“Remarkably enough, Jimmy seems to have avoided inheriting his father and grandfather’s worst excesses. He likes his toys, true, although with him it’s motorcars and aeroplanes—he’s got one of the sub-continent’s highest air fields. But the worst of the debauchery passed him by, and by some miracle he seems to have found some brains and backbone as well. He went away to university—America, funnily enough, rather than Oxford or Cambridge—then played in Europe, Africa, and South America for eight or nine years, developing his taste for big game. And then he turned his eyes on his home, and brought some ideas with him. In the fourteen years he’s been back, the kingdom has gone through enormous changes. Khanpur’s already got one of the best programmes of sanitation in the country, and Jimmy regularly sends boys out to school in England and America.

“He has two wives and a dozen or so concubines, eight or nine children, which are fairly conservative numbers for a man in his position. He’s sending his heir to school in England, and spends a certain amount of the state monies on improvements for the people—schools, water, sanitation. His heaviest personal expenditures, if the word ‘personal’ has any meaning in a princely state, have been on his zoo, used also for the breeding of exotic game animals, and on the restoration of what they call ‘The Forts,’ five miles outside of the city—actually two halves of the old Moghul palace, called Old Fort and New Fort, since there’s two or three centuries between them. Jimmy maintains the Palace proper in the city, where his womenfolk live, but he seems to prefer The Forts. Certainly whenever I’ve visited Khanpur, that’s where he’s been. It’s closer to the hunting.

“He’s made friends of most of the high-ranking political officers, and always invites visiting dignitaries for a shoot—generally the kind that ends up with a football-field covered with birds, although from time to time he’ll take the truly honoured on a tiger-hunt, with elephants and the lot. He has friends in high places, and a genius for combining European sensibilities with traditional Indian warrior virtues. He’s a Kshatriya, if that means anything to you.”

We nodded; the warrior caste was theoretically a step under the priestly Brahminical elite, but in practice they wielded the greater political and economic power, and were twice-born as the Brahmins were.

“So you are saying that the maharaja of Khanpur is beyond reproach?” Holmes asked.

“Well, no. I am telling you that to all appearances, he is a high-ranking aristocrat, loyal to the Crown, stable, and forward-looking. What, indeed, I have always regarded him.”

“‘To all appearances,’” Holmes repeated. “And beneath the appearances?”