tweed deerstalker wagged enthusiastically. “Right, you are so right.” His diction was sliding, the dental sounds long turned to mush, the “s” sounds now “sh.” Soon the labials would become difficult; in another half hour, he’d collapse with his head on the table.

“But look what’s happened in England,” Holmes urged. “The Red Flag is practically flying over Parliament.”

Goodheart’s eyes tried to track, with limited success. “Right,” he said, although he sounded somewhat dubious, as if unsure why Holmes had introduced politics into the discussion.

“Isn’t that a good thing? To have a Labour victory?”

“Of course,” he said, more stoutly now. “But they think it’s the end, when it’s only the beginnin’.” It sounded like a quote pulled from memory, and served to confuse him for a moment. Then he rallied, raised his glass, and shouted, “By s’prise, where it hurts!”

But the effort was too much—either that, or some vestige of self-preservation ordered him to be silent; in either case the effect was the same. He let his glass fall to the floor and slapped his palm across his mouth in the gesture of a child hushing itself, or in the more likely identical motion of a man whose stomach is on the verge of rebellion. I took a hasty step back while Holmes seized the man’s free arm and hustled him speedily out of the doors and to the railing, where the deerstalker caught the wind and sailed off into the night.

A gentleman in the P. & O. uniform came to tidy away the broken glass, and another appeared to help Holmes lead Goodheart away. So much for in vino veritas.

I traded my glass of sweet nothing on a table for one of the real thing from the first passing waiter, and went outside for air and thought. After a while a snake-dance of celebrants came shuffling out the door, Sunny Goodheart at their lead laughing gloriously at her long tail of admirers.

I put down my empty glass and went to bed.

Chapter Five

The following day we came to Aden and the mouth of the Red Sea, where the ship would pause for a few hours to take on coal. This would be our last land until Bombay, and Holmes and I were among the few walking wounded of the night before who waited to go ashore. The hills around the town seemed covered with tiny windmills, spinning in the hot wind, and the instant the ship dropped anchor, the sea around us filled with small canoe-type boats paddled by young boys, calling for the passengers to drop coins for them to dive after. From where I stood at the rail, the water looked so murky, thanks to the steamer’s huge screws, that I couldn’t imagine the boys seeing anything smaller than a gold guinea flashing past, but clearly the exercise was worth their while, or they wouldn’t have risked the sharks.

Heat settled over us as the launch approached the town, making me glad for once of the topee’s shade. We passed through the canoes and the dhows to tie up at the pier and be ceremoniously handed off; the solid ground felt oddly unforgiving beneath my feet, which in the eight days since leaving Marseilles had grown accustomed to the rise and fall of the decking. The air smelt intense, marvellously complex with the odours of dust and spice and animals, and only occasional whiffs of burnt fuel.

Our first stop was the post office, where we retrieved a handful of letters, including one from Mrs Hudson and two from my solicitors in London. A quick glance through them showed that there was nothing of any great urgency, although I did send off a telegram to the legal people to say that I’d got their letters and would write at leisure. We then slid the post into our pockets and turned into the bazaar.

Aden rides the border between several worlds, all of them represented in her marketplace. Skin tones from ebony to ivory, a thousand shapes of head covering, dialects to keep a linguist in ecstasy for a lifetime. Three dusty Bedu slipped down the streets behind a pair of British soldiers; a dark-skinned Jew displayed his copper pots to an African Moslem headed home from Mecca; four British tars with their distinctive rolling gait haggled with a Christian shopkeeper over the price of a small carpet; a pair of Parsee women, wrapped in loveliness and followed by a pair of watchful men, fingered lengths of brilliant silk; a British captain strolled with his lady, his eyes on her and not the pick-pocket trailing close behind.

All that in the first fifty feet, before Holmes ducked inside a gap between shops. However, I was ready for it, and made haste to follow him.

The noisome passageway was clotted with filth, its air stifling, the darkness such that one was tempted to feel for the walls—but for the knowledge that one really didn’t want to touch what was on those walls. I took half a dozen steps and stopped, waiting for my eyes to adjust before I found myself stepping into a coal cellar.

Then a door opened and the end of the passageway grew light, and I picked my way through unexamined shapes in that direction.

The room at the end was considerably tidier than its approach. It was a small space with a high ceiling, light but shaded from the direct sun hitting the courtyard outside its latticed windows. As soon as the door closed, the room’s fragrance of jasmine-flower and musk reasserted itself; it even seemed cooler in here, although it was probably an illusion brought about by judicious use of blues and greens in the hangings, and the pale wood of the walls and chairs. Just as, I noticed, it seemed larger than it was, since all the furniture was somewhat smaller than normal.

A light and lightly accented voice interrupted my survey. “You like my house, Miss Russell?”

I whirled, unaware that there had been anyone in the room. I had to look around for the owner of the voice, then look down, to find a tiny figure scarcely four feet tall, nearly hairless but wizened with wrinkles, seated in a nest of silk cushions beside a burbling hookah.

“It’s very attractive,” I replied. “How do you know me?”

He giggled, a sound I normally mistrust in a man but which seemed natural in him. “We have, shall I say, mutual friends. And you, Mr Holmes. I had not thought to lay eyes on you again this side of Paradise.”

“Good of you to imagine I might be headed in that direction, Solly. Russell, this is Suleiman Lal. Suleiman is the uncrowned king of Aden, and this room is the junction-box through which all the power of the Red Sea is dispersed. The state of the hall-way outside is his little jest.”

“I imagine it also keeps away stray tourists,” I said drily.

“Precisely,” said the small man, and took a draw at his pipe. “You have come for your mail, I think?”

“To see if there was any,” Holmes replied.

“In the cigar box on the second shelf,” said Lal. Holmes stepped over to the diminutive shelves and drew out the wooden box, thumbing open its lid and taking out the pieces of paper therein. They were not mail, but telegraph flimsies. “Please, do read them,” the small man urged. “You may wish to send a reply. And while you do so, we shall take tea.”

With that, a narrow door behind Lal opened silently and a very dark-skinned man of normal height padded in with an ornate brassware tray set with the makings of an Oriental tea. Lal laid his pipe aside and shifted forward to pour from the tall pot into the handleless porcelain cups, and as the odour of mint filled the room, I was transported back to Palestine. Yes, this was already sweetened, and I slurped at the scalding, syrupy mint essence with pleasure.

Holmes read the telegrams and handed them to me. Both were from Mycroft. They read:

YOUR PRINCE INDEED OF QUESTIONABLE VIRTUE

MAKING ENQUIRIES RE AMERICAN

MYCROFT

Followed two days later by:

TGH ACTIVE POLITICALLY AT UNIVERSITY NO CHARGES BUT MOTHERS GURU ARRESTED TWICE SPIRITUALIST FRAUD NO CONVICTIONS

TGH SEEN IN COMPANY OF MOSCOW SECURITY

SUGGEST YOU MENTION TO FRIEND IN DELHI

MYCROFT

“TGH” was doubtless Thomas Goodheart; his “political” activity at Harvard (to Mycroft, “political” would be synonymous with “subversive”) and his proximity to “security” in Russia went some way to justify Holmes’ interest in the man. Goodheart might be nothing more than Holmes’ shipboard hobby, but I agreed that whomever we were seeing in Delhi should be informed of our chance meeting.

I handed the flimsies back to Holmes, who stretched his arm over to Lal’s hubble-bubble to uncover its burning coal, using it to set the telegrams alight. He allowed them to burn out in an ash-tray, then thoughtfully tamped the ashy curls into black dust with his finger.

“There will be no reply,” he told Lal, who nodded.

“I was told your brother was unwell.”

“Is there any place you have no ears?” Holmes asked, sounding amused.

Lal thought for a moment. “Within the American White House I am currently friendless, but no doubt someone will come to my aid before long.” And with that revelation his smile changed from a thing of easy humour to a hint of what lay behind it, a knowledge of the world’s wickednesses and the sheer joy of possession. Suddenly his giggle was not so child-like and endearing.

Holmes continued to sip his tea, but I found the stuff too sweet, cloying along my throat, so that I had to force the last swallow down for the sake of politeness. The two men chatted of names I did not know while I hid my impatience to be gone, hid, too, my growing suspicion that there were things behind the airy silken drapes that I did not wish to see.

At long last, Holmes put down his empty cup and rose.

“You will not stay to lunch?” Lal asked, not really expecting that we would.

“We have purchases to make before the ship leaves, but thank you.”

Lal nodded, that curious sideways gesture of the Oriental, and his eyes slid to mine.

“Miss Russell, I am not, perhaps, on the side of God as you would see it, but I assure you, I am not on the other side, either. I am glad to have met you, my dear.”

He inclined his head, the equivalent of an offered hand, a gesture I returned. Then we left, through a door into the courtyard instead of the filthy alley, and came out on the next street over under the eye of a very large and well-armed Turk. I glanced around to be sure there was no one listening, and said in a low voice, “Holmes, do you trust that man?”

“Solly collects information, he does not sell it. He is utterly safe as a conduit because he is completely impartial, and would as willingly have given us our messages and served us tea if we were sworn enemies of the British Crown. Every side uses Lal because they know he will not sell them out. And no side tries to lay hands on his secrets because if they did, hell would pour down on them—secrets have a way of accumulating, and he lets it be known that his untimely death would loose them. Now, tell me what sort of silk you would like to practise your scarf act with.”

We submerged ourselves again in the souk, making small purchases such as any English visitors might, as well as two or three items that Holmes appeared to have ordered beforehand, no doubt through his diminutive friend with the conjoined Moslem-Hindu names.

One of these purchases was at a jeweller’s shop, and we were standing at the man’s small counter examining a cunningly linked trio of bangles and conversing with the shopkeeper in Arabic when Holmes abruptly shifted his position so that the bangles disappeared into his sleeve. He continued the motion by reaching out to pluck a ring from a nearby display, saying in a loud English voice, “My dear, isn’t this very like the ring your sister lost last year?”

As I had no sister and Holmes would no more address me as “my dear” than he would embrace me in public, it took no great subtlety of thought to know that he had spotted an intruder in the doorway. And sure enough, when I had taken the spectacularly ugly piece and turned with it to the lighter portion of the shop, there stood a familiar figure, ill concealed by his topee and dark sun-glasses. I looked up, surprised, and let an expression of recognition cross my face.

“Mr Goodheart, so you decided to come ashore after all! What do you think of this ring?”

He pulled the dark glasses from his bloodshot eyes and came fully into the shop, giving the ring I held out the merest glance. He seemed more interested in what we had been looking at earlier, but the bangles had vanished, and the shopkeeper was as phlegmatic as Holmes.

“I should think it would turn one’s finger green in a day,” Tommy Goodheart told me, looking more than a little green himself. “Say, you haven’t come across my mother anywhere in this madhouse, have you? I was looking at some carpets and turned around and she was gone.”

“I haven’t seen her, no.”

“Maybe you could ask this fellow for me,” he said to Holmes. “Since you seem to speak the lingo.”

So, he’d been listening outside long enough to hear the exchange. I didn’t look at Holmes while he asked the man behind the counter if he’d seen a large American woman in a flowered dress (all Mrs Goodheart’s dresses were flowered) looking lost. The man regretted that he had not seen such a person that day.

Holmes translated the man’s reply, then told him that we would take the ring, please. I was glad to see the jeweller pick up the unspoken message, that the bangles Holmes had made away with were not to be mentioned, but would now be paid for; he made no protest, and reacted not in the least to a payment vastly greater than the price of the trinket for my “sister.” He merely wrapped the ring, thanked us profusely, and turned to the young man and asked him in English if he wouldn’t like to look at some pretty necklaces for his girlfriend.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Thomas snapped. “And if I did I wouldn’t buy her rubbish at those prices. You really should’ve got him to come down,” he said to Holmes, following us out into the street. He winced at the brightness and put his sun-glasses back on.

“Oh, that’s my fault,” I told Goodheart. “I hate haggling over a pittance, it always seems so rude. And these people have so little, compared to us.”

I was interested to hear the committed Communist sniff in disgust at my willingness to share the wealth.

“Where’d you learn to speak the language?” he demanded, as if Holmes had revealed some distasteful habit.

“Oh, it’s one of those things a person picks up,” Holmes answered blandly. “I lived in Cairo for a time.”

“That’s right—the reason you didn’t care to take the train down to see the pyramids. You two heading for the sights here? The tanks are supposed to be quite something.”

“Not just now,” Holmes said. “We’ve a bit more exploring down here to do. In fact,” he added as if at a sudden thought, “we might just have a meal, something good and spicy. Have you ever eaten mutton pilau, Goodheart? The Arab style of mutton is memorable. A trifle greasy, perhaps, and the eyeballs take some getting used to, lying half buried amidst the rice—”

Goodheart flushed a most peculiar shade of puce, swallowed convulsively, and turned away, waving his hand in wordless farewell that attempted nonchalance.

“Enjoy yourself,” I called. We turned into the nearest arm of the bazaar, and in a dozen steps had lost young Goodheart in the crowd.

I laughed aloud. “Holmes, that was pure cruelty, the detail of the eyeballs.”

“The young puppy deserved it, forcing me to guzzle all that bad champagne and giving so little in return. I’ve a head-ache myself, you know.”

“Holmes, if we weren’t in an Arab country, I’d take your arm.”

“If we weren’t in an Arab country, Russell, I should allow it.”

We wandered, amicable if apart, through the ethnic potpourri for an hour or so, buying the odd item of foodstuff or decoration, dried figs and a double handful of almonds, kohl for the eyes and an ornate pair of embroidered slippers for Mrs Hudson, shopping more for the delight of the purchase than the thing itself, for the pleasure of fingering and sniffing and haggling in a variety of tongues. The sun continued to beat through the awnings, but slowly it shifted angle, until with reluctance Holmes drew out his pocket-watch to confirm the time. He snapped it shut, and I had just stepped around a small child to reverse direction when a rattling noise from over our heads was joined by a single cry of alarm from the far end of the narrow street. Without an instant’s pause, Holmes lunged, scooping up the child with one hand and tackling me with his other shoulder, shooting us through the adjacent doorway at top speed. We three tumbled headfirst into the shop, sweeping before us a group of robed matrons and landing with a stunning crash and clatter that shook the walls. I felt for a brief instant that we must have dived into a shop of pots and pans, such was the racket, but I quickly perceived that not all the softness underneath me was human, and that the boom and clatter had come from outside of the door, not all about us.

I sat up, only half aware of Holmes, who was full of ornate apologies to the ladies and desperate attempts to soothe the terrified child before it could loose its reaction. The horrendous din outside slid away into diminuendo, then trailed off with a couple of clangs. For a moment, the world seemed a place of remarkable stillness. But only for a moment, until the child’s breath caught in its throat and it filled the air with a roar as terrifying as the crash itself. As if at a signal, a tumult of voices joined the chorus, soprano fury within the door and excited horror without. I dusted myself off and went to see what had so nearly come down upon our heads.

It was difficult to tell at first just what had happened, since the awning of the shop—it sold carpets, which explained the softness of our landing—had been crushed and ripped, and was being further demolished by a crew of eager rescuers. The men seemed somewhat disappointed at the absence of corpses, or even bloodshed (other than one of the outraged matrons, who had broken one of her glass bangles and nicked her arm on it), but the shopkeeper’s assistant, miraculously preserved by the chance of having been leaning against the wall, was first terrified, then ecstatic at the wails of the infant. He snatched up the child, startling up a new round of screeches, and patted him all over, unable to believe him whole. In familiar arms, the child’s sounds gave way to hiccoughing cries, and his tears and those of his father mingled down the man’s shirt-front.

When eventually the awning had been ripped from the front of the shop and we could step tentatively out onto the paving stones, it became immediately apparent how lucky we had been. Holmes’ quick reflexes had saved us from certain maiming, if not death outright, for the object that fell where we had been standing was probably three hundredweight of metal and wood.

“What is it?” I asked Holmes.

“I fear to ask,” he said, sounding more disgusted than troubled. I glanced over and saw that he was looking, not at the tangle of pipes and boards, but at his hands, smeared with some dark and noxious substance. He bent to appropriate a corner of the dusty awning cloth, scrubbing at his fingers.

“I meant the thing that fell.”

He ran his eyes over the object that had so nearly ended the eminent career of Sherlock Holmes, then lifted his gaze upwards, as half the people around us were doing. One dusty beam still clung to the rough mud-brick wall some twenty-five feet above, with a clear line of holes and dirt showing where the rest of the thing had been. A glance down the street showed a number of similar makeshift balconies, bits of wood and metal tacked onto the walls high above street level, all of them strung with drying laundry, decorated with petrol tins overflowing with flowers and herbs, furnished with cushions and rugs, and stacked high with various household goods not wanted inside. This one had linked to its apartment by way of a flimsy door, now opening onto thin air. And as we gazed upwards the door did open; the face of a horrified woman looked straight out, then down at us. She gaped down at the crowded street before belatedly realising that there were strangers looking back at her; she whipped her head-scarf across her face, gave us one last white-eyed look, and slammed the door, dislodging a few more scraps of timber and dust.

Holmes waded through the wreckage, searching for the end pieces of the balcony. I joined him, our search somewhat hindered by the determination of the carpet-seller to keep people away from his now-vulnerable wares. I found Holmes fingering a pair of iron bolts, both of them old, one bent into a sharp angle, the other sheared off. Neither showed any sign of a saw’s teeth.

“We must examine the wall above,” he told me, and raised his voice in Arabic to ask how we might gain access to the above apartment. This took forever, first to brush off the teary gratitude of the young assistant whose son we had preserved and then to find a person who could show us the relevant corkscrew stairway. And once at the top, we were halted by the custom of the land, when Holmes would have gone within an apartment housing women alone.

In the end, I suggested instead that I might be allowed to venture within. The shopkeeper’s wife had by that time appeared from their nearby house and followed us up the stairs to deliver her thanks. As soon as she understood what we were about, she added her voice to mine, begging that they grant the request of this thrice-blessed if baffling foreigner. The women within knew perhaps six words of Arabic—I wasn’t even certain what their native language was—but they gave in. With a wide smile and many appreciative noises over the squalling, snot-nosed, kohl-eyed infant one of them clutched, I crossed the two rooms to the door that now gave out onto the bazaar.

Stretched out on the floor with my head and shoulders extending into thin air, I failed to spot any obvious saw-marks, merely holes in the walls where bolts had once stood. I ignored the fearful noises of the women behind me, the heftiest of whom had thrown herself across my ankles lest I fly into space, and I shaded my eyes to squint at the building on the opposite side of the street. Something odd there: a gash in the wall beneath a window, fairly fresh. I made to stand, found I couldn’t move, and had to plead with the woman on my legs to allow me upright, which took a while. Before I left the apartment, I looked around for some heavy piece of furniture, finding a sort of divan that weighed nearly as much as I did, which I wrestled across the room to block the rickety door. Then, exchanging mutually incomprehensible pleasantries with the gabbling women and thanking them for the various sticky foodstuffs they thrust into my hand, I finally rejoined Holmes on the landing outside.

“Can we get into the apartment on the opposite side of the street?” I asked him. “There looks to be a fresh bash on the wall there.” I looked around me for some place to deposit the sweetmeats, which were oozing over my palm.

Holmes looked at the collection of unlikely shapes and colours. “What is that?”

“By the feel of it, mostly honey.”

He peeled one from my palm and popped it in his mouth, pausing briefly to consider it. “Sage flower,” my beekeeper husband pronounced. “And something else. Rather piquant.”

“Holmes, we haven’t time to hunt down the source of the pollen in those ladies’ honey,” I said firmly.

He pulled out his watch, nodded in agreement, and turned for the rickety stairs. “You’re quite right, the ship’s siren went a few minutes ago. We risk missing the launch if we delay too long.”

I hadn’t heard the siren. “Can’t we send someone to have the ship held for us?”

“I shouldn’t like to chance it. The P. & O. lines pride themselves on keeping to the rules. Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

But fifteen minutes proved too little time to find the owner of the empty apartment across the street. There was indeed a bash in the wall, and the boards that had created it—a balcony railing and four or five carved supports—were lying by themselves at the very base of that wall, across the alley from the bulk of the débris. There was no convenient length of rope or chain attached to the middle of the railing, and the marks were too myriad to be certain, but it did look as if something had torn a fresh groove into the wood in the centre of the fallen railing. It was the sort of mark that might result if a person standing at a window were to toss a hooked line at an already unsteady structure across a gap of some fifteen feet, then give it a mighty pull. On the other hand, it was also the sort of mark that might come from hanging almost anything from that same railing, and the gouge in the wall could be days old. Without a look at the room to see if the window-frame bore the marks of a rope or if the opposite wall showed where a pulley had been mounted to make one man’s strength sufficient, without even a ladder to examine the wall more closely, there could be no certainty.

In any case, the ship’s siren sounded again, impatiently, declaring its intention to leave without us. We grabbed up our few purchases, which had been preserved and guarded by the carpet-seller (grandfather to the half-naked child), accepted a small rolled carpet thrust into Holmes’ hands as a token of gratitude, and trotted away.

The launch was idling at the pier, held there almost bodily by our friend the carpet-seller’s son-in-law. The child in his arms seemed remarkably pleased to see us, considering the fright we’d caused it, and the man himself was nearly in tears again by the time we’d been pulled on board the boat and out of his grasp. We waved patiently as the boat pulled away, then turned to deliver our apologies to our huffy companions.

Thomas Goodheart was there, and his mother. Both watched us from behind dark glasses, their faces in the shade of their topees. I gave a surreptitious glance at his hands as I sat, but they were no more red than the rest of him; certainly they bore no signs of rope-burn.

Mrs Goodheart spoke first. “My, you two look like you’ve been in a riot. What on earth have you been up to?”

I looked down at my filthy skirt and torn blouse, glanced sideways at the state of Holmes’ pale suit, and looked up with a rueful smile. “Being a tourist in places such as this, it’s an arduous business, isn’t it?”

Chapter Six

Aden’s gulf opened into the Arabian Sea, and for days, the watery expanse in all directions was broken only by the passing of the occasional ship and the island of Socotra, well to the south two days out of Aden. The life of our floating village went on, the aristocrats of the high decks intruded on regularly by voices rising from the lower, now that the heat had driven the population out-of-doors at all hours, with dancing on the decks long into the night, under the glare of arc lights. For some days, the taps had run with phosphorescence, adding an exotic touch to one’s toilette, bathing in cool blue flame. Holmes befriended a lascar in the depths, I approached the final scenes of The Mahabharata, Sunny received three marriage proposals, and her brother remained as he had been before, supercilious and aloof as he read his Marxist tracts. Certainly he gave no sign of having tried and failed to murder us in the Aden bazaar. He did not even make reference to his drunken indiscretions on the night of the fancy-dress ball, except once when he approached me to beg my pardon if he had said anything he shouldn’t while in his cups. Something about the apology made me suspect that it was delivered at his mother’s command, but I told him merely that he had done nothing to offend, and that I was sorry champagne gave him a head-ache.

On the Thursday evening, precisely two weeks after we had struggled with our bags through a snow-clotted Kentish railway station, we stood in the ship’s bow and watched a cloud of flying-fish flicking and splashing magically from the indigo-tinted water. The sun’s setting turned the sky to a thousand shades of glory, and gave us the sensation of cool. I breathed in, and for the first time in many days the air bore an indefinable promise of solid land, far-distant traces of smoke and dust and vegetation that the olfactory organs can only perceive when they have been long without. We went to bed surrounded by nothing but the heave and swell of open sea, and woke in the morning with the Western Ghats rising blue-grey into the haze of the horizon. As the brutal sun travelled overhead, the land drew us ever nearer, until by the afternoon passengers crowded the rails to see the city of Bombay approach.

When we were close enough to pick out the peculiar architecture of the yacht club, my heart began to quail: Land was a solid, pulsating, cacophonous, and even from this distance, malodorous wall of people, and the water was not much less heavily populated, by boats of all shapes and sizes. Perhaps we could just wait on board for a few hours, or days, until they all went away. But we were being met, it seemed, by shipping agents who would nurse us and our luggage through customs, and here, as elsewhere, company pride would undoubtedly demand that each man fight to ensure that his client be early through the process. I shook my head and went down to my suffocating cabin to assemble my last-minute things, to be startled five minutes later when the great engines fell silent.

We were, as I’d anticipated, claimed instantly by a round and obsequious brown-faced man in a tropical suit, accompanied by a pair of uniformed chuprassis. He introduced himself as Mr Cook and apologised five times in the first quarter hour for this “unseasonable” great heat which his great city was inflicting on ourselves, since at this time of year we might have justifiably anticipated a more gentle climate, a temperature more suited to our English selves, a less trying degree of mercury. After the fifth such synonymous phrase I wished him violently struck mute, but I was too flattened by the “unseasonable tropical humidity” to do so myself.

He herded us off the ship in the shade of a wide umbrella, following in the wake of four scarlet elbows that jabbed a path through the riot of colour and motion, a confusion of tongues raised at never less than a shout, with the ferocious sun beating down on us all. The Goodhearts were ahead of us, their umbrellas larger, their crowds kept at bay by rifle-bearing guards in trim red turbans with a white device at the forehead. The three Goodhearts wore garlands of brilliant marigolds around their necks, and were under the supervision of dignified individuals with nothing of our Mr Cook’s air of commercial traveller. Their maharaja, it seemed, was already smoothing the path of his bison-providing guests; as some heavy foot came down upon my shoe, I could not suppress a twist of envy for the truly blessed.

But, I reminded myself, if Mycroft had thought it sensible for us to stand out from the other passengers, he, too, would have arranged for a noble’s escort—with a marching band and caparisoned elephants, if the fancy had struck him. This way was hellish, but unavoidable.

Had I been in charge of this adventure, I might also have given us a few days in Bombay to get our bearings before we were shut inside a rattling train car for twenty-four hours, for the northwards journey to Delhi. That idea, however, had died a quick death at the sight of the crowds all along the waterfront: If the remainder of the city was anything like this portion of it, a stay here would not be a restful thing.

However, it appeared that there was a problem with our onward journey. My luggage was incomplete.

“What do you mean, ‘incomplete’?” I asked Mr Cook, for whom I had developed an instant and completely unreasonable dislike. He was so polite, I longed to kick his shins.

“I mean, memsahib, that my list says that you, Miss Russell, are the possessor of two small trunks: one from your cabin, the other from the hold, which was sent down to the hold when the ship reached Port Said, and yet there is but the one which was in your cabin. I have had this trunk placed into the baggage car of the train, along with the two trunks of Mr Holmes, but alas, I lack the requisite companion from the hold of the ship.”

“What’s happened to the other one?”

“We are endeavouring to determine that, memsahib.”

“Oh Lord, they’ve lost half my things,” I groaned, then was nearly knocked down by a large woman clutching a carpet bag to her chest so tightly that it might have held her virtue. Holmes caught my arm to save me from falling amongst the feet. The shipping agent did not notice, so caught up was he in my accusation.

The round head shook vigorously. “Memsahib, the P. & O. does not lose trunks from the hold.”

“Then where is it?”

“We are endeavouring to—”

“Yes, I know,” I snapped. “Is there some place we can sit out of this heat?”

“I could, if you wish, have you taken to your train. I will, of course, remain here until the matter is made straight.”

More likely he would wait until our backs were turned and make off home, I thought sourly, preparing to dig in my heels. But Holmes, to my surprise, agreed. “I can’t see that our presence or absence will make the trunk appear any more rapidly. Mr Cook can be trusted to see the matter through. If necessary we can replace most of what you’ll need in Delhi.”

The small man practically melted in obsequity. “Oah, yes, sir, I will not sleep until I see the trunk of this good lady. I will personally see that it is delivered by hand to you in Delhi. I will not fail you,” he vowed, then rather spoilt it by adding as an afterthought, “if the trunk is on board the boat.”

I did not see where else it could be, but I bit back the remark, reminding myself that I had the clothing I had worn on the ship; I would not go naked.

Although, with my clothes already clinging against my skin as if I’d run several brisk laps through a steam-room, nakedness was not altogether unattractive. Indeed, the very idea of woollens was repugnant. I should miss my revolver, yes, but we had Holmes’ gun, and his box of magic equipment. If ever I needed something warmer than sheer lawn, I would buy it.

We oozed onto the train, our compartment dim and shuttered against the sun. I headed for the nearest sofa, tripped over a shallow tin tray that someone had abandoned smack in the middle of the floor, and sprawled onto the heat-sticky leather cushions. “Who the hell left that thing there?” I grumbled, neither expecting nor receiving an answer. I wrenched off my topee, threw it across the room in petulance, and lay back, grateful at least that the floor was not tossing underfoot. Yet. After a time, I dashed the damp tendrils of hair from my forehead and told Holmes grimly, “This compartment is far too big for two persons. If our companions are the Goodhearts, I’m warning you now, I shall walk to Delhi.”

“I believe you’ll find that Mycroft has exerted his authority to grant us solitude.”

“God, I hope so.”

At my tone, Holmes turned to look at me. I shut my eyes so I couldn’t see his raised eyebrow.

“It occurs to me,” he said, “that I have neglected to warn you against one of the dangers of life in India.”

I jerked upright, expecting a cobra or a scorpion, but he was shaking his head.

“India has a most unsettling effect on Europeans in general—which collective noun, by the way, embraces residents of England, America, and half of Russia as well. This is a land that gives one little of what is expected or desired, but an abundance of what proves later to have been needed. The process proves hugely disorientating, with the result that even the most stable of individuals rather go to pieces. One tends,” he concluded in a sorrowful voice, “to shout at people.”

“Holmes, I do not shout.”

“That is true. Nonetheless.”

I stared at him, wondering what on earth he meant. His words seemed to indicate a personal experience with that state of mind, but—Holmes, red-faced and furious? I could not begin to envision it. And I certainly was not in the habit of shouting at anyone, particularly strangers. I might let fly with a barbed and carefully chosen remark if need be, but shout?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him, my voice low and reasonable, and subsided back onto the sofa.

While Holmes prowled the car, investigating its fittings, I lay motionless, wincing at the crashing, yells, and bustle outside, hoping that it would not intrude on us. After several minutes the voice of Mr Cook came from the entrance door, and before I could growl at him that we wanted no more news of disasters, Holmes called for him to enter. He did so, accompanied by the uniformed chuprassis carrying our cabin bags, the small carpet given us by the Aden carpet-seller, and a pair of closed-topped wicker baskets. Behind them came a sun-blackened man with a brief and grubby lunghi around his loins and a scrap of turban on his head. He staggered under the weight of an enormous block of ice, which he dropped with a crash into the offending tin tray, then vanished instantly. The two chuprassis paused at the door, and Mr Cook bowed nearly in half.

“This is for your comfort, in this most unseasonable heat, which truly I do not believe will continue to grip you as you journey to the north. If, however, it does, and if you wish the ice replenished, you need merely ask and it will be provided at the subsequent station. And although this train has a dining car, or you may wish to have a request for tea or a meal telegraphed ahead, I thought perhaps a little refreshment would not go amiss.” He gestured at the wicker baskets, and my unreasonable animosity against him retreated a small step.

“Thank you, Mr Cook.” I hoped I did not sound too begrudging. “That was very thoughtful. And I hope the hunt for my missing trunk does not prove too difficult for you.”

“I will not sleep until it is found,” he declared again stoutly.

“I shouldn’t want you to lose sleep over the matter,” I assured him, visited by a sudden image of the poor man fretting himself to an early grave, haunted by the memsahib’s lost baggage. “There was nothing irreplaceable in the trunk.” Except for the gun, to which I was attached, but if it was gone, so be it.

“Oah, that is so very good of you to say,” he whimpered, his accent suddenly going south. “I render the deepest apologies of my company and myself, and promise to hunt the solution to its bitter end.”

Holmes got to his feet and thanked the man out the door, shutting it firmly behind him. He then rummaged through the wicker basket, coming up with a vacuum flask of tea and a bottle of fizzy lemonade, proffering them wordlessly to me.

“If you can chip off a piece of ice from that block, I’ll have the lemonade,” I told him.

He shook his head. “No ice, the water won’t have been boiled first. Have the tea, and the lemonade later.” He poured me a cup, then hacked away at the block with his pen-knife until he had carved a depression in the top deep enough to hold the bottle. By the time the train shuddered into life, my bare toes resting against the block of ice were chilled, and the lemonade going down my throat was cold.

Bliss.

And, I told myself with satisfaction, Holmes was quite wrong: I hadn’t shouted at anyone.

Nor did I shout at any of the irritations of the train journey. Not when Sunny Goodheart, comfortably ensconced in the maharaja’s private cars, discovered that we were in the same train and trotted forward to join us at one of the stops. Since the cars were without linking doors, we could not be rid of her until the next station—and then, when I had all but pushed her bodily out onto the platform, to my horror the door came open just as the train was about to pull out, and Sunny tumbled back in, brother in tow, and we had to sit through fifty miles of Thomas’s fatuousness. I was, I will admit, somewhat short of temper with the railway employee who delivered our noontime meal, when the lamb curry I had requested turned out to be greasy tinned ham: It seemed to me that in a country with more major religions than it had states, it shouldn’t prove so difficult to explain that my religion forbade the eating of pork. The man seemed to think that “English” was a religion characterised by a love of tinned ham, warm claret, and suet-rich steamed puddings. In the end, I ate the mashed potatoes that had been meticulously arranged into the shape of a swan, picked at the grey boiled peas, and polished off both servings of stewed fruit.

And I held back my disgust at the pair of flies in the bottom of the milk jug the next morning, and my indignation at the oddities of the door latch that, while letting in all the world at all times, half the time prevented those of us inside the compartment from getting out, and my near-claustrophobic repugnance for the human tide that closed over the train at every station, the rapping knuckles and calls offering wares: flowers and shoes, hot snacks and cold water, handkerchiefs and melons, chai, toothache paste, oranges, and kittens. And those were just the words I understood. After a while I took to sitting in the middle of the car with my eyes on a page and my ears plugged, reading aloud to myself. But I did not shout, not even at the utter confusion of the Delhi station, where an iota of forethought would have prevented what was clearly a customary spectacle enacted countless times each day, as one trainload of passengers fought to emerge in the midst of another complete trainload, they battling in turn with an equal determination to board.

It wasn’t until I discovered the state of my shoes the following morning, following a good night’s rest in a quiet hotel room, that I lost control. The unassuming brown shoes I had left out to be cleaned the night before had been turned to a peculiarly mottled shade of dried blood. They were, granted, marvelously shiny, but the leather beneath the gloss looked as if the cow had died of leprosy.

The hotel manager himself was standing before me, straight-spined but tilted slightly back from the gale of my fury, before I remembered what Holmes had said about shouting. I stopped dead, panting a little. The ruination of a pair of shoes was a small matter, hardly cause for such a reaction, yet my cheeks burned with fury, my throat ached with long constriction. I looked around for Holmes, found him seated with his spine to me, bent over the morning paper, and I turned back to the manager. He braced himself. I drew a slow breath through my nostrils, let it out, and smiled.

“I am sorry, I don’t know what’s got into me,” I told him in a low and pleasant voice. “Perhaps you might recommend where I could find a shoe-shop in the area?”

Wary, unwilling to relax his guard, the man minutely settled his lapels and suggested, “Memsahib, I would be honoured if you were to permit me to arrange for a man to bring to your room a selection for your approval. And of course the hotel will make a gift of them, by way of a small apology.”

I felt very small myself. When he had made his escape, I went to sit near Holmes.

“Very well, you were right. Why did I do that?”

“I don’t know, but every so-called European does. Do you wish to wait until you have your new shoes before we go out?”

“Oh, no. I’ll just pretend that leprous shoes are the latest French fashion.”

I could only hope that they would remind me not to lose control again. Perhaps it only happened once, and then one had it out of one’s system.

If only they weren’t all so friendly and agreeable as they drove a person mad.

And the beggars—my God! I had met beggars in Palestine, but nothing like these. Of course, there I had worn the dress of the natives, but here, in European clothing, the instant we set foot outside the hotel we were magnets for every diseased amputee, wild-eyed woman, and sore-riddled child in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the note that had been waiting for us on our arrival the night before had neglected to say anything about transport being provided, so Holmes had asked for a cab. What awaited us was powered by four legs rather than a piston engine, but we did not hesitate to leap in and urge the driver to be off. The tonga’s relative height and speed would afford us a degree of insulation from the beggars’ attentions.

Delhi, the Moghul capital that was currently in the process of being remade as a modern one, nonetheless more closely resembled Bombay than it did London. The streets through which we trotted looked as though someone had just that instant overturned an anthill—or rather, as if a light covering of earth had been swept away from a corpse writhing with maggots. Furious, pulsating activity, occasional wafts of nauseous stench, unlikely colours. And blood, in seemingly endless quantities, spattering the recess in which a blind beggar perched, forming a great scarlet fan on a whitewashed building past which a pair of oblivious officers strolled, reaching up a mud-brick wall towards the sleeping figure along its top (at any rate, I trusted he was merely sleeping). I was just turning to say something to my companion when a rickshaw puller hawked and spat out a gobbet of the same red colour that decorated every upright surface, at which point I realised that the substance was of a lesser consistency and not quite the crimson of fresh blood. This had to be betel, the mildly narcotic chew of the tropics. The marks were still revolting, but considerably less alarming.

We left the main thoroughfare and rose into an area both newer and cleaner, with fewer pedestrians and the occasional motorcar. We went half a mile without seeing a beggar. The high walls were iced with hunks of broken glass, each gate attended by a man with a rifle. The guards wore a variety of regional clothing and their turbans could have stocked a milliner’s shop, but each face held an identical look of suspicion as we clip-clopped past.

The gate before which our tonga stopped was no higher than its neighbours’, the guard no more nobly clad, but where some of the others had given the distinct impression that their guns were empty and for show, the stout Sikh here left one with no doubt that he would not hesitate to shoot down even a sahib, if it proved necessary. He watched us climb down from the horse cart, his only response a brief twist of the head (his eyes never left us) and an even briefer phrase grunted over his shoulder in the direction of the gate.

Before Holmes could dig into his pocket for the note we had received, the stout gate swung open. Inside it stood a slimmer, younger Sikh in beautifully laundered salwaar trousers and long, frock-like kameez, who bowed his snug sky-blue turban in greeting.

“You will please walk with me?” he suggested.

Chapter Seven

The garden within the gates was a place of Asiatic loveliness, a Paradise of birds and flowering trees, decorated by an old mali and his young assistant wielding watering cans, and a pale, cud-chewing bullock placidly waiting to be attached to the lawn mower. Brilliant potted flowers—rose, hibiscus, bougainvillea—marched the length of the drive, and near the house a fountain splashed and glittered. The rush and stink of the town was cut off as if by an invisible wall, and I felt my skin relax against my already-damp dress.

The bungalow was worthy of its grounds, simple and white, its verandah set with rattan chairs and tables, the entrance hall-way an expanse of linen-covered walls and gleaming dark flooring of teak or mahogany. The servant’s soft sandals made slight noise as we crossed to a doorway. He stood back to let us enter, said, “I will bring tea,” and left us.

The room was a light, open space looking out onto the garden. Its simple furniture was a far cry from the Victorian stuffiness, mounted animal heads, and heavy draperies that I had expected from a Raj household. The house’s silence seemed another carefully chosen furnishing of the room, its texture broken only by a rhythmic creak of machinery out-of-doors and the rise and fall of a voice from somewhere deeper in the house. It was a one-sided conversation—over the telephone, I decided, since it paused, resumed, and paused again. Tea was brought and poured, the servant departed without a sound, and I carried my cup over to examine the objects on the wall.

Near the door was a collection of framed photographs, groups of men with horses and dead animals such as one sees in the social pages of The Times. One photograph, placed centrally among the others, showed three men on horseback: at the left side a dark-haired Englishman, and on the right a smaller man with a bandaged arm, whose face was half hidden by the shadow of his topee but whose blond moustache said he was European as well. Between them sat a darker-skinned man, hatless, aiming his black eyes at the shutter as if he owned it, with an expression beyond pride—more an amused patience with the antics of underlings. Out of focus on the ground before them were two mounds resembling small furry whales, with a scattering of dogs and turbanned beaters behind. At the bottom of the photograph were written the words “Kadir Cup, 1922.” Beside the photograph was one of identical size and frame, showing only the blond man and the native, except in this one, the darker face was tense about the jaw, as if a furious argument had broken off moments before. The black eyes flashed at the camera, the hand holding the reins was clenched tight. This one said “Kadir Cup, 1923.”

The other photographs were of similar occasions, several showing the blond man, although in most of them his face was at least half obscured by hat or hand. Beside one of them hung a plaited horsehair thong with a single claw nearly as long as my hand, which I thought might be from the tiger shown dead in the picture. Mounted above this shrine to the masculine arts were two spears, or rather, one long spear and the remains of a second, consisting of a broken head and about eighteen inches of shaft. The viciously sharp iron heads on each were stained, probably with dried blood.

I moved on to the more customary art-work on the next wall, and found it pleasingly light, almost feminine in its sensibilities. Half a dozen watercolour sketches of the Indian countryside alternated with ink drawings, crisp black lines on the white paper showing simple scenes of village life—a woman with a large jug balanced on her head, a man and bullock ploughing, a child and dog squatting beside each other to stare down a hole. The drawings especially were striking; I thought they would not look out of place among a display of Japanese art. I took another sip of my tea, which could have been chosen to set off the room, its clean, slightly smokey aroma blending with the room’s faint odours of lemon and cardamom.

And, suddenly, of horse. I had not noticed the distant conversation cease, nor heard anyone approach, but between one breath and another there was a third person in the room, the compact, blond-haired man of the photographs, moving to greet the equally startled Holmes.

“Thank you for coming. I see Hari has brought you tea. Did he give you the Indian or the China?”

“The Indian,” Holmes answered, “and very nice indeed.”

“Good. With Hari, one can never be sure. I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Holmes. We did, in fact, encounter each other long ago, when you visited my father’s camp in Himachel Pradesh, but you won’t have remembered. I was seven; my last tour with him before I went home to school.”

Holmes held the man’s hand for a moment as he studied the man’s features, and then his mouth twitched in a brief smile. “He was a district officer and you were in short trousers. A boy with a thousand questions about . . . turquoise and rubies, wasn’t it?”

Our host’s face opened in a grin. “I should have known you would forget nothing. And you must be . . . Miss Russell, I’m told you prefer? I’m Geoffrey Nesbit.”

His hand was cool and strong, and I thought, as he turned to face me fully, that Holmes’ act of memory was less impressive than inevitable: Even as a child, this would have been a difficult person to forget.

Nesbit was one of the most beautiful men I have ever laid eyes on, the thin scar running down his jaw line merely serving to emphasise his looks. Neat, blond, and sun-burnt, he was not the kind who usually stirs me to admiration, but his green eyes shone with intelligence and humour, and he watched with the quiet attentiveness of a cat, missing nothing. Like a cat, too, he appeared ageless, although the skin beside his eyes and down his throat testified to an age near forty. He reminded me eerily of T. E. Lawrence, another small, tow-headed, and youthful man who looked at the world out of the corners of his eyes, as if in constant dialogue with an amusing inner voice.

Nesbit was dressed in an odd combination of garments, jodhpur trousers beneath a long muslin kameez, and if the aura of horse he carried with him explained the trousers, he had certainly changed his footwear upon returning from his morning gallop. Unless he was in the habit of riding in soft leather slippers, in the style of an American Indian. Certainly in the photographs the man wore ordinary riding boots.

He poured himself a cup of tea, taking it black with sugar, and urged us back into our chairs, sitting down on the other side of the low, intricately carved table. He settled into a third, legs stretched out, ankles crossed.

“How is your brother?” he asked Holmes.

“Improving. I had a telegram yesterday night, he sounded himself.”

“I am glad. The world would be a lesser place without Mycroft Holmes. And a great deal less secure.”

Which observation declared, as surely as an exchange of Kipling’s whispered code-phrases, that this man knew well that Mycroft Holmes, who described himself as an “accountant” in the Empire’s bureaucracy, kept ledgers recording transactions considerably more subtle than pounds and pence. The suspicion was confirmed with his next words.

“When we have drunk our tea, we shall take a turn through the garden.” His raised eyebrow asked if we understood; Holmes’ curt nod and my reply answered him.

“We should love to see your garden,” I told him. And, clearly, to talk about those things the walls were not to hear. It was difficult to press one’s ear to a key-hole when the speakers were surrounded by open space. And the sad fact was, there were some things with which servants were not to be trusted.

So we drank our tea and passed a pleasant quarter of an hour hearing Nesbit’s suggestions about what to see during our stay in the country. He particularly urged us north, even though the weather would still be cool, and suggested one or two of the hill rajas who might show us an entertaining time.

“Do you shoot, either of you?”

I suppressed a wince: The last shooting party I’d joined had nearly ended in tragedy for the duke who was our host and friend.

“Some,” Holmes replied. “Russell here is a crack shot.”

“Of course, it’s pretty tame compared to some sports—even going after tiger from the back of an elephant pales once you’ve tried pig sticking. Or tiger sticking, although that’s harder to come by. You ever ridden after boar, Mr Holmes?”

“Er, no, I’m afraid not.”

“Is that what the Kadir Cup is about?” I asked, adding, “I noticed the photographs.”

“Yes, that’s it. Held annually, near Meerut, just north of here. Pig sticking is the unofficial sport of British India. Great fun. Though not, I fear, for the ladies.” He smiled at the thought. I smiled back, automatically plotting how I might go about learning to stick pigs—until I caught myself short. I didn’t even like fox-hunting, much less what sounded like a rout fit for overgrown adolescent boys, scrambling cross-country after a herd of panicking swine. Still, it brought up the obvious question.

“With what does one stick the pig?”

In answer he nodded towards the weaponry on the wall. “That’s the spear I took the Cup with last year.”

“The broken one?”

“Er, no. That one’s there to remind me to be humble.” He threw us a boyish grin. “Big job, that. No, the broken one’s from the ’22 Cup. The first day, I’d flushed a big ’un, run it across the fields a mile or more, right at its heels when it jinked back in a flash and came for my horse. Which very sensibly shied, dumping me top over teakettle. Somehow I landed on my own spear and took a great hunk out of my arm. Nearly the end of my career.”

“So, what, did you shoot the creature? Or did it run off?”

“Good Lord, no,” Nesbit said, affronted. “One doesn’t carry a gun when pig sticking. And once a pig’s decided to fight, it generally doesn’t quit until one or the other of you stops moving. No, one of the other fellows took the beast. And the Cup as well. Native chap—maharaja in fact, though nothing like what you think of at the title. That’s him in the photo. He nearly had the Cup from me last year, he’s that good. ’Course he should be good, he has enough practice going after any kind of game you can mention. African lion, giraffe—you name it.”

Sports; maharaja; exotic animals: The unlikely conjunction rang some bells in my mind, but Holmes got the question out first.

“What is the name of this maharaja?”

“They call him Jimmy. Rum chap, a bit, but a great sportsman. He’s the ruler of a border state named—”

“Khanpur.”

Nesbit’s eyes locked onto Holmes over the top of his cup. Then, calmly, he took the last swallow, placed the cup and saucer on the tray, and stood. “Shall we go and look at the garden?”

“Looking at the garden” seemed to be a common ritual in the Nesbit establishment. At any rate, the ground was clear for a circle of thirty yards around the two benches he led us to, benches located in the shade of a tree which had recently been thinned so its inner structure could hide no person, benches facing in opposite directions to cover all approaches. A low fountain played nearby, obscuring our voices.

“You seem to have an interest in the maharaja of Khanpur,” he said as soon as we were seated.

“Not directly, but the name has come to our attention.”

It took a while, the story. Thomas Goodheart and the bison-collecting maharaja who had been at a Moscow gathering attended by Lenin. The defiant words of the drunken Goodheart, and his odd choice of fancy dress, preceded the odder decision to enter Aden with a debilitating hang-over on the day a balcony fell. To say nothing of the interesting coincidence that Khanpur was one of the kingdoms along the northern borders insulating British India from her long-time Russian threat. Holmes even mentioned my missing trunk, although by this time neither of us thought that was due to anything more sinister than inefficiency, or at the most a garden-variety thievery.

Nesbit listened without comment, but with such intensity that I thought he might well be able to recite Holmes’ words verbatim afterwards. At the end, he sat forward with his elbows on his knees, his eyes not seeing the playing fountain while his mind explored the information. Eventually, he sat upright.

“If Goodheart is a known Communist, we probably needn’t worry, although I’ll pass his name on to the political johnnies. As for Khanpur, the state has always been staunchly loyal to the Crown. During the Mutiny, a handful of sepoys fleeing north attempted to pass through the kingdom, carrying with them two English captives, a mother and her young daughter. The then raja, Jimmy’s grandfather, allowed them entrance, but then set up an ambush on the road that passes through two halves of his hill fort. Dumped a thousand gallons of lamp-oil down the hill and set it alight. Killed them all, including the woman, unfortunately, but the child lived and was returned home. By way of recognition of their service, all the Khanpur tribute is remitted annually. And the raja’s rank was raised to maharaja. Khanpur has a seventeen-gun salute, which is big for its size—the girl’s family was important.”

“The Mutiny was a long time ago.”

“The Mutiny was yesterday, as far as every white man in the country is concerned. But it is true, that was the grandfather, and much can change in sixty-seven years. I shall bring this to the attention of my superiors.”

His eyes came back into focus. “Now, as to the reason why you are here. Kimball O’Hara. Mr Holmes, you knew O’Hara, did you not.” It was not a question.

“When he was a boy.”

“By all accounts, the man he became was there from the beginning.”

“The lad was remarkably well suited to The Game,” Holmes agreed.

“Which makes it all the more troubling that he has vanished.”

“How long has it been since he was last heard from?”

“Just short of three years.”

“Three—” Holmes caught himself. “We were told that he had not worked for the Survey in that time, but I had the impression his actual disappearance was considerably more recent than that.”

“It’s only in the past months that we’ve become aware of it. But once we cast back to look for his tracks, the last sure sighting we could come up with was in August of ’21.”

“Where was that?”

“In the hills above Simla. He stopped the night with an old acquaintance, and told her that he was going back to Tibet for a time, although he intended a detour to Lahore first to visit a friend.”

“But the friend in Lahore never saw him?”

“We could uncover no one in Lahore who had seen him. In fact, we couldn’t even find anyone there who would admit to being O’Hara’s friend.”

“And the amulet?”

“Ah. That arrived ten weeks ago. By post.” The dry answer forestalled any exclamations, for clearly the surprise of such an unadorned delivery had sent waves through the department, leaving a thousand questions in its wake. Holmes ventured one of those.

“Posted where?”

“In Delhi. Handed in at an hotel by a French tourist, a lady here to paint botanical watercolours. She was given it by a middle-aged Parsi who guided her through the gardens in Bombay, requesting that favour in return.”

“Extraordinary. I don’t suppose you still have the paper it came wrapped in?”

“Of course. It’s in my safe, if you’d like to see it.”

“Very much.”

I broke in with a question. “Pardon me if I ask things I either should not, or which I ought to know already, but was Mr O’Hara still on what you might call ‘active duty’?”

“Not really. After the War, with the Bolsheviks apparently having their hands full in Russia, we had all begun to think we might relax our guard and turn to other concerns. Since O’Hara’s expertise is that of the borders and Tibet, he sat at a desk for a year, possibly a bit more, then in late 1920 asked for a holiday. He was forty-five and had not taken one since returning from Tibet when he was nineteen, so one could scarcely object. But when we needed him this past autumn and went looking, we couldn’t find him.”

“You say you needed him. The Russians are back?” Holmes asked.

“If not yet, then soon. You know that Labour will grant the Bolsheviks formal recognition?”

“It is to be expected.”

“A mistake. MacDonald has his head in the clouds if he imagines The Bear will turn cuddly simply because they share a theoretical conviction. Belief was, The Game was finished with the Anglo-Russian convention seventeen years ago. But then the Reds came in and tore up all the treaties and back we went. Lenin—or whoever’s in charge while he’s ill—is buying time to sniff out our weak places, and will very soon be nudging through the passes like the Tsar before him. Our enemy may have changed his hat, but the Bolsheviks want a Communist East as much as the Tsar did, you can count on it. They won’t settle for the Congress Party—as far as they’re concerned, Gandhi’s worse than we are, a religious reactionary. And since the Bolsheviks will assuredly look to Tibet as a potential point of entry just as the Tsar before them did, we need O’Hara back on the force. True, Tibet has been receiving our own overtures of late—our giving the Dalai Lama shelter in 1910 saw to that—but whether the Russians or the Chinese get to Lhasa first, we’re going to need Tibet, and they us. We’re sending a political officer out this summer, but that’s all bells and whistles. We need someone who can see outside the diplomatic circle, and O’Hara knows the ground as a tongue knows its teeth.” He paused, to watch a pair of small black-headed birds dive at the fountain, and gave an almost imperceptible sigh.

“Still, that is not the main consideration here. What it boils down to is, O’Hara’s one of ours, and we want to know where he is.”

“And, perhaps, to know if he actually is still ‘yours’?”

Nesbit stood abruptly, taking three quick steps to bend over a fairly unexceptional flower. When he spoke, his voice was even but taut. “I refuse to believe that O’Hara has turned coat. I worked with the man. He is the King’s man to his bones.”

I waited for Holmes to agree, but he said nothing. Clearly, he had been rethinking the question since his vehement declaration in Mycroft’s rooms three weeks before. It sounded to me as if he was no longer quite so certain of Mr O’Hara’s bone-deep loyalties.

Holmes allowed the silence to hold for a while. Nesbit prowled up and down, gravel crunching under his soft shoes, until Holmes spoke.

“How many other agents have you lost in recent years?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘lost.’ ”

“Any of the word’s definitions will do,” Holmes said irritably.

“Sorry,” Nesbit said, coming back to his bench. “I don’t mean to evade your question. It is merely that the answer is difficult to give. In the sense that we’ve ‘lost’ O’Hara, there have been four others in the past thirty months. In England, or if they were Army, that number would be alarming. But here, it’s commonplace to go months, even years without hearing from one of our ‘pundits,’ as the native agents are called—it’s often just not possible for a man to report in. And frankly, I expect that one or two of those missing simply decided that their period of service was over and slipped quietly back to their families. I am aware of three other such who informed us openly of their retirement from The Game. All of whom, I have confirmed, are healthy and home, thank you very much. It is more than possible that the four missing agents have done the same, merely neglecting to tell us—which would be a typically Indian way to do things, by the way. Indians hate to disappoint a person to his face, and often say yes to something they know they can’t provide. I shouldn’t have expected the attitude from O’Hara, but it’s not beyond the imagination. We’ve made enquiries for him in all the obvious places, including his old lama’s home monastery. He’s either not there, or won’t respond.”

“And what about the other sense of ‘lost’?” Holmes pressed.

Nesbit’s green eyes wandered across to the playing fountain. “Three. All in the last nine months. John Forbes, Mohammed Talibi, and a new man—just a boy—Rupert Bartholomew. All good men. All dead.”

“How?”

“One shot, one knifed, one strangled.” He paused, and then gave us the worst. “All tortured first, beaten and burnt.”

It was suddenly all too clear why Mycroft had sent us.

“You have a traitor in the ranks,” Holmes said.

The handsome face grew still, as if movement might bring a return of pain. After a moment, he nodded, once.

“I no longer know whom I can trust. Even Hari, who has been with me for twelve years, even him . . .” Nesbit broke off, to dig a silver case from a pocket and light a cigarette, pinching the match between his fingers and tucking it back into the case. “I begin to understand how the officers must have felt during the Mutiny. Their own men, men they’d fought beside, marched with, trusted with their lives—with the lives of their wives and children, for God’s sake—turning on them, slaughtering them. And five years ago, I saw Jallianwala Bagh, the morning after. I saw the results of Dyer’s order to fire on the demonstrators. Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds and nearly every one of them hit civilian flesh—men, women, and little children heaped against the walls where they’d tried to get away from the machine-gun fire. I’ll never outlive the nightmares, never. Hundreds dead, thousands bleeding, and every white man in India wondering when the country would rise up and kill us in our beds, rid themselves of us once and for all.

“And who could blame them? We collect their taxes and we give them nothing but the bottom of our boot. You heard of Dyer’s ‘crawling order’? Where he set guards to make certain no native could walk past the spot where an Englishwoman had been attacked, but had to crawl—even the natives who’d rescued her? God help us, with such officers. There are days when, if I heard that someone in a position to undermine the Survey from within had chosen to do so, I couldn’t altogether bring myself to condemn him.”

“Yet you don’t believe O’Hara capable?”

“No. Not him.”

“Even though since he was a child his white blood has warred against his love and loyalty to the country that nurtured him?”

“Even so. He would not deceive his friends in that way.”

“O’Hara is quite capable of practising deceit, when it comes to playing The Game.”

“No.”

Holmes looked at the younger man and gave a small shake of his head, but said merely, “I’ll need all the details on the three men found dead, and on those missing.”

“I’ve included a précis in the O’Hara file I have for you. I prepared it myself; no one has seen it.”

“That’s as well.”

Nesbit crushed his cigarette out under his heel, then said abruptly, “I am having doubts as to the wisdom of this venture.”

“That is understandable, but we shall take the file nonetheless.”

“I should not have allowed you to come here, openly to my home. What if you were seen, and followed?”

“Who knows we are here?” Holmes asked.

“You and Miss Russell? By name? No more than four men within the Survey, all of them high ranks. But still . . .”

Holmes smiled happily and reached over to clap the man on his shoulder. “I shouldn’t worry. By tomorrow, your two English visitors will have ceased to exist.”

The smaller man looked taken aback, then forced a grin. “And I’m supposed to find that reassuring?”

With that, the more clandestine portion of our interview was at an end. Nesbit led us inside to his study, where he opened the safe and took out a flat oilskin envelope and a japanned-tin box, laying both on his desk. The tin contained a crumpled and torn paper wrapping with an address in the government offices. Holmes laid the paper out on the desk and set to with the magnifying lens he carried always, but in the end, it told him little more than it had Nesbit: that some tidy person—a man, to judge by the printing—had parcelled up O’Hara’s amulet and sent it to Captain Nesbit, but as the address was entirely in capital letters, it had little personality.

“I couldn’t say if that was . . . our man’s writing,” Nesbit told us, his voice low and avoiding names, “but I’d lay money that it was a St Xavier’s boy who wrote it—the way he’s made the numerals is fairly distinctive. I went to the school myself for two years,” he explained. “Not at the same time, of course, but these numbers look like what I might do, were I attempting to conceal my hand.”

Holmes bent again over the paper, and when he stiffened at some characteristic invisible to me, standing at his shoulder, Nesbit said, “The sand, yes. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to set it apart—it might have come from anywhere in the country.”

“In London,” Holmes muttered, “I could say for a surety that a mite of soil had come from one spot or another, but in this vast land, there are ten thousand places where such grains might have come from.”

“Such as from another parcel,” I pointed out, unnecessarily. Holmes laid the paper back in the tin and took up the twine, turning his lens on its knots. But as they were not tied in a manner known only to Bolivian merchant sailors or a small tribe of gipsies from northern Persia, and since the fibres bore no traces of raw opium, gold dust, or a face-powder sold only in one exclusive shop in Paris, the string told him no more than the paper it had covered. Nesbit seemed mildly disappointed, but unsurprised. He put the box back into his safe, pulling out a lumpy envelope in return. Bringing it to the desk, he fished from it a pair of small silver lockets strung on copper-wire chains and handed us each one.

Holmes smiled, as if he’d seen an old friend, and thumbed the surface of his with familiarity. I held mine up to the light. It was a rude piece of jewellery, with touches of black enamel in the silver and an almost invisible latch on one side, which opened to reveal a small twist of soft rice paper around a hard centre. I unfurled this cautiously, set aside the tiny chip of turquoise it contained, and examined the paper. It had been stamped with an inscription, its ink bleeding into the fibres; the script was unknown to me.

“What does the writing say?” I asked Nesbit.

“It’s a standard Buddhist benediction, for protection on the road. The usefulness of the charm lies in catching the eye of another who holds one. And since such objects can be stolen, the phrase that accompanies it is paramount.” He told us the phrase, in Hindi, and had us repeat it twice so he could be sure we had the proper and essential emphasis on the fourth word.

Holmes dropped his over his neck, working it inside his collar, then murmured, “The three men found dead and tortured. Were they, too, ‘Sons of the Charm’?”

“They were. And yes, the charms each wore are missing.”

I thought to myself that it might be time to replace this style of charm with something less widely circulated, but at least we were forewarned. Holmes slid the oilskin document case into his inner pocket, and stood up.

We shook Nesbit’s hand, and he locked the safe and walked us to the door. We paused on the verandah, listening to the sound of an approaching motor. As it pulled up before the house, Nesbit turned his head slightly and said, “It might be best to commit as much of the file as possible to memory, and burn the rest. I’ve also given you three methods of reaching me in an emergency. If there’s anything at all I can do, any time . . .”

“We shall be in touch,” Holmes told him. Hari stepped out of the motorcar to hold its door for us, then climbed behind the wheel and drove us back into the city.

Chapter Eight

Somewhat to my surprise, we did not instantly pack our bags and dash from the hotel into hiding, taking refuge in some Oriental equivalent of Holmes’ London bolt-holes. Rather, he poured the contents of the leather case out onto the floor and set about reading them.

“I thought you and Nesbit agreed that we might be in some danger here,” I said, with what I considered admirable patience.

He looked up with a frown at the distraction. “Oh, no more than usual. We shall be away before any rifles can sight down on our necks.”

“Good to hear,” I muttered, and picked up a page from the file.

Nesbit had made no attempt at presenting a coherent narrative of Kimball O’Hara’s life and work; he’d merely copied specific documents pertaining to the man’s last year or two of active field service in the Survey, before he had vanished from the Simla road. The ongoing problem of independent border kingdoms had been O’Hara’s main concern, as indeed it had been the concern of his superiors since the days of the East India Company: One minor king who defied British rule and surreptitiously opened his state to the enemy could spell disaster for British India. And in the past, hereditary rulers of the native states had not all demonstrated an unswerving sense of loyalty when it came to bribes and blandishments. Moslem nawabs and Hindu rajas, squelched into their borders first by the Company and later the Crown, had spent their entire lives with nothing to do but squabble over rank and invent ways to spend their money. The idea of an hereditary prince joining sides with the Communists was, of course, absurd on the surface, but that by no means ruled out the possibility, no more than it had for that American aristocrat, Thomas Goodheart.

O’Hara’s last report, three tightly written pages reproduced in photograph that we might recognise the handwriting if we happened upon it again, concerned a number of apparently unrelated but nonetheless provocative events and overheard statements concerning two of the principalities along the northern border. A seller of horses commenting on the sudden interest in his wares by the raja of Singhal’s men; an itinerant fakir bemoaning the treatment he had received in Khanpur’s main city, where before his begging had been welcomed; a huge order for raw cotton, enough to clothe all of Khanpur’s subjects in one go; and a dozen other incidents.

Cotton, I reflected idly, was also an essential element in the manufacture of high explosives.

When I had absorbed the contents of the letter, I turned to the writing itself. The distinctive running script was indeed similar to that of his copyist, Nesbit, although whether or not the printed numerals of the parcel reflected the same school’s training I was not prepared to say. In either case, behind the anonymous precision of the script could be seen evidence of a remarkably self-contained and self-assured hand. There was a touch of egotism in his capital Es and obstinacy in his lowercase Bs, but those were balanced by the humour in his Ss and Is and the simplicity of his capitals in general. All in all, the hand that had written this document was ruled by precision, toughness, and a high degree of imagination, and I found myself thinking that, if “Kim” had indeed sided against the British government, he might well have had good reason.

I caught myself up short. That kind of romantic nonsense would get us nowhere. In any event, we had to find the man before we could lay judgement upon his actions, and I could not see that the documents provided us with any clear direction.

“What do you think, Holmes?” Generally, venturing such a vague query resulted only in a burst of scorn, suggesting as it did that I was at a complete loss to know where I stood; but sometimes, and particularly if Holmes was as wrapped up in his thoughts as he appeared to be now, a vague probe merely loosed his tongue. To my relief, so it proved.

“Simla first, I believe. Three years makes for a glacier-cold trail, but he has always been a memorable character, and cautious enquiry might uncover a trace from his passing.”

“From what you told Nesbit, we will not be openly taking the train as Sherlock Holmes and wife.”

“I shouldn’t think that a good idea, no. And as we shall have to assume that we have attracted notice, it would be pushing our luck to board the train as two stray Europeans.”

I sighed to myself, and told him, “Well, whatever disguise you come up with, kindly make sure that the shoes aren’t too crippling.”

He paused to gaze up into mid-air. “Yes. Odd, that your trunk has not come to light.”

“You think its disappearance may be related? But that would mean that someone knew we would be on board that ship before we left Marseilles.”

“Not necessarily. It could have been diverted with the first rush of coolies in Bombay.”

“In either case, what would anyone want with my trunk?”

“The Baskerville case began with a missing boot,” he mused. “The same question occurred then. Perhaps they wished to compile evidence. Or wanted to steal your revolver. Which reminds me, we shall have to get you another one.”

“Perhaps they wished to be sure I had only one pair of shoes, and then arranged for the ruination of those, that they might pick me out of a crowd,” I said. I intended to be facetious, but Holmes took my suggestion at face value.

“True. It’s the one garment you might find time-consuming to replace.” My feet are large for a woman’s shoe, yet narrow for a man’s, and that morning the hotel manager’s shoe-seller had come up with nothing wearable. I should, I supposed, have to have a pair made, but bespoke footwear did indeed take longer to make than clothing.

“Are you serious?” I asked, but he merely grunted, and returned his attention to the document in his hand.

We took lunch in the hotel dining room—sitting well away from windows, I noticed. Afterwards, Holmes folded his table napkin and got to his feet.

“Russell, I should appreciate it if you were to stay in our rooms this afternoon while I make the necessary purchases for our disguises.”

“Why?”

“Because as an Englishwoman, you would stand out in the bazaars more than I do.”

“Very well,” I said, surprising him. “But if you haven’t returned by six o’clock, I shall walk out of the hotel’s front doors and come looking for you.”

He believed me.

I went back upstairs to our first-floor rooms, locking the door behind me. I was never entirely comfortable when Holmes took off like that—which was odd, considering how often it happened. But that afternoon I wandered the rooms, unable to settle to the work at hand, picking up objects and putting them down again. At one point I came across the small lumpy envelope Nesbit had given us, containing the amulets. Holmes, I noticed, had taken his already. I took the other, fastening it around my neck, and went to the looking-glass to inspect it.

The silver charm looked like the sort of thing a tourist might buy, or a poor Indian. It was the kind of decoration sold at any of a thousand shops in the city, crudely worked but not unattractive. I rather liked it, in fact, and although I hadn’t intended actually to wear the thing, changed my mind. Its secret-society overtones, which I found somewhere between quaint and silly, nonetheless held a sneaking kind of reassurance. I clasped my hand around it, then laughed at my fancy and got out my books.

I spent the afternoon immersed in Hindi grammar, deciphering the written letters and trying to make sense of the vocabulary. When my mind began to stutter, I rested it by conjuring coins from mid-air and practising the hand movements of deception, then relaxed with the headlines on that day’s Pioneer. Halfway through the afternoon, the hotel’s shoe-seller came with another selection of footwear, but I dismissed him—gently—after I had examined his ideas of footwear suitable for European ladies.

When he had left, I rang for a cool drink and a map of the country. With commendable promptness I received a pitcher of some sweet, mango-flavoured drink (with no ice) and a crisply folded map of India, which I spread out onto the floor. I sipped and studied and passed the afternoon without too much dwelling on the possibility of snipers’ cross-hairs following my husband’s back, but I will admit that my heart rose when I heard his key enter the lock.

“Thirty years,” were his words of greeting. “Thirty-two years since I was here, during which time the city has gone from Moghul backwater to capital city, and still the same shopkeepers cling to their corners.”

“You had success,” I noted.

“Indeed.”

“And yet your hands bear no parcels.”

“Certainly not. To walk out the door of this particular hotel in native garb would be noteworthy. Better to slip away as ourselves, and drop those identities behind us in the bazaar.”

“You found a bolt-hole?”

“One might call it that,” he prevaricated, and refused to tell me more. Which meant, I was sure, that the place in which we would transform ourselves would be filthy beyond belief.

“When shall we set off?”

“The cook tells me that the night watchman comes in just before midnight, and invariably visits the kitchen for a few minutes upon arrival. An ideal time to make our departure through the back.”

I rose briskly and walked out of the room.

“Russell, where are you going?”

“Holmes, I intend to bath, long and deep. Knowing you, it will be my last opportunity for some days.”

It was, as it turned out, an optimistic judgement.

We dined downstairs, Holmes on roast meat that was billed as beef and I on a dish largely rice, with bits of dried fish. We lingered over the meal, and even allowed our waiter to serve us with apple tart, which proved delicious once it had been dug free from the thick clots of Mrs Bird’s Custard. Coffee and a brandy for Holmes, and we retired up the stairs as if to our beds.

Instead, we prepared for our departure from India’s European community. Between the contents of my luggage that had survived our voyage and a judicious plundering of Holmes’ possessions, I put together a costume that would pass for an Englishman’s in the dark. My hair, as always, was a problem in disguise, and topees were simply Not Worn after sunset; in recognition of this Holmes had brought back with him from the bazaar a cloth cap not too unlike those worn in England by lower-class labourers and upper-class bloods.

We settled to our studies, planning on a couple of hours’ work before our midnight departure. But just past ten-thirty, a time when the floors vibrated with the motion of our neighbours and the hum of guests going past in the corridor was at a peak, a shudder of alarm ran through the building, a shout and a pounding on doors, one after another, working its way rapidly towards us.