The Game

through the barred window, I felt my way past chairs and tables until at last my fingers encountered the familiar shape. I was taking a risk, and not only that of some curious and sharp-eared passer-by. If the agent in Hijarkot thought it curious that this rural outpost should be sending a message at this time of night—and in English, as I couldn’t trust my Hindi spelling; if he made enquiries instead of just sending it on; if the maharaja got news of it . . . Well, in for a penny, I thought, and began to tap out the Morse address.

I made it back to my snoring neighbours, and managed to doze away for a while myself, in between listening nervously for the approach of constabulary footsteps and royal motorcars, but hard hands did not seize me, and the disgruntled pony and I were on our way before the sun.

The next caravanserai, the last before the border, came in the middle of the afternoon, but I bypassed its dubious charms, hoping to make Hijarkot that same day. However, we ran out of light well short of the border, and rather than press forward and off a cliff, I fed and hobbled my footsore companion and curled up at its side, continuing on with daylight.

Unfortunately, this made me an uncharacteristically early border-crosser, hours ahead of those who had stopped the night in the serai, and when dealing with officialdom, one ought never appear out of the ordinary. It is difficult to remain amiable and apologetic when every muscle in one’s body is straining towards action, but to allow shortness of temper only invited reciprocity on the part of the men with the red turbans, and I had to get across that border. So I smiled and repeated my story about an aged grandmother’s urgent summons to her bed-side, and allowed the pony to eat the chrysanthemums growing near the guard-house door.

Finally the two border guards got tired of me and waved me through. I kept the smile plastered on my face as I rode on, although it felt more of a grimace by the time I entered the outskirts of Hijarkot. I watched for the boy Bindra, thinking that he might be sitting by the side of the road, but he was not there, and although I would have expected his absence would be a relief, in fact it was just one more vexation to rub at my raw nerves. When a uniformed British officer appeared on his shiny big horse in front of me, angled to cut me off, I felt like pulling my knife on him.

“Miss Russell?” the officer said.

The unexpectedness of that name in this place made me startle the pony into a panic, jibbing around in the street until I could get it under control and facing the officer again.

“Good Lord, Captain Nesbit! How on earth did you get here so quickly?”

“I was in Delhi, rather than Simla, so I didn’t have to waste half a day in getting down from the hills. Come, let us get off the street.”

We rode out of the city to a nondescript villa in the middle of broad fields of pulse and corn. A syce took the two horses, and Nesbit led me to a room furnished with a narrow bed, some prints of English landscapes, and a door leading to a bath-room.

“You’d probably like to bath,” he said. “If you need clothes, there are things in the drawers. When you’re finished, the breakfast room is down the hall to your left. I’ll be there.”

As the stinking, travel-grey garments on my back were the only clothing I had with me, I pawed through the drawers in gratitude, coming up with an odd assortment of English and native garments that smelt deliciously of sun and the iron. I scrubbed, rinsed, and towelled vigorously until my skin was nearly its normal colour, pulled on the trousers and shirt I had found, and bound my damp hair in a turban-cloth. There was even a tooth-brush, which I had neglected to bring from the mirrored wagon and had missed terribly.

Nesbit was sitting at a table with coffee and a sheaf of official-looking papers, which he cleared away so I could take a seat in the sun that poured through the window. Plates appeared mere moments later, softly poached eggs, toast, kippers, and tomatoes. I devoured every crumb, and helped myself to more of the toast and jam, while Nesbit ate more sparingly and talked of politics and news from home.

When I was replete, he gathered his papers and we went down the hall to a study, where he closed the door and pulled two chairs close together.

I told him everything, beginning with the arrival of the aeroplane on the road outside the train station and ending with my breaking into the telegraph office. He interrupted only when my narrative passed over some detail, commented mostly with nods and raised eyebrows, although my description of the godowns and what I had seen there brought him briefly to his feet. When I had come to an end, he gazed out the window for a bit and then asked me for further details on the maharaja’s other guests; after that, he pulled out maps and asked me precisely where one thing or another had taken place.

In all, it took the rest of the morning. After lunch, he excused himself, saying that business required him elsewhere.

“Are you going to report what I’ve told you?” I asked him.

“I shall have to write a report, certainly. But I shan’t send it, not just yet. The contents of those godowns will prove explosive in more ways than the one.” He smiled. “Get some rest. I’ll be back for tea.”

With that domestic parting, he left. I chose a book from the shelves and carried it onto the veranda, although I was certain that I would not be able to concentrate on anything other than my agitation over Holmes. However, I woke three hours later to Nesbit’s boots on the boards and the gentle ting and clatter of a tea tray.

He sat down, waited for the khansama to go out of earshot, and said, “I’ve made arrangements for the both of us to be invited to The Forts.”

“How could I—” I started to ask, but he was still talking.

“I’m a regular guest there, or I used to be. Once or twice a year I would send Jimmy a telegram to say I had a few free days and suggest we ride after a few pigs. And every so often I’d bring a guest, so it would appear commonplace if I were to bring a friend. That’s what I’ve done. The only question is, you’re good at dressing the part of an Indian man; how are you at English men?”

I considered the possibilities, then suggested, “Someone relatively new to the country, who is coming to Khanpur primarily to look for his missing sister, Mary Russell? His twin sister, shall we say, as they look so much alike.”

“That would do nicely. Would a brother fit with the story you gave in Khanpur?”

I hadn’t really given much of a story in Khanpur, merely fact with some of the details left out. “I never told anyone I had a brother, but I never told anyone I didn’t, either.”

“Then that should be all right.”

“I do a marvellous Oxford undergraduate.”

“It’ll have to be an officer, I’m afraid.”

“Why? Couldn’t it be a trader or an accountant or something? Or a student on a world tour?”

“Any of those would be unusual to find in my company, from the maharaja’s point of view. An officer wouldn’t fraternise with a box-wallah.” The faint scorn in Nesbit’s voice echoed the general attitude towards tradesmen I had found since boarding the liner in Marseilles.

“Becoming an officer will take a lot of coaching.” It would take a week’s practice to deceive a general, although perhaps only twenty-four hours for civilians.

“We have nineteen hours. Jimmy’s sending the aeroplane for us at noon tomorrow.”

I set down my cup smartly. “Then we’d best get to work.”

At precisely mid-day on Friday, the throb of the maharaja’s aeroplane grew in the hot air over Hijarkot, and soon the sleek red-and-white Junkers I had ridden before lowered itself onto the cleared road half a mile from Nesbit’s villa. The pilot was the RAF man I had glimpsed in the Khanpur air strip; he gave Nesbit the handshake of acquaintances, received my introduction, and climbed back behind the controls. The ground I had so laboriously travelled earlier that week unreeled beneath us, and in well under an hour we set down on the Khanpur air field.

I wore civilian clothes, as befitted an officer on holiday, but I had spent most of the previous twelve hours enclosed in the uniform of the Indian Army, and my body retained its awareness of the shape and responsibility of it. I stepped out of the plane with the posture of a young Captain, so absolutely sure of his position in the world that he need not assert it. I thanked the pilot, waited while the coolies put our things in the motorcar, and joined my friend Nesbit in the back.

The road was unchanged; The Forts loomed as before, sliced in two by the shade-filled death trap of 1857. As the motor climbed the narrow road up the western side, my eyes were on the silent half of the palace,