Scandal in the Night (37 page)

“Ooh,” breathed Pippa when he had finished. “Oh, my.”

“You look just like the man in Miss Cates’s drawings,” said Gemma. “The one—”

“Genevieve,” Catriona interrupted in her most starched, repressive, chiding tone.

But Thomas’s dear niece Gemma was made of sterner, or at least less obedient, stuff. “But he does,” the girl insisted without batting an eye. “You must see that it is so. The one in your sketchbook.”

Thomas was beginning to harbor high hopes for Gemma. “I should very much like to see such a sketchbook,” he said, rising from the table in anticipation of his darling and daring niece doing just as she ought not.

Gemma was up, and had bolted across the nursery and into Miss Cates’s bedchamber before Catriona could voice any further objection. She emerged clutching a red, leather-covered book with a swiftness that spoke of much stealthy practice. Oh, yes. This one was certainly
his
niece.

“Genevieve,” Catriona said again with quiet authority. “It is rude to intrude upon anyone’s privacy in such a way. I did not give you leave to make free with my personal possessions.”

“Yes, but you showed them to us that time—” Gemma stopped a foot short of the table with the book wrapped protectively against her middle.

Catriona did not need to raise her voice or rail at her charges—her steady gaze and equally steady, grave tone were enough. “I do not give you leave to make free with my personal possessions,” she repeated quietly.

Thomas was impressed. Her words held none of the understated rebellion of her verbal engagements with her aunt in Saharanpur, but the same steel, undercut with soft generosity, ran through both. Her kind honesty—the sort of kindness she had so praised in him, and which he had all but disdained—was so devastating because it was so sincere.

Under such pressure, Gemma folded like a house of cards. Or at least she folded politicly—her voice was hardly contrite. “I’m sorry, miss. We’re sorry for going into your things, Miss Cates. Aren’t we, Pippa?”

Pippa, to her credit, stood by her sister, who was clearly the inciting malefactor of the duo. “Very sorry, miss,” she echoed loyally. “But the drawings are
so
beautiful. The ones with the watercolors especially.”

Thomas could not withstand such a lure. And he was not kind. So he stood, and by virtue of his height, simply reached out and plucked the book from Gemma’s hapless hands before Catriona could retrieve it.

“No—” Cat tried to stop him, rising precipitously out of her chair, but he forestalled her by the simple expediency of handing Mariah off to her, so that she had no choice but to take the little girl.

It gave him the few seconds to move back to his seat at the table and flip open the sketchbook.

“Mr. Jellicoe.” Catriona unsheathed the full force of her breathlessly sharp steel on him. “That is a private book. It is not meant for others to look at.”

Ah, but he was impervious. “So I see.” About half of the book had been used, filled with pencil drawings and the occasional vivid watercolor sketch. “I was a spy, Miss Cates. Surely you knew enough of me in India to know I don’t mind bending a rule or two, and prying into other people’s private lives.”

The scowl she sent him—one emphatically raised eyebrow, and the rest all tight, pursed lips—was masterful in its efficiency. “Then I pray, Mr. Jellicoe, that you will prove me wrong and do the right thing.”

“No such luck.” His fingers stopped riffling through the pages when the sketchbook fell open to a page with a pressed flower, and a note of the species and the date. Next there was a pretty watercolor of golden-pink honeysuckle. A green tree-lined avenue of a European-looking city. A beautiful charcoal sketch of Mariah’s seraphic face.

Around him, the children crowded his elbows, leaning over the table.

“There’s the elephant.” Amelia pointed a jam-sticky finger at the next page. “That’s the lady elephant.”

In a delicate wash of color, a pink-speckled Asian elephant with brightly painted markings looked soulfully out of the page, her crimson bedecked howdah and parasol wavering upon her back.

“Very true to life.” She must have done it from memory. She could hardly have snatched the sketchbook from the fire. Almost everything else of theirs had been consumed in the blaze. And there were no telltale smoke or smudgy ash marks.

Gemma reached over her siblings’ shoulders, and turned a few more sheets to the correct page. “There.”

And there he was. Mounted upon his horse, with one leg thrown casually across the pommel, leaning forward to smile at an unseen person, one hand propped upon his hip and the other lightly holding a mango. It was labeled
Sawar.

Gemma turned the page to another. A charcoal sketch of his head, swathed in a turban, and his eyes looking out from the page as if they were looking through the viewer.
Huzoor.
The night of the party at Colonel Balfour’s.

And another pencil drawing. This one of just his face, with his hair unbound, falling in loose arabesques around stark cheekbones and piercing eyes, tinted green with the only dash of color. The only time she had seen him thus, the night she had come to him. The night he had lost her.

This was how she saw him. From memory.

Thomas felt the air around him stand still. Even the children were struck dumb with some sort of reverence.

Catriona looked at the picture, and not at him. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That is your uncle. We were well acquainted.”

She remembered everything. And what she might not remember—those things that had mercifully slipped from her mind in order to forget the pain—he would give to her slowly and gently. A gift of memory, like the taste of almonds, and the scent of night-blooming jasmine.

It
was
love, deep and abiding, and growing still, despite everything. Despite the lies and loss. Nothing else could explain the absolute fullness of his heart, thumping like a loud drum in his chest.

Catriona felt it, too; though she said nothing, and turned away from the sketchbook, the flush of apricot color across her cheeks remained.

But he willed her to look at him, willed her to believe in him with the same unerring ferocity with which he believed in her. Willed her to trust him with her heart. With her life. “I’ve told you, your secrets are safe with me, Miss Cates. I’ll take them to my grave.”

Chapter Twenty-one

To his grave.

The words echoed endlessly in Catriona’s head. Over and over, as if she might wear them down to something more manageable, like a pebble smoothed down upon a shore.

It was no wonder she slept badly. She tried to rest, to close her eyes, but all she could do was stare at the ceiling while the rain outside continued to pour down, chattering relentlessly against the windowpane and chiding her for hiding under her safe, soft covers, and worry about what might happen. Worry about losing him all over again.

She ought to be doing …
something
. But what? Even Thomas had finally been persuaded that there was nothing to be done at night, and in the rain. But what about the morrow? What would come of his plan to track Birkstead down? Nothing good, of that she was sure.

The only solution she could think of was the one she had thought of first. The one that had never failed her—to run. As far and fast as she could.

All she had to do was convince Thomas.

Thomas. The Honorable Thomas Jellicoe was Tanvir Singh, and he was him. But whichever name would prove to fit him better, she missed him. She wanted his reassuring strength warming her lonely bed. She wanted his arms around her, holding her tight and making her forget all her worries for tomorrow.

But Lady Jeffrey had seen to it that Thomas was given a room far from the nursery, on the opposite side of the house, nearer to his family. With whom he had been compelled to spend the rest of the evening. Just as he ought.

Without the comfort of sleep, Catriona rose from her bed to wash and dress just as the first faint purple light of dawn colored the sky over Wimbourne. Outside the windows the heavy clouds of the storm appeared to be lifting and clearing, promising a fairer day. Which meant that Thomas would start his search for Birkstead.

For her part, she was anxious to see Thomas, and determined to speak to him and tell him all the things she had not yet—the whole of the uncomfortable truth. Willing herself to be brave. Knowing she might lose him all over again, before she had ever really had him.

No. She could not let herself think that way. Thomas Jellicoe had been steadfast—he would be still. He had said he loved her. He had said he wanted to marry her.

But she was going to have to put his love and steadfastness and offers of marriage to the test.

Outside the window, another long, shimmering ray of sunshine lanced through the clouds. If only their deadly problem with Birkstead—at large and with a gun, shooting at them from inconvenient distances, endangering everyone at Wimbourne with his potshots—would resolve itself as nicely and neatly as the weather. But there was no such chance.

Lord Jeffrey had arrayed his men to range over the estate to make sure no interloper could penetrate the grounds again. The gameskeepers’ men walked like sentries at the gate to the lane, their rifles tall and glinting dully in the overcast morning light. But Wimbourne was set right against the heart of the village, and was a working farm as well as a manor. People were already coming across the lane in front of the church that rose at the edge of the manor’s grounds—the girls who worked in the kitchens, as well as lads bound for the stable block, leading horses back from pasture or out for some duty on the home farm. The ground looked damp beneath their feet, shimmering green with heavy dew in the intermittent shafts of sunlight, dampening their boots and shoes, and muffling their steps. To the south a patch or two of blue sky was threatening to break through the last of the storm clouds—the kind of early-summer day that lured people out of doors. And made for clear shooting.

Catriona tried to shake off the feeling of rising gooseflesh through action. She was about to open her door, so she might be out and about and doing
something,
anything useful, rather that stew in solitude another minute, when from four stories below, came the percussive slap of leather boot soles upon the slate stone pathways next to the house, and then the crunch of footfalls upon the gravel lane leading to the stable yard.

Something, some instinct or premonition made her return to the window, and peer down, waiting for the person to come into view. And in another moment, Thomas’s broad shoulders, clad in an oilcloth redingote, hove into view and then disappeared into the stable.

He was going now. He was going after Birkstead. And he was going to be killed.

She had to stop him. Catriona immediately snatched up a shawl from the shelf in her wardrobe, and would have left to follow him immediately, but the sight of her traveling case gave her pause. And for no reason that she could discern, she took up her father’s small pistol from where she had left it at the top of her traveling case. It dropped like a heavy pebble into her pocket, and she smoothed down her skirts by force of habit, before she rushed out, clattering down the back stairs and out a little-used side door into the morning’s damp without pause for breath or decorum.

She hurried down the silent paths toward the stable until the chilling sense of urgency within prompted her to break into a run.

“Thomas? Thomas!” She wheeled to a stop in the stable doorway to catch her breath, and peer into the dim interior. Her senses filled with the pungent, low, pervasive smell of earthy animal and hay. The warm aroma was like a touchstone for her soul—it was the smell of home, peaceful and calming. That homey, damp, earthy scent gave her strength. And purpose. “Thomas!”

“Not an especially good day for a long walk, Cat. It’s coming on again to rain.”

Thomas Jellicoe waltzed out from between the stalls as if he had nothing better to do than prowl about in the darkness of the dawn. As if he were quite at home doing so, scouring stables and bazaars alike. Even the old-style redingote of his English riding clothes flared and swirled around him like his eastern
sawar’
s robes.

Thomas Jellicoe had passed the night with better result than she. His transformation was nothing short of remarkable. His coat was brushed, and his boots were polished, and his dark wavy hair was shining in the early-morning sun. And even though his face was freshly shaved of the dark whiskers that were all that was left of his beard, she could see the resemblance to Tanvir Singh in his bearing and demeanor. That easy masculine grace that made everything around him too delicate, or too effete, or too clumsy.

He was perfection. And he was smiling at her. Just as he had among the stalls of the Rani Bazaar.

She had to work to remember that she wanted to speak to him about something important. “It is not,” she said for lack of anything more pertinent to say to deflect his aura of dashing charm. “Coming on to rain. It’s clearing.”

“So much the better.” The long coat made him look disreputable and handsome all at the same time. “Well. Here you are,” he said, and reached out to take her hand. “I suppose it was too much to hope that you would stay tucked up and out of harm’s way. So I won’t ask nicely.” His voice rumbled out of him, steeped in a sort of jaunty, gallows-humor weariness. “Go back inside, Cat. It’s not safe for you to be out here.”

“And it is safe for you?” she countered. “Did it never occur to you that Birkstead shot at you, too, Thomas? That he could want you dead just as much as he wants me?” Her voice began to rise in proportion to her growing fright.

“Yes,” he answered simply. “It occurred to me last night, as I was sitting through a very stern tongue-lashing about the proper decorum for all things having to do with a wedding from James and his Cassandra—mostly from Cassandra. No stammering bride anymore, she. That Birkstead does have plenty of reasons to hate me. After all, you jilted him for me, did you not?”