you got into some ridiculous scrape,’ he added and the smile froze as the old guilt washed through her.
Without meaning, to she gabbled the whole story. ‘I was walking on the beach with my governess when I was eight and a big wave caught me, rolled me out over the pebbles and down, deep.’ She could still close her eyes and see the underneath of the wave, the green tunnel-shape above her, trapping her with no air, beating her down on to the stones and the rocks. ‘Miss Richards went in after me and she managed to drag me to the beach. Then the next wave took her. She nearly drowned and I couldn’t help her—my leg was broken. The poor woman caught pneumonia and almost died.’
‘Of course you couldn’t have helped,’ Callum said firmly. ‘You were a child and injured.’
‘But Lord Lyndon is correct—I had disobeyed her and was walking too close to the water. It was my fault.’ No one had beaten her for her bad behaviour, for Miss Richards had told no one. But the guilt over her childish defiance had never gone away and the fear of the sea at close quarters had never left her.
‘It has not prevented you from taking risks,’ Alistair said dispassionately.
‘Lyndon.’ Chatterton’s tone held a warning.
Alistair raised one eyebrow, unintimidated. ‘Lady Perdita prizes frankness, I think.’
‘It is certainly better than hypocrisy,’ she snapped. ‘And, no, it did not stop me taking risks, only, after that, I tried to be certain they were my risks alone.’
‘My leg is much better.’ Alistair delivered the apparent non sequitur in a conversational tone.
‘I cannot allow for persons equally as reckless as I am,’ Dita said sweetly. ‘I am so glad you are suffering no serious consequences for your dangerous riding.’
‘We’re here,’ Chatterton said with the air of a man who wished he was anywhere rather than in the middle of a polite aristocratic squabble.
‘And they are lowering a bo’sun’s chair for the ladies,’ said Alistair, getting to his feet. ‘Here! You! This lady first.’
‘What? No! I mean I can wait!’ Dita found herself ruthlessly bundled into the box-like seat on the end of a rope and then she was swung up in the air, dangled sickeningly over the water and landed with a thump on the deck.
‘Oh! The wretched—’
‘Ma’am? Fast is the best way to come up, in my opinion, no time to think about it.’ A polite young man was at her elbow. ‘Lady Perdita? I’m Tompkins, one of the lieutenants. Lord Webb asked me to look out for you. We met at the reception, ma’am.’
‘Mr Tompkins.’ Dita swallowed and her stomach returned to its normal position. ‘Of course, I remember you.’
‘Shall I show you to your cabin, ma’am?’
‘Just a moment. I wish to thank the gentleman who assisted me just now.’
The ladies and children continued to be hoisted on board with the chair. Most of them screamed all the way up. At least I did not scream, she thought, catching at the shreds of her dignity. What had she been thinking of, to blurt out that childhood nightmare to the men? Surely she had more control than that? But the tossing open boat had frightened her, fretting at nerves already raw with the sadness of departure and the apprehension of what was to come in England. And so her courage had failed her.
Dita gritted her teeth and waited until the men began to come up the rope ladder that had been lowered over the side, then she walked across to Alistair where he stood with Callum Chatterton.
‘Thank you very much for your help, gentlemen,’ she said with a warm smile for Callum. ‘Lord Lyndon, you are so masterful I fear you will have to exercise great discretion on the voyage. You were observed by a number of most susceptible young ladies who will all now think you the very model of a man of action and will be seeking every opportunity to be rescued by you. I will do my best to warn them off, but, of course, they will think me merely jealous.’
She batted her eyelashes at him and walked back to Lieutenant Tompkins. Behind her she heard a snort of laugher from Mr Chatterton and a resounding silence from Alistair. This time she had had the last word.
Dita sat in her cabin space and tried to make herself get up and go outside. Through the salt-stained window that was one of the great luxuries of the roundhouse accommodation she could see that they were under way down the Hooghly.
Every excuse she could think of to stay where she was had been exhausted. She had arranged her possessions as neatly as possible; thrown a colourful shawl over the bed; hung family miniatures on nails on the bulkhead; wedged books—all of them novels—into a makeshift shelf; refused the offer of assistance from Mrs Bastable’s maid on the grounds that there was barely room for one person, let alone two, in the space available; washed her face and hands, tidied her hair. Now there was no reason to stay there, other than a completely irrational desire to avoid Alistair Lyndon.
‘Perdita? We’ll be sailing in a moment—aren’t you coming on deck?’ Averil called from the next compartment, just the other side of one canvas wall.
Courage, Dita, she thought, clenching her hands into tight fists. You can’t stay here for three months. She had grown up knowing that she was plain and so she had learned to create an aura of style and charm that deceived most people into not noticing. She was rebellious and contrary and she had taught herself to control that, so when things went wrong it was only she who was hurt. Or so she thought until her hideous mistake with Stephen Doyle meant the whole family had had to deal with the resulting gossip. And in India she had coped with the talk by the simple method of pretending that she did not care.
But I do, she thought. I do care. And I care what Alistair thinks of me and I am a fool to do so. The young man she had adored had grown up to be a rake and the heir to a marquisate and she could guess what he thought about the girl next door who had a smirched reputation and a sharp tongue. Hypocrisy. Had the tender intensity with which he had made love to her eight years ago been simply the wiles of a youth who was going to grow up into a rake? It must have been, for he showed no signs of remembering; surely if he had cared in the slightest, he would recall calling her his darling Dita, his sweet, his dear girl …
‘I’m coming!’ she called to Averil, fixing a smile on her face because she knew it would show in her voice. ‘Just let me get my bonnet on.’ She peered into the mirror that folded up from the dressing stand and pinched the colour into her cheeks, checked that the candle-soot on her lashes had not smudged, tied on her most becoming sunbonnet with the bow at a coquettish angle under her chin and unfastened the canvas flap. ‘Here I am.’
Averil linked arms with the easy friendliness that always charmed Dita. Miss Heydon was shy with strangers, but once she decided she was your friend the reserve melted. ‘The start of our adventure! Is this not exciting?’
‘You won’t say that after four weeks when everything smells like a farmyard and the weather is rough and we haven’t had fresh supplies for weeks and you want to scream if you ever see the same faces again,’ Dita warned as they emerged on to the deck.
‘I
