The Game (35 page)

“I loved the garment you wore yesterday night,” Faith said, as oblivious of the shopkeeper’s lively attentions as she was of my inattention. “I was thinking of having one made for Lyn. What do you think of this colour?”

“Sorry?” The near-naked
sadhu
had a matted beard and wore his hair gathered into a snake’s nest atop his head; he sat motionless on a scrap of what had once been a leopard skin, a brass begging bowl next to one of his folded knees: No, it was not Holmes in disguise. I turned back to Faith, retrieving her words from the back of my mind. “That colour would be beautiful. And the maroon over there would do wonders for you.”

In the end, she bought lengths of both, arranging that they be sent to New Fort. “Jimmy has a tailor who can sew pretty much whatever a person wants,” she told me. “I’ve seen him produce an evening gown from a pencil sketch.”

We bought a bangle here, a handful of dried mulberries there, following the curving streets down towards the river, Faith talking while I studied every passing veiled woman over five and a half feet tall, but again, none of them were Holmes. Eventually the buildings fell away, revealing an open square of pavement with a few weedy trees. A shrine occupied one corner, its deity unidentifiable under the heaps of wilting marigolds and the smears of blood-red dye; in the opposite corner a silent circle of men stared down at a cow, which lay panting in a manner that did not bode well. I was wondering what city-dwelling Hindus did with cows that died, whether they just stood back and let the vultures in or if they found someone to drag it away, when my speculations were interrupted by Faith.

“Oh, look,” she said. “A magician. Shall we go see?”

I looked: dramatic black garments, shiny fat donkey, a magnificently painted and mirrored little wagon that had once pulled English children, a great eye now gracing its front.

Sherlock Holmes had arrived in Khanpur.

Chapter Nineteen

H
olmes was just coming to the end of the preliminary part of the
act, the flashy tricks and joking patter designed to capture an audience. He drew glittering balls from the air, made others vanish from sight, and caused one to burst into flame, its ashes floating upwards on the breeze. Young Bindra was nowhere in sight, and Holmes’ face looked tired to gauntness beneath the dye.

When he had brought together a sufficient number, he turned to the mind-reading portion. Faith’s Hindi was limited to “How much is it?” and “Get away from me,” but the magician’s gestures and the reaction of his impromptu partners was entertainment enough. After he had astonished by perceiving a number of unknowable things about five or six of the men (the process of deductive reasoning working as well in this setting as it did in London), he caused a deck of playing cards to appear, and proceeded to guess which was in a person’s hand (as if Sherlock Holmes would stoop to guessing!). In the smaller villages, he had used coins, but in a large town, playing cards would be common enough to be used for the trick. Again, Faith could not understand what either he or his partners were saying, but there was no mistaking their declarations of astonishment.

When the man in the black garments had magically transformed the entire deck into black aces, then flung it into the air to float down as fifty-two ebony feathers, he came around with a small bronze bowl. Faith and I dropped silver rupees on top of the annas; I held the grey eyes for a moment, warning him not to speak. But he had already seen the armed guard, and he merely
salaam
ed us and passed on.

We left him there and headed back into the bazaar. At the narrowest spot, when Faith stopped to take a closer look at a necklace she had been fingering earlier, I spoke into her ear.

“I just want to check something—I’ll meet you at the main gates in ten minutes,” and before she could object, I ducked my head down so our escort couldn’t see me, stepped behind a water-seller, and scurried away. At the next corner, I craned to see, but Faith was talking to the shopkeeper about the necklace, and the guard had not yet realised that I was no longer with her.

Holmes was seated on the ground in the shade of the wagon, counting his money, when I slid in beside him. He’d changed his Moslem cap for a black
puggaree,
tied elaborately with its starched end sticking up, and the thin moustache he’d grown since we parted in Simla added a rakish touch to his exoticism.

“Greetings,
memsahib,
” he told me.

“Holmes, you certainly got here quickly. Where’s Bindra?”

“It would seem that the same Delhi astrologer who instructed the boy to go with the two Mussalman gentlemen also warned him against entering Khanpur. Our young apprentice remained at the border, swearing to all the gods that he would wait there for me.”

“Wait there! So you’ve been doing all the work yourself, the donkey and everything?” The magician shrugged, and I muttered, “I’ll take off my shoe and give the brat
thapad
.”

“What do you make of the maharaja?” he asked, and he was right, we had time only for urgent business.

“Holmes, he’s . . . I don’t know, he’s an enigma. It may simply be the circumstances of his upbringing, but he’s thoughtful one minute and horribly cruel the next. An honest sportsman who apparently cheats at cards, a man who surrounds himself with artists and then keeps them from working, who is hugely generous with his hospitality but won’t let his guests out without watch-dogs. I have to get back,” I added, “before mine panics. And there’s a strange assortment of people at The Forts. He hired a best-selling novelist for a secretary; has two lesbian artists so avant-garde they make Epstein look staid, whom he’s commissioned to do works better done by an Indian; there are a couple of criminal types doing heaven knows what—remember the man Harry Koehler? He’s lived here for a year. The odd Communist like Thomas Goodheart. And me, whom he’s trying to convince to take on a project involving the education of Khanpur women. ‘Pets’ for his amusement, his cousin calls them. And a collection of individuals poached from side-shows, dwarfs and albinos. The dwarfs live down at the zoo, which I saw this morning. His treatment of the animals there is . . . troubling.”

“Cruelty?” he asked, coming alert. He knew, better than I, that a man who mistreats dumb beasts is apt to do the same to his human subjects. And I would have told him all about the zoo, if we hadn’t been so short of time. I’m sure I would have told him, if it wasn’t that I needed to think about it myself first. And if I didn’t know that if I described the maharaja’s act of cruelty, Holmes would become very nervous and would try to convince me that I shouldn’t return to The Forts. One thing I did not need at the moment was a nervous husband.

“Nothing extreme. It’s more that he’s experimenting to see if he can reshape their natures.”

“The lion lying down with the lamb?”

“No, more along the lines of convincing the lamb to become a lion.”

He thought about this for a moment, then to my relief, pushed it away for future consideration. “No sign of O’Hara?”

“If he’s here, he’s in the Old Fort. Have you seen the way The Forts are laid out?”

“I have.”

“The western half is where all the guests live, there’s a huge courtyard garden, the maharaja’s quarters. But the eastern part isn’t deserted—one occasionally sees guards on the walls. If the maharaja had a dungeon, it would probably be there, where the guests wouldn’t stumble on it.”

“Is there any way you can get in?”

“New Fort is locked up at night, although a circumspect individual might come and go. I don’t know about the other side, but it, too, looks the sort of place that might be invaded by one or two.”

“How much longer do you wish to stay?”

“Honestly, I can’t see that I’m going to uncover much more than I have. Another day or two, perhaps? And, if you can arrange it, a telegram recalling me to the outside world might be helpful. My host seems reluctant to permit his guests to leave.”

“Very well. If I’m not here, I’ll be half a mile down the Hijarkot road, there’s a caravanserai there. You’d better go or your watch-dog will come looking for you.”

I threaded my fingers through his, and we sat for a moment, eye to eye and hands joined, before I separated myself from his presence to dart from the shade of the wagon and into the nearest alleyway. I reached the city gates before Faith; our sweating guard was greatly relieved to see me. We strolled demurely back to the palace, and allowed ourselves to be shut in again.

The telegram came
the following morning, Friday, and said merely,
MARY RUSSELL PRESENCE REQUIRED MONDAY MORNING DELHI
. It was brought while I was at breakfast; I took it from the golden salver and opened it publicly, arranging a look of intense irritation on my face before wadding the flimsy and dropping it beside my fork. I left it there when I went to watch the morning’s entertainment, which proved to be a doubles tennis-match between dwarfs. Some of the guests seemed to think it uproariously funny, although I found that once my eyes had adjusted to the diminutive size of the players, it was just another amateur game. Perhaps the afternoon’s ostrich race would be more amusing, I thought, and closed my eyes in the sun.

My doze was interrupted by a cleared throat, and I opened my eyes to find a
chuprassi
clutching a note. It read,

Miss Russell, would you join me in the gun-room.

Its signature was the letter K, with a stamp that I thought might be the crest of Khanpur. I stood up and said, “Could you tell me how to find the gun-room?”

The
chuprassi
conducted me to New Fort’s east wing, where the maharaja’s private quarters lay. We entered through a brightly gilded archway just to the left of the gates, and within half a dozen steps, my jaw dropped. I had grown accustomed to the grand opulence of the central wing, but the corridor we walked down, the rooms whose open doors we passed, were another thing altogether. Here were unlocked display cabinets of exquisite miniatures, ivory and gold, beside paintings that any museum in Europe would covet. In one room, I saw Louis XIV furniture, clearly in daily use; in another room stood a display of trophies and photographs, including the one for the 1922 Kadir Cup that I had seen in Nesbit’s house. I tried not to gawp as we walked past, but my head swivelled unceasingly.

It was a revelation. These paintings, those trophies, had been placed here for the sole pleasure of one man, not as a way of impressing his guests—these fragile carpets took no concern of the wear of many feet, and the rooms had been arranged for his privacy and comfort, not for the appreciation of groups. The maharaja clearly enjoyed—even gloated over—his possessions, but he kept the true treasures to himself.

At the very end of the long corridor, the
chuprassi
opened a door and bowed me through; once inside, I stopped dead.

I do not know what was more disconcerting, the completely muffled sound in the room or its dim light, but one’s immediate response on entering the room was a frisson of alertness up the spine. Perhaps it was some trace aroma of the predator all around that made one go still, not even breathing, until the only motion to defy the room’s smothering atmosphere was the hair creeping upright on one’s skin. In any case, it wasn’t until one’s eyes became used to the light that the sensation of entering a lair became strong. And perhaps a full minute had to pass before the eyes told one why.

The walls, floor to ceiling, were covered in tiger fur. Black and orange stripes, running first in this direction, then that, fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, seamless but for a faint rectangular shape in the back wall. In the upper corners of the room, clustered and snarling, were mounted the heads.

I shuddered in reaction, and someone chuckled, the sound damped and muffled.

I whirled, and there was the maharaja, sitting in a chair of unrelieved black. Panther, my mind informed me; and the fluffy black-and-gold rug on which his boots were resting was made of the tails of the tigers on the wall. I swallowed convulsively, whether to repress fear or visceral disgust, I was not sure.