“Ah, Holmes is it? In, lad, in. Close the door behind you.”

Sherlock did as he was told, but as he pushed the door shut he caught sight of another figure in the room: a man standing in front of the window with a glass of sherry in his hand. The sunlight refracted in rainbow shards from the cut glass of the schooner.

“Mycroft?” Sherlock said, amazed.

His elder brother turned towards him, and a smile flickered across his face so rapidly that if Sherlock had blinked at the wrong moment then he might have missed it. “Sherlock. You’ve grown.”

“So have you,” Sherlock said. Indeed, his brother had put on weight. He was nearly as plump as the Headmaster, but his suit was tailored to hide it rather than accentuate it. “You came in Father’s carriage.”

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. “How on earth did you deduce that, young man?”

Sherlock shrugged. “I noticed the parallel creases in your trousers where the upholstery pressed them, and I remember that Father’s carriage has a tear in the upholstery that was repaired rather clumsily a few years ago. The impression of that repair is pressed into your trousers, next to the creases.” He paused. “Mycroft, where’s Father?”

The Headmaster harrumphed to attract attention back to him. “Your father is—"

“Father won’t be coming,” Mycroft interrupted smoothly. “His Regiment was sent out to India to strengthen the existing military force. There has been some unrest in the North West Frontier region. You know where that is?”

“Yes. We’ve studied India in Geography lessons and in History.”

“Good boy.”

“I didn’t realize the natives there were causing problems again,” the Headmaster rumbled. “Not been in The Times, that’s for sure.”

“It’s not the Indians,” Mycroft confided. “When we took the country back from the East India Company the soldiers out there transferred back under Army control. They’ve found the new regime to be a lot... stricter... than the one they were used to. There’s been a great deal of bad feeling, and the government has decided to drastically increase the size of the force in India to give them an example of what real soldiers are like. It’s bad enough to have the Indians rebelling; a mutiny inside the British Army is unthinkable.”