Scandal in the Night (27 page)

He shut the portal behind him firmly, but before Thomas could even raise his hands to forestall the lecture that he could feel coming, his brother was upon him.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Thomas? Are you ill?” Thomas let James grab his arm and pull him half the distance across the room, well away from Cat’s door. “What have you been doing up here with Miss Cates? My wife is already telling me that I need to cast you out of the house, and I haven’t the faintest idea what I am to tell her when I find you closeting yourself up with my servants.” Just as he had earlier, James kept a hold of Thomas’s arm, as if he really did fear that Thomas might be in the throes of a jungle fever.

Lady Jeffrey, who was hard on her husband’s heels, was not so nice. She was still delicately fuming at her new brother-in-law and profoundly concerned for her governess. “What have you done with her?”

“She’s right here, safely locked behind her bedchamber door, as she has been for the past three quarters of an hour.”

“But you were in here with her, and you locked Cassandra out.” James’s brow was as deeply furrowed as the dark clouds piling up in the sky outside.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said, even though he was entirely uncontrite. “But it was necessary I speak to your Miss Cates alone so I might put forward my proposal.”

Cassandra’s face cleared only a little at that news—she was still obviously put out at her brother-in-law’s high-handed ways—and she needled him with the cold tip of her lavender stare. “Thomas, do not think you can fob me off with … folderol.” She waved away his explanation. “I very much doubt Miss Cates was interested in whatever it was you proposed to her. Did she—did I—not make it very clear that you were to abide by my rules, and Miss Cates’s rules, which preclude closeting yourself alone with either young ladies, or members of my staff, and especially young ladies who are both? What are we to think? Have you lost your mind?”

“No, ma’am,” he replied as sincerely as possible.

Some of the inquietude left her voice, and she said more gently, but no less vehemently, “You are our guest, Thomas, but this is her
home.
Do you have any idea what a position you’ve put that poor girl in? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be beholden to other people for the very roof over your head and the food you put in your mouth? I won’t have her made to do anything she doesn’t want to do. I won’t have you after her like a dog in a manger because you once thought you knew her well enough to make unfounded assumptions about her. I don’t care about what might have happened in the past—everyone makes mistakes—but I won’t have you propositioning her in our house.” The crystalline violet eyes leveled at him, leaving Thomas feeling like a naughty undergraduate caught out by the porter.

“My dear Cassandra. I may have been a pagan and a spy, but I’m not a cad. I haven’t been propositioning. I’ve been proposing, if you must know.”

“Well done, Thomas.” James looked, if not exactly ecstatic, then at least relieved at this evidence that his younger brother’s morals had not drifted too far afield in pagan parts.

But Cassandra was not giving Thomas any benefit of the doubt. “Proposing what, exactly?”

“Marriage. What other sort of proposal is there?”

“Well!” She drew back in perfect imitation of a well-polished, ornamental poker. “If you need
me
to tell you that, then you’re certainly not the man of the world that James has taken you for.”

Over Lady Jeffrey’s tiny, delicate head, her far less delicate husband gave Thomas the kind of satisfied don’t-underestimate-my-wife look that only an older brother can give at the punishment of a younger sibling. And he was right—at this point in his life, Thomas should have learned to recognize the kind of woman who had steel running down her delicate spine.

“I do beg your pardon, ma’am.” Thomas attempted a more sincere tone of contrition. “But I assure you, my intentions are entirely honest, and mindful of the proprieties.”

“It’s more than just the proprieties of the situation, Thomas.” Cassandra reached out to touch his sleeve, in wordless appeal. “Miss Cates is more than a servant. She is vitally important to us. You know the children adore her, and that she is teaching them more than we had ever expected. And Mariah…” She turned away for a moment, and her husband took her hand in his, steadying and supporting her. “She has been giving Mariah back to us, Thomas, bit by bit. Returning her to us. Surely you can see that, and just as surely you can’t be so selfish, or so lust crazed that you would put Mariah’s future in jeopardy.”

It was affecting, this display of emotion and loyalty. It spoke well of both his sister-in-law and of the woman who inspired such loyalty and devotion. Catriona deserved not to be taken for granted. She deserved people who weren’t going to let her down. But he wasn’t going to let her down. Quite the opposite.

“Cassandra, I have loved this woman from the first moment I saw her. I have lost her. I have thought her dead. I have looked half the world over for her, and now that I have found her again, I am not going to let her go. Not for you, and not even for your children, who are my family and mean the world to me. I am going to take your Miss Cates from you one way or another, and frankly, I’m beginning not to care how I do it.”

“Steady on, Thomas,” James cautioned. “No need to get all hot and ardent. I should be the first to wish you happy, but there are a few things that need to be sorted out first. What about the charges you spoke of? Arson and murder, you said? How do you plan to defend her from those?”

“He already has.”

*   *   *

The moment Catriona spoke, Thomas came instantly to her side, tucking her hand into his, and offering her the strength and protection of his arm as she faced her employers with as much of her normal calm and composure as possible. Lord and Lady Jeffrey had been everything supportive on her behalf—she had heard them chastising Thomas while she put herself to rights—but it would be another thing entirely for them to support a marriage between their governess and their brother. Especially when their governess had lied to them about both her name and her rather inglorious past.

But Lady Jeffrey surprised her. “Dare I hope, dear Miss Cates,” she asked with a tremulous smile, “that this means your answer was yes?”

Catriona had made no real answer before, and she made none now. And she had no desire to speak with the kind of openness that a truthful response required—the kind of honest answer Thomas
deserved
—in front of the viscount and viscountess. “My lady. Please don’t think—”

Thomas broke in. “I know I’m not perfect, Cat. God knows I’m not.” She didn’t know whether he spoke to simply keep her from speaking, or to spare her from having to address so private and still unsettled a topic in front of his family. Whichever it was, he did her a kindness for which she was grateful. “I’ve made mistakes. I made grave mistakes with you. Mistakes for which I’d like to atone.”

It was heart wearying, the way fate had conspired to keep them apart. But fate was not done with them yet, still hard at work with her pry bar. Catriona still had to honor the devil’s bargain she had made with Lord Summers’s mother, the dowager duchess. Alice still had to be protected. And now Birkstead had to be stopped.

“Thomas, please.” His willingness to be so open and forthcoming with his thoughts and feelings still astonished her. “Spilt milk cannot be put back into the pail. The past is gone, as finite and ephemeral as a dream.” And she was awake now, and there was no going back to sleep.

“An admirable philosophy, to be sure.” Lord Jeffrey was still frowning at them. “But the charges?”

Thomas responded much as he had when they had been alone. “I testified to the company’s judiciary committee on her behalf. I told them Miss Cates”—he shot her a glance of apology—“that is, Miss Rowan, had been with me at the time. Which was the truth. I also told them she was my betrothed, and that she had the full and unquestioned support of my family, as well as me.” His gaze shifted to linger in some sort of unspoken communication with his brother, before it returned to Catriona. “And so she was cleared of the charges. But unfortunately, she did not know of this development until today, and has been, until this point, in some fear for her life.”

“And still is, if what you say about those wild shots on the lawn is true.” Lady Jeffrey’s anger was transforming itself back into deep concern. “Oh, my dear girl. How frightened you must have been!”

“Yes, your ladyship,” Catriona said carefully. “Very frightened. I hope you will be able to forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive. There are reasons enough to pretend to have a different name, I should think.” She made an elegant gesture to encompass the circumstances. “What I don’t understand is how anyone who knows you, and knows your caring ways, knows the way you are with children, could have ever thought you had done something so terrible.” Lady Jeffrey was generous to a fault—another person, it seemed, who was prepared to think the best of her.

As Catriona knew exactly how—another fact that would not be to her credit—it was Thomas who responded. “I imagine someone—the real murderer—was trying to shift the blame, and Catriona made a convenient target. Everyone believed her dead, so she made the perfect scapegoat.”

Oh, he was clever and smart, her Thomas Jellicoe, and saw things that other people didn’t. But he didn’t see everything. He couldn’t even begin to guess it all.

“Dead? Yes, but who would believe such a thing of Miss Cates—Miss Rowan?” Cassandra was insistent in her belief in her Miss Cates’s goodness. “A person cannot truly change who they are, the way a cat cannot change its stripes. Anyone who knew her would know she was good.”

Such willful kindness on the part of her mistress was a loving charity that Cat felt she couldn’t possibly deserve. The truth was that the residents of the British cantonment did not know her at all—Catriona had taken pains that it be so. She had avoided those people who she thought would have stood in judgment of her—and anyone who she thought might be under the influence of her aunt Lettice—in favor of her friends at the old palace. She had held herself apart from the cantonment long before they had ever rejected her.

And when powerful and influential voices had spoken out against her, naturally, people would have accepted their accusations without needing any proof. It was simply the way with power—those who had it usually made sure they could keep it, no matter the cost.

Thomas hesitated for another moment, but then he said, “It was said that Catriona was her uncle-in-law Lord Summers’s lover, and that his wife—her aunt—found out about the affair.”

Oh, Lord. Yes, the lying, scheming jackal knew just how to twist the knife—how to take a single grain of the truth and screw it round to his advantage. Too smooth and plausible by half. It only wanted that—that she be labeled an adulterer as well as an arsonist and a murderer. Her past was like a stone she simply couldn’t swallow.

Thank God she had listened to her fear, and to the begum, and run when she did. The company men would have seen her hanged from the flagpole in front of the Saharanpur barracks at dawn without so much as a word of protest if she had not fled from their rough justice.

“That couldn’t be true,” her mistress insisted, though her hand had risen to her mouth in shock. Lady Jeffrey turned wide eyes on Catriona, silently begging for her to refute the charge. “Who would say such a thing?”

“Lieutenant Birkstead.” Thomas all but spat the name out. “Who else?”

There was no one else. The jackal had warned her of the risks of defying him. He had screamed his vile, mortal threats through the empty, burning halls of the residency. He had sworn he would find the only person who had fully witnessed the depth of his depravity. And she had let him think that person was she.

It was exactly as the begum had told her within hours of the fire. The quiet begum—whom no one else in the company community had ever seen, and thus had never thought of—had kept her finger on the pulse of all of Saharanpur, and her ears open to all the talk, from the pious murmurings over prayer in the Jamid Masjid, to the petty complaints and accusations of the cantonment. The begum had known which way the wind was blowing, even as the ashes of the residency were still floating down upon the city. And without any prompting from Catriona, the begum and all the women of the
zenana
had predicted how it would be—powerful voices, male voices, would speak against Catriona, and there would be little she could say or produce in her defense. It would be her word against the lieutenant’s. And the children would suffer. Alice most of all.

Alice, at whom he had screamed his filthy threats. Alice, who had been the only one to see it all.

But Thomas, for all his spying wiles, could know none of that. He could only know that the bastard Birkstead had had a bullet in him that would have needed explanation.

“What else did the
Badmash
Sahib say?” It was best they knew all of it.

Thomas nodded. “
Badmash
, indeed. Colonel Balfour told me the lieutenant reportedly staggered out of the garden of the residency with a ball in his arm, and swore in front of the surgeon and the assistant commissioner, Mr. Fielding, that you had put it there. That you had shot him because he had come to propose, and found you in a tryst with your uncle, the lord commissioner. And that you had shot them all, and set the place on fire to cover it all up.”

She had always known the lieutenant’s capacity for lying was nearly infinite. So, too, was his invention. And his ruthlessness. Catriona felt the return of fear prickling under her skin.

“Did no one think to question this lieutenant?” Lord Jeffrey asked. “Did no one take the time to gather other testimony to corroborate this accusation?”

Lord Jeffrey was a man who believed in the sovereignty of the law. He could not conceive of the way India had been governed, by a company so intent upon their profits they would sacrifice all else, especially the spirit of fairness and impartial justice, before it.

Thomas, who probably knew even better than she what the long reach of the company had been like, just shook his head. “No one, apparently. Until I came. But as soon as I made my statement to the committee, and the records of my identity were checked and verified, Birkstead was conveniently invalided out. Left to come back to England to recover from his wounds.”