their wide, vivid skirts swinging out like exploding fireworks. But the two men did not spare them a glance and Anusha felt a cold finger of apprehension trail down her spine.
She went to her bedchamber unsettled and restless, her mind churning with her anxieties over the threat from across the border and the humiliation of the bathhouse.
‘Anusha.’ Paravi came in, her face serious.
‘What is it?’ Anusha dropped the book she was thumbing through and pushed back the loose hair that spilled over her shoulders.
‘My lord wishes to speak with you privately, without his councillors. Come to my chamber.’
Anusha realised that there were no maids present—neither her own, nor any with the rani. She stood up from the low couch, slid her feet into sandals and followed Paravi while her mind whirled with speculation.
Her uncle was unattended, his face starkly under-lit by the little lamps flickering on a low table by his side. Anusha made her reverence and waited, wondering why Paravi had pulled her veil over her face.
‘Major Herriard here has come from your father,’ Kirat Jaswan said without preamble. ‘He is concerned for you.’
Her father? Her pulse jolted with something close to fear. What could he want with her? Then the raja’s wording struck her. ‘Here?’
The big man stepped out of the shadows and bowed, unsmiling. He was still in Indian dress. The lamplight caught the gleam of the emeralds in his ear lobes, the silver embroidery and buttons of his coat. He looked both exotic and utterly comfortable, as at home in this guise as he seemed in the scarlet uniform.
‘I thought you were from the Company,’ Anusha challenged him in Hindi. ‘Not my father’s servant.’
The raja hissed a word of reproof, but the Englishman answered her in the same language, his green eyes meeting hers with a bold, assessing stare. No man should look at an unveiled woman not of his family like that. ‘I come from both. The Company is concerned about the intentions of the Maharaja of Altaphur towards this state. And so is your father.’
‘I understand why they should be concerned about a threat to Kalatwah. But why is my father thinking about me after all these years?’ Her uncle did not reprove her for not veiling herself. It was as though he was suddenly treating her as an Englishwoman, she thought with a shiver of alarm. The rani had slipped back into the shadows.
‘Your father has never ceased to concern himself with your welfare,’ the man Herriard said. He sounded irritated with her and when she shook her head in instinctive denial he frowned. ‘He saw the offer of marriage from Altaphur as a threat, a way of pressuring the Company through you.’
Her father knew about that? Kept such a close watch over her? It took her a moment for the meaning to force its way through resentment and the unsettling atmosphere of conspiracy. ‘I would have been a hostage?’
‘Exactly.’
‘How dreadful, that I might inconvenience the Company and my father in that way.’
‘Anusha!’ The raja slapped his palm down on the table.
‘Miss Laurens—’
‘Do not call me that.’ Her knees were shaking, but no one could see beneath the long skirts of her robe.
‘It is your name.’ Presumably the man spoke to his troops in this manner. She was not one of his troops. Anusha’s chin went up—that stopped it trembling as well.
‘Your father and I agree it would be better for you to return to his house,’ her uncle said. His quiet voice with its expectation of instant obedience cut across their hostility.
‘Go back to Calcutta? Go back to my father after he threw us out? He does not want me, only to stop me interfering with his political schemes. I hate him. And I cannot leave you and Kalatwah when there is danger, my lord. I will not run away—never!’ In her mind the crackle of flames and the clash of steel mingled with the sound of a big man’s belly-laugh and her mother’s stifled sobs.
‘Such drama,’ Herriard drawled, blowing the swirling images away like a draught of cold air. She itched to slap his well-defined jaw. ‘Ten years ago your father was in an impossible position and did the only honourable thing open to him to ensure the well-being of yourself and your mother.’
‘Honour! Pah!’
Herriard went very still. ‘You never, in my hearing, defame the honour of Sir George Laurens, do you understand?’
‘Or?’ Her neck muscles were so tense it was painful.
‘Or you will find it a matter for regret. If you will not leave because your father commands it, then do it for his Highness, your uncle. Or are your grudges so deep that you would hamper the defence of his state, the safety of the family, to indulge them?’
Grudges? He can calmly dismiss feelings about the betrayal of love, the rejection of a family, as a grudge? The marble floor seemed to quiver like sand beneath her feet. Anusha choked back the furious retort and looked at her uncle. ‘Do you want me to go, my lord?’
‘It is best,’ Kirat Jaswan said. He was everything to her: ruler, uncle, surrogate father. She owed him her total obedience. ‘You … complicate matters, Anusha. I would have you safe where you belong.’
So I do not belong here? No matter how she had been feeling these past months, this was too sudden, too abrupt. Her uncle had cast her out too, as her father had. Now she truly was adrift with nowhere to call home. To protest, would be futile, and beneath her. She was a Rajput princess by training, even if her blood was mixed. ‘I do not belong with my father. I never did, he made that clear as crystal. But because you, my lord and uncle, ask it, I shall go.’
And she would not weep, not in front of that arrogant angrezi who had got what he came for, it seemed: her surrender. She was of a princely house and she had her pride and she would do what her ruler commanded and not show fear. If he had commanded her to ride into battle to her death with his troops she would have done. Somehow that felt less frightening than this. ‘When must I go?’
The Englishman Herriard answered. It was as though her uncle had already washed his hands of her and had given her over to the other man. ‘You leave as soon as the vehicles and animals can be gathered and the journey provisioned. It is a long way and will take us many weeks.’
‘I remember,’ Anusha said. Weeks of blank discomfort and misery, clinging to her mother who was too proud to weep. Sent away because the big, loving, bear of a man who had hugged her and spoiled her, who had been the centre of her world and her mother’s universe, had cast them out. Because love, it seemed, was not for ever. Expediency conquered love. It was a lesson that had been well learned.
Then what Herriard had said penetrated. ‘Us? You will take me?’
‘Of course. I am your escort, Miss Laurens.’
‘I am so very sorry,’ she said, baring her teeth in a false smile. She would make every league a misery for him, if she could, the insensitive brute. ‘You obviously do not wish for this duty.’
‘I would walk the entire way in my bare feet if Sir George asked it,’ Major Herriard said. The cold
