by Gaelen Foley
“Ah.” Relief washed through him, and he gave his servant a cautious nod. “Very well, then. Let us be on our—” His words broke off abruptly, for at that moment, without warning, a rider came barreling into the market.
Astride a magnificent white Arabian mare, she came tearing through the bazaar, careening nimbly through the crowded zigzag aisles and leaving a tenfold chaos in her wake. Chickens went flying, vendors cursed, a tower of handwoven baskets crashed down, knocking over a fruit stand, and people flung themselves out of her way.
Ian stared.
In a cloud of weightless silk swathed exotically around her lithe figure, the woman leaned low to murmur in her horse’s ear. Above the diaphanous veil that concealed the lower half of her face, her cobalt eyes were fierce.
Blue.
Blue eyes?
As he watched in disbelief, she leaped her white horse over a passing oxcart—and then she was gone, racing off in the direction of the fire.
Ravi and Ian exchanged a baffled look.
He and Ravi and both coolies, along with the Knight family’s footman, stared after the girl for a moment, dumbfounded.
There was only one sort of woman he knew who could cause that much chaos that quickly.
Aye, in an instant, somehow, deep in his bones, Ian knew exactly who she was.
The footman had turned pale and now started forward in recognition, but Ian stopped him with a sardonic murmur.
“I’ll handle this.” With a cautionary nod at Ravi, he walked away from the servants, and followed irresistibly in the direction the young hellion had gone.
Georgiana Knight urged her fleet-footed mare onward, dodging rickshaws, pedestrians, and sacred cows that loitered in the road until, at last, she reached the riverside, where a gathering of some fifty people surrounded the funeral pyre.
Towering flames licked at the azure sky.
The sickening, charred-meat smell made her stomach turn, but she would not be deterred. A young woman’s life depended on this rescue—more than that, a dear friend.
The relatives of old, dead Balaram now noticed Georgie’s approach. Most of them still milled about the funeral pyre, sending up all the spectacle of mourning for the respected town elder, wailing and waving their hands, but a few watched her uneasily as she arrived at the edge of the crowd. They knew the British detested this holy rite, and she quite expected that at least a few of them would try to stop her.
The self-immolation of a virtuous and beautiful widow not only pleased the gods, but brought great honor to her family and that of her husband. Burning herself alive in a ritual suicide just to honor her husband’s name!
There could be no more perfect illustration, Georgie thought, of everything that was wrong with the whole institution of marriage—in both their cultures. It gave all the power to the man. And, good heavens, the way females were treated in the East was enough to put any sane woman off marriage entirely!
A cheeky aphorism from the writings of her famous aunt, Georgiana Knight, the Duchess of Hawkscliffe, trailed through her mind: Wedlock is a padlock. Well, today, she would not allow it to become a death sentence, too.
Then she spotted dear, gentle Lakshmi standing before the blaze in her red silk wedding robes, heavily encrusted with gold and pearls. The raven-haired beauty was staring at the fire as though contemplating what agony she would know before oblivion. Absorbed in her thoughts and no doubt lightly drugged with betel, the dead man’s bride was not yet aware of her British friend’s arrival.
Angered by the smoke, the white mare reared up a bit on her hind legs as Georgie pulled her mount to a halt at the fringe of the funeral crowd; she gave her horse a firm command to stay and leaped down from the saddle.
Murmurs rippled around her as she stalked through the gathering, her sandals landing firmly in the dust with each long, limber stride. The tiny silver bells on her anklet tinkled eerily in the hush.
Everyone knew the two girls had played together since childhood, and that Georgie was far more Indianized than most British folk, so perhaps the relatives thought she had merely come to say her last goodbyes. Lakshmi’s family were wealthy Hindus of the Brahmin caste, on a par with the aristocratic rank of Georgie’s clan in their respective cultures.
They let her pass.
Behind her, she now heard Adley’s rather noisy arrival at the edge of the crowd, tumbling along after her, as always, but Balaram’s relatives did not let the foppish young nabob any closer. She could hear him sputtering with indignation.
“I say! This will not do! Miss Knight! I am here—should you need me!”
Fixed on her purpose, she did not look back, surveying the dire scene before her.
The massive bonfire had already turned old Balaram’s bones to dust when Lakshmi looked up from the inferno and saw Georgie marching toward her. She faltered slightly at Georgie’s infuriated stare.
Reaching Lakshmi’s side, Georgie gripped her shoulders with a no-nonsense look and turned her friend away from the flames. “You are out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you go through with this—ridiculous superstition!” she scolded in a hushed tone. “It’s savage and cruel!”
“What choice do I have?” Lakshmi’s delicate voice quavered. “I cannot dishonor my family.”
“You most certainly can! It was bad enough they made you marry the old goat, but to die for him, as well? It is obscene!” she whispered furiously.
“But it isn’t dying, really,” Lakshmi insisted half-heartedly. “I’ll go straight to heaven, and w-when the people pray to me, I’ll grant their wishes.”
“Oh, Lakshmi. What have they done to you?” Had the three years her friend had spent living in the strict marital seclusion of purdah robbed her of all common sense? “I know you know better than this!”
“Oh, Georgie—my life will be too awful if I live!” she choked out, her big brown eyes filling with tears. “You know how it is for widows. I’ll be an outcast! People will flee me and say I’m bad luck! I’ll be a burden on my family, a-and I’ll have to shave off all my hair,” she added woefully, for Lakshmi’s night-black hair was her crowning glory, hanging all the way to her waist. “What’s the point?” she said in utter misery. “My life is over. It’s forbidden that I should ever remarry. All my childhood happiness came to an end the day of my wedding, and it will not return, so I might as well be dead.”
“You don’t know that. No one knows the future. My dear, you mustn’t give up.” Georgie hugged her for a moment, with angry tears in her eyes. “Look,” she resumed in as soothing a tone as possible, “don’t try to think about the whole rest of your life right now. Just think about this moment, and the next.”
Georgie coughed a little from the smoke, but willed away the pain that flared up in her chest and ignored the fear as the smoke began snaking through her lungs, agitating her old ailment.
“Think of all the reasons left to live,” she continued, “all the fun we have. Throwing powder paints on people at the Holi festival? Playing pranks on Adley? If you die, who will finish teaching me the Odissi dances? If you die, oh, my dearest, you can never dance again.”
Lakshmi let out a strangled sob, barely audible above the fire’s roar.
“Now, you listen to me,” Georgie ordered softly. “You won’t be a burden on your family, because—” A painful spasm in her lungs halted her words all of a sudden. She clutched her chest, alarmed. She hadn’t felt that harsh constriction in her lungs since she was a child. It was worsening. She cleared her throat but it was no use; she had begun to wheeze.
“What’s wrong?” Lakshmi searched her face.
“Nothing,” she lied impatiently, determined to save her friend or die trying. “You won’t be a burden on your family,” she repeated, refusing to yield to panic, “because you will come and live at my house. Papa won’t mind. He’s never home anyway, and as for my brothers, well, Gabriel and Derek will never forgive you if you go through with this—and they’ll never forgive me if I fail to
stop you.”
When she coughed again and then muttered a curse, Lakshmi realized for certain what was wrong. “It’s your asthma, isn’t it?”
“Don’t worry about me!” Georgie retorted, but concern for her was now rousing Lakshmi out of her trance of despair.
“Gigi, you can hardly breathe,” she insisted, using her childhood nickname. “You have to get away from this fire!”
Georgie fixed her with a meaningful stare. “So do you,” she replied in an urgent whisper. “Be brave, my dear. Be brave enough to stand up to them, and live.”
“Miss Knight, you must let her go now,” Lakshmi’s father interrupted. “It is time. Hurry, Lakshmi, while the fire is still hot enough.”
A shower of sparks popped violently and flew toward Lakshmi in a plume, as though old Balaram himself were reaching out from the depths of the fire, trying to grab the poor girl and drag her down with him to her doom. Lakshmi glanced from her sire back to Georgie, sudden panic in her eyes. “Help me,” she whispered.
“Put more wood on the fire!” one of the kinsmen ordered a nearby servant.
Georgie’s heart pounded. “Of course I will. That’s why I’m here. Come. Link arms with me. Let’s get you out of here.” Before your relatives make you go through with it whether you want to or not. Pressuring her to the brink of this ritual suicide was one thing, but would they resort to murder, throwing her into the fire against her will?
She glanced around warily, knowing this danger was certainly possible. “Everything’s going to be all right, I promise. Come, now. Let’s go.” Holding onto her friend protectively, Georgie drew her away from the inferno.
At once, the dead man’s relatives sent up a clamor of protest all around them, yelling at the girls; in an instant, they were surrounded by a sea of angry brown faces.
A few seized the girls’ arms, trying to separate them.
“Leave her alone!” Georgie shouted, shoving them away, but in their eyes, this was completely unacceptable.
The brother of the dead man came over and gripped Lakshmi’s other arm, rebuking her in Bengali, reminding her of her sacred duty and trying to drag her back toward the fire, as though he would throw them both forcibly into the blaze before he would see the late family patriarch dishonored.
“Let go of her!” Georgie pushed the man away with one arm and held fast to Lakshmi with the other. “Stay back! I’m not going to let you murder her!”
“Ungrateful daughter! Do not give in to this foreigner’s meddling! How dare you shame our family?”
“Father, please!” Lakshmi wailed, struggling against her kin, jarred this way and that in the tug of war over her, but when the men began steadily pulling both girls back toward the fire, terror came into her large brown eyes. Now instinct took over, and the girl fought for her life.
Georgie was having trouble drawing a simple breath, but she held onto her friend with both arms, sparing only a glance over her shoulder. “Adley!”
“I am here, Miss Knight! Hold on, hold on!”
It was only a minute or two, but it felt like an eternity before her faithful, flaxen-haired suitor came barging into their midst astride his fine chestnut gelding, leading Georgie’s white mare by the reins.
The tall stamping horses helped stave off the mob. Georgie pushed Lakshmi up into the saddle behind Adley.
To her family’s fury, the Indian girl wrapped her arms around the Englishman’s slim waist.
“Take her to my house! Go!” Georgie urged them, but Adley hesitated, eyeing the hostile crowd in doubt. “I’ll be right behind you!” She slapped the gelding on the rump to get them moving before the situation turned any uglier.
In the next moment, Georgie sprang up onto her horse’s back. The white mare tossed her head, but one of Lakshmi’s kinsmen grabbed the bridle and would not let go, excoriating Georgie as a meddler, a pagan, and a few even less savory epithets. Well, the world had called her famous aunt worse—the defiant duchess had been dubbed “the Hawkscliffe Harlot” for her many scandals. Georgie was not about to be intimidated. “Let go of my horse!”
They were closing in, rioting around her, and as her fear climbed, her difficulty breathing increased.
“Would you like to go into the fire in her place?” the infuriated brother-in-law yelled.
“Don’t—touch me!” As she fought them, she could hear her heartbeat thundering in her ears, her breath rasping in her throat, and in a flash, it brought back the long-forgotten, inward sound of panic.
She had come to know it well as a child. Unable to gulp enough air into her lungs, a wave of lightheadedness washed over her, terrifying her with the fear of passing out and falling from her horse into the irate crowd.
Suddenly, a towering Englishman exploded into their midst, driving the dead man’s relatives back.
“Stand down!” he roared, thrusting one arm out to hold the men at bay and blocking the others from getting at her with nothing more than a walking stick.
Georgie’s eyes widened.
The mob fell back before his furious commands for order, backing away from him as though a tiger had gotten loose in the market.
As she regained her balance in the saddle, Georgie’s stunned gaze flashed over the magnificent interloper—all six-feet-plus of him—lingering briefly on the sweeping breadth of his shoulders and the lean cut of his waist.
Moving into their midst with athletic elegance, a simmering cauldron of intensity, polished to a high sheen, he was crisp and formidable—lordly—from his sleek short haircut to his gleaming black boots. In terms of solid, unsmiling mass, the man was two of Adley, with none of his foppish flamboyance.
In her heart, Georgie knew him at once—not because of his fine London clothes, nor even because she had been expecting his arrival any day now at the nearby docks. She knew he was Lord Griffith because he did not draw a weapon on these unarmed people.
A man like him didn’t have to. The famed marquess wielded more force with his aura and his eyes than other men commanded with a pistol.
She watched him in awe. It seemed her illustrious guest had finally arrived, and from the first second, Georgie was more impressed than she liked to admit.
Somehow, in short order, Lord Griffith began single-handedly bringing the riot under control. Deliberately creating a distraction, he drew the crowd’s fury away from her to himself, so that, at last, she could take a few seconds to try to breathe. But she knew they had to get out of here—both of them. At any moment, the whole thing could erupt in violence.
When he threw her a piercing glance full of question—Are you all right?—she suddenly forgot to exhale, never mind the asthma.
Good heavens, he was easy on the eyes!
Having proudly doted on her two darling brothers all her life, a handsome face did not usually impress her. But in the midst of the fray, the diplomat’s striking good looks made her blink.
Some of the local men now recovered their courage and moved toward the marquess again, yelling at him in various dialects with renewed pugnacity and wagging their fingers in his face. At any second now, it was sure to come to blows.
His glower tamed them briefly when he looked back at them in warning, but the angry Hindus were doing their best to shout down his ever-so-reasonable-toned commands for calm.
Steadying her horse, Georgie finally managed to take a decent breath, though it burned all the way down into her chest.
She edged her mare closer toward him. “Lord Griffith, I presume?” she greeted him in a tone that strove for at least a show of levity.
He looked over at her with a strange mix of surprise and exasperation, but then he watched the crowd again distrustfully. Rather in spite of himself, the stern line of his mouth crooked in a saturnine half smile. “Miss Georgiana Knight.”
She coughed. “In the flesh.”
“I got your note.”
“Care to make a timely egress?”
“Delighted.”
He turned his back on the
mob just for a moment and swung up behind her like a born horseman. Large, lordly hands encased in tan kid gloves reached past her waist. “Better let me take the reins.”
She snorted. Men! “It’s my horse, and you don’t know the way. Hold on.” Shoving away one of Lakshmi’s in-laws, Georgie finally managed to wheel her mare around.
At last, her powerful horse broke free of the crowd, and, with her newfound ally riding behind her like a hard wall of warm, male muscle at her back, they went racing homeward.
CHAPTER
TWO
H ellfire, what had the mad chit gotten him into? He had come here to stop a bloody war, not to start one.
But the Marquess of Griffith was not a man who lost his temper. Ever.
Displays of emotion were for peasants.
Tapping into his formidable reserves of steadfast patience, Ian clenched his jaw and refused to say a word.
For now.
A true gentleman, not to mention a diplomat up to his eyeballs in protocol, habitually treated ladies with a degree of courtesy that placed them on shining pedestals; as a female member of the Knight family, this was doubly true of the consideration he felt compelled to show Georgiana.
But it was not easy.
Not when he had half a mind to wring her pretty neck for putting herself—and his mission—in danger.
He couldn’t believe she had dragged him into disrupting the solemnities of a damn funeral and could only pray that those people back there did not include anyone he’d have to work with on his assignment. As for her, what on earth did she think she was doing, dashing around the streets of Calcutta in this wild fashion?
He definitely meant to speak to her father about this.
Yes, he thought sternly, not to the girl, but to her menfolk would he address his displeasure. Somehow he doubted Lord Arthur knew what mischief his beautiful daughter had gotten into this day, but that was no excuse. The chit had nearly gotten herself roasted alive.
It was shocking that her father and brothers were not keeping a better watch over her than this. Did they not know that as the niece of the Hawkscliffe Harlot, she would in all likelihood require even more supervision than the typical impulsive young female? This branch of the Knight family was flirting with disaster by giving their Georgiana such free rein.