Simla was the year-round headquarters of the British Indian Army and with it the Survey of India, both its open and its hidden faces. The government as a whole moved up here, bag and baggage, as soon as the temperature climbed in the plains. From March to November this small Olympus ruled all the land from the Red Sea to the hills of Burma—what Gandhi a few years earlier had scornfully called “government from the five hundredth floor”—and it bustled with life, bursting with political and social intrigue, ringing with the voices of English children and their ayahs, vibrating with the conversations of their mothers about the latest scandal or shortage or piece of amateur dramatics. Today, however, was the last day of January, and we found the hill-town bitter cold, largely shuttered, and nearly bereft of an English presence.

Hotel rooms for our kind, however, were plentiful, and we had our choice of locations, sizes, and services. We hiked into the native bazaar that lay below the town’s European centre, a tumbling hotch-potch of buildings that climbed onto one another’s backs and looked over one another’s shoulders, with the street entrance of one shop giving out onto a rooftop exit at the rear. We took a suite of rooms in a native-style hotel that did not look too poisonous, with a mat near the kitchen for Bindra. I indulged in my first true bath since the night of the hotel fire, eleven days before, although I had to renew my skin and hair dye at the end of it. And if the meal we were served was a bastard imitation of English-style mutton curry, the beds we were given were soft, the sheets thin with wear but fairly clean.

I settled under the thick cotton coverlets with a sigh of contentment. My hair was still damp, but I was warm, and the solid walls were a reassurance after canvas. Holmes shed his shoes and crawled into the shelter beside me.

“I found myself looking for the shop of Lurgan Sahib, as we came through the bazaar,” I told him. The mysterious Lurgan, who introduced young Kim to the Jewel Game and taught him many arcane arts, had disappeared from Simla some years before.

“The building itself is still there, though much changed.”

“What its walls could tell.” I lay looking at the play of firelight on the ceiling for a minute. “Holmes, do you think Bindra could be one of Nesbit’s? An agent of sorts?”

“An Irregular? One does have to wonder, but somehow I doubt it. The boy does not seem interested enough in us. I’ve never caught him trying to overhear a conversation, have you?”

“No. Or go through our things. He’s pretty much a force unto himself.”

“Of course, he could simply be remarkably subtle with it.”

“At his age?”