Scandal in the Night (19 page)

What in the hell was he going to do with himself if she could not be made to see reason? If he couldn’t convince her of his love? The thought left a bleak, gaping hole through his chest.

“Certainly not.” Cassandra was just as insistent. “I will not do either of you the discourtesy, nor the disservice, of leaving you alone. The dinner hour can be postponed.”

Thomas rubbed his hand across the whiskers already coming in along the steep angles of his cheekbones, and then up into his short, shorn English hair, as if he could chafe some semblance of English civility and patience back into his brain.

But it was impossible. And the situation did not call for English caution and restraint. It called for sly Punjabi wiles. And a subtle display of force.

He turned the force of his gaze on his sister-in-law, looking down at her from under his brows. “Cassandra, I am not above picking you up, and putting you bodily from this room. But I would rather not. I will pledge to you that I will not move from that chair”—he pointed to a straight-backed chair across the room from Cat—“if you will please let me speak to Miss Cates alone, for a few minutes only, about a very private matter.”

Cassandra almost gasped in affront—not even his concession could blunt his rather primitive threat.

Across the room, Cat made no sound, but she eyed him warily, measuring him out like a coffin maker. Whatever it was she saw in him, it helped her make up her mind. “I think it best, your ladyship. Perhaps we might leave the door open and Nanny Gaynor can sit with us?”

“Privately, Cat,” Thomas reiterated.

Cat made an impatient sound. “Nanny Gaynor is as old as Methuselah’s grandmother, and as deaf as an out-of-tune piano, Mr. Jellicoe.” She sounded tired, and perhaps a little baffled. As if the constant clash of remembrance and reality had exhausted her as much as it had him.

“An out-of-tune piano?” He had to smile at that. Even closed up here in his brother’s walled manor, hiding in her gray, she had a unique way of seeing the world.

“My point, Mr. Jellicoe, is that her presence will serve the proprieties, and preserve my reputation—which is all that I have to myself at present. Will it not, my lady?”

Cassandra conceded with as much ill grace as Thomas had never thought to see in the normally elegant woman. “I suppose so.”

He wasn’t going to wait for his sister-in-law to change her mind. “Good. Off you go.” And if he did not do exactly as he had threatened and put her bodily from the room, then he did something only slightly less physical—he put his hands on his sister-in-law’s delicate shoulders, and very firmly
propelled
her from the room. “We’ll wait here for your Nanny Gaynor,” he said equitably. And then he shut the door firmly in his astonished sister-in-law’s face.

“Mr. Jellicoe.” Cat’s voice told him she was already regretting her accession to his wishes. Or perhaps she was finding the cooled embers of her once redheaded temper again.

Good. She had always been magnificent when she was riled. Thomas held on to the knob as Cassandra rattled it from the other side—there was no lock upon a nursery door—and attempted to rile Cat up a little more. “Don’t you think you could manage to call me by my name, now that we’re alone?”

“No,” Cat insisted in a low voice. “Or did you want me to call you Tanvir Singh, because he was the man I knew—or thought I knew—Mr. Jellicoe? And we’re not alone,” she added in a furious whisper. “Lady Jeffrey can still hear you.”

“I told her—I told them all—we were acquainted.”

Cassandra’s livid voice came through the panel. “I don’t care if you are
engaged,
let alone acquainted, Thomas. A gentleman does not seek to put himself apart with a young lady no matter his degree of acquaintance. This is
not
how a gentleman acts.”

Thomas didn’t answer. He kept his gaze on Cat, and softened his eyes, letting his smile hitch up one side of his face in the way that had always had power with her. “Do you think we need to tell her that I’m the very farthest thing from a gentleman?”

“I think she already knows.” Oh, it was prim and starchy, her pert rejoinder, but there was at least a trace of the tart, pomegranate sweetness sneaking its way through the repressive layers of gray. That glimpse of her wry humor gave him, if not hope, then at least enough encouragement to forge onward.

Out in the corridor, Cassandra was doing her best to be the opposite of encouraging. “If you do not open this door this instant, I’m going to get James,” she threatened. “
And
your father, Thomas, if that is what it will take to make you act like a gentleman.”

“It’s going to take a lot more than that,” he answered. But he kept smiling at Cat. Because it was damn fine to look at her, gray dress, dull, dark hair, and all.

She held her tongue and managed to resist his rough attempt at charm, and retreated to the farthest corner of the room, as if she wanted to put as much distance between them—figurative as well as literal—as possible.

Thomas respected that need, and stayed put for the moment, leaning his weight back against the door, listening until he heard Cassandra’s angry, rapid little footfalls retreat down the stair. He reckoned he had anywhere between five and twenty minutes alone with Cat at most before his brother came charging back up those stairs and either put paid to this interview, or put him bodily out of the house. “Miss Cates is greatly valued by Lady Jeffrey,” James had said. Clearly, Miss Cates was greatly
protected
by Lady Jeffrey, as well.

And since this little tête-à-tête was like to be his only opportunity to see Cat in her natural habitat, as it were, as Miss Anne Cates, he began a slow, circuitous promenade about the nursery, poking his head into the open door of the schoolroom in an effort to divine all of her secrets from the everyday objects with which she surrounded herself.

A glance told him the nursery and schoolroom looked like no other nursery he had ever seen—including his own, growing up the privileged and well-tutored son of an earl. Bookcases had been built along the entire length of one wall, and filled with an amazing variety of books. Thomas noticed that they were placed by topic, with the natural sciences separate from literature, for example, and that a variety of specimens, living and dead, were arranged on wide, open shelves. Drawings, diagrams, and charts filled the rest of the walls, as well as the back of the movable slate board. One large glass bowl was home to a group of floating tadpoles, while another housed some dark, spotted newts. In the sunny window was a birdcage so ornate it looked as if it might have once held a half-dozen lovebirds in some maharajah’s
zenana.
At present it housed only a slumberous family of field mice. He’d never seen the like of it in his life.

And all this had been wrought by Miss Anne Cates. How extraordinary. How singular.

Or perhaps not so singular. Perhaps she had done much the same thing in India, with the Summerses’ children. She had been forever taking them out for rides and adventures, stopping to collect flowers and all sorts of insects. They could never have spent so much time together, she and he, if they had not been accompanying the children. But he had had only glimpses of what her life might have been like within the walls of the residency. For all he knew, she may have kept ferrets in cages, or charmed snakes from large reed baskets. It bothered him to no end—he who had been trained to see and understand the secrets people preferred to keep hidden—to realize he knew so little about her. To realize that he had invented her—his red-gold warrior goddess—at the expense of the very real woman behind the steely veneer. “You are utterly remarkable, Catriona Rowan.”

She made a sound of depreciation very much like a scoff. “‘Remarkable for that piece of good breeding peculiar to natural Britons, to wit, defiance’?”

Thomas hadn’t expected philosophy. “I don’t know if I would say that your most remarkable quality is defiance, but—”

“No. It’s a quote from Steele.” At his obviously blank look, she clarified. “Richard Steele the writer. In
The Tatler
.” She shut her eyes and made a minute shake of her head in dismissal. “You don’t read much.”

“I’ve been out of the country.” He’d been out of his mind, but that was another subject entirely, his magnificent obsession—his single-minded pursuit of his invented goddess—she who did not want to be pursued.

His attempt at humor softened the corner of her mouth, but she was still all governess and not goddess. “He wrote at the beginning of the last century. And there were editions of his work in the residency library in Saharanpur, so it has nothing to do with being out of the country.”

“It has everything to do with being a nomad. But I’m glad to hear you speak of the residency in Saharanpur.” He left the schoolroom doorway and began to move slowly toward her, trying to not appear as if he were stalking her. But he was.

And she knew it. “Mr. Jellicoe. You promised Lady Jeffrey that you would stay put in that chair.” She pointed to the piece of furniture in question.

“I lied.” He didn’t even turn around to look at it.

“Ah, yes.” A marmalade eyebrow lifted with precise, elegant disdain. “You’re very good at that.”

He welcomed the quick pain of her wicked little slice of truth. At least they were getting to the contested heart of the matter. “Thank you. But you don’t mean it as a compliment, whereas I do. You’ve become quite adept at lying yourself.”

She would not admit his point. “No. I’m not like you. I’m not clever the way you are. I can’t speak forty languages, or tell if people are lying. I can’t pretend to be something I’m not.”

“You’re pretending to be Miss Anne Cates.” He stopped along a shelf to pick up an open book—poetry by Walter Scott—before he let himself glance at her. “Just as I had to create the identity of Tanvir Singh.”

“I didn’t create a new identity—a new religion and a new life, with new habits and customs. I’m not trying to convince people I’m something I am not. I only took a new name, but I’m still the same beneath it. I still talk the same and think the same and live the same. I’m still only a governess, Mr. Jellicoe.”

That time he was sure she said his surname to remind herself, to shore up her defenses against him. But he was a seasoned campaigner. He’d laid siege to taller walls. “I think you’ve always been much more than just a governess, Cat.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said.

“We’re alone now, Cat. You don’t have to act like Miss Anne Cates in front of me. Why can you not just be yourself?”

The look she gave him was nearly as blistering as it was bleak. “You of all people, Mr. Jellicoe, ought to know that to be oneself, as one pleases, is a luxury few people can afford. And I am not one of them.”

He pounced upon the excuse. “Yes. Yes, you are right. Just as I could not afford the luxury of being myself with you in Saharanpur.” But a different spark of instinct flared into flame as she reached out to trace the liquid silver path of a raindrop that had just begun to patter against the windowpanes. “I would take care to stay away from the windows, Cat.” He reached for her. “Your shooter may prove to be a sniper.”

Cat drew away abruptly. “A sniper?” She frowned at him in confusion.

“Is this a word the well-read governess doesn’t know?” He took her lack of response as a yes, and clarified. “A sniper is one who fires from a place of concealment. A sharpshooter.”

“I see.” She tucked that bit of information away in that blade-sharp brain of hers. “I think not.”

Something about her calm rejection of his theory set off more warning flares in the back of his brain. He stepped around a low chair, trying to find a better vantage point from which to see her face, cast in obscurity by the low, flat afternoon light. “You don’t think one can shoot from a place of concealment, or you don’t think your shooter is a sniper?”

She hesitated, directing a hard, assessing glance at his face—trying to read him—before she answered. “The second.”

Clever girl. But did she know? Had she guessed who it was? He wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her and protect her when the realization came, or when he had to tell her. But when he moved toward her, she stepped away again, meandering down the shelves. Keeping her distance. “Why do you think that?”

“If he didn’t hit us on the lawn, either his gun is inadequate for the purpose, or he’s just a very, very bad shot. Either way, I don’t think he’s going to be able to shoot me through a third-story dormer window across such an expanse as all that.” She gestured out across the empty lawns.

Thomas wasn’t conceding an inch of that open space. “So you admit he was shooting at you?”

Her eyes, those clear, pale gray eyes, cut to his sharply—another assessment—as if she were trying to figure out if she could trust him. Looking at him the same exact way he was looking at her. They were circling around each other like two wary elephants, slow and tentative, all but lifting their trunks in the air, searching out a whiff of advantage.

“You were on the lawn alone.” He began to lay out his case. “Moving away from the party when the first shot came—well away from the rest of us. I ran to you after that first shot.”

She shook her head, and lifted up one shoulder to reject the idea, uncomfortable with even thinking about what might have happened. Of how differently it might have turned out. She blew out a long, ragged breath, and for a moment he thought he had gotten through. For a moment he thought her lofty ramparts were finally beginning to crumble under his careful siege.

But then she retreated behind her walls and said, “I guess we will never know.”

“No.” He contradicted her immediately. “We will know. I’ll know. I’ll find out. I’ve been thinking about nothing else, and narrowing down the possibilities. Easy enough to do, as we had only one real mutual enemy between us. And the others are dead.”

She turned toward him at that. “No,” was all she said—a sharp, emphatic denial. She stared at him, livid in her perfect, silent stillness.

He had the entirety of her attention now—all that well-used, well-honed intellect focused upon him. He stepped nearer to speak. “It must be the lieutenant, Cat. Birkstead must have followed you here. No one else needs you dead.”