now?
‘Oh, so you were very much in love with her, like Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal. How sad.’ When she was not being imperious or snappy her voice was lovely, soft and melodious with something deeply female in it that went straight to the base of his spine.
‘No, I was not—’ Nick snapped off the sentence. ‘I married too young. I thought it was expected of me as a career officer. I married a girl I thought was suitable, a sweet little dab of a thing with no more strength to cope with India than a new-born lamb.’
‘What was she doing here, then?’ Anusha brought her horse alongside.
‘She was newly arrived in India as part of the Fishing Fleet.’ She murmured a query and he explained. ‘The shiploads of young ladies that come out from England. They are supposed to be visiting relatives, but actually they are on the catch for a husband.
‘I should have taken one look at Miranda Knight and realised that the country would ruin her health within the year. And it did. If I had not married her she would have gone back to England, wed a stout country squire and be the mother of a happy family by now.’
‘She must have loved you to marry you and risk staying here,’ Anusha suggested.
‘Do not turn this into a love story. She wanted a suitable husband and what did I know about marriage and how to make a wife happy with my background?’
‘What background?’
He glanced at Anusha, saw her read his mood in his face and close her lips tightly. After a moment she said, ‘I beg your pardon,’ in careful English. ‘I forgot that the Europeans do not like personal questions.’
He was going to be alone with her for days, weeks probably. It was foolish to make a mystery out of himself. Best to get the questions over and done with now. ‘My parents made a suitable, loveless match. It turned very rapidly into boredom on my father’s part, then anger when my mother persisted in wanting … more. I am not certain I would know what a happy marriage looks like.’
How simple it sounded put like that. All those years of distress and unhappiness, not just for his mother but for the little boy in the middle, aching for the love that both parents were too busy tearing each other apart to give. He was not a little boy now, and he knew better than to expect love. Or to need it.
‘Oh.’ She rode in silence for a while. Then, ‘So you have many mistresses now? Until you marry again?’
‘Anusha, you should not be discussing such things.’ She regarded him quizzically. Of course, she was used to an entirely different model of marriage and sexual relationships. ‘There is no reason for me to marry again. I do not live like a holy man—a sadhu. But neither do I have more than one mistress at a time, and none at the moment.’
‘And did you have a mistress while you were married? No, do not say Anusha like that. I want to understand.’
‘No, I did not. Some men do. I do not think it right.’ And his resolve had been sorely tried after a few weeks of Miranda’s vapours. However careful he was, however gentle, she had decided that sex was crude, unpleasant and for one purpose only. Her relief at becoming pregnant and having a good reason to bar him from her bed had been all too obvious. The familiar guilt came back like an aching bruise: he should have had the self-control to stay out of her bed until she had grown acclimatised to India, talked to her. Not got her with child.
Women before and since had assured him they found bliss in his arms. It seemed he was an acceptable lover and a failure as a husband.
‘I am sorry if I should not have asked these things. Thank you for explaining,’ Anusha said in English, sounding not at all contrite.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied in the same language. She was demanding, both emotionally at some level he was not used to, as well as practically. And she was distracting him, taking him away from the present and into the past, and that was dangerous.
The hairs were prickling on the back of his neck—he had learned to listen to his instincts. Nick wheeled Pavan. The grass was still long and lush although the ground was dry. The light wind was already blurring the marks of their passage so it would be hard to see how many horses had just passed.
Anusha had turned with him. ‘There is no one behind us,’ she said. ‘Is there?’
The prickling unease was still under his skin. Nick stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes. There, in the distance, was a small puff of dust kicked up by a group of riders coming at the gallop. ‘There is. See?’
Chapter Five
‘There is no cover, not for three horses.’ Anusha was proud of how calm she sounded. She could not see the pursuers, but if Nick said they were coming, then she believed him. She loosened the little dagger in her sash.
‘Follow me, exactly,’ he said and turned to ride over a hard-pan of dry baked mud where the rains had once made a large pool. At the middle he swung down from the grey, took the bundles from the back of the bay horse and flung them over Pavan’s saddle. ‘Stay here.’ He swung up on the bay and left the hard ground. As soon as he was on the softer earth he kicked it into a gallop, then lashed it across the flanks, swung down and rolled clear as it careered off into the distance.
‘Take Pavan.’ He tossed her the reins when he got back to her. ‘Walk slowly towards that bush.’
Puzzled, but obedient, her heart thudding uncomfortably high in her throat, Anusha did as she was told. Behind her Nick walked backwards, sweeping a branch over their tracks. She realised as she reached the bush that it was on a very slight swell in the ground, but even so, it was too thin and too low to hide a donkey behind, let alone two horses.
‘Are you going to shoot the horses?’ She slid to the ground as he backed behind the thorn bush next to her.
‘No need.’ He removed both saddles, then whistled, two clear notes, and the horses folded their legs, sank to the ground and rolled on to their sides, necks stretched out. ‘Get down.’
Anusha lay behind the swell of Pavan’s belly as Nick spread the dun-coloured blankets over both animals, then propped the two muskets up on Rajat’s flank and began to check over his hand guns. He laid everything out in order—ammunition, guns, sabre—loosened the knife in his boot and then glanced across at her. ‘Army horses, both of them,’ he explained, then glanced down at her hand. ‘What the devil have you got there?’
‘A knife, of course.’ She would keep the one in her boot hidden until it was absolutely necessary and she had to kill someone. Or herself. A dark excitement was surging through her, as strong as the fear. She wanted to hurt the people who were attacking Kalatwah, her family, her kingdom. For the first time she understood what had taken those warriors out to fight to certain death, understood the spirit of the women who had gone to the flames rather than face slavery and shame.
‘You are not going to need it.’
‘But there will be a fight, a battle.’ She could hear them coming now, the faint drum of hoofbeats. The maharaja’s men had picked up their tracks.
‘Not unless I have made a mistake.’ Nick was rubbing handfuls of dust over the musket barrels to mask their shine. ‘They should ride past, find the bay, conclude it was a ruse
