THE GAME
Laurie R. King
Bantam
British Mystery
ISBN: 0553583387

Chapter One

Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steamroller of deadlines and details straight at one's daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage.

On the first of January, 1924, I was enjoying a peaceful New Year's evening with my partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes, in our snug stone house on the Sussex Downs, blissfully unaware that scarcely forty hours later I would be sprinting desperately for a train across a snow-covered railway siding. But on the first day of the new year, I was at peace and I was at home, with a full stomach, a tipsy head, and-most pleasant of all-warm feet. No fewer than three bottles of wine stood on the sideboard, in various stages of depletion. Holmes had just taken a connoisseur's sip of the last to appear in our glasses, a dusty port twice as old as I. He sighed in satisfaction and stretched his slippers out to the fire.

"It is good to find that the French vineyards are recovering from the War," he noted, although of the three wines, only the champagne had gone into its bottle since 1918.

I agreed, rather absently I will admit. As I took a swallow of the glorious liquid, it occurred to me that some part of the back of my mind was braced for a ring of the telephone or a furious pounding on the door. The visceral mistrust of leisure was perhaps understandable: Twice in the past six months the outside world had crashed in on us; indeed, we had been similarly seated before the fire one evening a scant two months earlier when an investigation literally fell into our arms, in the form of an old friend with a bloodied head. It was not yet midnight, and I had no faith in our stout oaken door to keep out surprises of the kind Holmes tended to attract. However, pleasantly enough, no pounding fist came to trouble our companionship or, later, our slumber, and we rose early the next morning, fortified ourselves with one of Mrs Hudson's hearty breakfasts (this one even more elaborate than usual, to make up for her being cheated of preparing the dinner for this, my twenty-fourth birthday), and bundled into our warmest clothes for the sleetdrenched trip to London. We rode the train in silence, taken up with our thoughts and with the newspapers, both as cheerless as the landscape outside the windows. Foot-and-mouth disease, the rising Seine, and doomsayers with apocalyptic predictions on both sides of the Atlantic, set off by the recent Labour victory.

Grimmer yet was the real reason for our visit to the great city. We had no end of business there, of course, from a long-delayed appointment with the bank manager to calling on a noble family in order to follow up on our most recently concluded investigation, but in truth, we were there to see Holmes' brother Mycroft, whose health was giving, as the euphemism goes, cause for concern.

He was home from hospital already, although the doctors had strongly advised against it, and embarked on his own programme of therapy. I personally wouldn't have thought a near-starvation diet of meat and red wine combined with long hours of vigorous calisthenics would be the best thing for a shaky heart, but not even Holmes' arguments made much of an inroad on Mycroft's determination. We had maintained a closer contact with him than usual over the past week and a half, none of us voicing the thought that each visit could well be our last. We hurried through the day's business, I listening with an ear to the urgent recitation of calamity that trembled over the head of my American possessions, thinking only that, affection for my father or not, the time had come to rid myself of his once-cherished properties across the sea. I kept glancing at my wrist-watch, until finally with a sigh my solicitor threw up metaphorical hands, gave me the papers that required my signature, and allowed me to escape.

When we arrived at Mycroft's door, however, I had to admit that his self-prescribed fitness régime did not seem to be doing him any harm.

He was up and around, and if he opened the door in his slippers and dressing gown, he moved without hesitation and had colour in his face. There was also nearly a stone less of him than there had been on
Christmas Day, which made his jowls flaccid and his eyes more hooded than usual.

"Many happy returns of the day, Mary," he said, and to Holmes, "I believe you'll find a corkscrew on the tray, if you'd be so kind." After toasts came the inevitable discussion of the impending disaster that the new Labour government was certain to bring in. Predictions were rife that the institution of marriage was sure to be done away with, that rubles would replace the pound sterling, the Boy Scouts and the monarchy would be abolished, the House of Lords sold for housing flats-everything short of plagues and rains of frogs. There were strong rumours that the Prime Minister would refuse to step down to Labour's minority vote, thus igniting a constitutional crisis if not outright revolution; the newspapers that morning had mentioned the concern of America, politeness thinly concealing Washington's growing alarm. When I said something of the sort, Mycroft nodded.

"Yes, the Americans are becoming increasingly nervous about the
Reds. They seem to envision a Socialist state that stretches from London to Peking, and don't know whether to be more worried about the
Bolsheviks succeeding, or about the chaos that will follow if they fail."

When we had exhausted the various topics, we sat down to a meal only marginally less sumptuous than one of Mycroft's usual, accompanied by what passed for small talk and polite conversation in the
Holmes household, in this case an interesting development in forensic science from America and a nice murder that was baffling the authorities. Dessert was a small decorated cake, which none of us ate. The pouring of coffee, offer of brandy, and fingering of cigars indicated that the meal was finished, business could be resumed. The talk circled back through the Labour victory and the huge problems facing a minority government, before Mycroft took a last, ritual mouthful from his cup, put it onto the table, and asked, "Have you been following the news from Russia?"

My head snapped up as if he'd hauled back on my reins-which in a way, he had: I knew him far too well to think his question innocent.

"No!" I said sharply, before things could edge one syllable further down that slippery slope. "I absolutely refuse to go to Moscow in January."

He made a show of shifting feebly in his chair, letting out a quiet sigh of infirmity before he looked up. "I said nothing about Moscow."

"Siberia, then. Some place either deadly or freezing, or both."

He abandoned the attempt at innocence. "I would go myself," he tried, but at my disbelieving snort and Holmes' raised eyebrow, he dropped that as well. All the world knew that Mycroft Holmes went nowhere outside his tightly worked circle if he could possibly avoid it: Dr Watson had once referred to Mycroft's unexpected appearance in their Baker Street flat as akin to finding a tram-car running down a country lane.

It did, however, answer a question that had been in the back of my mind ever since the general election, namely, how would the radical change in government affect Mycroft? Mycroft's rôle in the outgoing Tory government was as undefined as it was enormous; it seemed he intended to simply ignore the shuffling of office-holders all around him.

"What has happened, Mycroft?" Holmes asked, drawing my attention back to the until-now overlooked fact that, if Mycroft, in his condition, had been consulted on a matter by whichever government, it had to have struck someone as serious indeed.

By way of answer, the big man reached inside the folds of his voluminous silken dressing-gown and pulled out a flat, oilskin-wrapped packet about three inches square. He put it onto the linen cloth and pushed it across the table in our direction. "This came into my hands ten hours ago."

Holmes retrieved the grimy object, turned it over, and began to pick apart the careful tucks. The oilskin had clearly been folded in on itself for some time, but parted easily, revealing a smaller object, a leather packet long permeated by sweat, age, and what appeared to be blood. This seemed to have been sewn shut at least two or three times in its life. The most recent black threads had been cut fairly recently, to judge by their looseness; no doubt that explained the easy parting of the oilskin cover. Holmes continued unfolding the leather.

Inside lay three much-folded documents, so old the edges were worn soft, their outside segments stained dark by long contact with the leather. I screwed up my face in anticipation of catastrophe as Holmes began to unfold the first one, but the seams did not actually part, not completely at any rate. He eased the page open, placing a clean tea-spoon at its head and an unused knife at its foot to keep it flat, and slid it over for me to examine as he set to work on the second.

The stained document before me seemed to be a soldier's clearance certificate, and although the name, along with most of the words, was almost completely obscured by time and salt, it looked to belong to a K-something O'Meara, or O'Mara. The date was unreadable, and could as easily have been the 1700s as the past century-assuming they issued clearance certificates in the 1700s. I turned without much hope to the second document. This was on parchment, and although it appeared even older than the first and had been refolded no less than four times into different shapes, it had been in the center position inside the leather pouch, and was not as badly stained. It concerned the same soldier, whose last name now appeared to be O'Hara, and represented his original enlistment. I could feel Mycroft's eyes on me, but I was no more enlightened than I had been by the certificate representing this unknown Irishman's departure from Her Majesty's service.

Holmes had the third document unfolded, using the care he might have given a first-century papyrus. He made no attempt to weigh down the edges of this one, merely let the soft, crude paper rest where it would lest it dissolve into a heap of jigsaw squares along the scored folds. I craned my head to see the words; Holmes, however, just glanced at the pages, seeming to lose interest as soon as he had freed them. He sat aside and let me look to my heart's content.
This was a birth certificate, for a child born in some place called Ferozepore in the year 1875. His father's name clarified the difficulties of the K-something from the other forms: Kimball.

I looked up, hoping for an explanation, only to find both sets of grey Holmes eyes locked expectantly onto me. How long, I wondered, before I stopped feeling like some slow student facing her disappointed headmistress? "I'm sorry," I began, and then I paused, my mind catching at last on a faint sense of familiarity: Kimball. And O'Hara. Add to that a town that could only be in India…No; oh, no-the book was just a children's adventure tale. "I'm sorry," I repeated, only where before it had connoted apology, this time it was tinged with outrage. "This doesn't have anything to do with Kim, does it? The Kipling book?"

"You've read it?" Mycroft asked.

"Of course I've read it."

"Good, that saves some explaining. I believe this to be his amulet case."

"He's real, then? Kipling's boy?"

"As real as I am," said Sherlock Holmes. "And yes, this is his amulet. I recognise it."

"You know him?" I don't know why this revelation startled me as if he'd claimed to have met a hippogryph; heavens, half the world considered Holmes fictional. But startle me it did.

"I knew him, long ago. We spent the better part of a year in each other's company."

"When?"

He smiled to himself. "While I was dead."

I knew my husband and partner was not referring to some spiritualist experience of a previous lifetime. "When I was dead" was his whimsical term for the period beginning in the spring of 1891, when he disappeared at Switzerland's Reichenbach Falls, and for three years wandered the globe, returning to London only when a mysterious murder called him back to the land of the living. Knowing that Mycroft had preserved his Baker Street rooms for him during those three years, and knowing what Mycroft was, I had no doubt that at least a portion of that time, Holmes had been about the Queen's business.

Still, I had never heard the details. I was not to hear them now, either. Holmes had already turned to his brother, and was asking, "How did these come to you?"

"Through the hands of a certain captain who has an interest in both worlds."

"Not Creighton?"

"The man who currently holds the same position that Creighton did then, fellow by the name of Nesbit."

"And the story that accompanied them?"

"So tenuous as to be nonexistent. An Afghan trader brings a rumour that a light-skinned native man is being held by a hill raja. Six months later, a camel caravan modifies the story, that the man was being held but took ill and died, asking that these, his last effects, be returned to his people. We did trace the amulet's arrival to such a caravan, but no man could say who had carried it south, or whence it came."

Holmes nodded, but said only, "I find it difficult to imagine that particular individual being held against his will."

I broke in, with a request I did not think unreasonable, particularly as we seemed to be on the edge of being dragged into a case involving Kimball O'Hara. "I'd appreciate a little background information, just a few details about what you were doing when you knew the boy."

Holmes glanced sideways at his brother, assessing his condition, then suggested, "Perhaps it would be best if we saved the tale for a later time."

I started to protest, then decided that Mycroft's colour was indeed not peak, and brought my curiosity under control, allowing them to continue.

Mycroft answered, "As you say, it takes some doing to imagine
O'Hara in custody for more than a few days. He was-how did you put it to me?

'Wily as a mongoose, slippery as a cobra, more deadly than either.' "

"If not in custody, then what?"

"The Bear is awakening."

" 'The Bear,' " I said. "You mean Russia? But I thought our relations with them had settled down-don't we even have a trade agreement now with the Bolsheviks?"

"Oh, yes, they've played on our attachment to India by accepting industrial supplies in exchange for little more than a verbal guarantee that they would cease their intrigue in the sub-continent. But then last May, Curzon had to threaten to withdraw trade unless they took their agents out. And, oh the surprise, they have not."

"And you imagine the Bolsheviks might have laid hands on
O'Hara," Holmes asked, sounding dubious, "or got him in their
sights, where the Tsar's agents could not?"

"Not precisely," Mycroft replied.

Holmes frowned. "A native agent, then, who worked his way inside
O'Hara's guard?" He seemed only a shade less doubtful about this possibility, but still Mycroft shook his head.

"Sherlock, I am not convinced the man is dead."

"What, then? Not dead, not held, then-No," Holmes said sharply as Mycroft's meaning fell into place. "Kimball O'Hara would never side with the Russians against the Crown. Never."

"Perhaps not side with them, necessarily, but use them? As a tool for India herself? The move towards self-rule-Gandhi's swaraj-has adherents on all levels throughout the sub-continent, and between their systematic obstructionism and the actions of outright revolutionaries, the country is a powder-keg. One more atrocity like Dyer's and the entire country will rise up, battering its own way between the British and the Bolsheviks. Neither of whom has much affection for Mr Gandhi. But even lacking outright revolt, the educated classes are pressing strongly for a voice in their own affairs. And the boy was always more native than white in his sensibilities."

"Sensibilities, yes, but not in his loyalties. He would not turn coat against His Majesty."

"Then perhaps he is truly imprisoned. Or dead."

Holmes did not answer. Instead, he took up the much-folded papers from the table, holding them to the light, one by one, for a long and close study. He found no marks, no pinpricks, nothing to indicate a secret message to the outside world. He even turned the leather case outside-in, as if the stitches of closure might have been embroidered into a code, but there was nothing. And as I knew that Mycroft would have given the objects the same scrutiny, I did not bother doing the same: If neither Holmes brother had found a hidden message, it was unlikely that I should do so.

"Has Kipling been questioned?" Holmes asked.

"The last he heard of O'Hara was in 1916. A letter of condolence arrived some months after Kipling's son was killed."

"Who was O'Hara's contact within the Survey?"

"O'Hara hasn't worked with the Ethnological Survey for nearly three years, but at the time it was Nesbit, and before that, Apfield. You knew him, I think?"

"We met," Holmes said, not apparently enchanted with the memory.
He turned to me to explain. "The Survey of India is responsible for producing accurate maps of the country, but it is also the home of the Ethnological department, wherein lies Intelligence. Under cover of survey and census, the British government assembles the subtler kinds of information concerning secret conversations and illicit trade among the border states. When I was there, Colonel Creighton headed the Survey. A good man." He finished packing the documents into their leather amulet case and slid the object back across the table to Mycroft. "You need me to go?"

"I don't want to ask," Mycroft said, which was answer enough.

"We're off to India, then?" I said. Ah well; we'd had a pleasant holiday for nearly an entire week. And at least it wasn't Russia: India was the tropics, which meant that my chilblains, begun in Dartmoor in October and not improved by two months in an underheated Berkshire country house broken by a cross-Atlantic trip for a missing ducal relative, might have a chance to heal. Still, I thought of the newspaper headlines I had read on the train, "Hindu-Moslem Bitterness-Riot in Calcutta Suburb," and suppressed a sigh. "Do we have time to pack a bag?"

"I shouldn't think so," Holmes said absently.

"Holmes!" I protested, but to my surprise, Mycroft came down on my side.

"The Special Express leaves Victoria at one-forty tomorrow afternoon.
The P. & O. steamer meets it in Marseilles at midnight Friday.
Plenty of time."

Not precisely what I would term plenty of time, but better than taking off for the East in the clothes I stood up in. Which request, frankly, wouldn't have surprised me. We were even allowed to finish our coffee before having to race for a cab.

The late train for Eastbourne was standing at the platform when we reached Victoria, but for some reason it proved unusually popular, with the result that we did not have a compartment to ourselves. This meant that the tale of Kimball O'Hara had to wait until after the car had deposited us at our door, and we had retrieved our trunks from the attic, and we had begun to pack them. Mrs Hudson, although we insisted we could manage, wrenched the clothes from our hands and took out her copious supply of tissue-paper. I admitted defeat and, leaving her bemoaning the lack of time to repair and tidy the summer-weight garments retrieved from the back of the cupboards, I followed Holmes down the hall-way and into the laboratory, where I cornered him.

"Very well, Holmes, you may proceed."

"About young O'Hara? Yes, an intriguing lad. You know his history, you said?"

"Born in India to Irish parents; mother died early; father drank himself to death, leaving Kim in the charge of a native nurse, who let him run wild so that he grew up in the bazaar."

"Save that it was opium that killed O'Hara, not alcohol, the rest is correct."

"As I remember it, when the boy was twelve or thirteen he finally came to the attention of the authorities, particularly the man who was in charge of the spy network operating along the Northwest Frontier. That was Creighton. He sent the boy to school for a while to learn his letters and numbers, before reclaiming him for the Intelligence service. Kim and some other agents foiled a Russian plot, something about treason among a group of hill rajas, and that's where the book ends."

"It was immediately after that tale's conclusion that I met him. He was only seventeen, but already a full operative of the Survey. He had befriended an old Tibetan lama, and was returning him to his home when our paths coincided, and I joined them."

"You mean you actually got to Tibet? I assumed that was one of Conan Doyle's romanticisms. Wasn't Tibet closed to outsiders until Younghusband's expedition in, what was it, 1904?"

"That set off in the final weeks of 1903, and yes, all that time Tibet was closed tighter than a miser's purse-string," he said with satisfaction.

"Which is why I needed to accompany the lama."

"And you wanted to go to Tibet because . . . ?"

"Mycroft, of course."

"Of course," I muttered.

"This was 1892, when the Russian threat was at its height. The Tsar wanted India, the Viceroy wanted to know which pass the Cossacks would come pouring through, and I happened to be on hand. As was young Kimball O'Hara. I had joined with a group of explorers, calling myself Sigerson, and made a lot of careful notes and maps. O'Hara came to our camp one black night, begging food for his lama, this grubby dark-skinned lad with eyes that saw everything. As he was leaving, he allowed his shirt to fall open and reveal a certain charm around his neck which, combined with an exchange of phrases, told me that he, too, was engaged in the 'Great Game' of border espionage. He crept back to my tent at midnight and we had a long talk, and ended up travelling together for a time. Most of what we did is no doubt still under lock and key in some ministry office, but after the Bolshevik revolution, I had assumed that the need for guarding India's passes had faded. However, it would seem that in Mycroft's eyes, The Game persists, albeit against different players."

He made to leave the room, but I had to protest, for his tale had been in no way adequate.

"But what was he like?" I persisted.

By way of answer, Holmes paused with his hand in a trouser pocket, then drew it out and dashed the contents onto the table nearest the door. A handful of small, disparate objects danced and rolled and threatened to fall to the floor, but no sooner had they come to a rest than he scooped them up again, and turned a questioning eyebrow on me.

We hadn't done this particular exercise in a long time, but I had sufficient experience with Holmes' ways to know what his action signified.

"You wish me to play Kim's game?" I asked.

"The boy himself called it the 'Jewel Game,' but yes."

It was a test of one's perception, first of seeing, then of committing to memory. I was tired, and I couldn't see what this had to do with my question, but obediently I began to recite.

"Three mismatched collar studs; a nubbin of India rubber; two paper-clips, one of them Italian; the cigar-band from Mycroft's cigar; a gold pen nib; the button that came off your shirt two weeks ago that you couldn't find, so that Mrs Hudson replaced all the shirt's buttons at a go; the stub end of a boot-lace; a seed-head from last summer's nigella; a penny, a halfpenny, and a farthing; two pebbles, one black and the other white; a tooth from a comb; and one inch of pencil."

He smiled then, and headed back into the bedroom. "You and
O'Hara will find you have much in common, I think." When I protested that he hadn't answered me, he put up his hand. "We shall have many days of leisure in which to recount fond tales of derringdo, Russell. But not tonight-we have much to do before we catch that train. And, Russ?" I looked up to find him outlined in the doorway, a pair of patent-leather shoes in his hand, his face as grim as his voice. "Make certain to pack adequate ammunition for your revolver."

Chapter Two

We rose from our brief rest to a world of white, and the news that the trains to London were badly delayed. Nonetheless, we had my farm manager Patrick put the horses into harness and take us to the Eastbourne station, where we found that indeed, the London trains were not expected to reach Victoria until late in the afternoon.

I glanced at my hastily packed bags and tried not to look too cheerful.

"That does it, Holmes. We shall have to wait until next week."

"Nonsense. Off you go, Patrick, before you end up in a drift over your head."

I shrugged at my old friend, who touched the brim of his cloth cap and picked up the reins. Holmes had already turned to the station master, a lugubrious individual long acquainted with this particular passenger's idiosyncrasies, and, I thought, secretly entertained by them. Very secretly.

"Are the telephone lines still up?"

"Not to London, Mr Holmes."

"What about the telegraph?"

"Oh, aye, we're sure to get a message through by some route or another."

The two went off, heads together. I looked at the trunks, gathering snowdrifts to themselves, and took myself inside out of the cold.

A couple of hours later something intruded upon my attention: a pair of shoes gleaming at me over the top of the book I'd snatched from Holmes' shelves on the way out the door. I blinked and straightened my bent spine to look up into my husband's face. His grey eyes were dancing with amusement.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Russell, I am constantly filled with admiration at your ability to immerse yourself in the task at hand."

I closed The Riches of Mohenjo-Daro and rose, in some confusion, only noticing when I was upright that the trunks had been brought in and arranged at my side, long enough ago that the snow had not only melted but dried as well. What was more, a tea tray someone had set by my other side bore a half-empty cup and a half-eaten biscuit. I could taste the biscuit in my mouth, but I had no recollection whatsoever of having consumed either.

"Glad I amuse you, Holmes. What have you arranged? An aeroplane journey to Marseilles? A sub-marine boat to run us to Port Said?"

"Nothing so exotic. The delay is due less to the quantity of snow than it is to something on the tracks the other side of Lewes. All other trains, though slow, are still getting through. Mycroft has arranged for the Express to wait for us in Kent."

I looked at him with astonishment. "I should have thought a submarine boat easier to arrange than the delay of a train."

"The Empire is but a plaything to the whims of Mycroft Holmes," he commented, glancing around for a porter.

"The Empire, yes, but the Calais Express?"

"So it would appear, even with the Labour Party bearing down on the horizon."

Not that the catching of it was a simple thing. It meant boarding an east-bound train, one of those locals that pauses at every cattle shed and churchyard, and which cowers in a siding every few miles that an express may thunder past in majesty. Not that anything much was thundering that day; I began to suspect that even Mycroft's best laid plans might leave us stranded in the middle of Kent. Still, I had a book.

Either through mechanical problems or through some deep-seated class resentment of the driver (he'd probably cast his ballot for the incoming

Socialists), our train stopped well short of the assigned station.

This expression of class solidarity (if that is what it was) became somewhat derailed itself when Holmes summoned many strong men to haul our possessions over the slippery ground, to the puzzlement of the local's passengers and the huge indignation of those on the Express. Class warfare at its most basic. Holmes did, however, tip the men handsomely.

The instant we had spilled into the waiting train it shuddered and loosed its bonds to steam furiously off for Dover. I understand that mention was even made in the next day's Times of a puzzling stop in the wilds of Kent for a hasty on-load of essential governmental equipment. Mycroft's decrees were powerful indeed.

The entire trip to Marseilles carried on as it had begun, rushed and uncomfortable. And dreary—it was on that train that we read of the death of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, an old friend of Holmes' whose problems on Dartmoor had occupied our early autumn. Then the Channel crossing was rough, so rough that I spent the entire time braving the sleet-slick deck rather than succumb to sea-sickness, reaching Calais with nose, hands, and toes not far from frost-bite.

Paris was flooded, its higher ground packed with refugees and their bags, the train crowded and all the first-class sleepers occupied by fleeing residents. We spent Friday with an aged Italian priest and his even more aged and garrulous sister, both of whom exuded clouds of garlic.

The rain and snow persisted, slowing the journey so much that I began to doubt that we would actually arrive before the steamer had departed, but in the end, the boat, too, was held (for the train as a whole, not merely for the two of us), and when we reached the docks, our possessions were hastily labelled and carried on, divided between cabin and hold. We scurried up the ice-slick gangway in the company of a handful of other train passengers, slipping almost apologetically onboard the sleeping boat, witnessed only by P. & O. officials and, I thought, one or two other sets of eyes in the higher decks, their presence felt but unseen in the darkness.

Once in our cabin (this, at any rate, had no priest in residence) I crept into bed, praying that exhaustion would take my body into sleep before the pitch and toss of the boat asserted itself. To my relief, such was the case: The steam-roller of the past fifty-four hours rumbled over my recumbent body, and my last memory was of Holmes wrestling open the small port-hole, letting in a wash of frigid air scented with salt, and nary a hint of garlic.

I woke a long time later to a more subdued sea, a pallid attempt at sunshine, and the ting of a spoon against china. When I reached for the bed-side clock, my hand knocked against the water carafe; after a moment Holmes came through the doorway with a cup of tea in each hand. He set one on the table, and sat down on the other bed with his own. It was, I saw, nearly noon.

The tea had the bitter edge of a pot that has sat for a while, but it was still hot, which told me that Holmes, too, had slept late, and was only on his second cup. I slurped in appreciation, grateful that the bed wasn't tossing beneath me.

When the cup was empty, I threaded my glasses over my ears so I could see my partner.

"I suppose I shall be spending the next two weeks being force-fed some language or other?" I asked.

"Hindustani is the common tongue of the north, used by all traders. You won't find it difficult."

"Before we begin, I want to know more about this O'Hara person."

"Not a 'person,' a young gentleman, despite his history and lineage.

A sahib."

"But he was only a lad when you knew him."

"Even then."

"That was, what, thirty years ago? Why hasn't he made a name for

himself in that time?"

"A man does not play The Game successfully for thirty years and more if he catches the eye of any but his superiors."

"O'Hara has been a spy for the Crown for all that time?"

"O'Hara has been many things, but yes, he has been there when he was needed."

"Tell me about—"

"Breakfast first, and a lesson in Hindi. Then I shall tell you old and happy, far-off things and battles long ago."

He reinforced his edict by standing up and walking into the adjoining room.

I finished my tea, dawdled over my morning rituals, and joined him moments after our mid-day breakfast came through the door. As I came in, he looked up from the fragrant plate and said, "Begumji, hazri khaege?" Lessons had begun.

At first my mind tried to slide the new language sideways into its niche for Arabic, a tongue I had learnt under similar circumstances five years earlier, but by the end of the afternoon, it had grudgingly begun to compile a separate store-house of nouns and verbs in a niche labelled Hindi. With concentrated (that is, around-the-clock) effort, the rudimentaries of most languages can be grasped in a week or two, with childish phrases and a continual "Pardon me?" giving way to slow, stilted fluency a week later. By the end of four weeks, under

Holmes' tutelage, I had no doubt that my somewhat bruised brain would be dreaming in its newest tongue. And it went without saying, my accent would be identical to his, that is, negligible. By the time we landed in Bombay, I would be able to pass for a genial idiot; another fortnight, and I would merely sound stupid.

However, it seemed that Hindustani was not the only subject

Holmes had in mind. When our plates were clean and I had satisfactorily recited the nouns and articles for all the objects on the tray, he swept the leavings to one side and laid a pair of tea-spoons and a linen napkin onto the table between us, and began a demonstration of sleight-of-hand.

Under the command of those long, thin, infinitely clever fingers, the silver came alive. It vanished and reappeared in unlikely places; it multiplied, shrank, changed shape, became near liquid, and finally sat quietly where it had begun.

I knew his tricks—basic conjuring was a skill I'd begun to learn early in our relationship—but my young fingers had been no match for his. Still, I'd spent one summer conjuring with coins so, although the spoons were more difficult to palm and vanish, my grip was accustomed to the motions. Now I picked up one of the spoons and performed a few of his moves back to him, albeit more slowly and clumsily, and leaving out the multiplication trick since he had stashed the other spoons somewhere about his person.

He looked on critically, grunted his approval, and produced the spare silver from an inner pocket. I had been many things as first the apprentice, then the partner of Sherlock Holmes: gipsy fortune-teller in Wales, personal secretary to a misogynist colonel, Bedu Arab wandering the Palestinian desert, working girl, matron, and Sweet Young Thing. Now, we were going to India, where I supposed I might be asked to dance in a harem or take up a position on the street among the lepers. Or perform conjuring tricks.

"We're to be Hindu magicians?" I asked.

"As Dr Johnson said, 'All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.' And as fire-breathing bears the hazards of flaming beards or self-poisoning with phosphorus or brimstone, and the more spectacular conjuring depends on equipment too heft for easy transport, we shall concentrate on prestidigitation."

"But why?"

He settled back and steepled his fingers for a lecture; I poured myself another cup of coffee.

"We in the West have developed the unfortunate habit of training and arming insurgents, then dropping them when they become inconvenient. As a result, there is a certain lack of long-term trust on the part of the native inhabitants, even those who declare themselves our stout friends. And as a part of that lack of trust, we cannot always be certain that our 'friends' are telling us all they know. The Northwest Frontier of India has known spies for so many generations, even the least sophisticated of communities suspects any outsider of nefarious purposes. One of the perpetual dilemmas for the man wishing to come and go freely along the border territories has always been finding an acceptable disguise to justify his presence, so that he is not thrown into gaol, or summarily shot. Some players of the Great Game go as hakims, with patent cures for fever and eye infections to supplement rudimentary medical skills; others bluster their way as hunters, collecting heads and skins openly as they surreptitiously map an area. I've known wandering antiquarians, big-game hunters, and itinerant durzis—tailors—but each depends on specific skills. One wouldn't care to be a durzi if one could not handle a needle, for example. O'Hara was note-perfect as a holy man, due to his long wandering in the company of a Tibetan lama. But for the man—or woman—with the necessary skills, one of the best disguises is that of a travelling entertainer. Native peoples expect a magician both to be itinerant and to behave in a mysterious fashion. And as long as there are no inconvenient coincidences, no village bullocks die or floods come to wash out the crops, the people are happy to accept most witchery as benign. I want you to practise your movements until you can do them backwards in your sleep."

I could see already that we wouldn't be spending much of the voyage up on deck, open to curious ears and eyes.

Too, this would clearly not be a visit among the exotic comforts of

India. From the sounds of it, we'd be lucky to sleep under a roof.

Worst of all, this talk of "frontier" made my heart sink and my chilblains tingle: It did not sound as if the warm, frangipani-scented south was to be our destination.

It was not until tea-time that Holmes broke off the lessons, when my tongue and my fingers were both about to stutter to a halt. We went up to the salon for tea, and the genial drink coupled with the fresh Mediterranean air soothed me as if I'd been granted an afternoon nap.

Afterwards, we bundled up and strolled the decks, where at last

Holmes began the story of his meeting with the young Kim O'Hara—in Hindi alternating with English translations, a broken narrative rendered yet more difficult to follow by the necessity of switching to something innocuous whenever another set of ears came near. It was a method of discourse with which, by that time, I had some familiarity: I had known the man at my side for just under nine years, been his partner for five, his wife for three.

"It was in the spring of 1891 that I encountered Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, an encounter from which only I walked away. Watson, as you know, thought I had met my death there, and made haste to inform the rest of the world. I was indeed dead to the world for three long years. When I finally returned to London, I told Watson that my absence had been due to the ongoing investigation of the Moriarty gang, but in truth, my heart had grown weary of the game. When I set off for my meeting with Moriarty, I anticipated that our final confrontation might well cost my life. To find myself still standing on the edge of the Falls while Moriarty was swallowed by its turbulence—it was as if the sky had opened up and a shiny Christmas parcel had been lowered into my waiting hands. All it required was for me to tug at its ribbons.

"The temptation was enormous. I had by that time been working out of Baker Street for ten very solid years, and although many of the cases were of interest, a few of them even challenging, I had reached a point at which the future stretched long and dull ahead of me. I was, remember, a young man, scarcely thirty, and the thought of returning to the choking fogs and humdrum crime of London was suddenly intolerable.

I stood with the Falls at my feet and gazed down the path leading back to Watson and duty, then up at the steep cliff that was my other option, and my hands reached for the cliff.

"Once at the top, setting my face to the East, I paused. In fact, I sat among the bushes and stones for so long, I saw Watson reappear in a panic on the path below me. I saw the poor fellow find the note I had left there, saw him . . . He wept, Russell; my loyal friend broke down and wept, and it was all I could do not to stand and hail him. But I was silent, not because I wished to cause him sorrow, not even because I had a thought-out plan of action. No, it was merely that I had been given the priceless gift of choice, and could not bring myself to throw it away.

"I made my surreptitious way back to London, and to Mycroft's door. My brother was surprised to see me, and I venture to say pleased, but he was not in the least astonished—we are enough alike, we two, to distrust a death without laying our thumbs on the corpse's pulse. And as it turned out, my very public demise had come at an opportune time for his purposes.

"What do you know of the conflict along India's northern frontier?" he asked me.

I know that war in one form or another has gone on for most of the last century, until the Bolshevik revolution five years ago. The Tsar wanted to extend the Russian borders across the mountains into Afghanistan and ultimately India, while we kept him out by a show of force and holding close watch on the passes. In the meantime, both sides have been mistrusted, manipulated, and often murdered by the countries in the middle; the Afghans particularly have made the trapping of outsiders a national sport."

"In 1891," Holmes resumed, "Kim O'Hara was seventeen years old and fresh from school when he was dropped straight into the thick of

The Game. A pair of 'hunters' came out of the hills carrying, along with their rifles, trophies, and a collection of well-hidden survey equipment, secret messages from the Tsar to some hill rajas entertaining treasonous thoughts. O'Hara was at the time in the company of his lama, and used his rôle as the man's chela, or disciple, to conceal his government work. The job was hard and nearly killed him, but he succeeded in capturing the relevant letter, and was rewarded by being turned loose for a time. His lama was dying and wished to breathe his last in Tibet—and the boy's superiors knew full well that if they attempted to keep him from his duties as a disciple, he would simply slip the reins and vanish."

"Tibet."

"Yes. A country all too aware of its vulnerability and its desirability, and therefore closed with grim determination against the eyes of all foreigners, a place with the habit of executing anyone even suspected of secret doings, a place where no Westerner had ever set foot. Unfortunately, just four months earlier, a Survey agent had gone missing from a mission into the reaches of Tibet, and it was feared that he had been taken captive, and was being questioned, under fairly drastic means—certain pieces of inside information had come to public knowledge. It was feared that any agent known to this man was in danger of exposure."

"So Mycroft suggested sending in someone whom the man could not have known," I supplied. "You."

"Correct again. The timing was coincidental—my own unlooked for availability and their sudden and urgent need for a competent stranger. And although by the time I reached India, O'Hara and his lama had left the plains, I managed to join a Scandinavian expedition into the mountains whose path would coincide with theirs."

"Wheels within wheels."

"Quite an appropriate image, Russell. The Tibetans often pray by means of a wheel spun on the end of a stick, its body filled with written prayers. With prayers, or with any other piece of writing a man might wish to carry with him. A map, say, or the copy of a private letter."

"So you persuaded a couple of Tibetan monks to take on a Norwegian explorer?"

"They were, as I mentioned, begging for their meal by the side of the road, as is customary for religious individuals in the East. I was in the habit of concealing a roll in the breast of my coat, for just such an eventuality, and slid inside it a wadded-up note suggesting that a 'son of the charm' might find a friend in the tent with the orange door. The boy came to me after his lama was asleep that night, bristling with suspicion, fingering in a most un-monk-like fashion the revolver he wore inside his shirt lest I prove an enemy—or worse, a colleague set on dragging him back to his responsibilities.

"I gave him food—the boy ate meat as if he was starving, which he may well have been—and tobacco, and we sat on our heels in the dark and talked. He was the most remarkable blend of hard and soft, cunning and naïve, schoolboy one moment, petty criminal the next. He was a prodigy, who'd played a similar Game in the streets before he'd even heard of Crown or Tsar—if Creighton had sat at a drawing-board to design the very tool for bearing the Survey's eyes and ears, he couldn't have come up with anything better than Kimball O'Hara. His only weakness was a distaste for lying to his friends, and even then, he would practice deceit joyously when it was part of The Game.

"In the end I managed to convince the lad that, far from wishing to pull him out of the mountains, I would urge him to go as far and as wide as he could with his lama—my sole request being that he take me with him. Two purposes had I: The more immediate was to find word of Creighton's missing agent, but beyond that, I had been asked, if it came into my purview, to whisper into the Dalai Lama's ear that, despite the alarming actions of certain importunate missionaries, England was in fact more interested in treaty than takeover. That we had no wish to rule Tibet, merely wished Tibet's assurance that they would not side with Russia and allow The Bear to use their land to stockpile troops and matériel for an invasion of India.

"At that time, I had no real thought that I would be allowed within shooting distance of the Dalai Lama, much less close enough to converse. That possibility came much later.

"The boy didn't want me. He was afraid I'd give them away, and bring some impossible-to-predict form of wrath down on his lama.

However, he was greatly tempted, seeing that supporting my assignment might go some way towards obviating his rebellion against his Survey masters.O'Hara would freely have given his life for the lama,but it troubled him greatly to give up his future. In the end, the benefitsoutweighed the risk, and he agreed to take me with them.

"Because the old lama was growing feeble, he and the boy moved more slowly than our well-equipped expedition. So I remained a Norwegian for some weeks, and acquitted myself well enough to receive mention in the world press before the Scandinavians pulled back to the foothills in front of the snows. I went with them, then slipped away and doubled back to join O'Hara.

"Somehow or other he'd managed to assemble another set of monk's clothing for me, complete with prayer-beads and the sort of tam-o'-shanter cap they wore."

I paused in our peregrination of the foredeck to study Holmes, trying to picture him in the colourful fittings of a Tibetan monk. I could not.

"We wintered just below a pass, taking shelter in a monastery of like-minded individuals until the snows retreated in the spring."

"That must have felt like a long winter," I commented. If he'd fled

England because he hungered for action, months in a snow-bound monastery must have been hugely frustrating.

But to my surprise, he leant forward to rest his elbows against the ship's rail, a half-smile coming onto his narrow mouth as memories took his gaze to the horizon. "In some ways, yes. Certainly it didn't take long to run out of objects to play the Jewel Game with. But those two, the young white boy raised as a street urchin and the ancient Buddhist scholar, made for the most extraordinary company I've ever encountered, Russell. The one bursting with youth and beauty, the other a sea of wrinkles, the one a guttersnipe and petty thief, the other a revered head of a monastery—but when they met, the old man laid a potter's hands on the boy, and re-formed him in his image. The bond between them was so powerful, and so completely unlikely, it made one begin to believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. It was the only way to explain it, that they'd known each other many times over the ages."

I stared; the strange thing was, I couldn't tell if he was jesting.

He felt my gaze, and although he did not meet it, he straightened and went on more briskly. "In any event, the winter did grant me sufficient leisure to become word-perfect as a red-hat monk. I spent many hours teaching the boy certain skills he might need, if he chose to return to the road of the Intelligence agent, and in exchange he coached me until I could recite the lama's prayers better than he could, could expound on texts and write simple charms. And long hours out-of-doors in that high altitude rendered my skin as dark as those around me. When the pass cleared, I could probably have strolled into Lhasa without them.

"But Lhasa was where the lama was bound, and Lhasa was where his chela, and now their companion, would take him.

"We crossed over into Tibet in late March, reciting our rosaries all the way. The snows were so high, I would have chosen to wait another fortnight, but the lama was impatient—for a man who had attained enlightenment, he could be remarkably susceptible to his desires—and O'Hara thought himself strong enough for both. In the end, I had the old man on my back for a number of very rough miles—and at fifteen thousand feet, that can be rough indeed. But we half-staggered, half-rolled down the other side, tipped our hats to the startled border guards and said a blessing on their unborn sons, and went our way.

"And there we were, inside Tibet, two British sahibs in a place where, had they known, the countryside would have swarmed up like an anthill and exterminated us, or at the very least thrown us out on our ears. But because the lama was known and loved, and because he vouched for his chela and the companion who had joined them some months before, no man questioned us, no official barred our way.

"I spent the rest of that summer and autumn there, during which time I succeeded in locating our captured agent—who was not actually within Tibet, but gaoled in a neighbouring kingdom—as well as planting amiable suggestions in certain important ears. I even managed two audiences with the Dalai Lama himself, who was much of an age with Kim, and although he hadn't young O'Hara's advantages in the wide world, he was nonetheless remarkably sensitive to nuance and willing to question his advisors' assumptions about the British threat.

"In the end, young O'Hara left his lama long enough to help me break the agent free from his prison and to secret him into hiding near the border. I tried to convince the lad to come with me back to India, but he stood firm. He was utterly devoted to his lama, and he had given his word: He would not leave until the old man was finished with his chela's services. Neither of us thought that would be past midwinter, but I had no choice but to leave, and return the prisoner to his home. We parted there, on the road fifty miles from Lhasa, and never saw each other again."

The wistfulness in Holmes' voice, his faraway gaze over the water, the fact that he had neglected to interject the running Hindi translation for the past five minutes, all gave me the odd, sure sensation that a part of him regretted that he had not remained behind, deep in Tibet with the boy and his lama. It was a peculiar feeling, finding this entirely unsuspected stream flowing within a man I believed I knew so well.

And, as I could not then admit, not even to myself, the knowledge brought with it a faint trickle of jealousy of the apprentice Holmes had taught so assiduously, and come to admire so warmly, nearly a decade before I was born.

Chapter Three

Before the Port Said light grew on the horizon, our new shipboard community was well on its way to becoming an ephemeral village.

In many ways, it was a duplicate of the society we had left behind: the aristocracy of First Class on the upper decks, the peasantry of enlisted men, clerks, and their families under our feet, with the true labouring classes either tidily concealed beneath P. & O. uniforms or else thoroughly hidden away in the bowels of the ship. Rigid social custom swayed not a millimetre in the dining rooms: One never spoke to a neighbour at table if one had not been introduced, and since there were few mutual acquaintances to proffer the necessary introductions, conversation was largely nonexistent. Holmes and I attended few of the dining room meals.

Other areas of the boat were less severely bound by the strictures of human intercourse. In the exercise room, for example, it proved difficult to maintain a dignified formality with the woman at the next stationary bicycle when both of you were sweating and panting and furiously going nowhere. And because of the limited population in our floating village, group events such as card games, mah-jongg, or table tennis tended to require a certain loosening of rules in order to maintain a pool of players, which broke the ice sufficiently to permit one to nod to one's fellow player when one came upon him or her perambulating the deck the following morning.

However, as I used the ship's gym rarely and played neither mahjongg nor table tennis, I was permitted, in the brief periods of free time permitted me by my taskmaster, to remain firmly sheltered with my books. I had finished with the archaeology of Mohenjo-Daro and was sitting bundled on a sheltered deck chair with a translation of the massive and hugely complicated Hindu epic called The Mahabharata, when an unexpected voice intruded.

"So, what are you going as?"

I blinked up at the voice, which had come from a slim girl of perhaps seventeen who was dressed in an ever-so-slightly garish fur coat, a pleated skirt, a cloche hat over her bobbed hair, and a long beaded necklace. She was standing near the railing, trying to set alight the long cigarette she'd fitted into an even longer ivory holder; the wind was not giving her much joy with it.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked. I couldn't think what she was talking about, nor did I think we had met.

She seemed unaware of the repressive overtones in my question, unduly taken up with the problem of getting the match to meet the tobacco before the wind blew it out. I thought she had not been smoking long. Come to think of it, her presence on such an inhospitable and deserted bit of deck might not be unrelated to her inexperience: hiding from a disapproving parent, no doubt.

"The fancy-dress ball," she explained, and then bent over the match to shelter it, nearly setting her fur coat on fire in the process. At last—success. With an air of accomplishment she let the wind snatch away the spent match, placed the ivory mouthpiece to her lips with two elegant fingers, sucked in a lungful of smoke, and promptly collapsed in a gagging, retching fit of coughs that left her teary-eyed and weak-kneed. I sat with my finger between the pages, watching to see that she didn't stagger over the railings, but the fit subsided without my assistance. She hiccoughed once, swabbed her eyes, and tottered over to collapse onto the empty deck chair next to me, glaring accusingly at the cigarette that burnt serenely in its holder.

"Next time just hold the smoke in your mouth," I suggested, "instead of pulling it all the way into your lungs."

"Whew!" she exclaimed. "I mean to say, I've smoked before, of course, but I guess the wind . . ."

"Quite," I said, and opened my book again.

"So, what are you going as?"

"Sorry? Oh, the fancy-dress ball. I didn't realise they had one." I might have done, had I stopped to consider the matter. Shipping lines invented all sorts of ways to keep their passengers from succumbing to the throes of boredom, and encouraging wealthy men and women to make utter fools of themselves was a popular ploy, not the least because it ate up hours and hours in the preparations. "I shouldn't think I'll be going."

"Oh, but you have to!" she said, sounding so disappointed I had to wonder again if we didn't know each other. But before I could ask, I noticed her burning tobacco sinking forgotten, dangerously close to her coat.

"Er, watch the end," I urged her.

"Oh! Gosh," she exclaimed, patting furiously at the smoldering fur and plucking the still-burning cigarette out of the holder, tossing it into the wind, which I hoped might be strong enough to carry the ember clear of the unsuspecting passengers below. "Maybe I'm not cut out for smoking."

It was on the end of my tongue to reassure her to never mind, she'd pick it up with practice, but I kept the thought to myself. Why should

I encourage the maintenance of a filthy habit?

"Mama wants me to dress as a Kewpie doll, but I was thinking of being an Indian dancing girl—you know, scarfs and bangles."

A certain degree of negotiation was clearly in store for the girl and her mother. Who was she, anyway?

As if I had voiced the question aloud, she thrust the ivory holder into her pocket and stuck out her hand. "Sorry, I'm being rude. I'm Sybil Goodheart. Everyone calls me Sunny."

"Mary Russell," I offered in return.

"And of course, you're just joking about not going to the ball. I'm so bad, I never can tell when someone's pulling my leg. What are you going as?"

I gave up; the child was too persistent for me. "Perhaps I'll just wear my pyjamas and go as the downstairs neighbour, come to complain."

She clapped her hand across her mouth and giggled, blushing slightly, perhaps at the idea of a proper lady coming in her nightwear.

For a Flapper, she was easily shocked.

"You're an American," I said. If the accent hadn't told me, the brashness would have.

"From Chicago. You ever been there?"

"I passed through once, when I was young."

"It's got to be the world's stinkiest city," she declared. "What're you going to India for?"

"Er, my husband and I have business there." Impossible to give the deflating retort a proper Englishwoman would have wielded at the importunity of the question; poor Sunny would have gone behind the clouds.

"Is that nifty old—er, older man your husband?" she asked in astonishment.

"I mean to say, Mama and I noticed him earlier when you were on the deck."

"That is my husband, yes," I told her. And if she delivered a third rudeness, I would smack her. Verbally, of course. "And you, why are you going out?"

"I'm a little late for the 'fishing fleet,' aren't I?" she said with a most disarming grin. "Actually, we had meant to come out in October, but

Mama had a message from the spirits saying it was inauspicious, so we waited, which in the end was fantabulous, because I got to meet Ivor Novello at a party in London."

" 'The spirits,' " I repeated carefully.

Sunny inclined her head towards me and confided, "Hokum, isn't it? But Mama has had some powerful experiences in her time, and who's to argue? That is to say, I did argue at the time, because who wants to come all the way here and have to skedaddle away after a few weeks as soon as the weather gets hot? But Mama chose her time, and we will at least have a month to sight-see before we go to see her Teacher."

There was no mistaking the capital letter on the noun. Knowing I was going to regret it, I asked her which teacher that was.

"His name's Kumaraswami Shivananda, have you heard of him? No, most people haven't. Mama met him when he was on a lecture tour through the States, and came to Chicago. He's absatively keen for an old man—has to be at least forty, but has those dark eyes that seem to look right through you. Anyhoo, he channels the spirits, especially one he calls The Vizier, who was something big in ancient Egypt. The Vizier sent Kumaraswami on his world tour, to gather pupils and then teach them all about enlightenment through the body. Ever so much nicer than all those skinny, unhealthy-looking characters who tell you to renounce all sensation, don't you think?"

"Is, er, Kumaraswami Indian, then, or Egyptian?"

"Oh, no, he's from Pittsburgh. But The Vizier spoke to him one day in a séance and told him to change his name and go to India, so that was that."

Keeping my face straight was a struggle, but I agreed solemnly that enlightenment through the body did sound far nicer than some of the ascetic disciplines I had heard of. Sunny smiled, not knowing what I was talking about, but happy to have found what she took to be a kindred spirit.

"Have you ever been to a séance?" she asked.

"I, er, I know people who have."

"They're bunk, really, but tons of laughs. Everyone sitting so serious and then the channeller begins making all these squeals and groans, and you have to sit there fighting not to giggle."

At least I shouldn't have to warn the child not to be too gullible, I reflected, somewhat relieved.

"Come meet Mama and Tom?" she urged, jumping to her feet as if there could be no doubt that I would instantly agree.

"I should be getting back to w—" I started, but she pleaded.

"Oh, just for a jiffy! They're right below us waiting for tea, it would be ever so nice to show Mama I've made a friend so that when I want to go off and flirt with those tasty young officers she won't worry."

Who was I to shackle a free spirit such as Sunny Goodheart? And if she had originally intended to join the "fishing fleet" of eligible young women travelling to India to hook a husband, she would need all the help she could get to make up for three months of lost time. "I'd love to meet your mother," I said, causing her to give a little jump of pleasure before she seized my hand and led me down the deck towards the stairs. It was impossible not to smile at the creature; despite her dress and her cultivated worldly airs, she struck one as little more than a child.

Mama, on the other hand, was formidable, and I vowed not to venture into the heavy waters of theology with a woman possessed of that determined jaw. I offered her my hand, did not bother to correct Sunny's introduction of me as "Mrs Russell," and then shook the hand of the tall young man who had been seated at Mrs Goodheart's side. He had placed a bookmark in his collection of the works of Marx (an English translation) before unfolding himself from the deck chair, a process rather like that of a standing camel or an unfolding crane.

He was at least three inches over six feet, taller even than Holmes, and thin to the point of emaciation. One might think he'd been ill, except his colour was good and his movements, although languid, showed no discomfort.

"And this is Tom," Sunny told me. "My brother. He finished at Harvard last June and has been taking the Tour in Europe. He decided to include India, since Mama wanted to go. Tommy's a Communist," she appended proudly.

Personally, I couldn't see much to be proud of, either in the political stance or in the young man himself. Tom Goodheart's features were pleasing enough, and he appeared to have some wiry muscle under his European-tailored jacket, but even seated, he looked down his nose at one—not openly, but behind an expression so bland, one immediately suspected it of being a mask. I decided that he was a member of the supercilious generation—no doubt he fancied himself an artist or a philosopher, or both—and the attitude as much as the clothes the three wore told me that Communist or no, money did not go wanting in the Goodheart family. The swami from Pittsburgh, I decided, was on to a good thing.

"How do you do?" I said, and before Sunny could drag up a chair (and it would be she who dragged it, not her brother) I glanced at my wrist and began to apologise. "I'm terribly sorry, I just remembered that I promised my husband I'd meet him a few minutes ago, it went right out of my head. Lovely to meet you, I look forward to seeing more of you all on the voyage."

And made my escape.

We took our evening meal in our rooms, as well as breakfast on Monday, and by making immediately for the more insalubrious portions of the decks during the middle of the day, we avoided the Goodhearts until Sunny caught us strolling down the stairs at tea-time, her brother ambling along behind her.

Oh! Mrs Russell, I've missed you so. I hope you haven't been ill, I was looking for you at lunch. Hello, Mr Russell."

"We've just been elsewhere," I told her; Holmes murmured something vaguely apologetic and pulled a vanishing act. "Did you need something?"

"Oh, yes, I just wanted to ask if you were thinking of going ashore at Port Said tomorrow. Tommy and I are skipping off to see Cairo and the pyramids by moonlight, although Mama says it's too strenuous a jaunt for her. The purser says we'll rejoin the ship in Suez, he absolutely promises. Please, won't you come?"

Moonlight? I thought. The moon would be but a tiny sliver, handsome enough in the desert sky but short-lived and less illuminating than a candle. Little point in saying anything to this young lady, however—the shipping line might not permit lap dogs, but Sunny was doing her best to make up for their absence, endearing herself to all and polishing off whatever odd scraps were put on her plate. I stifled an impulse to snap the order to Sit!

"No, thank you, Sunny. I may go ashore in Aden, but not here." I had not yet seen the pyramids, but I did not wish to do so for the first time on a rushed day-trip in the company of a shipload of tourists. Call me a snob, but I prefer to take in the world's grand sights when I can at least hear myself think. Not that I was killjoy enough to say so aloud.

Her round little face fell in disappointment. "I'm so sorry. Tommy was looking forward to it."

Tommy, I thought, cared not a whit if I came, although at the memory of the fellow's bland and disinterested mask, I experienced a vague stir of disquiet. Before I could pursue the thought, Sunny perked up again. "Well, maybe you'll join Mama? There's a group going ashore to buy pith helmets and such, sounds ever so fun."

I rather doubted that, and could only imagine the sort of solar topees on offer at a shop catering to lady tourists fresh from England. Holmes would go ashore in Port Said to send a telegram to Mycroft; I'd ask him to buy me a sun-hat while he was there.

"No, I'll wait, thanks. You have a good time. And, Sunny? Please call me Mary."

Her face blossomed again, simple soul, and she chattered for a while about maharajas and camels before bouncing off to consider the proper wardrobe for pyramid-visiting. I smiled at her retreating back: It would not be long before the one-woman fishing fleet was reeling in a whole school of handsome young officers on her line.

Excerpted from THE GAME © Copyright 2004 by Laurie R. King. Reprinted with permission by Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

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