Scandal in the Night (10 page)

And it had been more than enough just to watch and listen. It had made her happy to look without ever once thinking to partake. Her life in Saharanpur had already seemed too enchanted, too full of ease and the loving companionship of her young cousins to wish for anything more.

But that night, her thoughtful new uncle decided that she was to be included in the invitation to an event—an evening dinner party at the home of the mysterious Colonel Balfour, the preceding resident commissioner, to welcome and fete the new resident. Lord Summers had insisted, and Aunt Lettice had bestirred herself enough to see to it that Catriona was properly fitted out. She was in a new dress made by a British seamstress, Mrs. MacElroy, a sergeant major’s clever wife who kept a store of the latest fashion plates—“latest” being a relative term in the hinterlands of the frontier—in her small bungalow, and a small group of Indian seamstresses in her even smaller back room to carry out the work.

Catriona remembered that exquisite dress as if she had just folded it carefully into her traveling case—embroidered gauze with a tiny, satin-sashed waist, and elaborate, wide sleeves decorated in delicate hand embroidery and cutwork in demure, dewy debutante’s white that Mrs. MacElroy had tea-stained, “To look just so with your fair, fair skin.”

And, oh, how it had suited her. Catriona had felt like a fairy princess with such sleeves as wide as angel’s wings.

And she remembered being filled with a sort of optimism that she hadn’t felt in years, since her mother had died and all the warmth and easy comfort had disappeared from her life. Her excitement—the giddy combination of anticipation and expectation fluttering around in her stomach like butterflies drunk on nectar—had carried her up to the strange, dark, battered door of Colonel Balfour’s home.

It hadn’t looked like much from the outside, that crumbling wall and creaking wooden gate that the English children whispered hid a house as haunted as any Gothic castle, but behind the massive portal was a scene straight out of Scheherazade’s tales. Once through the outer gate, Catriona had been enchanted to find they were within the walls of an ancient Mughal palace so beautiful, she was sure she had taken a wrong turn and walked uninvited into the very garden of paradise.

The first courtyard led on to another, and every courtyard was filled with sinuous palms and lemon trees laden with bright fruit. Everywhere she looked a thousand and one blazing torches illuminated walkways and bubbling fountains. And across the central garden courtyard, across the twinkling pools and night-blooming flower beds, was a tiered pavilion—floor upon floor stacked up like a wedding cake upon pillars. There were no walls to speak of—the spaces between the carved stone pillars were hung with jewel-toned curtains in shimmering silks and transparent gauze that fluttered in the evening breeze. Some of those curtained spaces were set with wide, white cotton mattresses, and colorful bolster cushions and pillows in the Oriental fashion, while others contained furniture that could have graced a duke’s drawing room.

Above on a gallery sat a group of musicians playing a low, vibrating, insistent music that danced along with the beat of her pulse. And in the center of the pavilion the curtains had been hung to create an airy central dining room, complete with a mahogany table so long Catriona was sure the King of England himself did not have one so large at Windsor Palace.

Everywhere around her was color and music and movement. Catriona had never seen anything so beautiful and so intrinsically, alluringly exotic.

She had stood stock-still in breathless awe, bewitched by the flowing, liquid beauty of the night.

“Well, look at you.” Her uncle had smiled indulgently at her. “If you aren’t the prettiest young lady at the dinner party, I shall eat my hat instead of whatever strange curry old Colonel Balfour will feed us. I daresay it will taste about the same!”

Catriona had laughed and blushed, and said something thankful and demure, and let her uncle take her arm on one side, and his wife’s on the other, to escort them toward the pavilion. “With you looking like that,” Lord Summers said with an indulgent smile, “we shall have to beat off all the young men vying for your hand. But we shall be very choosy.”

“My dear Lord Summers.” Her aunt had loosened a languid little laugh. “There is no need for such great haste. I, for one, am in no hurry to see dear Catriona leave us so soon—she has only just arrived.” Her aunt turned to Catriona in kind, if condescending, explanation. “The children already love you so, I do not know how they ever did without you. Indeed, I shouldn’t like to do without you ever again. You do remind me of my own dear sister so.”

The night had been so full of magic that Catriona had chosen not to take umbrage at her aunt’s subtly patronizing tone, or think about Aunt Lettice’s motives in making such a speech. She had chosen instead to be charmed and grateful for their very real generosity. “You have been so very kind to me.”

“And what do you think, Lettice, about Henry Carruthers?” Lord Summers dealt out potential bridegrooms like cards from a deck. “Or my secretary, Mr. George Lamont?”

“My dear sir.” Aunt Lettice had laughed again, a little huff of amused dismissal. “Such a pea goose of a man.”

“Not dashing enough for our pretty niece? Ah, I know just the man. How about Lieutenant Birkstead for her? Eh?” He nudged Catriona affectionately. “That would be the catch of the country, would it not? And a very good match for him as well, for I mean to see that our pretty niece has a fortune to go with her lovely face.”

“Sir!” Catriona had been astonished at this unlooked-for good fortune. “You are too kind.”

“Well.” Aunt Lettice’s laugh was less amused than it was dismissive. “Oh, he has dash, the lieutenant, to be sure. But I hardly think such a man will do for our sweet little niece. Nor she for him.”

Catriona had not heeded the undercurrent of scorn in her aunt’s jaded tones. She was too grateful her relations were thinking of her at all in such a way, too happy in the thought that her new uncle would be so exceptionally generous, too pleased with the marvelously heady possibility she might find a husband to marry.

It was all part of the enchantment, the wondrous, giddy charm of that special evening.

Colonel Balfour had enhanced that charm by greeting them himself upon the steps of the pavilion, wearing a shining silk robe and plumed turban fit for a Mughal emperor. He looked everything kind and gracious and learned, and he bowed low over her hand like the most courteous of gentlemen, a cavalier of the old school.

And when she looked up from Colonel Balfour, there
he
was. The tall Sikh
sawar,
Tanvir Singh. Her secret storybook prince.

There had been nothing of the rogue in him that night. Nothing of sly amusement turning up the corners of his eyes or widening his bright slashing smile. But there was everything of the noble
huzoor.
Tanvir Singh stood upon the steps of the pavilion attired almost entirely in crimson. There was no other word that better described the shining, deep, deep red silk tunic belted at the waist with a sash of white shot through with gold threads. Above his dark hair he wore a turban of the same white silk, a bright contrast to the glowing tan of his skin.

He bowed his head to her in a gorgeous, courtly salaam, and she felt a sort of giddy triumph at having merited so much of his attention. He was so unlike all the others there. He looked relaxed and composed and graceful all at the same time. He moved in a way that she had never noticed in a man before—folding himself down with effortless elegance to sit comfortably on the cushions, while the Englishmen around him in their starched, formal evening dress crouched down awkwardly.

She had laughed to herself in wonder that no one else seemed able to see that he was so obviously a long-lost prince.

But she had not had time to do anything more than smile her pleasure back at him, because her uncle led her by, determined to see her amongst the company set—carrying her away into the whirl of officers and company officials. Into the closed circle of pleasant, clubby chitchat.

And she had not objected when her uncle introduced her to gentlemen, nor when her aunt had introduced her to the ladies. She was grateful and unfailingly polite to the Mrs. Carstairs and the Miss Fieldings and the Mrs. Cowpers of their world. She set herself diligently to remembering their husband’s names and ranks and positions, determined to be accommodating, and useful and gracious.

She would have been better served to step back, and open her eyes and unstop her ears. She would have been better off to take heed of the treacherous undercurrents flowing around her. She would have been better prepared to utilize her well-honed Scots skepticism to take a more critical, sharp-eyed look at those around her. If she had, she might have better recognized the malice that hung like incense in the sultry, perfumed air.

It had not been her first encounter with perfidy, that night in Saharanpur. But it certainly had proved the most instructive. And the most lasting.

But what was done, was done. There could be no turning back, no chance of reliving the moment, of making different choices. No chance of redemption.

Catriona recalled herself to the present, to the inconvenient task that awaited her at Wimbourne and steeled herself to speak to Lady Jeffrey one more time. “My lady, please understand. It is impossible. You see, Mr. Thomas Jellicoe did not mistake me for another.”

“No,” her inconvenient prince said from the doorway. “I never have.”

Chapter Seven

And he wasn’t mistaking her now. He could feel the tense readiness, the watchful thinking, emanating from Cat in waves. She meant to leave. Without him.

He could see her knowledge in her eyes—see the determination, that absolute conviction he had once admired. The steely purpose beneath the prim, starched exterior.

It had always been there, that well-honed sense of surety. Miss Anne Cates’s face might look as impassive and stoic as the
Himalaya
, frozen and unmoving as she sat so calmly by the unnecessary fire, but he did not for one moment think she was unfeeling. No. She felt. But like the remote, timeless mountains, Catriona Rowan was alive beneath the heavy covering of snow, shifting slowly, merely biding her time. She could not hide herself so thoroughly from him, though she gazed at him with all the calm certainty of a queen—in the world, but not of it.

And he, who knew everything of masks and keeping his thoughts from his face, was impressed by her resolve and her control. He had seen it before.

He had first seen it that night in Saharanpur, at the party Colonel Balfour had carefully orchestrated to try and bring the new resident commissioner into some greater knowledge and appreciation of Hind and its richly varied peoples and cultures.

That night Thomas had scrubbed all traces of the horseman from his hands, and dressed himself in silks and satins, and wrapped his long hair in a fine white turban. All the while thinking only of her. Keeping his mind conveniently blank as to his true motives. Telling himself he was only playing a little game.

But it had not been a game, the way he had watched her, his northern flame-gold goddess.

Watching was what Tanvir Singh was good at—observing people, noticing the little things they did not know they did, finding the ways their hands or their eyes gave the lie to the words they spoke.

And that was what had made Miss Catriona Rowan so very interesting, and so very, very different. In the veritable viper’s nest of petty deceptions on display—the sweating upper-level company clerk, Mr. Pillock, in charge of the warehousing of export trade goods, who was standing in the corner sporting a diamond pin that was surely too expensive for such a minor functionary, had most assuredly been skimming profits from the company’s coffers; the young subaltern chatting with the matron and her daughter had eyes only for his regiment’s master sergeant; and the fat cotton merchant Rama Kumar was augmenting his profits by dabbling in smuggled opium—where nearly every person alternated between platitudes and outright lies, Miss Catriona Rowan all but radiated pure truth and conviction.

Her every action, from her clear open gaze to her quick agile fingers as she shook hands with everyone she met, spoke of a forthright character, and an intelligence that never strayed to cunning. She did not say one thing and mean another. She spoke the uncomfortable truth.

The Lady Summers had steered her niece to the little cluster of English ladies, and was introducing her around. “You remember my niece, Miss Rowan? Mrs. Foster. Mrs. Foster is Mrs. Fielding’s sister, you know.”

“Yes, of course. We met after church services last Sunday. How nice to see you again, ma’am.”

From as far away as he could bear to stand and observe her, Tanvir Singh saw her smile and nod politely, and then step back, just as she ought, so that her aunt could take the place of precedence in her little pride of lionesses.

Only the English ladies were on hand for the evening. While Colonel Balfour was a friend to all and a confidant to many besides Tanvir Singh and Thomas Jellicoe, the rich cotton merchants like Rama Kumar and Sanjay Lupalti, who had fattened their purses to bursting trading with the East India Company under the aegis of the colonel, kept their women safe at home, and did not mix business and family. Only the English brought their tight-corseted, fainting wives and daughters. And nieces.

Miss Catriona Rowan was not the only younger, unmarried woman to walk under the high archway of the palace gate, but she was clearly the most beautiful. At least to Thomas. Because she was the only one who was alive to the beauty around her.

She was the only one who looked around her in open, happy amazement. She was the only one unafraid to cast admiring eyes on the beauty and splendor of the old Mughal fort Balfour had long ago made his own when he had married an almond-eyed local beauty. The Begum, as the colonel called his wife, was by her religion a Mohammedan, and as such, not at home to strangers. But the dear kind lady, who had done so much to help young Thomas Jellicoe when he first came to India, was no doubt keeping her eye on the proceedings from one of the screened windows high above, and her ladies would have their ears attuned to every conversation that carried upward from the courtyard or the spacious, tiered colonnades surrounding the hall where the European-style dinner table had been set.