The Game (26 page)

Not altogether a social visit, then. I wondered if the maharaja was aware of that.

We sat at the window, chatting idly, with the mountains looking over our shoulders as the musical names unfolded beneath us: Sirhind, Ludhiana, Jullunder, Amritsar. At this last, with a lot of jolting, the prince’s car separated from those continuing on to Lahore and points west, leaving us for a while on an empty siding (empty of trains, that is: there appeared to be a small village living on the tracks) before we could join with a north-bound train. Batala, Gurdaspur, Pathankot, up into the mountains again, the people along the snow-speckled rails again showing the rounder features of the mountain folk. Flat roofs gave way to peaked, sandals to boots, bullock carts to loads carried on the back in long
kirta
baskets. The snow-laden mountains drew near, the trees grew in height, the windows radiated cold.

A luncheon was brought to us, and Mrs Goodheart woke and put on her shoes, Tommy laid aside his tracts, and we ate the uninspired cutlets and two veg, Mrs Goodheart sighing, Tommy distracted, and me thinking wistfully of Bindra’s curries and the large, greasy, chewy
puri
s we had used to scoop them up.

“Miss Russell.” I blinked and looked across at Tommy Goodheart. “That is right, isn’t it? You prefer Miss?”

“Generally, yes.”

Mrs Goodheart raised her head sharply. “I thought you were married?”

“I am, I just—”

“A lot of married women keep their names, Mother,” Sunny explained.

“But—”

Her son ignored her confusion. “Your husband and I spent a lot of time together, but I’m afraid that you and I never had much of a conversation. You’re English?”

“I live in England and my mother was English, but my father was American. From San Francisco.”

Mrs Goodheart said doubtfully, “I don’t know any Russells from San Francisco.”

“His family was from Boston originally,” I admitted, and saw the woman’s eyes go bright.

“The Boston Russells? Well, well. I wonder if I ever met your father? I went to any number of parties there, when I was young.”

“I doubt it,” I said firmly. “His parents moved out to California when he was very small. So yes, I regard myself as English. Proudly so, particularly at the present.”

As I hoped, Goodheart took the bait of distraction. “Are you referring to the Labour Party’s victory?”

“Yes. Extraordinary, isn’t it? I’ve heard it called a bloodless revolution.”

He was launched: For the first time, he betrayed a degree of animation, and the rest of the meal was dominated by his questions about the English working classes (about whom I knew little, other than farm labourers and London cabbies) and whether or not I had met MacDonald or a dozen other men, most of whom, indeed, I had never heard of. Then one name caught my ear.

“Yes, I believe I’ve met him,” I said. “At a fancy-dress party in a Berkshire country house, just before Christmas. He was dressed, let’s see—oh yes. He was in a very chilly costume, that of a pyramid builder, complete with red-paint whip marks on his back.” And a very unsuitable costume it had been, too, for the man was pudgy and his back showed acne beneath the paint.

“Strange place to find him.”

“He was probably experimenting with subversion from within,” I told him, keeping my face completely straight.

“I suppose. Odd, that your husband didn’t seem all that interested in politics.”

“Well,” I said, “he’s on the conservative side. I wouldn’t call him a reactionary, exactly . . .” This was by no means the first time I’d had to deny Holmes in the course of a case. And as before, no cock crew.

Goodheart’s face was, as always, remarkably difficult to read, but I thought his interest was piqued. If so, it would be understandable: A woman abandoned—even temporarily—by her considerably older husband, who then expresses an interest in radical politics, might be worth cultivating. I still couldn’t tell if he knew who Holmes actually was, but if this young man had indeed tried to murder us in Aden, separating myself from Holmes in his mind might stop him from pulling another balcony down on my head in Khanpur. Mrs Goodheart, however, was not pleased at what she perceived as the intimacy of our glance. She fixed me with a sour gaze, and demanded that Thomas search out a deck of cards. I subsided and went back to my window.

At long last, the train slowed, and sighed, and came to a stop. Noses pressed against the windows (all except the proud Thomas, who nonetheless watched with great interest), we waited to see what manner of royal vehicle would come for us. Sunny was hoping for camels and elephants, although I thought a Lagonda or Rolls-Royce more likely—and less crippling, considering we were still more than fifty miles from Khanpur city.

What came for us was an aeroplane.

Chapter Fifteen

W
e heard it first, above the shouts of the coolies and the dying
huff and hiss of steam from the engine, a rising and directionless mechanical presence among the wooded peaks. We peered and craned our necks, Thomas Goodheart no less than the lowliest of coolies, and then suddenly the noise had a source as a wide pair of brightly painted red-and-white wings shot from behind a hill and swept in our direction.

It dropped so low above the train station, I could see the distinctive corrugation of its siding—although even its elegant shape identified it as a product of the German Junkers company, building passenger aeroplanes now that potential war-planes were forbidden to them. This one wagged its long wings over our heads in passing. It flew on south for a minute or so before rising sharply into a high turn, then dropping down to come back at us. Children went scurrying—not, as I thought, in terror, but to slap and shove a pair of cows from a stretch of nearby road. As soon as the beasts had been encouraged from the track, the aeroplane aimed itself at the roadway, touched down lightly, and taxied up in our direction, coming to a halt before the nearest telegraph lines a quarter of a mile away. Its propeller coughed to a halt, and in a minute a man kicked open its door and jumped from its wing to the ground.

Thomas Goodheart’s reaction made me look at the approaching figure more closely. The young American straightened and started down the road, walking more briskly than I had seen him move before. When they came together, the pilot grabbed Goodheart’s hand and pumped it, slapped his arm, and continued towards us. The coolies and
tonga
drivers paused in their work, the railway workers turned to watch; this could only be the maharaja of Khanpur, come to greet his guests.

He bent over Mrs Goodheart’s hand, not quite kissing it. “Mrs Goodheart, thank you for gracing my home with your visit. I feel as if I know you already, Tommy’s spoken of you with such affection. And you are the sister, Sybil. Welcome, Miss Goodheart.” He took Sunny’s outstretched hand before turning to me. “And Mrs Russell, you, too, are welcome. Any friend of Tommy’s—I’m glad he felt free to ask you.”

Not that Thomas Goodheart had done anything more than bow to his mother’s pressure, but I wouldn’t mention that, not to a man with eyes as filled with speculation as his. I merely thanked him, laid my fingers briefly within his hard hand that bore the distinctive callus of reins, and pulled away.

His Highness was not what I might have expected in a maharaja, and further removed still from the folksiness of a “Jimmy.” A small man, shorter even than Nesbit (and, I thought, irritated at being forced to look up into my face), the maharaja resembled an Oxford undergraduate—the athlete rather than the aesthete, with fashionably bagged trousers, a white knit pull-over, and an astrakhan cap pulled over black hair. His lower lip was full, a faint intimation of the family habit of debauchery, and his dark eyes were lazy with the same self-assurance I had seen in the photograph on Nesbit’s wall, speaking of a bone-deep aristocracy that relegated the House of Windsor to the status of shopkeepers: This was the most important man in his particular world, and he assumed those around him agreed. There was nothing in his manner or his dress (apart from the cap) that spoke of India, certainly nothing in his lack of concern about castely impurities that permitted him to take the hands of strange women, nothing other than a faint dip and rise in his accent and the old-penny colour of his skin.

Mrs Goodheart looked confused; Sunny, on the other hand, was bedazzled. I couldn’t help speculating about Mrs Goodheart’s opinions on inter-racial marriages.

The aeroplane would hold the four of us and our smaller bags, with the maharaja at the controls. We would leave behind a small mountain of Goodheart possessions and my solitary trunk, guarded by a uniformed
chuprassi
until the plane came back for them.

We settled into the padded seats, Thomas beside the maharaja, with Mrs Goodheart on one side and Sunny and I on the other. The noise made speech impossible, which was just as well. Mrs Goodheart turned pale as the plane roared and bounced and then leapt skyward. Her knuckles remained white the entire way as her hands clenched the arms of her chair, holding her from falling to the ground below; once when the air dropped away beneath us, I feared she was going to faint. Sunny did not notice, but spent the entire forty-five minutes in the air with her head craned and turning, to see the hills, the glimpse of road, the brilliant white peaks that seemed at arm’s reach, the occasional pocket of lake. Goodheart seemed even less concerned, moving easily into his seat and paying more attention to the actions of our highly capable pilot than to our height, our movements, or the scenery. Thomas Goodheart, I thought, had flown before.

After forty minutes, we flew over a town, a hillside collation of tile roofs near a white river, then continued on for a few minutes before we dropped lower, skimmed the tops of some trees (Mrs Goodheart moaned and squeezed her eyes shut), and then set down smooth as cream on a wide, long, tarmac runway, taxiing along it to a wide shed, in front of which waited two motorcars and several men. The landing strip even had lights marking its sides, I noticed. Near the hangar at the southern end were tied down a small fleet of aeroplanes, six in all, ranging from a battered RAF fighter plane to an enormous three-engined thing with wings that must have stretched nearly a hundred feet. It looked as if it had just come from the factory, and was still sheathed in gleaming metal, not yet having received the red-and-white paint that covered the others. Its sides, I saw as we flashed past it on the landing strip, were corrugated like the one we were in, the same distinctive duralumin siding of the Junkers corporation. The bigger version probably had a flight range of seven or eight hundred miles; a person would be well inside Russia before having to refuel.

We slowed and made our turn, little more than halfway up the long macadam strip. The northern end of the runway rotated slowly past my window, affording me clear view of the five substantial warehouses or
godown
s facing one another across the tarmac.

For a maharaja’s plaything, the air strip was a serious affair.

For someone storing goods best kept out of the British eye, those
godown
s were ideally placed. I itched to see inside at least one of them, but all five doors were shut tight, and appeared locked. I craned my head against the window-glass until they had disappeared behind us, then subsided into my seat like a good guest, waiting to disembark at the formal southern end of the field.

The engine died and the propeller kicked to a halt, leaving our ears ringing furiously in the silence. “Welcome to Khanpur,” our pilot announced, and opened the door with a flourish.

Mrs Goodheart needed assistance across the wing and down the folding steps. On the ground, she gulped wordlessly at the cold air and allowed her son to settle her into the seat of the waiting sedan car, grateful beyond words to enter a vehicle that was not about to leave the earth behind. Sunny, when she reached the ground, turned a circle, hands clapped together, oohing at the setting. Goodheart, filled with cool insouciance, gave a glance to the high circle of white mountains before turning his attention to our host.

I waited, intending to thank the maharaja, but he was moving off with Goodheart in the direction of the sleek little racing car, while we ladies were placed in the roomier, more sedate Rolls. The two men got into the small car and tore away at high speed without a backwards glance. Our bags were placed in the back of the Rolls, and the driver, wearing a uniform of red and silver, his red-and-white turban microscopically perfect, got in and turned us in the great man’s wake. As we left, one of the men sitting next to the building tossed his cigarette to the ground and sauntered over to the plane, his skin and features European, his very posture proclaiming him an RAF man.

I looked back to see him climb into the plane, and I wondered what a one-time fighter pilot thought of fetching baggage for a maharaja.

The Forts, two miles south of the air field and five miles north of Khanpur city, were aptly named, a pair of high fortified walls crowning a pair of sharp hills bisected by the north-south road. The two halves Nesbit had called Old Fort and New Fort were clearly from different eras, that on the east an early Pathan hill fortification with walls ancient enough to appear fragile, whereas the larger, western, and well-maintained New Fort was pure Moghul, its small, tower-flanked gate reached by a narrow road that climbed from the hillock’s southern end to its eastern, every inch of it nicely exposed for the purposes of defence. Round towers surmounted by flanged caps like German helmets jutted out from the red, age-streaked stone walls every hundred feet or so, each one large enough to shelter a dozen archers. The big sedan car passed through the dividing chasm, turned sharply right to climb the narrow drive, and finally eased through the gate, where raw patches betrayed the passage of many incautious drivers.