The Game

and I did not go our separate ways at one point or another?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I do not require—”

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

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

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

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

Holmes spoke up. “I think you should.”

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

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

“Our general factotum,” I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Fourteen

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

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

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

“The alarm was the thing.”

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

I handed him his coffee without comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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