The Game

“I understand that you and Captain Nesbit are to be singularly honoured today.”

“Yes? How is that?”

“You didn’t know? Jimmy’s taking the two of you out with him, no one else.”

“I was only told that the horses were being brought out. Pig again?” I thought it slightly out of the ordinary for the maharaja to repeat his sporting activities that soon. Perhaps Nesbit’s presence, and their shared passion, made shooting or cheetah-coursing less appealing.

But Miss Kaur shrugged nervously and said, “I really don’t know. It sounded rather as if he’d got something special arranged.”

With that I recalled the maharaja’s final words to us the previous evening, long hours before. What had it been? Something about the Kadir Cup, and how Britain’s honour will demand that India lose—yes, and it had been followed by the thrown-gauntlet statement, “Let us see what you do with my entertainment tomorrow.”

If we were going ahead with the maharaja’s plans, then it would seem that he had not yet received news of a prisoner’s escape. I ate my eggs without tasting them, trying to envision the details of the cells. Would breakfast have been handed the prisoner, or simply shoved beneath the door? Yes, I decided, the door to Holmes’ cell had certainly been far enough off the stones to allow for a tray to be slid beneath. In which case, O’Hara’s absence might well go undiscovered until the guard went to retrieve the breakfast utensils.

It seemed likely that our day would end abruptly at noon.

Permitting us to creep silently off to our beds.

Slightly cheered by the possibility, and marginally restored by food and coffee, I smoothed my freshly glued moustache and went to face the day’s “entertainment,” my mind not so much forgetting Gay Kaur’s bruised face, as putting it aside.

I walked through the gardens and down the road to the stables, nodding at the guards, seeing no one else, which was slightly unusual. The animals in the zoo seemed restless, the monkeys’ chatter on seeing a human pass louder than usual, their leaps and swings on the high perches nearly frantic. The great African lion loosed its coughing roar every half minute or so, although as I went by its cage, I could see nothing out of the ordinary through the trees. Then at the stables, I found five horses saddled: the white Arab stallion, two bays, and the two nearly matched chestnut geldings that Thomas Goodheart and I had been given the first day. I greeted the syce; he responded with a sickly grin and would neither answer nor meet my eyes.

My skin began to prickle with uneasiness.

Minutes passed, and the gabble of monkeys heralded the approach of Geoffrey Nesbit, his perfect features looking older in the morning sun.

“Jimmy’s not here yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I told him, keeping my voice cheerful in the proximity of servants. “I was just going to have a smoke and watch the birds.”

We strolled around the stables to the rise overlooking the great tank, and settled on a half-wall in view of the swans and exotic fowl. A snowy egret picked its way through the reeds, perusing the water, and my companion held a match to the end of my cigarette. I filled my lungs with as much appreciation as act.

“If I’m not careful,” I said, “I’m going to find myself liking these things.”

Nesbit was not interested in my bad habits. “Have you any idea what’s going on?”

“None. But the maharaja’s cousin has a badly bruised face, and the syce won’t talk to me. Something’s wrong. You think he’s discovered O’Hara missing?”

“I went to borrow a stamp from Trevor Wilson. He told me that Jimmy had a letter yesterday, from Delhi. No one seems to know what was in it.”

“If it came yesterday, it could explain his evil temper yesterday night.”

“And if he then found O’Hara gone . . .”

I was suddenly glad for the weight of the revolver against my leg.

“How will that change things?” I asked him.

“Impossible to say. However, if he decides to make another all-nighter of it with me, I don’t think we ought to wait. You play ill. An attack of malaria should do it, you can start looking flushed over dinner and excuse yourself. As soon as it’s dark, make your way over to Old Fort and wait for them to bring Holmes out. The two of you should be able to overcome the guards—I can give you another vial of morphia, if you like, so they stay unconscious for a while, although I haven’t another syringe.”

I stared out over the lake, the forgotten tobacco burning down towards my fingers as I pushed the various parts of the puzzle about in my mind. Would Holmes use the syringe and drug his guard as soon as darkness fell, or would he wait until after the maharaja’s midnight matinée? He had no way of knowing that, with the current turmoil, the call might never come. In which case, how long after midnight would he wait, before having to risk the dawn? No, better if I ventured again into the prison fortress and brought him out. Nesbit would simply have to watch his own back.

My tobacco had burnt itself out; Nesbit ground his out under his boot and said, “It’s possible he’s forgotten—oop. Spoke too soon.”

The clamour from the monkey-cage rose as they spotted someone coming down the path. We stood to see, over the roofs of the stable; in a moment I could make out three men, the first bareheaded, the two taller figures behind him topped with red puggarees. The monkeys screamed and bounced around their trees wildly, the men came down the path, and then the three stopped, directly adjacent to the high, noisy cage.

The maharaja seemed to be speaking to his two guards, although at this distance, I could not even make out the gestures, just that they had stopped and were facing each other. Then the smaller man flung his right arm out at the monkey-cage, and one of the guards seemed to move slightly back, the sun briefly glinting off the barrel of the rifle he carried. I saw his free hand, too, raise up in a weak gesture, and then the maharaja stepped forward, snatched the long gun, and brought it down, butt first, in the guard’s face. The red puggaree staggered back; the maharaja brought the rifle to his shoulder and pivoted ninety degrees towards the cage. The barrel spat flame, and the sound of a shot rolled across the landscape, startling the lake birds into sudden flight. A dark shape dropped from its high perch, and the other monkeys went crazy. A second shot flashed and sounded; with the third, terror sent the creatures cowering into the corners, silent at last. The maharaja flung the gun back at its owner and continued on down the hill.

“Christ Jesus,” Nesbit murmured into the shocked air. The three men disappeared behind some trees, and Nesbit set off for the stables at a run.

The stable-hands were furiously tightening girths and polishing saddles, their faces pale and taut, when their lord and master swept into the yard with the two armed guards on his heels, one with blood streaming from his smashed nose, the other gripping his gun with white knuckles. The maharaja marched straight over to the white stallion; the syce ran for the mounting block, but he was too slow, and received a kick from the spurred boots for his delay.

Up in the saddle, kerbing the stallion with hard hands, our host glared down at us, his face terrible in scorn and rage. “My ancestors ruled this land when yours were squatting in grass huts picking for lice,” he shouted. “My father and grandfather made treaties with the British Crown, and we have remained loyal to those treaties. And now your government thinks it can summon me—me, the king of Khanpur—to stand before them like a schoolboy answering for his petty crimes. They threaten me—threaten! With what? Next they will be sending men to spy upon me. I swear, before that happens I will disembowel their stinking sudra of a Viceroy and leave him for the vultures.”

I was more than prepared to dive for cover, but my companion was made of the stuff that had built an Empire. Nesbit stood his ground as the horse jittered and turned under its enraged rider, and even took a step forward into range of those spurred boots, looking up at his friend.

“Jimmy,” he said, and, “Your Highness. What has happened? I don’t understand. Tell me what has happened.”

“A letter! From London, telling me—not asking, telling!—that I am to report to Delhi immediately to answer questions concerning some damnable woman. What woman, I ask? Who am I to care if my neighbour has lost one of his daughters?”

It suddenly became a lot clearer: The complaint of the neighbouring nawab had percolated upwards, and hit the sensitive place of England’s new régime. I cursed under my breath, and knew Nesbit would curse too. The timing could not have been worse for a display of the Socialists’ determination to treat all its citizens near and far with an equal hand.

“Jimmy, it’s the new government, you know?” Nesbit said in soothing tones. “New boys, they mean well, but they haven’t a clue as to how things are done, and are stumbling around stepping on toes right and left. Look, I’ll go back to Delhi immediately and straighten it out. Honestly, think no more about it. I’ll talk to the CinC—he knows me, he knows you’ve been a loyal friend to Britain, he’ll hear me out.”

The prince hauled himself back from the edge, but his now-stifled rage sharpened into a look of calculation, even cruelty, and he interrupted Nesbit’s ongoing explanation of the delicacies inherent in a change of governments.

“This is an insult to my very blood. You have been my friend, Nesbit, but you are first and foremost one of them. And your friend here.” The look he gave me was enough to curl my toes. “I invite his sister to share at my table and my sport, and the woman gets it into her head that she must leave, and walks away from my hospitality without even an as-you-please. I long thought the English had some sense of honour, or at least manners. I find now you have neither. You people imagine that you rule here in Khanpur. I tell you, Nesbit: You do not.” He spat out the three words like bullets. “I rule Khanpur; I and I alone. I invited you here; I am prepared to disinvite you. But before you go, you will take today with you, and—by God!—it will give your English government something to think about. Mount and come, both of you.”

He whirled the stallion on its haunches and kicked it into a gallop, its hooves sliding dangerously over the stones of the yard. Nesbit and I climbed more reluctantly into our saddles and followed at a more sedate gait; as we left the yard, the two armed guards were shouting at the syces to bring up their two bays.

“What do you suppose he has in mind?” I asked Nesbit as we trotted along the dusty road. “Panthers? His pet African lions?”

“I suppose we should be glad he didn’t just have his men tie us up between two elephants.”

He looked glum, but the thought of that sort of punishment made the breakfast go queasy in my stomach. “You don’t think . . .”

“That he’s going to do us in? No, I don’t think he’s that mad. Besides which, he seems to have in mind more of a demonstration. Or a contest—yes, that may be it.”

“Whatever it is, for God’s sake let him win.”

“I’ll do my best. But I shouldn’t think that doing so openly would be a good idea. Having a rival deliberately throw a game could well be the match that lit the charge.”

I could see that, and I reflected, not for the first time, that those who had decreed that British boys grow up playing demanding games had a lot to answer for.

“Perhaps it’s time just to tell him who we are.”

Nesbit screwed up his face and shook his head, more in doubt than in disagreement. “We may have to. But I’d rather keep that as a last resort. That, too, might be the spark that drove him to violence, to think that a friend was now spying on him—you heard what he said about spies. The other princes would probably feel much the same—a lot of uncomfortable questions would be asked if they thought they might be the object of surreptitious surveillance. No, none of them would like it one bit.”

We rode for an hour, into the open land where we had ridden after pig on the first day. My exhaustion retreated with the exercise, the clean air clearing my head, the horse’s eager energy proving contagious. I had no wish to pit myself against some deadly animal while armed with nothing but a sharp stick, but if the maharaja was determined to do so in order to prove Khanpur’s superiority over the effete Brits, so be it. I had a gun that would give pause to anything smaller than an elephant, and a horse under me that could outrun most predators.

All in all, although I was not pleased with how the day was turning out, it could have been worse. The maharaja might, as Nesbit said, have thrown us into the cell next to Holmes’, or had us executed outright. Or he could have come up with some kind of competition that would have proved instantly disastrous for Martin Russell, such as wrestling or employing the more primitive skills of the nautch girls. With any luck, he would merely rub our noses in our inferiority and throw us out of the kingdom, leaving us no worse off than we had been yesterday night. Yes, there remained the problem of retrieving Holmes, but as Holmes himself had said, he need only stand up and publicly declare himself an eccentric English magician, and the maharaja would have no choice but to allow him to leave.

With any luck.

Again the shikaris waited beneath their tree, spears in their hands, but this time with apprehension in their straight spines and the sideways glances they cast at the man on the white horse. The dry grassland rustled beneath a light morning breeze; the fields of sugar cane and barley glowed green and lush in the bright light; the stand of trees from which the herd of pigs had been driven stood on the rise, unchanged. The single new element in the drama was a solid-sided farm cart, roofed and with a door in the back, bolted securely shut. The thought passed through my mind that the bullock drawing it was a remarkably phlegmatic animal, considering that it stood dozing less than a dozen feet from whatever wild beast the cart contained, but I did not really think about it further. I was too busy feeling relieved that, whatever our prey was to be, it could be no taller than a man, and light enough to be pulled by a single bullock.

At a signal from their prince, one of the servants walked over to the cart. To my astonishment, he did not climb up to work the bolt from the safety of the roof, but simply reached out for it. His hands weren’t even nervous, the fool. I lifted my spear, and readied for the charge.

What came out instead was a tall man, clothed in black from boots to turban, unfolding himself from the cart’s dark interior to open ground, tugging his starched black puggaree down to shade his eyes from the sudden glare, showing no iota of surprise at seeing two of us who should have been gone.

Holmes.

Chapter Twenty-Five

What the bloody hell kind of a joke is this?” Geoffrey Nesbit demanded, allowing his spear-head to drop.

“Not a joke. This man is my prisoner. He was seen in front of any number of witnesses to slay his assistant, one week ago. He has been condemned to death. We are his executioners.”

Suddenly, breathing became difficult.

“If he committed murder, where’s the body?” Nesbit challenged him.

“I assume the villagers disposed of it.”

I found my voice. “It was merely a trick.”

“No trick. It was murder.”

I had had as much of this charade as I was willing to take. “All right, this is ridiculous—” I started, but Nesbit’s hand on my sleeve stopped me. I turned to hiss at him, “Geoffrey, this has gone far enough. The border is less than five miles off. Thank the man for his kind hospitality and let’s go.”

He didn’t answer, just looked over my shoulder until I shifted in my saddle to follow his gaze. The shikaris under the tree had been joined by the two guards, both of whom had their rifles at the ready, aimed at us.

“Yes,” came the maharaja’s voice. “You see the problem. I am fully within my rights to execute my prisoner in whichever way I like. A pig spear is, I grant you, less usual than shooting or hanging, but can be as fast as either. And if my two English guests choose to interfere, my two guards may—inadvertently, tragically—interpret my commands to mean the death of the meddlers. Particularly if they refuse to lay down the revolvers both carry. Alas, how sad.”

“You would never get away with shooting us,” Nesbit told him, outraged.

“No, probably not. But can you see the maharaja of Khanpur condemned and hanged? I think not. The greatest punishment would be for me to abdicate in favour of my son, and live out my days in Monte Carlo or Nairobi. But,” he said, his fanatic eyes lit from within, “the English would never forget Khanpur. Never.”

My God, he was dead serious. I looked to Holmes, completely at a loss, but Nesbit distracted me, putting his head near mine that we might not be overheard.

“We have little choice,” he said.

“You don’t honestly think he’d go through with it?”

“Jimmy, on his own, would probably come to his senses before it was too late. But those guards have the determination of men under orders. They’d bring us down before he could speak up.”

Nesbit was a captain in the Indian Army; one thing he knew was the habits of soldiers. “So what do you suggest?”

“We can do nothing here, where we’d be a pair of ducks on the lake, awaiting the gun. Out in the field, however, anything can happen.”

“Nesbit, you swore that man would set Holmes free if only we declare our citizenship. Let’s do that and be done with this farce.”

“I said, if we publicly declare his identity. What public have we here?” His green eyes drilled into mine; I tore my gaze away, looked at the two guards with their motionless rifles, looked at the maharaja with his triumphant smile, then at Holmes, standing with his hands tied together, saying nothing. His attitude brought home to me how very far from England we were. One grows accustomed to being the citizen of no mean country; to find oneself in the hands of a person to whom that signifies nothing is humbling. And frightening.

“He’s mad.”

“I fear so.”

“And your only suggestion is that we take to the field and improvise?” We both heard my unvoiced scorn: This is the best an Army captain can come up with? This is the flower of British Intelligence, heir to Kimball O’Hara and Colonel Creighton?

On the other hand, I was the student and partner of Sherlock Holmes, sister-in-law to the renowned Mycroft, and I had nothing in my repertoire, either.

“We could hope to get close enough to Jimmy to take him hostage—they’d not shoot if one of us had a spear to his throat. Barring that, we can attempt to manoeuvre ourselves beyond the range of the rifles and into the cover of those trees, then make a run for it.”

“We’d never make it, not without our guns.”

“I don’t know that we have an abundance of choices,” he said grimly. And thinking it over, I had to agree. He saw it in my face, and turned to the prince.

“That’s not exactly fair play, Jimmy. You’ve got the guns, we’ve got sticks, and even when we’ve finished with this blighter you can have your men shoot us down.”

“I will not. Indeed, why would I? Once you have executed this condemned murderer for me, why need I bother further with the British?”

Nesbit looked at me for confirmation, and I wavered in an agony of indecision. The maharaja was beyond a doubt insane, but it appeared to be a more or less linear madness, with the goal of shaking the Englishman to his boots and re-establishing the autonomy and honour of Khanpur’s rulers. Monomania, rather than outright psychosis. If we did manage to thwart his plans and make our escape, God only knew what outlet his wrath would take. But once outside the borders, the Army encampment was a matter of hours away, and the wholesale rescue of the maharaja’s remaining “guests” would be their concern.

It was to be a game, then, with deadly results if we did not play it according to its inventor’s rules. Three of us, three of them, with two rifles on the opposing side. With deep foreboding, but not seeing much choice, I pulled the fancy revolver from my pocket and handed it to the shikari sent to us for the purpose; Nesbit gave over his gun as well. We were given pig spears in exchange, of a different design than the one I’d used before. This one was more than a foot shorter, with a smaller blade and weighted at the butt. Nesbit took his as if there was nothing unusual in the shape, but the maharaja’s was the long style. A servant carried another long spear with him when he cut Holmes’ bonds; to my surprise, he handed the weapon to Holmes.

Holmes hefted it, silently eying the man on the white horse, who showed him his teeth and said in Hindi, “Yes, you wish to use it, magician, I can see. And you will have your chance—if you succeed in killing these other two first. This is a fair game, you see? Your spear is long, theirs short. They have horses, you have your feet, along with whatever magic you can find here on this hillside. You claim to read minds, so here is your opportunity. One man at a time; I give you to the count of one hundred before the green-eyed man comes after you. If you live, next will come the man with the eyeglasses, and after that, me. Nesbit, here is your chance at first blood in the first-ever Khanpur Cup.” And he laughed.

Nesbit and I looked at each other, but I had no idea how we might get out of this impossible dilemma, and clearly neither did Nesbit. I automatically turned to consult with Holmes, and found him making off rapidly in the direction of the first trees, his jaunty cocked turban waving sharply with every step—he was wearing the boots he’d brought with him, I noticed, not the soft shoes; the maharaja must have decided that decent footwear was more sporting. Which meant that Holmes had a small knife available to him as well as the long spear, along with a set of pick-locks—although I couldn’t see what difference either would make.

I straightened my back and shrugged mentally, more as a means of ridding my mind of dread than an expression of confusion. Something would come up, I told myself. Holmes would see to it. He always did.

The dark trotting figure surprised a flock of birds into flight, their sudden rise giving him not a moment’s pause. He skirted a stand of waist-high shrubs, dipped into a hollow, then followed the line of the hill, closer now but still terribly far from the trees where the pigs had sheltered that first day, a mixed stand of about an acre. The maharaja’s lips moved as he counted the seconds off under his breath, then said aloud, “Fifty.” As if he’d heard, Holmes speeded to a lope. Nesbit’s hands tightened on the reins, causing his horse to champ and fret. I glanced over at the two armed guards; they had lowered their rifles to rest across their saddles, but they were watching closely.

How good were they with those guns? I speculated. If Holmes made the trees, if Nesbit met him there, perhaps . . .

I nudged my horse over until I was knee-to-knee with the Survey man. “Look, Nesbit, chivalry be damned, and uncomfortable questions can be dealt with. The maharaja won’t kill me once he sees I’m a woman. You two make for the border and I’ll strip to my under-shirt, take off the moustache, simply tell him I’m Mary Russell and not her brother. He’ll be angry, but he’s a Kshatriya—he might slap a woman, but anything more than that would go against his warrior’s ethic. If he doesn’t have me dumped immediately over the border, you can have the Viceroy send a delegation to fetch me. The only thing we lose that way is my pride, and a few days.” His set jaw told me what he thought of that idea. “For God’s sake, man,” I urged, “use your head! If I go, the guards—”

“Ninety,” the maharaja interrupted. “Ready, Nesbit?”

In answer, the blond man kneed his horse away from my side and loosed the reins. His horse, somewhat puzzled at the lack of any pigs in this pig-hunt, obediently pricked its ears, and I cursed.

“Nesbit, you fool,” I hissed, but then, “One hundred!” and the man was off, straight as a loosed arrow, his posture sure, every inch of him an officer on the hunt, his game—

I froze, ice beginning to flood my veins—and then caught myself: Don’t be ridiculous, Russell. Of course Nesbit knows that’s Holmes. He said as much when . . .

But as I went over our exchange in my mind, I could not lay my hands on any scrap of conversation that proved Nesbit had connected the maharaja’s pet magician with the Holmes he had seen in gaol.

I gave myself a smart mental slap. Don’t be a vaporous female, Russell! How could Nesbit not know? For heaven’s sake, the man wasn’t blind. And he wasn’t stupid enough to be fooled by the turban (the black turban that shaded Holmes’ face as he got down from the cart, the turban he hadn’t worn before in Nesbit’s sight . . .) or by the boots or the renewed dye on the prisoner’s skin. Nesbit was a professional. Certainly he’d known who the magician was the night we arrived. Hadn’t he? We didn’t speak Holmes’ name, of course, for fear of listening ears, but still. . . .

But dear God, the man looked determined on that horse, galloping full-tilt towards the running figure, looking for all the world a man making the best of an unpleasant but necessary task. I gathered my reins to take off after them, but the maharaja’s voice stopped me.

“Captain Russell, I am gratified by your eagerness, but you will please wait until one or the other of them is down.” With the reminder, I could feel the guards behind me, knew they had raised their guns in preparation. I loosed my grip on the spear I had unconsciously lifted, and stared across the terai at the fast-closing figures, burning with fear and with the painful irony of the entire situation: If the man on the white Arab had known who his magician was, known he had Sherlock Holmes in his collection, he would have been more eager to hide him than to hunt him.

I nearly whooped when I saw Holmes leap into the trees, bare yards in front of the rider, who reined back hard before his mount pelted headlong into trunk and branch. The horse half-reared at the harsh hand on its reins, and Nesbit began to circle, looking for a more congenial way in. He might have followed on foot, but it looked as if he wished to preserve the advantage of height in the face of his prey’s longer spear. He trotted south thirty or forty yards, then turned back and cantered past the place where Holmes had disappeared.

Thick, dark forest began in earnest two miles away, rising up to the endless snow-capped mountains that sheltered Kashmir and, beyond it, Tibet. Unfortunately, this stand before us was in no way connected with the greater forest—had it been, the prisoner would never have been allowed anywhere near it. Still, Holmes could use it as the pigs had, as shelter and weapon against the hunter. It’s the hidden tusks that kill, the maharaja himself had said.

Abruptly, a herd of pigs launched itself out of the stand fifty feet or so from Nesbit. My horse jerked in response, eager to get on with the business of the day, but I kept him in line, murmuring for him to wait, that he’d get his turn to run in just a while. The sudden flushing of game loosed a chatter among the men behind me, but it quickly died away as realisation of the nature of the prey returned to them. None of them would risk speaking out against their master, I thought, but I noted their fear, and beneath it their disapproval, as something that might be used.

Nesbit had reached the northern end of the trees and slowed to circle around. We could still see him, his light coat and the colour of the horse flitting behind the trees. The guards did not care for his vanishing from their sights. One of them said something in the local tongue, but the maharaja’s sharp reply evidently told them not to move. And indeed, while I was there, they did not need to; I knew better than they did that Captain Geoffrey Nesbit would not ride away and leave me.

Now, however, Nesbit was not visible. Two minutes went by, three, and the same guard spoke again, to no reply. Four minutes, and the Arab stallion arched his neck in reaction to the hand of his rider, but before the prince could send his guard to see what was happening amongst the trees, Nesbit burst from the thickest section of growth, on foot and racing in our direction. He took perhaps ten steps out from the tree line, then flung his hands up in the air and collapsed forward onto the ground. Even without the maharaja’s binoculars, I could see the short, weighted spear sticking out from between his shoulder blades, see, too, the brilliant red stain that spread across the back of his coat. He lay still.

Immediately, the maharaja shouted a string of commands that had his guards hastening into action, although they did not go anywhere near Nesbit. Rather, they were after his horse. They reappeared a few minutes later, the gelding trotting behind them; the maharaja relaxed, and mused aloud.

“So. It appears that our magician throws the javelin as well as conjuring coins and mice. And he still has his own weapon. I suggest you watch yourself, Captain Russell.” His manner said the opposite, that he would like nothing better than to see me sprawled on top of Nesbit, leaving the field free for him. Still, he was not about to trust to the magician’s skills. He shouted at the other guard to go to the southern end of the copse, where his weapon would ensure that I remained in play until either I or the magician was out of the game.

I gripped the shaft of my short spear and kicked my gelding forward towards the trees.

My path took me twenty feet from where Nesbit lay. I glanced involuntarily at the spear haft that protruded from the back of his blood-soaked jacket, but I did not stop; there seemed little point. Instead, I continued south, towards the guard, sitting with his rifle across his saddle. From where he waited, he could watch both sides of what I now saw was an overgrown nullah or stream-bed, a long, rock-strewn dip in the earth that resulted in a trickle of water at its southern end. His horse lipped at some green shoots that followed the watercourse; I passed between guard and trees, ignoring both.

Halfway up the eastern side, Holmes’ face peered out at me from between two trees. I said nothing, did nothing to let the guard know what I had seen, but Holmes grinned at me before slipping back into the undergrowth. As I rounded the northern end of the trees, he used the momentary distraction of my reappearance to make his move.

His black figure darted out from the trees to where Geoffrey Nesbit lay. The guard immediately raised his rifle and fired a shot, which missed his target wildly but ricocheted alarmingly ten feet from my horse’s nose. I shouted in fury, hauling back on the reins to force my gelding into a rear, but only when the maharaja added his voice to the protest did the guard lower his gun and kick his own horse into a run instead.

He was too late. Holmes had grabbed Nesbit’s ankles and dragged the limp body face-first at high speed across fifteen feet of ground and up the rocks into the shelter of the trees. Nesbit’s arms stretched out after him, muscles slack, head bouncing back and forth wincingly across the rough ground. A dozen steps and they were gone. The guard galloped up, pressing his bay close to the wall of green.

“I say,” I shouted at him. “Unless you want a spear through you, I’d suggest you move back.”

His English was quite good, and he moved away briskly. After a minute, seeing that there was nothing he could do now to keep the magician from retrieving the spear that had killed the English captain, he looked to his master for instructions, then rode back to his position at the southern end.

I made a great show of peering this way and that into the growth before circling back north and turning down the far side of the copse. The guard shifted a few yards to the east so he could keep track of me, but came no farther, wanting to remain within sight of his maharaja. I rode to the spot where Holmes had shown himself to me, then dismounted, looping the reins over a dead branch and patting the damp chestnut neck. The horse bent to lip at the grass; I hefted my spear up to shoulder level for effect, then stepped into the trees and the dappled half-light.

In a clearing near the creek, I found Nesbit sitting hale and hearty, bathing the blood from a scraped cheek while Holmes unthreaded the doctored spear from the resurrected man’s coat. I saw that its blade had been thrust through a flat piece of wood then bent sideways to lock it down, after which the spear’s butt end had been threaded through a slit in the garment and bound up against the victim’s spine with a length of black turban fabric. The blood was explained by the carcase of a young pig that lay on the rocks, the spearing of which no doubt explained the sudden exodus of the rest of the herd.

“A masterly bit of illusion, Holmes,” I said. He nodded his acknowledgement, gave my cropped scalp and blond moustache a pained glance, then concentrated again on the work in hand. “Now, if you can just conjure up one of our host’s aeroplanes, we’ll be well out of here.”

“I couldn’t even manage to hang on to Nesbit’s horse,” he said apologetically.

“You did well to lay hands on me,” Nesbit objected.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Self-criticism is my husband’s way of patting himself on the back.”

“Nonetheless,” Holmes went on, deigning to take note of my psychological insight, “we’re three riders with one horse, and a border at least six miles away.”

“Have to do something about that, won’t we?” I said. The situation ought to have filled me with alarm, but instead I felt irrationally cheerful. “What’s our arsenal?”

“One long spear, one short, another short one with a ruined head. You have your knife, Russell?” he asked with a glance at the borrowed riding boots.

“Of course. Nesbit?”

“No. Well, a pen-knife, that’s all.”

“Still, there are plenty of rocks. You take my spear,” I told him. “You’re better with it than I am. Shall we go?”

The puzzled Army captain put on his ruined coat and followed us through the green to the eastern border. My absence had brought the guard, who was stirring his horse into a trot. In a minute he would be behind the trees, invisible to the maharaja and the other guard. I scooped up a pocketful of round rocks and yanked down several branches of fresh new leaves. When the guard was fifty feet away, I stepped unconcernedly out from the trees, my arms full of greenery, and carried it over to drop at the chestnut’s feet. As he lowered his head to explore it, I took out Martin Russell’s cigarette case and picked one out, setting it between my lips.

“Why do you stop?” the guard demanded. His rifle was in his hands, but pointing still at the ground between us.

I flicked my lighter and got the tobacco going before telling him, “Go and see.” I slid the lighter back into my pocket, and as he turned to peer into the trees, I pulled out a pair of rocks and let fly.

The damnable puggaree he wore gave little chance of knocking him cleanly out, but my rocks were heavy and fast, and at the third blow between his shoulders the startled bay shied and dumped him. I went after the horse as Holmes and Nesbit swarmed out to overcome the guard.

I couldn’t have caught the animal if he’d run, if the guard had got off a shot and truly frightened him. As it was, he slowed to a halt forty feet away and watched me walking more or less in his direction, but at a safe angle away from him. I strolled, dreading the sudden appearance of the second guard, murmuring idly at the creature until the ears twitched forward. Gently, doing nothing to alarm his equine sensibilities, I drifted closer, tempting him with greenery, until I had my hand on his bridle.

The moment my hands touched the reins, Holmes kicked the other horse into a run, Nesbit behind him on the wide haunches with the fallen guard’s rifle. I threw myself into the saddle, drove my heels hard into the horse’s sides, and flew on their heels across the grassland in the direction of the Khanpur border.

But the guards were superbly trained, or the maharaja cautious. Less than twenty strides into our gallop, the first shot came. I felt as much as heard the bullet cut through the air, saw a puff of dirt rise up on the other side of Holmes and Nesbit, and looked back over my right shoulder to see the second guard as he rounded the southern tree line. The crack of the gun reached us, and Nesbit, ahead and to my left, twisted around, trying to bring his stolen rifle up as he clung to the bare horse with his legs. Unfortunately, I was directly between the two weapons.

I wrenched the reins to the left so I was heading back towards the trees, desperate to clear Nesbit’s line of fire. After a quarter of a mile, I twitched them back to the right, and was in a line with the other horse when out of the corner of my eye I saw a white flash, beating its way flat-out around the northern end of the trees.

Four horses, five riders, their trajectories coming together at a point where an arm of forest stretched out into the grassland of the terai. The maharaja’s Arab was ideally suited for this race, deft on its feet over the rough ground and filled with stamina, whereas stamina was just what the doubly-laden gelding in front of me was running short of. My stolen bay might, possibly, have outrun the smaller Arab, but the chestnut under Holmes and Nesbit was already showing the first signs of foundering. From the south, the guard’s sturdy bay would reach the point last of all, but it would all be over before then.

Nesbit was the first to move in the sacrificial stakes. He and Holmes seemed to be shouting at each other, but before the magician could act, his tow-headed passenger flung himself off the horse, hitting the ground hard and rolling. He came up on one knee and turned his rifle at the guard, magnificently—if suicidally—oblivious of the bullets spitting dirt around him. One shot slapped at his leg the instant his rifle fired, jerking his aim to a miss. The guard continued roaring down on him from the south, the maharaja from the north, and I in the middle. Nesbit’s trouser leg reddened, and then he rose to a stand, took careful aim, and fired again. I saw the guard’s bay stagger; the man himself kicked free of the stirrups and rolled clear before the animal went down. Kneeling now, half concealed by the wounded beast, the guard aimed at the still-standing Nesbit.

And then something odd happened. Before he could fire, the man seemed to flinch, then duck. He raised his hand as if to shade his face, and seemed to glow briefly in the bright mid-day sun. Then Nesbit’s gun went off, and the guard fell backwards.

There was no time to consider the meaning of the man’s peculiar gesture; the maharaja was fast closing in on Nesbit, his long spear in deadly position, the Arab’s ears forward: only one thing to do. I hammered my heels down, pulling the thin knife from the top of my boot; the broken, bloodied spear on Nesbit’s wall in Delhi flashed through my mind. Nearly the end of my career.

The prince saw me shift direction and responded instantaneously. His spear swung up to the place where I would be when my horse collided with the Arab, eight feet of steel-tipped bamboo against my own five inches of blade. There would be no throwing the knife underhanded and behind me—all I could do was try to avoid his blade, shoving it forward and crashing into the shaft or jumping at him the instant before it impaled me. I slipped my boots free from the stirrups and braced for the impact, cringing from the approaching razor.

And then the world flared in a soundless explosion, blinding me for precious moments before moving on. Frantically I blinked, but in that instant the two horses came together, the maharaja’s spear sliding between my body and the bay’s mane as my knee smashed into the prince’s. Without thought, I clamped my right hand onto the bamboo shaft and stabbed out with my left; before the horses leapt apart, I heard the man gasp.

The two horses veered away from each other the moment the pressure on their reins permitted, but I couldn’t understand what had happened. My dazzled vision confirmed that I had the spear in my right hand and a blood-smeared knife in my left, but where had the silent explosion come from, a flash like the sudden burst of a—a looking-glass! I’d suffered that blinding flash before.

Bindra.

The white stallion was pounding off north nearly as fast as it had come, its rider’s left hand clapped over a bleeding right biceps. Holmes was circling back at a gallop, Nesbit was bending to examine his leg, and I brought the bay to a halt and stood in the stirrups to search every bump and shrub, but not until the boy repeated the mirror trick did I find him. Bindra saw me, and rose from his hiding place half a mile away, the ladies’ compact in his hand, grinning hugely.

But that was not the end of the surprises. A few hundred yards beyond the boy, a light-skinned man in monastic robes stepped out of the beginnings of the forest, carrying in his hand some dark shape that could have been a short spear, but which I thought was a rifle. After a minute, he swung it up to rest across his shoulder, which I took as confirmation. And soon he was close enough to recognise: Kimball O’Hara.

All our chicks come home to roost.

Nesbit finished strapping his belt around his thigh and accepted Holmes’ arm to pull himself onto the gelding. But Bindra paid us no mind. Instead, he turned and flew across the ground towards the man with the rifle, leaping into O’Hara’s arms so that the monk staggered back. The sound of their laughter reached us through the still, hot air, and I kicked my mount into a canter until I was even with Nesbit.

“Who the hell is that boy, anyway?” I demanded, but the handsome, somewhat battered face just grinned at me. “Did you arrange for him to be at the horse-seller’s? Is the brat one of yours?”

“Oh no, not mine. I didn’t even know for certain that he existed, although I had my suspicions. No, I’d say the boy belongs to what one might term an earlier régime of Intelligence.”

As we approached, O’Hara’s free hand rested on the boy’s shoulder; our close-mouthed donkey-boy grinning and chattering in a manner I’d not have imagined of him. We came closer, until I saw the same exact grin displayed on the man’s face; with a flash like that of the brat’s mirror, I knew what I was seeing, wondered only that I hadn’t seen it before.

The urchin donkey-boy could only be Kimball O’Hara’s son.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We had no time to spend on explanations or even greetings, not with the maharaja’s stallion skimming across the ground in pursuit of reinforcements. O’Hara paused only long enough to look at Nesbit’s leg, then whirled and set off at a fast trot, his robes dancing around him and the rifle over his shoulder, the boy on his heels.

“Wait!” I called. “We can double up on the horses.” But O’Hara never looked back.

So Holmes and I rode my fresher horse, putting Nesbit up on the chestnut; once we had the wounded man in safety, I could always come back with both horses to fetch O’Hara and the child.

We left them far behind across the terai. Once among the trees, however, we began to climb, dismounting every half mile or so to lead the horses around some precipice or across the slick stones of a quick-running stream. When we felt quite certain not only that we were well free of the Khanpur border but that we would see the maharaja’s men should they pursue us onto government land, we brought Nesbit down from his horse to see to his bleeding. Holmes loosed the belt tourniquet and ripped open the fabric to explore the bloody wound with delicate fingers.

Nesbit, white-faced but in control, said, “The bullet will need to be cut out. But it’s doing no harm for the present. It’ll keep.”

Holmes nodded, but replaced the too-snug belt tourniquet with lengths torn from the remains of his puggaree. I was about to suggest that I take the two animals back for the others while Nesbit rested, when Bindra’s chatter floated up the hill. We put Nesbit on one horse and the boy on the other, and hiked over hill and ice-girt stream until we were above the snow-line. Soon we came to a path, much trampled by booted men and heavy bullock-drawn carts.

The encampment lay to the north, but Nesbit said, “There’s a dak bungalow a mile and a half to the south.”

“I think we should go on to the encampment,” I said. “That leg needs a surgeon.”

“All it needs is to have the bullet dug out; even the boy could manage that.”

“It is right under the skin,” Holmes agreed.

“Going to the encampment would necessarily bring the Army into our actions,” O’Hara pointed out in a mild voice. “Have we decided to do that?”

I looked at the others and sighed. “All right. But just overnight. And if there’s any sign of fever, I’m going for a doctor myself.”

We turned south and soon came to the promised dak bungalow, one of the network of travellers’ rests scattered across India for the use of European officials. It was a low stone building with two more ramshackle structures behind it, one for horses, the other for resident and visiting servants. Bindra led the horses away towards the one, while from the other scurried a startled pair of men, astonished at our unheralded approach and unaccustomed anyway to parties on the road at this time of year. The inside of the bungalow would have benefitted from a broom and scrub-brush, but the plaster had been whitewashed within the last year, and the place was too cold to smell of anything but damp.

The men were even more taken aback by our scant baggage, which consisted of two rifles and a cloth bag belonging to Bindra, and that contained nothing but a blanket, some very old chapatis, a handful of dried apricots, and his mirror. With ceremony, the older of the two servants carried the grubby object before us into the bungalow, laid it onto a rough-hewn table, and turned to the business of making a fire, shaving slivers of dry cedar from a log with the heavy knife that had been left on the hearth for the purpose.

Camp chairs were quickly brought, sheets for the two iron beds promised and bed-rolls for those condemned to the floor, but the first things Holmes demanded were a honed razor and a pot of well-boiled water. I sat before the fire and pointedly turned my back to the operation behind me. Clothing rustled, Holmes and O’Hara consulted briefly, and then the patient was wheezing a forced breath from his lungs as the razor bit in. In no more than thirty seconds came the dull tink of a metal slug sinking to the bottom of an enamelled dish-pan.

Tea was brought and drunk with gratitude, and the khansama brought a hastily killed and curried chicken to our table. We five ate enough for a dozen civilised persons, and sprawled afterwards before the fire with tobacco in various forms—all but myself and, I noticed with private amusement, Bindra, whose eyes followed the cigarette given by Nesbit to O’Hara, but who did not then pull out one of the foul little bidis I felt sure he had about his person. Instead, the boy took out the five coloured balls, and with the supreme nonchalance that does nothing to conceal great pride, he juggled. His father watched, making noises of appreciation and awe, his chest swelling along with that of his son. Holmes scraped out a disreputable pipe that one of the servants had found for him, and filled it with black leaf. A contented silence fell on our unlikely little band.

When Nesbit reached the end of his cigarette, he tossed it into the flames and glanced at where O’Hara sat, comfortably cross-legged on the floor. Bindra pocketed the balls and curled before his long-lost father, small head cradled by the man’s robes, the young face gazing at the low flames, eyes slowly closing in the warmth. O’Hara’s left hand rested on the tousled hair, his right played unceasingly with the beads of his rosary; he looked as content as the child.

Nesbit broke the silence, keeping his voice low. “Why did you not tell me about the boy?”

O’Hara smiled. “Because you would have wanted him. I was given over to Creighton’s hands when I was thirteen; plenty soon enough.”

“But the child has been living unsheltered for three years. Surely having him come to us would have been better than wherever he’s been.”

“Two years and three months, since we were separated. He has been among friends.” O’Hara’s fingers told the rosary, over and over, while the wood fire crackled and the boy’s breathing deepened.

“But how on earth did he find us?” I wanted to know.

The monk smiled down at his sleeping son. “Until twelve weeks ago, he was with his mother’s brother, in the mountains. When I succeeded in getting the amulet out, it passed through the hands of a man who knew where to find the boy. He told the lad I was safe, and then my son got it into his mind to watch Nesbit, that he might participate in his father’s rescue. You two came; he followed Holmes as he came and went, talking to Nesbit, purchasing many interesting things, and finally going to the horse-seller’s; when you arrived there to take possession of the donkey and the cart, Ram Bachadur himself lay sleeping, thanks to some drugged pilau he had eaten.”

“Who was the man that helped you?” Nesbit demanded.

The calm eyes looked back. “A friend.”

“He was one of us, wasn’t he? Within the Survey?”

“That is possible.”

“What he’s done could be called treason.”

“Or brotherhood.”

“There is some man performing treason, from within the walls of the Survey. Men have died because of him. Men who were our brothers: Forbes, Mohammed Talibi, and a new boy, Bartholomew.”

O’Hara’s fingers paused on his rosary, his head dipped as the names registered with him, but when he spoke again, his voice left no room for doubt. “I grieve for their deaths, Nesbit, but it was not he who put the knife to their throats.”

Nesbit scowled at the man on the floor; still he had little choice at the moment but to put aside the question of the traitor in the Survey ranks, and go on. “But how did you end up in that prison in the first place?”

“Pride,” O’Hara answered promptly. “Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast. I know that you received my letter telling of the fakir’s ill treatment and the order of cotton—my friend Holmes here told me as much during one of our long Morse code conversations through the stones. But the means of my uncovering the thread, of picking it free from the surrounding design and following it to the source, I did not tell of that. I was clever,” he said, making it sound like a character flaw. “When I was good at The Game, there was none better; this time, two years and more ago, it happened I had my son with me, a son any man might be happy to claim, and I wanted him to witness his father’s cleverness and skill. The Wheel of Life turns hard and fast, and my pride rode its top but for a moment, before it spun down to crush me underneath.”

He saw Nesbit’s impatience with the metaphor, and relented. “I went more deeply into suspect territory than I ought, and asked questions more pointed, and became more visible than any player of The Game dare do. I became, in short, a rank amateur, showing off for my son. His mother had died of the cholera when he was six, and he lived with his Tibetan grandparents for the three years after that. I thought the time had come to take him by my side, and as this was to be my last such expedition, I saw no harm in showing him some of the rules of our Game.”

He sighed, and shook his head. “My Holy One spent long hours expounding on the Wheel that is life, trying to re-form me from the imp I was. In the Wheel that holds the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, the hub is formed of the conjoined animals whose individual natures are ignorance, anger, and lust. Taken together, the hub of Illusion is pride.

“Yes, Nesbit, I see you wish fact and not philosophy. Very well. The boy and I went into Khanpur itself, selling copper pots. Which might have been innocent enough, but why then should a seller of pots take himself north out of the town for six or seven miles, to a place where there is no village, only a fort? Why should a seller of copperware be so interested in the maharaja’s air field, he ventures into the very buildings where the aeroplanes are stored? In my eagerness to come up with a prize for my last round in The Game, I chose to forget the danger of my opponent.

“I would have been executed forthwith, I think, but for the presence of the boy, which puzzled the men who took me, and puzzled their master when we were brought before him. Had they let him go, I would have gone to my death with a degree of equanimity—after all, when one has cheated The Great Illusion as many times as I have, it is hardly sporting to complain when it catches one up. But they held the boy, and they were preparing to use him to open me up.

“So I offered to give them what they wanted, without having to go to the effort and delay of torture, if only they would let him go free. And moreover, I told the maharaja, I would offer him a great prize, one he would never get from me by the brand or the rack, as soon as I had seen the child cross the Khanpur border. I promised him that it would be worth it, and he looked into my eyes, and he decided to gamble that I was giving him the truth.

“I sent the boy to my friends, extracting from him first the promise that he must never enter Khanpur again without my word, and watched him go down the road and through the guard’s post. As soon as he had passed, I turned to my captor and told him who I was. That I was not only an agent of the British Intelligence service, but that I was also the boy known to the world through the writings of Rudyard Kipling.”

“And you gave him your word that you wouldn’t try to escape under your own power,” Nesbit concluded. “Thus condemning me to a case of severe back-strain.”

“I did make a considerable effort not to grow fat inside the prison,” O’Hara countered. “Since I thought it possible that such a scenario might come about.”

“Possible, my foot,” his superior officer said with a grin. “You planned for it. That’s why you worded your vow the way you did. You knew someone would come after you sooner or later, and had to trust that they would be able to haul you off.”

“Or drive me at gunpoint,” O’Hara said, shooting a grin of his own in my direction. “Yes, I admit it: another tit-bit of pride, to sweeten the tongue.”

“The sweetness of the plan must have faded considerably, after two years in a cell.”

“Not at all. I knew my son was safe, and I knew he would arrange things as needed, with the assistance of my . . . friends. Once I had the amulet away, I knew it was literally only a matter of time.”

By way of response, Holmes reached forward to knock out his pipe against the stones of the fireplace, then pulled the heavy knife out of the cedar kindling-block and drove its point into the side of his boot-heel. Reluctantly, the heel parted, and Holmes picked from the base of it the small oilskin-wrapped amulet that had set us on our play of The Game long weeks before. He tossed it over to O’Hara, who dropped the rosary in order to catch it. He cupped the object in his right palm, his face going soft with affection.

“One of the guards had a small son he loved, who fell ill,” O’Hara told us. “I cured the boy where the physicians could not, and in gratitude, the man passed my amulet on to a friend in Hijarkot, who would give it to a relative in a camel caravan, and so on. I was glad to hear that it survived.” He slipped it into his robes, and his hand resumed the beads. His left hand had not moved from the boy’s dark head.

“And now, Mr O’Hara,” Nesbit said, his voice taking on the edge of a superior officer. “Do you have a report to give me?”

With that demand, tension took hold of the dank stone room. It all came down to this: a report demanded and given. From the beginning, his friends had sworn to O’Hara’s loyalty, but his being locked in the maharaja’s gaol did nothing to obviate the doubts. He could as easily have been working for India as for Britain.

But the imp Kim looked out of the middle-aged eyes, as if he knew what we were thinking.

“Oah, of course I have a report,” he said. “I have ears, the guards have tongues, their master enjoys teasing his prisoners, and the hours are long for purposes of analysis. Do you wish my report now?”

“The gist of it will do.”

“The maharaja of Khanpur plots rebellion, but of a twisted and most secretive kind. He is using The Russian Bear to supply himself with guns and ammunition, which he will pass on to the most radical of firebrands he can find—the makings of tons of explosives, guns fresh from Germany. When he is ready, he will then secretly open his borders to the Bolshevik troops. But he has no intention of handing them India. Instead, he plans to allow them in just so far, and then raise the alarm. When the British respond, in force, after the Russians are extended into his land, he will shut the door behind The Bear’s back. The Bolsheviks will be trapped between Khanpur and the Indian Army, where they will be crushed entirely. For the second time, a maharaja of Khanpur will become an heroic defender of the Crown, and his reward this time, for saving British India from The Bear, will be vast.

“His reward, in fact, will be India itself.”

“The Lenin of the sub-continent,” I interjected softly.

“You might say that,” O’Hara agreed. “Or a native Viceroy.”

“Native prince, hereditary ruler,” Holmes mused. “The blood of the Moghuls in his veins, a thousand years of experience in his hands. A compromise between Congress and the Moslem League, certainly, but a shining opportunity as well, for India and England. Gandhi and Jinnah wouldn’t have a chance.”

“The English would seize upon Khanpur’s maharaja with vast relief, that with a man of his stature in charge, they could now withdraw with honour.”

“Leaving the country in the hands of a murderer and a madman,” I pointed out.

“Which is why we cannot allow his plot to ripen even one week further.” It was O’Hara who spoke, which surprised me.

“Wouldn’t continuing to involve yourself in Survey business be furthering the actions of the Wheel of Life?” I asked him.

“One attains merit through action as well as by refraining from action,” he answered piously. “The innocent must be given the opportunity to attain self-knowledge, which the unfettered actions of the wicked would prevent.

“To say nothing of the fact,” he added, “that it should be jolly fun.”

Our startled laughter woke Bindra for a moment. He kneaded his eyes with his fists, located his father, and settled again, nuzzling into the robed lap with a sigh of contentment.

“If I understand you aright,” Nesbit said, ignoring my digression, “you would suggest that action be taken that does not bring the Army into this? Since,” he noted, his green eyes beginning to dance, “it was you who suggested that we might not wish to approach the encampment at this time.”

“Oah, Nesbit, truly you are a man after my own heart.”

“What do you propose?”

“Well,” the Irish Buddhist said, “you were willing to carry me on your shoulders from The Forts to the borders of Khanpur, until Miss Russell drew her gun.” Holmes stirred, and I realised, belatedly, that he knew nothing of the events of the previous midnight. “But as that demand was not made upon your back and sinews, perhaps, given a few days for your leg to heal, you would not mind carrying the considerably lesser weight of the maharaja?”

“Kidnap him?” The quirking of Nesbit’s mouth showed his love of the idea, although the hesitation in his eyes said he was thinking, too, of the report he would have to make to his superiors. Particularly if the plan went awry.

“Invite him outside to Delhi, for conversations,” O’Hara suggested.

Holmes took his pipe out of his mouth to point out gently, “He is in a heavily guarded fortress.”

“There is at least one concealed entrance,” O’Hara said. “When he came to the Old Fort in the night, he did not always come smelling of the outside world, but of stones and dampness.”

Holmes nodded. “I thought as much, the first time he came to my cell. But if a passageway links the Old Fort with the New, that would still require passing a number of guards. Unless it also has an opening to the outside.”

I sat up as if brushed by a raw wire. “The zoo!” The three men looked at me. “When the maharaja showed us the zoo, I noticed a small pathway going around the back of the lion pen, past the entrance used by the zookeepers. The big path was marked heavily by bits of spilt food and the drag of equipment, but beyond it was the sort of footpath worn by a single set of feet, walking it with regularity. His dogs knew it as well—when they would have gone down it, he called them back. Sharply.”

“That could be anything,” Nesbit objected.

“I think not. The lion pen itself is built right up against the hill of the Fort, firmly into its westernmost side. And just before going to the zoo, I was in a room in New Fort located on the heights of that same side. The toy room, he calls it. Have you seen it?” I asked Nesbit.

“Years ago, and briefly. But you’re right, it is on the western spur of the New Fort.”

“It has a hidden door. I noticed the wear on the floor there, where the marble is grey with soil and scattered particles of gravel. The servants do not clean in the toy room very often. And in fact,” I said as another piece of the puzzle came to me, “the maharaja has the reputation of sorcery—of being able to appear and disappear unexpectedly. No doubt this is partly explained by the number of purdah screens throughout the Fort, which would conceal a small elephant, but there may be a network of hidden passages as well. And you’d expect one to the outside, such as down to the zoo.

“Too,” I said before they could object, “there may be a similar hidden passage in that horrid fur-lined gun-room of his. A room which is near the gates on the east side, a location which would be very convenient for crossing under the road to the Old Fort in the night. A passageway smelling of stones and dampness.”

Silence again fell in the room, but it was an electric silence of intense speculation rather than repose. Even the boy was awake—or had given up the pretence of sleep—and had drawn himself up at his father’s side.

“Provocative,” Holmes said at last, and proceeded to repack his borrowed pipe with the Indian black leaf.

“You’re certain?” Nesbit demanded.

“Of soil and wear on the floor near two blank walls? Yes. That those doors lead to the zoo and the Old Fort? Of course I cannot be sure.”

“Even if we find a door out of the zoo, we could wander underneath the Fort for hours,” he fretted.

“Oah, Nesbit,” O’Hara said gently, “you English are so unhappy with uncertainty.”

“And you Indians are so deucedly eager to embrace it.”

The two men grinned at each other in easy understanding.

“However,” Nesbit said, struggling to get to his feet. “Tomorrow I ride to the encampment, to arrange a proper show of support once we get the gentleman across his border.”

We spread ourselves around the main room, Nesbit and myself on the narrow iron-framed beds, the others on the floor. Bindra turned down the paraffin lamp and padded back to his sleeping roll in front of the low-burning fire. We lay, silent with our thoughts, Nesbit’s bed creaking and complaining as he sought to find a comfortable position for his leg, but at last even he fell still.

But it was O’Hara who had the last word, voicing a thought that was going through my own mind, and I think Holmes’ as well.

“In the morning, when we are fresh, I should like to propose that the expedition into Khanpur be done posthaste.” Nesbit’s bed squealed in preface to his reaction, but the Irishman on the floor cut him off by saying, “I do not propose this tonight; but in the morning, we need to talk about it.”

Nesbit subsided, positively radiating distrust and suspicion. One by one, we slept.

All but O’Hara. Whenever I woke during the night, I could see him sitting before the dying embers, breathing the words to the prayer Om mane padme om, over and over again, his long rosary beads clicking softly as outside, light snowflakes whispered against the window-glass.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In the morning, Nesbit’s green eyes glittered with fever, although he swore that it was nothing, that he was capable of riding, that he would carry the maharaja on his back if it came to that. Holmes and O’Hara glanced at each other over the wounded man’s head, and said nothing, not then. But after we had eaten the eggs and bacon the servants cooked for us, both men drifted away outside where they stood, Holmes trying to get his pipe alight, O’Hara again fingering his rosary, their breath swirling into clouds in the heatless morning sun. I gave them five minutes, then walked out onto the fresh snow after them, my unprotected scalp tightening with the cold.

I saw no reason not to come to the point. “I’ll not be left behind to play nursemaid.”

O’Hara’s hands stopped their motion as he gave me a look of surprise, but Holmes merely smiled into his troublesome pipe.

“You want to go today,” I continued. “I agree: If the maharaja was angry enough to shoot his pet monkeys yesterday, then today, after having all of us escape him at one time, he’ll be insane with rage. I’m glad Sunny is out of things, but the others are too vulnerable. We can’t wait until Nesbit is fit, but I refuse to stay with him. Leave Bindra here.”

“Unfortunately, I have given my word that the boy will not be left behind again,” O’Hara told me.

“As you wish, although I don’t believe I’d take a son of mine into that hornets’ nest. When do we go?”

“It is better that you stay here,” O’Hara said. Holmes took an involuntary step back.

“And why is that?” I began, then stopped. “No, don’t bother, I don’t need to ask. What do women need to do in order to be taken as equals? Become Prime Minister? For heaven’s sake, just pretend I’m ‘Martin’ if it makes you any happier, but let’s have no more words about leaving Miss Russell out of anything. Besides, you need me. I’m the only one who’s been to the toy room.”

“You can draw us a map.”

“Inaccurate. And you’d need to use a torch or matches, either of which would be seen from the room’s high window. I can walk it in the dark.”

O’Hara’s dark eyes travelled to consult Holmes, who nodded and said, “She has a certain skill at the Jewel Game.”

O’Hara studied me, as if such a talent would show on the surface, then said abruptly, “You went into the stables yesterday night.”

“Yes,” I replied, wondering if he was accusing me of something. “I wanted to see that the horses had been looked after.”

O’Hara had something else in mind. “We will cover your eyes, and you will walk through the stables by way of demonstration.”

It seemed to me a rather silly exercise, but we were, after all, embarked on a game here, and perhaps my accepting the challenge would move things ahead more rapidly.

And so it proved. From the moment O’Hara snugged the linen dish-cloth around my head to the time we slipped across the Khanpur border was a matter of half a day.

We left with a rucksack Bindra had found somewhere, provisioned with food, water, and candles; two knives and an ancient revolver Holmes had got from the khansama; the rope and morphia, which Holmes had hidden about his person ever since the night in the gaol; and several small but vital pieces of inside information possessed by Nesbit. Only when we had extracted the facts did we reveal to the man that we were leaving him behind. He was not pleased; we had to chain his wrist to the iron bed to keep him from joining us.

His curses, however, followed us far down the snowy road.

Nor was Bindra happy to be left outside of the Khanpur border with the horses, but the boy had to admit, when pressed by a father employing all the logic of Socrates, that bearing the weight of an abducted maharaja would be beyond his abilities, and that someone needed to watch the beasts. We built a makeshift shelter for them below the snow-line, in an area of deep brush and woods far from the track, where Bindra could keep the animals quiet: The weightiness of that responsibility calmed him. At least we hadn’t left him back at the dak bungalow, making sure that Nesbit did not get free.

Just before dark we reached the end of the forest, east and slightly to the south of The Forts, more or less where Nesbit and I had left O’Hara after the gaol-break. The moon rose with the darkness; when it was well clear of the mountains behind us, we slipped from the trees into the cultivated edges of the rough terai.

At ten o’clock, with an enormous, bright moon full in the sky, we crossed the main road without having disturbed anything more than pi-dogs and a few night birds. On the other side, the land was more heavily used, but in India even farmers tend to live inside village walls. We gave those wide berth, keeping to fields and paths and moving cautiously; we saw no person.

Well before midnight, the smells of the zoo came to us across the frigid air. A rooster crew, some big animal—one of the lions, perhaps?—coughed irritably, nocturnal habits lying uneasy beneath the daylight régime of its keepers. Another half mile, and we were at the walls surrounding the village of dwarfs. There we paused for whispered consultation.

“The fence here seems to be nothing but thorn brush,” I noted.

“Too noisy to move,” Holmes countered. “We go around.”

The tangle of dry thorn eventually gave way to high, strong wire fencing that kept the maharaja’s giraffes from straying into the sugar cane. We had brought rudimentary burglary tools with us, but it proved unnecessary here, as the fence was not topped by barbed wire. We climbed up and dropped into the pen, keeping near the fence as it pushed deeper into the zoo, then at the far side climbed out again. The white gravel paths glimmered in the light from over our heads, giving us direction, although we did not walk on the gravel for fear of the betraying crunch.

The lions’ pen would have been easy for a blind person to locate, stinking of carnivore, the faint splash of water from the hillside spring the only noise in the great stillness. Our boots made no sound on the winter-soft grass, our clothing gave less rustle than the breeze in the leaves. We drew near the high, gleaming bars, the trees and rock wall behind them a dapple of light and dark.

Then a lion roared from what seemed ten feet away, and I nearly screamed in response. We froze, and my heart coursed and leapt in my chest, making me dizzy; the night seemed to pulse and fade. There came the sound of a large body shifting, the pad of enormous feet, and a second roar. We remained motionless. Would a night watchman come to investigate? Did the roar of lions mean the same as the bark of a dog? Or was the animal merely calling into the night, in hopes that his voice might be heard by another?

After an interminable time, which was probably only six or eight minutes, the animal grunted to itself and padded across the ground. Then it dropped with a breathy grunt and quieted.

I began to breathe again. After a minute, one of the men touched my arm, and we crept forward, cautious as mice in a cattery.

At the end of the lion cage, the greenery closed in so it became impossible to avoid the gravel, but when I gingerly set my foot onto its pale surface, I found that here it had not been refreshed as recently as in the centre of the zoo, and the stones in this damp place had sunk into the ground. We passed the door to the keeper’s building behind the cage where the food and cleaning equipment was stored, and where the white gravel came to an end.

But as I had remembered, there was an unnatural space between the bushes and the building where the salukis had bounded as at a familiar way, and the ground under our feet bore the unmistakable imprint of traffic. Working by feel alone, unable to see anything but the glow of the sky above, I patted my way along the walls until I came to the place where baked-mud wall merged with the naked rock of the hillside.

There we found the door. Unevenly shaped to suit the rough wall, too low for even a short man to pass while standing, and narrow enough to require slipping through sideways.

And locked.

Holmes eased past me to deal with that little problem, and when his pick-locks had done their work, we all breathed a sigh of relief to find the door unbarred. A battering-ram would not have suited our purposes at all.

We slipped inside, into a tight space that smelt of must and stone and the dampness of ages. Holmes closed the door behind him, and I lit a candle. We stood in a hollow perhaps five feet square and seven feet tall, rough-hewn from the rock. I had expected one passage, but we found two, both just wide enough for a man’s shoulders and tall enough for Holmes to walk without being forced to duck. We took the one to the left, which began by heading north, but soon doubled back south, then north again. We were, I decided, cork-screwing upwards in the hill below New Fort, the floor of the passageway ever rising beneath our feet. Twice we came to junctions, and after debate, we took care to mark our choice with small pebbles. After the second junction, we went for five minutes or so before Holmes and I stopped almost simultaneously, sensing the way diverging from where we wanted to be. Returning to the junction, we shifted the pebbles and went on, ever climbing, until the passage came to an end at a door as broad as the outside one had been narrow.

This door, however, had no lock, merely an expanse of uneven, time-darkened wood. I pushed against it, then dug my fingernails into one of the cross-pieces and pulled, but the heavy thing did not budge. Without a word, I stepped back far enough to allow Holmes to pass, and handed him the candle.

He ran the light back and forth over the surface, looking more for signs of wear than for a trigger, but found nothing. Not until he began to search the surrounding rock did he give a grunt of triumph. Shifting the low-burning stub to his left hand, he reached up with his right forefinger to press something hidden by a rough place in the stone. There was a faint click, and the flame danced wildly and snuffed out in the sudden current of air from around the concealed door.

Holmes pressed back against the rock to allow me passage. I laid my hand against the wooden surface, which despite its weight gave way with the silent ease of oiled hinges, and felt forward with the toe of my boot for the high marble trim that had run around the toy-room floor. It was there, and moreover, the air smelt of dust and machine oil. I stepped inside, listening for motion or the sound of stifled breathing, until I was satisfied that we were alone.

I turned back to the invisible door, and breathed, “It’s clear. Could you do something to the lock so—”

“It’s done,” Holmes whispered back. The last thing we needed, should this mad mission actually succeed, would be hunting for another trick switch with an abducted maharaja on our hands.

The two men slipped into the toy room beside me, and I pushed the door shut, more or less. As I turned into the room, two hands came to rest on my shoulders, Holmes’ familiar long fingers gripping my left, O’Hara’s on my right. Now was the time to make good on my foolish assertion to Kimball O’Hara that I could find my way through a black room I had visited only once.

I bent my head and allowed my mind’s eye to summon a view of the room as it had been. The door; the high shelves of mechanical dolls and animals to its left; the scattered arrangement of glass-enclosed mechanisms across the floor—not in a haphazard pattern, not once one knew that there was a doorway hidden behind them. The Englishman-eating tiger was over there, the erotic toys back there. Which meant that we need only circle the piggies’ tea party and dodge the pair of fortune-telling gipsies, and we would be at the room’s entrance.

I led the way forward—slowly and with my hands stretched out to be sure, since I was not all that supremely confident. But we reached the door without noise or mishap, and I felt a surge of pride as I laid my hand upon the doorknob.

The corridor stretched out in both directions, lit by oil lamps every thirty feet or so. The nearest one was smoking and guttering, a black stain on the ceiling showing that it had not been properly trimmed. We closed the door quietly and turned south, away from the durbar hall and the billiards room, where late guests and their attendant servants might still be up.

The southernmost quarter of the New Fort, hidden from view behind a thick stand of timber bamboo, had not yet known the hand of the maharaja’s renovators. Behind the greenery, the plaster was chipped, the paint long peeled away, the stone floor of the arcade worn and gritty underfoot. But not uninhabited—these were the servants’ quarters, with faint cooking odours wafting in from the open corridors. We slipped from one darkness to the next, freezing into imitations of the stone pillars around us when two tired-looking chuprassis scurried from the Fort’s central courtyard and slipped between two columns into the south wing.

I stood pressed up against the greasy stones and looked through the bamboo at the guest centre above the durbar hall and dining rooms. It had to be nearly one o’clock, but all the lights were still burning, the band played, the sounds of merriment spilled over the lotus pond and trimmed bushes. I thought the merriment sounded more than a little forced, but perhaps that was imagination. Certainly the sound was drunken. What state could the maharaja be in? Thwarted at every turn, his captives escaped, first Mary and then Martin tweaking their Russellian noses at his compulsory hospitality. No wonder the servants looked edgy.

For the first time, it occurred to me that the man might be too overwrought to enter his rooms at all. Our loose plan called for abducting the maharaja as soon as we found him alone, and either taking him away immediately or, if it was too near dawn, finding an abandoned corner of this vast place and keeping him drugged until night fell.

It was, frankly, a terrible plan. It was no plan at all. But it was marginally preferable to watching a regiment march across the borders and force a madman into open battle, and the three of us were all old hands at making do with whatever opportunities that presented themselves.

And in the event we did not succeed, the servants at the dak bungalow had been given a letter for the commander at the encampment. It would be taken to him if we did not return by dawn Wednesday, some thirty hours hence.

The two chuprassis came back out of the crumbling corridor, carrying what appeared to be a canvas stretcher. The object seemed weighty with implications, and my eyes followed it all the way across the gardens and up the steps into the hall. Holmes had to tug my sleeve to get me moving again.

The maharaja’s private quarters lay adjacent to the main gates at New Fort’s easternmost limits. The so-called “gun-room” with its fur walls was to the north of the gates, and according to Nesbit, the prince’s bedroom and private suites were immediately to the south of the gates, reached by a corridor that linked both halves of the wing on the top level. We planned to reach his quarters from the rear, by means of a little-used servants’ stairway at New Fort’s most southeastern corner, which Nesbit had seen but never tried to enter. He thought it might be passable.

It was, but only just. I think, looking back, it was probably the thought of that stairway that kept Nesbit from fighting harder about being tied to the bed. His wounded leg would never have got him up it.

But it did mean that, once we had shinnied up the abandoned stones and pulled ourselves over the gaps, we were in a place no one would have expected to find us. I had gone first, as the lightest and most agile, and now I folded the rope the others had used to traverse the final gap while we discussed what came next.

“It sounds to me as if the maharaja is having a pretty determined party,” I said, in little more than a murmur.

“Which merely means that the Fort will sleep late in the morning,” Holmes replied, his voice deliberately soothing. “Are you ready, O’Hara?”

“Oah yes,” he said. “May the Compassionate One be watching over us all.”

We stole north along the corridor towards the lighted section, there to reconnoitre. On the other side of a bend in the corridor, restoration had taken place: The carving around the doors gleamed; intricate carpets lay on the polished marble; brightly coloured frescoes graced the fresh plaster walls. There were even electrical lights in this section, as if a line had been drawn between the twentieth century and the seventeenth. O’Hara walked down the hall-way, opened a door, and disappeared from sight. We settled ourselves for a long wait.

This portion of the evening’s sortie had caused us the most vigorous argument. The maharaja was rarely alone for more than a few minutes while he was awake. Therefore, our best opportunity for laying hands on the man, short of a pitched battle with his guards, was to take him asleep, or at least alone in his rooms. And if he was not alone, at least the numbers would be few, and presumably any woman he took to his bed would not be armed.

But we couldn’t all three hide in a wardrobe or under his bed. And in the end, O’Hara’s talents, and the fact that he was smaller than either of us, gave him the job. He had the morphia, he could move as silently as a ghost, and heaven knew he had as much patience as might be required. So Holmes and I watched him go, and adjusted the revolvers in our belts, before settling ourselves to wait beyond the reach of the lights. As we waited, my hand kept creeping to my near-naked scalp, exploring the loss, and the freedom.

It is always at least mildly astonishing when plans actually work out, and I was indeed mildly astonished when, an hour later, the maharaja actually appeared, accompanied by two stoney-faced guards and a giggling German girl. The guards took up positions on either side of the door; after a few minutes, however, they looked at each other, and in unspoken accord retreated to the head of the main stairway, standing with their backs to the lit corridor.

I tried not to grin at the picture of O’Hara, silently reciting his rosary and trying to close his ears to the noisy events that had forced the guards’ retreat. It seemed forever before the shrieks of the girl’s laughter faded, and longer before the thuds and sense of movement died away, but in truth, less than an hour after we had come up the derelict stairway, the door nearest us eased open and the girl slipped out. Five minutes later it opened again, and Kimball O’Hara looked out at us.

We were on our feet in an instant. Holmes held up two fingers to warn him of the guards, then put one finger to his lips before gesturing that he should come. O’Hara stepped back inside for a few seconds, then reappeared with a weight slung across his shoulders, pausing to glance down the corridor at the two distant backs. He emerged fully, pulled the door shut, and in a few silent steps was with us.

The maharaja, wrapped in a dark red dressing-gown, stank of alcohol, but his sleep was that of drugs as well. He stayed limp as we slung him down the pit of the stairs; he remained lifeless across O’Hara’s shoulders through the shadows of the ground-floor arcade. The festivities on the other side of the gardens seemed to have died rapidly away once the maharaja was gone; half the lights had been extinguished, and the only voices I could hear were the querulous calls of the over-worked servants. Still, we kept to the deepest shadows, and made the western wing without raising an alarm.

We shifted our unconscious burden from O’Hara’s back to that of Holmes, and I led the way through mostly unlit passages to that off which the toy room opened. Nearly half the oil lamps had burnt out, including the one nearest the blue door itself. In near darkness, I reached for the doorknob, when the smoothly working mechanism of abduction suddenly hit a rough patch that sent it through the roof.

“Hey,” said a familiar voice. “What’s going on here?”

O’Hara stepped in front of Holmes as if he might conceal a six-foot-tall man with an insensible maharaja on his shoulders, and I reached for my gun, only to freeze when the figure down the hall-way stepped under a lamp, a large Colt revolver in his hand.

Thomas Goodheart.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The tableau held for six long breaths, seven, and then all hell broke loose. Another figure appeared beside Goodheart, dressed in the uniform of a chuprassi with a scarlet turban and an outraged voice.

“What is this thing?” the newcomer demanded in the lilting accents of the Indian, looking from us to him. “You have found dacoits stealing the master’s treasures, oah, sir—”

But to my utter confusion, Goodheart raised his revolver and pointed it, not at us, but at the red puggaree. The servant choked off his words in confusion and stared at Goodheart, as flabbergasted as I.

Tommy started to gesture with his gun, saying “You’ll have to come—” when the man broke, turning on his heel to sprint for the outside door. Without a moment’s hesitation, the American shot him.

Instantly, he turned and said urgently, “You two come fetch him, then stay in that room until I join you.” And without a word of explanation he fled up the passageway and burst outside into the courtyard gardens.

O’Hara and I looked at each other, then he kicked open the toy room door for Holmes and we ran to gather up the chuprassi. The servant had died instantly, shot through the heart. We took him, shoulders and feet, and scurried back to dump him inside the blue door.

“What the hell was that about?” I demanded of Holmes, but he could not enlighten me. I looked down at the dead man, but he, too, could tell me nothing apart from the obvious: that Goodheart had shot him, and not us.

“I think you two should get into the tunnel,” I said.

“I will wait here,” O’Hara said, but I was already shaking my head.

“You’re stronger than I am,” I told him. “Easier for you and Holmes to carry the maharaja five miles than Holmes and I.”

I did not wait for the men to agree, merely ripped the red turban from the dead man’s head and hurried back to where he had fallen, thinking that I might remove the worst of the stains from floor and wall, thus delay a full-scale search of this specific area. I shook out the tightly wrapped fabric and was just kneeling down to scrub at the stains when more gunfire cracked the stillness, followed by shouting voices. Or rather, a shouting voice.

I pinched out the oil lamp over my head, then ventured down the corridor to the nearest window onto the courtyard gardens. There I saw a puzzling sight: Thomas Goodheart, swaying like a foundering sailboat, seemed to be arguing with a pair of chuprassis.

“These god-damned bats!” he roared. “They drive a man insane with their infernal chatter. All night, in and out, get in the rooms and try and roost in your hair! I’m going to shoot every one of the accursed monsters.”

Quieter voices could be heard, apparently pleading for reason; the servants continually glanced over their shoulders at the dark rooms above.

“I won’t give it to you, damn you both!” the American raged. “I tell you the bats are—what’s that?”

More rapid conversation, much patting of hands in an attempt to reassure, and Goodheart swayed again, then suddenly relinquished his gun. The relief of the two servants was palpable and immediate, and the one with the gun took a step away from this obstreperous guest. The hand of the other hovered near Goodheart’s elbow, urging him back in the direction of the guest quarters, and he succeeded for a time. But when they reached the shadowy edges of the gardens, Goodheart shook the hand off. I heard him shouting again, something about leaving a man alone to have a quiet smoke.

Both servants immediately retreated. Goodheart slumped into a bench, his legs alone visible by the light of a lamp on the nearby terrace; then came the flare of a lighter, followed by the unsteady waver of a cigarette. His voice said something else, quieter now but still threatening, and both of the servants went away across the terrace into the hall.

I was not particularly surprised when, before I had reached the end of my muslin turban and the bloodstain was faded and nearly colourless, the man appeared at the far end of the passageway, moving without the slightest sign of drink, and without a cigarette. I stood up, bundling the last end of the sticky fabric into itself.

“Captain Russell?” he asked dubiously, peering into my face.

“And his sister as well,” I said. After all, I was armed, he was no longer; I could afford to experiment with honesty.

“Thought that might be the case. Where are the others?”

“In the toy room.”

“Where’s that? And once you’re there, how do you think you’re going to get out of here? That was the maharaja you had, wasn’t it?”

But I was not about to give him the secret passageway, not yet.

“Look, who are you?” I demanded.

“You know who I am. Shouldn’t we get out of this hall-way?”

He did have a point. I led him to the toy room, pulled a candle from my pocket and lit it, sheltering it with my hand while I bent to feel the chuprassi’s pulse. Yes: dead. Goodheart knelt beside me at the man’s side, tentatively pushing on one shoulder to reveal the face and the bloody chest. After a minute he stood up, unnecessarily wiping his hands on his evening jacket.

“He’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never . . . I didn’t intend to kill him. But he had to be stopped.”

“Why?”

That distracted him from staring at his victim. He stared at me instead. I hoped Holmes and O’Hara could hear all this.

“Oh God. Don’t tell me you’re kidnapping Jimmy for ransom?”

“What other reason might you imagine?”

He heard in my voice not an answer, but a test question. He nodded slowly, and looked around him into the darkness, clearly searching for my accomplices. “I think it’s very possible we’re both working toward the same goal.”

“And what might that be?”

“Jimmy’s clearly . . . unbalanced. But I wouldn’t guess it’s easy to arrest a native prince openly on his own ground.”

I let the words stand, and waited, cocking my head at the darkness. Goodheart waited, too, although he could not know for what. In seconds, I had my partners’ answer.

“Bring him,” said Holmes’ voice.

Once inside the hidden passage, we let the door click shut. I made cursory introductions. “Thomas Goodheart, Mr O’Hara, and you know my husband.”

Hands were shaken, and Goodheart said, “Mr Holmes, not Mr Russell. The purser told me, the day after the fancy-dress ball.”

“So the costume was an accident?” Holmes asked.

“Er, not entirely. I’d heard one of the passengers, a lady from Savannah, talking about Sherlock Holmes. At the time I just thought she meant that you looked like Sherlock Holmes, not that you were him. I hadn’t meant any disrespect.”

“I shouldn’t worry, young man. A lady from Savannah, you say? I don’t remember meeting her.”

“Yes, odd that. She must have left the ship at Aden; I didn’t see her again.”

“Holmes, can we leave this for later?” I suggested.

“Indeed,” he said, although the puzzle remained in his voice.

It proved impossible to shoulder our still-limp burden down the narrow passageway, but with one each at his head and feet and the spare two lighting the way with candles, we transported him through the belly of the hill, sweating and cursing, and no doubt bruising him all over. But the maharaja didn’t complain, not in his condition, and the necessarily slow rate of progress made it possible for me to repeat my question to Goodheart, at the fore of the procession. This time I received an answer.

“So, who are you?”

“Tommy Goodheart, travelling through India with his somewhat dotty mother.”

“But something else as well.”

“Yes. You see, when I was at Harvard, one of my friends had an uncle who is high in the War Department. Military Intelligence. He told me that I had such a superb poker face, I mustn’t waste it. And so I played along with him, went to a couple of Red meetings, even got myself arrested once—what a lark. Then when I graduated, and he found out I was going to be travelling in Europe, he called me in and gave me a serious talk.

“Our government believes that the Soviet Union is a spent force, militarily. We’ve been helping them rebuild their factories, giving them food, in the hopes that they might stay where they are. I mean to say, one only has to look at a map to be a bit nervous about the Reds, don’t you think? There’s a considerable acreage there.

“So he sort of suggested that if I went in that direction, I might just keep my eyes open. Nothing formal, you know? The U. S. of A. as a whole doesn’t have much of an interest in Intelligence—we seem to think it’s what the Brits would call ‘unsporting.’

“But when I got to Russia, I found the factories looked just fine, and there are an awful lot of healthy-looking soldiers. And then I’ve been told that the Soviets are buying guns and planes from the Germans. A whole lot of planes.

“I’d guess this uncle of my friend’s feels even more jittery after the last few months, what with your new government and all. Too many comrades make an outsider feel a mite uncomfortable. Although truth to tell, I haven’t been in touch with him since I left Europe, so I’m sort of playing it all by ear, here.”

“A one-man Intelligence operation,” Holmes commented from his position at the maharaja’s shoulders. He did not, however, sound disbelieving, and I had to agree with him: It made a certain amount of sense that the young man was independent, rather than under the control of some organised group.

“Did you arrange for that balcony to fall on us in Aden?” I asked Goodheart.

“Balcony? Is that what happened to you? Good Lord, no.”

I listened carefully, and could not hear a lie, but as I was at the rear, I could not see his face. His poker face. “What about the hotel fire in Delhi?”

“Ah. Well, there wasn’t really a fire. That is, there was, but it sort of . . . got out of hand.”

“And my missing trunk, off the boat?”

“Well, yes, I am terribly sorry about that. I tried to work some way to have it returned to you, but then you disappeared from the hotel. I only arranged to have it mislaid for a while. It seemed to me that searching your luggage would be one way of finding out if you were Russian spies.”

At that, all three of us stopped dead to stare at his back. At our sudden silence, he turned and saw our expressions. “Really!” he protested. “I’d been told that the most dangerous Bolsheviks were those that didn’t look like the enemy. And I couldn’t see the two of you travelling to India for any of the usual reasons, you just didn’t fit in. So I thought, maybe . . .” His voice died away in the tunnel.

Then O’Hara began to laugh. It started with a snort, then merged into giggles, and in a minute he had dropped his half of our prisoner and collapsed into uncontrolled merriment. Holmes, too, was grinning widely, and despite the vast inconvenience this man’s amateur sleuthing had caused me, even I had to grin. O’Hara giggled, repeating to himself, “Bolshevik spies! Sherlock Holmes a Russian spy!”

Goodheart looked vastly embarrassed. “It’s . . . I know. It was stupid of me, and I’d better give up this spy business before I do something really dangerous. So anyway, when I saw you with Jimmy, I figured you must know what you were doing, and I’d better throw my lot in with you. Um, can I ask, where are you taking him?”

The simple question triggered another paroxysm of mirth in O’Hara, and he began to choke, tears seeping from his eyes. I finally took pity on the American.

“As you said, we’re arresting him—taking him to Delhi to answer for his crimes. If the Army has to come in after him, a lot of people will die unnecessarily.” The original summons to Delhi, of course, the letter that had set off the maharaja’s final madness, had concerned the disappearance of the neighbouring nawab’s daughter—a sin which seemed less and less likely to be laid to his account. But that summons had been sent before the contents of the godowns came to light; once Nesbit’s report reached his superiors, a stern letter would not be deemed sufficient. I was hit by a brief vision: serried ranks of Tommies marching up the road to Khanpur, while just over a rise lay a phalanx of those machine-guns I had seen, draped and oiled and waiting.

“Is this kind of arrest legal here?” Goodheart asked, then hurried to explain, “Not that I mind, if it’s not. I’d just like to know.”

“Probably not,” Holmes said.

“Oh. Well, all right. How can I help?”

“You can take his legs for a while, since O’Hara seems to have lost his strength.”

Goodheart and I took a turn lugging our royal prisoner, and conversation lapsed. When we switched over again, twenty minutes later, he caught his breath and then asked, “How do you plan on getting him out of Khanpur?”

“Carrying him.” Holmes said it sharply.

“You could take some horses from the stables.”

“There are a dozen or more syces living at the stables,” I explained. “The way we came, cross-country, we may not be noticed until the first farmers rise.”

“I see. And that goes against borrowing a car, as well.”

“Doubly so, considering the terrain between here and the border.”

“Of course.” We went on for a while in silence, and then he said diffidently, “And I’d guess the airplanes are guarded, too.”

“Probably. Plus there’d be the small problem of flying it.”

“Why would that be a problem?”

We stopped again to stare at him, but none of us were laughing this time.

“Are you saying you could fly one of the maharaja’s aeroplanes?” Holmes demanded.

“Pretty much any of them, I’d guess. If there was fuel,” he added. We looked at one another, then picked up the maharaja and continued.

We made the lower door shortly after three A.M., arms stretched and shoulders aching, Goodheart’s head bleeding from two or three encounters with the low roof, our bellies empty and our throats parched. I distributed leathery chapatis and we shared out a bottle of water, chewing and swallowing and feeling the cold seeping its way into our tired muscles. As we sat on our haunches, the man at our feet stirred, and Holmes bent to feel his pulse and look under his eyelids. Wordlessly, O’Hara handed him the needle and morphia bottle, and Holmes slid another injection into our captive’s arm.

As the prince dropped more deeply into his sleep, I took a final swallow of water and asked, “What is our decision? Five miles to the border, or two to the air field?”

“With four backs to carry it, the load is eased,” O’Hara said. “I would choose the silent way.”

“I agree,” I said, getting my vote in so as not to be the last voice. “There are too many variables the other way: Are the aeroplanes fuelled up; are they unguarded; can we get past the stables without waking the syces?” I also wondered, but did not ask aloud, Does this wealthy American dilettante actually know how to pilot the things? And more to the point, will he—or is he waiting for an opportunity to stab us in the back? Yes, he distracted the guards back in the Fort, but . . .

Holmes nodded, albeit hesitantly. “The way we came is slower, but would appear to involve less risk.”

The Buddhist member of our conspiracy summed up the decision, making it sound like a philosophical dictum: “The simple path is best.”

I did not know how simple it was going to be, staggering across the countryside with a royal personage across our backs and the sun fast coming up to the horizon, but I had no wish to spend the day in this dark, cramped, and poorly provisioned place. I folded the last of the chapatis back into my rucksack, and we were ready.

The cold air that washed through the narrow doorway smelt of lions and greenery, alive and reassuring after our long passage through inert stone. We threaded our burden out, not bothering to lock the door, and when our eyes had adjusted from candlelight to moonlight, O’Hara squatted down and slung the maharaja easily over his shoulders. He followed me, with Goodheart behind him and Holmes bringing up the rear, as I picked my way forward, one hand brushing the wall of the lion house, until I saw the white gravel path.

Three more steps and I halted, sharply putting out one hand to keep O’Hara from treading on my heels. There seemed to be someone at the main junction of the paths some fifty feet ahead of us, just after the lion cage. I couldn’t see in detail, but my heart sank at the figure’s size: one of the zoo-keeping dwarfs. And that was the only way past the cage: He couldn’t miss seeing us. I turned to whisper to my companions that we would have to retreat, when the short, sharp whistle of a night bird rang out from behind my shoulder. In a panic, I slapped my hand over the maharaja’s mouth, but it was slack. Goodheart—? But then I looked back at the junction and saw the small figure running in our direction. Oddly silent, but for the quick patter of feet on the gravel.

A voice in my ear murmured, “My son.”

Bindra it was, his black eyes sparkling even in the moonlight, his entire body wriggling like a puppy with his own cleverness.

“What did you do with the horses?” I hissed at him.

“Nesbit sahib loosed himself and came, and said he would watch them. Oah, he is so very angry at the three of you, he says to tell you that he will have you locked into the Umballa cantonment. My father, who is this man?”

“His name is Goodheart,” O’Hara told him in English, then added in Hindi, “It remains to be seen if he lives up to his name.”

“If he does not, I will beat him,” the child declared. “But, my father, I do think we need to be gone from this place. A little time ago, four angry soldiers came running down the road, and three of them went back, then I heard some others on the big road that goes between the two hills. I think maybe they have found that you have carried away their master.”

“Hell,” I said. “That was quick. What now?”

“Which way did the others go on the road?” Holmes asked the boy.

“Down towards the valley, not the hills.”

South, then, towards Khanpur city.

“It’ll have to be the aeroplanes,” Holmes said decisively.

“But we cannot go between the stables and the lake. The ground is open, and there are birds nesting all along the waterfront, just waiting to raise an alarm.”

“Only one guard at the stables.”

“Plus the syces.”

“Russell, we waste time. Goodheart, take the maharaja. And if he makes a sound, you have my permission to bash his royal head in.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The white gravel guided us from the zoo to the steps leading up to the path encircling the hill. The soldiers Bindra had heard pass were nowhere to be seen, although we expected with every step to come across the one left behind at the stables. Tom Goodheart, accomplished as he might be in amateur dramatics, failed miserably at surreptitious passage, his boots finding every twig and patch of gravel. Well short of the entrance to the compound, O’Hara stopped us.

“Goodheart needs to remain here with the prince. My son and I will go ahead through the stables and locate the guard. Miss Russell ought to come with us, as she best knows the terrain. Mr Holmes, you perhaps should assist Goodheart, watching for the approach of trouble.” “Trouble” being either the royal guards or treachery from Goodheart, but no need to state it aloud. I caught the flash of O’Hara’s white grin. “Perhaps you can make the call of a bird if it comes?”

He did not wait for any of us to disagree, and indeed, there was little reason: Holmes did not know the stables and I did; someone had to stay with the loud-footed Goodheart until the way was declared clear. I touch Holmes’ sleeve in passing, for the reassuring solidity of the arm beneath, then led the two O’Hara men down the steps.

The domestic odours of hay and horse dung scrubbed the last reek of big cats from my nostrils as we descended towards the buildings. Before, I had followed the track through the grand archway and into the central yard, but I had also noticed a footway that wound around the back of the first block in the direction of the road. This was how we went, picking our way by the blue reflected light, pausing to look closely into each shadow that might hide a clever sentinel, lingering long before stepping across the narrow gap between two buildings. We found the path both clear and well illuminated by the huge moon moving down in the western sky, and walked its length all the way to the main road without seeing anyone.

Back at the stables, O’Hara leant towards us and whispered, “I shall remain here. My son, you stop at the break between the buildings to watch. Miss Russell, you bring the others. And—perhaps the American would make less of a hubbub were he to remove his boots.”

Bindra and I turned back, moving more quickly now that we’d been over the path once. He scurried in front, clearing the gap between the buildings with scarcely a glance. It was a mistake. I, two steps behind him, paid the price the instant I came even with the dark hole between the walls.

“Thahro! Kaun hain?” split the night, followed closely by the terrifying sound of a round being chambered. One did not need to speak the language to know the command to freeze: I froze.

And Bindra saved me, saved us all. Before I could do more than raise my hands in surrender, the child was at my side, mindless of the watchman’s gun, brisk and sure and heaven-sent.

“Tum kaun hain?” he demanded in return, his voice a fraction lower than its usual youthful tones: Who is that?

I thought he’d gone mad, and made to grab at his shoulders and dive for shelter but he moved too swiftly for me, striding openly down the narrow alleyway, talking all the while as my brain slowly squeezed out a translation.

“Are you the guard here?” he was asking. “Why was there only one left behind? Where are the others?”

His assumption of authority gave the other pause, and I belatedly realised that a resident of The Forts would be more apt to believe in an officious dwarf than someone in the outer world. I couldn’t see if the man’s finger loosed on his trigger, but I could feel it, could hear the loud tension in his voice give way to argument and, in less than a minute, irritation. No, he was here alone, and no, he’d had no such order, to wake the syces and send them to the Old Fort. Bindra took another step in his direction, hands on hips now and voice taking on an edge of incredulity.

And then there came a dull crack, and the guard’s tirade was cut short in the sound of a falling body.

“My son, that was done well,” came the low voice. “Go now.”

We went, fast. Just not fast enough.

The rumour of approaching turmoil reached me at the same instant a bird-call floated down from the road. Bindra whistled sharply in reply, and we met the others on the steps, Goodheart in his stocking feet and Holmes with the prisoner slung across his shoulders. Bindra led them down the path at a run, I brought up the rear, my shoulder blades crawling with the sounds of half a dozen heavy men trotting rapidly down the road: They would be upon us in minutes.

At the stables entrance, O’Hara waved Holmes and Goodheart towards the main road, but made no sign of joining us.

“What are you doing?” I demanded in a whisper.

“My son and I will make a distraction with the horses. You take your gun to make certain Goodheart does not forget the controls of the aeroplane.”

“You can’t stay here. They’ll kill you.”

“If they catch us, they may try. But they will not catch us.”

“I can’t leave you here. What would Nesbit say?”

“Nesbit would say you are wasting what little time you have been given,” he answered, his voice calm.

He was right. Damn it, he was right. I glanced down the road at the two tall and rapidly disappearing figures, then back at my companions, and stepped forward to seize Kimball O’Hara’s shoulders, kissing him on the cheek. To his son I offered my hand, and while shaking it, told him, “Bindra, it has been an experience. And just now, with the guard? That was phenomenal. Very fine work,” I added, by way of translation. “Thank you.”

Then I left them and ran.

When I reached the main road, I halted, listening to the loud neighs of horses and the slamming of stable-doors, followed by more whinnying and snorting and the clatter of escaping hooves coming towards me, quickly drowning out the shouts of running men. I knew without thinking that these horses would be riderless, that the O’Haras would have taken others and ridden west, leading at least some of the guards away from the air field. Somewhere out there, God willing, they would slip down from the animals and hunker into hiding, for an hour or a day; sometime, God willing, they would make for the hills, and leave Khanpur at last.

I waited just long enough to meet the stampeding horses. As they neared, I jumped from the northern edge of their path, waving my hands to frighten them into a mad gallop south, before I spun around to beat my own hasty retreat north.

The two miles to the air field seemed twenty, but at last my feet hit the smooth runway, and faint sounds led me to our intended escape vehicle. The corrugation of its sides suggested that it was a Junkers—not, thank God, the three-engined monstrosity I’d seen parked to one side. Rather, it seemed to be the same F13 we’d arrived here in, and indeed, a glance inside confirmed it. I helped Holmes bind our now-mumbling prisoner into a seat. Goodheart was seated at the controls, muttering and cursing under his breath.

“I hope to Hannah this crate’s got enough gas to get us out of here,” he said grimly. “No time to check. Where the hell’s the starter, anyway? Hey, I need somebody to undo the ties and take the blocks out from the wheels. And for God’s sake stay clear of the propeller.”

I jumped down to loose the ropes and kick away the chocks, then climbed back onto the wing to await further instructions. Clearly, Goodheart knew what he was doing, and as far as I could see, he was not in any need of an encouraging revolver at the back of his neck. Holmes and I made sure that we were never both out of the aeroplane at the same time, but Goodheart seemed oblivious as he checked the instruments by the light of the aeroplane’s torch, tapped their glass faces and swore at them and threw switches.

As I crouched near the door, my mind’s eye visualised the panicked horses slowing and being rounded up; the guards finding that we were not on their backs; the guards returning to the stables, where some would follow the lake-shore west in the footsteps of the O’Haras, while others came north to find . . .

My brain snagged on some unrelated imagery, spitting up an alarm composed of: horses, running loose; cows, wandering loose; cows, being chased from the road in Hijarkot—

“How do we know the runway is clear of animals?” I asked.

“Oh God,” Goodheart groaned, and pounded a dial with his fist. I took that as his answer.

“Holmes,” I said into the dim interior. “If we are discovered, get the maharaja away. I’ll make my way to Hijarkot.” I slid down the wing to the macadamized ground before he could object.

The moon was brushing the western mountains, but I could see well enough to follow the smooth river of air strip that cut between the rough grassland on either side. I didn’t know just how much distance the aeroplane needed before it took to the air, but with four people on board, I decided to be conservative, and checked for sleeping bullocks all the way to the end. I found no bullocks, no living thing at all, but halfway back, there appeared to be some dark, tall shape near the machine’s left wing. I held up a hand to block the faint light from Goodheart’s cockpit torch, and it was still there. Not moving, and just the one, but it was the shape of a man.

I pulled the revolver from my pocket and crept forward, wishing there was something I might hide behind: If the moonlight was sufficient to illuminate him, it would betray me as well.

The man did nothing until I was perhaps fifty feet away. And then he spoke.

“I say, is there something on?”

“Who is it?” I demanded.

“Jack Merriam. Er, the pilot?”

I straightened. “Ex-RAF?”

“Right-o. Is the maharaja on one of his stunts?”

“You might say that.”

“You need me to turn on the runway lights?”

“That would be most excellent.”

“Happy to. I do wish he’d tell me when he’s planning one of these night jaunts of his. I wouldn’t have to turn out when I heard noises.”

“This was somewhat spur-of-the-moment. But I’ll mention it to him.”

“I don’t mean to complain. I’ll get the lights, won’t be a tick.”

When I tumbled back through the open door, I found Goodheart’s torch off.

“Who the hell was that?” he hissed.

“The pilot. He’s turning on the runway lights for us. Would that be helpful?”

“Helpful? I thought I’d be doing this by torchlight. Thank God for the Brits. Hope the fellow doesn’t get into trouble.”

“Too late to worry about that.”

True to his word, the pilot illuminated our abduction of his employer. The bank of lights flared on, one block at a time, glaring onto the clean, smooth surface. Our engine caught, the propeller began to turn, and Goodheart pointed its nose between the twin rows of spotlights and revved the engine. We began to move, then to bounce, and on one of the bounces we hesitated briefly, then rose.

But our escape did not go unrecognised by the men we left behind. The guards must have been near the air field even before the lights attracted their attention, because we’d only been airborne a few moments, and were about to bank around the high trees at the end of the runway, when the roar of noise within the machine changed in some indefinable way, and the air blew into our faces in a manner it had not before. I suddenly could see light from the runway, spilling in three clear circles punched through the floor.

“The fools—they’re shooting!” Holmes cried.

My body tried to crawl into itself, although there could be no escape, either from being hit directly, or from going down in a ball of flame. But Goodheart banked hard then, and the change in our outline, or the increased distance from their guns, or even their belated realisation that they might also be shooting at their prince, meant the end of it: No more holes appeared in the thin metal skin. When the plane’s wings had levelled out and we were aimed south, I uncurled to pat our waking prisoner from head to toe. It was a huge relief to find him unwounded: Explaining an abducted maharaja was going to be hard enough; a dead one might present real problems. The man himself appreciated neither concern. He glared at me over his gag, drugged and drunk still but angry; I checked his bindings and went back to Holmes.

“He’s all right. Where are we heading?”

“I don’t suppose you know if the British encampment has a parade grounds?”

“I should very much doubt it, in these mountains.”

“Then it’s Hijarkot.”

I sighed, foreseeing the hell that would break loose the minute we set down with our kidnapped maharaja and no authority, no legal stance, no Geoffrey Nesbit to explain.

I leant forward to yell into Holmes’ ear. “Mycroft is going to be absolutely mortified when he finds out that his sources misled him regarding Goodheart.”

“These amateurs,” Holmes bellowed back, wagging his head in mock disapproval. “They present a continuous obstacle to the smooth running of the world.”

Holmes shifted, intending to head forward and help Goodheart navigate his strange aeroplane across an impossible route between a place where men were shooting at us and a place where we would be unable to set down, over seventy miles of invisible and terrifying mountainside, by nothing but the fading moonlight. As he stood, I caught at his elbow and pulled him back so he could hear me.

“The next time Mycroft asks us to do something,” I shouted to my husband, “we really must tell him no.”

Chapter Thirty

It took three days to fetch Nesbit out of his hiding place near the border of Khanpur, days we spent holed up in the nondescript villa amidst the corn while messages of outrage and command heated the telegraph cables between Delhi and London. More than once I thought we should have to make good our threat to use the variety of guns we had found in the house; more than once, the maharaja came near to escape. If nothing else, the period proved to our satisfaction that Thomas Goodheart was on the side of the angels. Or at any rate, on the same side as Sherlock Holmes and his wife.

But on the third day, a tired-looking Geoffrey Nesbit rode into the front garden on an even tireder horse, and the machinery of government began to mesh again. That evening, the maharaja of Khanpur was quietly taken into custody to await His Majesty’s pleasure in the contemplation of crimes against the Crown and the people of Khanpur, and for the first time, we slept the night through, no patrols set, no rifles at our sides.

We did not, I am sorry to say, see Kimball O’Hara or his son again. But the following afternoon, as we prepared to leave Nesbit’s villa, my eye was caught by a flash out of the hills to the east. I stood and watched, and it came again, and again.

Holmes had noticed it as well, and stood at my side, reading the flares long and short.

One long, three shorts: the letter B. Short, long, two shorts: L. Short: E. Three shorts: S.

Blessings of the Compassionate One, said the message.

And with that, Kimball O’Hara went home to his high mountains, with his son, and his rosary, and his secrets.

Author’s Thanks

As this volume’s opening dedication was meant to indicate, the Russell books would not exist without the passionate dedication of li brarians. I am particularly grateful to the staff at the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who with endless good cheer unearth for people like me all those glorious treasures that are checked out once every thirty years, such as Malcolm Darling’s Rusticus Loquitur, a closely detailed account of his 1928 tour as Registrar for the Punjab Co-Operative Societies, or the 1924 treatise written by Sir Robert Baden-Powell (yes, the Boy Scout man) with that most evocative of titles, Pig-Sticking or Hog Hunting.

I also thank Gordon Werne, of the Hiller Aviation Institute, for his good-humored expertise regarding antique planes, and Sirdar Tarlochan Singh, Ph.D., for details of Punjabi life. And anyone who has read into the time and place will realize how much the present work owes to Peter Hopkirk, not only for his brilliant expositions of the Victorian cold war—“The Great Game”—but specifically for his identification of Kimball O’Hara’s birth date in 1875. For Hopkirk’s and other titles, see my website, laurierking.com.

(I ought perhaps to point out that none of my maps shows the precise location of the place Miss Russell calls “Khanpur.” Nor have I found it possible, after all this time, to determine which of the northern princely states she might have meant. An editor’s task is never easy.)

And as always, I thank my husband, Noel King, in this case for introducing me to his mad homeland, and for providing Russell with her Hindustani curses.

The Game may be read as a humble and profoundly felt homage to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, one of the great novels of the English language. If you, the reader, do not know the book, please do not delay that acquaintance. If you read it in childhood and remember it as a juvenile adventure, may I suggest another read? Kim is a book for any age.

And for those skeptics in the audience, yes, Kipling did indeed begin to formulate the idea of Kim during that precise period when Sherlock Holmes was in India.

About the Author

LAURIE R. KING became the first novelist since Patricia Cornwell to win prizes for Best First Crime Novel on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of her debut thriller, A Grave Talent. She is the bestselling author of four contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, seven Mary Russell mysteries, and the bestselling novels A Darker Place and Folly. She lives in northern California.

Other Mystery Novels by

LAURIE R. KING

Mary Russell Novels

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

O Jerusalem

Justice Hall

Kate Martinelli Novels

A Grave Talent

To Play the Fool

With Child

Night Work

And

A Darker Place

Folly

Keeping Watch

THE GAME

A Bantam Book / March 2004