Scandal in the Night (36 page)

“I’ll take care of him.” Thomas spoke with all the quiet conviction he felt. “You can trust this to me, Catriona. Birkstead will not be allowed to prey upon you a moment longer.”

He would have kissed Cat, then and there, because she was finally looking at him with something approaching admiration. And because he wanted to. A quick hard kiss that spoke of possession and promises yet to keep. Because the truth was,
he
had not fully trusted her in India—he had never trusted her with the truth about his identity. A truth that had eventually led to him being able to clear her name, but which might have saved them all endless heartache, as well as the enormous distress of their current predicament, if he had only shared it then, before she had needed it.

But the past could not be bought back, except by an investment in the future. A future he would be damned if he would concede to Birkstead.

And the sooner he proved to her that she could trust him, and rely upon him, the sooner she could learn to be happy again. “James,” he addressed his brother. “What have your men come up with?”

The lord of the manor seemed cautiously happy for the change of subject. “My groundskeeper found fresh hoofprints on the west side of the outer wall, leading south to the gate, but no farther. And he’s asked around the village, and at all the coaching inns hereabout, and from what he can tell, the only noticeable stranger who seems to have come along fits a description of you.” James cocked up his mouth in a wry smile. “They were especially concerned that they had given
you
our direction in Sixpenny Handley. The publican there apologized most profusely to Peters.”

Thomas didn’t miss a beat. “With a family as large as yours there’s bound to be the odd black sheep.”

Neither did James. “‘Odd’ being the operative word.”

“Yes, I think we’ve firmly established my character, or lack thereof, James.” But it felt good to settle into the easy rhythm of friendly sibling bickering as an antidote to the seriousness of the situation—a sort of momentary relief to the sheer intensity of the story Cat had just told them. But it wasn’t a story—it was real. And it had happened to her. Whatever he had imagined his sufferings to be, they were nothing in comparison to hers. She had done everything she could to save her family, only to have them taken from her. He had lost her, but she had lost everything.

“Well.” James recalled him to his duty. “You were the one who said he had experience in these matters—what do you suggest?”

“Someone has to have seen something.” Thomas ran his hand through his strange short hair. “A man doesn’t just ride up to the wall of an estate like Wimbourne, practically stuck in the middle of the village, at ten o’clock in the morning on a summer day when all the world and his dog is up and about on his business. Someone knows. They just don’t know what they’ve seen.”

“I’ve sent men out, asking up and down the length of the village and beyond, if they saw something unusual.”

“Ah. There’s your trouble.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It won’t have been something unusual, then. It will have been something normal, something they didn’t think to remark upon. Our malefactor won’t have a large sign hanging over his head saying, ‘I’m unusual, pay attention to me.’”

“Well, if you’re so very much better than all my men, then by all means, have a go at the villagers.”

“Thank you. I believe I will. But we need to look for one person. He’s bound to be conspicuous—he’s the sort who can’t stand not to be.”

“And that sort is?”

“Unmitigated bastard.”

“What’s a bastard?” piped one of the younger children who were suddenly spilling around Cat’s skirts, fresh and rosy faced from their baths. Christopher, he decided, the youngest boy—his voice was still as soft as the girls’.

Thomas looked down to find a mirror of his younger self looking back at him. The little boy was gazing up at his uncle with the same forthright equanimity Thomas had once possessed when dealing with horses five times his size, and Thomas felt a kindred spirit kindle within. How nice it was to learn it would take more than his rangy, looming presence to discomfit his nephew. “A bad man. But I’m going to take care of that.”

And then they were all there, her charges, filling up the nursery until it was crowded with their robust, boundless energy. Questions came from every side, talking nineteen to the dozen.

“We aren’t meant to go outside again, until it’s safe.” Amelia, he judged, skeptical and prudent. “Papa told us we couldn’t.”

“You almost missed tea.” That was the twin who was slightly taller—Gemma. Always counting, and keeping track in James’s letters, was young Lady Gemma.

And indeed the nursery maids were just now streaming in with trays laden with pots of steaming tea, boiled eggs, and toast soldiers.

“My apologies.” Cat immediately met the battery of their appearance with easy, calm reassurance. “It has been rather a topsy-turvy day, hasn’t it? Why don’t you all come to the table, and we’ll have our tea now.”

“Yes. That is a very good idea,” Lady Jeffrey agreed. “And you can all see that Miss Cates is quite well, and you needn’t have any worries for her.”

Yet the wobble in the lady’s voice said otherwise, so Cat was swift in her reassurances. “Oh, absolutely. But I should very much like a nice cup of tea, and some jam to set me to rights. Don’t you all? I’ll see to everything, my lady.”

But Thomas was not about to miss this opportunity to meet his nieces and nephews properly, and neither was he prepared to let Cat out of his sight. “I’m sure we are all in need of fortification after our trying day. I know I am.” He followed the children to the table, but seeing that the chairs were all quickly taken—no hangers-back in the Jellicoe family—he simply picked little Mariah up and set her upon his lap. The child accepted his presence just as serenely as he accepted hers, even when her eggy fingers reached up to touch and stroke his face. He merely kissed her fingertips as if it were a normal occurrence for him to take food off a child’s hands. As if he did it every day. “Is that raspberry jam?” He pointed his chin at a pot on the table.

“Yes.” Gemma looked at him with something of a scowl, as if she thought her uncle a bit dim not to recognize raspberry jam when he saw it.

Her somewhat precocious tone didn’t affect him in the least. “I ask because we used to have the most marvelous raspberry jam at Downpark, when I was growing up. I haven’t had any in years.”

Pippa immediately passed him the jam pot. “But this
is
Downpark jam. Granny sends it for us.”

“Well, Mrs. Downpark Cook sends it, really,” Gemma clarified. Always one to have the last word—punctual, correct Gemma. “Because
she
makes it, but Granny is the one who has her send it to us when Mrs. Downpark Cook puts it up.”

Thomas was not prepared for the strange shift within—the minor earthquake that was the restless refitting of the edges of his soul. He sat dumbfounded—he who had kept his head while spying on maharajahs and shahs—for a long moment while Mariah smeared more egg on his chin. “Granny?” he finally asked. “You call your grandmother—my mother, the Countess Sanderson—Granny?”

“What else would we call her?” Amelia asked.

Thomas felt entirely at sea, as he had the moment he had first arrived—as if he had only just stepped off the ship and the land was still behaving badly underfoot. He was bewildered. Almost bereft. Because he was just now understanding all the changes the years apart from his family had wrought. Just now taking account of the loss. “Grandmama, I suppose,” he finally sputtered. “Granny just sounds so … cozy.”

“Well, she
is
cozy.” Little Christopher piped into the conversation. “And she smells lovely.”

“Mr. Jellicoe? Thomas?”

Cat was looking at him with concern, a careful pity warming those cool gray eyes. She who knew what it was to lose family.

“Yes.” He made himself smile at her to show her he had recovered. “She always did smell of roses, as I recall. So very English. I prefer jasmine. And lemons. There are lemons and jasmine in India.”

Just like that, Cat’s pale, composed face went up in flame.

Oh, yes. He could still conjure Tanvir Singh from behind the confines of his rumpled English clothes. He still had the ability to discompose her defenses in a room full of strangers. Even in a room full to the brim with children.

“Tell us about India, Uncle Thomas.” For the first time the oldest boy, Jack, who had been holding back while the other children chattered, asserted himself into the conversation.

It was astonishing looking at the boy—he was James in miniature, a vision from Thomas’s own youth. James was eleven years older than Thomas, and his most lasting impressions of his older brother had been of a tall, strong young man, who looked so very much like this boy before him, who carried himself with some of the same solemn gravitas—the weight of being the heir. Just like James, this boy would be Earl Sanderson someday.

“I worked for the British East India Company. And I was a spy.” It felt good to speak it so plainly. But though he said it out loud to the children, he was looking at Cat, who had gone still and quiet. Listening. “It was not much of a job for a gentleman, I grant you, but it was the job I was given, and I was very good at it.”

“Very good.” The words slipped out under Cat’s breath. “No one would have known. No one did.” She was trying to preserve her Miss Anne Cates persona, all buttoned up, full of prim starch, her spine precisely aligned in a straight unbending line. But he had made her bend before. He would do it again.

“Did you know Uncle Thomas in India, Miss Cates?” Jack asked. “I didn’t know you’d been there.”

“I did.” Gemma was full of a younger sister’s one-upmanship. “Pippa and I knew.”

Catriona turned a stern, questioning eyebrow upon the girls, but Jack was ignoring his sister’s provocation, and already asking another question. “I’d like to be a spy. How did you get the job?”

“I studied very hard, for a very long time, at home at Downpark to learn almost every language under the sun—or so it seemed at the time. Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi to name the few that became the most important.”

Jack looked properly impressed. “I know French and German, and Dr. Tallmadge comes from the vicarage to help with my Greek and Latin. But those … Arabic and Urdu.” He pronounced the words carefully, as if they contained some volatile magic. “Will you teach me?”

“You’d have to ask your father, lad. My brother may have other plans for your education that are more attuned to your place as the future viscount.”

Jack pulled a put-upon face. “I don’t want to be a viscount, and count sheep and corn and keep tenants happy. I want to be a spy and ride horses across the desert.”

“How do you know about riding horses across the desert?”

Jack had to think about that for a long moment before he shrugged. “Miss Cates tells the most marvelous stories in the evenings. Not like fairy tales and princesses, but proper yarns with ships and adventures. She told one about a caravan of horses and camels crossing the wide western desert.”

“Did she now? Proper yarns?” He looked back at Cat. “I begin to see.”

Until this afternoon, what Thomas had truly known about Catriona Rowan would have filled a teaspoon. He had thought her experience in India had been limited to her journey upcountry from Calcutta, and the area around Saharanpur. But the trek across the desert of western Rajasthan was one of the ancient overland trade routes linking Hind with the kingdoms of Persia and Arabia, and beyond that the near east of the Ottomans and the Levant. He had crossed that wide arid expanse himself only twice in his travels.

But he would never in a thousand and one years have thought that Catriona Rowan, alone and frightened, would have been able to navigate such an arduous route. And neither had the company officials who had sought to apprehend her. “You went across the Thar Desert.”

She did not answer him, and kept her face as calm and expressionless as the Buddha as she sipped her tea. “I tell stories about Paris, and Nova Scotia, and Siam as well.”

“But I like the Persian ones best,” said Jack. “With the dromedaries.”

“I like the one with the elephants all painted with dots of colors, and the beautiful crimson howdah with the princess,” added Pippa.

Gemma let out an audible sigh of happy accord. “I like the story where the elephants fell in love.”

Thomas regarded his princess, his newly revealed Scheherazade, over the top of Mariah’s head. “Elephants falling in love, Miss Cates?”

She didn’t even blink, or miss so much as a beat. “A most tragic story. They were entirely unsuited.”

“Ah. I see,” he murmured as the children objected to such a characterization of what was obviously a lovely little tale. “I’d like to hear it sometime.”

“The elephant story is fine for
children,
” Jack said, trying to regain control of the conversation. “I want to know more about being a spy. Who did you spy on?”

“Upon whom did you spy?” Catriona corrected in her Miss Cates mode.

Though he looked at Jack, Thomas noticed that Catriona’s eyes were all for him. So he answered her. “Everyone. But mostly on the Maharajah Ranjiit Singh’s kingdom of the Punjab.” He let the words flow off his tongue in the vernacular, giving them spice and flavor for the children’s enchantment. “A powerful, most dangerous man, the maharajah, and an enemy of the East India Company. Though I hardly thought so. Privately, I admired him.”

“And did you have to slink around, and hide in dark alleyways and palace halls to listen to people?”

“No. The best way to be a spy is first, not to look conspicuous and as if you are watching other people, and second, not to hide. It’s best just to blend in. To hide in plain sight.” Thomas leaned back in his chair, and while still balancing Mariah carefully on his knee, he reached back to take up a beautiful shawl someone—presumably Lady Jeffrey, or with luck, his Cat—had left over a chair. Within a moment he had twisted and wrapped the fabric into a turban, just as he had morning after morning, for so many years.