Scandal in the Night (30 page)

Lieutenant Birkstead was not at all moved by her recitation of her sad facts, only amused as he strolled nearer. “So modest. So effacing. But I know better. I know what you’re
really
like.” He drew close enough to whisper, “And I know what you did, little mouse. I know.”

The burning heat in her lungs chilled to ice, even as she steadfastly denied it.

He could not know for sure. He could not. No one knew. No one had seen. No one had been there.

She forced the words upon her lips. “And what is it you know?”

“That your father was a traitor, a United Ulsterman, and was on the run when he died before he could be taken for the noose.”

The chill was spreading through her body, turning her as cold and numb as she had that night in the woods outside of Glasgow. The night she had sat with her father’s body until it had grown cold and stiff. Until there was nothing she could do, but pile his body carefully with rocks to form a cairn, so it could not be scavenged by the wolves that still roamed the woods. So they could find him, and perhaps take his body to a priest.

“Some said he killed himself, like a coward, rather than be taken. Some said he simply died from a fall he took in his escape, just as he ought.”

The numbness was spreading to her feet, for she could not run. She could only stand there, frozen in horror, while he chipped away at her, like an axe splintering apart the ice.

“But do you know what I say, mousie? I say no one who kills himself, or dies alone in the woods, makes his own cairn.”

The cold within brought a savage, biting pain. The pain that she had carried with her like a grave marker across all those leagues of dark deep sea. Across all the miles of hot dust-whipped roads. The pain that had never gone away, but could no longer be pushed aside, an ache to nurse in some other, less dire time. The time of reckoning had come.

“Nothing to say? Cat got your tongue, my little mouse? Good. Let’s keep it that way, shall we? You keep quiet to Lord Summers about your
objections
and
won’t suits,
and I may be persuaded do the same, and keep your little scandalous—and conveniently felonious—deed quiet. I won’t tell your uncle what I know of you, and your father in Scotland, and you won’t tell him anything more about me. That way we both get what we want.”

“And what is it exactly that you want, Lieutenant?” The words were nothing but the ghost of her breath in her mouth.

“Why, you, little mouse.” He ran his hand across her hair carefully, testing her acceptance of his possession, as if he thought her as fractious as her mare, and was being careful not to get bit. “You and all your lovely mousy money. And influence as a part of the resident commissioner’s family. I’m ambitious for us, you see, little mouse. Nearly as ambitious as
you.
” He kept touching her, and while she was still, and made no move to stop him, or break his hold, he reached out and traced a finger down her nose, and tugged in cruel mockery of playfulness at her chin. “I thought I was going to have to wait for years, until little Alice dear grew up. But then you showed up, my ambitious little mousie, like a gift from fate. Yes. I think we will treat together very well. Very well.”

Though she was cold and shaking with the effort, she drew slowly and carefully out from under his hand. “And what does my aunt think of your ambitions, Lieutenant?”

His answer was the slyest smile of them all, curving around one side of his mouth like the jackal he was, sliding silently through the long grass. “Let me worry about dear Lettice, mousie. You just keep your little mousy head down, and keep your little mousy mouth shut tight.”

It was already shut tight. An ache crawled along her jaw from the pressure of her teeth clamped down to hold in her disgust and fright. She backed away from him as carefully and steadily as if he were an unpredictable, wild animal, until the sight of him was lost to her in the dark pressing silence.

She kept her mouth shut, and her head down all the way to her chamber, trying in vain to stop the voice in her head telling her to run. Now. Before he could talk.

But where would she go? She had already run halfway around the world. Was she prepared to tackle the other half?

Perhaps, her brain whispered. Perhaps with Tanvir Singh.

He would help her. With Tanvir Singh she could roam across mountains and down valleys. Over frontiers. To Punjab and Kashmir, and beyond. Perhaps even to Tibet. She could leave the cantonment and all questions of caste and color and cuckolding behind. She could be done with dark ambition.

She could become the new person Mina and the begum, and even Tanvir Singh himself, had been encouraging her to be. She could be his lover. He had said he wanted more from her. He had said he wanted to do more than kiss against dark walls. Surely he wanted her enough to take her with him?

And to whom else could she turn? The colonel, and Mina and the begum? The old palace would be the first place Lord Summers looked, and she had no other friends. Only Tanvir Singh had the means necessary to spirit her away and out of British-controlled India.

Yes. Going to Tanvir Singh would answer for everything.

She would not let her fear return her to the cold, shivering, frightened girl she had been that autumn day in the hills above Avon water. She was not that girl. Something fundamental had changed, and she was no longer just the pale, mousy girl the Jonathan Birksteads of this world thought they could intimidate into doing their bidding. She refused to be.

She would choose differently.

Chapter Seventeen

That last night in India, Catriona had quickly shoved as much of her clothing as she could into the practical Scots knapsack that was all the baggage she had brought with her from Scotland. She hated that she would have to leave so much behind again, and take only what she could carry. The elegant pieces of clothing, the beautiful, fairy-dust evening gowns that had been gifted to her would have to remain. Alice could have them, when she was a bit older—Catriona would not need such luxuries if she were to live the life of a horse trader. She would be clothed differently from now on, in plain
salwar kameez,
but in the meantime, she would take only sturdy, practical clothes suitable to the cool of the hills, and a few small personal items.

And her father’s gun.

Catriona drew the ancient pistol out from under the stack of shawls where she had hidden it in the bottom of her chest of drawers. She had not touched the weapon in months—since the day of her first ride with Tanvir Singh. She had not felt the need. But she ought not leave it behind for Birkstead to find and postulate over, and she certainly might need it were she confronted by the jackal again as she made her surreptitious escape.

The thought brought a quiver shivering its way along the surface of her skin. What had her father said?
I’ve lived by the gun. I’m prepared to die by the gun, too
.

Catriona was not so prepared, and her hands shook as she made the careful movements of measuring out shot and powder.

But at last it was done, and there was nothing left to do but hope for the best—that she would never be called upon to use it—and go away from the residency as quickly and silently as possible.

She hesitated for a long moment, torn between her desire to say good-bye to the children—to kiss the little ones, Charlotte and George, as they lay sleeping. To tell Arthur he was the best of lads, and to hug sweet Alice and tell her she loved her—and her instinct to run as far and as fast as her feet and her mare could carry her, away from Lieutenant Jonathan Birkstead and his malevolent knowledge of her past.

Instinct won out, but the delay cost her. She made her silent way out of the residency—away from Birkstead and his twisted version of marital bliss, away from the house of spies and lies—via the dark of the walled garden, before she turned toward the unguarded stable gate at the side of the garden. All the time, she was searching with new eyes for Birkstead’s paid accomplices, seeing in every shadow a potential enemy.

She had never felt so hunted. So exposed. It had been one thing in Scotland to think that she might be followed—to think that someone, anyone, might know what she had done to escape and survive—but it was another thing entirely to
know
that her every movement was being noted and reported.

And who would do such a thing? The elderly gate porter who always waved and smiled? The grooms who stood back so respectfully when she took out Puithar, or the houseboys who had seemed happy to run errands or take messages to Mina at the old palace? And what about Namita, the
ayah
who had been assigned to look after Catriona as if she were her shadow?

It was Namita who followed Catriona through the garden, and who chased her through the gate. The
ayah
pleaded and admonished in turn. “Oh, mem! What do you do? Thou shouldst not go out alone at this time of the night,” she wailed. “There are more than one kind of jackal in the streets. Nothing good can come of it.”

There was more than one kind of jackal loose in the house, and nothing good was going to come of that, either.

“Go back inside the house, Namita. Nothing bad is going to happen.” The lie slipped easily off her tongue. “I only want to walk for a while, alone. I know my way around the garden well enough to go blindfolded.”

Namita did not believe the lie. “And where wilt thou go blindfolded, and with thy baggages in the dark?” The
ayah
clung to Catriona’s arm like a limpet. “What will I tell the lord sahib when he finds that I have let thee go alone into the night?”

“And is it only Lord Summers that you will tell, Namita? Who else has been paying for your loyalty?”

Namita looked conscious—though she shook her head in denial she could not meet Catriona’s eyes. “Please, mem,” she begged. “The
Badmash
Sahib, he…”

“Yes, I know.” Catriona wanted to be angry, but she knew that whatever pennies Birkstead was bribing Namita with were undoubtedly a welcome increase in her probably pitiable wages. But still the knowledge that her own servants, who had helped her dress and knew all the intimate details of Catriona’s daily life, had betrayed her to Birkstead—the thought of what Namita might have been made to reveal to Birkstead sat like a cold knot in Cat’s stomach. “I wish I could offer you more, to buy your silence, but I can’t.” Catriona hadn’t a penny of her own to her name. “So tell him I’ve gone into the night. Tell him I’ve gone to Tanvir Singh, and see if he dares to follow me.”

Namita’s face turned ashen with fear, and she clutched at Cat’s sleeve. “Oh, no, mem. Do not do it, I beg thee. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing. Thou wilt be killed in the night.”

“I will not be killed.” She would do Birkstead absolutely no good dead, and she had all the protection she thought she might need, deep in the pocket sewn into her riding habit. Catriona pulled herself from Namita’s grasp. “And I
will
go.”

Her resolve carried her into the stable where she slipped Puithar out of her stall with only a bridle—her saddle was stored too high for her to retrieve without much noisy trouble; another sin of interference to lay at Birkstead’s head?—before she slipped away into the night.

As she hurried along in the shadows under the trees toward the encampment along the other side of the river, a different sort of feeling gave way to the suspicions Catriona carried out of the residency. She had no trouble upon the dusty roads at the fringes of the city—she rode Puithar at too great a speed for anyone to accost her—the showy mare identified her to every nodding beggar and smiling fakir along the way as the
angrezi
girl who was the friend of Tanvir Singh, as someone under his protection.

It was madness, surely, the heady, intoxicating feeling pounding up from her heart—this understanding that there was no turning back. She had slipped the traces of polite, respectable expatriate life, and there would be no fitting her back to the harness. No matter what Tanvir Singh said—if he accepted her or not—she could not go back. It was a nerve-racking gamble to trust that Tanvir Singh meant what he had whispered to her in the close confessional of the cantonment wall—
This is real. All else is madness.

But it would have been a greater madness to stay and let herself be manipulated by Birkstead, to take the scraps of life he surely meant to feed her. If she accepted the marriage Birkstead and her uncle offered, she would live the rest of her days in fear and abject misery. Nothing—no privilege, no reputation, and no family—was worth such a sacrifice.

And then there was no more time for second thoughts and regrets—she was there at the edge of the encampment along the shaded banks of the river. Catriona knew her way through the bright tapestry of colored tents and pavilions that made up his caravan, though she had never been there at night, and never before come alone. She halted and waited for the hard beating of her pulse to slow and her breath to lengthen enough so she might draw a deep, steadying lungful of the evening air before she dismounted.

In the middle of the encampment, bright fires leaped from torches and braziers, and lanterns turned the tents into beautiful glowing cubes of color. Catriona had envisioned Tanvir Singh’s world being comprised solely of men—a nomadic, almost monastic existence—and she had never seen females during her daytime visits with the children. But at night, women seemed to be everywhere—servants moved about the tents among the horsemen, married women tended to their husbands, and in the distance she could hear the tabla drums, sitar, and jangling bells of dancing.

If anyone paid her more than a passing glance as she wound her mare through the tents, she did not notice, so consumed was she by the sights and smells and sounds, and the curiously pleasant flight of butterflies battering about her belly in anticipation. But she had not passed unnoticed. A tall
sa’is
appeared suddenly, and bowed and gestured with a sweep of his arm that she should follow him.