It took three days to fetch Nesbit out of his hiding place near the border of Khanpur, days we spent holed up in the nondescript villa amidst the corn while messages of outrage and command heated the telegraph cables between Delhi and London. More than once I thought we should have to make good our threat to use the variety of guns we had found in the house; more than once, the maharaja came near to escape. If nothing else, the period proved to our satisfaction that Thomas Goodheart was on the side of the angels. Or at any rate, on the same side as Sherlock Holmes and his wife.
But on the third day, a tired-looking Geoffrey Nesbit rode into the front garden on an even tireder horse, and the machinery of government began to mesh again. That evening, the maharaja of Khanpur was quietly taken into custody to await His Majesty’s pleasure in the contemplation of crimes against the Crown and the people of Khanpur, and for the first time, we slept the night through, no patrols set, no rifles at our sides.
We did not, I am sorry to say, see Kimball O’Hara or his son again. But the following afternoon, as we prepared to leave Nesbit’s villa, my eye was caught by a flash out of the hills to the east. I stood and watched, and it came again, and again.
Holmes had noticed it as well, and stood at my side, reading the flares long and short.
One long, three shorts: the letter B. Short, long, two shorts: L. Short: E. Three shorts: S.
And with that, Kimball O’Hara went home to his high mountains, with his son, and his rosary, and his secrets.
Author’s Thanks
As this volume’s opening dedication was meant to indicate, the Russell books would not exist without the passionate dedication of li brarians. I am particularly grateful to the staff at the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who with endless good cheer unearth for people like me all those glorious treasures that are checked out once every thirty years, such as Malcolm Darling’s
I also thank Gordon Werne, of the Hiller Aviation Institute, for his good-humored expertise regarding antique planes, and Sirdar Tarlochan Singh, Ph.D., for details of Punjabi life. And anyone who has read into the time and place will realize how much the present work owes to Peter Hopkirk, not only for his brilliant expositions of the Victorian cold war—“The Great Game”—but specifically for his identification of Kimball O’Hara’s birth date in 1875. For Hopkirk’s and other titles, see my website,
(I ought perhaps to point out that none of my maps shows the precise location of the place Miss Russell calls “Khanpur.” Nor have I found it possible, after all this time, to determine which of the northern princely states she might have meant. An editor’s task is never easy.)
And as always, I thank my husband, Noel King, in this case for introducing me to his mad homeland, and for providing Russell with her Hindustani curses.
And for those skeptics in the audience, yes, Kipling did indeed begin to formulate the idea of
About the Author
LAURIE R. KING became the first novelist since Patricia Cornwell to win prizes for Best First Crime Novel on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of her debut thriller,
LAURIE R. KING
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
THE GAME
A Bantam Book / March 2004
