Rogue Grooms (26 page)

“Are you all right, Buttercup?” he asked softly. “Mother and Miss Lynn are looking for you. It is almost time for tea.”

Emily blinked down at him. She felt like she was just beginning to come awake after a very long nightmare. “They have gone away, Alex,” she whispered.

“The Huntingtons? Yes, I know. Mother said they were going back to India. I’m sorry, Buttercup—I know David was your friend.”

“India is such a very long way away.”

“Indeed it is. But I am sure you can write to him once he is settled there. It is not on the moon, you know.”

Emily had not thought of that, and it gave her a tiny spot of comfort in her pain. “Do you think I could?”

“Of course. But you must be well when you write to him. He would not want to hear you have caught a chill standing here in the wind. Will you come home with me now, Buttercup, and have some nice, warm tea?”

She nodded slowly, still feeling strangely numb. She let Alex lift her up onto his horse and turn toward home.

I will not forget, David,
she thought.
Never.

 

“
I
t is true, then, David
shona.
You are leaving us.” The soft, dulcet, yet unmistakably imperious voice of David’s grandmother Meena floated to him on the warm breeze from her open windows.

David closed the door behind him and leaned back against it, his arms crossed over his chest. He could not help but grin, despite the seriousness of his errand in the zenana. His grandmother could have made a fortune treading the boards, if she had not married a wealthy rajah at the age of thirteen and lived all her life in splendid, if isolated, luxury. Her voice, full of doom, and her pose of weak prostration against silken bolsters were pure drama.

“I am hardly
abandoning
you,
Didu,”
he answered. “You have all my cousins still, and a veritable army of servants at your beck and call at all times. I daresay you will not miss me at all.”

“Not miss you!
Ish
.” Meena flung out one dark, slender, bejeweled arm, her ruby and emerald bangles clinking like the lightest of music. “You are my eldest grandson, my darling, departed Gayatri’s child. You are the father of my prettiest great-granddaughter. I rely on you so, David. And now you propose to leave me. To abandon your home!”

Some of David’s amusement faded at this familiar litany. She knew very well why he had to go.

He pushed away from the door and moved into the room. His grandmother’s personal sitting room was, as always, the very portrait of luxury and comfort. The tiled floor was covered with a carpet woven in rich, jewel-like tones of red, blue, and gold. Scattered about were low tables inlaid with intricate mosaics of flowers in mother-of-pearl, as well as silk cushions and bolsters in green, red, purple, and sun yellow. Heavy wooden shutters were drawn partially over the windows, letting in a cooling breeze but shutting out the worst of the warm afternoon sun. Servants hovered in the shadows, waiting on their mistress’s every whim. One of them worked the punkah that stirred overhead.

David came to a halt next to the cushions where his grandmother reclined. The rich silk of her green and gold sari shimmered around her, and her silver-streaked black hair and unlined skin, the shine of her black, kohl-lined eyes, belied her age. She could easily have passed for David’s mother rather than his grandmother, and that included her vibrant good health and energy as well as her beauty. Yet she so enjoyed playing the helpless elderly female, dependent on her grandchildren for everything.

What a hum that was. She ran everyone’s life in their family, and she well knew it.

“Didu,”
David said gently. “This is not my only home, as you well know. My father has been dead for years now, and I have neglected my estate and duties in England for far too long. It is past time I attended to them. I have told you all of this before.”

“You have a manager for that wretched English estate! A most competent one, by your own account. Surely that fulfills any duty you have there.”

“It would be remiss of me not to take a personal interest, as the earl. Indeed, I
have
been remiss. I would not be the honorable man you and Father raised me to be if I did not go back there.”

Meena sighed in resignation, as she always did at the conclusion of these disagreements. She sat up against the bolsters, and arrayed the folds of her sari more attractively about her. “You are too tall, David. Sit down before I get a crick in my neck looking up at you, and have some refreshment.” She snapped her beringed fingers, and one of the hovering servants brought forth a tray. As the servant melted back into the shadows, Meena arranged the tea things, the bowls of papaya and guava, the plate of sweet
shandesh.

“Very well,” she said, pouring out fragrant mint tea into paper-thin porcelain cups. “I understand that duty calls you back to the land of your father, and I can even agree that you are doing the correct thing, though I cannot like it. I knew from the moment of your birth that you could not be ours forever. Yet why must you take Anjali as well?”

David sipped at his tea, more to give himself time than for the refreshment. This, too, was an old quarrel, one that had been ongoing ever since he announced his intention to return to England. And it was not a quarrel that was as easy or as clear-cut as his own duty.

“Anjali is my daughter,” he answered. “She deserves to know all of her heritage, to decide for herself how she will live in her adult life.”

Meena snorted in derision. “Decide for herself! A female cannot decide such things.”

“Anjali will be able to, when she is older and clearly aware of her options.”

“She is nine years old. We should be thinking of a suitable marriage for her, teaching her more of the female arts such as music and embroidery. You should not be dragging her away to the other side of the world, where she will know little of the customs and manners. The English here in Calcutta are so very barbaric. To think that my own granddaughter will learn their ways!”

David set his teacup down with a sharp click. “I will not argue with you about the manners of the English here. But to learn English ways is precisely why she must come to England with me now. She is just a child—she has time to learn anything she needs to know. Her English is excellent; I will hire an English governess for her as soon as we are settled. She is smart and quick—just as her great-grandmother is. She will be fine wherever she goes. And in a few years, if she wishes it, she can come back here.”

Meena slumped back against the bolster, a hint of a pout touching her carmine-red lips. “By then, she will be too old for any suitable Bengali match.”

David grinned at her unrepentantly. “Then she will just have to marry an Englishman, won’t she?”

“And you, David? Will you marry an Englishwoman?”

His gaze narrowed as he looked into his grandmother’s oh-so-innocent expression. This was a new tack of hers. They had not spoken of marriage for him since his wife, Rupasri’s, death two years ago. He should have been expecting it. Marriage and matchmaking were Meena’s chief delights in life.

He sat back against his own cushions and shrugged carelessly. “I will probably never marry again.”

“Not marry again?” Meena’s tone was deeply shocked, as if such a thing was utterly unthinkable. “But, David, you are young! You will want a son, to inherit your wealth and title and say prayers for you when you are dead.”

“My father has cousins who can have the title, and Anjali can have my money when I am gone. And I daresay she can say a prayer for my soul as well as anyone.”

“Of course she cannot! She is a female.”

“You forget,
Didu,”
David said, in a deceptively quiet voice, “that Anjali and I are Christian, not Hindu. Even Rupasri was Christian. God will hear Anjali’s prayers as well as He would those of any son.”

Meena lapsed into a heavy silence. The point of faith was a sore one with them and always would be. Usually, they just ignored their differences and went on.

Meena was not about to let the issue of marriage go quite so easily, though. “You are a fine match, David. You are handsome, just as your grandfather was, and wealthy. You have a title, which they say the English ladies like.”

“Is that what drew my mother to my father? His grand English title?”

“Don’t be so impertinent, David! My daughter was a silly, romantic, headstrong girl. Gayatri fell in love with his golden curls and green eyes, and would have no other man. We had begun to arrange a most suitable match for her, but her father foolishly indulged her and let her marry where she would. And now you will be just as indulgent with Anjali.”

“It hardly signifies at the moment,
Didu.
Anjali is just a child. Her marriageable years are far in the future.”

“But yours are not. You are twenty-eight, David; you have been a widower these two years and more. Anjali needs a mother, and you need a companion. Since you are so determined on your course to leave us and go to England, I suppose it must be an English wife. But even that is better than nothing.”

David remembered the chilly reception he and his father had received in England, the whispers about his dark complexion, his “heathen” mother. He shook his head. “I doubt there is any Englishwoman who would have me.”

“What? Not one on that entire rainy island? I cannot believe that.”

Unbidden, an image flashed in David’s mind, a picture of a girl he had known so long ago. Emily Kenton laughed in his memory, the sunlight shimmering on her pale curls, her dark blue eyes full of admiration as she watched him.

I won’t forget,
she had whispered.

Yes, there had been one English girl who stood as his friend. Even after all these years, after everything that had happened—his life in India, marriage to Rupasri, the birth of his daughter—he cherished that memory. With Lady Emily, he had been able to be entirely himself, to forget the bittersweet nature of his life in England, to just laugh and talk like an ordinary boy. She made that time not just bearable, but even—fun. And special.

But that was many years ago. Emily was surely married by now, a grown-up beauty with a family of her own. Perhaps they would even meet when he was back in England, at a ball or a rout or riding across their lands at Combe Lodge and Fair Oak. Yet she would not remember him. Not as he remembered her.

His grandmother watched him with an odd expression on her face, and he realized that his silence had stretched on much too long.

“We shall just have to see once I am settled in England, won’t we,
Didu?’
he said lightly.

“Indeed,” Meena answered, her tight tone saying she was not entirely convinced by his carelessness. “But there is something else I must speak to you about before you leave, David. Something very important.”

She peered up at him with her onyx eyes, and something in their depths killed the flippant remark he had been about to make concerning the relative importance of matrimony. “What is it?”

Meena folded her jeweled hands carefully in her lap. “When your mother married your father, she gave him something—something that was
not
hers to give.”

David knew immediately of what she spoke. He had expected her to bring it up as soon as he and his father returned to Calcutta fourteen years ago, yet she never had. She treated his father with the same icy, remote politeness she always had, and she had not even mentioned it when the earl died. Now David knew she had just been biding her time. “The Star of India.”

“Yes. The Star.” Meena looked more solemn than he had ever seen her, yet her eyes took on a deep glow as she spoke of the Star. “Our family gave the jewel as a sacrifice to the temple of Shiva—it belongs to the god. Gayatri was always a silly girl, and she was overcome by her infatuation with your father. She foolishly took it from the very feet of Shiva and gave it to her husband, in a bid to secure his love to her forever. It was a very great wrong. It brought a curse onto our family—a curse that killed your mother!”

David felt an enormous disquiet at his grandmother’s demeanor. She was often full of drama and tears to get what she wanted. Yet now, as she told a very dramatic tale indeed, she was only aglow with quiet intensity, religious fervor.

“Childbirth killed my mother,” he told her softly. “She was trying to bring my baby brother into the world.”

Meena shook her head decisively. “If she had not stolen the sapphire, your brother would have been safely born and Gayatri might still be with us. It is so written. And then your father left the Star in England, who knows where or with what blasphemous sorts of people! If he had brought it back, we could have returned it to Shiva. Now, the curse—and the duty to erase it—have fallen onto you, my grandson.”

So that was it. He was to be the means of erasing a “curse.” David did not believe in such things as curses himself. But he did believe in the power of suggestion, and he knew his grandmother sincerely thought she was under a god’s curse. A god’s displeasure. “What would you have me do?”

Meena took a deep breath. “You must find the Star and return it to the temple. Only then will you and Anjali be safe.”

David studied her face carefully, searching for any flicker of deception. “Is this a ploy of yours to entice me to return soon to India?”

She gave an indignant huff, her gold nose ring shimmering. “I might be a foolish old woman, David, but I know when I must be serious! If you are unable to return to India, you must find a safe way to send the Star to me and I will take it to the temple. The most important thing is that you find it. Can you do that for me, David? Please—I beg of you.”

He nodded slowly. Begging was not his grandmother’s way. This must truly be of deepest importance to her. He did love his grandmother—she had been like a mother to him when his own had died, and he found himself all alone in this strange land. He did not want her mind to be unquiet in any way. “Yes. I will find it for you,
Didu.”