The Golden Leopard

by Lynn Kerstan

  From the far end of the conservatory came the sound of a door opening and closing, followed by the crunch of leather on gravel as someone approached the garden. Her skin began to tingle. Moments later a tall, loose-limbed figure, altogether at ease, arrived at the entrance to the garden.

  “I very much wish you had brought me a gun,” she said.

  Chuckling, Duran stepped into the courtyard and gave her an overly deferential bow. “Could you have hit me?”

  “Oh, eventually. I would have kept trying until I did.”

  “Yes, well, if you have it in mind to kill me, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to the end of the queue and wait your turn.” His smile became diffident. “Are you angry with me for invading your home? You should have expected it. I warned you not to run away.”

  “Did you? I must not have been listening. And did you really expect me to salute and obey?”

  After a startled look, he broke out laughing.

  “I’m quite serious, Duran. You have no right—”

  “I know, I know. And you’re far too serious, my sweet, which is not at all how I remember you.”

  “Life is a serious matter, sir, although you do not appear to have noticed. It seems you have taken a vow of perpetual boyhood, with nothing more consequential to do with yourself than drink, game, and carouse with undiscriminating women.”

  “A boy could do worse. What would you say if I told you that I have been, for longer than I care to recall, chaste as a monk, peaceful as a Quaker, and sober as the Archbishop of Canterbury? Well, nearly so. And for all I know, the current archbishop tipples like an East India Company clerk. But you take my point.”

  “And don’t believe a word of it. What is more,” she said, pleased to hear the stern chord in her voice, “I care nothing for how you choose to behave, so long as your frivolities don’t include me.”

  “Ah.” Head tilted, eyes a trifle narrowed, he regarded her from top to toe. “I have been mistaken. What with the advertisement in the news rags and your presence at the auction house, I had assumed you to be precisely what I am looking for—an expert in the business of art and antiquities. But now, and I am sorry for it, I see that you are instead the headmistress of the Academy for Young Women with Pokers Up Their Backsides.”

  Astonished and hurt, she nearly toppled into the fishpond. At the same time, she wanted to launch herself at him with fingernails extended. Except that they were clipped short, and what he had said was appallingly close to the truth.

  He had meant to pry her off her moral high horse, and by God, he had succeeded. Jessica Carville, spouting moralistic platitudes. Whom had she imagined she was fooling? Not Duran, who knew all too well her rebellious spirit and restless, passion-hungry flesh. What secrets could she withhold from him now? Tears burned at the corners of her eyes.

  A boot, lightly dusted after a morning in the fields, appeared next to her hip. She regarded it for a few moments, willing the tears to evaporate.

  “Ought I to grovel for your pardon?” he asked, not sounding in the least like a man on the verge of groveling.

  “No. I was insufferable. I deserved a blistering setdown.”

  He leaned forward, arm on knee, until his head was nearly even with hers. “Jessie, if I hadn’t spoken as I did, we would have continued crossing swords to no purpose save the exercise of our wits. I need your help. And because you have set yourself to resist me, I fired a broadside. It was, I believe, a necessary tactic.”

  “Oh, good heavens, Duran. Have done with the military metaphors.” The man would tie her in knots if ever she let him get hold of her at both ends. “Everything you do is calculated for effect. Even your insults come bearing plots. How have you suborned poor John Pageter, I wonder? How do you even know him?”

  “When the ship reprovisioned at Cape Town, the colonel was among the new passengers who came aboard.” The lines at his temples crinkled with amusement. “As I understand it, he narrowly escaped being leg-shackled to you. The poor frightened fellow ran all the way to Africa.”

  “Only so far as Africa? I must be losing my touch.” She produced a chilly smile. “You ran all the way to India.”

  “And even there I could not escape you,” he said after a moment. “But I was joking about Pageter. He told me your mother had been promoting a match that neither of you wished, although he much admired you. I believe he was in love with someone else at the time, but the lady was not in a position to return his affections. He left to avoid causing her pain.”

  “A common excuse, I believe, when a man does not wish to marry a woman he has dallied with.”

  “Ah. Now you are talking about me, Jessie. About us. Are you certain that you wish to?”

  “What I wish, of course, is to be rid of you.” It was true. Her pulse raced. Her throat was dry. All the familiar, unwanted symptoms of exposure to Hugo Duran. “You have made use of a perfectly nice man to insinuate yourself into this house, where you bribed my father to make you welcome. Your purpose cannot be honorable.”

  “That is not a word, I agree, generally linked to my name. But perhaps you should reserve judgment until you have heard what my purpose is.” He hadn’t moved, that she’d noticed, nor had she, but he seemed a great deal closer. “Is it so much to ask, a few minutes of your time and a chance to explain?”

  She studied the ground. With Duran, nothing was that simple. To give him the slightest opening was to invite an invasion. She had made herself vulnerable to him once, and he had hurt her. But she took responsibility for that. She had not meant to care for him, or even known that she did, until he left her. It had been a devastating surprise.

  And in all fairness, how could he have known her feelings, if she did not?

  “Humility does not suit you,” she said finally. “You do not ask, however soft your voice. You demand. And if that fails, you deceive. But pray get on with it, sir, so that I may decline to do whatever it is you want of me.”

  “Well, I would,” he said in a friendly voice, “but your father expects me to join him for a trial of his new gun. Shall we speak after supper? And in the meantime, my dear, see if you can do something about that grudge you are carrying.”

  Pride stiffened her back. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “No?” He looked sorrowful. “You never used to lie.”

  “I had a good teacher.”

  “Then I have more to regret than I had thought.” He stepped away and bowed. “Tonight, Jessica. Do not fail me.”

  Chapter 6

  The day was already turning hot. Duran, on his way to the shooting ground, longed to strip off his jacket, but Sothingdon observed strictest propriety in matters of sport. Rigid formality would surround even this late-morning exercise.

  He had been told that only the younger men—those on the morning side of sixty, he supposed—would take part in the target shooting. By his standards, that made what he intended to do a trifle less reprehensible.

  John Pageter, waving a greeting, fell in step with him not far from the house.

  “Prepare yourself,” Duran said. “I feel a bout of exceptional accuracy coming on.”

  “This would be the time for it,” Pageter agreed, his freckled face serene under the wide-brimmed hat he wore. “I shall try not to appear smug when I rake in your winnings. Will you lose most of it back tonight at the whist table?”

  “I won’t be there. Which reminds me. When I vanish after dinner, devise some excuse for me.”

  A lifted brow was Pageter’s only response.

  Duran regarded him for a moment before returning his gaze to the path. A man of few questions, Colonel Lord Pageter, and even fewer answers. After several months on ship in his company, Duran had decided that behind all that stalwart British calm lay a deep reservoir of more stalwart British calm. All of it grounded, marrow deep, in traditional British honor, the sort most men proclaimed and neglected to practice.

  Pageter was the genuine article, a solid, pleasant-faced gentleman you’d want at y
our back in a fight, which made his complicity in these money-raising ploys something of a mystery. Duran, an expert on the subject, had yet to detect a trace of larceny in the fellow’s character. Unfortunate, that. He’d prefer to be making use of a less virtuous man.

  Not that Pageter failed to know the score. Duran had told him as much about the nizam and the leopard as he was likely to believe, and with his usual composure, Pageter had accepted it straightaway.

  “Odd chaps, some of these native rulers,” he’d said, going on to offer whatever assistance Duran required, so long as he wasn’t expected to commit an actual crime or help do away with Shivaji and his associates.

  Now, his schemes smoothly in play, Duran found himself pricked by needles of conscience. “I will pay you back,” he said into the companionable silence.

  “I’ve no doubt of it. The hope of repayment is what inspires me to see that you escape.”

  And if I don’t? The unspoken question hung in the air, deliberately ignored by them both.

  “It will take time,” Duran advised him. “Years, probably.”

  “I don’t mind. There is little I want, and where I spent the past few years, there was even less to buy. I can well afford to advance you a stake. And if your gaming fails to scrape up the funds you require, I shall procure passage for you to . . . Where is it you plan to scarper?”

  “Brazil, I think. Or Peru.”

  They had paused, as if by common agreement, in the shelter of a copse not far from their destination. For the most part they kept distance between them, to avoid suspicion of complicity in precisely the sort of scam they were running. Being compelled to share a suite of rooms had been a setback, but none of the other guests appeared to have noticed.

  In the shadows, a lone bird chirping overhead, Duran seized the chance to ask a question he would not, in the usual course of things, even think of asking. “Why are you doing this, John?”

  Smiling, Pageter looked directly into his eyes. “There is someone I care about. When first I met her, she was beset with difficulties, but I could do nothing for her. Nor can I now, these many years later, although her troubles have multiplied.”

  “Jessica?”

  “Jessica as well, I suppose, in her way. But I was speaking of another woman. And that is all I will say of her, because truly, I cannot be of service to her now. Which is why I offer to you what help I can. One must keep the waters stirred, you see.”

  Duran had the feeling he ought to know what Pageter was talking about. He knew damned well he should let it go. But of late, he hadn’t always been feeling and acting like himself. Something was chipping away at who he had always been, as if trying to carve a decent man from a scoundrel. “Which waters would those be?”

  “What?” Pageter must have been lost in his own private thoughts. “Oh, I was referring to the pool at Bethesda. In the Bible, one of the Gospels, I think. People with ailments gathered there, hoping for a miracle. And sure enough, now and again an angel would come down and stir the waters. The first person to dive in was cured. Something of the sort. I ought to spend more time with the scriptures.”

  His freckles, bronze on flushed skin, grew darker with his obvious embarrassment. “The thing is, I cannot be of help to the one for whom I would give my life. She is unable to make her way into the healing waters. But best as I can, I mean to keep them stirred for others to take advantage of. In this case you, and after you, someone else.”

  If possible, Duran was even more embarrassed than the man standing opposite him. He understood what Pageter was saying, though. No one could live thirty-four years in India without becoming conscious of endless circles whirling about one’s ears. What passes one on the right side invariably comes about again on the left. Like, yes, stirred waters.

  “I don’t imagine,” he ventured, “that I could do something for your . . . friend?”

  There was a brief hesitation before Pageter spoke. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

  Duran knew it for a lie. “Well, if you think of something, let me know. Unlike some, I’ve no objection to the occasional high crime or misdemeanor.”

  As if regretting the confidence he’d shared, Pageter resumed walking. “In that case,” he said just as they were emerging from the copse, “I wonder that you have not eliminated your troublesome valet.”

  “Believe me,” Duran said, spotting Shivaji standing in his usual place overlooking the shooting field, “I think of little else.”

  When Duran returned, considerably wealthier after a remarkable demonstration of target shooting, Shivaji was waiting for him in the bedchamber.

  “We shall return to London in the morning,” he said, his dark eyes uncommonly stern. “You will inform your host of our departure.”

  Duran, at the bootjack, smothered his initial reaction and took his time removing the second boot. “I haven’t finished here,” he said. “It may not appear the case, but I am making progress.”

  “I have seen none.”

  “If you required a daily report, you should have said so. For one thing, I have asked Sir Fenster Barber how to trace the relations of a gentleman who died last year in India, a friend who supposedly gave me letters and parcels to deliver. That would be our thief, of course. Sir Fenster has written to his solicitors, instructing them to conduct an investigation.”

  “To what purpose? We are not certain of his true name. And do you imagine the thief dispatched the leopard to his family by common post?”

  “Well, we’ve no idea what he’d been up to, given that he was dead when you found him. It’s your bloody theory the leopard made its way to England.”

  “But not to this estate, where you take holiday.”

  “On the contrary. I’m laboring like bloody Hercules. Winning the cooperation of a stubborn female is all twelve tasks rolled into one.”

  “I do not believe the lady looks kindly upon you. What will induce her to assist us?”

  “My charm? No, she’s got herself immune to that. But her curiosity will snare her in the end. It would be easier if I knew of something she wanted in return, but nothing has disclosed itself.”

  “It is apparent to me, Duran-Sahib, that she wishes for you to take yourself away.”

  Grinning, Duran peeled off his shooting jacket and tossed it on a chair. “I made a rather abrupt departure several years ago, and she hasn’t quite forgiven me the manner of it. The last thing I want is to repeat that mistake, which—may I point out?—is precisely what you have in mind for me to do. This is a delicate matter. I need more time.”

  “You have tonight,” came the uncompromising reply.

  “In that case, you should apply to your gods for a miracle. The lady has agreed to meet me after dinner, but I cannot simply pounce upon her with my request. Jessica is a creature of flight. One does not snatch a falcon from the sky, dear fellow. One offers the lure and hopes she will deign to accept it.”

  Chapter 7

  It had required a surprising degree of courage for Jessica to request a meeting with her father. In the Sothingdon household, personal matters—save for births, marriages, and deaths, which could hardly be overlooked—were never discussed. And until now, having no desire to enmesh herself in the affairs of her family, she had been a willing participant in the conspiracy of silence.

  She was reluctant still, but since Mariah would do nothing to help herself, someone had to take up the spear. As his debts mounted, Gerald was becoming ever more erratic and brutal. He had been rescued ten years ago from determined creditors by the wedding settlement Mariah brought him, and in his current situation, Jessica wouldn’t put it past him to consider a similar ploy. The first stage would be to eliminate his now-inconvenient wife.

  Gerald was of only moderate intelligence, but he had always been cunning and resourceful. She did not underestimate the difficulties that lay ahead.

  She had been pacing in the study nearly an hour before her father, his round cheeks flushed after several glasses of port, entered with unc
oncealed distaste and took his seat behind the heavy oak desk.

  “Come, my dear,” he said, regarding her with the expression of a hare pinned in the sights of a rifle. “Tell me quickly what is on your mind. I do not mean to put you off, but the whist game cannot get underway without me.”

  When confronted with an unpleasant situation, men invariably provided themselves with an escape route. Forcing a smile, Jessica dropped onto a chair across from him. “Then let us come directly to the target. I wish you to help Mariah secure a legal separation from Sir Gerald.”

  Sothingdon slammed his palms on the desk. “A separation? Have you run mad?”

  “It should not be difficult, so long as Mariah is supported by her family and receives the backing of your influential friends.”

  “But she has said nothing of this. Whatever put such an idea into your head?”

  “She requires protection. Gerald beats her.”

  “Does he, by God?” Sothingdon lapsed back onto his chair. “For what reason?”

  “Reason?” She took a long, calming breath. “What reason could there possibly be? Mariah is meek as a lamb. She would never provoke him. He needs to punish someone for his own failures, I expect. And he has a frightful temper. One day he’ll lose all control.”

  Looking stunned, the earl pulled out his handkerchief and used it to blot his face. Briefly, his eyes were concealed from her. But when he removed the damp square of linen, she saw the blank expression she recognized from her childhood. In a matter of seconds, he had detached himself from the web of unpleasantness and responsibility.

  But what had she expected? She met his eyes, saying nothing, until his gaze slid away.

  “I shall speak to Gerald,” he murmured, “if you think it will do any good. Beyond that, I cannot interfere. Nor, I am sure, will the courts meddle with the legal right of a husband to discipline his wife. Unless there are other grounds on which a separation might be obtained?”

  “There might be. I don’t know. We require legal advice.”