Scandal in the Night (24 page)

But he was too late.

He spotted her instantly—her long, lithe silhouette stood out starkly against the bright orange light of the conflagration. He had almost caught her. Almost.

At that point she had been on foot and even running full out, she was not nearly as fast as he, mounted on horseback. But she kept on running. She did not so much as pause at the sight of the building burning down before her, but rushed in headlong. Her stupid, wide, gray English skirts brushed against smoldering door frames, a walking rag waiting to catch fire.

But in she went.

He vaulted to the ground and tore after her, but people were streaming out of the building in her wake, running against him like a tide. The deputy resident, Fielding, was trying to stop the servants from fleeing, and organize some sort of bucket chain for water, but he was shouting the wrong words.

“You there!” Fielding’s hand clawed at his arm. The deputy resident was white with fear and pink cheeked in consternation. “Make these fellows listen. We’ve got to get the furniture out of the reception rooms if possible. And keep the devils from stealing everything they can carry.”

Thomas slowed only to roar a few words at Lord Summers’s
sircar,
threatening him with eight kinds of invective to perform his bloody job, but by the time he had reached the reception room there was no sign of her. No sign on the long, circular stairwell. No sign in the other rooms of the ground floor or the rear courtyard.

More servants were coming out of the house, and he pushed them toward the doors to the veranda, asking in both Hindi and Urdu after Memsahib Rowan, until he saw the eldest Summers boy, Arthur, who was moving across the lawn gripping his young sister Charlotte. Behind them was a young amah with the youngest boy, George.

“Where is Catriona?” he shouted to them as the crackle and chatter of the greedy flames grew louder.

“She went for Alice,” the boy croaked out, gesturing hopelessly in the direction they had come.

“Where?”

“Above. I don’t know. She led us down and went back. She said she’d be right back.” Arthur doubled over with his hands on his knees, hacking out the smoke fumes. Charlotte had begun to sob, her tears leaving a trail through the soot clinging to her cheeks, so Thomas picked her up, and steered Arthur farther away, onto the lawn where small crowds were beginning to gather—servant women huddling in clumps, clutching each other, and people from the cantonment looking on in passive dismay. On the far south side of the building, servants were still hauling out furniture onto the lawn—working under the direction of company men who used all their energies to save the priceless antiques instead of to ensure that women and children were safe.

Jackasses. Bastards. Useless parasites. Thomas cursed them into his beard.

Thomas turned back to enter the house the same way he had exited, but the veranda roof collapsed down in front of him in a shower of splintering timber and sparks. He shielded his face with his arm in front of him, but he circled toward the back of the house, looking for another entrance, another way to get in and get to her. There had to be a way.

He ran along the edge of the formal garden just in time to see a dark silhouette of a man stumble out of the building in a cloud of smoke and fall tumbling onto the lawn.

“Cat.” Even as he ran toward the figure he knew it could not be she.

And he was right. It was Lieutenant Birkstead, his coat gone and his sleeve smeared in soot and blood. Enough blood to mean he’d been shot.

In a fire?

Thomas hauled the man to his feet by what was left of his shirtfront. “Who else is still in there? Did you see Miss Rowan? Or Alice? She went for the child.” If Birkstead had made his way out, perhaps she could, too.

Birkstead wrenched away from him as if Thomas were the one who had shot him. “Get your hands off me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Thomas let Birkstead go, but pressed him for an answer. “I’m talking about Miss Rowan and Alice.”

“No,” Birkstead answered, but something lit in his eyes—some spark of understanding or realization. The bastard was lying. Thomas was sure of it. Everything about Birkstead’s defensive posture—his good arm was out in front of him as if he would ward Thomas off—was wrong. And he had a bullet hole in his other arm.

A bullet hole Cat might have put there. She’d had that bloody gun with her when she’d left the encampment.

“Where is she?” The words wound out of Thomas’s chest in a deep, animalistic growl, full of threat and the promise of savagery.

“I don’t know. I swear.” Birkstead was scrambling backward, his boots slipping in the grass, kicking up debris, trying to escape into the darkness of the garden behind. “Jesus. If I had I would have—”

Thomas went after him. He had no time for patience. He had no time for logic and sanity. He had no time for anything but brutal, direct, punishing force. He didn’t even reach for his weapons.

He sent Birkstead reeling to the ground with one savage blow, making good on his promise to himself to rearrange the lieutenant’s face. But despite the fresh blood gushing from his broken nose, Birkstead tried to scrabble to his feet, fighting to get away with a wild, feral strength. Thomas closed his mind to everything but finding the man’s weaknesses—the lieutenant had already lost blood, seeping out of the wound on his arm and soaking into his sleeve, and he had a lung full of smoke, and no matter his desperation, he wasn’t going to last long.

And Thomas had learned to fight dirty. There was no sense in wasting anything like honor or fair play on a jackal like Birkstead. He had the lieutenant jerked up by his hair and in a choke hold without breathing heavily. “What have you done with her?”

Even as Birkstead’s hands clawed at the forearm Thomas had wrapped around his neck, Thomas felt nothing for him. Nothing. He wrenched Birkstead’s wounded arm back brutally. “Where?” he roared into the man’s ear. “Where?”

Birkstead’s only response was a howl of pain, but desperation and fear had made something less than human out of Thomas, and he had nothing of pity or patience left. Viciousness coiled through him like a snake, pure and uncivilized. He rammed his elbow with brutal force into Birkstead’s bullet wound.

And the bastard didn’t even get a full cry out of his mouth before he collapsed, slumping to the ground unconscious.

There was no time to regret his rash stupidity in giving way so easily to violence, so Thomas dropped Birkstead to the ground, and immediately returned to searching the outline of the building, scanning the windows above for any sign of movement, any sign of life—some clue as to where to search for her—before he plunged inside.

The narrow hallway was choked with smoke, but he crouched low and pushed on, trying to reckon which way Birkstead had come. “Above,” Arthur Summers had said, so Thomas searched for a stairwell, for any way to get him to the upper stories.

Stupid, stupid to have let his fear goad him into knocking Birkstead out. Infinitely, moronically male of him to be so driven by rank, riotous jealousy. Ruinous of him to waste his best hope of finding her.

He should have dragged the bleeding bastard back in with him, forced him to show him the way where thick plumes of smoke were curling down from the ceiling, searing into his lungs, obscuring his sight and burning his eyes.

Thomas unwrapped his turban to cover his mouth, and felt his way to the foot of the servants’ stairs at the back of the house. But the upper floors appeared to be nearly engulfed in fire. Everywhere he looked was nothing but heat and smoke and red-orange flame that drove him back step by step, until he was stumbling down the stairs, propelled out by the fury of the fire, until he was at the outer steps again.

Birkstead was gone—crawled back into whatever bolt-hole he had come out of—so there was no one Thomas could ask, no one on whom he could unleash his impotent fury.

Then, the very top edge of the outer walls of the building began to waver as the interior supporting structure was fully consumed. Thomas watched in stunned disbelief, numbed by his inability to do anything but stand as the walls slowly crumpled, collapsing in upon themselves with a moaning roar.

In the wake of the strange, suspended numbness, a wave of heat pushed him backward even as his feet were moving forward, not accepting the evidence before his eyes. He had to get in, so he could get Catriona out. But there was nothing but flame and seething embers. Nothing left to enter into.

The residency was gone. And so was she.

No. He fought back the pain tearing at his chest. She couldn’t be gone. He would have known. He would have felt the loss of her if she were truly taken by the fire. He would have felt the irreversible rending of his very soul.

But he still felt hope—a swift, though defensive and delusional, surety that she must have survived. She
must.
She was too determined, too alive. Too young. He would not allow fate to be so very cruel.

So he who had defied fate for the entirety of his adult life had stayed, walking around the edge of the burning hulk of the building, doing what he did best, questioning every single servant he could find, in at least a dozen languages. What had they seen? Where had they been? Who had they spoken to?

“Burned,” some people said. The whole family was assumed by many to have perished in the fire.

“No,” he had insisted stupidly. “Arthur and Charlotte and George got out. They were all out on the lawn. I
saw
them. I spoke to the boy, Arthur, who said Miss Rowan had gone back for Alice, but said she would bring her right out. Someone must have seen them.”

No one had. Servants shook their heads and looked fearful, and the company people closed ranks, shutting him out with cold shoulders and haughty looks that asked what business was it of an itinerant horse trader to be asking questions of their resident’s family?

He left them to their willful ignorance. If they wouldn’t help him, he would help himself. He would find the information he needed on his own. He always had. But hours he had spent, combing through the wreckage, trying to find the amah he had seen with the children, pushing hope against foolish hope, until there was nothing more to be done. Until he had to face the truth. Until all he could do was hold off the bottomless black well of despair that threatened to overtake him.

The damage was done. His heart had been pulled apart not in one swift, painful rending, but slowly, through the long night. The chill of loss had crept upon him by slow, aching degrees like a killing frost, withering everything in its path.

And so he had found his horse, and mounted, and turned its head to the north, and rode out of the Doab Valley and into the night trying desperately to outrace the voracious pain of oblivion before it could catch him and consume him whole.

Chapter Fourteen

But his instincts had been right. She had been alive, somewhere, hiding. She was alive now, still hiding, and if not exactly well or happy, she was at least separated from him only by a single door.

Which he could break down if he bloody well had to. But he didn’t want to. He wanted her to open it.

“I came, Cat,” he insisted. “I was there.” It was the one thing he was still sure of. He had stayed until all hope had been lost. Until there had been nothing to see but dying embers. “You were the one who disappeared as if you had ceased to exist.”

“Yes,” she finally agreed on another deep, drawn-out breath, as if she were gathering her fragile strength. “Our plan rather worked too well.”

“Your plan?” Had she
planned
from the start to disappear? To leave him? He couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe it. She had seemed so sincere. Thomas pressed his forehead against the panel, trying to hold himself still, hoping and waiting for the words he was longing—had been longing for years—to hear. For some explanation that would keep his hope alive.

Instead, she said only, “I can’t tell you how much it means to me to know you came back. And I thank you for your kindness.”

Thomas strangled back a vile oath. “I don’t want your thanks. I didn’t do it from
kindness.
” How he had come to hate that word. “You must know. You must know I did it for you. And I will do anything else I have to—scour the earth, take bullets out on the lawn. Anything, Cat.” He sounded frustrated and maybe even a little desperate, but he had to convince her. He
had
to. “I will take care of you—I can protect you. And we can start anew, and begin to trust each other again, if you’ll only give me the chance.”

“We can’t start anew, Mr. Jellicoe.” Her tone was just as determined, still trying to keep him at a distance, but her voice was weighted down with weary resignation, as if she were trying to convince herself as much as him. “I know I said I was the same person, but I’m not. I’ve changed. I’ve
had
to change.”

“I don’t believe that. I can see you past your wall of prim composure, Cat—behind your lavender and starch. I can see the girl you once were.”

“It’s not just composure and lavender and starch, Mr. Jellicoe. It’s … too much has happened. There’s too much that has already happened. And too much still to come.”

He couldn’t think of what was still to come. He could only think of here and now. Of Cat. Of making her believe him. Of showing her she could trust him. Everything else would follow in its time. “If you think you can’t be Catriona Rowan, then I will love Miss Anne Cates.” He raised his hand to thump the pad of his clenched fist against the door, as if he could push his sincerity, his resolution through the panel and into her. Hammering away at the wall of her defenses, brick by brick. “I don’t care. You’re the one who just said it’s only a name—that you are still the same person underneath. I love you no matter who you think you are.”

“Mr. Jellicoe.” Her weary fatalism chilled him. “You can’t love a lie in me any more than I could love the lie in you.”

But he could hear her voice begin to come apart—the edges of her composure fraying under the strain of the day—and he knew he had to press his advantage. “Then we will start anew now that we both know the truth. We will face what is past and what is to come together. I will protect you,
kaur,
” Thomas insisted. “I called you that then—my princess—and I will make you my princess now. Just trust me, Cat, please. Just please open the door.”