Scandal in the Night (12 page)

“Hold,” he said, even as his hands were closing about her waist to lift her safely down. And he was not thinking of how light and nimble she was, weighing next to nothing in his arms, an enchanting combination of grit and gossamer. He was not thinking that his rough horseman’s hands could nearly span her sashed, soft, muslin-clad waist. And he most definitely was not thinking about the fact that his fingers had detected the somehow erotic restraint of boned stays under Miss Rowan’s trim little waistline.

Because all the thinking in the world could not contain the heat that whipped across his body like a lash, stinging him with its intensity the moment he had touched her. He had wanted nothing more than to pull her long, lithe back against his front, and whisper all the ways
he
would never disappoint her. And show her all the clever ways he could please her.

But when he had taken a deep breath and could think again, he realized that despite all obvious temptations not to, he was going to have to do a
much
better job of maintaining Tanvir Singh’s character.

So he did what a roguish, nomadic horse trader would do. He smiled and picked the lock.

“Allow me, mem.” He made very short work of opening the gate, partially because the mechanism was old and well-known to him—he had practiced on this very lock when he had first learned the art—and partially because his skills with the steel tools he kept hidden discreetly in the folds of his turban had grown considerably over the intervening years.

A sort of surprise, more curious than shocked, lit her peach-white face as he stepped back and gestured for her to pass through.

“Did you just pick that lock?”

He bowed in acknowledgment. “I assisted it in opening, as thou seemed to want it opened. Was I wrong to do so, mem?”

“Oh, no.” But she was looking at him with new eyes. Perhaps even admiring eyes. “Thank you.”

A low excitement began to throb through him, like the slow beating of a drum. “Thou art most welcome. The begum’s garden is most beautiful in the evenings.”

He thought now she might be done with him, and simply brush by, anxious to be alone in the comfort of the dark to cry the tears of humiliation glinting in her eyes. But she didn’t rush by this time. She walked cautiously around him, before she turned to look back to level him with those solemn, but now ever so slightly defiant, gray eyes.

“Are you coming?”

The heat of the lash faded into the steady roar of fire warming his gut. Oh, yes, he was coming with her. Most certainly. “I would be honored.”

Mere curiosity, he lied to himself, and politeness. She really oughtn’t to be left alone in the dark garden. Who knew if she was perhaps despondent enough to cast herself into the dark, slowly swirling depths of the river on the other side of the wall? Who knew what such a quixotic girl was capable of?

That was what he told himself, rehearsing excuses and apologies should anyone find them together. Because it was wrong for him to be alone with her. And he knew it.

And still he stayed.

Because she wasn’t despondent. The glimmer of sorrow he thought he had seen in her eyes had ebbed, transforming itself, until she had worked herself into being marvelously, gloriously angry. It animated her in an entirely different way than her calm surety, and lit her northern flame from within, as she strode along the length of the reflecting pool, a bright flicker reflected in the cool dark surface of the water.

“Damnation.” She let out a long, gusty breath. “I heartily dislike being made a fool of.”

Her voice had regained the full, rolling cadence of her Scottish lilt, and Thomas was even more smitten. She was rather magnificent in her ire. “Thou art right to be angry, mem.” He used the familiar, diminutive address even though he knew he shouldn’t dare such intimacy. Even though she should not permit it.

But she made no objection at all to his familiarity. She was focused almost entirely on what she clearly saw as more important issues. “I
am
angry,” she said with a sort of fresh wonder, as if the emotion were something of a revelation to her. “Because the lieutenant is a right proper bastard. And my aunt is not any better.”

He was shocked by her strong language. And pleased. He gave her a smile of deep appreciation for her mettle. “Very good, mem. This is an English word I do know—‘bastard.’ The officers are very fond of this word. But I think you should not know it.”

She heard the wry amusement in his tone and smiled, her indignation falling away before her own good humor. “Well,
huzoor,
the cold fact of the matter is that the world is full of bastards—quite as many in India as there ever were in Scotland. And I am of the mind that it behooves a lady to be able to spot them.”

So incongruously, deliciously militant in her soft confection of a gown. She looked for all the world like a soft, spun-sugar meringue of a girl, but he was happy to see there was something of Scottish granite beneath the airy layers. “I am of the same mind, mem, though I am sorry that there should be a need for you to know of such men.”

“Oh, so am I. I am heartily sick of them.” She meandered to a stop next to the cool gurgle of the fountain, and drew in a deep, audible breath. “How much did you hear?”

He tipped his head to the side, a small gesture of mitigation. “Enough.”

“Enough to understand they—my aunt and Lieutenant Birkstead—are having an affair?” She looked at him directly. “My aunt is having an affair with the man my uncle-in-law was only this evening recommending
I
take for a husband.” She took another deep breath, and exhaled into the night as if she could blow the memory of what she had heard away. “Well. At least now I have the answer as to why my aunt lavishes me with her contempt. I thought it was all for my mother, for the embarrassment of who my mother had chosen to become by marrying my imprudent, impoverished father—a nobody. But it turns out she hates me for my own self.”

He tried not to react to the ache hidden under the brisk self-awareness in her voice. To do so seemed indiscreet, an intrusion upon her. Yet it was impossible for him not to have sympathy for her. If he could, he would take her pain away.

And she felt it, too, the strange sympathetic intimacy between them. “I am very sorry,
huzoor.
I have no idea why I’m telling you all this. I’m sure it’s rather rude to be spilling one’s troubles out like marbles from one’s pocket, loose and skittering about underfoot.”

What a marvelous image. “Thou mayest spill thy marbles as thou likest, mem. But first thou must tell me, what are ‘marbles’?”

“Oh.” Her face had lightened momentarily, just as he had hoped. “It is a game one plays with little round pieces of polished glass. One shoots the marble from outside a circle—”

“Ah, yes. We have this game for children here, too—but the pieces are made out of clay.”

She smiled, and blew out a sigh of laughter, as if she had been holding too much inside for too long. As if she were becoming comfortable with their rapport. “It is rather mortifying to learn truths about people, isn’t it? And especially mortifying to hear unflattering truths about oneself. And it’s certainly more than mortifying to hear oneself spoken about with such contempt.”

“They have wounded thee.”

“Perhaps.” She shrugged up one delicate shoulder, to show him she was determined not to let the lieutenant or her aunt’s shallow desires bother her anymore. “I’ll live. The truth is, I’ve heard worse.”

He felt his smile widen and tip up one side of his face. This was the rapport he felt, the deep sense of understanding. “So have I.”

In response, she gifted him with a small, bittersweet smile of camaraderie. “I imagine you have.”

He spread his hands in the air before him—his gesture to show
he
didn’t care. “The lieutenant sahib excels at this contempt for all of Hindustan, not just me.”

A small dimple arose from the far corner of her mouth and pressed itself into her gingersnap cheek. “It’s nice to know I’m in such good company. And now that I have recovered some of my equanimity, I note that you,
huzoor,
did not seem surprised at all by this revelation of my aunt and the lieutenant’s perfidy.”

He would have shrugged in dismissal, or made any of the many other gestures he had perfected to say the lieutenant’s behavior was of no import to him, but his red-gold goddess, Miss Catriona Rowan, was looking at him with such steady, uncompromising expectation—an air of almost savage serenity—that made him understand she was brave enough for the fullness of the vicious, ugly truth.

“All the world and his wife, as they say in Hindustan, from the meanest beggar to the wealthiest merchant in the bazaar, knows that the lieutenant sahib is a lying jackal of a man, lower in honor than the lowest beetle upon a dung heap.”

Oh, she liked that. Her smile broke across her face as brilliant and colorful as a pink-gold sunrise. “And does all the world and every wife in Saharanpur know with whom the jackal lies?”

Thomas spread his hands again. “The world, and especially his wife, has eyes and ears and mouths. And relatives.”

“Talkative relatives in the bazaar?”

“And the cantonment. Sooner or later, everyone in Saharanapur, and most especially his wife, comes to the bazaar.” It was a wonderful, well-timed game, this little match of word play.

“Except the Englishmen? But clearly they”—she gestured back down the path the way they had come to indicate her aunt and the lieutenant—“are not very discreet, if they are having assignations at dinner parties. Surely I cannot be the only person to find them out?”

“There are many things that many people may know, that they choose not to understand, or to speak of.” The subtle politics of life for a subjected, subservient people were complicated. As were the less subtle politics of the ambitious people of the cantonment. “Many fear the lieutenant, even if they cannot respect him.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” But then she shook her head. “Well, I shan’t fear him, or respect him, either. Oh, Lord.” A new thought blanked her pale face. “What about my uncle, Lord Summers, the resident commissioner? Do you think he knows? Please tell me I am not a pawn in some awful game he is playing with my aunt?” She shook her head again, and threw up her hand as if she could ward off that particular evil. “Please tell me he wasn’t pushing me at the lieutenant just to try and spite her?”

This was a possibility that Thomas had not thought of himself. She was clever, this girl, this ruthlessly insightful gossamer confection. “What sort of man would willingly let his wife make love to another man, if he knew of it? Lord Summers does not strike me as such a man, mem. I do not think he knows.”

She contemplated his answer for a moment, before she looked to him again. “Well, then, before I’m tempted or flattered into making a complete ass of myself over a man again, are there any more dung beetles masquerading as gentlemen, whom I should avoid? My relations seem anxious to marry me off, but I think it prudent from this point on to be a trifle less trusting of their judgment. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Despite her forthright words, she could not hope to keep her true feelings from him, who had trained himself to watch and understand. There was still hurt pooling in the corner of her eyes, and held in the tight set of her jaw and in the way she pleated her lips between her teeth. And especially in the way she rearranged the folds of her gown just so, trying to impose some small measure of order on an unruly, disorderly world.

“Thou hast had a great shock.”

She accepted his sympathy philosophically. “Yes, I suppose I have. It
was
quite shocking to find that my aunt is cuckolding my uncle. And with one of his subordinate officers, to boot. Well, I’m glad I shall no longer have to find a reason to like him—the lieutenant—or her, for that matter. It brings me to mind of a line from my favorite book.
‘She was returned to all the pleasure of her former dislike.’
That’s me.”

Oh, she had a sly sense of humor, his red-gold goddess. “I am glad you are able to smile. I feared the lieutenant sahib had upset you with his thoughtless words.”

“He did. And so did my aunt—I’m not forgetting her share in this tawdry affair. But I’m striving to get over it, to overcome the blow to my pride, which must be more considerable than I had previously imagined.”

She was funny as well as sweet. He could not remember the last time he had even wanted to talk to any girl like this, let alone an English girl. But he
did
want to talk to her, because when she looked at him, she seemed to see
him,
Thomas, and not the man he had so carefully constructed out of whole turban cloth. She did not see just another native, an exhibit in a menagerie, a dumb animal who did not understand her language, or empathize with her thoughts.

It was enchanting. And deeply seductive.

He
was enchanted and seduced by this fey, ginger, spun-sugar confection of a girl in the dress that made her look like she was about to fly away and mingle with the mischievous northern fairies.

“If I may be so bold, Memsahib Rowan, the lieutenant is a fool. Thou art clearly the most beautiful woman in attendance here this evening. Thou lookest both enchanted and enchanting.”

“Thank you. You are very kind.” Her head tucked down before she looked up at him from under her gold-tipped lashes. A blush the color of pale apricots was blossoming across her cheek. She really was not used to even so mild a flirtation. “The dress is very pretty isn’t it? A very prettily made piece of irony. I hope you can appreciate that these are called
imbécile
sleeves.” She fluffed up the wide puff of one sleeve as she pronounced the French word. “And I fear they made me very silly and imbecilic indeed, thinking I could be like
them
.”

She gave the word a particular emphasis, as if in obvious evidence that she never had been like them—like all the clubby little misses gathered in closed-shouldered clumps in the pavilion.

“A very pretty irony, indeed.” Thomas could not find it in him to care that Tanvir Singh ought not to understand such a subtle linguistic joke, and he laughed for her, if for no other reason than to see her smile again. And to encourage her to continue to confide in him.