Scandal in the Night by Elizabeth Essex Read Free Book Online

afternoon, he felt the need for the fortification only strong spirits could afford. But he must begin as he meant to go on—honestly.
    “You see, in India there was a northern proverb: ‘Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi, and thou shalt make a Sikh.’”
    Thomas had first heard it spoken by his superior, Colonel Augustus Balfour, on the day almost fourteen years before, when Thomas had ridden back from his first assignment for the East India Company. Alone.
    “Almost as soon as I had arrived in India, I was sent upon a particularly mortal expedition to buy horses for breeding stock in Baluchistan. Of all the Englishmen sent out by the company on that expedition—twenty-three men—only I lived.”
    Even after the passage of so many intervening years, the loss still ached like a bruise that should have long since healed.
    Only he had survived the rigors of a year of caravan travel, the exposure to disease, the ravages of climate, and the predations of bandits and tribesmen, to return a different man than the boy who had left. When he had finally made it back to Delhi, he had looked and spoken more like a native than any son of pale Albion.
    “A Colonel Balfour was the resident commissioner of the northwest provinces back then, and when I had told him all the things I had seen and heard in the course of the long journey, and what I had learned to make of them, well, that cagey gentleman concocted a devious but simple plan. It was decided that I would go with him to Saharanpur, and Tanvir Singh, Sikh, trader of horses, finder of information, giver and keeper of secrets, I would become. I wrapped my hair that had grown overlong and unruly in a turban, and donned the kirpan and kara, the ceremonial dagger and silver bracelet, as the outward signs of the Sikh religion.”
    James leaned forward in morbid curiosity. “Just like that? You take up a pagan religion?”
    “It’s not pagan, it’s monotheistic.” But he did not have the leisure to debate theology with his brother. “I was a spy, James. That’s how it’s done. You can dissect my moral compromises at some later date.”
    He had become the company’s most secret weapon, passing across borders with impunity. He had learned to cull the meaningful facts out of his observations, while at the same time keeping himself invisible, hidden in plain sight amongst the teeming masses. “I took up a lot of things for expediency’s sake.”
    “Including Miss Cates?” his father probed.
    “No.” Thomas’s tone was every bit as steely and uncompromising as his sire’s, hard and tempered by experience, full of the man he had become. “Do not make unfounded assumptions. There was nothing expedient about my association with your Miss Cates.”
    Yet, how could he explain what Cat had been to him? It would do him little credit in his family’s eyes to know he had abandoned the English way of life without looking back, and never thought another thing about it, through all the years he had roamed back and forth across kingdoms, deserts, and frontiers, until that late spring morning two years ago, when an angrezi woman in Rani Bazaar had looked at him, and made him feel something keen and bittersweet about the life he had so easily left behind.
    It had been altogether unwelcome, that pang. He had loved his role as a clandestine agent in the Great Game of espionage between all the many powers in the shadows of the Hindu Kush. He had loved the horses, loved their beauty and their heart, and he loved most of all the freedom to go where he liked, and the intrigue of finding what went on everywhere he looked.
    “It suited me—Balfour’s version of spying. I was free to travel, and trade and breed horses. I earned an independent fortune doing so. I was beholden to no one, so long as I brought secrets, along with my horses, down from the Maharajah Ranjiit Singh’s powerful kingdom of the Punjab and offered them to the company.”
    And they had taken him and his