The Game

With many twists and turns through the servants’ passages, we eventually came out at the side entrance of the hotel, where we stepped over the hastily abandoned bags of some late arrival and trotted down the dim alley, past the guest stables and garage until we came out on the next major thoroughfare. We slowed to a stroll among the night traffic, its pedestrians as yet unaware of the nearby alarms, and after a few minutes hailed a rickshaw. The puller did not comment on Holmes’ destination, which proved to be a brightly lit palace of the senses such as one found in any city of size. It catered to Europeans, although I glimpsed a pair of brown faces in the party of men going through the door, and the music that rolled out with the opening of the doors seemed a peculiar amalgam of West and East. The tune rendered by the weird and wailing native instruments was that of a popular song I remembered my father crooning, “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” although I doubted that he would recognise it without help.

I was just as glad, however, that our path did not take us into the place, but around it. Holmes had clearly laid out this escape, and walked without hesitation down the side street and through a gateway into a yard lit only by a feeble oil lamp. He opened a door, taking my hand to guide me inside, and shut it behind him. I waited in the blackness as his bag hit the ground and his fingers sorted through the contents of his pocket before coming out with a rattling match-box. The box rasped open and with a scrape, light flared. He stepped across to where a handful of fresh candles lay on a tea chest, set the match to one, and dribbled a puddle of wax onto the chest to hold it upright.

We were in what I would have called a cellar, had we not entered it from street level. It was a dank and rustling space about fifteen feet square, with neither windows nor stairs, although the door appeared stout enough. Two walls were heaped with anonymous crates and barrels, on top of which lay a number of string-wrapped, dust-free parcels. The fruit of Holmes’ shopping expedition, I had no doubt.

He wedged a chip of brick under the edge of the door to discourage intruders, and took out his folding knife to slice through the twine of one parcel, tossing its contents in my direction. Most of the garments landed on the dirt floor—thus, I supposed, adding to the verisimilitude of my appearance. From another parcel he took a bottle about five inches in height, containing a thick, dark liquid. This he did not toss, but placed with a scrap of soft cloth on the top of one of the barrels. I removed most of my upper garments, uncorked the bottle, and set about turning myself into a Eurasian.

Without a mirror or adequate light, the walnut-based skin dye was a somewhat haphazard affair, and would need attention the next morning in order to pass close inspection. But for now, by night and heavily clothed, our faces and hands would give the necessary impression. When the dyestuff had worked its way into our pores, Holmes prised the top from one of the barrels, and we washed our skin in the water it contained.

Baggy salwaar trousers of coarse white cotton, knee-length kameez and padded waistcoats over, floppy turbans wrapping our heads and woollen shawls around our shoulders: We would disappear into a crowd. My once-handsome shoes went into the bag Holmes had found to replace the dignified leather case, and I pulled on a pair of toe-cutting native sandals. We looked more like a pair of enthusiastic guests at a costume party than we did two residents of the great sub-continent, but it would do for the moment. Holmes blew out the candle, and we slipped away into the city.

Chapter Nine

For two days, we camped in a tiny room in the back of a spice- seller’s in a small bazaar to the south of Delhi. The warring fragrances were a mixed blessing, becoming at times so powerful as to make one dizzy, but even when sealed up for the night they succeeded in overriding the less appealing odours of our surroundings.

I should say, rather, that I camped there, for Holmes spent the entire first day scavenging through the city for what we should need; on the second day, he abandoned the shack well before dawn, leaving me with a jug of a particularly disgusting and considerably more permanent skin dye. He was away until the afternoon, and returned to find me black of hair and brown of skin, to say nothing of bored to tears. He rapped on the sheet of metal that was the door, and I removed the prop to let him in.

I had to admit, Holmes dressed down better than I did. Apart from being far too tall, he was every inch a native labourer, and even his height he could disguise by rearranging his spine to drop a full six inches. He set a frayed flour sack onto the dirt floor and dropped to his heels by my side, pulling a dripping leaf-wrapped parcel from his breast and laying a slab of fried puri on top. I eagerly peeled back the leaf and mashed the rice and lentils into manageable little balls, a technique I had perfected in Palestine.

“Did you get everything you needed?” I asked around a mouthful.

Holmes chuckled. “Nesbit nearly rode me down. It would appear that beggars are not welcome along the British rides, and he sits a high-strung horse. But yes, his sources are better than my own, and even if the wrong person hears of his purchases, little will be thought of it—the man is forever acquiring odd objects for his own purposes.”

Most of what Holmes required for the next stage in our campaign he had found in the bazaars, but it would appear that revolvers were not generally available on the open market, and to ingratiate himself into the underworld of Delhi in pursuit of firearms would have taken time. So he had set off that morning with the intention of asking Nesbit for one, and had clearly returned successful. I swallowed the last of the rice, scrubbed the inside of the banana leaf with the stub of bread, and pulled the flour sack over to see what he had found.

I raised my eyebrow at the revolver. It was a pretty thing—almost ridiculously pretty, with mother-of-pearl inlay on the grip and a curlicue of flowers up the barrel. Was this Nesbit’s idea of a lady’s gun, or his idea of a joke? Remembering the quiet amusement in his eyes, I thought it might be both.

“He assures me it is more authoritative than it appears,” Holmes said, answering my dubious look. “And it takes .450 bullets, which are readily available. I should think it all right.”

I balanced it in my hand, feeling its weight—it was indeed more substantial than it looked. When I cracked it to look at the chambers, I found its mechanism smooth, the surfaces well cared for, so I shrugged and laid it by my side: I have no objection to decoration, if it does not interfere with function.

Further in the sack I uncovered a change of raiment—and, more important, a change in identity. This was the garb of a Moslem, instead of the Hindu clothes I wore now, subtly different to English eyes but a clear statement to natives. The itinerant trader in northern India is more often a Mussalman than a Hindu, and that identity possessed the singular advantage that I was already able to recite all the important prayers and a good portion of the Koran in near-flawless Arabic. As Moslems moving through a mixed countryside, we would be both apart and identifiable, an ideal compromise. Best of all, Holmes had included a more satisfactory pair of native boots of some soft, thick leather. I pulled them on and stretched my toes in pleasure. I wouldn’t have put it past my husband and partner to indulge his occasionally twisted sense of humour by presenting me with an all-over chador in which to stumble the roads, but it seemed I was to be allowed my oft-assumed identity as a young male, younger brother to the identity Holmes was now assuming, although his was unrelieved black, for some reason, and he wore a Moslem cap instead of a turban like mine.

As I bound my hair tightly to my head and prepared to wrap the ten yards of light cloth over it, I mused aloud, “How long do you suppose it will be before a woman in these parts of the world won’t have to disguise herself as a man to be allowed some degree of freedom?”

“I can’t see the Pankhursts making much head-way in this country,” Holmes said absently.

“No, you’re right. Perhaps by the time this generation’s grandchildren are grown, freedom will have grown as well.”

“I shouldn’t hold my breath, Russell. Here, you’ll need to change the shape of that puggaree.”

My hands had automatically shaped the thing as if I were moving among Bedu Arabs, but Holmes tweaked it from my head and unrolled it with a snap of his wrist before demonstrating on himself. He went through the motions twice, then handed the cloth back to me and watched as I attempted to copy his motions. His had looked as if he’d worn the garment his entire life, while mine felt as if a faint breeze would send it trailing to the dust, but I told myself that the sensation would pass, and tried to move naturally while I put my new belongings into some kind of order.

“You’ll be pleased to know we have a donkey awaiting us, Russell,” Holmes said cheerfully.

“Oh Lord, not again!”

“It was mules last time.”

“And they were bad enough.”

“Better than carrying everything ourselves.”

“You can be in charge of the beast.”

“That would be most inappropriate,” he said, and curse it, he was right. If I was to be the younger partner on the road—apprentice, servant, son, what have you—then the four-legged member of our troupe would have to be my responsibility. As well as the cooking pot. Cursing under my breath, I thrust my spare garments into the cloth bag and tied my turban once again. This time it felt more secure, which improved my temper somewhat. It was never easy, partnering a man with as much experience as Holmes had—I truly detest the sensation of incompetence.

We spent the night hours practising with the equipment Holmes had conjured out of the bazaar. A set of linking rings, larger relatives of the linked silver bracelets he had bought in Aden, appeared welded in place, awaiting only the magician’s touch before the metal miraculously gave way and allowed the rings to part. A long knife that collapsed into itself at the press of a button; a light frame with a pneumatic pump to lift me in levitation; a small laboratory of lethal chemicals whose reactions would give clouds or sparks or other useful effects. And, when we were ready for it, torches wrapped for flaming, for the ever-impressive juggling of fire.

In the hour before dawn, when only the chowkidars were awake at their posts, we shouldered our cloth bags and in silence left the spice-seller’s shop. The air was still fresh, without the dust raised by a quarter of a million tramping feet, the stars still dimly visible before fifty thousand cook-fires threw their pall over the heavens. Holmes made his way as one who was intimate with the place, ducking past godowns and crossing over deserted boulevards, until the smell of livestock rose up around us and we entered a sort of livestock market, horses in one area, large pale bullocks in the other. Magnificently oblivious of the dung heaps, Holmes strode forward to a shed with a tight-shut door. He banged the side of his fist against the shed’s side, but answer came there none. He drew back his hand to hammer again, when a voice piped up from behind us, speaking Hindi.

“If you are wanting the horse-seller Ram Bachadur, he has gone away to see his mother.”

It was a child, a small person of perhaps nine or ten in Hindu dress, perched atop the low stable wall eating peanuts. Even in the half-light of early dawn it was clear that there was something curious about him, some slightly Mongolian angle to his features, so that one expected him to be slow, his natural development retarded by nature. It took but one brief exchange to begin to question the assumption.

“Do you know where he has gone?” Holmes asked, his arm still raised.

“But of course I know; how else would I have agreed to await your coming?” the boy retorted, the scorn in his voice perfectly modulated to place us a step below him. He spat a shell on the ground by way of punctuation.

Holmes lowered his hand, his head tipped to one side as he, too, re-evaluated the urchin. “Are we to take delivery of the donkey and cart from you, Young Prince?”

The boy slid down from the wall and sauntered around towards the pens. “Not the same animal you had agreed upon, oah no,” he answered, the last two words an English interjection before returning to the vernacular. “That creature was good only for feeding the vultures, and moreover had the trick of breaking its hobbles on the first or second night out and trotting home to its stable. I succeeded in loosing its rope during the night and exchanging it for its sister, who is an ‘altogether more satisfactory beast.’ ” Again, the final phrase was in ornately accented English, which might have been disquieting except that I had the clear idea that it was merely his way of demonstrating what a man of the world he was.

We followed our unlikely guide past some stinking pens that were full to bursting with horseflesh, to one that was deserted but for one lone donkey, dozing in a corner. The boy climbed up on the gate and gave a little chirrup sound with his teeth, and the creature’s ears flapped, its head coming up and all four feet planting themselves on the ground. It then hesitated, seeing three of us, before sidling around to greet the boy, who reached out and scratched its skull; even in the dim light, I clearly saw the cloud of scurf and dust the motion raised. However, I could also see that the animal appeared well fed and alert.

“And the cart?” Holmes asked.

The boy swung his legs over the gate and dropped into the pen, splashing through the half-liquid and entirely noxious ground to the far corner of the pen, where he stuck his toes into invisible niches and clambered over the wall like a monkey. A minute later he reappeared around the outside of the pen, heaving at a miniature cart that contained a child-sized armload of hay. He stopped in front of us, let the traces drop, and gestured proudly at the light little vehicle. It had probably started life as a cart for the entertainment of small English children, and although its paint was long gone and the high sides had seen rough use, the solid craftsmanship held, and the repairs to its two big wheels and leather straps were neat. The boy stood looking up at Holmes, taking no notice of the muck to his knees; I wondered again about his mental acuity.

Holmes surveyed the object solemnly, and nodded.

Instantly, the child shot back over the gate to leap onto the animal’s scrofulous back, nudging it forward with heels and knees. I opened the gate to let it out, and in a moment the beast was standing amiably between the cart shafts while the boy strapped it in. After some adjustments to the girth, the boy slapped the animal’s shoulder in satisfaction and stood away. “You are to pay me what is owed,” he said.

“Oho,” Holmes retorted, “and when it comes to light that the horse-seller merely sleeps, and you have delivered to my hands a stolen donkey and cart, what then do I tell the police who come to arrest me?”

The boy’s indignation was profound, and well polished. “Sir, never would I do such a thing! You came to buy a donkey, here is your donkey, and I am here to collect for the horse-seller. You have paid him one-half, and all the cost of the cart, and one day’s food. You may pay me the remainder.”

“That much at least he knows correctly,” Holmes said to me, then to the boy, “But you will have to tell me exactly what is owed, before I believe you.”

The child hesitated, caught on dilemma’s horns. If he quoted the amount Holmes clearly had in mind, then we might believe his veracity; if, however, he followed his gut instincts and demanded more—which is the only way to do business in India—then he risked losing all. He sighed, and rolled his eyes to express his disgust for the whole affair.

“Twenty-three rupees,” he admitted. Holmes raised his eyebrows and inclined his head slightly in a nod before turning his attention at last to the beast herself, looking to see if the trick lay with the substitution. But she looked sound beneath the filth, and if she was willing to respond to the blandishments of an urchin, no doubt her affections, or at least her attention, could be bought by owners willing to ply her with plentiful food and the occasional application of a brush to her sides. Holmes reached for his money-pouch, and thumbed the coins into the child’s hand.

The boy accepted the coins with the gravity of a bank manager, bound them up into a rag, and then scampered over the shed and pulled himself up its outside wall, diving headfirst through a small, high window. A minute later he re-emerged, the coin-rag replaced in his hand by a horse-brush and a small sack of grain. His grin told us without words that these were not part of Holmes’ original bargain, but a baksheesh he had appropriated from the horse-dealer’s store. He tossed both sack and brush into the cart beside the armload of hay, gathered up the donkey’s lead, and looked between us expectantly. “Where do we go?”

“Oh no,” Holmes said firmly. “I required a donkey, not a donkey-master. We travel alone.”

“But if you do not take me, I shall be beaten and starve,” the child whined, pitifully. Holmes merely laughed.

“I cannot imagine one such as you starving,” he said. “Give me the lead.”

“Then I shall follow you on the road,” the boy declared. He sounded determined, alarmingly so; Holmes eyed him curiously.

“Why would you do so?”

“Because I had my horoscope cast two days past, and I was told that my path lay with two strangers dressed as Mussalmani.”

I was not certain that I had caught the subtle oddity in his phrasing—not “two Moslems” but “two men dressed as Moslems”—but Holmes’ reaction made it clear that I had heard it correctly. He went very still, his grey eyes probing the child like a pair of scalpels. The boy squirmed, and changed his words.

“I cannot help it, that is what I was told. That there would be two Mussalmani come to buy a donkey, unlike any men I knew from the bazaar. That is all, oah yes.”

Holmes did not believe in the retraction any more than I did. He raised his eyes to mine, consulting; I could only shrug. I did not doubt that the child would follow us, and keeping him close at hand made controlling him, and finding out what he was up to, more likely.

Besides, I was more than happy to have someone else in charge of pack animals and drudgery.

Holmes cast his gaze down at the servant we had just acquired. “And how much will it cost me to have you look after this beast and serve our needs?”

“Oah, next to nothing,” the boy chirped in English, elaborating somewhat more believably, “Five rupees every week.”

Holmes burst into laughter at the effrontery, causing the donkey to snort and tug at the rope. The boy controlled her without a struggle, and said, “Very well then, you will give me my food and drink and whatever small money you think I am worthy of. You see, I am trusting you gentlemen, not to torment and tease a homeless orphan.”

Boy and man gazed at each other for a time. Then Holmes said, “What is your name?”

The urchin wriggled with satisfaction, taking this as it was clearly meant, an acceptance of his proposal. “I am Bindra.”

“Well, Bindraji,” Holmes said, adding a mock honorific, “we are in your hands.”

The deed settled, we dropped our bags into the cart; the boy, after enquiring again as to which road we wished to be on, tugged the donkey into motion and led his small caravan out onto the road.

“Why do I get the idea that the child is going to take us wherever he thinks we should go?” I asked Holmes in a low voice.

“A most determined infant,” he agreed.

“It’s going to be very difficult, not to give ourselves away in front of him.”

“Hm,” Holmes commented, unconvinced. “I should say that his wits tend more towards the cunning than the analytical.”

I thought privately that the child would have to be remarkably obtuse to spend much time in our company without noticing that one of the “gentlemen” had some very odd habits when it came to private matters, but I said nothing. If the boy’s presence became difficult, we could always drive him away.

Or, we could try.

We turned north, the sun rising on our faces as we walked the road with a million other inhabitants. We were making for Simla, the government’s summer capital and year-round home of the Ethnological Survey of India. Holmes had debated heading south first in order to shake off any possible enemies from our tail, but he had decided that disguise and the sheer number of people on the road ought to be enough, so north it was, with the sun to our right.

Five miles outside of the city we paused to take tea at a roadside café that seemed to double as a motorcar repair shop, hung about with rubber belts and tyre tubes. Holmes wandered away to talk with the mechanics, and when we had finished with our refreshment I was not surprised to find him directing our steps around the back of the garage. There we received the rest of our possessions for the road, left there by Nesbit: a tent of some light but tightly woven fabric with a silken sheen, a pair of sleeping rolls, pots, pans, and paraffin lamp.

Everything a travelling magic show might require.

We kept close eyes on our new assistant, but although he darted to the side from time to time, picking up the odd twig or discarded object, he made no attempt to flee with our possessions. He appeared to have a jackdaw’s love of shiny objects, nearly coming to grief under the feet of a gaily caparisoned elephant when he spotted a silver button about to be trampled into the dust. He darted forward, under the animal’s very belly, and out the other side with his fist raised in triumph; the button he polished on his shirt-front, and hung on a piece of twine from the donkey’s harness.

Being caught up in his own affairs, the boy spent most of his time well ahead of us, which meant that I could continue my language lessons without attracting his questions. In another day or two, I thought, I might even venture the odd phrase in the boy’s direction.

Or perhaps three. I was already beginning to suspect that young Bindra was neither as innocent nor as feeble-minded as he appeared.

Chapter Ten

I had been in India for nearly a week, but only that morning, on foot and beneath the hot blue sky, did I begin to see the country. From the train I had witnessed a dream-like sequence: canals and hamlets; elephants bearing massive loads and camels hitched to wagons; a dead cow in a field, decorated with vultures; a man in homespun dhoti and purple socks wobbling on a shiny new bicycle; an Englishman in khaki shorts solemnly jumping rope on his verandah; a peacock atop a crumbling wall, feathers spread wide in a blaze of shimmering iridescence before his dull and disinterested lady; train stations without number, each packed like sardine-tins with veiled women hugging bundles and kohl-eyed babies, men draped with a thousand goods for sale, cows stealing from the food-sellers, policemen pontificating, and scabby dogs picking up the edges. Just before dusk I had seen a red-eyed sadhu seated cross-legged at a roadside shrine, his forehead smeared with the three white lines of the holy man, his thin body clad only in beads and the scrap of cloth around his loins. At first light the following morning I had seen a group of men in a river, brushing their teeth and washing their heads, while farther out from the bank three elephants were being bathed. From behind the dirty windows I had watched the passing of a dusty and unreal landscape, as if I were being transported through an art gallery.

Now, I had stepped into the painting, which mixed Breughel’s activity with Persia’s colours, with just a touch of Bosch horrors.

Women dressed in crimson and apple-green and yellow ochre swayed with loads balanced on their heads, one hand steadying the brass pot or the straw basket, the other holding one end of their scarf up, lest strange eyes see what they shouldn’t. Men in cheap suits and men in filthy lunghis scurried or lounged, chewing betel or smoking thin brown bidis. Naked children tumbled in the gutters while pale hump-backed cows roamed freely through the markets, snatching greens where they might.

And when we were finally clear of the city, when the tree-lined road stretched out before us through fields of cauliflower and onions, sugar cane and chilis, the air began to smell of something other than dust and diesel. The acrid odour from a brilliant field of flowering mustard blended with the soft sweet incense wafting from the doors of a small whitewashed temple. The stink of putrefaction slunk over from a heap of scrap-draped bones, too leathery even for vultures, then the next moment the nostrils tingled with pepper and turmeric from a spice-seller’s, and rejoiced with the rich rosewater smells from the sweetmeat stand. Wet dust around a well; drying clothing from a long hedge; the ripe dung of an elephant; hot-burning coal and overheated metal from a blacksmith’s; urine and feces; opium from an upstairs window; sweet-cooking wheat chapatis from below.

We were on the Grand Trunk Road, that river of humanity flowing fifteen hundred miles across northern India from the swampy heat of Calcutta to the thin, dry air of the Khyber Pass, linking the Bay of Bengal with Afghanistan, passing the lands of conquest: Darius and Alexander, Timur and Babur, slaughtering and conquering and looting; the plains of Kurukshestra where the Aryans first took root; the battlefields of The Mahabharata and of the Indian Mutiny three millennia later; the place where Babur killed fifteen thousand and brought the Moghul empire to Delhi, where Afghans killed Mahrattas, and where Persians killed Moghuls (twenty thousand in two hours, the historians say) then walked on to strip Delhi of its gold, its Peacock Throne, and its Koh-i-noor diamond. Holy places and bloodshed lay all around me, while in the fore, Bindra gnawed on a length of sugar cane and skipped beside the placid donkey.

To begin with, all was dust and turmoil, even at an hour when the dew was still damp on the canvas. With the distinct sensation of becoming a twig tossed into a fast-moving stream, I gave myself over to the current, needing only to keep the boy’s head in sight, and to keep from stepping under the feet of an ill-tempered camel along the slower edges or the wheels of a hurtling lorry in the swift-flowing centre. It was exhilarating, it was exhausting, and it served as nothing else to set me firmly into this foreign land. We paused for lunch at a roadside tea shop, an open-fronted shack with a roof half thatch, half waving tile, beside a spreading mango tree under which the café owner had arrayed his ranks of the ubiquitous wood-framed charpoy beds, the piece of furniture that is dining table, chaise longue, and business centre in one. As I took up my position on the sagging ropes, I felt almost at home in my foreign raiment, as if my skin had changed.

Certainly my tongue had. Without much pause for thought, I told the boy to bring us some samosas, pointing with my chin at the seller across the way. We ate our greasy snack from the clean leaf-plates as the road swept past, watching the traffic as if we were a Thames-side picnic party on a summer’s Saturday afternoon. At the end, we tossed our earthenware cups onto the pile of such, and continued on our way.

We came that night to a caravanserai that Holmes said had been there since the days of the emperor Akbar, where men and animals from all the reaches of the land came together for the night to shelter behind the crumbling Moghul walls. Bindra took some annas from Holmes and came back with an armload of feed for the donkey, then requested a greater sum and went off again. I eased myself down onto my pack, feeling all the muscles that I had not worked for months. My skin, toughened though it was from the sea journey, tingled with sunburn, and my feet had rubbed raw in three or four spots. I was very happy to sit quietly. I would have been happier to lie down and sleep, but it was still broad daylight, so I compromised by closing my tired eyes and paying attention to my other senses.

The cooking fires here smelt like nowhere else. Not coal or wood, nor Irish peat, nor even the varied substances used in Palestine. Here, cow dung mixed with straw was slapped onto the walls in dinner-plate–sized mounds to dry, then peeled off, heaped into baskets, and hawked to travellers in the caravanserai. The musky smoke rose around me, blended with the odours of fresher droppings, horse sweat, unwashed clothing, and the spices that went into the evening meals. Someone was cooking chapatis, the delicious smell of wheat flour waking my salivary glands and making me aware of a sharp interest in dinner.

I was just stirring to ask Holmes if he thought we had seen the last of Bindra and our rupees when the boy sauntered up, laden with sacks and twine-wrapped scraps of paper, onions and carrots sticking out of his pockets. He caught up one of the pots and filled it at the communal pump, then dropped to his heels before the fire that we had made (he had gathered a surprising quantity of sticks in his apparently aimless scrounging during the day) and set about constructing dinner. A generous pinch of mustard seed popped and spattered into melted ghee, followed by a sliced onion, half of a somewhat tired cauliflower, and pinches of turmeric, pepper, cumin. And as that mixture was cooking, he took a pair of bowls and placed them between his feet, then pulled over the heavy little canvas sack he’d come back with, rolled down the top, and plunged in a grubby hand. Without taking his eyes off the bustle and activity of our various neighbours, Bindra began to sort the contents. I watched his quick little fingers for a few minutes, then curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see what he had in the sack.

It held a mixture of rice and pulses—an inadvertent mixture, it would seem, because Bindra was separating it back into its component parts. And he did so at an amazing speed, flicking the rice into one bowl and the pulses into the other, dropping any stray pebbles to the ground. I looked at him, looked back at his hands, and couldn’t believe the mechanical speed and precision of his motions: Watching closely, I could see no rice grains join the lentils, no pulses among the rice. The boy pretended to ignore me, but if anything, his hands speeded up.

I took a handful from the bag, to try it myself. With fierce concentration, I could tell one tiny grain from the other after rubbing them for some seconds between finger and thumb. Without benefit of vision, it would take me hours, days to work my way through the two or three pounds his sack contained. He was halfway through it already.

I went to sit next to Holmes, and whispered in English what I had seen. He raised his voice and asked the boy, “Bindra, tell us why you have bought these sweepings from the market?”

“Not sweepings! I do not eat unclean food from off the ground. This is merely the work of a clumsy seller of grain, who allowed one to spill into the other. And he is lazy as well, for rather than going to the labour of sorting, he would rather sell it for next to nothing.”

“And have I paid the full cost of the dhal and the rice, or next to nothing?” Holmes asked drily.

“Not full, no!” the boy declared, filled with righteous indignation. But under Holmes’ gaze, he faltered, and made a show of checking the water to see if it was boiling yet. “I divide the cost of the two, that you may thus pay me for my labours of sorting. Since,” he pointed out darkly, “you have not agreed on a wage for my other hours.”

Holmes chuckled. “You speak fairly, Bindraji. Next time buy the lentils and the rice already separated, and spend your hours at some other work. I shall grant you one rupee each week. And more, when you prove your worth.”

The boy nodded, satisfied for the moment. When the sack was empty he tipped the bowl of lentils into the fried onion and the rice into the water. He scooped up half a dozen round chapatis that he had bought in the market and laid them on top of the pot lids to warm.

“We seem to have found a most capable servant,” Holmes murmured.

“That dinner does smell good.”

“It is, however, provocative to reflect that the trick with the rice and lentils is commonly used to teach sensitivity to the fingertips of apprentice pick-pockets.”

As our meal cooked the caravanserai had been filling up, so that when we looked up from our empty bowls, we found ourselves between a group of Rajputs on their way to the races in Calcutta and a family of Sikhs going home to the Punjab. The Sikhs were four men and a boy of about twelve, all of them handsome and proud.

The men settled their livestock and sent one of their number off to buy a meal. Bindra swilled out our pots beneath the pump, then squatted next to the donkey and smoked one of the noxious Indian cigarettes called bidis before getting out the purloined horse-brush and applying it to the sides of the appreciative donkey. Holmes took out a shiny coin and began to fiddle with it until he caught the Sikh boy’s eyes; he then sharply stretched out his right hand, palm down and fingers outstretched, but the coin, instead of dropping to the ground, vanished. More slowly, he extended his other hand, turned the hand palm up, and there sat the coin. Simple tricks, playing on the shininess of the silver in the firelight, and ignoring the sensation he was causing when the boy tugged at the sleeve of his uncle and pointed at the flicker and dash of silver in the stranger’s hands.

When Holmes appeared to lose the coin, patting all over his garments for it and searching the ground around his feet in alarm, the Sikh family began to do the same—until Holmes looked up, seeming to notice them for the first time. He rose upright, marched across the four paces that separated our two encampments, and shot his hand out to snatch the coin from the brief head-covering of the startled boy.

Holmes held the coin out to the lad, pinched between finger and thumb, but when the boy reached out for it, the coin was gone.

The older men laughed, appreciating the trick, and the boy ducked his head in confusion. But when Holmes moved into his marginally more advanced routines, the adults’ superior smiles faltered, and soon gave way to expressions of frank amazement very like that worn by the boy. And when the magician pulled from his cap a distinctive bridle decoration, which none of them had noticed him steal from their mare a full hour before, there was a general “Oah” of astonishment and much fondling of beards as they discussed the magician’s authority.

Holmes threw me a half-wink, and turned to his bedding roll.

I lay long and listened to the sounds of the Indian night, the murmur of voices and the bullfrog groans of hookahs slowly dying away, leaving only snores, coughs, the bubbling grumble of the camels, the coo of doves, and the distant yammer of jackals to break the great stillness.

I had anticipated enormous problems, living in such public circumstances as a male. It is one thing to adopt the guise in a desert place such as Palestine, when one may see a handful of others in the course of an entire morning, but here, there would be no such privacy. Very fortunately, I have been blessed with a strong bladder, and found that by timing my visits to the fields to the dusk hours, and by making use of the privacy afforded by the tent, my uncharacteristic physiognomy went unnoted. Either that, or my neighbours were too polite to comment.

At first light, with the coughs and throat-clearing rising around us like the sounds of a hospital mustard-gas ward, we beat the frost from our tent and continued on our way. The dawn turned the sky to a yellow-pink at the east, a deep rose to the west, with all the world between made up of insubstantial pink-grey silhouettes, treetops and temples and distant buildings called into being from the drifts of rosy mist, disconnected from any objects that might have roots and foundations, mere islands of dark solidity in a glowing pink sea.

And then the light grew stronger, and the silhouettes took on depth, and soon the sun lumbered huge and orange over the horizon, pulling free of the obscuring mist and dust and smoke. India’s great age and crowdedness and solidity re-established itself, sucking the frost and freshness and youth from the air. The land grew colour and dimension, the spectacular mountains on the horizon retreated into the haze, and a small troupe of wandering magicians left the hurly-burly of the Grand Trunk Road to set off across the Indian countryside.

Of all the possible disguises an English spy might choose, doctor or antiquarian or big-game hunter, ours was one of the more idiosyncratic. For one thing, we were on foot, our pace confined to what our legs would permit, our possessions in a cart so small it looked more a joke than a useful form of transport. To have it pulled by a donkey rather than a bullock, or even a mule, added to the disarming unlikeliness of the entourage, and with Bindra to cook our decidedly non-English meals and barter for staples and fuel added the final touch of verisimilitude. We were foreign, certainly, but nothing about us said “British.” That was, after all, the point of the exercise.

It is something over one hundred and fifty miles between Delhi and Simla. We could have made it there in a forced march—indeed, we might have saved ourselves a great deal of trouble and taken the train, or even hired a motorcar—but at this point in our expedition, the need was greatest to perfect our act, that when we got into the hills, we might be word-perfect. Moving at donkey rate, pausing each day to set up camp and do our performance, we covered at most twenty miles a day.

But in that time I learned to levitate under Holmes’ hand and to swallow a sword without gagging, and we even began to juggle flaming brands between ourselves. When he first saw our conjuring and magic, Bindra was apprehensive, but once he had witnessed the similar reaction of the rustics, he immediately took on the garments of sophistication and scorned to gape, other than secretly. I think he understood that what we did were tricks, not actual necromancy; on the other hand, I do not know that to his mind, there would be much difference between cleverness and supernatural powers.

By the third day on the road, however, he clearly decided to throw himself into the act. On the morning of that day, we passed through a small town, too large for our purposes but convenient for the purchase of supplies. So when the boy turned to Holmes and demanded some money, I figured it was because he’d spotted some brinjal or eggs that he thought we needed, or some of his horrid little bidis. Holmes fished out a rupee, but Bindra left his hand out and said, “Five.”

“Five rupees?” Holmes asked. “But why?”

“You will see.”

Holmes thought about it, and after a moment the remaining coins fell out of the sky, bouncing off the boy’s head. Bindra gathered them from the dust without remark and trotted back the way we had come. Holmes and I continued on our way, for by this time the donkey was nearly as willing to go with us as it was with the boy.

Outside of town, we joined a flock of goats for a time, then found ourselves following a veritable mountain of rustling greenery down the road. When it turned off into a field, we paused to watch a group of men scramble up to loose the huge load of sugar cane from the elephant’s back, leading the animal to one side where it stood patiently, swinging one hind foot while it picked over an offering of the cane it had borne. This was a gur factory, the cane fed through a hand-run crusher so that its grey juice ran into a series of vats set over a fire. All four vats were already boiling furiously, great clouds of intoxicating steam billowing into the cool air. Holmes bargained for half a dozen fist-sized lumps of molasses-rich gur sugar, still warm, which melted under our tongues as we continued on our way.

It was, I thought, both like our wandering time in Palestine and yet very different. Most of the difference lay in the population density, I decided: In Palestine we might walk all day and see but a handful of other nomads, whereas here, we were rarely out of sight of farmers working their fields, holy men tending their roadside shrines, a caravan of camels wending their way from the hills, or women swaying back from the wells with heavy brass pots of water balanced on their heads. Every piece of flat ground was being planted or harvested, every stream was inhabited, if not by young boys and their bullocks, then by the local laundry service, the dhobis slapping their garments on the wet rock, draping the clothing on the bushes to dry, laughing and calling to us without inhibition.

We were well out of town when Bindra came trotting up, but instead of aubergines and oranges he carried an armful of small tin pots, which he arranged carefully inside the jolting cart. And then, instead of taking his place at the head of the donkey, he hopped inside to perch on the canvas-wrapped shapes. Taking out a small stiff-bristled object resembling a tooth-brush for an iron-gummed giant, he dangled over the side of the cart and started scrubbing away at the shabby wood. Bemused, Holmes and I exchanged glances, then moved forward to avoid the flying specks of old paint and dried muck. The boy had, over the past couple of days, succeeded in burnishing the donkey’s coat until it shone; now, it appeared, the cart was to be brought up to snuff as well.

It took him hours to scour the cart down to clean wood. But rather than stop there, he turned to his little tin pots, prised the top from the largest, and pulled another, softer brush from inside his clothing. Dangling over the front of the cart like a monkey from a branch, completely oblivious of his two companions who were all but walking backwards down the road to watch him, he dipped his brush into the pot, stuck out his tongue in concentration, and drew a line of deep, rich blue along the edge of the much-abused wood. This was so interesting, we resumed our position behind the cart in order to watch his progress. The donkey seemed happy to walk without guidance, its long ears swivelling from time to time as it listened to the boy’s encouragement and conversation.

The boy, too, looked healthier, I thought. Certainly he kept cleaner than he had in the livestock-seller’s pens. Holmes had bought him a change of raiment, child-sized pyjama-trousers and buffalo-hide sandals underneath the European-style shirt Bindra had chosen. He went bareheaded, either because of his age or his inclination, and generally bare-footed unless the track was particularly rough, but since he and Holmes had come out of the clothing shop, I had not once seen him without the colourful vest decorated with small chips of mirrored glass held in place with circles of embroidery floss. The shiny specks caught the sun as he dangled on the cart, his brush transforming the entire thing to the colour of the Indian sky an hour after the sun had set, and I had to smile.

“A curious child,” I commented to Holmes. (A distinct advantage of male dress here was that it permitted me to walk closer to Holmes than I could have as a woman, thus allowing us conversations we might not otherwise have had.)

“He has his pride,” my companion answered, and I saw what he meant: Bindra’s vision of our troupe’s dignity did not include a bashed-about wagon.

“What did Kipling call his Kim? ‘Little friend of all the world’?”

“Yes; being all the world’s friend, O’Hara ultimately belonged to no-one. In that respect, the phrase applies to young Bindra. Kim, however, formed his own family as time went on, binding himself to the chosen few irrevocably and utterly. I am not certain that this child has that capacity.”

“He seems to have formed an affection for us—certainly for you.”

“But can you see him hesitating for a moment to drop us if something better came along?”

I could not. The jackdaw-boy, with his fascination for shiny knick-knacks and decorations, was probably just taken by the oddity that we represented, and perhaps by the challenge. “Do you think he’ll try to steal us blind when he goes?” I had been keeping all my valuables on my person, not where he could find them on the cart.

“Oddly enough, I do not. He seems to have a set of standards he holds himself to. If he leaves, he may well help himself to some of our possessions, but only by way of compensation for what wages he considers earned but unpaid. Not more.”

With this reminder of the curious Oriental concept of ethics, back my thoughts circled to the enigma of Kim. “And do you think O’Hara might not have done the same? Was the Survey part of the world with which he was casual friends, or was it family, to which he bound himself irrevocably?”

Holmes sucked his teeth, a peculiar habit he had never demonstrated before coming here—a part of his current persona, no doubt. “That’s the essential question, is it not? I had the impression that O’Hara would lay his life down for Creighton’s organisation, but it is, I suppose, possible that his mind differentiated between Creighton and the Survey. That when Creighton went, the ties of brotherhood lapsed, and O’Hara merely stayed on for a while out of good manners.”

“The same good manners Nesbit was talking about, that drive an Indian to tell you yes when he knows the answer is no.”

“Precisely.”

“Which means that if O’Hara has joined the other side—whichever side that might be—it isn’t so much treason as a resumption of deeper loyalties.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t see that helps much.”

“No.”

By dusk, we had a mostly blue donkey cart, and Bindra went about preparing the meal with a hum of satisfaction between his teeth. And while Holmes and I were occupied with the evening’s performance, the donkey-boy laid claim to our paraffin lamp to continue his work. I looked down the road at the bright glow of the light, and saw him dusting off the wheels preparatory to painting them, squinting over the smoke from his bidi. Later I saw that he had begun to sketch some other design along the upper edge of the cart with a charred twig. Before Holmes forcibly reclaimed the lamp and shut it down for the night, the boy had laid a precise border of yellow Indian swastiks along all the edges, and begun a large, all-seeing magic eye on the front panel, to proceed us down the road. The next day he found frustrating, as the painting of the sun and moon he wanted on the side panels was not made any easier by the jostle of the cart, and eventually he gave up, sulking when Holmes would not stop the night at a pleasant village reached at two in the afternoon.

However, the enforced delay proved beneficial. The night before, I had been replacing the small mirrored juggling balls back into their protective bag, under the watchful eye of the young artist, when the method of their manufacture attracted my closer attention. The balls were made of some sort of plaster into which, while it was soft, many small pieces of mirrored glass had been set. Holmes had chosen them carefully, lest they have protruding edges that shred our fingers, and the plaster nestled closely against each segment.

If damp plaster could hold glass, other things could as well, I thought, and began watching for a shop that sold manufactured goods. These were rare in rural India, but late that day we passed a shop with tins of marmalade and boxes of Mrs Bird’s Custard stacked in its door, jammed in between a carpenter’s piled high with half-sawed tree trunks, wooden ploughs, and half-finished furniture, and a lacquer-goods manufacturer draped with toys, utensils, and decorative charpoys. I ducked inside, made my purchases, and was out before Bindra noticed. That evening after dinner, I handed him the parcel.

He undid the twine, taking care with the knots, and unfolded the newspaper from the broken pieces of a looking-glass. It was enough to cover about a square foot, although it was in eight or ten pieces.

“If you press small pieces into the wet paint,” I told him, having checked my vocabulary with Holmes earlier, “I believe they will stick.”

He turned the shiny treasure over and over in his hands, relishing the potential. Then he picked up the other object, a dented, palm-sized metal case missing most of its original enamel which, due to the wear, had not cost me much more than the broken glass had. I waited for him to find and manipulate the side latch, then said, “This is the looking-glass of an English lady. The cover protects it from breakage.”

I might have given him solid gold. He peered into it, looked at me over it, and went back to the contemplation of his own eye. I stood up to get ready for the performance, and as I pulled open the tent flap, I heard a small voice say, “I thank you.”

“It is nothing,” I told him.

That night the cart’s sides grew stars, the mirrored glass broken down further with infinite care, rock against rock, each splinter treasured. And despite the proliferation of sharp edges, the boy didn’t so much as scratch himself in the process.

Under the morning sun, our progress was glorious.

Chapter Eleven

The next day began like the others. The dust rose and the villages passed—variations on mud walls, communal well, and fields—while we left behind the early-morning murmur of grindstones and walked to the music of the bells on grazing cattle, the melodious dirge of camel-drawn Persian wheels, and the chorus of cooing doves. Halfway through the morning we bought bowls of yogurt-like lhassi from a veiled woman and crumbled some of the gur over it, taking our refreshment in the fine-speckled shade of a neem tree while Holmes traded news with the farmer who came to see who we were. As the sun slanted and softened into the smoke of the horizon, we began to look for a village of the right size and, preferably, state of affluence, to appreciate our labours with an offering of food and perhaps a few annas—not a town, just a centre of fifteen to thirty mud houses around the inevitable small stone temple. Up to that time, when we had spotted a promising candidate along the road or across some fields, Bindra and I would wait with the donkey while Holmes went ahead to consult with the village headman. On our first day out of the caravanserai, this had been quickly done, and permission granted to make camp just outside the village walls. The next day, Holmes had been gone for two hours, since the man he sought was working in his fields and had to be tracked down. Today, Bindra took charge.

I thought at first the scamp had tired of us and decided to steal away—with all our possessions. Holmes and I had been deep in conversation when I looked up and realised the boy and animal were nowhere to be seen.

“Hell!” I exclaimed, in English. “The brat’s gone.”

Holmes examined the dusty track ahead of us, which was devoid of the familiar shapes. He said nothing, but picked up his pace. After half a mile or so we came to a field occupied by an old man clearing his channel from the nearby canal.

“Ho, my father,” Holmes called. “Have you seen a small boy and a blue donkey cart come this way?”

The elderly man straightened his back, with difficulty, and shaded his eyes against the sun. “An imp with a quick tongue?”

“That is he.”

“He asked after the mukhiya, seeking permission to bring to the village a jadoo-wallah with a wonder show.” He sounded rather dubious; despite the sparkling cart, Holmes and I looked far from wondrous or magical in our dust-caked clothing.

“Oah,” Holmes said with a sideways shake of his head. “He is a good lad, if too quick with his elders. I hope you will join us for the show, father.”

“We have not so many entertainments passing through our village that we turn our backs like city dwellers,” the old man said with a chuckle, and resumed his chopping with renewed vigour.

When we neared the village, a collection of mud walls like any other, we spied young Bindra squatting in the shade of an enormous peepul tree, laying out twigs and branches for a fire, the donkey already freed of its load and chewing at a handful of leaves, the noisy little mynas already gathered in attendance. The lad looked sideways at us as we came up, his small body swelled with complacency.

“And to think you would have cast me aside back in Delhi,” he told us smugly. “I shall be earning my salary, I think.”

“If you can find some puris to go with the curry, I shall increase your salary to two rupees a week.”

The boy snorted in a ritual of derision, but he scrambled up eagerly enough and trotted off to the collection of walls that formed the village centre. And with that, Bindra’s responsibilities expanded to include arrangements for our night’s lodging.

On this, our fifth night on the road, negotiations had been swiftly concluded, and dinner was being arranged. Holmes and I bathed our faces and beat the dust from our clothing, then set about erecting the small tent, a necessary shelter in so many ways, concealing us (and particularly me) from curious eyes and allowing us to practice our conjuring in solitude. Bindra returned before the last peg was hammered in, bearing a laden tray. As before, he helped himself from the communal dish and took his bowl to one side, while we unclean types finished it off, after which the boy took the tray and bowls back to their owner. Holmes sat with his pipe while I enjoyed the dusk and the sounds of the fruit-bats that roosted overhead, going out for the evening while their human neighbours came in. Three small children peered at us from the entrance to their courtyard, giggling, until the woman of the house came to shoo them inside; she, too, peeked at us, her scarf securely over her face, before she disappeared with a swirl of garments.

The men came in from the fields, most with rough-handled hoes resting on their shoulders, a few driving dark buffalos and pale bullocks before them into the lanes, where the animals stayed, ruminating and urinating outside the houses while their masters ate the evening meal. India’s quick dusk settled into night, voices rose and fell from behind the mud walls, and we sat in the open beneath the paraffin lamp, that the villagers might see our every move and be assured there was nothing to fear: This land believes in the evil eye of strangers, and would come after us with sticks and fire if they thought us a threat to their crops and cows. The cooking aromas faded, replaced by the occasional whiff of the men’s pipes. When the cattle in the lanes began to be brought inside the walls, Holmes got to his feet, took up the three torches he had prepared from oil-soaked rags wrapped tightly around the end of a staff, and strolled out from under the shelter of the tree.

I followed, silent as always. I played the enigmatic one, never answering if a child called to us, rarely acknowledging a gift. I was also the one to warm the audience up, as soon as Holmes had snared their attention.

He began by planting the torches, forming an equilateral triangle with two straddling the road and one on the side away from the town. He worked methodically and with a touch of drama, as if the placing of the three staffs was a sacrament. Within seconds of his stepping onto the road, the village was hushed, every eye upon us from behind gate and walls.

When Holmes was satisfied with the position of the cold torches, he went to stand in the precise centre, extending his right arm to point his finger at the torch to his right, ten feet away. After a moment, during which he chanted some phrase continually under his breath, it burst into flame, and the darkness filled with exclamations. He did the same with the second, and the third—although his timing was slightly off and the two lit nearly simultaneously, the combustive reactions of chemicals under those circumstances being difficult to control with precision.

Then he retired, leaving the stage to me.

Luckily for me, the demands of our rural entertainments were on a fairly basic level. Indeed, putting on too slick a show would only alarm the simple folk, and cause any of the more knowledgeable residents to ask themselves why we were here rather than in some city or raja’s town where we might actually earn some rupees. Rudimentary and clumsy, and clearly tricks rather than the more sinister magic.

I juggled. Not very well, and taking full advantage of the humour in the odd fumble, I juggled, looking puzzled as the balls turned into apples, then potatoes, and exclaimed and nearly dropped them when they began to sparkle and shine with the shards of mirror embedded in the bright plaster. Then one at a time, the five mirror-balls transformed themselves into small golden birds, which one by one flew away, leaving me with four balls, then three, until I tossed one lonely, sparkling ball from one hand to the other. Finally, it, too, flew off. I stood gazing into the darkness after it, bereft, when all of a sudden the sky began to rain down apples and potatoes and mirror-balls, causing me to stumble and trip in confusion and in the end duck down under cover of my arms. The rain of objects slowed, and ceased, and I cautiously peeped out from under my hands—at which one final potato dropped down on my turban. I sat down abruptly on the ground, and the entire village roared with laughter at my misfortune.

A good start.

Still seated on the ground, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cap, a simple Moslem cap such as Holmes wore. I peered inside and took from it an egg, which I held up to look at, and to allow the village to look at, before placing it on the ground in front of my tucked-in legs. I looked back into the cap, and drew out a flower, then a mouse (which ran, fortunately, away from my cloth-covered legs) and a small sparkling ring and a clay cup full of tea, which I drank thirstily and set down. I gazed again into the cap (which measured, of course, no more than the circumference of a head and four or five inches tall), then reached into it. This time my hand went in, and kept going. In a moment my forearm was buried in the shallow headgear while I frowned, deep in thought, over the heads of the villagers (all of whom had by now emerged from behind their walls, even the women). I felt farther into the cap, up to my elbow and beyond, scowling ferociously now. A boy of about seven started to giggle, and it spread through the audience. My upper body contorted with effort, my arm almost entirely consumed by the inadequate scrap of cloth—and then triumph! I jerked as my hand (which had travelled unseen up my other sleeve as far as my rib cage, through a well-concealed slit in the cap) seized some elusive object hidden impossibly deep inside, and began to draw it out. Arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, then—slowly, slowly—two fingers, delicately pinched around a scrap of bright orange, clear in the flashing torchlight. I tugged gently; the scrap grew, and I pulled and it grew some more, inches and feet of silk until I was hauling yards of the brilliant stuff out onto my lap. I swam in it—a sari length is a lot of silk—and beat it away from my face, drowning in orange, until with a sharp jerk the last of the fabric snapped into the air. I worked to gather it, armloads of orange with a sparkle of silver along the border, climbing awkwardly to my feet with the unwieldy burden bursting from my grasp in all directions. And then I bent to look at the ground, and freed one hand to pat at my clothing, and looked in increasing desperation at the ground all around, but the cap was gone.

Putting on my face a look of Harold Lloyd sadness, and crumpling the stubbornly escaping ends of silk back into the wadded armload, I carried it over to the audience and handed it to the first person who did not draw back from me, a boy of about seventeen. He took it, half reluctant, half pleased, and I heard a gasp from the darkness behind him where his family stood—probably a young wife, who I hoped would know what to do with all those yards of orange sari fabric. Saris were a costume of the south and of the cities, but it was hard to create humorous drama by pulling the legs and sleeves of a salwaar kameez out of a cap.

With the villagers warmed up, I retired to the sidelines while Holmes came forward to claim the light. His portion of the act was more dramatic, closer to the heart of the magic arts, and demanded a fine understanding of the sensibilities of the audience. If he went too far, drew too heavily on the mysterium of awe, the rustic folk would retreat, might even turn on us, fearing that we brought true darkness into their midst. Holmes had to read them at every instant, keeping them on the edge of discomfort and mystification without allowing them to slide into open fear, convincing them of his power, but only over the inessentials, transforming a mouse into a sparrow; setting fire to an inert glass of lhassi; and separating and re-joining two sets of clashing rings, one of silver bangles, the other big and brass; and setting into motion the dancing figures in a cloud of perfumed smoke, projected from the phantasmagoric lantern he had brought from home. As a climax, he drew me from the shadows, passed his hand over my face to put me into a trance, and then levitated my senseless form some feet above the earth.

Very basic stuff, dependent on quick hands, firm distraction, and simple equipment sold in magic shops the world around (or, in our case, made to specification by Delhi metalworkers). We garnered a handful of coins and a lot of wary glances, and moved on in the dawn when the buffalos were back ruminating in the lanes and the grindstones had begun to sing, with the snow-topped Himalayas little more than faint pink ghosts riding high above the horizon. The menfolk interrupted their morning ablutions to watch us leave, while the women pulled their curious babes back inside the gates of their humble compounds, just in case.

During the days of our partnership (or, as he no doubt viewed it, of his management of this road show) Bindra had grown ever more cocky. He was, after all, a city boy among farmers—he kept himself aloof from the village children, occasionally deigning to answer them while he worked on the cart by the light of the lamp, and it occasionally seemed to me that his moon face was older than those of the others his size. He did not understand how our tricks were done, but by this time he was convinced that they were tricks, and that was enough to make him superior to the gullible. On this, our sixth morning on the road, he got the donkey started, then hesitated, and turned to me.

“Teach me to draw a coin from an ear,” he commanded.

“You have not the purity of spirit,” I said blithely.

He was not impressed. “I do not believe it is the spirit that does the act. It is a trick of the hands, and I wish to learn it.”

“I cannot teach it,” I told him, and that was the end of it for the moment. I did not imagine the boy would let it drop, however; nor did I imagine the way in which he would force me into teaching him.

With the morning sun behind us and Bindra and the cart far enough ahead to give the dust time to settle, he discovered a new game. My first inkling of it was when the road ahead of me exploded into a flare of light, painful and completely blinding.

“Damn!” I cried, and raised my hand to block it—only it had stopped. I blinked furiously, and when I could see the road again, it was as before, with the boy and the glittering cart. At first I thought one of the looking-glass stars had caught the light, although they seemed too small for that. Then I noticed the boy’s hands, holding the folding ladies’ looking-glass up before his face.

“Bindra!” I shouted. “Khabadar! Shaitan ka batcha!”

He turned around to walk backwards, shrugging his shoulders at me, all innocence.

A few minutes later it happened again. Deliberate, the little brat, I knew. The kid needed something to keep his hands busy—oh.

“He really is something,” I muttered to Holmes, and trotted ahead to dig the cloth practise balls from the cart.

I took out the red one, showed the boy how to toss it, then told him to practise the motion until he could do it for fifty paces down the road with his eyes shut.

“Er, do you know how to count to fifty?” I asked him. He glared at me and snatched the ball.

That took care of him for the rest of the morning: no more blinding flashes. The red shape would appear rhythmically over his head for a while as he walked alongside the placid donkey, then he would drop it, run after it, and start again. He improved rapidly, and kept the ball going for longer and longer. I could tell when he began to experiment with closing his eyes, because he tended to veer slowly away from the donkey’s side, the ball slapping between his hands as he headed for the fields to the side, or came closer and closer to the animal’s sharp little hooves as the beast followed a turn in the road and her barefoot master did not.

Most entertaining—although I was glad we were no longer on the crowded Grand Trunk Road. The boy would surely be crushed in the first mile.

In the meantime, Holmes and I conversed, almost exclusively in Hindustani now. My brain had grown calluses with the heavy use, and I no longer found the exercise exhausting.

“How old do you think Bindra is?” I said to Holmes in the vernacular tongue.

“He is of the hill people, and they are small. I think him older than he appears.”

“I thought he might be—he was watching one of the girls in that last village, and she had to be at least thirteen. Are hill people round of face, like him? From his features, I thought at first he was mentally retarded.”

“Oh, that he is not.”

“He really should be in school, then.”

“You may find he has been, at some time in his past. I saw him reading a notice on a wall the other day.”

“Then what on earth was he doing shovelling muck for a horse-dealer?”

But Holmes could not answer that, any more than I.

Chapter Twelve

Over the week of our sojourn, the radiant and majestic line of snow-covered peaks had grown from a line of white teeth to a wall of jagged peaks stretching so wide there was nothing else in their half of the world, towering so high they ate the sky itself. Step by step we had been drawn into their icy embrace, until finally on Wednesday we reached the town of Kalka, huddled at their very feet.

We found rooms for the night, and arranged to leave the donkey and our heavier belongings with the innkeeper while we took the train to Simla. The man swore that no one would so much as lay a finger on anything, and guaranteed it by taking only a small payment, leaving the larger part until we returned. Holmes then went off to make arrangements with an ironmonger and carpenter for some conversions to the cart itself, which negotiations took the better part of the afternoon. We had intended to leave Bindra with our possessions, but the boy, unimpressed by the town, would have none of it, and in the end, it was easier to allow him to come than to keep arguing. At least he did not insist on a space in our room that night, making do with a charpoy in the stables. I saw him at dusk, sitting cross-legged, tossing the red and green balls up and down.

The boy was waiting for us when we came down in the morning, no doubt fearful we would sneak out and leave him behind. Still, I could not quite understand why a trip into the mountains with us was preferable to a warm, quiet holiday in the stables. So when we were standing on the platform waiting for the train that would climb with us to Simla, I asked him.

“Why do you keep following us?”

“Because you are so very interesting,” he retorted. “And I learn many things—see?” That morning he had demanded that I give him the yellow ball, and he now stood, tossing the three spheres up and catching them in a smooth rhythm, talking nonchalantly all the while. Soon he would be better than I.

“You’re going to wear them out,” I said.

“When do I throw the mirror-balls? And when do I throw with you?”

“The mirror-balls when you can keep these in the air for two hundred paces without dropping them. And as a partner when you can keep five up.” It would be far more expertise than he’d need to hold up his end of a two-person team, but it condemned the urchin to solitary labours for a few more days while I accustomed myself to the idea of a three-person partnership. “Bindra, can you read and write?”

“Oah yes. I write my name,” he asserted, but he began to concentrate closely on the trio of coloured balls he was tossing and catching with smooth competence.

“Why are you not in school?”

“I told you, I learn things from you.”

“You should be in school.”

He did not bother to answer. I tried another tack. “How old are you, Bindra?”

“Maybe twenty?” But before I could react, he changed it to “Or eleven? I think more than eight, I can remember eight.”

“Where are you from? Where is your family?”

“I have no family.”

“You’re an orphan?”

“I have an auntie in Calcutta. I was with her, oh, two or three years I think, before she sold me to the horse-dealer.”

“Sold you?”

“Oah yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I was happy to go. His hand was lighter than hers.”

“There’s no slavery in India.”

The brief look he shot me was eloquent. It occurred to me that I’d just given myself away definitively: He’d long overlooked my chronic oddities of speech and habit, but only a foreigner could assert that slavery did not exist in a place where clearly it did. I tried to regain my standing.

“Truly, Bindra, under the white man’s law, slavery is not allowed. Your aunt could not sell you, although she told you she could.”

“Oah, I know that. But I am a child. If I stand up and say, ‘I am not to be sold,’ what then? I am turned out to live on the street and go hungry. I did not mind. And ho! It has meant that I found you and the magician. I eat good food and breathe clean air. And now I am going to ride a train.”

Every boy’s dream, in this country as in others: to run away and join the circus. “Yes, well. We must talk more about a school for you. Because one day you will be a man, and need the skills you can only learn in school. Unless you wish to be a farmer in a village,” I added, knowing his disdain for the man with the hoe.

“I shall be a magician,” he said, adding slyly, “when you have taught me to pick the coin out of the air.”

I laughed and reached out to clap him on the back, and stopped with my hand an inch from his shoulder. To most Hindus, I as a Moslem was horribly unclean, and making contact with them would be deeply offensive, requiring lengthy purification. “What is your caste, Bindra?”

“Oah, I have no caste.”

“No caste? What do you mean, all India has some kind of caste.”

“No. I am a Kee-ristian.” It took a moment for my ears to translate the word from Hindi. The boy was a Christian? Good Lord, I thought; were we dealing with another Kim here, an abandoned European? The boy went on, oblivious. “Some Kee-ristians came into our village when I was quite small—this was before I went to Calcutta to live with my auntie. They wore long dresses, the women always, the men on some days, and one such day they made a great ceremony under the trees and dipped water on our heads and told us that in Jesu there was neither Brahmin nor Kshatriya, no Sudra or foreigner. Some of the village were angry, and in the end they drove those Kee-ristian men away with sticks and paid the priests great sums to return them to their proper place. I had no money to pay the priests, but although I did not ask to have my caste taken from me, truly, I have found that to have no caste is altogether a good thing, for now I can eat what I like, sleep where I please. I will have to pay a priest to restore me when I wish to marry, of course—who but the lowest Sudra would take a casteless man into his house? But that is a long time away.”

I could only gaze at him, open-mouthed, and follow him into the little carriage when the train pulled in a few minutes later.

Holmes had told me that the narrow-gauge train would climb six thousand feet, in sixty miles, taking six hours or more to do so. We should need our heavy coats at the end of it. The sites of my chilblains tingled in anticipation, as I found that our third-class car was heated only by the body warmth of its occupants. Bindra seemed not to notice, so rapt was he with wonder at the passing scenery. Then the train entered a tunnel, and he scrambled away from the window in surprise.

“Have you ever been on a train before?” I asked him.

“Oah yes, many times,” he said, although his unconcealed excitement declared that he was lying through his teeth. Still, he had plenty of practise on that run to become used to passing hills and the darkness of tunnels: Holmes thought there were a hundred or more, although I would have believed it if he’d said a thousand.

Simla was the year-round headquarters of the British Indian Army and with it the Survey of India, both its open and its hidden faces. The government as a whole moved up here, bag and baggage, as soon as the temperature climbed in the plains. From March to November this small Olympus ruled all the land from the Red Sea to the hills of Burma—what Gandhi a few years earlier had scornfully called “government from the five hundredth floor”—and it bustled with life, bursting with political and social intrigue, ringing with the voices of English children and their ayahs, vibrating with the conversations of their mothers about the latest scandal or shortage or piece of amateur dramatics. Today, however, was the last day of January, and we found the hill-town bitter cold, largely shuttered, and nearly bereft of an English presence.

Hotel rooms for our kind, however, were plentiful, and we had our choice of locations, sizes, and services. We hiked into the native bazaar that lay below the town’s European centre, a tumbling hotch-potch of buildings that climbed onto one another’s backs and looked over one another’s shoulders, with the street entrance of one shop giving out onto a rooftop exit at the rear. We took a suite of rooms in a native-style hotel that did not look too poisonous, with a mat near the kitchen for Bindra. I indulged in my first true bath since the night of the hotel fire, eleven days before, although I had to renew my skin and hair dye at the end of it. And if the meal we were served was a bastard imitation of English-style mutton curry, the beds we were given were soft, the sheets thin with wear but fairly clean.

I settled under the thick cotton coverlets with a sigh of contentment. My hair was still damp, but I was warm, and the solid walls were a reassurance after canvas. Holmes shed his shoes and crawled into the shelter beside me.

“I found myself looking for the shop of Lurgan Sahib, as we came through the bazaar,” I told him. The mysterious Lurgan, who introduced young Kim to the Jewel Game and taught him many arcane arts, had disappeared from Simla some years before.

“The building itself is still there, though much changed.”

“What its walls could tell.” I lay looking at the play of firelight on the ceiling for a minute. “Holmes, do you think Bindra could be one of Nesbit’s? An agent of sorts?”

“An Irregular? One does have to wonder, but somehow I doubt it. The boy does not seem interested enough in us. I’ve never caught him trying to overhear a conversation, have you?”

“No. Or go through our things. He’s pretty much a force unto himself.”

“Of course, he could simply be remarkably subtle with it.”

“At his age?”

“True. Even a prodigy such as young O’Hara concealed his interest by pretending to an alternative preoccupation, not by showing no interest at all.”

This was rather too complex for my drowsy state; after a minute, I let it go, and murmured instead, “Do you think we’ll find him?”

“O’Hara? If he’s there, and if he wishes to be found, yes.”

“And what shall we do then?”

I felt Holmes’ fingers on my hair, following the shape of my long night-time plait, before he answered. “We will bring him back. And if he does not wish to come, I shall look him in the eye and ask him why.”

It snowed during the night, two inches of dry flakes that rose up around our boots and blew like spring blossoms. Bindra took one look at it and dug in his heels like a startled mule.

“Oah, that does not look at all good.”

“It’s just snow,” I told him. “Frozen rain.”

“I know snow, thank you,” he retorted with some force. “I will be staying inside today. When you return, I shall be able to keep the blue ball in the air.”

I rather doubted he’d convince the cook to allow him to juggle in her warm kitchen, but I wasn’t about to argue. I buttoned my heavy skin-lined coat and scurried to catch Holmes up.

The boots of the plains people were not adequate for walking on the cobbles of a hill-side town covered in snow, and I was glad when we stopped at the corner of two roads that fed into the Mall. I stared up at the town, astonished. With the snow, it looked more like Switzerland than sub-continent, all peaked chalet roofs and carved frontispieces.

“Holmes, this place is extraordinary.”

“No English!” he chided, then added, “You ought to see it in the summer. It looks as if you’d plucked up the inhabitants of a Tibetan town and set them down in Surrey.”

Holmes pulled the mirrored balls from about his person and set to juggling them; I left my hands deep in my coat pockets.

“What are we doing here, Holmes?”

“Waiting to attract attention. Even in the busy summer we could not risk going openly into the Survey offices. We must wait until someone comes to see what we are about.”

“Shouldn’t we go a little closer?” I asked. We were still among the ramshackle buildings of the native bazaar, before the road widened into the sloping plaza.

“If we did, we’d risk being thrown out, even in the winter season. No native is permitted there except on business.”

I sighed, drew my hands from their warm nests, and prepared to catch whatever he might throw me.

There is a nearly hypnotic rhythm to a session of juggling, where the world narrows down to the other’s hands, when sight and sound merge into an almost psychic anticipation of one’s partner’s moves. It would have been a pleasurable interlude, had the temperature been on the melting side of freezing, since we had no audience to speak of. The occasional passer-by paused for thirty seconds before the cold urged him on, and two infants of five or six squatted in the drifted snow for far too long, their teeth chattering and their brown skin going an alarming shade of blue before an older sister appeared to chase them inside. My own fingers were turning white, rather than blue, and I did not know how much longer they would respond to their brain’s instructions to open and close.

We had been working the corner for nearly forty minutes before Holmes straightened marginally; when I shot a glance up the Mall, I saw a man, strolling unconcernedly, glancing into shop windows. He went inside one, coming out a few minutes later with a rolled newspaper under his arm. He greeted a man walking briskly up the hill, tipped his hat at a pair of well-wrapped ladies getting into a two-horse tonga, and took a very long time to descend the length of Simla’s social centre. Finally he paused to watch our increasingly clumsy game of catch.

It was none other than Geoffrey Nesbit. He ran his eyes over Holmes, identifying him, before studying me. I thought there was a little smile resting along the corner of his mouth, although I kept my eyes on Holmes’ hands.

“That is quite clever,” he said in Hindi. Somehow, I didn’t think he was talking entirely about the juggling.

“Thank you, sahib,” Holmes replied, in the same tongue.

“In fact, I think I might be able to steer you towards a bit of work. Children’s parties and the like.”

“Oh, sir, we can do many tricks.”

The smaller man stifled a laugh, and said merely, “I don’t doubt that.”

“And we go where we are told,” I added. The fluency of my phrase snapped his attention back onto me. He opened his mouth, but I was not to hear his words, for behind his shoulder, coming from the warren of side-streets that lay beneath the Mall, three figures were approaching. One brief glance, and I caught and placed the balls, one-two-three-four-five, on the trampled snow between my feet before turning my back on Holmes and saying in a low voice, “I’ll see you later.” I took three rapid steps and ducked into the next alleyway.

I trusted that Holmes was safely concealed under dye and clothing, but my spectacles, which I tended to leave off only when comparative blindness was preferable to the needs of disguise, would be a dead giveaway when it came to the Goodhearts. What the hell were they doing in Simla? I paused just around the building with my ear bent to listen.

Mrs Goodheart’s distinctive voice rang stridently through the streets, bouncing off the brick and stone buildings. “. . . not get me into one of those jampani machines again, I thought we’d end up at the bottom of the hill. And here I thought we were coming to the tropics! If I’d wanted snow I’d have stayed in Chicago. Really, Thomas, couldn’t we have gone to your maharaja directly? There’s nothing at all to see in this town.”

“Mother, I thought the Teacher’s message said that hard experiences took one on the road to enlightenment.” The young man sounded a bit snappish.

“And what would you know about that? Sunny, watch you don’t get too close to that beggar.”

Holmes obligingly started up the whine for bakshish, although he was hardly dressed for the part, and beggars rarely juggled mirrored balls. I could only hope the Goodhearts did not find it peculiar for a white man to be carrying on a conversation with a beggar. However, Mrs Goodheart’s next words reassured me, for they were spoken in a politer tone than she had used for her son.

“Pardon me, sir, but I wonder if you can recommend a place to get a cup of tea that won’t poison us?”

“Poison you?” Nesbit asked, his voice nicely puzzled.

“You know what I mean. My son informs me that at this altitude it is necessary to boil water for considerably longer than in the lowlands, and I can’t get the waiter at the hotel to understand it. That may be fine for local constitutions, but I fear that ours won’t survive. My daughter is too delicate to risk it.”

I smiled at Mrs Goodheart’s unsubtle nudge of her daughter in the direction of this apparently eligible male. Sunny’s constitution was about as delicate as a tornado.

“Certainly, I’d be more than happy to show you a dependable tea shop. Perhaps you would be my guests?”

Pressed back into a doorway, I peered cautiously at their retreating backs, Mrs Goodheart’s arm through her son’s, which more or less forced Nesbit to offer Sunny his. At the place where the road opened out, young Goodheart turned to look back. I was in shadow and therefore invisible, but I could only hope that Holmes had continued with his act in their absence. One sharp glance over his shoulder, and then Nesbit was ushering them through a gaily painted doorway, a cloud of lovely warm steamy air billowing into the frigid outside world at their passage.

I went back to Holmes, and was glad to find him still seated and juggling, turned slightly downhill now. I hunkered onto my heels at his side.

“Thomas Goodheart looked back at you before they went into the tea shop,” I told him.

“Did he now?”

“What do you suppose they’re doing up here?”

“They must have diverted on the way to Khanpur. I can’t see them going the land route through Simla, even if the pass is still open.”

“Mrs Goodheart doesn’t seem too pleased to be here.”

“Perhaps Nesbit will find out why they’ve come here rather than visit Jaipur or any of the usual places. Thanks to your quick eyes, I had just enough time to tell him who it was.”

“I do wish there were some way to disguise spectacles,” I grumbled. It was a complaint I had made before.

“We shall have to see about getting you a pair of those on-the-eye lenses the Germans are working on,” he said thoughtfully, and I shuddered; the very thought of wearing paper-thin slivers of curved glass pressed up against my corneas made me queasy.

“Thanks, but I prefer to walk into things,” I said. “How will we get back into touch with Nesbit?”

“Look in the cup.”

Among the small coins in the tin mug Holmes had set out lay a twist of fine paper. I reached for it, then paused. If I tried to pick it up, it might well be lost to my clumsiness.

“Perhaps we might go back to the hotel for a while?” I pleaded. “My fingers are numb to the elbow.”

We were greeted at the hostelry door by young Bindra, who crowed “Look! Look!” and set four balls into the air. Holmes patted his head by way of approval, I told him “Good job” around my chattering teeth, and we requested much hot tea and made for the nearest fireplace.

The note Nesbit had dropped into Holmes’ cup bore the words “Viceregal Lodge, 10:00 P.M.” I hoped the formal venue did not indicate that we were to dress, but decided that the hour was not that of a dinner invitation. It scarcely mattered: I had nothing suitable to wear anyway.

Chapter Thirteen

At nine-thirty of a winter’s evening in the Himalayan foothills, few pedestrians picked their way over the ice-slick roads. Those who did were so thoroughly bundled that only the breathy clouds rising from their swathed heads showed that they were animate. The thin air here smelled of wood smoke instead of dung fires, and the sharp green aroma of deodar was intoxicating.

I had decided, given time to think over the matter, that considering the time of year, the Viceroy himself was not likely to be in residence, and so it proved. The ornate stone fortress two miles from the Mall, which even in the moonless black resembled a Scottish castle, had lights in few of its windows, and those behind drawn curtains. We were not even required to decide which door to approach, since as we drew near, a shadow detached itself from a tree and intercepted us, speaking the single English word “Come.”

We went around the back and entered Viceregal Lodge through a scullery, empty but warm, and followed our guide up a narrow and uncarpeted stairway to an upper room, warm and well lit, with armchairs, sofas, and low tables gathered in front of a great stone fireplace. Our guide closed the door behind us, and we all three peeled, unwrapped, and tugged ourselves free from the multiplicity of coats and shawls we wore.

Once free of his wrappings, our guide proved to be, not the chowkidar, but Geoffrey Nesbit. He heaped logs onto the coals in the grate, then pulled open a capacious and well-stocked cupboard. “Brandy? G and T?”

It was peculiarly exotic, to be seated on a high-backed sofa with the taste of brandy on the tongue, speaking English. There was a sort of echo in the first minutes of speech, almost as if my mind was translating the words into themselves.

“Have you had a successful week?” he asked.

“A valuable one,” Holmes replied.

Nesbit nodded as if he understood the value in a week on the road, but I thought he had not really heard the reply. My suspicion was confirmed when he said abruptly, “I don’t know how much you have heard of the world’s news while you were travelling here.”

“Not a great deal. There was a rumour that Lenin is dead—although it came to us as ‘the king of Russia.’ ”

“No rumour. He died the day you left Delhi, or the day before, it is far from certain. It appears the country will be governed by a triumvirate, never a good omen for stability.”

“But our own Parliament, that transfer of power has gone ahead?”

“The Americans are voluminously unhappy and the Russians grimly inclined to gloat, but yes, Mr Baldwin stepped down in the end, and Ramsay MacDonald has been confirmed. The new Secretary of State for India is Lord Olivier.”

“The governor of Jamaica? But he’s not Labour.”

“A number of the new cabinet aren’t. Critics are saying it’s because there aren’t enough competent Socialists to fill the ranks, although I’d say it’s more an attempt at mollifying the opposition. Still, there might have been considerably less alarm about a minority government had the Socialists not celebrated their victory by publicly singing both ‘The Marseillaise’ and ‘The Red Flag.’ The Bolsheviks will be invited to discuss the treaties and claims they tore up when they came into power. I can only pray Olivier has the sense to hold firm on India.” He put his glass to his mouth, discovered that he’d already drained it, and leant forward to replenish it with brandy and a very small dash of soda. “And Gandhi’s health is deteriorating. The man goes on a hunger-strike, then we get blamed when he becomes ill. Bombay may be forced to suspend his sentence so he doesn’t die in custody—the last thing we need is to create a martyr for the swaraj cause.” He tipped the glass down his throat, although I wouldn’t have thought him a heavy drinker.

As if he’d heard my thought, he slapped the glass down on the table and sat back. “Now, you wanted to know about the maharaja of Khanpur. I’m probably not the man to ask for an objective view.”

“You like the man,” Holmes noted.

“I’d even call him a friend, although our paths don’t cross that often, and then usually at events. But I’ve been a guest in his home any number of times over the years, and have found him not only a staunch supporter of Britain, but a fine sportsman as well, which to my mind counts for a lot.”

“Pig sticking,” I said, not intending to say the words aloud. But I did, and Nesbit heard the amusement, even distaste in my voice. Before he could do more than bristle, Holmes drew out his clay pipe, sure indication of a lecture.

“Russell, I don’t know that you are clearly picturing just what this particular sport entails,” he said sternly. I permitted Nesbit to refill my glass, as this was clearly going to take a while—although given the topic, I couldn’t see why. “The British pig is an indolent creature of unsanitary and occasionally comic habits, who most of the time is no more dangerous than a milch cow or draught horse. A wild Asian boar, on the other hand, is as much as three hundred pounds of furious muscle directed by a sly and malevolent brain and armed with four curved razors as much as eight inches long, any of which is capable of slicing through a horse’s leg, or a man’s—few other blood sports give the quarry such an equal opportunity for victory. The whimsical name of the sport aside, pig sticking demands strength, endurance, and a degree of horsemanship far beyond what one sees on, for example, a fox hunt. Pig sticking, or to use the slightly more dignified term employed in Bengal, hog hunting, embodies the warrior virtues of both cultures, East and West. It reduces a soldier’s training to its essence: iron nerves, an acute sensitivity to the enemy, the ability to commit to an instantaneous response, and an overpowering determination to win—precisely those qualities one requires in battle or to quell a riot. Saying that a man is a pig-sticker does not mean merely that he is proficient at relieving the countryside of a pest; it says that the man is possessed of singular ability and self-control, even wisdom. In the context of India, pig sticking is the game of games.”

Nesbit, twice possessor of the Kadir Cup, looked abashed at this implied tribute, but it was as well Holmes said it. If nothing else, it clarified Nesbit’s attitude towards his sporting friend “Jimmy,” although to my mind, the male’s passion for games often led him to become frivolous towards those things requiring serious thought, and to be serious about the essentially frivolous. But this was hardly the place for philosophical debate.

“I understand,” I said. “You will pardon me, Captain Nesbit, if as a Jew and a woman who lives on a farm, I don’t take pigs seriously. But I shall endeavour to keep in mind the sharp edge of the tusks rather than the comical twist of the tail.”

Nesbit studied his glass, trying to retrieve the conversation’s thread before Holmes had diverted us into sport. “Yes, well, the maharaja of Khanpur. He is as near to what the Americans might call a ‘self-made man’ as an hereditary ruler can get. You no doubt realise that the hundreds of native states within India have huge differences. One state has a population of less than two hundred in under an acre; on the other hand, Kashmir occupies an area larger than France, while Hyderabad possesses an income greater than most of the European countries. Some are one step from feudal barbarism, in their society and their economy, others well on their way to becoming industrial powers; it’s entirely up to each state’s prince. The British Resident may suggest and recommend, but he rarely asserts any authority. It’s the price we pay for their loyalty—the princes saved us in the Mutiny. Indeed, one might even say that they made the Empire possible. They are still essential to British rule, a guarantee that if the tide turns against us again, we have a bulwark against the waves. If you will pardon the flight of fancy,” he added.

“The princes are, to put it bluntly, above the law of British India. Short of declaring war or entering into independent diplomatic relations, they are free to do as they like, to spend their time and their fortunes gambling in Monte Carlo or hunting tigers or filling their days with dancing girls. Only if they become too wildly erratic, or too political, do we step in. But their sins have to be pretty extreme.”

I kept my face expressionless, but all in all, it sounded as if British India had managed to preserve and encourage all that was bad about an hereditary aristocracy, buying the princes off by averting eyes from their misdemeanors while heaping them with ritual displays of power—the big shooting parties, the nine- or seventeen- or twenty-one-gun salutes—in hopes that they might not notice their essential impotence.

“A generation ago,” Nesbit was saying, “a man in my position might argue that the British would remain a part of India always; now, only the most self-deluding burra-sahib would claim that. This country is set on the road to independence, a journey we have the responsibility of assisting and guiding. And as we prepare to step aside, two competitors are jostling to move into the vacuum of power: the Congress Party, which is largely Hindu, and the Moslem League. I’m sure you are fully aware of the deep and abiding mistrust and simmering violence that exists between Hindu and Moslem here. The two religions are essentially incompatible: Moslem views Hindu as a worshipper of idols, Hindu condemns Moslem as unclean cow-killer. And that isn’t even beginning to touch the other parties, the Communists on the one side and the swarajists on the other, who hate and mistrust each other. In order to reach a common ground between the Congress Party and the League, there are many who believe that the princes will come into their own, as a sort of House of Lords with real power, providing continuity between a colonial past and a more democratic future.

“And that is where your maharaja comes in, Mr Holmes. His father died when the boy was small, four or five—poison was suspected, but never proved, although half a dozen servants and two of his wives were put to death over it. Having had a look at the file, I should say it was more likely to have been some treatment for the syphilis he picked up in southern France—the man had an unfortunate fondness for the rougher side of life.

“The old man, Jimmy’s grandfather, was one of the feudal types, interested only in harem and toys—quite literally: He had one of the most extraordinary collections of mechanical oddities in the world, and seems to have had some fairly rum practices behind the walls of his palace. In fact, at the time he died, despite his service during the Mutiny, an investigation had begun into some of his less savoury practises. I mean to say, we’re happy to allow a proved friend of the Crown a certain amount of leeway when it comes to governing the country his family have ruled for centuries, but one can only turn a blind eye on depravity and despoilment for so long, and buying small children for . . .” Nesbit stopped to study his hands pinkly for a moment. “For purposes best suited to the harem, goes too far. In any event, his age caught him up before the government could step in, and he died in his bed at the age of eighty-four, his only son long dead and his eldest grandson Jimmy just eleven.

“Remarkably enough, Jimmy seems to have avoided inheriting his father and grandfather’s worst excesses. He likes his toys, true, although with him it’s motorcars and aeroplanes—he’s got one of the sub-continent’s highest air fields. But the worst of the debauchery passed him by, and by some miracle he seems to have found some brains and backbone as well. He went away to university—America, funnily enough, rather than Oxford or Cambridge—then played in Europe, Africa, and South America for eight or nine years, developing his taste for big game. And then he turned his eyes on his home, and brought some ideas with him. In the fourteen years he’s been back, the kingdom has gone through enormous changes. Khanpur’s already got one of the best programmes of sanitation in the country, and Jimmy regularly sends boys out to school in England and America.

“He has two wives and a dozen or so concubines, eight or nine children, which are fairly conservative numbers for a man in his position. He’s sending his heir to school in England, and spends a certain amount of the state monies on improvements for the people—schools, water, sanitation. His heaviest personal expenditures, if the word ‘personal’ has any meaning in a princely state, have been on his zoo, used also for the breeding of exotic game animals, and on the restoration of what they call ‘The Forts,’ five miles outside of the city—actually two halves of the old Moghul palace, called Old Fort and New Fort, since there’s two or three centuries between them. Jimmy maintains the Palace proper in the city, where his womenfolk live, but he seems to prefer The Forts. Certainly whenever I’ve visited Khanpur, that’s where he’s been. It’s closer to the hunting.

“He’s made friends of most of the high-ranking political officers, and always invites visiting dignitaries for a shoot—generally the kind that ends up with a football-field covered with birds, although from time to time he’ll take the truly honoured on a tiger-hunt, with elephants and the lot. He has friends in high places, and a genius for combining European sensibilities with traditional Indian warrior virtues. He’s a Kshatriya, if that means anything to you.”

We nodded; the warrior caste was theoretically a step under the priestly Brahminical elite, but in practice they wielded the greater political and economic power, and were twice-born as the Brahmins were.

“So you are saying that the maharaja of Khanpur is beyond reproach?” Holmes asked.

“Well, no. I am telling you that to all appearances, he is a high-ranking aristocrat, loyal to the Crown, stable, and forward-looking. What, indeed, I have always regarded him.”

“‘To all appearances,’” Holmes repeated. “And beneath the appearances?”

“Understand, I have not seen the man since last year’s Kadir Cup in March. And I will say that at the time, he struck me as being uncharacteristically short-tempered. Nothing extreme, you understand, just general impatience. He clubbed a beater with the weighted butt of a short spear, knocked him out briefly.”

Beating a servant unconscious was evidently not considered “extreme” behaviour on the part of a pig-sticker, I noted.

“Further enquiries this past ten days have come up with some disturbing facts. Our Resident in Khanpur took ill four months ago and hasn’t yet returned from England, which makes communication from within the state considerably less efficient than usual. Khanpur has recently instigated a relatively aggressive border patrol, which is frankly unusual in a native state—although border guards are by no means forbidden under the treaty, it would have been brought to our attention had the Resident been there. One of the neighbouring states has issued a complaint that its nawab’s daughter is missing, stolen into Khanpur, although from the girl’s reputation, they’ll probably find her in Bombay with a lover. And there have been a number of unsubstantiated complaints concerning the ill-treatment of his people—a young man who made speeches in Khanpur city has vanished, and bazaar rumour has it he’s been fed to the maharaja’s pet lions, which is slightly absurd. Another whisper concerns a concubine killed in a fit of pique, which is a rumour I hear at least twice a year from all over the country, that when investigated has proved true once, to my memory. And a rumour of a train from Moscow carrying three dismantled German aeroplanes, which went missing at the end of the train line. These are, of course, all things which the Resident would have investigated, if he’d been there. But added to the maharaja’s visit to Moscow, when we had only known of his being in Europe, and compounded by his invitation to a young man with known Bolshevik contacts and sympathies, then, yes, it is time we had a closer look inside the state.”

I had been involved with this life long enough to hear unspoken messages behind a monologue; I waited for the man to work around to what he wanted of us.

Holmes, too, was clearly impatient to hear the man’s proposal, and urged him onward with the dry observation, “To say nothing of the matter of three dead agents, tortured and robbed of their charms, all found dead within twenty miles of the Khanpur border.”

Nesbit grunted unhappily. “You came to this country to look for Kimball O’Hara,” he said, then stopped again to reach for the brandy decanter and pour himself a couple of undiluted inches. I was starting to feel positively apprehensive about this. Whatever his point was, he clearly did not expect us to like it much. “On the voyage out, this other matter came to your attention, and you brought it to me.”

Holmes had had enough. “Come, man, get it off your chest. Are you saying you wish us to go to Khanpur for you?”

“Yes,” Nesbit said, sounding relieved. “But it’s not just—here, let me show you what I’m getting at.” He abandoned his drink and went to a low, deep cabinet on the wall, opening one of its shallow drawers and pulling out two maps. He cleared the glasses from the table and smoothed the first page out before us, a map of all India, its long triangle heavily marked with irregular blue shapes that covered nearly all of the north and a great deal of the centre: the princely states.

I blinked in surprise. “I hadn’t quite realised how much of the country is in private hands.”

“A third of the land, a quarter of the people. Native states hold some of the richest agricultural land, diamond mines, key passes into Afghanistan and Tibet.” His finger tapped a place heavily marked by topographical lines, orientating us to the whole. “Here’s Simla. There’s Delhi,” he added, touching his finger to the city three inches south, then dragging it up in the opposite direction. “The Afghan border here; Tibet; Kashmir up here, and just below it, looking deceptively small and out-of-the-way, lies Khanpur.” When we had absorbed its setting, he plucked the other map from the floor and allowed it to settle over the first.

Where the first map had been a product of some government printing agency, a cooperative effort with more detail than personality, this page was a work of art, a depiction of the northernmost knob of the Indian nation, lettered by a hand both neat and familiar. I bent over it to be sure.

“Yes,” Nesbit said, “this is O’Hara’s work. It took him five years walking every hill and track, counting those steps on his Tibetan prayer-beads, recording what he had seen and done each night on the back of a sheet inside his prayer wheel. I had the privilege of accompanying him once, and I’ve never seen a man more single-minded at the task. One year, O’Hara spent an entire hot season as a punkah-wallah, pulling the fan in a wealthy merchant’s house, his ear to the wall listening to everything said inside. When we worked together, I’d see him interrupted time and again by locals wishing a blessing or a piece of news, or wanting to give him food or shelter, and each time he would turn aside and talk yet somehow keep track of his count, never losing track once. Brilliant man. And beyond being simply a surveyor, he seemed to know just where to ask the questions, precisely how to find the key people, however unlikely they might be. He was . . . It is difficult to explain, other than saying he took joy in his work. The hill folk saw that joy and interpreted it as holiness. He went everywhere as a monk, and was apparently never doubted, even when he was young. He wasn’t like any monk I ever met, but somehow when he put on that red hat, you believed him completely. It was something in the eyes.”

Suddenly, Nesbit caught himself, and his handsome face flushed. “Sorry, I’m not used to strong drink at these altitudes.”

“I do know what you mean about O’Hara,” Holmes reassured him. “Did you ever meet the old Pathan horse-dealer?”

“Mahbub Ali? Of course.”

“He told me that the boy was a steel whip, although he gave far too freely of the truth. He said the lad could bend and contort into all sorts of shapes, but he always returned to himself, and he would only be broken when forced to break his word. Mahbub intended that as a criticism, I believe.”

“No doubt. In any event, this map is the work of O’Hara’s hand, and accurate down to the last stream and serai. And if you study it for a bit, you will begin to see the strategic potential of the kingdom of Khanpur.”

I had been studying it, while the two men exchanged their eulogies of the lost Survey agent, and could well see what he meant. The state was a long, narrow strip, mountains in the north giving way to a broad central plateau, where the capital city straddled a river. Four or five miles north of the city was a dark square marked “The Forts”; far beyond it, at the state’s northern tip, a pair of reversed brackets marked a pass, beside which was written “9400 feet.” Khanpur city was perhaps sixty miles from its southern neighbour and the city of Hijarkot, where the railway ended, but a scant fifteen from the country’s eastern boundaries; the square marking The Forts was even nearer the border, perhaps six or eight miles. Beyond the country’s eastern boundaries an uneven square marked a British encampment, but my eyes strayed to the strategic, relatively low pass at the northern end. The brackets were less than two hundred miles from the southernmost point of the Russian railway system: by aeroplane, perhaps two or three hours.

As if he had seen the direction of my gaze, Nesbit said, “That pass was actually a fairly late discovery, not on the maps at all until the late eighties. There used to be a lake there, with sheer mountain sides, until the big Kashmir earthquake of 1875. It brought an enormous flood down the valley, hundreds killed, but it wasn’t until three years later that a Scottish botanist wandered up there looking for new flowers and before he knew it, found himself in Afghanistan.”

“And suddenly Khanpur is of strategic importance,” I remarked. “Captain Nesbit, it’s been a long day and Holmes and I have spent far too much time on the road already. Why are we here?”

“Um, yes,” he hesitated, and finally decided to meet bluntness with bluntness. “You came here to search for O’Hara, inadvertently bringing me this conundrum of the American Thomas Goodheart. I do not know if the two cases are at all related—as I told you in Delhi, it is more than likely that O’Hara is living in a hill village somewhere, growing rice and raising a family. But I do know that Khanpur and its maharaja have suddenly become an urgent concern. Let me ask you this: Do you believe that Goodheart’s costume on the boat, dressing as a stage Sherlock Holmes, was a coincidence, or a deliberate statement?”

The question was odd, but the intent was clear. Holmes answered him. “If you are asking, does Thomas Goodheart know who I am, I can only say that if he does, he’s a better actor than he is a political analyst. I am constitutionally opposed to the idea of coincidence, but I spent the better part of two weeks in his company, and he never let his mask slip.”

“So you would say that he does not regard you, or Miss Russell here, as the enemy?”

“Apart from our unwillingness to commit to the Socialist cause, no.”

“Very well. You two are in a unique position, one that would take a Survey agent months to duplicate. I realise that you have spent the last weeks in perfecting your travelling-magician disguise, but I would like to ask you to drop that disguise and take up your friendship with the Goodheart family.”

“No,” Holmes said flatly.

“What friendship?” I said simultaneously.

“Acquaintance, then,” Nesbit said, choosing my objection as the less intractable. “I believe you more than capable of ingratiating yourselves into their lives to the extent that they would invite you to accompany them to Khanpur. The girl seemed particularly fond of you, Miss Russell. She mentioned you this morning, with no prompting on my part, I should add.”

“Fine,” Holmes said. “Russell will change back into an Englishwoman and observe the palace from within. Bindra and I will take the more circuitous route, and we shall meet in Khanpur.”

This time it was Nesbit and I who spoke at the same instant.

“I don’t think—” he began.

“Look at me!” I demanded. “I’m dark as a native—I even blacked my eyelashes, for pity’s sake. And my arms have burn scars all over them from the cursed fire-toss.”

“—that it’s a good idea for you to . . . Fire-toss?”

“The dye will come off, Russell.”

“Yes, along with most of my skin.”

“Suffering for the sake of enlightenment, Russell?”

“And who is Bindra?” Nesbit asked, to no effect.

“I never asked for enlightenment. Apart from which, it’s my skin that needs enlightening, not my soul.”

Nesbit finally decided to return to his original objection, and inserted firmly into our bickering, “I don’t know that it’s the best idea for the two of you to divide up. It might not be entirely safe.”

“Holmes,” I said, distracted by his remark, “have we ever had a case in which you and I did not go our separate ways at one point or another?”

He paused to reflect. “I believe we spent most of the Colonel Barker spy investigation in each other’s company.”

“A minor investigation, nine years ago,” I said. “No, Captain Nesbit, we generally work separately at some point in an investigation.”

“But this is India, and I shouldn’t like to think of a woman—”

I froze the words on his tongue with a gaze as flat and icy as the Simla Skating Club rink. Holmes threaded his fingers together over his stomach and studied the ceiling. Nesbit cleared his throat and tried again.

“I am sure you are remarkably competent, Miss Russell, but were anything to happen to you—”

“Captain Nesbit, what sort of demonstration would satisfy you?”

Holmes murmured sotto voce, “Swords, or pistols at dawn?” but Nesbit did not hear him.

“I do not require—”

“Oh, I think you do,” I said, and in the blink of an eye the slim little knife I wore in my boot whipped past him and thunked into the bad painting on the wall, parting Nesbit’s hair in its passing. He whirled around, stared at the slip of the throwing handle where it quivered between the eyebrows of the man in the portrait, then turned to look at Holmes for explanation. Holmes was now studying his fingernails.

Nesbit glanced at me, stood up, and went to look at the knife. After a minute, he pulled it out, rubbed at the canvas as if to heal the scar, and brought my blade over to lay it beside my glass on the table. I returned it to its boot-top sheath, and we looked at each other.

“Very well,” he said. “I stand corrected.”

“I still don’t want to go with the Goodhearts,” I told him.

Holmes spoke up. “I think you should.”

“Oh God, Holmes. Why don’t you go with Sunny and her mama? I’ll stay behind and teach Bindra the fire-toss.”

“Who the deuce is this Bindra chap?” Nesbit demanded.

“Our general factotum,” I told him.

“Sorcerer’s apprentice,” Holmes amplified. “No, if one or the other of us needs go with the Goodhearts, it should be you. Even if it was not Goodheart who tried to kill me, he would be more closely guarded around me than he would be with you. If,” he added, “you can refrain from demonstrating your extreme competence with him as well.”

I thought about it. If O’Hara had been killed or was being held prisoner inside Khanpur, evidence would be somewhere within the palace. And having one set of ears inside, the other in the town outside the walls, I had to admit, greatly increased our chances of hearing something. I should much rather be with Holmes than with the Goodhearts, but my own preferences could not be of primary consideration here. And it need only be for a few days, before I rejoined Holmes.

I looked down at my arms, trying not to think too closely about the coming ordeal. “What can we do about my colour?” I asked. “And I shall have to have something other than homespun salwaar kameez to wear.”

“I brought with me the things you left at the hotel,” Nesbit told me. “And I have the necessary bleaching materials for your skin and hair.”

“Very sure of yourself, weren’t you?” I said, but he was not about to repeat his mistake.

“Merely relying upon your professionalism, Miss Russell.” His boyish grin was irresistible.

Chapter Fourteen

I stayed on that night at the Viceregal Lodge after Holmes left, having been given a room considerably more luxurious than our hotel in the native bazaar. In the end, however, I spent little time in the room itself, and many hours in the marble bath-room, scraping some of the brown from my face and hands and turning my black hair back into a substance the colour and, alas, texture of straw. Dawn found me damp, raw, jaundice-skinned and red-eyed from the combination of chemical fumes and lack of sleep. And because Nesbit and I agreed that the fewer people who witnessed this transformation the better, I saw no servants until one brought me a breakfast tray at seven o’clock. He was followed shortly by Nesbit, who apologised for the early hour, and ushered in a pair of the staff carrying not only my things from Simla but the bags I had abandoned in Delhi.

“I see the hotel didn’t burn to the ground,” I commented. “Coffee?”

“Thank you. And no, it was but a smokey collection of oil-soaked rags in a cellar stairway.”

“The alarm was the thing.”

“If we assume that the fire was deliberately set and aimed at you two, yes. However, even if it was not an accident, that same stunt has been pulled at two other hotels in the past year. An hotel emptied of fleeing foreigners makes rich grounds for a burglar.”

I handed him his coffee without comment.

“The Goodhearts plan to leave for Khanpur today,” he said, but when I set down my cup with alacrity he added, “however, I fear they will find that their porters are infected with the current intransigent attitude of the Indian working classes, and are holding out for more pay.”

“You talked the workers into going out on strike?” A gambit Mycroft would be proud to claim.

“Not precisely. But one of my agents filled their ears with sedition. And, incidentally, their bellies with strong drink.”

“Leaving them too hung-over to work.” He was good; his humble smile told me that he knew it.

“They should be fully restored to the maharaja’s services by Monday.”

“That gives me two days in which to ingratiate myself. Should be plenty. Thank you.”

“I have also arranged for a durzi to come here and provide you with two or three new garments for your time in the palace, and a shoemaker waits downstairs to measure your feet.”

My toes cringed in anticipation of the native craft, but there was always the leprous footwear, and a pair of formal slippers in my bags if I needed those. He drained his cup, preparing to leave, but first I had a question.

“What did you mean yesterday, that O’Hara counted his steps on Tibetan prayer-beads?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a thing the ‘pundits’ do, when surveying. The standard Tibetan prayer-beads hold 108 beads, along with two subsidiary strings of five each. If one removes eight, the rosary appears the same, but an even hundred becomes quite useful for survey purposes: One bead for each hundred steps, ten thousand steps to a circuit; with the side-beads a man can survey a small country. Assuming the length of his steps is unchanging.”

“I see.” I tried to imagine keeping track of steps while carrying on a conversation, and maintaining perfect distance on each stride; I failed.

When Nesbit left, he took with him the débris from the enlightenment of skin and hair so as not to provide fodder for below-the-stairs gossip. As I struggled to bring my straw-like mane under control, I made a mental note to purchase some sort of oil in the town to keep the strands from snapping off entirely. A short session with the white-bearded durzi, choosing samples and lending him some of my clothes to copy, and a shorter session with the shoemaker, then I was off to town.

I reminded myself to use the front door of the Lodge, where I nodded briefly to the regal chuprassi who held it for me, and was about to take to the road when I noticed the motorcar, its driver holding its door. You’re English again, Russell, I reminded myself, and climbed inside.

Nesbit and I had sketched out a plan to bring me back into the Goodheart circle, beginning with a chance meeting at the tea shop where he had taken the family the day before. As soon as he heard of their distressing abandonment by their porters, he would extend a breakfast invitation to the family matron, who would no more leave Sunny behind than she would walk the two miles to Viceregal Lodge. And indeed, when I happened to wander through the Gothic doors of that particular tea shop across from the band-stand, Mrs Goodheart and her Flapper daughter were seated opposite the eligible young British officer, all smiling merrily over their coffee cups. The other patrons of the shop watched Sunny from the corners of their eyes, as much, I thought, for the gaiety of her person as the extremity of her wardrobe. Mrs Goodheart’s smile faded somewhat when I came to their table with my exclamations of surprise, but then she remembered that I was safely married, and invited me to join them.

“My, Mary, haven’t you gone dark!”

You don’t know the half of it, I thought, and accepted the invitation to coffee with some remark about the strength of the sun at these altitudes.

It was Sunny who asked the question. “Where is your husband this morning?”

“Oh, nothing would do but that he had to go off and climb some mountain or another, can you believe that? So vexing, he’s simply abandoned me here at the end of the world. No offence meant, Captain Nesbit.”

“None taken; I agree there is not much to occupy a young woman in Simla at this time of year.”

“Come with us,” Sunny piped up. I forbore to look at my wrist-watch, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Nesbit pull his own watch from his pocket and note the time; I had to agree, even for me thirty seconds was something of a record for the manipulation of innocent victims. I beamed at dear, fresh, pretty, boring little Sunny.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. What do you call it, ‘crashing’ your party?”

“Oh baloney. Mama, tell her she has to come along. Tommy’s friend would think it was posalutely nifty.”

I blinked, but the phrase seemed to indicate affirmation, and although I couldn’t imagine having the temerity to invite myself to a maharaja’s house party, that is precisely what I seemed to be doing. I put on my most lost and wistful expression to say, “Well, it would be perfectly lovely. What do you think, Mrs Goodheart?”

Had I been an unmarried woman, she’d have abandoned me in the snow without a gram of compunction, but a matronly companion for her daughter might have its advantages. By providing contrast to the child’s looks and sparkle, if nothing else. “It does seem a bit forward of us, but . . . I know, I will ask Thomas to cable his friend, and see if we might bring another guest. Seeing as how we’re stuck here for the day, anyway.”

Sunny clapped her hands and I said, “That is very generous of you, Mrs Goodheart,” and to the disappointment of both women Nesbit took his leave, pleading the demands of work. Mrs Goodheart eyed the heaps of snow with no enthusiasm and declared her intention of returning to the hotel, but I suggested that Sunny might enjoy a walk through the town. The older woman hesitated, then concluded that I was capable of guarding her baby girl from harm in broad daylight, and agreed.

We began at the skating rink, hiring skates and edging out onto the uneven ice. It had been so long since I had been on blades, I clung to the rail like a child, but to Chicago’s daughter ice was a lifelong companion, and she sailed merrily back and forth, her cheeks pink as a china doll’s, her teasing laughter ringing across the trees. My ankles were watery when we turned in our hired skates, and we paused to drink a cup of sweet tea sold by the establishment.

I used the moment of leisure to question my young companion. “It was a lovely surprise to see you,” I told her. “But I can’t really imagine what you’re doing here.”

The innocent did not hesitate to answer. “I know, Simla’s not much compared to Jaipur or something. But Tommy wanted to see it, and the maharaja isn’t at home until tomorrow. We had thought to go to Khanpur today, or at least go back down today and head for Khanpur tomorrow—what a fantastic train ride, isn’t it? All those tunnels? But then today the coolies wouldn’t work, so we’re here for longer. I’m glad; it gives us a chance to see something of each other. Have you finished? It’s pretty chilly, sitting here.”

We returned our cups, and Sunny tucked her arm into mine as if we’d been friends for years.

“I have to say, it’s absolutely fantabulous of you to have found something that I can do better than you. I’ll bet you planned it out.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Oh, Mary, you can do just everything. You know everything, you’ll talk to anyone, you do all these things that just give me the heebie-jeebies, sometimes I feel about six years old around you. But I am so glad you’re coming with us to see Tommy’s maharaja—a genuine maharaja, for gosh sake! I just know that when I stand there in front of him my lips will just freeze up, but with you there it’ll make it easier, sort of following your lead.”

I looked down at her fur-covered head, astounded. Although why should I be? Elaborate fronts were often constructed to conceal doubts and insecurities. I laughed, and said, “Just think, you’ll probably be the first Flapper to reach Khanpur.”

“What a nifty title for a book—The First Flapper in Khanpur. When I write my memoirs, I’ll thank you for the name. Where are we going now?”

“Shall we take a look at the native bazaar?” There would be no chance of stumbling across Holmes; he and Bindra would be long gone, on the first train out of Simla to retrieve the travelling show and make for Khanpur, questioning people about O’Hara all the way.

“Oh, that would be fun! I wanted to go into those shops yesterday when we walked through with Mama, but she took one look at them and said they were too dirty and that we’d probably get robbed.”

“I should think they look worse from the outside than they are.”

“And do you know, it was funny to see you come into the tea shop this morning? We’d just been talking about you yesterday.”

“Oh yes?” I asked, warily.

“Yes, Tommy swore he’d seen a native that looked just like your husband, there in the bazaar, can you imagine? I mean, anyone less like an Indian than him, I can’t picture, and he was squatting down at the side of the road like they do, trying to beg some money off Captain Nesbit.”

“It’s not likely to have been my husband,” I assured her mildly, squelching the alarm I felt at Goodheart’s unexpected perceptiveness, but she burst out laughing at the thought.

“Of course not, silly, it’s just that Tommy was reminded of him, and so we were talking about you a little, telling Captain Nesbit about the voyage out, that’s all. Say, do you think we could find a sari in this bazaar? That one you wore on the ship was posatively dreamy.”

“We’d be more likely to find a sheepskin coat than a silk sari, but we can look.”

We found many things, from a dozen bright, rattly bangles for Sunny’s wrist to an embroidered cap for Tommy’s head, including two sari-lengths of silk for the girl, one bright green with a silver border, the other saffron-yellow with a heavy stripe of darker orange, along with their under-skirts and blouses. Next door lay a shop with a dusty display of necklaces in the window, a place dark and mysterious enough to have belonged to Kim’s Lurgan Sahib; with a squeal, Sunny dived inside.

The shopkeeper was no teacher of spies, but we did make him a happy man. Something about his wares, which were rough to the point of primitive, appealed to the girl from Chicago. And I had to admit, she had a remarkable eye for the unlikely treasure, uncovering a shimmering breastplate of opals set in native gold that added five years and a lifetime of sophistication to her face. I was fingering a heavy necklace made of amber beads when she snatched it from my hand, turned me bodily about, and propelled me over to the only clean surface in the shop, a looking-glass. Standing behind me and craning to see around my shoulders, she pushed the silver amulet-charm I wore under my collar and fastened the amber around my neck in its place, chatting all the while.

“I don’t know why you wear that funny old thing, it’s nowhere near as nice as some of the pieces you wore on the boat. There, that’s better,” she said, and exclaimed, “Oh, Mary, amber is so tasty on you!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sunny,” I said, reaching behind my neck for the clasp.

She slapped at my hands and urged me at the glass. “I mean it, Mary. Look!”

I looked, and saw a pale-haired, scrubbed-looking woman transformed by a wealth of Baroque colour riding her collar-bones. The uneven stones of the necklace, graduated in size from cherry-pit at the top to a baby’s fist at the centre, were the deep and cloudy orange of good amber, with tantalising slices of shimmering clear stone twisted through them. It looked like nothing I would wear; that, in truth, was a great part of its appeal. Nonetheless, I reached up to unfasten the clasp, and handed it to the man. Sunny, however, grabbed it first and dropped it beside the bangles, the opals, and the other pieces under whose spell she’d fallen.

“We’ll take all of these,” she told him.

“We’ll take none of them,” I corrected her, and when she began to sputter in indignation, I turned to the man and started the age-old bargaining rituals of the East.

In the end, I beat the price down so that the girl had the amber for nothing and saved a third of his original price on the opals. Pleased, she gathered up the heavy orange beads and pressed them into my hands. I protested, and tried to give them back to her, but when she started to look hurt, I thanked her, and subsided.

While she was making arrangements for the delivery and payment, I opened my fingers and gazed at the necklace. A gift from a rich girl to a new friend she imagines to be comparatively poor, although she is not. A rich girl whose brother is the subject of that friend’s suspicions, a girl whose brother may have tried to kill the friend and her husband. A rich girl who was even now being used, with cold calculation, by her friend.

Amber, when warm, gives out a faint aroma, the odour of slow time. I put the spilling double-handful up to my face, and inhaled its trace of musk, laced with the tang of betrayal. Sunny Goodheart gave me the necklace because it looked pretty on me; I accepted the gift because it would remind me of consequences.

We took lunch at one of the restaurants facing the Mall, and afterwards walked up for a look at the shivering monkeys on Jakko before I led her back to their hotel. There we found that Thomas had sent a telegram to Khanpur, and had already received a reply: Yes, I should be welcome to join the party. I told Sunny I would have my bags brought to their hotel first thing on Monday morning, trusting that the porters would have settled down from their insurrection and would be willing to take to the road, and before anyone could ask where I was staying, I invented an almost-missed appointment and hurried away.

My steps dawdled through the shambling lower bazaar, however, my fingers playing with the warm beads in my pocket as my mind went over and over the episode in the shop. It was the thing I liked least, in all the requirements of this odd investigative life which I had entered when I became the partner of Sherlock Holmes: the need to use and manipulate the innocent.

At times, the means by which we reached our end left a most unpleasant taste in my mouth.

I spent all of Sunday wandering the mountains above Simla, ostensibly asking questions about Kimball O’Hara, but in fact merely enjoying the glimpse of a new world. I hiked the lanes past native dwellings stacked on top of each other, around furniture shops and blacksmiths spilling out into the road, dodging mountain people with huge tangles of firewood or anonymous bundles across their shoulders, balanced on their heads, or worn in long kirta baskets slung between their shoulders. Craftsmen sawed and hammered, infants tumbled, and schoolboys played a Himalayan version of cricket. A mountain of immense deodar logs had been built outside of the town, and on its peak sat a lone monkey, looking very cold. I was more of a stranger in this remarkable land than the simian was, and I prized every moment of the experience. Particularly when, once away from the centre of the town, the beggars became thin on the ground, and I could look the residents in the eye without fearing the outstretched hand.

I found no word whatsoever of O’Hara, and got back to Viceregal Lodge when the sun was low against the western hills, footsore, light-headed from the long exertion at that altitude, and yearning for many cups of hot tea. The tea was provided within moments, and as the man was leaving, he said, “Madam, the durzi and the shoemaker are at your convenience. When you wish to see them, please ring.”

I had forgotten all about them, and frankly was not looking forward to the interviews, since I did not expect that anything they had produced would be wearable in any but a last resort. But obediently, when I had drunk my tea and scrubbed away the worst of the day’s dust, I rang the bell and prepared my words of polite thanks.

But the durzi was a magician. Open-mouthed, I looked over the wares he spread out on the chairs of the anteroom. Two of the blouses appeared identical to one I had given him for copying, but three others, while cut to the same size, had clever details of cuff and front that the original had not. The four skirts he proffered were similar variations on a given theme, and my thanks and praise had no element of polite sham. And then, with a curious air of humble pride, he had his assistant produce the last garments.

“Nesbit sahib requested that I make this as well,” the old man told me. “He said, ‘If the lady does not wish it, that is of no matter, but it is best she have the choice.’ ”

What he spread out on the stuffed sofa was a classic salwaar kameez, only far, far more formal than anything I’d seen on the streets. Voluminous trousers, gathered at the ankle into stiff, embroidered cuffs, matched the knee-length tunic, which was worked with intertwined patterns of beaded embroidery along the neck and down the buttoned placket, as well as following the two long seams that ran up the front and down the back. With the shirt and trousers came a breathtaking Kashmiri shawl woven of whisper-fine wool and heavily embroidered with silken arabesques, so beautiful my rough hands could not keep from caressing it. The old durzi’s eyes warmed at my response and he told me it was his wife’s work, then demonstrated how it was worn. The ensemble was even more stunning than the sari Holmes had bought in Port Said, and every bit as graceful, with the inestimable advantage of leaving its wearer able to walk, sit, and even stretch out her arm for something without the risk of sudden nudity.

I embarrassed him with my praise. And when he had left and the shoemaker come to show me what he had done, I vowed to appoint Geoffrey Nesbit my permanent lady’s maid. Three offerings, all as comfortable as an old pair of moccasins; one formal pumps, one sturdy oiled leather hiking boots, the other a close facsimile of my leprous shoes, only in a deep and delicious shade of brown. He had even brought a small leather handbag that matched the black pumps.

Riches.

I spent the evening trying on and gloating over my new wardrobe, and slipped between my lavender-scented sheets with a smile on my face, while Holmes, bundled against the cold, lay somewhere on the road west of Kalka.

First thing on Monday morning, the Goodhearts and most of the hotel staff were gathered in the forecourt of the grandest hotel in Simla, overseeing the loading of enormous quantities of luggage from door to tongas. Why hadn’t they left the bulk of their things in Delhi, or shipped them ahead to await their side-trip? But I didn’t ask, merely offered to take one or two of the trunks in my tonga and meet them at the railway station. I ended up with three, along with four hat-boxes and a rolled carpet.

Similar activities at the Simla station made me glad that one of my trunks had vanished into the Red Sea, and by the time we had gone through the same rituals in Kalka, shifting to the larger-gauge train (Mrs Goodheart wouldn’t hear of allowing the porters to do it unsupervised—one would swear she had the Kohinoor amongst her bags), then twice in Umballa, from train to hotel in the evening then back again the following morning, I was thoroughly sick of every trunk, bag, and hat-box in the collection, and tempted to stand up with the small bag holding my new clothes, comb, and tooth-brush, forswearing the burdens of civilisation.

But the maharaja’s own saloon coach had been sent down for our use, and an appropriately princely train car it was, all sumptuous glitter and spotless carpets, overhead fans and electric lights, its staff in spotless white and wearing the red turban with white device I had seen on the docks in Bombay. The car had its own baggage compartment, which meant that once we had picked our way past the Umballa platform’s sleeping bodies, which eerily resembled corpses sheeted for burial, we were not required to oversee the shifting of anything more complex than a tea cup for the rest of the day. I settled into my armchair with a sable-lined travelling rug over my knees, and prepared to be pampered. Mrs Goodheart, having spent the past twenty-four hours labouring heroically to maintain Yankee order in the face of Oriental chaos, collapsed onto a softly upholstered sofa, where she allowed Sunny to prop up her feet and slip off her shoes under cover of her own fur rug. After a spate of fussing, dabbing wrists and forehead with cool scented waters, and downing a mighty slug of purely medicinal brandy, she retreated into sleep, her snores rising and falling with the beat of the train over the tracks.

Sunny came to sit near me at the window, giving me an apologetic smile.

“Your mother is finding India a challenge,” I observed.

“She’s not used to letting other people do things for her.”

I lowered my voice so that her brother, seated at the other end of the car with a book, might not hear us. “I’d have thought your brother could help a little more.”

“He’s pretty preoccupied,” she replied, which was both an agreement and an excuse.

“By what?”

“Oh, it’s something to do with the maharaja. I don’t really know, but Tommy’s hoping to get the maharaja interested in one of his pet projects. His backing, you know?”

“Ah. A business venture.”

“Not really. I think it’s something to do with setting up a school in the States. But like I said, I don’t really know. Just that Tommy’s got a lot of hopes hanging on it.”

Not altogether a social visit, then. I wondered if the maharaja was aware of that.

We sat at the window, chatting idly, with the mountains looking over our shoulders as the musical names unfolded beneath us: Sirhind, Ludhiana, Jullunder, Amritsar. At this last, with a lot of jolting, the prince’s car separated from those continuing on to Lahore and points west, leaving us for a while on an empty siding (empty of trains, that is: there appeared to be a small village living on the tracks) before we could join with a north-bound train. Batala, Gurdaspur, Pathankot, up into the mountains again, the people along the snow-speckled rails again showing the rounder features of the mountain folk. Flat roofs gave way to peaked, sandals to boots, bullock carts to loads carried on the back in long kirta baskets. The snow-laden mountains drew near, the trees grew in height, the windows radiated cold.

A luncheon was brought to us, and Mrs Goodheart woke and put on her shoes, Tommy laid aside his tracts, and we ate the uninspired cutlets and two veg, Mrs Goodheart sighing, Tommy distracted, and me thinking wistfully of Bindra’s curries and the large, greasy, chewy puris we had used to scoop them up.

“Miss Russell.” I blinked and looked across at Tommy Goodheart. “That is right, isn’t it? You prefer Miss?”

“Generally, yes.”

Mrs Goodheart raised her head sharply. “I thought you were married?”

“I am, I just—”

“A lot of married women keep their names, Mother,” Sunny explained.

“But—”

Her son ignored her confusion. “Your husband and I spent a lot of time together, but I’m afraid that you and I never had much of a conversation. You’re English?”

“I live in England and my mother was English, but my father was American. From San Francisco.”

Mrs Goodheart said doubtfully, “I don’t know any Russells from San Francisco.”

“His family was from Boston originally,” I admitted, and saw the woman’s eyes go bright.

“The Boston Russells? Well, well. I wonder if I ever met your father? I went to any number of parties there, when I was young.”

“I doubt it,” I said firmly. “His parents moved out to California when he was very small. So yes, I regard myself as English. Proudly so, particularly at the present.”

As I hoped, Goodheart took the bait of distraction. “Are you referring to the Labour Party’s victory?”

“Yes. Extraordinary, isn’t it? I’ve heard it called a bloodless revolution.”

He was launched: For the first time, he betrayed a degree of animation, and the rest of the meal was dominated by his questions about the English working classes (about whom I knew little, other than farm labourers and London cabbies) and whether or not I had met MacDonald or a dozen other men, most of whom, indeed, I had never heard of. Then one name caught my ear.

“Yes, I believe I’ve met him,” I said. “At a fancy-dress party in a Berkshire country house, just before Christmas. He was dressed, let’s see—oh yes. He was in a very chilly costume, that of a pyramid builder, complete with red-paint whip marks on his back.” And a very unsuitable costume it had been, too, for the man was pudgy and his back showed acne beneath the paint.

“Strange place to find him.”

“He was probably experimenting with subversion from within,” I told him, keeping my face completely straight.

“I suppose. Odd, that your husband didn’t seem all that interested in politics.”

“Well,” I said, “he’s on the conservative side. I wouldn’t call him a reactionary, exactly . . .” This was by no means the first time I’d had to deny Holmes in the course of a case. And as before, no cock crew.

Goodheart’s face was, as always, remarkably difficult to read, but I thought his interest was piqued. If so, it would be understandable: A woman abandoned—even temporarily—by her considerably older husband, who then expresses an interest in radical politics, might be worth cultivating. I still couldn’t tell if he knew who Holmes actually was, but if this young man had indeed tried to murder us in Aden, separating myself from Holmes in his mind might stop him from pulling another balcony down on my head in Khanpur. Mrs Goodheart, however, was not pleased at what she perceived as the intimacy of our glance. She fixed me with a sour gaze, and demanded that Thomas search out a deck of cards. I subsided and went back to my window.

At long last, the train slowed, and sighed, and came to a stop. Noses pressed against the windows (all except the proud Thomas, who nonetheless watched with great interest), we waited to see what manner of royal vehicle would come for us. Sunny was hoping for camels and elephants, although I thought a Lagonda or Rolls-Royce more likely—and less crippling, considering we were still more than fifty miles from Khanpur city.

What came for us was an aeroplane.

Chapter Fifteen

We heard it first, above the shouts of the coolies and the dying huff and hiss of steam from the engine, a rising and directionless mechanical presence among the wooded peaks. We peered and craned our necks, Thomas Goodheart no less than the lowliest of coolies, and then suddenly the noise had a source as a wide pair of brightly painted red-and-white wings shot from behind a hill and swept in our direction.

It dropped so low above the train station, I could see the distinctive corrugation of its siding—although even its elegant shape identified it as a product of the German Junkers company, building passenger aeroplanes now that potential war-planes were forbidden to them. This one wagged its long wings over our heads in passing. It flew on south for a minute or so before rising sharply into a high turn, then dropping down to come back at us. Children went scurrying—not, as I thought, in terror, but to slap and shove a pair of cows from a stretch of nearby road. As soon as the beasts had been encouraged from the track, the aeroplane aimed itself at the roadway, touched down lightly, and taxied up in our direction, coming to a halt before the nearest telegraph lines a quarter of a mile away. Its propeller coughed to a halt, and in a minute a man kicked open its door and jumped from its wing to the ground.

Thomas Goodheart’s reaction made me look at the approaching figure more closely. The young American straightened and started down the road, walking more briskly than I had seen him move before. When they came together, the pilot grabbed Goodheart’s hand and pumped it, slapped his arm, and continued towards us. The coolies and tonga drivers paused in their work, the railway workers turned to watch; this could only be the maharaja of Khanpur, come to greet his guests.

He bent over Mrs Goodheart’s hand, not quite kissing it. “Mrs Goodheart, thank you for gracing my home with your visit. I feel as if I know you already, Tommy’s spoken of you with such affection. And you are the sister, Sybil. Welcome, Miss Goodheart.” He took Sunny’s outstretched hand before turning to me. “And Mrs Russell, you, too, are welcome. Any friend of Tommy’s—I’m glad he felt free to ask you.”

Not that Thomas Goodheart had done anything more than bow to his mother’s pressure, but I wouldn’t mention that, not to a man with eyes as filled with speculation as his. I merely thanked him, laid my fingers briefly within his hard hand that bore the distinctive callus of reins, and pulled away.

His Highness was not what I might have expected in a maharaja, and further removed still from the folksiness of a “Jimmy.” A small man, shorter even than Nesbit (and, I thought, irritated at being forced to look up into my face), the maharaja resembled an Oxford undergraduate—the athlete rather than the aesthete, with fashionably bagged trousers, a white knit pull-over, and an astrakhan cap pulled over black hair. His lower lip was full, a faint intimation of the family habit of debauchery, and his dark eyes were lazy with the same self-assurance I had seen in the photograph on Nesbit’s wall, speaking of a bone-deep aristocracy that relegated the House of Windsor to the status of shopkeepers: This was the most important man in his particular world, and he assumed those around him agreed. There was nothing in his manner or his dress (apart from the cap) that spoke of India, certainly nothing in his lack of concern about castely impurities that permitted him to take the hands of strange women, nothing other than a faint dip and rise in his accent and the old-penny colour of his skin.

Mrs Goodheart looked confused; Sunny, on the other hand, was bedazzled. I couldn’t help speculating about Mrs Goodheart’s opinions on inter-racial marriages.

The aeroplane would hold the four of us and our smaller bags, with the maharaja at the controls. We would leave behind a small mountain of Goodheart possessions and my solitary trunk, guarded by a uniformed chuprassi until the plane came back for them.

We settled into the padded seats, Thomas beside the maharaja, with Mrs Goodheart on one side and Sunny and I on the other. The noise made speech impossible, which was just as well. Mrs Goodheart turned pale as the plane roared and bounced and then leapt skyward. Her knuckles remained white the entire way as her hands clenched the arms of her chair, holding her from falling to the ground below; once when the air dropped away beneath us, I feared she was going to faint. Sunny did not notice, but spent the entire forty-five minutes in the air with her head craned and turning, to see the hills, the glimpse of road, the brilliant white peaks that seemed at arm’s reach, the occasional pocket of lake. Goodheart seemed even less concerned, moving easily into his seat and paying more attention to the actions of our highly capable pilot than to our height, our movements, or the scenery. Thomas Goodheart, I thought, had flown before.

After forty minutes, we flew over a town, a hillside collation of tile roofs near a white river, then continued on for a few minutes before we dropped lower, skimmed the tops of some trees (Mrs Goodheart moaned and squeezed her eyes shut), and then set down smooth as cream on a wide, long, tarmac runway, taxiing along it to a wide shed, in front of which waited two motorcars and several men. The landing strip even had lights marking its sides, I noticed. Near the hangar at the southern end were tied down a small fleet of aeroplanes, six in all, ranging from a battered RAF fighter plane to an enormous three-engined thing with wings that must have stretched nearly a hundred feet. It looked as if it had just come from the factory, and was still sheathed in gleaming metal, not yet having received the red-and-white paint that covered the others. Its sides, I saw as we flashed past it on the landing strip, were corrugated like the one we were in, the same distinctive duralumin siding of the Junkers corporation. The bigger version probably had a flight range of seven or eight hundred miles; a person would be well inside Russia before having to refuel.

We slowed and made our turn, little more than halfway up the long macadam strip. The northern end of the runway rotated slowly past my window, affording me clear view of the five substantial warehouses or godowns facing one another across the tarmac.

For a maharaja’s plaything, the air strip was a serious affair.

For someone storing goods best kept out of the British eye, those godowns were ideally placed. I itched to see inside at least one of them, but all five doors were shut tight, and appeared locked. I craned my head against the window-glass until they had disappeared behind us, then subsided into my seat like a good guest, waiting to disembark at the formal southern end of the field.

The engine died and the propeller kicked to a halt, leaving our ears ringing furiously in the silence. “Welcome to Khanpur,” our pilot announced, and opened the door with a flourish.

Mrs Goodheart needed assistance across the wing and down the folding steps. On the ground, she gulped wordlessly at the cold air and allowed her son to settle her into the seat of the waiting sedan car, grateful beyond words to enter a vehicle that was not about to leave the earth behind. Sunny, when she reached the ground, turned a circle, hands clapped together, oohing at the setting. Goodheart, filled with cool insouciance, gave a glance to the high circle of white mountains before turning his attention to our host.

I waited, intending to thank the maharaja, but he was moving off with Goodheart in the direction of the sleek little racing car, while we ladies were placed in the roomier, more sedate Rolls. The two men got into the small car and tore away at high speed without a backwards glance. Our bags were placed in the back of the Rolls, and the driver, wearing a uniform of red and silver, his red-and-white turban microscopically perfect, got in and turned us in the great man’s wake. As we left, one of the men sitting next to the building tossed his cigarette to the ground and sauntered over to the plane, his skin and features European, his very posture proclaiming him an RAF man.

I looked back to see him climb into the plane, and I wondered what a one-time fighter pilot thought of fetching baggage for a maharaja.

The Forts, two miles south of the air field and five miles north of Khanpur city, were aptly named, a pair of high fortified walls crowning a pair of sharp hills bisected by the north-south road. The two halves Nesbit had called Old Fort and New Fort were clearly from different eras, that on the east an early Pathan hill fortification with walls ancient enough to appear fragile, whereas the larger, western, and well-maintained New Fort was pure Moghul, its small, tower-flanked gate reached by a narrow road that climbed from the hillock’s southern end to its eastern, every inch of it nicely exposed for the purposes of defence. Round towers surmounted by flanged caps like German helmets jutted out from the red, age-streaked stone walls every hundred feet or so, each one large enough to shelter a dozen archers. The big sedan car passed through the dividing chasm, turned sharply right to climb the narrow drive, and finally eased through the gate, where raw patches betrayed the passage of many incautious drivers.

With the name of the place and its master’s passion for hunting, I had expected it to be a cross between a hill fort and an all-male hunting lodge, with a veneer of comfort over a utilitarian base. Instead, we drove into an earthly Paradise.

As the mountains encircled Khanpur itself, so high, warm-red walls, built for military purpose, now gave shelter to a garden, several acres of closely planned and maintained lawn, flower, and tree. Its centre was half an acre of lotus pond with playing fountain and water birds; a trio of tame gazelles in jewelled harnesses tip-toed across the close-trimmed lawn sloping up from the water; bright birds sang in the trees that rose half as high as the three-storey walls. In places the pillars of the ground-floor arcade were overgrown with a riot of crimson bougainvillea that reached the open-air passageways of the second and even third levels.

The great building inside which we stood followed the outline of the hill, forming a skewed circle but for the flat eastern side, which contained the gates and faced the Old Fort across the road; late-afternoon sunlight glittered off fresh gilding around the east wing’s deep-set windows. Before us to the north, a wide terrace spilled flowers from pots the size of a man, and the arcade behind it gleamed with mosaics of lapis-blue and gold. To my left, the western wing was more or less obscured by trees, and a glance behind me at the south walls gave the only indication that the conversion of The Forts was not yet complete, for flaking paint and stained stone peeped from between branches of bamboo as thick as my forearm.

There was no sign of the maharaja, although his motorcar stood open-doored on the gravel drive. In his place, we were met by a man as grand as the uniform he wore, its snug trousers spotless white, the heavy silk brocade of his tunic dropping past his knees, the ends of his greying moustaches trained flawlessly upwards. To one side stood two men with leashed cheetahs, the cats’ collars flashing with rubies; both animals eyed the delicate gazelles with feline interest, the very ends of their tails twitching, twitching. Up on the terrace, half a dozen musicians had begun to play the moment we came through the gates. Behind these ceremonial figures, a platoon of lesser chuprassis stood waiting to retrieve us and our bags, to show us to our rooms, to draw us scented baths and tea trays and finally to take up positions outside of our doors, awaiting our least wishes. I was given a suite of two rooms with its own small bath-room, the bath’s square-footage more than compensated for by the ornateness of its walls: It had enough mirror and gilt to send Bindra into a thousand ecstasies. I, on the other hand, was overjoyed to find that it had running water, both hot and cold. Someone in Khanpur’s past had been remarkably progressive when it came to the comfort of guests; I couldn’t imagine what it must have cost to install nineteenth-century plumbing in a sixteenth-century building.

When I had been shown the glories of the water closet and had illustrated for me the geyser controls over my bath and the resultant spouts of furiously hot water, the two men who had accompanied me to my rooms left me in peace, one of them pausing only to adjust, with ostentatious ceremony, the ornately worked album resting on the writing table beneath the window. When they had left, I went to see what the album’s significance might be, and found it to contain a magnificently calligraphed document with the day’s date at the top.

5 February 1924

Welcome, friend, to Khanpur.

While the riches of Khanpur are many, the demands on its guests should be few. For however long you may grace us with your presence, please feel completely at home here, free to participate in our many activities, or free to remain in your quarters in quiet meditation, or with a book from our library. Bells will be rung at the following times, but if you wish not to join us at table, please, merely turn your name-plate outside your door to face inwards, and we shall know not to make a setting for you.

And again, if there is anything we might do to serve you, you need only ask.

There followed a list of times, most of them for meals—tea, I saw, was being served now on the upper terrace, wherever that might be; the next bell that came would indicate drinks, followed an hour later by dinner, which was followed by the notation “Dress: Casual.” I turned the page and found a description of the palace, with the interesting sights in the vicinity and suggestions of places to go in the town, all written in an ornate English that had me smiling.

There was even a map.

It was an odd document, I thought, one more suited to an hotel than to a private estate, and it said a great deal about the mind of the man behind it. Clearly, the maharaja was accustomed to entertaining large numbers of guests with highly disparate interests, and found it more convenient to present each with this cool, almost commercial document rather than convey the information in some more personal manner.

Well, it suited me nicely. I left my name-tag facing outwards, and took myself to the marble-and-gold bath to explore the intricacies of the Victorian hot water system.

The bell that rang the summons for the programme’s drinks-before-dinner event was no gong, but a small, silvery voice that approached, paused outside of my door, and continued on to the next guest. I finished arranging my hair, thrust my revolver into hiding beneath the feather bed, and checked the palace plan in the album. Map-reading proved unnecessary, for a uniformed chuprassi was squatting patiently in the hallway outside; he stood instantly to guide me to the room where the guests were gathering.

I stopped dead, brought up short as much by the intense beauty of the room as by the crowd it held; there had to be thirty people in the room already, drinks and cigarettes in their hands, the inevitable empty talk of the cocktail party on their tongues. Three flighty German girls nearby chattered madly about the lake-birds they had seen, two American men debated the relative merits of two makes of shotgun, a mixed trio of Italians seemed to be trying to sell a race-horse to another American—and that was the mixture within earshot. Only a handful of the guests appeared Indian, and none of those wore traditional dress. I was glad I hadn’t put on the lovely garment the Simla durzi had made for me—I’d have been as out of place as a caparisoned camel.

Sunny stood across the room, her face flushed with excitement and, I thought, with the drink she held. She spotted me an instant later and began to wave furiously, so that half the people in the room turned in amusement to watch me come in.

“Ooh,” she burst out, “isn’t this just the superest thing? Isn’t my brother just the darlingest?”

I looked up and around the jewel-box of a room, its walls and ceiling of creamy white marble inlaid with semi-precious stones, predominantly jade and lapis lazuli with spots of coral. The upper level was obscured by carved marble screens, designed for the use of the women in purdah, I supposed, and the colours made it feel as if one stood in a tropical sea, blue-green waters sparkling with the bright colours of the fish. “It certainly is impressive. What are you drinking?”

“It’s something called a White Lady,” she said, peering doubtfully into the glass. On the boat, I’d never seen her permitted drink stronger than a single glass of wine.

“Perhaps you should stick to the lemonade,” I suggested. “If you take it in a champagne glass, nobody’ll know.”

She giggled, and I decided it was probably too late to worry about her sobriety. “Where is your mother?”

“Feeling a bit under the weather,” she confided. “Mama went on a barn-storming ride once at a fair and the aeroplane landed sort of hard. Well, crashed, really. So she’s not too keen on them, anymore.”

“That’s understandable. Thank you,” I said to the uniformed entity who appeared at my side with a tray of champagne and gin fizzes. I took the wine. “Your brother, though—he seemed more experienced.”

“Oh yes, Tommy’s flown a lot.” Sunny giggled at nothing much, then leant forward to whisper, “Have you talked with His Highness yet?”

“No, I’ve been in my rooms.”

“Neither have I. Isn’t he dreamy?”

“He seemed very nice,” I agreed somewhat noncommittally; actually, I thought his brisk abandonment of his lady guests at the air field, and his absence at our arrival in The Forts, rather unusual.

“Do you know, are all these people house-guests, too?”

“I haven’t a clue. There are rather a lot, aren’t there?”

“I’ll never keep them straight,” she moaned, although having seen her in action on the boat, I thought they’d be eating out of her hand by evening’s end.

She turned to the young man at her side, while my eyes strayed to the gathering. They were a remarkably attractive collection of individuals, the majority of them male, most of them between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, although a handful had grey heads. Now that I was actually among them, I saw that there were a greater number of Indians than I had originally thought: I had moved among the country’s rural inhabitants for too long for my eyes immediately to interpret as Indians the man in Oxford bags and tennis sweater, or the young woman with crisply shingled hair and knee-length skirt who was smoking a cigarette in a long enamelled holder. Such was the young lady Sunny was now talking with, and to whom she introduced me, more or less.

“Mary, this is my new friend, she’s from the Punjab.” Sunny sounded infinitely happy that she could bring us together.

I held out my hand. “Mary Russell. How do you do?”

“Gayatri Kaur, call me Gay.” Her perfect upper-class English drawl was betrayed only by the faintest lilt of accent.

“What part of the Punjab?” I asked politely. Why on earth had I come here to make inane conversation that I’d never have put up with in England? Damn Geoffrey Nesbit, anyway.

“Farathkot, along the southern border of Patiala state. You know it?”

“Unfortunately, I’ve only seen the western portions of Uttar Pradesh. And Simla, of course, that’s where I stumbled on Sunny here.”

“If you have nothing to do, let me know. My uncle’s the raja, he’d be happy to put you up for a while.”

“Oh, well, thank you.”

“He adores Englishwomen. Nothing improper, you understand—none of his wives are English, not even his concubines—he just enjoys their company. A dear, really.”

“I’m sure,” I murmured, and drained my wine and looked around: When faced with Sikh Flappers, I felt a sudden need for a full glass.

My search for strong drink was interrupted by a ripple that travelled through the room, set off by the arrival of our host. Perversely, the “Dress: Casual” notice had passed him by, for he was resplendent in a gold brocade achkhan coat, high of neck and snugly buttoned to the waist with amethysts, its tunic skirts flaring to the knees of his white trouser-leggings. He didn’t look like an undergraduate now, not even one in fancy dress—no European could wear that exquisitely wrapped white turban with such aplomb, no mere scholar would possess those dark and captivating eyes.

In a word, dreamy.

The room surged gently towards him, leaving me with Gay Kaur beneath an archway. I asked her where she had gone to school, and listened with half an ear while I watched the maharaja work his way through the guests, shaking hands, gracing one after another with his flashing smile, laughing aloud at a remark made by Thomas Goodheart. The prince had a habit of speaking to taller men with his head slightly turned away, I saw, which forced the other to bend to his height. He also seemed to disconcert some of the people, particularly those most eager to put themselves close to him, and I watched him fix those seductive eyes on Sunny, take her eager hand, and lean close to whisper something into her ear. He turned away to the next person just as Sunny stepped back sharply, looking badly startled. What on earth had he said to her?

Just then his eyes scanned the wide room to where Gay and I stood, and the frown on my face seemed to catch his attention—either that or my height and the straw-coloured hair piled on my head. He shook off his admirers and stalked across the floor to us. His dark eyes were on me the whole way, unreadable in a face arranged for polite greeting, but once in front of me he continued on for another step and seized my companion’s face in both his hands to kiss her full on the mouth, taking his eyes from me only at the last instant. A shock ran through the room, but it was nothing to Gay’s reaction. She dropped her glass and her cigarette to push against his shoulders, squirming back from the embrace that went on for about three seconds too long for friendly greeting. I had just reached the reluctant decision to intervene when he let her go, laughing heartily. Gay’s face darkened with fury as she bent to snatch cigarette and holder from the floor.

“Jimmy, you’re such a bastard,” she hissed, jabbing the end of the cigarette back into the ivory, all of us ignoring the servant’s quick gathering-up of glass from around our feet.

“Cousin, aren’t you glad to see me?” he asked, and without waiting for her answer, turned at last to me. Fortunately with his hand, not his lips.

I hesitated. Had I not been here for a purpose, I would have turned my back on the maharaja of Khanpur, but the impulse ran up against the thought of explaining to Geoffrey Nesbit why I had departed the state so hastily. I looked at his outstretched hand just long enough to make my feelings clear, then without enthusiasm allowed him my fingers.

“Mrs Russell, I trust you found your rooms to your satisfaction?” His grin was boyish, his eyes danced with amusement, but there was something altogether too calculating behind the charm.

“It’s Miss Russell,” I corrected him coolly, “and yes, Your Highness, they’re quite nice, thank you.”

“Ah. Tommy told me you were married,” he said, his voice rising to a question.

“I am.” Let him figure it out. The element of puzzle allowed the calculation to edge further into his expression, and then it was gone, and his firm and welcoming handshake was over. “Very well: Miss Russell, welcome to Khanpur.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you ride?” he asked, as at a sudden thought.

“I do.”

“Some of us are going out in the morning,” he said. “If you don’t object to blood sport. You too, Gay. You used to be one for the spear.” I could not tell if I was imagining the air of double-entendre to his last comment, but Gay seemed in no doubt. She put up her chin and gave him a regal glare.

“I’ve grown up some since then, Jimmy. I’m a little more choosy about my sport.”

He laughed, and said to me, “Seven o’clock if you like, Miss Russell, just ring for a riding outfit.”

And then he was gone back to his other guests, leaving me wondering at the peculiar tremors that followed in his wake.

Gay was working to get the knocked-off end of her cigarette alight, her hands not altogether steady. I watched her, thinking that it would take a good deal to shake an aristocrat like this from her self-confidence.

“He’s your cousin?” I asked.

She finally had the thing going, and drew deeply on it, closing her eyes briefly against the smoke. “Distant cousin, of a sort. My mother’s mother was married to Jimmy’s father’s sister’s brother-in-law.”

“And people say the European monarchy is confusing.”

She did not seem to register my remark. “We went to school together for a couple of months, when my parents got the emancipation bug and decided I should go with my brothers, and the school took a while to figure how to get rid of me. And later Jimmy came home with my brothers a couple of holidays.” She shot a dark look across the hall to where he stood, his back to us. “If that girl is your friend, her mother should be told not to leave the child alone with him.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” I promised.

“It’s just that he’s . . . persuasive.”

“I see.”

Gay glanced down at the end of her holder, where the stub was nearly burnt out, and plucked it out with her long fingernails, allowing it to fall onto the ornate tiles. “Suddenly I’m not hungry. I think I’ll go back to my rooms. Have a nice ride in the morning.”

Shortly thereafter we were ushered in to dinner. “Casual dress” extended to the procession, as well, which was more of a general drift in the direction of a doorway than an arm-in-arm procession. But the place we were taken belied any informality.

This had been, I thought, New Fort’s durbar hall, where traditionally the king met with visiting dignitaries whom he wished not only to entertain, but to intimidate. The Fort’s was immense, and if the adjoining room had felt like an underwater grotto, this was like standing inside the world’s largest emerald. Flashes of green and blue quivered in the air, the mosaic so lush the hand wanted to brush the walls, the tongue to taste it. Where the stone was not inlaid, it was covered either with gold leaf or high mirrors, tossing back the colours and the light of two dozen elephant-sized crystal chandeliers that hung from a golden ceiling forty feet above our heads. The floors were thick with silken carpets, and an orchestra, half hidden behind the inlaid marble purdah screens of the upper level, began a Mozart concerto as we rinsed our hands in rose-scented water poured from long-necked silver jars.

The meal itself was extreme, a bizarrely overdone ordeal-by-food, the kind of meal forced on unwelcome courtiers for the bitter amusement of bored kings. Dish after dish, each richer than the last, European alternating with Indian to the benefit of neither, all ornately arranged on the heavy gold plates, half of them giving offence to one guest or another—beef appeared twice, in this Hindu land, and slips of prosciutto ham so the Moslems (or in my case, Jew) wouldn’t feel neglected. Lobster flaked with silver leaf and whole grilled songbird served on platters made of their brilliant feathers, saffron-infused snakes’ eggs and curried peacocks’ tongues, roast kid stuffed with raisins and pistachios, and a score of other dishes beat upon our senses. Whatever wasn’t swimming in honey or ghee was drenched with cream, and long before the final courses, all my neighbours had been reduced to picking at their plates, and most of them looked somewhat green, particularly when the dizzying odour of sandalwood wafted in clouds from the upper levels.

When at long last the final glistening blancmange had passed from our plates and the music that had accompanied the banquet ceased, we staggered from our places like so many pardoned criminals, only to have the announcement come that there would be dancing on the terrace. The man at my side, an English popular novelist, groaned, and muttered something about the maharaja having given up sleep. Sunny, the peacock tongues clearly wreaking havoc with her sense of well-being, tried to summon her customary enthusiasm.

“It might be nice, to work off some of that food,” she said gamely.

I suspected that the maharaja’s rather sadistic sense of humour would not permit a gentle glide across the floor, and indeed, the band instantly set off on one of the more vigorous modern dance-steps. I shook my head.

“Perhaps we’d best go and see how your mother is,” I suggested in a firm voice. The relief with which Sunny seized on this escape would have been funny, if the very idea of laughter hadn’t been so physically repugnant.

We found a servant to lead us to the Goodheart rooms, where Sunny did not argue overmuch with her mother’s prescription of early bed. I, too, escaped the dance terrace, despite the opportunity for asking questions of half-stunned individuals ripe for indiscretion. With the amount of sleep my distended abdomen would be allowing me this night, the seven o’clock ride would come all too soon.

Chapter Sixteen

A set of riding clothes awaited me in the morning, although all I took from the laden tray that accompanied them was a single cup of tea. I moistened my long, mistreated hair with some almond oil that I had bought in the Simla market and bound the plaits closely to my head. The jodhpur trousers I had asked for fit well, and the boots, although somewhat loose around the calves, were long enough not to cramp my toes. I stretched my arms and shoulders against the shirt and jacket, finding the fit just loose enough for free movement, and put on the gloves (snug but long enough) but left the spurs where they lay. I then picked up the hat sent for the purpose, a sort of fabric-wrapped topee, and presented myself to the waiting chuprassi.

The servant led me into the gardens, where more servants and a motorcar stood waiting.

“How far is it to the stables?” I asked. I’d seen the map and didn’t think it far. “Can’t we walk?”

“Certainly, memsahib.” The man closed the motorcar door obediently. “It takes fifteen minutes only.”

We went out of the gate and into the morning sun, where I stopped to raise my face to the welcome warmth. Directly across from me, separated by the chasm of cliffs and road, were the gates of the Old Fort. The doors themselves stood open, although there was no sign of life there. Weeds sprouted from the walls, and from potholes in the narrow track climbing from the road.

The drive that circled New Fort’s hill, on the other hand, was surfaced with closely fitting paving stones. At the bottom, where the drive turned back on itself to join the main road, my red-puggareed guide went right, following a wide path that circled the hill. Halfway around, I was startled by a sudden jungle shrieking and the sight of dozens of monkeys of various shapes and sizes, leaping frantically around inside an enormous cage. The servant glanced at me with mingled apology and reassurance, and I went on, even when the roar of a lion came up nearly under my feet. The zoo, I realised: I wasn’t about to be fed to the carnivores.

A lake appeared in the distance, decorated with white birds; beyond it stretched a great field punctuated with large grey shapes. I squinted, then smiled in delight as they became moving creatures: elephants, thirty or more of them, their attention centred around bright heaps of greenery. There were even babies among the herd, indistinct, but magical even from afar.

Belatedly, I realised that my guide had stopped to wait for me, and I hurried to catch him up. As the path continued, rooftops came into view: a lot of rooftops, long low buildings arranged around six immense courtyards. This could only be the maharaja’s stables, but the complex was lavish, larger than any race-track facilities I’d seen.

“How many horses does the maharaja own?” I asked my guide.

“I believe His Highness pleasures in two hundred and twenty-five, although I am not completely certain as to the numbers. Does memsahib wish me to make precise enquiries?”

“No,” I assured him weakly. “That’s fine.”

We walked down a wide stairway and through a magnificent archway into the yard farthest from the lake. There we found nine horses saddled, five of them claimed already by their riders, all men. The maharaja saw me approaching and dropped his conversation with a young Indian Army officer named Simon Greaves, whom I had met the night before, to come and meet me.

“Miss Russell, how good you could join us.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I told him easily.

“I didn’t ask what kind of a rider you were, so you’ll have to let me know if you’d like something less flighty.”

He had gestured to one of the servants, who tugged the reins of a glossy chestnut gelding and led him over, carrying an ornate little stool in his free hand. The horse was the tallest animal there, although I thought it scarcely fifteen and a half hands, with muscle in its hindquarters that suggested it could jump anything I might care to point it at. I ran my hands down its legs and along its back, pleased that it didn’t twitch or move away.

“Does it have any bad habits?” I asked the syce, who looked at his master before answering me.

“Oah, no, memsahib, his manners are good. His mouth is hard, but he will not run under a branch or drop a shoulder to have you off, oah no.”

The affection with which the old man patted the animal’s neck more than the words reassured me that my host wasn’t out to amuse himself at the expense of my bones. I let the beast snuffle my hand, and checked the girths before using the stool to boost myself to the saddle. The maharaja watched me as I took the reins and got the feel of the gelding’s mouth, which did indeed require a firm hand. Then he went over to a beautiful pure-white Arab stallion and mounted up. He and Captain Greaves had spurs on their boots, but none of the others did.

The four strangers were introduced as a polo-playing cousin of the captain’s from Kent, on a world tour, an American recently retired from the Army, and a pair of Bombay industrialists. As we exchanged greetings, I had to wonder if such iconoclastic relationships were common amongst India’s nobility. Khanpur’s prince seemed determined to deny his orthodoxy on all kinds of levels, from the consumption of alcohol and meat to the company of foreign women and businessmen—mere box-wallahs were almost as below the salt here as manual workers.

The men went on with their various conversations as the syce and I made adjustments to the stirrups, and after a few minutes the motorcar from the Fort drove into the yard and gave forth our two missing riders—the Goodhearts, brother and sister. Although he was taller than I, Thomas was given the marginally shorter twin of the chestnut I was on, while Sunny was mounted on a placid mare little larger than a pony that probably wouldn’t have jumped a branch if it was lying flat on the ground, but then again probably wouldn’t spook and dump its rider. With all the saddles full and our host in the lead, we continued around the New Fort hill until we met the main road again.

Before I turned my mount’s head north, I glanced up at the hillside of the eastern Old Fort across the road. There, with the morning sun streaming through the gap, I could see the marks of fire, clear on the stones of the cliff face, where the mutineers and their hostage had been set to flame by the old maharaja in 1857.

We jogged along for nearly an hour, past the polo grounds and the elephant pens with their Brobdingnagian stables, then skirting the air field, which showed no sign of life this morning, not even around that tantalising cluster of godowns at the northern end. My cheeks tingled with the brisk air, and I did not need the sight of the surrounding peaks to be reminded of Khanpur’s altitude. An eagle rode the breeze above our heads, the air rang with the pleasing sounds of bridle and hoof, and I listened with half an ear to the conversations wafting to and fro. Thomas Goodheart was even less responsive than usual, being either hung-over or just uninterested in scenery and small-talk, or both. Two of the others began to grumble interestingly about their losses the previous night at cards, speculating on just how it was the maharaja had been cheating, but revelations were cut short by their belated awareness of an audience, and they talked about the Delhi races instead. Sunny commented on every form of wildlife we passed, and half the domesticated stock, topics that did not distract me much from my own appreciation of the day. Once past the air field, we entered a land of cane and corn. Men working their fields paused to honour our passing. A whiff of gur came to me from a nearby factory, followed by the rhythmic creaks of a water wheel whose design was older than India herself. I mused over the range of technology represented in such a short space, from Persian wheel to modern air design, and made a mental note to talk about it with Holmes when I next saw him.

Whenever that might be.

Four or five miles past the air field, at a spot on the road marked by a small wayside shrine, we turned into an area of terai, open scrubland dotted by trees. Half a dozen shikaris—hunt attendants—squatted near a smokey little fire, standing up as we came into sight. One of them walked out into the road, waving his arms in some unintelligible signal directed, not at us, but at another figure on a nearby hilltop. Signals exchanged, he then came forward to speak with the prince, who, after a few minutes’ consultation, wheeled his Arab and joined us.

“The beaters have found pig, they’re driving the sounder—the herd—towards us up the next hill. I would suggest that you ladies rest here, or if you’d like to continue on to the tank—the lake—you’ll find tea set up there.”

“You’re going pig sticking?” I asked.

“We are.” Was that a challenge in his eyes, or did I imagine it? I had no real desire to murder pigs with a sharpened stick; on the other hand, what was I here for if not to work myself close to the maharaja? If that weedy Flapper cousin of his could stick pigs, so could I.

“Do you mind if I join you? It sounds great fun.”

“Mary!” objected Sunny.

“Not you,” I hastened to add. “It doesn’t look to me like your horse would be much use on rough ground.” Unlike my mount, whose pricked ears indicated that he knew precisely what was over that hill, and knew what he was supposed to do about it. Just don’t let me fall off with a pig staring me in the face, I prayed, and committed myself. My host seemed pleased, although his male companions looked as if they’d bitten into a bad apple.

The shikaris came up carrying an armload of wicked-looking spears and handed us each one. Mine had a bamboo shaft two feet taller than I was, strong and flexible and packed with lead in the butt, the tip mounted with a slim steel head the length of a child’s hand, sharp as a well-honed razor and with grooves running down both sides. I held the spear in my hand, feeling its heft and balance, trying to visualise how far a person could lean out of the saddle at a gallop without tumbling off, and trying to imagine how much practise it would take to be able to harpoon a pig in full flight. In truth, the shaft did not seem nearly long enough to me: If even half of what Holmes had told me about wild boar was correct, the farther from the pig, the better.

As I held the weapon, a shikari noticed my awkwardness and took pity on me. “You have not done this before, I think, memsahib? Very well. You are left-handed? Then the spear is held thus,” he began, shifting my fingers around the long bamboo shaft. “And you must ride with the point well forward, always. When the boar breaks from cover—and only a boar, no female pigs—you pursue it, fast fast. Hold yourself twenty, thirty feet in back, and when the beast begins to tire, speed up and aim just behind its shoulder blade.” He eyed the uncertain waver of my spear-head and modified his instructions. “Or you can jab where you wish—first blood is considered an honour, and the animal will weaken and die,” he explained.

“But memsahib, you must watch for a flare of the eye or the chewing of its tusks, for that tells you that he is about to turn and come for you. This is called ‘jinking,’ and it is very dangerous, you must watch for that at every instant. If by great bad fortune you lose your spear” (I thought all in all this was highly likely) “you must not dismount to retrieve it unless you can be completely and absolutely certain that the pig is gone.” The shikari stood watching me try to find the spear’s balance and to work out a way of carrying the thing so it didn’t slice the gelding’s legs to ribbons; with an almost imperceptible sigh and shrug of his shoulders, he went back to his work.

The maharaja divided us into pairs, which I supposed was to lessen the severity of a collision or a stray spear. I thought he would put me with another inexperienced rider and thus dismiss the incompetents from his mind, but to my surprise he chose me for his partner. After the first flush of pleasure, it occurred to me that he was all but guaranteeing that he have the day to himself. I firmed my grip on the shaft, and determined at least to remain in the saddle.

We made our way down the road towards some hills. As we rode, I began to get a feel for the spear’s movements; I could even see the reason for allowing the pig so close: Were the shaft any longer, it would be impossible to manoeuvre it with any precision at all. In the end, I decided it must be like jousting; given the chance, I’d simply count on the horse to run me over the pig, bracing the spear like an eight-foot-long skewer.

With my eyes closed, praying fervently.

As the road cleared the top of the hill, we left it to set out into an open plain, several miles of rough terai with patches of waist-high sugar cane, dotted by thickets of weedy trees and some rocky outcrops. We distributed ourselves, pair by pair, in a long string of riders, and there we stood, listening to the beaters working their way down, half a mile or more away. They sounded very different from the beaters used to drive game birds in England, but their purpose was the same, raising just enough noise to make their target edgy, representing in their numbers enough of a threat to encourage the animals to move away, not to panic—or in the case of pigs, turn and attack. It was a lovely morning, clear and still cool, and the horse beneath me was promising, needing little attention from its rider to avoid obstacles, responding easily to my suggestions. I relaxed, and decided that, in spite of the vicious weapon in my hand, the true purpose of pig sticking was the same as that of fox-hunting, namely, an excuse for a pleasant day’s vigorous exercise in the open. And, no doubt, for the sumptuous hunt lunch that would await us at the tank. I fingered the silver charm I wore for reassurance, and wondered where Holmes was.

Then without warning, two things happened simultaneously: When the first of the beaters came into sight, I was astonished to see, not simply men on foot, but with them mounted elephants, ears waving and trunks up. And no sooner had I focussed on those amazing and glorious beasts, when the corner of my eye caught a number of fast dark objects shooting out of a patch of thick green cane to rocket across the grassland at an angle from me, aiming for a thick stand of trees a mile or so away. Without pausing to consult me, my horse gathered its hindquarters and lunged after the pigs with the other riders stretched out, right and left, the white Arab in the fore. In three seconds flat we were pounding at a full gallop across dry grassland while the smaller members of the herd, sows and piglets, started peeling away from our path, ducking under bushes and doubling back for safety, leaving three, then two, and finally a solitary black creature that flew along the ground on its stumpy legs, an angular, hairy slab of muscle and bone that showed no sign of lagging. I did not know where the others were, but the white Arab was in front and fifty yards to my left, its rider up in his stirrups, his spear as steady as if it were mounted to a track. My own weapon bounced and wove with each beat of the body beneath me, giving all too vivid illustration to Nesbit’s casual remark about ending up with a spear through his arm.

I wouldn’t have imagined that a pig would be fast, but this one maintained its distance from both horses for half a mile. The trees were fast approaching, but either the pig was tiring or the horses had their stride, because my mount was coming up on the pig’s right side. Afterwards, I decided the experienced bay had done it deliberately, cutting the boar off from the trees while the white Arab fell away on our left. The pig veered reluctantly away from the trees, then farther away, until it was headed into open ground.

And then it jinked.

Such light-hearted and adolescent words the sport used, my mind threw at me in its last instant of clarity for some time. Sticking, jinking, pig—all those short vowels lent it such a jaunty air.

What happened in fact was that, thirty feet ahead of me, the boar turned with the ease of a swallow in flight and aimed itself at the Arab’s white belly. Our quarry had no intention of being driven out into open ground, and anything in its way would be ripped apart, it was as simple as that—except that it was not simple, the jink was a feint. The maharaja’s spear was already down and waiting, but the charge at the white belly stopped as swiftly as it had begun, and the animal whirled on its hooves in the clap of a hand and shot straight at me.

In an instant, my fear of embarrassing myself and letting down the women’s side vanished completely, gulped up by a flood of pure mortal terror. The pig looked the size of a bear, with murderous little eyes over a cluster of curved razors; I half expected the thing to leap into the air and rip out my throat. Thank God the horse at least knew what it was doing. While my arm froze and the spear bobbled up and down like a broom-stick balanced across a clothes-line, the big bay gathered its muscles, paused for a moment—only later did it occur to me that the horse was waiting for me to stick the thing, had I been either so inclined or so able—and then vaulted hugely forward out of the boar’s way. As we rose, the spear-head dipped to bounce ineffectually off the pig’s rock-like shoulder, a tap that jarred my shoulder down to my boots.

I came within a hair of dropping my stick as the horse flew forward, tucking its feet miraculously clear of the searching tusks and coming back to earth at a dead run. It took just half a dozen strides and then, with absolutely no instruction from me, dug in its front hooves. Spear and topee flew over the horse’s ears, nearly followed by rider as I clung hard to mane and saddle, losing one stirrup as the horse hauled itself around to face the boar again.

Which meant that I looked back over my gelding’s neck just in time to see a textbook illustration of how a pig is stuck. With its right side now clear, the animal was sprinting for the trees, the maharaja riding hard to catch it first. Ten feet from safety the spear—so steady it resembled the javelin of a bronze athlete—slid into the tough hide. The beast tumbled and regained its feet, the horse veered and came about, and spear met pig in mid-stride, the point slipping effortlessly into the fold where the thick neck began. The boar hesitated, then collapsed slowly and was still.