Forbidden Jewel of India

‘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.’