Holmes, too, was clearly impatient to hear the man’s proposal, and urged him onward with the dry observation, “To say nothing of the matter of three dead agents, tortured and robbed of their charms, all found dead within twenty miles of the Khanpur border.”
Nesbit grunted unhappily. “You came to this country to look for Kimball O’Hara,” he said, then stopped again to reach for the brandy decanter and pour himself a couple of undiluted inches. I was starting to feel positively apprehensive about this. Whatever his point was, he clearly did not expect us to like it much. “On the voyage out, this other matter came to your attention, and you brought it to me.”
Holmes had had enough. “Come, man, get it off your chest. Are you saying you wish us to go to Khanpur for you?”
“Yes,” Nesbit said, sounding relieved. “But it’s not just—here, let me show you what I’m getting at.” He abandoned his drink and went to a low, deep cabinet on the wall, opening one of its shallow drawers and pulling out two maps. He cleared the glasses from the table and smoothed the first page out before us, a map of all India, its long triangle heavily marked with irregular blue shapes that covered nearly all of the north and a great deal of the centre: the princely states.
I blinked in surprise. “I hadn’t quite realised how much of the country is in private hands.”
“A third of the land, a quarter of the people. Native states hold some of the richest agricultural land, diamond mines, key passes into Afghanistan and Tibet.” His finger tapped a place heavily marked by topographical lines, orientating us to the whole. “Here’s Simla. There’s Delhi,” he added, touching his finger to the city three inches south, then dragging it up in the opposite direction. “The Afghan border here; Tibet; Kashmir up here, and just below it, looking deceptively small and out-of-the-way, lies Khanpur.” When we had absorbed its setting, he plucked the other map from the floor and allowed it to settle over the first.
Where the first map had been a product of some government printing agency, a cooperative effort with more detail than personality, this page was a work of art, a depiction of the northernmost knob of the Indian nation, lettered by a hand both neat and familiar. I bent over it to be sure.
“Yes,” Nesbit said, “this is O’Hara’s work. It took him five years walking every hill and track, counting those steps on his Tibetan prayer-beads, recording what he had seen and done each night on the back of a sheet inside his prayer wheel. I had the privilege of accompanying him once, and I’ve never seen a man more single-minded at the task. One year, O’Hara spent an entire hot season as a
Suddenly, Nesbit caught himself, and his handsome face flushed. “Sorry, I’m not used to strong drink at these altitudes.”
“I do know what you mean about O’Hara,” Holmes reassured him. “Did you ever meet the old Pathan horse- dealer?”
“Mahbub Ali? Of course.”
“He told me that the boy was a steel whip, although he gave far too freely of the truth. He said the lad could bend and contort into all sorts of shapes, but he always returned to himself, and he would only be broken when forced to break his word. Mahbub intended that as a criticism, I believe.”
“No doubt. In any event, this map is the work of O’Hara’s hand, and accurate down to the last stream and serai. And if you study it for a bit, you will begin to see the strategic potential of the kingdom of Khanpur.”
I had been studying it, while the two men exchanged their eulogies of the lost Survey agent, and could well see what he meant. The state was a long, narrow strip, mountains in the north giving way to a broad central plateau, where the capital city straddled a river. Four or five miles north of the city was a dark square marked “The Forts”; far beyond it, at the state’s northern tip, a pair of reversed brackets marked a pass, beside which was written “9400 feet.” Khanpur city was perhaps sixty miles from its southern neighbour and the city of Hijarkot, where the railway ended, but a scant fifteen from the country’s eastern boundaries; the square marking The Forts was even nearer the border, perhaps six or eight miles. Beyond the country’s eastern boundaries an uneven square marked a British encampment, but my eyes strayed to the strategic, relatively low pass at the northern end. The brackets were less than two hundred miles from the southernmost point of the Russian railway system: by aeroplane, perhaps two or three hours.
As if he had seen the direction of my gaze, Nesbit said, “That pass was actually a fairly late discovery, not on the maps at all until the late eighties. There used to be a lake there, with sheer mountain sides, until the big Kashmir earthquake of 1875. It brought an enormous flood down the valley, hundreds killed, but it wasn’t until three years later that a Scottish botanist wandered up there looking for new flowers and before he knew it, found himself in Afghanistan.”
“And suddenly Khanpur is of strategic importance,” I remarked. “Captain Nesbit, it’s been a long day and Holmes and I have spent far too much time on the road already. Why are we here?”
“Um, yes,” he hesitated, and finally decided to meet bluntness with bluntness. “You came here to search for O’Hara, inadvertently bringing me this conundrum of the American Thomas Goodheart. I do not know if the two cases are at all related—as I told you in Delhi, it is more than likely that O’Hara is living in a hill village somewhere, growing rice and raising a family. But I do know that Khanpur and its maharaja have suddenly become an urgent concern. Let me ask you this: Do you believe that Goodheart’s costume on the boat, dressing as a stage Sherlock Holmes, was a coincidence, or a deliberate statement?”
The question was odd, but the intent was clear. Holmes answered him. “If you are asking, does Thomas Goodheart know who I am, I can only say that if he does, he’s a better actor than he is a political analyst. I am constitutionally opposed to the idea of coincidence, but I spent the better part of two weeks in his company, and he never let his mask slip.”
“So you would say that he does not regard you, or Miss Russell here, as the enemy?”
“Apart from our unwillingness to commit to the Socialist cause, no.”
“Very well. You two are in a unique position, one that would take a Survey agent months to duplicate. I realise that you have spent the last weeks in perfecting your travelling-magician disguise, but I would like to ask you to drop that disguise and take up your friendship with the Goodheart family.”
“No,” Holmes said flatly.
“What friendship?” I said simultaneously.
“Acquaintance, then,” Nesbit said, choosing my objection as the less intractable. “I believe you more than capable of ingratiating yourselves into their lives to the extent that they would invite you to accompany them to Khanpur. The girl seemed particularly fond of you, Miss Russell. She mentioned you this morning, with no prompting on my part, I should add.”
“Fine,” Holmes said. “Russell will change back into an Englishwoman and observe the palace from within. Bindra and I will take the more circuitous route, and we shall meet in Khanpur.”
This time it was Nesbit and I who spoke at the same instant.
“I don’t think—” he began.
“Look at me!” I demanded. “I’m dark as a native—I even blacked my eyelashes, for pity’s sake. And my arms have burn scars all over them from the cursed fire-toss.”
“—that it’s a good idea for you to . . . Fire-toss?”
“The dye will come off, Russell.”
“Yes, along with most of my skin.”
“Suffering for the sake of enlightenment, Russell?”
“And who is Bindra?” Nesbit asked, to no effect.
“I never asked for enlightenment. Apart from which, it’s my skin that needs enlightening, not my soul.”
Nesbit finally decided to return to his original objection, and inserted firmly into our bickering, “I don’t know that it’s the best idea for the two of you to divide up. It might not be entirely safe.”
“Holmes,” I said, distracted by his remark, “have we
