Forbidden Jewel of India. Louise Allen
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of clothes and he would feel human again.
Running feet, the faint, sharp scratch of claws on marble. The hilt of the knife in his boot came to hand with the familiarity of long practice as he twisted to face the side passage, crouched to meet an attack.
A mongoose shot out of the opening, skidded to a halt and chittered at him, every hair on its body fluffed up with aggravation, its tail stuck out behind like a bottle-brush.
‘Idiot animal,’ Nick said in Hindi as the patter of running feet became louder and a girl followed the mongoose, her wide crimson skirts swirling around her as she caught her balance and stopped. Not a girl, a woman, unveiled and unescorted. The part of his brain that was still dealing with an attack analysed the sound of her footsteps: she had changed direction twice just before she emerged, which meant this was one of the off-set entrances to the zanana.
She should not be here, outside the women’s quarters. He should not be here, staring at her with all the blood in his brain heading south, his body poised for violence and a weapon in his hand.
‘You may put away your dagger,’ she said and it took him a moment to adjust and realise she was speaking in lightly accented English. ‘Tavi and I are unarmed. Except for teeth,’ she added, showing hers, white and regular between lips that curved into a smile of faint mockery. It masked, he was certain, shock. The mongoose twined between her bare, hennaed feet, still grumbling to itself. It wore a gem-studded collar.
Nick got a grip on himself, pushed the knife back into its sheath as he straightened and brought his hands together. ‘Namaste.’
‘Namaste.’ Over her own joined hands dark grey eyes studied him. The shock seemed to have turned to suspicion edged with hostility and she was making no effort to disguise either emotion.
Grey eyes? And skin like golden honey and hair that showed streaks of mahogany and deep brown as it fell down her back in a thick plait. His quarry, it seemed, had found him.
She did not appear disconcerted to be alone, unveiled, with a strange man, but stood there and contemplated him. Her full red skirts, weighted with heavy silver embroidery, hung just above her ankles, giving a glimpse of close-fitting trousers. Her tight choli revealed not only delightful curves and elegantly rounded arms decked in silver bangles, but also an unsettling band of smooth golden midriff.
‘I should go. Excuse me for disturbing you,’ Nick said in English and wondered if he was perhaps the more unsettled of the two of them.
‘You have not,’ she replied with crushing simplicity in the same language. She turned and walked through the opening she had appeared from. ‘Mere pichhe aye, Tavi,’ she called as the skirts of her lehenga whisked out of sight. The mongoose followed obediently, the faint click of its claws fading along with her light footsteps.
‘Hell,’ Nick said to the empty passageway. ‘That is quite definitely her father’s daughter.’ Suddenly a simple duty had become something else entirely. He squared his shoulders and strode off in the direction that led to his rooms. A man did not become a major with the British East India Company by being disconcerted by acid-tongued young women, however beautiful. He needed to clean himself up and seek an audience with the raja, her uncle. And after that, all he had to do was to transport Miss Anusha Laurens safely halfway across India, back to her father.
‘Paravi! Quickly!’
‘Speak Hindi,’ Paravi reproved as Anusha entered her room in a flurry of skirts and trailing scarf.
‘Maf kijiye,’ Anusha apologised. ‘I have just this moment been speaking to an Englishman and my head is still translating.’
‘Angrezi? How can you be speaking to any man, let alone an angrezi?’ Paravi, plump and indolent and her uncle’s third wife, raised one exquisitely plucked eyebrow, but she pushed aside the chessboard she had been studying and sat upright.
‘He was in the corridor when I chased Tavi just now. Very big with hair of pale gilt and in the red uniform of the Company’s soldiers. An officer, I think—he had much gold on his coat. Come and see him.’
‘Why so curious? Is he so handsome, this big angrezi?’
‘I do not know what he is,’ Anusha confessed. ‘I have not seen one so close since I left my father’s house.’ But she was curious. And there was something else, a tug of yearning, deep inside, at the memory of another male voice speaking English, of another big man, scooping her up in his arms, laughing with her, playing with her. The man who had rejected her and her mother, she reminded herself as the memory turned sour.
‘He is different from the men I am used to, so I cannot decide if he is handsome or not. His hair is so pale and tied back tightly and his eyes are green and he is tall.’ She waved her hands to illustrate. ‘He is big all over—broad shoulders, long legs.’
‘Is he very white? I have never seen an angrezi before except from a long way away.’ Paravi was becoming interested.
‘His face and his hands are golden.’ Like my father’s were. ‘But the skin of all the Europeans goes brown in the sun, you know. Perhaps the rest of him is white.’
Imagining all of the big Englishman produced a not-unpleasurable shiver which he did not merit. But any novelty was welcome in the restricted world of the zanana, even if this novelty brought with him unsettling reminders of the world outside the fort. The faint sensual tingle was lost in a wave of something close to apprehension. This man made her uneasy.
‘Where has he gone now?’ Paravi uncoiled herself from the heap of cushions she had been occupying. The mongoose immediately dived into the warm spot she had created and curled up. ‘I would like to look on a man who makes all those expressions chase across your face.’
‘To the visitors’ wing—where else should he go?’ Anusha tried not to snap. It was not flattering to be told her face betrayed her. ‘He was very dusty from the road, he will not be seeking audience with my uncle like that.’ She gave herself a little shake to chase away the foolish fancies. ‘Come with me to the Sunset Terrace.’
Anusha led the way through the familiar maze of passages, rooms and galleries that filled the western wing of the palace.
‘Your dupatta,’ her friend hissed as they left the women’s quarters to cross the wide terrace where the raja would sometimes sit to watch the sun sink over his kingdom. ‘There are no grilles here.’
Anusha clicked her tongue in irritation, but unwound the neglected length of cerise gauze from her neck and draped it so it covered her face to the chin. She leaned on the inner balustrade of the terrace and looked down into the courtyard below. ‘There he is,’ she whispered.
Below, on the edge of a garden threaded with rills of water in the Persian manner, the big angrezi was talking to a slender Indian she did not recognise. His body servant, no doubt. The man gestured towards a door.
‘He is telling him where the bath house is,’ Paravi whispered from behind her own dupatta of golden gauze. ‘There is your chance to see whether Englishmen are white all over.’
‘That is ridiculous. And immodest.’ She heard Paravi laugh softly and bristled. ‘Besides, I am not in the slightest bit interested.’ Just burningly, and inexplicably, curious. The two men had vanished into the guest rooms overlooking the garden. ‘But I suppose I had better see whether the water has been heated and someone is in attendance.’
Paravi leaned one rounded hip against the parapet and glanced up as a flock of green parakeets screeched overhead. ‘This man must be important, do you not think? He is from the East India Company and they are all-powerful in the whole land now, my lord says. Far more important than the Emperor in Delhi, even if they do put the Emperor’s head on their coins. I wonder if he is to be the Resident here. My lord said nothing about that last night.’
Anusha rested her elbows on the parapet and noted that her friend seemed to be in favour with her