“Yes,” came the maharaja’s voice. “You see the problem. I am fully within my rights to execute my prisoner in whichever way I like. A pig spear is, I grant you, less usual than shooting or hanging, but can be as fast as either. And if my two English guests choose to interfere, my two guards may—inadvertently, tragically—interpret my commands to mean the death of the meddlers. Particularly if they refuse to lay down the revolvers both carry. Alas, how sad.”

“You would never get away with shooting us,” Nesbit told him, outraged.

“No, probably not. But can you see the maharaja of Khanpur condemned and hanged? I think not. The greatest punishment would be for me to abdicate in favour of my son, and live out my days in Monte Carlo or Nairobi. But,” he said, his fanatic eyes lit from within, “the English would never forget Khanpur. Never.”

My God, he was dead serious. I looked to Holmes, completely at a loss, but Nesbit distracted me, putting his head near mine that we might not be overheard.

“We have little choice,” he said.

“You don’t honestly think he’d go through with it?”

“Jimmy, on his own, would probably come to his senses before it was too late. But those guards have the determination of men under orders. They’d bring us down before he could speak up.”

Nesbit was a captain in the Indian Army; one thing he knew was the habits of soldiers. “So what do you suggest?”

“We can do nothing here, where we’d be a pair of ducks on the lake, awaiting the gun. Out in the field, however, anything can happen.”

“Nesbit, you swore that man would set Holmes free if only we declare our citizenship. Let’s do that and be done with this farce.”

“I said, if we publicly declare his identity. What public have we here?” His green eyes drilled into mine; I tore my gaze away, looked at the two guards with their motionless rifles, looked at the maharaja with his triumphant smile, then at Holmes, standing with his hands tied together, saying nothing. His attitude brought home to me how very far from England we were. One grows accustomed to being the citizen of no mean country; to find oneself in the hands of a person to whom that signifies nothing is humbling. And frightening.

“He’s mad.”

“I fear so.”

“And your only suggestion is that we take to the field and improvise?” We both heard my unvoiced scorn: This is the best an Army captain can come up with? This is the flower of British Intelligence, heir to Kimball O’Hara and Colonel Creighton?

On the other hand, I was the student and partner of Sherlock Holmes, sister-in-law to the renowned Mycroft, and I had nothing in my repertoire, either.