Forbidden Jewel of India

‘I will treat you with the respect that you earn, Miss Laurens.’ Herriard...Nick...hefted an urn over to the stone trough by the horses and poured out water. ‘You are a woman and your father’s daughter, which means I do not deal with you as I would a man. After that—’ he shrugged ‘—it is up to you.’

‘I do not wish to go to my father. I hate my father.’

‘You may wish what you will and you may think what you wish, but you will not abuse Sir George in my hearing. And you will obey me. Stay there.’ In the semi-darkness she could not read his face, but Anusha heard the anger. Again he showed that fierce, puzzling, loyalty to her father. He turned and walked away.

‘Wait! Where are you going?’ Surely he was not going to punish her by leaving her here in the dark?

Nick vanished into the scrub and she heard what sounded like boots kicking at the low branches. When he walked back he was doing something to the front of his trousers and she blushed in the gloom. ‘There is a nice thick bush there,’ he said, gesturing. ‘With no snakes.’

‘Thank you.’ With as much dignity as she could muster Anusha stalked down the three steps to the ground and over to the bush. The mundane implications of being alone like this with a man were beginning to dawn on her. There might be vast areas with hardly a bush. How was she supposed to manage then? The wretch seemed to have no shyness, no modesty about mentioning these things at all. Never, in the ten years until she had chased Tavi and found herself in that corridor with Nick, had she been all alone with a man, even her uncle or one of the eunuchs.

When she emerged his attention was, mercifully, on lighting a small fire in an angle of the wall. The flames made a pool of light on the platform, but would be hidden from anyone approaching from the direction they had come. A bed of blankets had been made up close to the fire.

In the shadows she could see the stumpy pillar of the Shiva lingam and the firelight glinted for a moment on something that trickled down its side. ‘People have been here recently.’ She went and looked at the pool of fresh oil on the head of the ancient stone phallus, the spray of flowering shrub that had been laid on the curve of the stylised female organ that it rose from.

‘I have,’ Herriard said as she joined her hands together in a brief reverence. It seemed that, whatever his beliefs, he knew how to show respect to the gods, if not to her. More in charity with him, she turned back and he gestured to food laid out on a large leaf beside the blankets. ‘Here. Eat and drink and then rest. Do not take anything off, not even your boots.’

‘I have no intention of removing anything!’

‘Then you are going to have a very uncomfortable few weeks, Miss Laurens. Oh, sit down, I am far too weary to ravish you tonight!’

That was a jest. She hoped. Warily Anusha sank down on to the blankets. ‘Eat and keep your strength up. Now we can only rest for a short while. Tomorrow night I hope we may take longer.’

‘Where are you going to sleep?’ She took a piece of naan, folded it around what looked like goat’s cheese and ate, surprised at how hungry she was.

‘I will not sleep. I will keep watch.’

‘You cannot do that every night,’ she pointed out.

‘No,’ Nick agreed. ‘I will rest when it is safer and where you can keep watch.’ He tore off a piece of the flat bread and ate it. She caught a glimpse of strong white teeth.

‘Me?’

‘Look around you, Miss Laurens. Who else is there? Sooner or later I must sleep. Or are you not capable of acting as a look-out?’

‘Of course. I am capable of anything. I am a—’

‘Rajput, I know. You are also your father’s daughter, which should mean that there is a brain in there somewhere, despite all evidence to the contrary.’

Anusha choked on a mouthful of water from the flask. ‘How dare you! You are used to this sort of thing, I am not. I have been dragged from my bed, forced to ride through the night with a man—I have never been alone with a man for ten years—I am worried about Kalatwah...’

‘True,’ Nick conceded. It was not much of an apology. ‘I will do my best to preserve your privacy and your modesty, but you must behave as much like a man as you can, for your own safety. Do you understand that?’

‘As you guessed, I do have a brain,’ she retorted. ‘Now I am going to sleep.’

‘Namaste,’ he said, so politely that he must be mocking her.

‘Namaste,’ she returned as she rolled herself into the blankets. She would just close her eyes, rest her aching body. But she would not sleep—she did not trust him.