Scandal in the Night by Elizabeth Essex Read Free Book Online Page A

intelligence for granted, the company, like a plate of sweetmeats left outside a door by an obedient, invisible servant.
    Yet, that morning, in the Rani Bazaar, the girl had appeared to him like the insistent vision of a remorseful angel, come to remind him of what he was, and who he had once been below the surface of his darkened skin. She drew his eye like a bright flame, a cold-burning torch amid the heat and profusion of the bazaar. An angrezi woman so very white, she was exotic.
    She hadn’t looked like all the typical memsahibs, full of starched righteousness and stewed faces, with wilted, disapproving lips. Yet she was most assuredly European, with her vividly pale, freckled skin, strawberry-ginger hair, and tall stature, despite the fact she was dressed unconventionally for either bazaar or bungalow. She wore a pale gray muslin angrezi frock, but her head and shoulders were swathed in a bright orange silk veil that matched her hair and formed an arching halo about her head as the hot breeze lifted the translucent material, giving her the appearance of an otherworldly, Hindu-influenced, Renaissance madonna. Half-forgotten tales from schoolbooks flooded his mind—of Boadicea, the pagan Celtic queen, or the warrior goddess Freya, with her red-gold tears.
    “ Huzoor, what is thy pleasure?” A confused sa’is, one of the many Afghani and Balti grooms in his employ, had called to him, for Thomas had turned his mount toward the girl instinctively, moving away from his caravan without sparing a thought for the consequences.
    She had looked up at him then, with her pale, clear gray eyes so composed and solemn, and something within him—the part of his soul that had unbeknownst to him grown weary of deception and restlessness—stilled and came to rest. Something within him whispered home.
    He had tried to dismiss such a cock-brained notion. Home was wherever a man was content to lay his head, for however long that might be. It was wherever he could laugh with friends and be happy. And he was happy as Tanvir Singh, a creature of the road, a denizen of every town and village from the back of beyond to the front, and friend to everyone he met. He was no longer the Honorable Thomas Jellicoe to be staring at pretty English girls. He was a fierce, respected sawar. He ought to be mocking himself for even noticing such a pale angrezi woman.
    Yet, how could he not? Tanvir Singh was a man, and any man—nay, every man in Rani Bazaar that day—had followed her pale, exotic beauty with his eyes. Memsahibs rarely found their way to the bazaars in the city, well outside the protected confines of the English cantonment, and certainly did not come alone, without a carriage or train of protective manservants to buffer them from contact with the teeming populace.
    But that girl—for all her solemnity she could not have seen more than twenty summers—had seemed to have passed through the throng unmolested by the demands of merchants and beggars alike. As if they, too, could see she was a goddess from some cold, far-off northern place, come to vanquish the gods of the sweltering plains, and left her unprovoked.
    He should have turned, or looked away, but he had held fast, transfixed by his vision and his inexplicable longing for something he had never experienced—the regard of an English girl. Because of her, for the first time in years, he felt apart. He felt all the weight of the double life, the work he had chosen of his own free will, settle heavily upon his shoulders.
    And so he looked. At her solemn smile as she gazed in open admiration at his horses, at the pale, subtle apricot of her lips, at the bold shower of freckles across her face and nose from the sun. And at the promise of the endlessly long, white limbs hidden by the flowing folds of her skirts. Limbs he thought about twining around his waist like a vine and …
    Oh, yes. He didn’t even know her name, yet he had been ridiculously, unaccountably, irreversibly smitten.