The Game

was nothing irreplaceable in the trunk.” Except for the gun, to which I was attached, but if it was gone, so be it.

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

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

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

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

Bliss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Seven

The garden within the gates was a place of Asiatic loveliness, a Paradise of birds and flowering trees, decorated by an old mali and his young assistant wielding watering cans, and a pale, cud-chewing bullock placidly waiting to be attached to the lawn mower. Brilliant potted flowers—rose,