by Louise Allen
‘A what? How the devil do you expect Sir George to transport a pregnant cow halfway across Rajasthan?’
She shrugged and his big hands slid up and down her arms, trailing shivers in their wake. ‘Your wonderful East India Company can do anything. No doubt someone will work it out if the important Sir George Laurens commands it.’
His long fingers tightened, banding her upper arms. ‘What has put the vinegar on your tongue this morning, Anusha? I had hoped that female company, food, a good night’s sleep would put you in a better mood.’
‘Nothing is wrong with my mood. You had best look to your hair—it is dry and the wind is tangling it.’ As she spoke it blew across his face and he let go with one hand to swipe at it. ‘Oh, leave it to me.’ A strand had tangled in his eyelashes which were thick, and far too long, in her opinion. They hid his feelings all too well when he chose to lower them. ‘Stand still.’
Nick did as she asked, uncharacteristically obliging, while she reached up and brushed the hair from his face, caught the final strands between finger and thumb, then pushed it back to the sides of his face with her palms. ‘Where is the cord to tie it?’
‘In my pocket.’ He rummaged while she stood there and tried not to think about the strong bones of jaw and cheek, the way his hair felt like raw silk, the faint prickle of stubble on cheeks that had doubtless been shaved hurriedly in cold water. They were standing very close, her face tipped up to his so she could see what she was doing. If she slid her hands into his hair, took half a step closer and he bent his head…
‘Got it. You can let go now.’ There were traces of colour over his cheekbones when she lifted her hands and stepped back. Warmth from her skin—or was her closeness responsible for it? Surely not—Nick had managed to control any amorous instincts she might provoke with unflattering ease so far.
‘Say your goodbyes, we are going now.’ He turned on his heel with the precision of a soldier and strode off to the headman’s hut. Anusha glared after him, then caught Vahini’s sympathetic gaze. The other woman rolled her eyes and lifted her hands, palms up. The gesture needed no words. Men!
By the time she had made her farewells Nick was mounted, his hair hidden beneath a turban again. ‘Come on, we did not get up at dawn in order to linger here until the sun was hot.’
That was something she recalled from her days living in her father’s house—the European obsession with punctuality and time. There was one clock in the palace in Kalatwah, and a man who carefully wound it, but no one looked at it for the time, only enjoyed the wonderful whirling works and the chimes. What did a minute, or thirty, matter? The sun was guide enough to the routines of the day.
The boys ran with them for half a mile, the dogs barking at their heels, jaunty tails curled over their backs. When their followers fell back Nick raised a hand in salute and kicked Pavan into a canter. Anusha looked back, but they had been swallowed up by the rolling landscape and she and Nick were alone again.
*
‘You never showed me how to load a musket,’ Anusha
said when Nick brought down some hares for their supper the next day.
‘No more I did. We got distracted talking of my coming to India, if I recall.’
And about my father rejecting Mata and me and that woman he called his wife coming to take our place. Anusha schooled her face to show none of her thoughts. ‘That is so. You will show me now?’
‘Very well.’ He tied the hares to the saddle bow and rested all three muskets against a tree. ‘I will do this one, you follow what I am doing with one of the others. You take a cartridge, like so.’ She fished one out of the pouch. ‘And bite the end off.’ Anusha grimaced at the bitter taste of the black powder. ‘No, don’t swallow it, spit if you have to. Tip a little into the pan, like this. Lower the hammer—don’t bang it down!—then tip the rest down the barrel with the bullet and the wad and pull out the ramrod.’
He waited patiently while she struggled to pull out the long rod, her hands ending up over her head before she found she could stand on a rock for the extra height. ‘And ram down the charge. Take out the ramrod—unless you have run out of bullets and want to spear the enemy—put it back. There, you have loaded a musket.’
‘It was very slow,’ she grumbled.
‘Indeed, we would have been overrun by the enemy or eaten by the tiger by now. Try again.’
‘I need more practice,’ Anusha lamented when the second musket took almost as long as the first. ‘You do it so fast.’
‘I was drilled in it until I could load in the heat of battle or in total darkness. Even on an elephant.’ Nick took the weapon back from her and ran his hand down over the barrel, down the polished stock, like a lover caressing a woman. ‘Like all things, it needs practice.’ He glanced up. ‘Now what have I said to put you to the blush?’
Practice. ‘Nothing!’ Of course making love needed practice as well, not just the theory gained from looking at books and listening to the married women. She would be hopelessly clumsy at first—her foolish daydreams about Nick catching her in his arms and being enraptured by her sensual skills were just that, foolish. And, of course, if he did try such a thing, common sense would take over and she would push him away, slap his face, remind him of who he was and who she was. ‘Nothing at all.’
And she did not want him to make love to her anyway, not really. He might be beautiful to look at, but he was her father’s man and he had no sympathy for her at all. Perhaps Nick was jealous of her. She pondered the idea as he slid the muskets back into their sheaths on the saddles. He had been like a son to her father all these years and now a real child of Sir George would be in his home.
‘Do you enjoy fighting?’
‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation.
‘Killing?’
‘Not for itself, no. If the enemy would all surrender or run away, I would be very happy, but if they want to kill me, then…’ He shrugged. ‘I find satisfaction in the politics of war, the use of strength to gain power and then build on it. But I enjoy doing that by talking and dealing just as much as by fighting.’
‘You would have been a very poor clerk,’ she observed as they moved off again.
‘Indeed I would. Sir George saw that, too—you both know me better than my own father did.’
‘Perhaps he did not realise when you were so young that you would want to be a warrior.’
‘Perhaps. I certainly did not.’ They fell silent as the horses began to pick their way down a slope towards what must be a stream, its water hidden by thick foliage and trees.
‘Where are we?’
‘About seventy-five miles west of Sikhandra. If we keep going in this direction, we will find the Jumna River just above or below that town, then we can take a boat down to the confluence with the Ganges and then down to Calcutta.’ Nick spoke absently, his head moving as he scrutinised the land ahead and then the increasingly soft ground beneath their horses’ hooves.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Tiger.’
‘Oh.’ It came out as a squeak and Anusha turned it into a cough. She had seen many tiger hunts, but only with scores of armed men, beaters, elephants and stout stockades for the watchers. Out here she felt as though slitted amber eyes were already fixed on her unprotected back.
‘I am comforting myself with the thought that a tiger is likely to be at least as scared of us as we are of it,’ Nick remarked.
‘You are scared?’ That was no help at all. She did not want Nick to be capable of being scared of anything. He had admitted to being frightened of the cobra, she recalled. But he had killed it anyway, without hesitation. Soldiers must be afraid a lot of the time and have to learn to ignore it. She wished she could.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a cheerfulness that had her glaring at his back as her stomach swooped. They were in tall grass now, over the heads of the horses. ‘There could be anything in here—rhino, buffalo, tiger, leopard. Keep talking nice and loudly.’
Her m
outh felt as dry as dust. Anusha groped for something to say as Pavan plunged down the stream bank and up the other side. ‘Look.’ Nick pointed down at the mud. ‘Tiger spoor.’ The paw prints looked enormous.
‘I wish I was on an elephant,’ Anusha confessed as they rode up the other side.
‘That,’ Nick agreed drily, ‘makes two of us. The grass is getting shorter though.’
‘What do we do if one attacks us?’ She tried to speak as lightly as he did.
‘I kill it with great skill and bravery while you ride in the opposite direction as fast as you can.’
That was comforting. ‘Have you killed many tigers?’
‘This would be the first.’
Oh. ‘Are you not supposed to be reassuring me by telling me there is no danger and you have it all under control?’ she enquired, despising herself for the fact that her hand shook on the reins.
‘If you were an empty-headed chit, I would, yes. As it is, you’d see right through that and, if you are on edge, then that’s two of us watching like hawks. There,’ he added as they came out of the tall grass on to the higher, drier ground, ‘We can see for miles now.’
Anusha let out her breath in one whoosh of relief. ‘Is an empty-headed chit like a totty-headed female?’
‘More or less.’ He was grinning, the wretch. ‘I said you appeared to have your father’s brains.’
‘I have my mother’s. She was an educated and intelligent woman!’
‘Remind me to start you on the subject the next time we are in heavy cover,’ Nick said, digging his heels into his horse’s flanks. ‘If you had made that much noise back there, every tiger for forty miles would have headed for the hills.’
‘Oh! You…you…man!’ But he was already almost out of earshot. Anusha gathered the reins and sent her mount after his. Insolent, scheming, manipulative man. He had deliberately played on her nerves back there. He should be cosseting her, soothing her fears, treating her like a lady. Seething, she rode on.
*
They had spent another night in the open on an island in a small river, another day untroubled by tigers or pursuing troops, then a night in an abandoned herder’s hut. Anusha stretched as she rose at dawn, wanting warm water and hot food and a pile of soft cushions.
Nick was boiling water for the usual strong tea that she was learning to tolerate, if not like. He had been restless the night before and had left her to sleep alone in the hut. She heard him padding around outside every time she woke and there were faint blue shadows like thumbprints beneath his eyes.
‘Did you not sleep last night?’ she asked. She squatted down beside him and studied his face. ‘You look tired.’ She did not want to think of him having any vulnerabilities, it made him too real.
‘I dozed.’ Nick shifted and stood up as she lifted a hand to touch the lines of strain at the corner of his eye. He had become more taciturn over the past twenty-four hours, she realised. Anusha searched her memory for anything she had done to anger him, but could find nothing. Perhaps he was simply bored with her company, tired of this journey. He stopped kicking at the fire and glanced at her, frowning. ‘We should be near the Jumna by now.’
‘That is good, isn’t it?’ Anusha ventured.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Of course. Never mind my mood, I am just…distracted.’
*
I am just bloody randy, Nick thought with deliberate crudity in an attempt to shock himself into focus. But it was more than that—he didn’t want to have a woman, any woman. He wanted this one, and for more than a tumble. He wanted to make love to her, slowly. He wanted to uncover those long limbs, that honey-coloured skin, unbind the thick plait the colour of toffee and teak. He wanted to lose himself inside her slender, strong body. That innocent body, he reminded himself as he had throughout the long, restless night pacing around the hut while Anusha slept inside.
The urge to seduce her warred with the instinct to protect her. He had felt it with Miranda, although his wife, whom he failed, had simply expected it, whereas Anusha alternately spurned his offers of help or pretended to berate him for scaring her with tigers.
For some reason, while he had found it easy enough to lie beside her in the open, the enclosed hut felt dangerously intimate and, once the thought had got hold of his imagination, his body had done the rest to ensure a sleepless night. No amount of reminding himself what a wilful, haughty, unpredictable—and completely untouchable—female she was helped in the slightest.
And, worst of all, perhaps, in the small hours, came the suspicion that the ache he was feeling was not just desire, but loneliness. He wanted to reach out to something within her that she was not prepared to let him touch.
The landscape was every shade of grey and violet in the pre-dawn light. As they rode, it gradually brightened and the colours intensified until the river valley was plain before them. There were the craggy hills behind, still purple in the shadow of sunrise, the lush green fringing the watercourse, the short-cropped grass and scrub where village flocks had eaten their fill. In the distance, downriver, there was a haze of smoke marking a town or a big village.
A buffalo cart loaded with sugar cane creaked across the rough track ahead. ‘Namaste!’ Nick called to the driver. ‘What place is that, brother?’ He pointed downriver. ‘Is it a big town? Can we find a boat there?’
‘It is Kalpi, brother, and only one or two kos away,’ the man said and pondered the other questions. ‘Yes, it is big, for they make sugar there and there is much trade. Assuredly you will find many boats.’
Nick waved his thanks and turned Pavan to take the track downstream. ‘Almost there, then. Have you been on a river before?’
‘No, only the lake. Is it pleasurable?’
‘It can be,’ Nick said with some caution. Goodness knows what they would find to hire or buy. Something with separate sleeping accommodation for Anusha, that was certain. He wasn’t spending more than a week cooped up at night with this woman, her big, questioning grey eyes and soft, inquisitive hands and his own aching loins. Not if he could help it.
They were closer to the river now and it spread across perhaps half a league, its numerous channels braiding into loops and sandbanks. They would have the current to help them down, but he’d need someone who knew the river over a good distance, not simply a local boatman—
What is that? In front. Movement jerked him from a mental list of things to be done and back, with a jolt, to the present. Three men came out of the trees to the right, two on foot, one on a horse. Nick twisted in the saddle: two more men on foot behind them. The river cut sharply into the bank to their left, to the right the land rose to a heavily forested bluff. They had ridden right into an ambush.
‘Dacoits.’ He drew his sabre. ‘Stay behind me and don’t stop, whatever happens. I’m going to ride them down.’
One of the men on foot knelt, lifted something to his shoulder.
‘And keep low—they have guns!’ He sent Anusha a rapid glance, saw the dagger in her hand and then kicked Pavan straight at the man with the musket. It would spoil his aim, he would get up and run—
The blow, the pain, came before the sound of the shot. Nick reeled in the saddle, grabbed for the pommel, his left shoulder on fire. He hung on grimly, locked his fingers and raised the sabre. Pavan, trained to battle, rode right into the gunman, lethal hooves slashing, then turned, answering the pressure of Nick’s knees, to charge the horseman. A sweep of the sabre and the man was screaming, clutching his face where blood streamed down, before spurring for the forest.
There did not seem to be any sound. As if time had slowed, Nick hauled on Pavan’s reins and the excited horse spun again. Anusha had ridden Rajat straight at the third man and the black was rearing, lashing out. Behind them the remaining dacoits were running for cover.
Rajat’s front hooves hit the ground and the terrified man scrambled to his feet and dived into the brush. Anusha turned, her face white, the dagger clenched in her raised fist. There was blood on it. He saw
her lips move, but he could not hear what she was saying. The pain in his shoulder was monstrous, a beast dragging at nerve and muscle with savage claws.
‘Go!’ he managed to shout. ‘Ride for the town!’ But she paid no heed. Perhaps he had made no sound, Nick thought as the forest tilted. Something was wrong, the ground shouldn’t be…
Chapter Nine
We have done it! With a cry of triumph on her lips Anusha twisted in the saddle, brandishing her knife. Five dacoits and she had helped Nick rout them!
Then she saw him fall across Pavan’s neck, the dark blue of his coat stained black over his heart, and her own heart seemed to stutter and stop. ‘No!’ She spurred Rajat forward. ‘Nick!’
The gelding reached its stable mate before Nick toppled to the ground and the horses seemed to know what to do, perhaps trained for this, she thought distractedly as she reached for the limp body that Rajat’s shoulder was supporting. With a heave, and strength she did not know she possessed, she got Nick back in the saddle and breathed again when he moved under her hands.
‘Thank you, Lord Krishna,’ she gasped as she steadied him. ‘He lives.’ She gave him a little shake. ‘Nick, can you hold on? I dare not dismount, they might come back.’
‘Yes.’ He dragged his eyes open with a visible effort. ‘Stop the bleeding…’
Anusha tore open her saddle bag and pulled out a linen shirt, worn for two days, but the best thing she had within reach. The horses stood like rocks while she fumbled Nick’s coat open. There seemed to be blood everywhere, but when she put her hand on his back it was dry. ‘The bullet’s still in there,’ she said as she stuffed the linen under his shirt. ‘Can you hold that?’
He grunted, so she turned Rajat, Pavan wheeling with him as though understanding the need to keep Nick within her reach. But he managed to stay upright in the saddle, one hand on the reins, the other pressed to his shoulder. He was doing it by sheer will-power, as far as she could see—his face was white under the tan, his eyes unfocused.
