The Game (40 page)

He had been shouting happily all the way down the pass, and the moment he came into the sunlight he allowed the horse to slow. It came to a halt within half a dozen paces, so tired was it, but its rider seemed unaware of its distress, merely dropped to the ground to greet his fellow enthusiast.

“Had any good rides lately?” he asked, pumping my companion’s hand.

“Been saving it for the Cup,” Nesbit replied, slipping into the easy banter of old companions, revealing nothing of the strain he had to feel at suspecting this long-trusted comrade capable of acts ranging from kidnapping to treason.

“I’ll take it from you again this year, I can feel it. And this is—
achha!
”

His astonishment was so great, his English fled. He peered under the brim of my topee, his eyes telling him that he was looking at the young woman who had escaped his hospitality the week before, his brain insisting that this was someone else. The shadow from my topee obscured the upper half of my face; the wax I had stuck along my back teeth made my face squarer and more masculine; the thickened eyebrows, steel-rimmed spectacles I wore (hastily manufactured in Hijarkot), and a moustache said: man. Blessedly, the marks from the pig-hunt had faded, and the bruised fingernails on my left hand, ripped on my downhill climb from the gate, had been done since he’d seen me last.

“Martin Russell,” Nesbit offered, into the silence.

I thrust out my hand, its palm roughened overnight with sand, and greeted the maharaja with an officer’s drawl pitched lower than my usual voice. “Even if I didn’t know she’d been here, Your Highness, I’d have guessed from your reaction that you’ve met my sister.”

The vigorous shake of my hand loosed the prince’s voice. “The resemblance is truly extraordinary.”

“Yes, Sebastian and Viola, I know. They say Shakespeare got it wrong, that identical twins have to be, well, identical. But as you can see, it sometimes happens that a brother and a sister come pretty close to being cut from the same mold. We’re even both short-sighted and left-handed. However, I assure you that I’m half an inch taller, have a better sense of humour, a superior seat in the saddle, and can beat her at darts any day of the week. I’m also not nearly half the trouble she can be. I don’t suppose she’s still here? Her husband’s having the devil of a time finding her; he’s peppering me with telegrams, sending me chasing all over the country.”

The dark face was busy re-evaluating the person in front of him, trying to shape me into this new form. I left an amiable look on my face, and prayed that my moustache would stay in place.

“No,” he said at last. “She left here a week ago precisely. Vanished during the night, taking a few articles and leaving a note to ask that we forward the rest of her things to an hotel in Delhi. Which I believe we did.”

“Oh, you did, all right. That’s what set a burr under the old man’s tail, Mary’s bags showing up without her. Not that it’s the first time she’s pulled a disappearing act. Last time it was Mexico; she spent the better part of a month with the wife of Pancho Villa, or girlfriend or sister, some damned thing. ‘She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases.’ Nesbit invited me here more to escape the telegrams than because I thought she’d be here. You have any luck with your panther?”

“Panther? Oh, yes. We got him, although we had to use a gun to do it, unfortunately. He came for me out of some rocks, and I was ready for him but he had one taste of the spear and decided he didn’t like it much. He turned tail, swiped a chunk out of one of the beaters, then took to a tree and wouldn’t come down. We’d have set fire to it to bring him out, but the field was too dry, it would have burnt the village with it.” During the telling, his attention had shifted from me to Nesbit, the one who might appreciate the tale. I was glad to see the shift, because it indicated a degree of acceptance that, unlikely as it seemed, Martin Russell might be who he appeared.

I didn’t ask after the wounded beater. Mary would; Martin wouldn’t.

The others began to catch us up, their horses plodding and stained with sweat, and we went through the same shock of introductions with the four of them who had met Mary. With the maharaja’s acceptance, however, the lead was down for them to follow, and I slipped into the rôle of visiting male friend without great difficulty. One of the young women, a newly arrived friend of the novelist Trevor Wilson, even batted her eyelashes at me.

We met for drinks on the terrace, with the sun slanting low over the rooftops behind us and the talk circling about the panther, its ferocity and speed, the bravery of the men approaching it with nothing but sharp sticks. At one point the animal itself was paraded through on a sort of decorated stretcher for our approval. Its sleek hide had been sponged to remove the gore, but I thought that, while the pair of gashes in its shoulders should prove easy for a taxidermist to stitch into invisibility, the great hole in its chest might prove more of a problem, particularly if, as the maharaja clearly did, one regarded a bullet as somewhat shameful.

Perhaps damaged skins were set aside to upholster more furniture.

The sun retreated up the walls, and a thousand small oil lamps were lit for our festivities, tiny earthenware saucers with floating wicks that added an incongruous touch of romance and tradition to the evening. A passing servant asked if I would like another gin and tonic, but I turned down his offer, knowing that we would shortly be off to our rooms to dress for dinner.

However, the maharaja had a surprise up his sleeve. With a flourish, not of trumpets but of his arm, he raised his voice and called us to attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have for you a small entertainment, a performance for your amusement and your mystification.”

That was all the warning I had before the tall, black-clad figure of my husband was escorted in from an unlit corner. Holmes had kept his own clothes, I saw, although he wore a Moslem cap instead of the starched turban, and his boots had been replaced by soft native shoes (which meant, damn it, that the knife and pick-locks in his heels were no longer a part of his equipment). I saw with relief that he had not been mistreated—his motions with the mirrored balls were fluid, his posture dignified, the broken English of his patter word-perfect. Whatever the maharaja was doing with him, Holmes seemed happy enough to go along with it for the moment.

He ran through most of the one-man stunts, and if the audience was vastly more sophisticated than the rustic villagers he normally performed for, even the English guests were caught up in the mystery of where objects went when they left his hands, and why they might reappear in unlikely places.

After twenty minutes, the mirrored juggling balls sparkling into nothingness for the last time, he bowed first to the maharaja, then to us, and made as if to leave. But the maharaja would have none of it; he called various people forward to examine the innocent hands of the magician, to pat his sleeves and marvel at the absence of hidden pockets (Holmes was a surprisingly competent tailor, when the need arose). Nesbit and I hung back, but we did not go unnoticed.

“Come,” our host called. Nesbit stepped forward and I reluctantly followed. The prince held up the magician’s hand as if this were the foot of a horse to be examined for stones, and he patted Holmes’ wrists, which showed nothing but brown skin—not nearly brown enough, I saw in alarm; dyestuffs are not readily available inside gaol. Holmes stood impassively under the handling, his eyes meeting mine but giving no sign of recognition—clearly, he had studied the crowd on the terrace from his dark corner and seen me talking with Nesbit.

And then the maharaja said to me, “Do remove your topee, Captain Russell; you’ll be able to see better.” Holmes tensed, his hand making a fist, his eyes darting to the guards as he prepared to fling himself to my protection.

But a topee is not a turban, and I had been my teacher’s pupil before I became my husband’s wife, learning to my bones that half a disguise is none at all. I lifted my topee, smoothed my regulation officer’s haircut with my other hand, and bent forward obediently to witness the lack of tricks up the magician’s sleeve.

The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest I’ve ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away.

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
he magician was led back into the palace, either escorted or
under guard, according to the eyes that watched him go. The rest of us drifted away to dress for dinner. My clothing had been ironed and either folded away or hung in the spacious wardrobe, and the safety razor and shaving mug I had borrowed from Nesbit were laid out in the bath-room, ready to lend the verisimilitude of smooth cheeks to my appearance. I launched into the laborious process of donning a man’s formal attire, fumbling with the studs and cursing under my breath at the tie, working for just the correct touch of insouciance. The indicators of quality in a human male are more subtle than those of the female, hence all the more essential to hit it right. Hair combed but not plastered; shoes of the highest quality and shined to a mirror gloss, but clearly not new; fingernails clean but not pampered. When the knock came on my door, I presented myself with all the nervousness of a débutante at her Court presentation.

Nesbit ran his eyes over me, coming up with approval and a trace of amusement, which made me glad, that he was beginning to get past his dislike of the clandestine impetus for our invasion of Khanpur. He did not care for spying on his friend, but he would do so at the top of his bent.

“Shall we go?”

“I didn’t hear the bell.”

“Time for a drink before,” he suggested, and Martin Russell followed him agreeably down to the billiards room.

The atmosphere of the palace had shifted in my absence, although I could not lay my finger on the how or why. Mrs Goodheart had left, off to Bombay to see her “Teacher,” taking Sunny with her; that accounted for some of the change. And although Gay Kaur was there, her hands trembling as she lit a cigarette, I saw neither Faith nor Lyn, who had seemed to me steadying forces in the maharaja’s ménage.

For one thing, we seemed to be heavily weighted to the masculine now, the three flighty German girls gone, a couple of visiting wives returned to their homes. The feminine exodus had left behind eight rather hard-looking females who would only by the furthest stretches of chivalry be termed “ladies,” two of whom I thought I recognised from the
nautch
dancers, as well as four diminutive Japanese girls, two peculiar-looking albino women, and three of the maharaja’s female dwarfs, all of them wearing heavy make-up and scanty dress.

We didn’t actually make it as far as the billiards room, not with drinks being served on the terrace. We were standing with our glasses in our hands and a couple of flirtatious women in our faces when Thomas Goodheart came onto the terrace, spotted me, and stopped dead. I carefully took no notice of him, bending instead to listen to the witticism of the painted lady, but he certainly took notice of my every action. After a few minutes he brought his drink over to where Nesbit and I stood.

“Hello, Captain Nesbit,” Goodheart said, although he was watching me as he spoke. “I didn’t know you were coming to Khanpur.”

“Good evening, old chap,” Nesbit said, pumping the American’s hand in greeting. “And I didn’t realise you were still here. I don’t see your charming sister. Or your mother.”

“No, they’ve gone to meet Mama’s friend. I stayed on to . . . I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said, although he didn’t sound at all sure of it.

“Captain Martin Russell, old friend of mine,” Nesbit told him. We shook, and I arranged a somewhat tired smile on my face.

“From your reaction I take it that you, too, have met my twin sister. Whatever she did, I probably don’t want to know.”

Nesbit’s ease and my hearty masculinity completed what the hair-cut and false moustache began, and Goodheart, like the others before him, began tentatively to accept this peculiar coincidence. I felt various eyes on me during the evening, but my mask did not slip, and by the evening’s end, I was Captain Russell, not Miss.

After dinner we were again entertained by
nautch
girls, and although they were the same dancers who had entertained us the other night, their performance tonight was a rather different thing from that wholesome version. When the dozen figures came into the
durbar
hall, whirling and clashing and gyrating seductively, I could not help glancing to see what Geoffrey Nesbit made of it. He seemed much taken aback, so much so that he looked over at me and then quickly away, his face going blank, if slightly pink about neck and ears. Clearly, this was not a form of entertainment commonly offered on his past visits.

I kept my place, grateful that I was not on the outside and thus a target of one of the sinuous women, and it was with huge relief that I saw them leave: It would have been exceedingly awkward had the evening degenerated into a whole-scale orgy then and there. When the group rose to adjourn in the direction of billiards or cards or the smaller-scale orgy that no doubt was scheduled for elsewhere, I made my excuses and headed for the doors.