The Game - Laurie R. King [128]
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
The 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