Duty Before Desire (19 page)

The elder boy
harrumphed
. “Don't want to. We never get to see you anymore, Uncle Sheri.” His face brightened. “You could come sleep in our room! We'll nick biscuits from the kitchen and eat them in bed.”

Sheri managed a half-hearted smile. “Not tonight. Another time, promise. Run along now.”

“Yes, sir,” Crispin said glumly, returning the quizzing glass.

“Good lad,” Sheri said, ruffling the boy's hair.

“Good night, Uncle Sheri,” Webb said, unexpectedly throwing his arms around his uncle's waist.

Sheri returned the embrace and kissed the top of his nephew's head. “Good night, Webb,” he rasped, his throat constricting. “Thank you for coming to see me. Do try to keep your brother out of trouble.” Webb nodded against Sheri's chest.

As Crispin opened the door, the sound of voices grew closer.

Webb stiffened. Sheri patted his back. “Go, go,” he urged in a whisper. On silent feet, the twins darted down the corridor away from the approaching adults.

Quickly, Sheri leaned over the table and frowned as if considering his next shot. Seconds later, Lothgard entered with another man. Sheri recognized the short, gray fellow as McGully, the surgeon.

Sometime since Sheri'd purloined his whiskey, his brother had finished dressing for whatever evening plans had been spoiled by Sheri's arrival. The simple elegance of the marquess's navy coat balanced the richly embellished waistcoat to perfection. Sheri felt a frisson of envy at the artistry of the ensemble. French was an excellent valet, but Lothgard's man, Powell, was a visionary. Once, Sheri had cornered the servant and told him to name his price. The price Powell named sent Sheri right back to French's ministrations.

“Mr. McGully has treated your … friend,” Lothgard said.

“How did you find her, sir?” Sheri inquired, shaking the surgeon's hand.

“
Och
, a wee bit battered, my lord,” McGully replied. The Scotsman removed his spectacles and held them to the light, squinting through the lenses. “Besides what you've seen on her face, there are extensive contusions around her trunk. Ribs bruised, but no' broken. A strained shoulder from, I think, her arm being twisted behind her back.” He huffed onto the lenses, polished them with a kerchief, and replaced them on his face.

Sheri winced. “Good God. What happened?”

“I'd hoped you might answer me that, lad. The woman said not a word. She tolerated my examination and let me bandage her up, but she wouldn't answer my questions and refused the medicine I offered to help with the pain and allow her to sleep. Lady Lothgard is with her now, trying to coax her into taking it.”

“Will she be all right?”

“Oh, yes, a few days of rest will see her well again. Mind that rib, though. Light duty for a month.”

Sheri thanked the surgeon, then headed up to see Poorvaja for himself. He wished he could get word to Arcadia and relieve the worry he knew must be bedeviling her, but he had no way to contact her tonight. Tomorrow morning would have to be soon enough.

Deborah answered his light rap on the door. She looked over her shoulder at the patient, then gestured Sheri back into the corridor and closed the door behind them.

“I spoke to McGully,” he said. “How is she?”

Deborah shook her golden head, one hand clutching her wrapper closed at her neck. “It's hard to say. She doesn't speak English.”

“She does,” Sheri assured her. “I've heard her myself.”

“Well, she wouldn't speak to me. She kept saying one word over and over:
Jalanili
.”

“That's what she calls Miss Parks.”

The little marchioness tilted her head and regarded him. “Are you really engaged to Miss Parks?”

“As good as. I've already spoken to the lady, and plan to speak to her uncle in the morning.”

A sweet smile spread over his sister-in-law's face. “Oh, Sheridan, I'm so glad.”

“Are you?” he asked, cautious. “Lothgard isn't, even though he's the one who insisted I find a bride.”

“Elijah worries,” she said. “Nothing is ever right until he sees that it is. You'll just have to show him that Miss Parks is the lady for you. I'm ready to love her, though, if she has captured your heart.”

Guilt trickled down his spine at Deborah's sweet, unaffected generosity. “Yes, well …”

Her smile broadened, crinkling the corners of her eyes. “We'll try not to crowd you too much,” Deborah said, misreading his reticence. “But I am eager to welcome her to the family, and the timing couldn't be better. You can announce your betrothal at our ball in two weeks' time.”

“But that's your birthday ball,” Sheri protested, politely refraining from mentioning that he'd not received an invitation for the annual festivity. Black sheep flirting with disownment had no room to complain when they were cut from family parties. “You must be the center of adoration the entire evening.”

“I'm happy to share the glory. Besides …” A pained expression crossed her face; she lowered her eyes.

Owing to the constant pain in her bones, Deborah hadn't been capable of dancing in years. Lothgard's dedication to the annual celebration of his wife's natal day was commendable, but the ball should have given way to some other festivity long ago.

“I should check on Miss Poorvaja,” he said.

“Yes, do.” Deborah gripped his wrist. “Mr. McGully left some medicine, but she wouldn't take it for me, I'm sorry to say.”

“Don't fret, my dear. I'll see to it. Thank you for everything you've done this evening.” He squeezed her hand, then headed into the sickroom.

Most of the candles had been extinguished, but one remained burning on the bedside table, and the coals glowing in the grate provided more illumination. Poorvaja was sitting up in the bed, back erect, not reclined against the pillow. Her dirty, torn dress had been replaced with a white, long-sleeved nightdress buttoned up to her chin. The pear-green coverlet draped across her lap revealed the outline of crossed legs. Despite her upright posture, her eyes were closed and remained so when Sheri entered; was she asleep, after all?

He crept forward on the balls of his feet. Spotting the bottle of medicine and a spoon, he debated with himself over what to do. If she was resting, disturbing her to take laudanum was silly. But then, she might awake in pain during the night—pain that could be preemptively avoided by a dose now.

“Miss Poorvaja?” he whispered.

The sitting woman remained still as a statue. Her black hair fell loose about her shoulders; rumpled and tangled, it cloaked her back and brushed the covers. He allowed his hand to drift close to her shoulder. If she did not respond to a light touch, he would leave her be. Her complete stillness, contrasted with the slightly wild look created by her hair and the discolored injuries beneath her skin, unnerved him somewhat. A tremor passed down his arm.

“What do you want?” she said before his fingertips made contact, her eyes still closed.

He jerked his hand back and yelped, then covered the unmanly reaction by clearing his throat and clasping his hands behind his back. “I came to see how you are faring and ask if you are in need of anything.”

Poorvaja's shoulders crested through the curtain of her hair as she inhaled, then vanished again on her sigh. Her eyelids parted. “No.”

Taking up the medicine bottle, Sheri fiddled with the stopper. “McGully has left some medicine for you.” She shook her head. “It'll help with any pain.”

Her eyes were hard when they found his. “Take your opium away,” she said, regal as a queen. “I'll have none of it.”

He cracked a smile at her tone, so similar was it to Arcadia's. Sheri pulled over a chair and took a seat. Poorvaja averted her eyes from his appraising gaze, but rather than maidenly shyness or servile submission, her lowered face felt more like a dismissal. She did not look at him because he did not interest her.

Her indifference presented a challenge. Sheri might have to get approval from Lord Delafield before he could marry Arcadia, but winning Poorvaja was just as important—perhaps more so, in the grand scheme of things. Sheri very much doubted Arcadia Parks, headstrong as she was, ever did anything without her ayah's approval. Even if he could prevent Arcadia from crying off their match, he would have to win Poorvaja over, too.

Judging by the sparse gray strands in her black hair and fine lines around her eyes and mouth, Poorvaja couldn't have more than a few years' seniority over him. Looking past the swelling and bruising marring her jawline, he saw a pretty face with round cheeks and full, plum-colored lips. And though she might have spent the last twenty years in the service of one headstrong English girl, she was still a woman—and women could be charmed.

For the first time since the poor, battered creature had been put in his care hours ago, Sheri felt more in his element. He was just having a chat with a pretty girl, something he did all the time. Changing his tack, he said, “Even if your pain is not too much, consider that you now share a roof with eleven-year-old twin boys. Rendering yourself insensible might be the only way to get any uninterrupted sleep.”

At this, her eyes cut in his direction, her lips quirking to the side.

“Aaah, I see you're familiar with the feral creature that is the adolescent male. Did you have brothers?”

She shook her head. In her lap, her slender brown fingers laced together first one way, then another. “Only two older sisters, much to my parents' sorrow.”

“Speaking from experience, allow me to assure you you've missed out on nothing by not having an older brother. They're dreadful brutes and only gain a superficial polish of civility over the years when it comes to their younger siblings. Mine still likes to order me about just as he did in the nursery. I was never so happy in my life as I was the day Elijah left for Eton. I crowned myself with a wreath crafted of twigs from my mother's trained wisteria, then ransacked my brother's room for any treasures he may have left behind. Found a veritable sweet shop squirreled away in a trunk. I sat in the middle of his bed and gorged myself on the spoils of my conquest.”

“Oppressed, were you?” Poorvaja asked, that wry smile still in place.

“Quite brutally,” he assured her. “Elijah used to sit on my chest, pin my arms, and allow his phlegm to dangle above my face, then suck it back up just before it reached me. There should be a special military division devoted to systematizing big brother torture techniques for use in interrogation settings.”

Left unsaid was the stomachache that had hounded him the remainder of that day and kept him awake that night frequenting the chamber pot. Left even more unsaid was the accompanying ache in his chest that had settled in not long after the last bite of toffee, a dull, hollow place created by his brother's absence. But perhaps Poorvaja knew that sad destiny of younger siblings, being resigned to forever say goodbye to those idol-tormentors.

“But you have encountered boys somewhere,” he deduced, drawing away from his own ruminations. Reclining, he crossed his arms over his middle. “Do they roam the Indian countryside in packs as they do here in England?”

Poorvaja, too, relaxed her posture, leaning back against the headboard. “I have many male cousins. Thirty-something, at last count.”

“
What?
”

“My father's brother, Gyan, is head of our family. In his
zenana
, he keeps six wives and five concubines. After our lessons, the first wife turned the boys out of doors and told them she would snip a toe off any who dared return before dark.” Sheri must have still looked shocked by her revelation about thirty male cousins (
How many girls were there?
)
,
for she added, “My other uncles and aunts have children, too, but none so many as Gyan.”

“I should hope not.” To his own ears, Sheri sounded like a stuffy old coot, scandalized by wicked, heathen ways. He'd heard of harems, of course, and like any man with hot blood and a functioning brain, had sometimes fantasized about having so many women attending his needs and desires. Meeting someone who'd spent time in one sapped a bit of the eroticism out of his lewd daydreams. Nowhere in his imagination had scores of children been running about, with lessons and harried mothers.

“Crispin and Webb won't be worse than anything you're used to, then.”

Sighing, Poorvaja turned her eyes to the canopy draped over the bed. “That was a long time ago. Most of those boys are men now. There are still a few youngsters. Gyan's youngest wife is no older than Jalanili.”

“Why do you call Arcadia that—Jalanili?”

“It means a
water
…” Her dark brows drew together on a frown of concentration. “Spirit? Or fairy? I don't know the English word.”

Sheri tapped his lip. “A water nymph?”

Poorvaja shrugged. “Perhaps.” She hooked her hair behind her ears. “Arcadia was born blue, not breathing. The English doctor who'd come to the
mofussil
said the baby was dead and told me to take her away to spare Lady Parks the sight. She looked like a water … what you said.”

“Nymph.”

“Yes. Perfect and blue. When I held her, that tiny purple mouth opened, and she drew breath and cried and took right to my breast. My beautiful little
Jalanili
.”

She almost whispered this last in a tone of reverence, of love. She sounded like … Well, she sounded like a mother. And she must have been, to have been the newborn Arcadia's wet nurse. As he'd heard nothing of Poorvaja's own child, Sheri presumed there was tragedy in the woman's past. How much had she lost? A child, at least, but perhaps a husband or lover, too. She'd left India and her extended family behind to accompany the daughter of her heart to a new, foreign land, only to have Arcadia, too, prised from her.