Scandal in the Night (6 page)

“
Huzoor,
what is thy pleasure?” A confused
sa’is,
one of the many Afghani and Balti grooms in his employ, had called to him, for Thomas had turned his mount toward the girl instinctively, moving away from his caravan without sparing a thought for the consequences.

She had looked up at him then, with her pale, clear gray eyes so composed and solemn, and something within him—the part of his soul that had unbeknownst to him grown weary of deception and restlessness—stilled and came to rest. Something within him whispered
home.

He had tried to dismiss such a cock-brained notion. Home was wherever a man was content to lay his head, for however long that might be. It was wherever he could laugh with friends and be happy. And he was happy as Tanvir Singh, a creature of the road, a denizen of every town and village from the back of beyond to the front, and friend to everyone he met. He was no longer the Honorable Thomas Jellicoe to be staring at pretty English girls. He was a fierce, respected
sawar.
He ought to be mocking himself for even noticing such a pale
angrezi
woman.

Yet, how could he not? Tanvir Singh was a man, and any man—nay, every man in Rani Bazaar that day—had followed her pale, exotic beauty with his eyes. Memsahibs rarely found their way to the bazaars in the city, well outside the protected confines of the English cantonment, and certainly did not come alone, without a carriage or train of protective manservants to buffer them from contact with the teeming populace.

But that girl—for all her solemnity she could not have seen more than twenty summers—had seemed to have passed through the throng unmolested by the demands of merchants and beggars alike. As if they, too, could see she was a goddess from some cold, far-off northern place, come to vanquish the gods of the sweltering plains, and left her unprovoked.

He should have turned, or looked away, but he had held fast, transfixed by his vision and his inexplicable longing for something he had never experienced—the regard of an English girl. Because of her, for the first time in years, he felt
apart.
He felt all the weight of the double life, the work he had chosen of his own free will, settle heavily upon his shoulders.

And so he looked. At her solemn smile as she gazed in open admiration at his horses, at the pale, subtle apricot of her lips, at the bold shower of freckles across her face and nose from the sun. And at the promise of the endlessly long, white limbs hidden by the flowing folds of her skirts. Limbs he thought about twining around his waist like a vine and …

Oh, yes. He didn’t even know her name, yet he had been ridiculously, unaccountably, irreversibly smitten. And so he had contrived to give her the mare.

“I gave her a horse.”

It was as good a place to start as any, but Thomas looked up to find his family regarding him as they had upon his arrival—as if he had contracted a rare and debilitating brain fever.

“Actually, or more correctly, I sold the animal, one of my prize Marwari mares, to her uncle, the resident commissioner, Lord Summers.”

“Ah.” His father narrowed his eyes and nodded. “I begin to see.”

“See what?” James frowned and straightened up. “What do you see?”

“Lord Summers is, or was, the third son of the late Duke of Westing. Lord Summers was also—correct me if I am wrong—” he said aside to Thomas, “killed in India. A tragic fire, some two years ago, was it? There were some rumors of a tawdry love triangle, but it was all hushed up. He was Miss Cates’s uncle?”

“It was Lady Summers who was Miss Cates’s”—the name still felt awkward on his tongue—“mother’s younger sister. And Lord and Lady Summers were both killed in the fire. Their home, Miss Cates’s home, the residency of Saharanpur, was entirely consumed.”

“How ghastly.” James’s face was tight with concern. “I had no idea. She never mentioned a word.”

“I imagine she was too terrified. Both then and now.” Thomas had been terrified as well, torn to shreds by the seething frustration of knowing she was alive, but not knowing where she was. Throughout the past two years, he had been unable to stop himself from imagining what it must have been like for her in the confused aftermath. He was still haunted by dark dream images playing out across his brain, over and over again, from when he had thought her dead. And he was still ripped up to find she no longer trusted him. So ripped up he had just accused her of inexcusable things.
As ruthless as a courtesan.
He was the one who ought to be shot. “Especially after she was accused.”

“Miss Cates?” James foundered, caught between his clear fondness for his employee and the enormity of the accusation. “Of setting the fire that killed them? How could that be?”

“She was easy to accuse. There was no one to … speak on her behalf.” Even now, even as he chose the careful words, his excuses sounded trite and unworthy. “She was accused and would have been charged. But by then, she had disappeared. And I’ve been looking for her ever since.”

“Good Lord.”

“Thomas.” The immutable strength in the Earl Sanderson’s voice brought them back to the inescapable issue at hand. “Did you believe her guilty?” he asked from his place in his chair. “
Do
you believe her guilty?”

Thomas shook his head. He had been told by the English authorities she was guilty—told the evidence was incontrovertible—until he
had
half believed some part of it might be true. And she had disappeared, another proof, it was said, of her guilt.

“No. She was not guilty.” She could not have started the fire that the company men claimed she had set in order to cover up the murders of Lord and Lady Summers, for one simple reason. Because she had been with him—with Tanvir Singh—at the time.

But by the time Thomas had understood that he alone held the power of her deliverance, it was too late. She was gone without a trace.

“What I don’t understand,” James interjected into the silence, “is what all this has to do with your supposition that Miss Cates was being shot at. You are the missing penny here, Thomas. Nobody was being shot at until
you
turned up. From Liverpool, of all places. What else haven’t you told us?”

“Everything.” Thomas might have laughed, if he hadn’t been so goddamned weary. So tired of carrying the incessant worry. Tired of the burden of his guilt. Tired of trying to figure it all out. And now that he’d found her, it seemed that instead of being resolved, the situation had become even more complicated. And dangerous. “There’s simply too much to tell.”

“Well, then, Thomas,” his father prompted in his calm, unruffled voice. “Why don’t you begin with the horse.”

Chapter Five

The mare in question had been a three-year-old of his own breeding, in whom Rajput Marwari bloodlines were most prominent. She was a strong, high-spirited filly, but she had taken to the girl in the bazaar easily enough, eating an apple from her hand as familiarly as if she did so every morning, though the beastie had regularly torn strips out of the less nimble of the
sa’is.

Thomas had been rather fond of her—the mare. She was beautiful, tall black with white socks, a delicate face that showed traces of Arabian blood, and the characteristic sweet, inward-pointing ears of the native Rajput Marwari breed. She was young and had not yet been bred—he would be sorry not to have the chance to breed her. But he came and went between Hindustan and the Punjab freely in his role as a Sikh horse trader—it was therefore necessary he actually
trade
in horses. And if he sold the mare to the girl of flame, he would be able to see her. And her mistress.

If he were honest—and he was not, he was a spy—the mare was merely an excuse, the means by which he had decided to satisfy his absurd curiosity without anyone being the wiser. Beautiful young women who appealed to him were thin on the ground in company cantonments on the edge of the frontier, and though the English kept quite largely to themselves, they would be astonished to know much of their daily lives was the fodder of open conversation throughout the bazaar and the whole of the city, and how many of their servants were happy to share the details of their lives for the cost of a bowl of rice. Tanvir Singh had only to keep his ears and his purse open to learn the bright young woman with the hair like flame and an incomprehensible, unpronounceable
angrezi
name was the niece of Lord Summers Sahib, the new resident commissioner of Saharanpur.

That news of a
new
resident commissioner had stung, like the venom from the bees high in the Himalayan caves—a small but burning hurt. It had surprised and wounded him to learn that Colonel Balfour had so summarily been replaced. That the only man Thomas had entrusted with his true identity had been so swiftly pushed aside. It stung Thomas’s pride and offended his sense of loyalty.

And he had made up his mind, right there in the Rani Bazaar, to play a game with this new man. To toy with the man who was ostensibly Thomas’s superior, by keeping him ignorant of Thomas’s true identity. To Lord Summers, Tanvir Singh would be nothing more than he appeared to be—a nomadic native horse trader who kept his ear to the ground in exchange for steady remuneration.

If Thomas had been a prudent man, or if he had actually been the man he was supposed to be, he would have turned away there and then. Tanvir Singh would have closed his mind to all thoughts of a girl who was clearly forbidden to him. But he was also Thomas Jellicoe, the son of an English peer, and he liked a challenge. He was an independent, clandestine agent of the Great Game, who thrived on risk. What better, harmless game was there than to challenge the narrow conventions, and disrupt the false serenity of the company’s grandees? He had laughed aloud at just the thought.

And the game had proved to be almost laughably easy. Lord Summers was rumored to be a man who liked his horses—one of his great pleasures in his assignment in India was his polo. All Tanvir Singh had had to do was suggest, while mingling among the ranks of East India Company officers and sepoys who came to his encampment to bargain for horses, that he considered his prized mare, bred from an Arabian stallion and a Marwari dam, too fine for any of the Englishmen in Saharanpur. He would be taking her south to Delhi, or perhaps east to Ranpur, he said, to sell to a more discerning clientele.

Within a few short hours, the talk had made its rounds from the camp to the bazaar, and from the bazaar to the cantonment, whence Tanvir Singh was duly summoned by the express request of the resident commissioner himself, Lord Summers.

A request Thomas had blithely ignored.

Lord Summers, in the way of a great functionary, then sent his minions—his secretaries and undercommissioners of one sort and another—to try and treat with Tanvir Singh. But the wily
sawar
had serenely resisted their overtures, steadfastly refusing to let the emissaries so much as see his beautiful mare.

It was all a part of the greater game, this little game he played with the new resident commissioner, who came himself, of course, and at last.

Lord Summers, the third son of the Duke of Westing, brought himself to visit in the cool of the morning two days after Thomas and his caravan had arrived in Saharanpur, tooling across the bumpy ground of Tanvir Singh’s encampment along the small tributary river to the north of the town in an open, unshaded carriage driven by a tightly liveried
sa’is
.

Lord Summers’s appearance did little to dispel Thomas’s first impression of him as altogether too much of the new style of company man to be entirely trusted. The old-style men, like his mentor, Colonel Balfour, who had cultivated a deep understanding and appreciation of Hindustan and her ways and customs, had been pushed aside for the likes of Summers, who was said to stride about speaking only English, and seemed indifferent, or even happy to give offense so long as he made money exploiting the native population and treating them like ignorant children, or worse, like savages who were unfit to rule their own country.

“And so you are Tanvir Singh, about whom I have heard so much,” was Lord Summers’s greeting, when the resident commissioner strode into Tanvir Singh’s tent.

Thomas awaited them on his own terms, reclining on deep, pristinely white cushions beneath the shade of an open-air tent set in front a wide grassy area from whence he could observe his animals being brought forward for buyers’ perusal. He did not rise, though he brought his palm up and made a shallow, courtly salaam. “As thou may see, Excellency.”

The resident’s layers of tight-fitting English clothing—high-collared shirt and cravat under a waistcoat and jacket, so unsuitable to the climate even in the easy heat of the morning—made him look uncomfortably pop-eyed and waspish. The impression of a fussy autocrat wasn’t aided by the fact that the resident was accompanied by a scarlet-clad officer of the company’s Saharanpur regiment, the deputy assistant commissary, Lieutenant Birkstead.

Thomas inclined his head slightly to the officer. “Lieutenant sahib.”

Neither the lieutenant, whom Thomas had met once or twice before, when he had last made his way to Saharanpur with important intelligence for the company, nor the resident commissioner returned the civility. Instead the lieutenant gave Tanvir Singh a contemptuous look meant to show his superiority, but which revealed his discomfort in this situation over which he had so little control.

Thomas was too used to such impotent snubs to give them any attention. Despite the fact that he had once been very much like Birkstead—young and wanting to make his mark—he couldn’t like the junior officer. He was far too insinuating, too much the bullyboy for Thomas’s tastes, and he was spoken ill of in the bazaar. And from what Thomas had heard, he thought it singularly unwise of Lord Summers to trust Birkstead.

Lord Summers wasted no time on what he clearly saw as peculiar, time-wasting, Oriental preliminaries. “I understand you have a very fine mare for sale.”

“I have many fine war mares, Excellency.” Thomas swept his arm to encompass the large encampment. “And I have sold many to thy regiment. But please, I invite thee to come and sit, and take thy leisure so we might talk of business.”