Scandal in the Night (5 page)

How blind had she been, never to have seen it—that his sense of command came from an innate sense of privilege? How stupidly infatuated had she been that she had never seen the obvious truth of the man standing so close to her?

Too close. Again, she tried to wrest her elbow from his grasp.

He tugged her closer.

“Gun room, sir.” Michael was saying. “My Lord Jeffrey says I’m to take you there now, if our Miss Cates isn’t hurt.”

It gave her strength, that “our Miss Cates,” that feeling of belonging. She found her voice somewhere in the back of her aching throat. “No. I’m not hurt.”

Michael chanced returning a small smile. “I’m glad, miss. Then you’re to go to Lady Jeffrey and the children.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you.” She tugged against Thomas Jellicoe’s grip again, harder. “I’ll go directly.”

But Thomas Jellicoe wouldn’t let her go. He continued to ignore Michael’s, or more properly, Lord Jeffrey’s request—continued to do just as he pleased, just as he always had. “I’ll escort
your
Miss Cates.”

“I am not
your
Miss Cates, either. I am not your anything.”

He loomed over her, intimidating her with his height and breadth, and his dark English coat. “We are not done, Cat,” he promised her. “Not by a long measure.”

She looked up at him, and it was as if she were seeing him clearly for the first time—the hard, implacable English bedrock beneath the honeyed skin and dazzling smile. And despite the fact that she wanted to think she might see the last of him, Catriona didn’t doubt him in the least.

Chapter Four

The moment he was forced by the demands of good breeding and his obligation to his family to let Catriona go, Thomas’s fingers ached for the loss. And without her to hold, to actively keep safe, he immediately felt the enormous lack of a weapon in his hands. Nearly fifteen years in hostile, dangerous lands and he had not spent a moment without a knife and a gun tucked into his waistband. Two days back in peaceful England and he was unarmed, and unable to prevent a shooting at a garden party.

Bloody, bloody hell. Thomas watched Catriona hurry into the house and away behind the baize door to the servants’ corridors with a feeling close to panic. Every instinct told him not to let her out of his sight, to keep her safe by his side, not to let another moment go by without prying the truth out of her. There was still too much to say, too much that needed explaining.

But there was also much to do. The estate had to be made secure, and Thomas doubted James, for all his typical efficiency and legions of staff, could be as experienced in such nefarious matters as he. If his bloody double life had cost such a high price, Thomas wanted to at least know he’d gotten value for his ill-spent money.

The gun room, located within the northeast portion of the house, its windowless walls furnished with dark oak cabinets, was a hive of activity. Shuttered safety lamps revealed James and their father, the Earl Sanderson, together at a central table, poring over a map with a man who was either the steward, the gamekeeper, or possibly the groundskeeper—Thomas’s recollection of the hierarchy of English outdoor servants was sketchy. Nearly fifteen years of being thought little better than a servant himself by his fellow Englishmen had left him with a skewed perception of both his betters and his equals.

They stopped speaking as he entered.

Thomas asserted himself into the silence. “Have you secured the perimeter of the estate from the walls outward? The shots came from over the manor wall to the west and—”

The look James gave him was nearly a glare, so sharp and probing it could have cut glass, though his voice was brittle with calm. “Thank you, Thomas. I’ve already sent my men out. Thank you, Peters,” he said to his steward. “You’ll see to it? Have Foster from the home farm come up to see me as well. You may go, all of you, while I have a word with my brother.”

James saw his steward out of the room, and returned to his maps with impeccable self-discipline. But Thomas could see his brother’s knuckles were white where his hands clenched the edge of the table in an effort to remain calm and in control.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Thomas felt the need to explain himself. “James, I have experience—”

“No doubt.” His brother’s tone grew sharper as his fright for his family overtook his good manners. “I could see that by the
experienced
way you tossed poor Miss Cates about like a sack of grain. Tell me what the hell is going on, Thomas. Tell me your
experience
hasn’t followed you here, to
my home,
to threaten my
children
and family.” James’s voice rose, raw with suppressed fear. “Tell me.”

It hadn’t gone unnoticed by Thomas that in the course of fifteen years of clandestine service, he might have acquired an enemy or two. He had spent years in careful consideration of such a possibility, always on the watch for trouble. But he hadn’t expected such trouble to follow him home, to soft, sweet England, to his brother’s manor of all places, a house he had never set eyes upon until a scant half hour ago.

No. The gunshots had not been fired at him. Nor, as far as he could tell, at the rest of the party. “My apologies, James. I assure you I am very conscious of the safety of your family. But the shots were not for me. There was a single gunman. He fired, from my recollection, three shots, in succession at timed intervals, which suggests some army training. And every single one of them was fired at your Miss Cates. Thank God I got here when I did.”

“Miss Cates? That’s ridiculous.” James echoed Cat’s sentiments. “Who would want to shoot a poor governess?”

The list, by Thomas’s calculation, was not extensive. Just brutally efficient. “I think you should know, there is more to your Miss Cates than meets the eye.”

James crossed his arms over his chest and took a more careful, measured look at his younger brother. “I could say as much about you, Thomas. Miss Cates has been living amongst us in the neighborhood quite peacefully until you showed up. And you’re the one who scared her half to death. You frightened her even before the shooting. Why?”

Thomas weighed his truths out as carefully as possible. “I knew her in India.”

“So I gathered. She did not seem pleased to renew the acquaintance.”

“No, she didn’t.” Thomas had imagined their reunion many, many times in the past two years. In each imagining Catriona had been glad—more than glad. She had been deliriously happy to see him. She had thrown her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately. She had not pulled away in disgust and said, “Leave me alone.”

“Did you manhandle her there as well? I hope I don’t need tell you, Thomas, as pleased as I am to see you, I won’t stand for anyone, even my long-lost brother, bullying or mistreating my servants. Miss Cates is greatly valued by Lady Jeffrey. Greatly.”

Thomas looked at his brother and his father—whom he hadn’t even greeted properly—and felt the weight of his own shortcomings, his own failures. Cat had been right. She was not ecstatic to see him because he had failed her. Miserably.

“I understand completely. Again, my apologies. Hello, Father.”

His father, the Earl Sanderson, extended his hand and gave his youngest son a deep, slow smile. “It is, of course, a pleasure—more than a pleasure—to see you after all these years, Thomas, but … It has not been the most auspicious of homecomings.”

“No. I am sorry.”

James was only partially mollified. “Sorry doesn’t explain why someone shot at my family. Or, as you insist, at my governess.”

Thomas’s natural inclination was to keep the few of Cat’s secrets that he did know to himself, for they were rightly hers to tell. But James was right—his family had been exposed to gunfire. Thomas owed them a larger measure of the truth. “How much of what I did in India do you know?”

James looked to their father.

“A little.” The earl settled into a leather armchair. “A very little. I could find only that you were asked by the company to assume another identity, though even I couldn’t learn anything beyond that. I assume you were a spy.”

“That’s as neat a description as any.” It gave Thomas little pleasure to have his work described thusly. However good he had been at gathering intelligence, spying was hardly an honorable profession for a gentleman. He had hoped never to mention his erstwhile career to his family—only to tell them he had made his fortune in horse trading and breeding.

But his father, it seemed, had intelligence sources of his own. “It was not, perhaps, a career I would have chosen for you,” his father admitted. “Indeed, I had hoped your service in India would lead eventually to a political career.”

His
career,
such as it was, was over. Finished.

“I didn’t choose it, either. It seemed to have chosen me.” Not for the first time in the past year, Thomas wished for a drink. After years of honoring the vow of abstinence he had taken in his identity as Tanvir Singh, this was what his tangled obsession with Catriona Rowan had reduced him to. Even this early in the afternoon, he felt the need for the fortification only strong spirits could afford. But he must begin as he meant to go on—honestly.

“You see, in India there was a northern proverb: ‘Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi, and thou shalt make a Sikh.’”

Thomas had first heard it spoken by his superior, Colonel Augustus Balfour, on the day almost fourteen years before, when Thomas had ridden back from his first assignment for the East India Company. Alone.

“Almost as soon as I had arrived in India, I was sent upon a particularly mortal expedition to buy horses for breeding stock in Baluchistan. Of all the Englishmen sent out by the company on that expedition—twenty-three men—only I lived.”

Even after the passage of so many intervening years, the loss still ached like a bruise that should have long since healed.

Only he had survived the rigors of a year of caravan travel, the exposure to disease, the ravages of climate, and the predations of bandits and tribesmen, to return a different man than the boy who had left. When he had finally made it back to Delhi, he had looked and spoken more like a native than any son of pale Albion.

“A Colonel Balfour was the resident commissioner of the northwest provinces back then, and when I had told him all the things I had seen and heard in the course of the long journey, and what I had learned to make of them, well, that cagey gentleman concocted a devious but simple plan. It was decided that I would go with him to Saharanpur, and Tanvir Singh, Sikh, trader of horses, finder of information, giver and keeper of secrets, I would become. I wrapped my hair that had grown overlong and unruly in a turban, and donned the
kirpan
and
kara,
the ceremonial dagger and silver bracelet, as the outward signs of the Sikh religion.”

James leaned forward in morbid curiosity. “Just like that? You take up a pagan religion?”

“It’s not pagan, it’s monotheistic.” But he did not have the leisure to debate theology with his brother. “I was a spy, James. That’s how it’s done. You can dissect my moral compromises at some later date.”

He had become the company’s most secret weapon, passing across borders with impunity. He had learned to cull the meaningful facts out of his observations, while at the same time keeping himself invisible, hidden in plain sight amongst the teeming masses. “I took up a lot of things for expediency’s sake.”

“Including Miss Cates?” his father probed.

“No.” Thomas’s tone was every bit as steely and uncompromising as his sire’s, hard and tempered by experience, full of the man he had become. “Do
not
make unfounded assumptions. There was nothing expedient about my association with your Miss Cates.”

Yet, how could he explain what Cat had been to him? It would do him little credit in his family’s eyes to know he
had
abandoned the English way of life without looking back, and never thought another thing about it, through all the years he had roamed back and forth across kingdoms, deserts, and frontiers, until that late spring morning two years ago, when an
angrezi
woman in Rani Bazaar had looked at him, and made him feel something keen and bittersweet about the life he had so easily left behind.

It had been altogether unwelcome, that pang. He had loved his role as a clandestine agent in the Great Game of espionage between all the many powers in the shadows of the Hindu Kush. He had loved the horses, loved their beauty and their heart, and he loved most of all the freedom to go where he liked, and the intrigue of finding what went on everywhere he looked.

“It suited me—Balfour’s version of spying. I was free to travel, and trade and breed horses. I earned an independent fortune doing so. I was beholden to no one, so long as I brought secrets, along with my horses, down from the Maharajah Ranjiit Singh’s powerful kingdom of the Punjab and offered them to the company.”

And they had taken him and his intelligence for granted, the company, like a plate of sweetmeats left outside a door by an obedient, invisible servant.

Yet, that morning, in the Rani Bazaar, the girl had appeared to him like the insistent vision of a remorseful angel, come to remind him of what he was, and who he had once been below the surface of his darkened skin. She drew his eye like a bright flame, a cold-burning torch amid the heat and profusion of the bazaar. An
angrezi
woman so very white, she was exotic.

She hadn’t looked like all the typical memsahibs, full of starched righteousness and stewed faces, with wilted, disapproving lips. Yet she was most assuredly European, with her vividly pale, freckled skin, strawberry-ginger hair, and tall stature, despite the fact she was dressed unconventionally for either bazaar or bungalow. She wore a pale gray muslin
angrezi
frock, but her head and shoulders were swathed in a bright orange silk veil that matched her hair and formed an arching halo about her head as the hot breeze lifted the translucent material, giving her the appearance of an otherworldly, Hindu-influenced, Renaissance madonna. Half-forgotten tales from schoolbooks flooded his mind—of Boadicea, the pagan Celtic queen, or the warrior goddess Freya, with her red-gold tears.