by Louise Allen
‘All right?’ He did not wait for her answer, but squatted by the fire and began to make tea, throwing leaves into the boiling water from a pouch that lay amongst the food he had set out. It was the same as last night and the bread would be dry. And she supposed from the brisk manner with which he was preparing it that she should have done this while he was away. She had never been without servants before, either.
‘Eat,’ Nick said, pushing the food towards her and pouring tea into a horn beaker. ‘There is no one in sight, we should get on.’
‘When will we be able to get more food?’ Anusha chewed on the dry bread and wondered if the cheese had been this pungent the night before.
‘When we come across someone who can sell us some.’
‘The next big village is—’
‘We are not going through villages, big or small. Do you want to leave flags to mark our route?’
‘But surely they will give up? We could be anywhere by now.’
*
Nick washed the stale naan down with tea that was too hot and contemplated the haughty, exquisite face of the young woman opposite him. It was a reasonable question and she was sorely in need of reassurance and comfort, despite the mask she was putting on.
But what Anusha was going to get was a bracing dose of reality and he was going to allow his irritation with this entire situation to ride him. It was the only way he was going to be able to ignore the tension in his groin and the heat that seemed to wash through him whenever he looked at her. Or when she looked at him. He was still recovering from the impact of those grey eyes studying him as he dealt with the horses. It was odd that she should affect him so—Miss Lauren’s spiky personality was hardly alluring.
‘How many armed men do you think it would need to take me?’ he asked. When she just shook her head, he answered himself. ‘Eight, ten perhaps. I have three muskets, but we have lost our other marksman and besides, muskets take time to load. I am good, Miss Laurens, and lucky—I would not be alive today if I was not—but I am just one man. And the maharaja’s spies will have told him that. It will be a blow to his pride that you have escaped him, so he can easily spare a dozen riders to come after us. And they’ll know we’ll be heading east, that is the logical direction to go in.’
He expected fear, possibly tears. Instead she looked at him down the straight little nose that she had definitely not inherited from her father and said, ‘Then teach me to load a musket and go somewhere that is not logical.’
So, he had not been wrong—she had her father’s intelligence after all and her late mother had the reputation for both learning and political cunning. He could have his hands full with her. Even as he thought it he winced at his choice of words—he wanted very much to have his hands full of Anusha Laurens.
‘All right, I’ll teach you to load, that makes sense.’ At least, it would if she could manage it. He had short India Pattern muskets with him, not the British army Land Pattern version, but even so she would be wrestling with a weapon almost forty inches long. ‘And I can aim directly at the Jumna River to find a boat and not head further south-east to Allahabad. But I must do it by the sun and stars—there were no detailed maps of this area and any deviation will add time.’
‘I do not wish to be with you, Major Herriard, but I would like even less to be with that man. Take however long is necessary.’
‘Then we will go more to the east than the road to Allahabad,’ Nick said, getting to his feet and recalculating. The map that he had studied before he had set out was fixed in his memory, but it was sketchy to put it mildly.
‘The muskets?’ she demanded, rising from the dusty stone with the trained grace of a court lady.
The wish that he could see her dance came into his head, irrelevant and unwelcome. A well-bred lady would only dance with her female friends, or for her husband. To do otherwise was to lower herself to the level of a courtesan. Nick found himself pursuing the thought and frowned at her, earning a frigid stare in response. She was not used to being alone with men, and it was a long time since he had been alone with a respectable young woman for any length of time. How the devil was he supposed to treat her? What did he talk to her about?
‘Muskets?’ Anusha repeated, impatience etched in every line of her figure. She was slender, small—the top of her head came up to his ear. He would have to stoop to kiss her… Nick caught himself, appalled, and slammed the door on his thoughts, remembering another slender woman in his arms, of how fragile she had been, how clumsy she had made him feel. But Miranda had been frail as well as fragile—this girl had steel at her core.
‘When we stop to rest at noon.’ He was equally impatient now. The more distance they had between themselves and the fort, the happier he would be. He strapped the blanket rolls on the bay horse and led Rajat, Ajit’s black gelding, forwards for her. In a crisis he could let the bay go and leave her with a horse as highly trained as his own Pavan.
‘Why this one?’
Must she question everything? But he almost welcomed the irritation, it distracted him from fantasies and memories. ‘He knows what to do. His name is Rajat; let him have his head.’
Anusha shrugged and mounted. Nick tied the end of the bay’s long leading rein around his pommel and led them away from the shrine, not back to the track but out across the undulating grasslands, following the line he had mentally drawn on the map in his head.
*
‘This is deserted,’ Anusha observed after half a league.
‘Yes. Except for the tigers.’
‘We will starve or be eaten. You are supposed to be looking after me.’ She did not sound petulant, merely critical of an inefficient servant.
Nick breathed in hard through his nose and controlled his temper. ‘We have plenty of water. The streams are still running. The horses will sense tigers.’ I hope. ‘Food we can do without for a day or two if necessary. I am, as I promised your father and your uncle, keeping you safe. I never made any promises about comfort.’
She was silent. Then, ‘Why do you dislike me, Major Herriard?’
Pavan pecked, unused to a jerk on his rein. ‘What? I do not know you. And I am not used to young ladies.’
There was a snort and he glanced across at her. The little witch was grinning. ‘That is not what I heard.’
‘Respectable young ladies,’ he said repressively.
‘No?’ She was still laughing, he could hear it, although she was managing to keep her face straight. ‘Is your wife not respectable?’
‘I do not have a wife.’ Not any longer. Nick gritted his teeth and concentrated on scanning the undulating plain before them, plotting a route away from the stands of trees that might harbour a striped death.
‘But why do you not have a wife? You are very old not to have a wife.’
‘I am twenty-nine,’ he snapped. ‘I had a wife. Miranda. She died.’
‘I am sorry.’ She sounded it; the mocking edge had gone from her voice. ‘How many children do you have? Will you marry again soon?’
‘I have no children and, no, I have no intention of marrying again.’ He tried to remind himself that this intense curiosity about family was simply the normal Indian polite interest in a stranger. He was inured to it, surely, by now?
‘Oh, so you were very much in love with her, like Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal. How sad.’ When she was not being imperious or snappy her voice was lovely, soft and melodious with something deeply female in it that went straight to the base of his spine.
‘No, I was not—’ Nick snapped off the sentence. ‘I married too young. I thought it was expected of me as a career officer. I married a girl I thought was suitable, a sweet little dab of a thing with no more strength to cope with India than a new-born lamb.’
‘What was she doing here, then?’ Anusha brought her horse alongside.
‘She was newly arrived in India as part of the Fishing Fleet.’ She murmured a query and he explained. ‘The shiploads of young ladies that come out from England.
They are supposed to be visiting relatives, but actually they are on the catch for a husband.
‘I should have taken one look at Miranda Knight and realised that the country would ruin her health within the year. And it did. If I had not married her she would have gone back to England, wed a stout country squire and be the mother of a happy family by now.’
‘She must have loved you to marry you and risk staying here,’ Anusha suggested.
‘Do not turn this into a love story. She wanted a suitable husband and what did I know about marriage and how to make a wife happy with my background?’
‘What background?’
He glanced at Anusha, saw her read his mood in his face and close her lips tightly. After a moment she said, ‘I beg your pardon,’ in careful English. ‘I forgot that the Europeans do not like personal questions.’
He was going to be alone with her for days, weeks probably. It was foolish to make a mystery out of himself. Best to get the questions over and done with now. ‘My parents made a suitable, loveless match. It turned very rapidly into boredom on my father’s part, then anger when my mother persisted in wanting…more. I am not certain I would know what a happy marriage looks like.’
How simple it sounded put like that. All those years of distress and unhappiness, not just for his mother but for the little boy in the middle, aching for the love that both parents were too busy tearing each other apart to give. He was not a little boy now, and he knew better than to expect love. Or to need it.
‘Oh.’ She rode in silence for a while. Then, ‘So you have many mistresses now? Until you marry again?’
‘Anusha, you should not be discussing such things.’ She regarded him quizzically. Of course, she was used to an entirely different model of marriage and sexual relationships. ‘There is no reason for me to marry again. I do not live like a holy man—a sadhu. But neither do I have more than one mistress at a time, and none at the moment.’
‘And did you have a mistress while you were married? No, do not say Anusha like that. I want to understand.’
‘No, I did not. Some men do. I do not think it right.’ And his resolve had been sorely tried after a few weeks of Miranda’s vapours. However careful he was, however gentle, she had decided that sex was crude, unpleasant and for one purpose only. Her relief at becoming pregnant and having a good reason to bar him from her bed had been all too obvious. The familiar guilt came back like an aching bruise: he should have had the self-control to stay out of her bed until she had grown acclimatised to India, talked to her. Not got her with child.
Women before and since had assured him they found bliss in his arms. It seemed he was an acceptable lover and a failure as a husband.
‘I am sorry if I should not have asked these things. Thank you for explaining,’ Anusha said in English, sounding not at all contrite.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied in the same language. She was demanding, both emotionally at some level he was not used to, as well as practically. And she was distracting him, taking him away from the present and into the past, and that was dangerous.
The hairs were prickling on the back of his neck—he had learned to listen to his instincts. Nick wheeled Pavan. The grass was still long and lush although the ground was dry. The light wind was already blurring the marks of their passage so it would be hard to see how many horses had just passed.
Anusha had turned with him. ‘There is no one behind us,’ she said. ‘Is there?’
The prickling unease was still under his skin. Nick stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes. There, in the distance, was a small puff of dust kicked up by a group of riders coming at the gallop. ‘There is. See?’
Chapter Five
‘There is no cover, not for three horses.’ Anusha was proud of how calm she sounded. She could not see the pursuers, but if Nick said they were coming, then she believed him. She loosened the little dagger in her sash.
‘Follow me, exactly,’ he said and turned to ride over a hard-pan of dry baked mud where the rains had once made a large pool. At the middle he swung down from the grey, took the bundles from the back of the bay horse and flung them over Pavan’s saddle. ‘Stay here.’ He swung up on the bay and left the hard ground. As soon as he was on the softer earth he kicked it into a gallop, then lashed it across the flanks, swung down and rolled clear as it careered off into the distance.
‘Take Pavan.’ He tossed her the reins when he got back to her. ‘Walk slowly towards that bush.’
Puzzled, but obedient, her heart thudding uncomfortably high in her throat, Anusha did as she was told. Behind her Nick walked backwards, sweeping a branch over their tracks. She realised as she reached the bush that it was on a very slight swell in the ground, but even so, it was too thin and too low to hide a donkey behind, let alone two horses.
‘Are you going to shoot the horses?’ She slid to the ground as he backed behind the thorn bush next to her.
‘No need.’ He removed both saddles, then whistled, two clear notes, and the horses folded their legs, sank to the ground and rolled on to their sides, necks stretched out. ‘Get down.’
Anusha lay behind the swell of Pavan’s belly as Nick spread the dun-coloured blankets over both animals, then propped the two muskets up on Rajat’s flank and began to check over his hand guns. He laid everything out in order—ammunition, guns, sabre—loosened the knife in his boot and then glanced across at her. ‘Army horses, both of them,’ he explained, then glanced down at her hand. ‘What the devil have you got there?’
‘A knife, of course.’ She would keep the one in her boot hidden until it was absolutely necessary and she had to kill someone. Or herself. A dark excitement was surging through her, as strong as the fear. She wanted to hurt the people who were attacking Kalatwah, her family, her kingdom. For the first time she understood what had taken those warriors out to fight to certain death, understood the spirit of the women who had gone to the flames rather than face slavery and shame.
‘You are not going to need it.’
‘But there will be a fight, a battle.’ She could hear them coming now, the faint drum of hoofbeats. The maharaja’s men had picked up their tracks.
‘Not unless I have made a mistake.’ Nick was rubbing handfuls of dust over the musket barrels to mask their shine. ‘They should ride past, find the bay, conclude it was a ruse to send them off the road.’
‘But we must kill them!’
‘Bloodthirsty little wild cat,’ Nick said, low-voiced. She sensed amusement in him. He had a strange sense of humour if he found this funny. ‘If they do not come back, then the maharaja knows they have found us and will send more men. If they go back without seeing us, he will conclude we have gone another way.’
‘Oh. Strategy.’
‘Tactics, to be exact. Now, be quiet.’
There were eight riders. They passed at the gallop, vanished. Anusha released her pent-up breath and slid a little closer to Nick.
Time stretched on. Her left leg was becoming numb. ‘They have gone.’
‘Wait.’
As Nick spoke she heard them returning more slowly, scanning the ground as they came, the bay on a leading rein. They rode past, then the only sound was the buzz of insects, the rumbling of Rajat’s stomach under her ear, the mew of a hawk high overhead.
‘Stay here.’ Nick began to ease away. ‘You can let go of my coat.’
‘Oh!’ Anusha’s fingers cramped as she released her death-grip. ‘I didn’t realise I was holding it.’ But Nick was already moving, a musket in each hand, pistol in his sash, keeping low over the ground as he dodged from bush to bush.
It was like trying to see a ghost—if she took her eyes from him he would vanish. She blinked and he was gone into the long grass. Even behind the bulk of the horses she felt incredibly exposed, utterly alone. She had not realised what a large emotional space he filled. An infuriating, man-shaped, protective space.
What would she do if she heard shooting? Anusha studied the weapons he had left beh
ind. One musket, one pistol, the bag that contained the ammunition, his sabre. Now was not the time to learn how to reload, but she could take it all to him. She worked out the best way to carry the weapons, wondering if the horses would obey her and get to their feet.
A hand closed around her ankle.
Anusha twisted, her knife in her hand, her other lashing out, fingers bent, nails raking down.
Nick laughed and rolled to one side, releasing her foot. It was the laugh that made her temper snap, that and the long-held tension. Anusha dropped the knife and launched herself at him, intent on hurting his male pride, if nothing else.
The next moment she was flat on her back with her hands pinned above her head and the weight of one very large man on top of her. And he was still laughing. ‘Wild cat. I was right.’
‘You—’ Words, and breath, failed her. ‘Get off me.’
For a long unfathomable moment he stared down into her eyes and his own seemed to darken. Nick stopped laughing. For an instant she thought he had stopped breathing.
‘It is not seemly,’ she managed to say as her mind tried to assimilate all the new sensations of a hard male body pressed against her own softness. She liked them. All of them.
‘No, it is not.’ Nick rolled off her and got to his feet in one fluid movement. He is as supple as a young sapling, Paravi had said. Heat washed through her. ‘I am sorry, I could not resist it. You were quivering like a hound wanting to be let off the leash.’
‘I was listening for shots,’ Anusha said with as much dignity as she could muster, flat on her back and filled with what she was horribly afraid was sexual desire. ‘Have they gone?’
‘They have, no doubt thinking that only a fool would head into the wilds with only two horses and a princess.’
He meant to mock her when he called her princess, she knew that. ‘And are you a fool?’