“Because as an Englishwoman, you would stand out in the bazaars more than I do.”

“Very well,” I said, surprising him. “But if you haven’t returned by six o’clock, I shall walk out of the hotel’s front doors and come looking for you.”

He believed me.

I went back upstairs to our first-floor rooms, locking the door behind me. I was never entirely comfortable when Holmes took off like that—which was odd, considering how often it happened. But that afternoon I wandered the rooms, unable to settle to the work at hand, picking up objects and putting them down again. At one point I came across the small lumpy envelope Nesbit had given us, containing the amulets. Holmes, I noticed, had taken his already. I took the other, fastening it around my neck, and went to the looking-glass to inspect it.

The silver charm looked like the sort of thing a tourist might buy, or a poor Indian. It was the kind of decoration sold at any of a thousand shops in the city, crudely worked but not unattractive. I rather liked it, in fact, and although I hadn’t intended actually to wear the thing, changed my mind. Its secret-society overtones, which I found somewhere between quaint and silly, nonetheless held a sneaking kind of reassurance. I clasped my hand around it, then laughed at my fancy and got out my books.

I spent the afternoon immersed in Hindi grammar, deciphering the written letters and trying to make sense of the vocabulary. When my mind began to stutter, I rested it by conjuring coins from mid-air and practising the hand movements of deception, then relaxed with the headlines on that day’s Pioneer. Halfway through the afternoon, the hotel’s shoe-seller came with another selection of footwear, but I dismissed him—gently—after I had examined his ideas of footwear suitable for European ladies.

When he had left, I rang for a cool drink and a map of the country. With commendable promptness I received a pitcher of some sweet, mango-flavoured drink (with no ice) and a crisply folded map of India, which I spread out onto the floor. I sipped and studied and passed the afternoon without too much dwelling on the possibility of snipers’ cross-hairs following my husband’s back, but I will admit that my heart rose when I heard his key enter the lock.

“Thirty years,” were his words of greeting. “Thirty-two years since I was here, during which time the city has gone from Moghul backwater to capital city, and still the same shopkeepers cling to their corners.”

“You had success,” I noted.

“Indeed.”

“And yet your hands bear no parcels.”

“Certainly not. To walk out the door of this particular hotel in native garb would be noteworthy. Better to slip away as ourselves, and drop those identities behind us in the bazaar.”

“You found a bolt-hole?”