She still felt the pain of her father’s rejection twelve years ago very deeply—how must it feel to have a father who spurned you, a grandfather who had cast his son, and therefore his grandson, away?
‘Your grandfather is still alive? Is he an important man?’
‘I suspect he will live for ever. He is sixty-eight now and, reports say, as tough as a whip. As for importance, he is a marquis. Like a maharaja, I suppose. A duke would be a very senior maharaja. A marquis comes next. Then an earl is a third-ranking nobleman—a raja.’
‘So you are a milord?’ Mata had tried to explain the English nobles to her, but it was very complicated and strange.
‘No. I do not have a title. My father is styled the Honourable Francis Herriard. His elder brother uses my grandfather’s second title, Viscount Clere—he is called Lord Clere. My grandfather is the Marquis of Eldonstone.’ He glanced across at her and the expression on her face seemed to lift his mood, for he grinned at her. ‘Confused?’
‘Completely. Why are you not a prince?’
‘Because only the sons of the king are princes and they are usually dukes as well.’
‘But—’ She broke off as Nick reined in and sniffed the air.
‘I smell smoke.’
People, danger? Her dagger, the one in her boot that Nick had not found, was still there when she reached down and trailed her fingers unobtrusively over it, bracing herself for whatever was going to be thrown at them this time.
Chapter Seven
Nick inhaled deeply. ‘There is a village ahead. I can smell cow dung burning.’
‘Will it be safe?’
Please let him say it will be, pleaded the tired, frightened part of her mind, the part she was trying so hard to ignore. The thought of the company of other women, of being able to wash, to sleep on a bed, even if was only a crude charpoy with ropes threaded on a wooden frame, made her ache with longing. And this was only the second day.
Anusha stiffened her spine. She had boasted that she was Rajput and she would not show weakness even if Nick said this was not safe and they must spend the night in the open again with no food.
He sent her a flickering look. Reassurance or assessment? ‘Let us hope so. This has been an eventful day and, speaking for myself, I have had about enough of it. We are a long way from any source of news here, they cannot have heard about us,’ he added.
They saw the goats first, then the white humped cattle. Small boys, sticks in hand, leapt up from where they crouched guarding the animals and dogs came skirmishing out, barking.
‘Are!’ Nick called. ‘Where is your home?’
They crowded round, skinny in their skimpy loin cloths, all dark eyes and eager tongues, chattering in excitement and vying to point out their village to this man on horseback who towered above them. He was surely a raja, Anusha heard them say, a great warrior with his firearms.
‘Do many men on horseback come this way?’ she asked, leaning down to speak to the tallest lad.
‘Nahi. Not for many months, not since the tax collectors came before the rains.’
Nick caught her eye and nodded approval of the question. Their pursuers had not visited here—they were safe for a night at least.
‘We are travellers,’ he said. ‘Will you take us to your headman?’
The boys broke into a run, streaming ahead of them, the dogs yapping. The village appeared behind a low bluff of land: a dozen or so round huts of mud brick, their roofs thatched with thin branches and straw, the whole surrounded by a mud-brick wall, mended here and there with bundles of thorn.
Women were gathered round a well and they turned, pulling their veils across their faces with one hand as they balanced the big copper water vessels on their heads with the other. Their clothes were vivid crimson and orange and sharp, acid green. The men clustered in the gateway, the boys falling silent as the headman walked forwards to deal with this unexpected visitation.
He was bent, thin-shouldered, but had once been tall. His drooping white moustaches fell below his chin and his turban was huge, a construction of twisted white-cloth ropes coiled together.
Nick swung out of the saddle, dropped the reins and put his hands together. ‘Namaste.’ Anusha followed his example, waiting behind him as the greeting was returned.
‘We come from the west,’ Nick said in his clear,
idiomatic Hindi. ‘We travel to the Jumna to sail down to meet the Mother Ganga and we seek shelter for the night.’