The Game - Laurie R. King [167]
Holmes shifted, intending to head forward and help Goodheart navigate his strange aeroplane across an impossible route between a place where men were shooting at us and a place where we would be unable to set down, over seventy miles of invisible and terrifying mountainside, by nothing but the fading moonlight. As he stood, I caught at his elbow and pulled him back so he could hear me.
“The next time Mycroft asks us to do something,” I shouted to my husband, “we really must tell him no.”
Chapter Thirty
It took three days to fetch Nesbit out of his hiding place near the border of Khanpur, days we spent holed up in the nondescript villa amidst the corn while messages of outrage and command heated the telegraph cables between Delhi and London. More than once I thought we should have to make good our threat to use the variety of guns we had found in the house; more than once, the maharaja came near to escape. If nothing else, the period proved to our satisfaction that Thomas Goodheart was on the side of the angels. Or at any rate, on the same side as Sherlock Holmes and his wife.
But on the third day, a tired-looking Geoffrey Nesbit rode into the front garden on an even tireder horse, and the machinery of government began to mesh again. That evening, the maharaja of Khanpur was quietly taken into custody to await His Majesty’s pleasure in the contemplation of crimes against the Crown and the people of Khanpur, and for the first time, we slept the night through, no patrols set, no rifles at our sides.
We did not, I am sorry to say, see Kimball O’Hara or his son again. But the following afternoon, as we prepared to leave Nesbit’s villa, my eye was caught by a flash out of the hills to the east. I stood and watched, and it came again, and again.
Holmes had noticed it as well, and stood at my side, reading the flares long and short.
One long, three shorts: the letter B. Short, long, two shorts: L. Short: E. Three shorts: S.
Blessings of the Compassionate One, said the message.
And with that, Kimball O’Hara went home to his high mountains, with his son, and his rosary, and his secrets.
Author’s Thanks
As this volume’s opening dedication was meant to indicate, the Russell books would not exist without the passionate dedication of li brarians. I am particularly grateful to the staff at the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who with endless good cheer unearth for people like me all those glorious treasures that are checked out once every thirty years, such as Malcolm Darling’s Rusticus Loquitur, a closely detailed account of his 1928 tour as Registrar for the Punjab Co-Operative Societies, or the 1924 treatise written by Sir Robert Baden-Powell (yes, the Boy Scout man) with that most evocative of titles, Pig-Sticking or Hog Hunting.
I also thank Gordon Werne, of the Hiller Aviation Institute, for his good-humored expertise regarding antique planes, and Sirdar Tarlochan Singh, Ph.D., for details of Punjabi life. And anyone who has read into the time and place will realize how much the present work owes to Peter Hopkirk, not only for his brilliant expositions of the Victorian cold war—“The Great Game”—but specifically for his identification of Kimball O’Hara’s birth date in 1875. For Hopkirk’s and other titles, see my website, laurierking.com.
(I ought perhaps to point out that none of my maps shows the precise location of the place Miss Russell calls “Khanpur.” Nor have I found it possible, after all this time, to determine which of the northern princely states she might have meant. An editor’s task is never easy.)
And as always, I thank my husband, Noel King, in this case for introducing me to his mad homeland, and for providing Russell with her Hindustani curses.
The Game may be read as a humble and profoundly felt homage to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, one of the great novels of the English language. If you, the reader, do not know the book, please do not delay that acquaintance. If you read it in childhood and