Holmes was just coming to the end of the preliminary part of the act, the flashy tricks and joking patter designed to capture an audience. He drew glittering balls from the air, made others vanish from sight, and caused one to burst into flame, its ashes floating upwards on the breeze. Young Bindra was nowhere in sight, and Holmes’ face looked tired to gauntness beneath the dye.
When he had brought together a sufficient number, he turned to the mind-reading portion. Faith’s Hindi was limited to “How much is it?” and “Get away from me,” but the magician’s gestures and the reaction of his impromptu partners was entertainment enough. After he had astonished by perceiving a number of unknowable things about five or six of the men (the process of deductive reasoning working as well in this setting as it did in London), he caused a deck of playing cards to appear, and proceeded to guess which was in a person’s hand (as if Sherlock Holmes would stoop to guessing!). In the smaller villages, he had used coins, but in a large town, playing cards would be common enough to be used for the trick. Again, Faith could not understand what either he or his partners were saying, but there was no mistaking their declarations of astonishment.
When the man in the black garments had magically transformed the entire deck into black aces, then flung it into the air to float down as fifty-two ebony feathers, he came around with a small bronze bowl. Faith and I dropped silver rupees on top of the annas; I held the grey eyes for a moment, warning him not to speak. But he had already seen the armed guard, and he merely salaamed us and passed on.
We left him there and headed back into the bazaar. At the narrowest spot, when Faith stopped to take a closer look at a necklace she had been fingering earlier, I spoke into her ear.
“I just want to check something—I’ll meet you at the main gates in ten minutes,” and before she could object, I ducked my head down so our escort couldn’t see me, stepped behind a water-seller, and scurried away. At the next corner, I craned to see, but Faith was talking to the shopkeeper about the necklace, and the guard had not yet realised that I was no longer with her.
Holmes was seated on the ground in the shade of the wagon, counting his money, when I slid in beside him. He’d changed his Moslem cap for a black puggaree, tied elaborately with its starched end sticking up, and the thin moustache he’d grown since we parted in Simla added a rakish touch to his exoticism.
“Greetings, memsahib,” he told me.
“Holmes, you certainly got here quickly. Where’s Bindra?”
“It would seem that the same Delhi astrologer who instructed the boy to go with the two Mussalman gentlemen also warned him against entering Khanpur. Our young apprentice remained at the border, swearing to all the gods that he would wait there for me.”
“Wait there! So you’ve been doing all the work yourself, the donkey and everything?” The magician shrugged, and I muttered, “I’ll take off my shoe and give the brat thapad.”
“What do you make of the maharaja?” he asked, and he was right, we had time only for urgent business.
“Holmes, he’s … I don’t know, he’s an enigma. It may simply be the circumstances of his upbringing, but he’s thoughtful one minute and horribly cruel the next. An honest sportsman who apparently cheats at cards, a man who surrounds himself with artists and then keeps them from working, who is hugely generous with his hospitality but won’t let his guests out without watch-dogs. I have to get back,” I added, “before mine panics. And there’s a strange assortment of people at The Forts. He hired a best-selling novelist for a secretary; has two lesbian artists so avant-garde they make Epstein look staid, whom he’s commissioned to do works better done by an Indian; there are a couple of criminal types doing heaven knows what—remember the man Harry Koehler? He’s lived here for a year. The odd Communist like Thomas Goodheart. And me, whom he’s trying to convince to take on a project involving the education of Khanpur women. ‘Pets’ for his amusement, his cousin calls them. And a collection of individuals poached from side-shows, dwarfs and albinos. The dwarfs live down at the zoo, which I saw this morning. His treatment of the animals there is … troubling.”
“Cruelty?” he asked, coming alert. He knew, better than I, that a man who mistreats dumb beasts is apt to do the same to his human subjects. And I would have told him all about the zoo, if we hadn’t been so short of time. I’m sure I would have told him, if it wasn’t that I needed to think about it myself first. And if I didn’t know that if I described the maharaja’s act of cruelty, Holmes would become very nervous and would try to convince me that I shouldn’t return to The Forts. One thing I did not need at the moment was a nervous husband.
“Nothing extreme. It’s more that he’s experimenting to see if he can reshape their natures.”
“The lion lying down with the lamb?”
“No, more along the lines of convincing the lamb to become a lion.”
He thought about this for a moment, then to my relief, pushed it away for future consideration. “No sign of O’Hara?”
“If he’s here, he’s in the Old Fort. Have you seen the way The Forts are laid out?”
“I have.”
“The western half is where all the guests live, there’s a huge courtyard garden, the maharaja’s quarters. But the eastern part isn’t deserted—one occasionally sees guards on the walls. If the maharaja had a dungeon, it would probably be there, where the guests wouldn’t stumble on it.”
“Is there any way you can get in?”
“New Fort is locked up at night, although a circumspect individual might come and go. I don’t know about the other side, but it, too, looks the sort of place that might be invaded by one or two.”
“How much longer do you wish to stay?”
“Honestly, I can’t see that I’m going to uncover much more than I have. Another day or two, perhaps? And, if you can arrange it, a telegram recalling me to the outside world might be helpful. My host seems reluctant to permit his guests to leave.”
“Very well. If I’m not here, I’ll be half a mile down the Hijarkot road, there’s a caravanserai there. You’d better go or your watch-dog will come looking for you.”
I threaded my fingers through his, and we sat for a moment, eye to eye and hands joined, before I separated myself from his presence to dart from the shade of the wagon and into the nearest alleyway. I reached the city gates before Faith; our sweating guard was greatly relieved to see me. We strolled demurely back to the palace, and allowed ourselves to be shut in again.
The telegram came the following morning, Friday, and said merely, MARY RUSSELL PRESENCE REQUIRED MONDAY MORNING DELHI. It was brought while I was at breakfast; I took it from the golden salver and opened it publicly, arranging a look of intense irritation on my face before wadding the flimsy and dropping it beside my fork. I left it there when I went to watch the morning’s entertainment, which proved to be a doubles tennis-match between dwarfs. Some of the guests seemed to think it uproariously funny, although I found that once my eyes had adjusted to the diminutive size of the players, it was just another amateur game. Perhaps the afternoon’s ostrich race would be more amusing, I thought, and closed my eyes in the sun.
My doze was interrupted by a cleared throat, and I opened my eyes to find a chuprassi clutching a note. It read,
Miss Russell, would you join me in the gun-room.
Its signature was the letter K, with a stamp that I thought might be the crest of Khanpur. I stood up and said, “Could you tell me how to find the gun-room?”
The chuprassi conducted me to New Fort’s east wing, where the maharaja’s private quarters lay. We entered through a brightly gilded archway just to the left of the gates, and within half a dozen steps, my jaw dropped. I had grown accustomed to the grand opulence of the central wing, but the corridor we walked down, the rooms whose open doors we passed, were another thing altogether. Here were unlocked display cabinets of exquisite miniatures, ivory and gold, beside paintings that any museum in Europe would covet. In one room, I saw Louis XIV furniture, clearly in daily use; in another room stood a display of trophies and photographs, including the one for the 1922 Kadir Cup that I had seen in Nesbit’s house. I tried not to gawp as we walked past, but my head swivelled unceasingly.
It was a revelation. These paintings, those trophies, had been placed here for the sole pleasure of one man, not as a way of impressing his guests—these fragile carpets took no concern of the wear of many feet, and the rooms had been arranged for his privacy and comfort, not for the appreciation of groups. The maharaja clearly enjoyed—even gloated over—his possessions, but he kept the true treasures to himself.
At the very end of the long corridor, the chuprassi opened a door and bowed me through; once inside, I stopped dead.
I do not know what was more disconcerting, the completely muffled sound in the room or its dim light, but one’s immediate response on entering the room was a frisson of alertness up the spine. Perhaps it was some trace aroma of the predator all around that made one go still, not even breathing, until the only motion to defy the room’s smothering atmosphere was the hair creeping upright on one’s skin. In any case, it wasn’t until one’s eyes became used to the light that the sensation of entering a lair became strong. And perhaps a full minute had to pass before the eyes told one why.
The walls, floor to ceiling, were covered in tiger fur. Black and orange stripes, running first in this direction, then that, fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, seamless but for a faint rectangular shape in the back wall. In the upper corners of the room, clustered and snarling, were mounted the heads.
I shuddered in reaction, and someone chuckled, the sound damped and muffled.
I whirled, and there was the maharaja, sitting in a chair of unrelieved black. Panther, my mind informed me; and the fluffy black-and-gold rug on which his boots were resting was made of the tails of the tigers on the wall. I swallowed convulsively, whether to repress fear or visceral disgust, I was not sure.
The maharaja rose from his panther-skin chair and walked over to a table that appeared made of grey-painted wood, and on closer look proved to have a texture. It was covered in elephant hide, I realised, and somehow that final outrage tipped me over the edge, and I was suddenly icy calm.
“I have something for you,” he said. “Since you did not wish the boar’s head for your wall, I had this small souvenir made, a memento of your first pig-hunt.”
I looked apprehensively at the velvet-covered box he was holding out to me, and kept my hands at my sides. “That’s really not necessary.”
So he opened it himself and turned it for me to see.
Since Wednesday’s hunt, he had somehow contrived to have all four tusks of the boar removed and handed over to a goldsmith for mounting. The object before me had a central shaft as long as a hand, made of heavy, deep-red gold that had been intricately worked with a design I recognised from the stamp on the note that had brought me here, the crest of Khanpur. From the gleaming metal protruded the tusks, the shorter pair curving up from the bottom, the longer upper tusks rising from the shaft above them to curl together, nearly forming a circle above the gold. The tusks themselves had not been touched, aside from their removal, and looked as they had when they came to rest on the ground near my foot: the ivory as yellowed as a smoker’s teeth, the tip of the upper left one snapped off and worn blunt, even the dried spatter of blood that had been burned into my memory when the beast had been struggling to eviscerate me. The art of the goldsmith had been linked to these brutal tools for digging and killing, man’s most intricate craftsmanship used to set off all the nicks, grime, and blood that Nature had provided.
It was quite the ugliest thing I had ever seen in my life.
Beyond its mere appearance, the ornament was repugnant on any number of levels: aesthetically, yes, but also emotionally, in its attempt to create beauty from what was essentially a grisly extermination; theologically, in its glorification of the uncleanest of animals; even politically, that in a poor land, so much gold should be used for a frivolity. The maharaja of Khanpur held the box out to me, willing me to take it. I did so, reluctantly, then laid it immediately upon the elephant-hide table.
Satisfied, he went around the desk and sat down behind it, gesturing me to the chair on the other side. Since this appeared to be merely wood, not bison’s leg-bones or stiffened cobras, I sat down in it. He crossed his legs and said, “I wanted to have a further conversation with you about your proposal for women’s education.”
I had made no such proposal, but there seemed little point in arguing with him. Instead, I said, “Yes, I’m sorry about that, but it appears as if I’ll have to abandon it for the moment. I’ve been called back to Delhi. I’ll need to leave tomorrow.”
His eyes narrowed, but I could see that the news came as no surprise. Indeed, I should have been amazed if it had.
“Oh, Miss Russell—Mary—you must stay. We’re going after tiger on Sunday, you can’t possibly miss that.” The firmness in his voice left no room for contradiction, yet contradict I did.
“That is a disappointment,” I replied, although it was all I could do to keep from looking at the walls and asking him if enough damage had not been done to the state’s feline population. “But my husband is expecting me, and truth to tell, he’s quite capable of sending someone after me if I don’t show up. You’ll just have to take the tiger for me.”
“But you did promise to look at the schools here,” he said, which again I most emphatically had not. He kept his voice even, reasonable, although it seemed something of an effort. The maharaja was not accustomed to being crossed.
“Yes, I suppose I did. Perhaps I can return, when we’re finished in Delhi. It’s just, well, my husband can’t do this particular piece of business without my presence.”
His eyes darkened, and he rose to come around the desk, standing over me in a clear attempt to force me into obedience. Another woman might have been cowed, but another woman was not Mary Russell; another woman had not spent nine years in the company of Sherlock Holmes. I set myself against the waves of domination and anger coming from him, bracing to repulse him if he decided to hit me. He managed to keep control, though, and merely said in a rather strangled voice, “I’m afraid the aeroplane is not available until the end of the week.”
“What a pity. Well, perhaps I can find a motor to take me to Hijarkot.” From the sudden, hot anger in his face, a free car anywhere in the country would be no more forthcoming than the aeroplane. I stood up, forcing him to retreat a step. “In any case, I thank you for your hospitality. I’ve had a most interesting time here, and appreciate it hugely.”
His voice stopped me at the door, saying my name. I looked back; he had the velvet box in his hand.
“There is an interesting fact about pigs,” he observed, his voice gone silky soft. “The killing tusks are not the prominent upper ones, but the smaller, more hidden pair beneath.”
I looked from his expressionless face to the box, and in the end I took the thing, walking back across the tiger-lined lair to do so. I took it because to refuse would have forced the issue of my rebellion into the open, with unforeseen consequences. Perhaps I took it because the smell of predator was strong in my nostrils, and I was afraid. I am not sure precisely why I allowed my fingers to close around the box containing that freakish object, but of one thing I was absolutely certain: I would not hold on to it any longer than I had to.
I closed the gun-room door, and stood for a moment in the hallway, breathing hard, feeling the dampness on my palms and scalp, unable to say why I felt as if I had just put a door between me and a live tiger.
I had two visitors during the afternoon. First came Faith, whose gentle knock I missed at first, busy as I was with folding away my clothes. When it came a second time, I realised what it was and went to open the door.
“Hallo,” I said, “do come in. Why is it one’s things never seem to go back into the same space they originally occupied?”
“Mary, please don’t go,” she said without preamble, sounding upset.
I sat down beside my pile of folded blouses. “Faith, I’ve been away for a week. I have a life to return to.”
She laughed, a sound with little humour in it. “Yes, don’t we all?”
“Faith,” I asked slowly, “are you being kept here … against your will?” It sounded too melodramatic for words, especially considering the woman I was talking to, and she reacted as I might have done.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Although I suppose you could say—Oh, it’s too complicated to explain! No,” she asserted, suddenly firm. “Nobody’s being kept against their will. This is the twentieth century, not some feudal state. But Jimmy’s touchy sometimes, and one thing he hates is to think his generosity is unappreciated. You’re an honoured guest, and for you to just shake his hand and take off, well, it seems gauche to him.”
“Faith, I have business to attend to.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“The repercussions would be considerable.”
“They will be here, too.”
“Such as what?” I demanded, suddenly a little touchy myself. “Will he put the rest of you in chains? Torture a few coolies in a fit of pique? Come after me with a pig spear? What repercussions are we describing, precisely?”
But she either couldn’t or wouldn’t say what he might do, and left shortly afterwards, glum at her inability to convince me to stay within the golden bars. Then an hour later, while I was sitting with a book in the shade of the garden, Gay found me, and asked me to stay as well.
I closed the book with a snap. “Gay, this concerted effort to keep me here is becoming a bit worrying. What is going on here?”
“Nothing at all, it’s only that Jimmy had plans for Sunday and is very disappointed to find them slipping away. He’s fond of you.”
“Fond or not, most people would be glad enough to see the back of an uninvited guest. I don’t wish to overstay my welcome.”
“But you’re here, and you interest him, and he’d like you to stay for a few days longer.”
I leant forward to look the woman in the eye. “Gay, I’m not one of Jimmy’s pets. I need to leave.” And so saying, I stood up and left the garden.
But before I was quite out of earshot, I thought I heard her say, “Good luck.”