Think, Russell!
I had, it seemed, three choices. I could wait here; I could go after Holmes by myself; or I could ask Nesbit for help. And if I forced myself to overlook the alarming method by which the prince had laid hands on the magician—not an easy thing to do, to ignore my body’s nearly overwhelming impulse to race down the road in the wake of the car—I had to admit that Holmes was very probably in no great danger. Yes, he had been abducted in an alarmingly similar fashion once before, and yes, that time the results had been nearly catastrophic, but I had no reason (no rational reason) to feel that anything of the sort was going to happen here. Potential Lenin or no, there was no indication that the maharaja was arresting Holmes for a spy; his words had said merely that the prince of Khanpur wanted to see a magician do his tricks. Annoyed he might be by having to search for the magician, and granted, he was in the habit of “inviting” his guests to stay on, and on, but once my heart had ceased to pump in buckets of adrenaline, my mind’s voice could be heard, saying that it would not be much harder to retrieve Holmes in four or five days than it would be if I stormed the palace tonight.
And—my brain at last beginning to function with clarity—it was quite possible that Holmes might find traces of Kimball O’Hara where I had failed. Particularly if, as I thought possible, the spy was quartered in Old Fort rather than among the European guests.
Still, I did not think that sitting in this mud-walled village would help anyone, so I wiped away the artificial blood from the “slashes” on my arms and legs, doused the guttering flares, and went to look for the headman.
It took some doing to convince the man that I was neither dead nor spirit. In the end, the solidity of the rupees I put in his hand decided the matter. He would guard the wagon and feed the donkey, and although he had no horse himself to sell me, he could send for a man who did.
By midnight, I was jogging north out of the village on a sturdy pony that had a bone-jarring gait but loads of stamina. I took the first road that came in from the right, and pressed on for half an hour before the moonlight failed entirely and the horse let me know that it was blind. I hobbled the creature and curled up in a blanket for a short time, rising and setting off again as soon as the road became visible.
We travelled all day, passing Khanpur city with the end of my puggaree drawn across my face against the dust, without spectacles most of the time, trusting to my anonymity and the pony’s sureness of foot. In the afternoon I began to watch the telegraph lines that dipped and rose on poles beside the main road to Hijarkot, but I found no telegraph office until the road gave birth to a caravanserai, its air already heavy with a dozen smokey cook-fires, clusters of men sitting around eating, coughing heartily, and spitting red splashes into the dust. I might have gone another hour or two before dark, and certainly would have continued had I wished merely for sleep, but instead I hired a string charpoy from the same establishment that stabled my pony, and bought a large plate of rice and dhal so hot it brought tears to my eyes. The smoke rose and then died away in the serai, the horses and camels complained and quieted, the lights were turned out in the telegraph office, and eventually the charpoys around me subsided into a night-time chorus of snores and mumbles.
I lay without moving, to all appearances asleep; in fact, my brain whirred, dredging up images of Holmes in chains, or tortured, or fed to the lions, one pointless speculation after another. I dragged my thoughts from him and placed them instead on Kimball O’Hara, this phantom of the Survey who had brought us thousands of miles and occupied us for weeks now, a world-famous Irish-Indian lad who was also an unknown middle-aged Intelligence agent, a born trickster who found it painful to lie, a man who might be dead, or farming in Tibet, or sleeping on the next charpoy. Or who might be in chains, or tortured, or fed to the lions, or … I wrenched my mind from these futile images, and decided I’d waited long enough.
I had chosen my bed at the far reaches of the free-air dormitory, so it was an easy matter to slip from my bed-roll and, avoiding the watchman (who like all chowkidars spent the night warning villains off with his coughs), circle around to the stout mud-brick building that held the telegraph office. At its door, I pulled back the lining of my spectacles case to reveal a set of pick-locks, and bent over the door’s lock. It was the work of no time before I was inside among the silent equipment, grateful that the Khanpur line was not busy enough to require manning around the clock.
Wishing I had a torch, or even an old-fashioned dark-lantern, to supplement the sparse illumination that came 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 boxwallah.” 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, wondering if Holmes was there, wondering if he had heard the aeroplane go overhead and known that I had returned.
The maharaja was not present to greet us, having taken a party out into the hills after a panther that had mauled a villager the previous day. We were greeted by the major-domo, whose tongue stuttered briefly into silence when he saw my familiar female features in their new, male setting, but he was too experienced at dealing with his master’s varied acquaintances to betray more than a moment’s bemusement before pulling himself back into the rôle of professional dispenser of honours. And we were given honours beyond those that Mary Russell had received—Nesbit’s quarters comprised three spacious rooms complete with balconies overlooking the inner gardens, while mine down the corridor were not much smaller. The pigsticking fraternity, it seemed, was of higher rank than stray Americans brought in for amusement.
When we had overseen the stowing of gear in the wardrobes and splashed the dust of the journey from our faces (and I, in the glass, checked that the adhesive was secure on my slim and excellently crafted blond moustache), Nesbit, with the familiarity of the regular guest, took me on a tour of The Forts, showing me all the nooks and corners that I had not even glimpsed as Mary Russell. Naturally, he included the zoo, a must-see for a first-time visitor to Khanpur, and again I wandered the white gravel paths, greeting the orangutans and lions, admiring the ostriches and crocodiles. We continued our circumnavigation of New Fort, through the stables and back to the main road, where we turned south, strolling between the two halves and looking up at the eastern half of the fortress.
“You’ve never been inside that?” I asked Nesbit in a quiet voice.
“No, although this past week I tracked down an eighteenth-century description of it, written by a Frenchman. It wasn’t terribly detailed—he was more concerned with the inlay and gilding in the durbar hall—but it seems to be laid out along the lines of a keep built around an inner courtyard. He says there are windows within, but as you’ve seen, none on the exterior walls.”
“A ready-made prison.”
“Or simply a place so inhospitable it isn’t worth keeping up.”
“Holmes has to be somewhere.”
“There are acres of possibilities in the New Fort alone.”
That was true, I had to admit, although it made my heart sink to consider the task of sneaking through the fortress’s endless and well-attended corridors in search of one itinerant magician.
We emerged into the sunshine again, and as if our reappearance had been a signal, there came a shout from behind us. Turning, we saw a body of horses trailing down the road from the north. Even at a distance, the heaviness of their stance and movements spoke clearly of having been ridden hard; nonetheless, the distinctive Arab at their head was kicked into a trot, then a canter, and in a moment the maharaja’s voice rang out from the depths of the defile.
“Nesbit! So glad you could come, we’ve been holding the pigs for you—I got news
of a giant among beasts up where you lost the horse last year. Rumour has it that the thing measures thirty-eight inches, not that the peasants know anything, but still.”
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.”