“Even then.”
“That was, what, thirty years ago? Why hasn’t he made a name for himself in that time?”
“A man does not play The Game successfully for thirty years and more if he catches the eye of any but his superiors.”
“O’Hara has been a spy for the Crown for all that time?”
“O’Hara has been many things, but yes, he has been there when he was needed.”
“Tell me about—”
“Breakfast first, and a lesson in Hindi. Then I shall tell you old and happy, far-off things and battles long ago.”
He reinforced his edict by standing up and walking into the adjoining room.
I finished my tea, dawdled over my morning rituals, and joined him moments after our mid-day breakfast came through the door. As I came in, he looked up from the fragrant plate and said, “
At first my mind tried to slide the new language sideways into its niche for Arabic, a tongue I had learnt under similar circumstances five years earlier, but by the end of the afternoon, it had grudgingly begun to compile a separate store-house of nouns and verbs in a niche labelled Hindi. With concentrated (that is, around-the-clock) effort, the rudimentaries of most languages can be grasped in a week or two, with childish phrases and a continual “Pardon me?” giving way to slow, stilted fluency a week later. By the end of four weeks, under Holmes’ tutelage, I had no doubt that my somewhat bruised brain would be dreaming in its newest tongue. And it went without saying, my accent would be identical to his, that is, negligible. By the time we landed in Bombay, I would be able to pass for a genial idiot; another fortnight, and I would merely sound stupid.
However, it seemed that Hindustani was not the only subject Holmes had in mind. When our plates were clean and I had satisfactorily recited the nouns and articles for all the objects on the tray, he swept the leavings to one side and laid a pair of tea-spoons and a linen napkin onto the table between us, and began a demonstration of sleight-of-hand.
Under the command of those long, thin, infinitely clever fingers, the silver came alive. It vanished and reappeared in unlikely places; it multiplied, shrank, changed shape, became near liquid, and finally sat quietly where it had begun. I knew his tricks—basic conjuring was a skill I’d begun to learn early in our relationship—but my young fingers had been no match for his. Still, I’d spent one summer conjuring with coins so, although the spoons were more difficult to palm and vanish, my grip was accustomed to the motions. Now I picked up one of the spoons and performed a few of his moves back to him, albeit more slowly and clumsily, and leaving out the multiplication trick since he had stashed the other spoons somewhere about his person. He looked on critically, grunted his approval, and produced the spare silver from an inner pocket.
I had been many things as first the apprentice, then the partner of Sherlock Holmes: gipsy fortune-teller in Wales, personal secretary to a misogynist colonel, Bedu Arab wandering the Palestinian desert, working girl, matron, and Sweet Young Thing. Now, we were going to India, where I supposed I might be asked to dance in a harem or take up a position on the street among the lepers. Or perform conjuring tricks.
“We’re to be Hindu magicians?” I asked.
“As Dr Johnson said, ‘All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.’ And as fire-breathing bears the hazards of flaming beards or self-poisoning with phosphorus or brimstone, and the more spectacular conjuring depends on equipment too heft for easy transport, we shall concentrate on prestidigitation.”
“But why?”
He settled back and steepled his fingers for a lecture; I poured myself another cup of coffee.
“We in the West have developed the unfortunate habit of training and arming insurgents, then dropping them when they become inconvenient. As a result, there is a certain lack of long-term trust on the part of the native inhabitants, even those who declare themselves our stout friends. And as a part of that lack of trust, we cannot always be certain that our ‘friends’ are telling us all they know. The Northwest Frontier of India has known spies for so many generations, even the least sophisticated of communities suspects any outsider of nefarious purposes. One of the perpetual dilemmas for the man wishing to come and go freely along the border territories has always been finding an acceptable disguise to justify his presence, so that he is not thrown into gaol, or summarily shot. Some players of the Great Game go as
I could see already that we wouldn’t be spending much of the voyage up on deck, open to curious ears and eyes.
Too, this would clearly not be a visit among the exotic comforts of India. From the sounds of it, we’d be lucky to sleep under a roof.
Worst of all, this talk of “frontier” made my heart sink and my chilblains tingle: It did not sound as if the warm, frangipani-scented south was to be our destination.
It was not until tea-time that Holmes broke off the lessons, when my tongue and my fingers were both about to stutter to a halt. We went up to the salon for tea, and the genial drink coupled with the fresh Mediterranean air soothed me as if I’d been granted an afternoon nap. Afterwards, we bundled up and strolled the decks, where at last Holmes began the story of his meeting with the young Kim O’Hara—in Hindi alternating with English translations, a broken narrative rendered yet more difficult to follow by the necessity of switching to something innocuous whenever another set of ears came near. It was a method of discourse with which, by that time, I had some familiarity: I had known the man at my side for just under nine years, been his partner for five, his wife for three.
“It was in the spring of 1891 that I encountered Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, an encounter from which only I walked away. Watson, as you know, thought I had met my death there, and made haste to inform the rest of the world. I was indeed dead to the world for three long years. When I finally returned to London, I told Watson that my absence had been due to the ongoing investigation of the Moriarty gang, but in truth, my heart had grown weary of the game. When I set off for my meeting with Moriarty, I anticipated that our final confrontation might well cost my life. To find myself still standing on the edge of the Falls while Moriarty was swallowed by its turbulence—it was as if the sky had opened up and a shiny Christmas parcel had been lowered into my waiting hands. All it required was for me to tug at its ribbons.
“The temptation was enormous. I had by that time been working out of Baker Street for ten very solid years, and although many of the cases were of interest, a few of them even challenging, I had reached a point at which the future stretched long and dull ahead of me. I was, remember, a young man, scarcely thirty, and the thought of returning to the choking fogs and humdrum crime of London was suddenly intolerable. I stood with the Falls at my feet and gazed down the path leading back to Watson and duty, then up at the steep cliff that was my other option, and my hands reached for the cliff.
“Once at the top, setting my face to the East, I paused. In fact, I sat among the bushes and stones for so long, I saw Watson reappear in a panic on the path below me. I saw the poor fellow find the note I had left there, saw him . . . He wept, Russell; my loyal friend broke down and wept, and it was all I could do not to stand and hail him. But I was silent, not because I wished to cause him sorrow, not even because I had a thought-out plan of action. No, it was merely that I had been given the priceless gift of choice, and could not bring myself to throw it away.
“I made my surreptitious way back to London, and to Mycroft’s door. My brother was surprised to see me, and I venture to say pleased, but he was not in the least astonished—we are enough alike, we two, to distrust a death without laying our thumbs on the corpse’s pulse. And as it turned out, my very public demise had come at an opportune time for his purposes.
