The Golden Leopard

by Lynn Kerstan

  All the things he had told her, even his final evasion, were laced with messages she was helpless to interpret. And the idea of a prayer boat was suddenly repellent to her. “I brought nothing with me,” she said, wanting to leave and not at all certain he would permit her to go. The river seemed to be made up of fallen tears.

  “Look around you,” he said gently. “Choose.”

  She did, wanting to weep and wondering why. She had forsworn tears a long, long time ago. Eyes blurred, she broke an umbrella of pink blossoms from the flowering rush plant he had used to create the boat. What had been severed, she decided, laying the offering in the vessel, could be put together again.

  He placed her boat in her hands, took up his own, and they walked a few steps beyond the calm pool to where the water resumed its summer pavane.

  The birds had gone silent. No breeze stirred. Only the river, its course determined when the hills and valleys were formed, drove its way to the sea. They set their boats on the water at the same instant, and for a time, the woven vessels with their offerings of rice and almonds, raisins and peppercorns and flowers, navigated side by side on the current. Then the river curved again, and they were lost from sight.

  Her prayer, when she remembered to produce one, was the first thing that came to her mind. And as it did, she knew it was the thing she most wanted. “Let Mariah be safe,” she whispered. “Oh, and put some happiness in her hands. She’ll never go after it on her own.”

  Looking over at the silent, enigmatic man standing beside her, the man who carried a knife and wove grass into prayers, she could not imagine what kind of request he had made of his own deity.

  “You should not, I think, be walking so far without an escort,” he said. “Will you return with me to the house?”

  It felt as if she had been with him in this enchanted place for hours. But when she looked up through the canopy of oak, the sun stood directly overhead. Only noon, then. Plenty of time to complete her errand and return before anyone missed her. Not that anyone would. “Thank you,” she said, “but I’ve been walking these trails nearly all my life. I’ll be perfectly safe.”

  There was a brief silence. “Yes,” he said, bowing. “You will be safe. Good day, memsahib.”

  She had gone only a little way when she looked back to see him in the same place, the breeze stirring the loose ties of his turban and the fringed ends of his gray sash. “Your name is Shivaji, I believe,” she said, reluctant to leave without having deciphered the puzzle of this man. “Has it a meaning?”

  “I was named for Shiva,” he said after a beat. “The Destroyer.”

  She didn’t wait to hear any more.

  Chapter 13

  Most other days she had watched him shoot, but not today. With Arjuna at his side, Duran slogged through the August heat, dutifully swinging his rifle in the direction of any bird driven by the beaters into his vicinity. All his attention was drawn to the lookout spots where Jessica might appear. She never did.

  He settled under a tree while the others gathered for lunch, pretending to doze, reflecting on Jessica’s bewildered expression when he asked her to marry him. Except for the astonishment, he was unable to decipher the other emotions, a rainbow of them, that had prismed across her face.

  She hadn’t expected the proposal. But hell, neither had he. And she would refuse him, he was certain, as well she should. It was what, in his better moments, he wanted her to do.

  Unfortunately, in a lifetime of moments, few of his could be described as “better.”

  What he ought to do was cut her free of all this and take himself off. He knew that, rationally.

  And then, against every noble inclination he’d managed to scratch up, he reached out for her the way a drowning man grasps for a lifeline. The way he’d done off the coast of Madagascar, stretching his hand to Shivaji, and look how that had turned out. He’d been rescued, all right, only because he could be killed later.

  The fact is, a man had only himself to rely on. Enemies, lovers, gutless exploiters of the innocent—they were all the same. Someone always got hurt. Someone always did the hurting.

  He should be stronger. He kept resolving to be stronger. Then he thought about not seeing her again and found it unendurable. Who would have thought he had so much feeling left in him? He’d assumed it had been burned out of him years ago.

  She would, he supposed, find that amusing. Hugo Duran, gazetted rogue, lovelorn and tormented by his own conscience. He’d laugh, too, one of these days. If he survived long enough.

  It was early afternoon and he’d just brought down a black grouse—by accident, considering his lack of concentration—when a liveried footman arrived from High Tor and put a folded message in his hand. Scanning it, he swallowed a bitter laugh.

  “Is there a problem?” John Pageter asked, coming up beside him.

  “You could say that. I’d call it a disaster.”

  The footman, a second message in his hand, had crossed to Arjuna. After reading it, Arjuna cast Duran a meaningful look and began assembling the rifles and appurtenances.

  Duran turned back to Pageter. “I may be required to leave this afternoon. For London, I expect, but my recent guesses haven’t been paying off. If I can, I’ll send word where you can reach me.”

  “And in the meantime . . . ?”

  “Forget you know me, if you’re a man of good sense. I rather hope you are not.”

  “On that you may safely rely. But unless you have plans to the contrary, I’d prefer to remain at High Tor for the time being. Most of what I’m able to do for you can be accomplished from here.”

  “Yes.” Duran glanced around. Arjuna was already gone, assuming he would follow, and the Others were lurking somewhere nearby to make sure that he did. “Keep an eye on Jess . . . Lady Jessica, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  Pageter put out his hand and Duran took it, feeling something hard pressed against his palm before Pageter let go and turned away. Duran’s fingers closed over the gift, a ring, he could tell by the shape of it, something for him to sell in an emergency. On the way back to the house, while passing under a thick overhang of oak branches, he opened his hand and looked down at an engraved gold band set with a large, square-cut emerald.

  A family heirloom, damn it all. He couldn’t pawn a bloody heirloom, and he’d have to figure a way to get it back to Pageter before Shivaji discovered it.

  The gesture of friendship, though, he would always remember. “Always” being, in his case, not so taxing a commitment. In any case, he could not afford to indulge in sentimentality. Very shortly, he’d be face-to-face with a man who was emphatically not his friend.

  Aubrey Carville, Lord Buckfast, heir to the Earl of Sothingdon and consummate prig, was waiting with folded arms and a constipated expression in the entrance hall, flanked by a pair of broad-shouldered footmen. Duran wondered if they were there to protect the Sothingdon scion or toss the Duran devil into the nearest bog. Because it would annoy Aubrey, he produced an elaborate bow.

  Predictably, the scion colored to the roots of his receding hairline. He had changed little since their only prior encounter, which took place in the private room at White’s Club where Duran had dragged the boy before he made a public and irrevocable mistake. Aubrey had been eighteen or nineteen then, already round as a watchtower and nearly as solid, his brown eyes blazing with conviction and rage. They were afire now as well, and his small white hands were fisted.

  Still given to creating scenes, the scion, and Jessica might be in the house. “In the library,” Duran said, tossing his hat and gloves to the startled footmen. “Only the two of us . . . unless you’re afraid I mean to thrash you.”

  That would do it, Duran thought, correctly. He heard Aubrey dismiss his bodyguards, although they’d probably been told to remain close to hand, and settled his hips on a mahogany desk to await developments.

  Aubrey—Duran could never think of him as Buckfast—erupted into the library like a one-man cavalr
y charge. “Y-you,” he sputtered, “will leave here immediately. Your servants have packed. I’ve arranged for a coach. It’s in the back, as befits tradesmen and reprobates. How dare you come here? Does your word mean nothing to you?”

  “Do I go, or do I answer?” Duran smiled at him. “And if I answer, with which question shall I begin?”

  Aubrey had matured, to a degree. With visible effort, he stilled his hands and planted his feet on the parquet floor. “The last one. You swore to leave England without speaking again to my sister. But here you are, under the same roof.”

  “To be precise, I agreed not to speak again to Lady Jessica before taking ship for India, or writing to her after I’d gone. There were no restrictions placed on what might happen if I came back.”

  “That’s quibbling. You knew what I meant for you to do!”

  “Yes. And I should never have consented to any of it. A snot-nosed boy, calling me out in front of twenty witnesses. If I hadn’t clapped a hand over your mouth before it went too far, neither of us could have honorably backed down. And that, my child, would have been the last of you.”

  “Perhaps. But it was my duty to fight you. I should have done. If you’d killed me in a duel, you wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Superb reasoning, as always. Do you mean to challenge me again? You may be sure that this time I won’t decline. And as your father can testify, I’m a roaring good shot.”

  To Aubrey’s credit, he didn’t flinch. “I only challenge gentlemen,” he said. “Blackguards I expel from my house.”

  “Your house? The present earl is, I believe, in excellent health. And partial to my company, by the way. I doubt he’ll evict me.”

  “But he’ll thank me for doing so, when he learns that you have defiled his daughter. And when you are gone, we shall deal with her as she deserves.”

  In a heartbeat, Duran was off the desk and halfway across the room. “Deal with her? Meaning what?”

  “That is none of your concern. She has shamed the family. Now the family will contain the damage as best it can.”

  “Trust me on this,” Duran said softly, gripping Aubrey’s neckcloth. “Say one insulting word to your father or anyone else about the Lady Jessica and I’ll put a bullet between your eyes.”

  When Aubrey lowered his gaze, nodding, Duran let him go. It was a mistake.

  “I wonder that you express an interest,” Aubrey said, adjusting his neckcloth. “A man of your stamp rarely cares what becomes of the women he whores.”

  The next sound was Duran’s fist against Aubrey’s jaw, followed by the thud of Aubrey’s head against the wall. He hung there for a moment, slack-jawed, a thin line of blood trickling down his chin. Then his eyes turned up in his head, his knees buckled, and he slid slowly to the floor, leaving a trail of red on the green brocade wallpaper.

  Duran, longing to hit him again, took two circuits of the room to cool his temper. A quick, clean exit seemed the best of the unsavory options on the menu. He bound Aubrey hand and foot with twine from the desk drawer, stuffed his handkerchief in the open mouth, secured it with twine, and tugged the limp body behind the desk. After some thought he wrapped a pair of warming rugs around Aubrey’s arms and legs to keep him from thumping against anything loudly enough to draw attention.

  The scion’s heartbeat was strong and his breathing steady. All too soon, he’d be making trouble again.

  Duran’s hand was on the latch before he remembered the footmen. Damn. He grabbed a book from the nearest shelf, opened the door, and made a polite remark to the supposedly conscious Aubrey before closing it behind him.

  A passing chambermaid gave him another chance to fend off an immediate investigation. “Lord Buckfast wishes a refreshment tray brought to the library in half an hour,” he told her loudly. “For two. Lady Jessica will be joining him.”

  “But Lady Jessica is not at home, milord.”

  Damn again. No opportunity to speak with her before he left. “She is due back shortly, or so Lord Buckfast has said. Perhaps you should check with him at, say, three o’clock. He is dealing with matters of business and will not wish to be disturbed before then.”

  After a curtsy, the girl returned to her dusting while Duran went to the stairs and mounted them in a hurry.

  When he arrived at his bedchamber, the last of the luggage was being carried out. Shivaji was nowhere in sight, thank God. He crossed immediately to the writing desk and began composing a message to Jessica.

  Not long after, soundless as smoke, Shivaji materialized beside him. “What has become of the young man?”

  Having considerable trouble wording his note, Duran looked up in annoyance. “I put him out of the way for the time being. He will probably recover.”

  “To bring charges? You forget yourself. Our mission cannot prosper under the attention of the authorities.”

  “That’s the least of my concerns.” After some thought, Duran wrote the direction of the rooms they had occupied in Little Russell Street, on the chance they’d be returning to them now. Asking Shivaji didn’t seem like a good idea. He added that at his first opportunity, he would dispatch a longer letter explaining the abrupt departure. Should he apologize?

  “Where is he now?”

  “Who?” Duran rubbed his forehead. “Oh. In the library, behind the desk, bound and gagged.”

  “I will see to him,” Shivaji said, a touch of resignation in his tone. “Go to the coach.”

  “In a minute. This is important.”

  “Sign it and go, or you will be carried there.”

  I’m sorry, he scribbled as Shivaji left the room. Find a little faith in your heart for me, Jessie. Give me a chance to tell you what happened.

  He nearly signed his first name, thinking it would sound more personal. More sincere. But she had never used that name with him, not even when they made love. If he trotted it out now, she was bound to be suspicious. Duran, he wrote, chilled. Once lost, sincerity—like virginity—could never be reclaimed.

  After slipping the folded, sealed note under Jessica’s door, he used the servants’ stairs to the ground floor and arrived in the courtyard to find Shivaji already there, Arjuna at his side. All too quickly the coach was on its way to London, leaving Jessica and all his hopes behind.

  Chapter 14

  When Aubrey awoke, he was sprawled facedown on a familiar carpet . . . the one on the floor of his bedchamber. Something heavy lay across the back of his head, which throbbed like the devil, and there was broken glass strewn as far as he could see. That was only a short way, until he gingerly raised the burden and slid out from under it. Then, groaning, he sat up and examined his surroundings.

  What had brought him down, or was meant to look as if it had, was the large, gilt-framed mirror that had formerly hung over the mantelpiece. The wire that held it had snapped, or been snipped, by whoever it was brought him here and staged this scene.

  He had a pounding headache, but there was nothing wrong with his memory, at least to the point where that blackguard Duran had landed him a facer. From then until he recovered consciousness was a blank. Fury all but obliterating the pain, he crawled to the bellpull, and a few minutes later, seated in an armchair with an icepack on his head, he was interrogating the two footmen who were supposed to have been protecting him.

  They were properly deferential, but their story never wavered. When Lord Duran left the library, they had followed him upstairs, and from there to the courtyard, where he and his peculiar foreign servants departed in the coach. No more than nine or ten minutes passed while all this took place. About twenty minutes after that, a maid had brought a tray of refreshments to the library and found it empty.

  More intense questioning added a few minor details, only one of which Aubrey found interesting. Before leaving, Duran had paused by the Lady Jessica’s door and slipped something under it.

  Worrying at a loosened tooth with his tongue, Aubrey secured a set of keys from the housekeeper and retrieved Duran’s note from Jessica’
s bedchamber. Then he went downstairs and inspected the library. Everything looked to be in order, except that he’d thought a tall, glass-fronted curio cabinet had stood closer to the fireplace. But perhaps not. He rarely spent time in the library, and furniture got moved around now and again.

  What to do next?

  To follow his own inclinations, which tended toward bloody revenge, was lamentably out of the question. Duran’s threat, uttered with gentle intensity, could not be ignored by a man with a wife and four children. Sometimes the cost of pride was too high. And after all, he had proven his valor a half-dozen years ago, risking death for the sake of his family’s honor—never mind that his sister had already surrendered hers. If not for his new responsibilities, he would stoically take that risk again.

  What to tell his father was another matter. Someone had to rein Jessica in, but since the earl was unlikely to take action, there was little point disturbing his peace.

  Well, he would think on it later, when the pain in his head and jaw allowed him to think clearly. He looked down at the folded sheet of paper in his hand, at Duran’s seal stamped in blue wax, and resisted the temptation to read the message. Honor forbade it.

  And practicality forbade putting it into Jessica’s lascivious hands. Striking tinder, he burned the letter in a copper bowl.

  It was late afternoon before Jessica arrived back at High Tor. Tired, exhilarated, unable to shed the apprehension that had hovered about her all day, she let herself in through a side door and went directly to her room. Duran could wait. It would do him good. And she wanted to look her best when she gave him her reply.

  Spending the afternoon in the company of a woman in love had not changed her mind. Perhaps it made her envious, Mrs. Bellwood’s serenity, but Mrs. Bellwood loved a man who had proven his fidelity by cleaving for a quarter century to a woman he feared and loathed. A man as far from Duran in loyalty as the North Pole was from the South. Of course, Lord Sothingdon was also somewhat lacking in beauty and magnetism, but Mrs. Bellwood didn’t seem to mind. She valued him for all the things his first wife had carped at—his sweet nature, his regular habits, his attachment to a settled life.