The Duke of Shadows (10 page)

"Get up, Emma." He was not looking at her, but at the sepoy who pressed a bayonet directly against his heart.

The priest spat out a sharp word. Reaching down, he yanked off his shoe. With a bold stroke, he knocked the bayonet aside and slapped the armed soldier in the face with the slipper. The sepoy snarled, a guttural expression of rage.

Emma glanced quickly to Julian, who looked on with seeming dispassion as an argument appeared to ensue between the priest and sepoy. The man holding her tightened his grip, clearly distressed. He interjected something in a high, rapid voice. When the armed soldier ignored him, he spat, barely missing Emma's foot.

The one with the rifle snatched the priest's shoe and raised it over his head.

Silence fell, unmistakably tense. The priest held out his hand in an imperious command. The sepoy shook his head; he would not return the shoe. He said something very softly, and then hurled the shoe at the old man's head.

The soldier who'd been guarding Emma shouted; at the same time, Julian lunged. He took the sepoy with the bayonet to the ground. They rolled in a tangle of limbs, Julian emerging on top. He landed three punches in the man's face. The crack of bone against bone rang in the air, sickeningly distinct. Then he wrenched away the gun and leapt up, pressing the point to the throat of the man on the ground.

A knife bit into her neck. The sepoy holding her barked out a warning. Julian did not look their way, but the line of his jaw abruptly tightened.

"Don't move," he said to her.

She opened her mouth to answer, but the knife dug deeper. She felt a warm trickle of blood pool at the base of her collarbone. One little bit more, she thought. One bit.

The priest clutched his head with his hands and wailed something long and despairing. Julian shot back a string of rapid words, then placed his fingers over his brow, next to the mark he'd been given at the temple. On the ground, the sepoy rolled over and then up to a kneeling position. He asked something. After a hesitation, Julian nodded, gesturing briefly to the cut down his cheek.

The kneeling sepoy laughed—a strained sound. He waved to Emma for the benefit of his companion.
"Angrezi mem unki hai,"
he said.

Angrezi.
It was a word Emma knew:
English.
A chill moved through her. What did Julian think to do here?

She looked to him. He conducted a brief dialogue with the man on the ground. His voice, low and husky around those foreign syllables, barely seemed familiar. Something he said seemed to amuse the sepoy; the man grinned, revealing teeth stained crimson. Marcus had written to her once of this strange phenomenon, so she knew it was the effect of some herbal mixture called
paan,
which was chewed and spat like tobacco. Still, in her agitated state, she fancied it the stain of blood. A bad omen—no need to look to the stars.

A hysterical laugh threatened to rise. She choked it back. It would only force the blade deeper into her throat.

With sudden cheer, the sepoy pushed to his feet. He strolled toward her, as over his shoulder Julian met her eyes. She could read nothing in his expression, but he looked at her fiercely, the force of his regard holding her still as the soldier came up to examine her.

After an agonizingly thorough inspection, the longest seconds of her life, the soldier gestured for the other sepoy to release her.
"Theek hai,"
he said to the Marquess.
"Pandit-ji ko bandook de dijiye."

The sepoy took her arm in a rough grip, pushing her back to Julian's side.

"Thank God," she muttered. "How did you—"

"Quiet." He put his palm on her shoulder, wheeling her around so her back pressed into him. The sepoys stood together now, watching avidly. The priest clutched the rifle to his chest, but the anxiety in his wide eyes afforded her no comfort.

She felt Julian's hand tugging on her braid. He leaned forward to murmur into her ear, "For your life, trust me." Out of the periphery of her vision, she saw his hand rise. He motioned to one of the soldiers.

Who stepped forward to hand him a knife.

Shock sheeted over her like ice, blurring the scene, filling her ears with an odd, high buzz. She shut her eyes, swallowing hard. What … what…

But what she felt was not the bite of the blade. With steady pressure, he pulled down on her braid, and then—with one sharp, confusing tug—she was free. The sudden unbalancing rocked her forward. He caught her by the elbow and pulled her back to her feet.

She did not understand what had happened, but the soldiers were grinning; the one with the rifle cackled and stepped forward. Julian tossed something over. Her braid. Dear God, he had cut off her hair! Her hands flew to her scalp. Her head felt so light; why hadn't she noticed immediately? Her hair, her
hair,
he was handing her hair to that scoundrel—

The priest threw the rifle to Julian. He caught and cocked it in one unbroken move, but did not aim it at anyone.
"Jaa,"
Julian said to the men.
"Ghodon ko chhodkar jaa. Theek hai?"

At moonrise, they drew up at the crumbling remains of an ancient edifice. Emma hooked her horse's reins over a broken pillar and wandered through the toppled slabs. The rosy sandstone was ghost-pale in the starry dark. The night wind sighed through the ruins.

Finally she spied a small niche in a collapsed wall that suited her purpose. She sank down into it. Her shoulders barely fit, but the stone embrace halted her tremors. She felt for the remnants of her hair, the ends that trailed raggedly at her shoulders, and clenched them hard.

Time passed—a minute, an hour, maybe centuries. She could not be sure, not in this strange land where barren desert concealed the sprawling skeleton of a mighty palace. Where night did not edge gently upward from the land, indigo to violet to fading lilac, but plummeted all in an instant from the flaming sky above, pitching the world into a darkness striated with countless stars.

The sight was somehow painful. Crossing arms over bent knees, she cradled her head in her own private darkness.

How alone she was here. She could sense the oppressive immensity of the barren plain, stretching out empty in all directions. Once these ruins must have been the center of something grand. Some sparkling world—unable, in its splendor, to conceive of its own end. The laughing men and women who had reigned here would have gasped at the audacity of their soothsayer, did he foretell the anonymity with which time would punish them.
Your world will be violently, irrevocably destroyed.

Everything fell away, in the end. Everyone, as well.

"What," Julian murmured, "can you possibly be thinking?"

She raised her head. He was too big to join her between the fallen stones, so he sat at the opening, his legs crossed and drawn inward before him. Not an English pose. But he'd had no difficulty convincing those sepoys of his native blood. They'd believed she was his captive. That he, too, had killed Englishmen during these wild days of anarchy.

What was she thinking? "That I don't know you," she said softly.

The moon was clouded over, the starlight too weak to reveal his reaction. Only a faint suggestion here, a shadow there, suggested he faced her at all. But what use was vision when appearances proved so misleading? He could not be defined by his looks, or his name, or by the moments she had shared with him. Even his current silence held a quality strange to her. She had never known someone who could seem so still.

But it served no end, did it? No matter how unnoticeable Julian made himself, he would still draw others' attention. Some people were like that; they could not escape criticism, because they never quite managed to convince themselves of the role everyone believed they should fill.

She searched her heart. It did not disgust her, this foreignness about him. How could it, when it had saved her life? But it unnerved her all the same. It made her feel, in an immediate way, just as this entire country did on a vast and impersonal level: hopelessly weary, terribly obvious, horribly helpless. Exposed, yes, and vulnerable. His eyes saw more, even in the darkness, than she meant to reveal.

"How can I say you know me," he said steadily, "when you know best what you feel? If I seem a stranger to you, then I am."

She pressed her folded hands to her lips, taking comfort in the hard dig of her nails. "Could you not have made this easier? Could you not say, 'Yes, Emma, you do know me; I am in this trouble alongside you; and what I did, I did only to save your life, that's all.'"

His sigh was the barest hint of breath. "Because you already know that. That's not what you mean when you say I'm a stranger to you."

Her hands fell away. "What
do
I mean, then? When you behave the way you do—what else
could
I mean?"

No one would have attributed his laughter to amusement. It was cold, horrible to hear. "Do you really want me to read your soul for you? Do you want me to explain why it horrified you to see me deal with those sepoys? Why it would have been easier for you to watch me kill them, than to see me hand them your hair?" His pause was mercilessly precise. "Or do you want to hear me wonder whether your opinion would have been different if it were white men we talked of killing?"

She slammed her palm against the rock. "No!
That is not true!"

The air burst from her lungs, a breath she'd been holding for perhaps forever. "I don't know what to make of you! One moment you're the man I met in the Evershams' garden, and the next, you're someone else entirely!"

"I see." At length, he said, "If you must
make
something of me, the days ahead won't be easy for you. I am
not
just an English aristocrat, Emma. I was born in this country, and for many years of my childhood I knew only two words of English—my first and last name." His words gained speed, took on a sharper edge. "And I must say, if you think I have changed for the worse, that I have somehow
lost my way,
you are badly mistaken. The man you met in Delhi, the one you think you know—the fucking Marquess of Holdensmoor—he is the act. He is what I was forced to become."

His voice softened. "Of course I did what I did to save your life. Do you think I had a particular desire to chop off your hair? But they wanted to humiliate you. I might have fought them before letting it come to that—I thought of it. But the odds were against me. And if they had taken me down, then what? Perhaps they would have killed you. Perhaps they would have raped you. But above all, you must understand that they wanted to do to you what has been done to them. Emma, this land has been
crushed
by the English. Its wealth stripped, its honor trampled. You are not dealing with penny-dreadful villains here; you are dealing with embittered human beings who have been robbed of their dignity, their autonomy, their sense of self-worth. And
that
is what this mutiny is about. Not animal grease on bullet cartridges, or any of that nonsense. It is simply the inevitable result of everything the British have done to India."

In her shock, she could grip only one coherent thought.
"You want them to win."

The British. As though he weren't one of them. God, what a fool she was! He had all but
said
he wasn't one of them! And so had Marcus, she remembered.

She moistened her lips, struggled to find her voice. "You're Indian then. You don't consider yourself English. You are Indian."

His tone was dry enough to burn. "What nice, convenient labels. If one works for you, by all means, don't mind me. Few ever do, in that regard."

She peered blindly into the darkness where he was sitting. His words were so bitter that they curdled the air. Yet prevalent in her mind was not distress, but sadness. There were worse things than being alone, she saw now; there were terrible sorts of intimacy as well. "I have failed you. Or … disappointed you. You think I'm a narrow-minded fool, just like the rest of the memsahibs."

In the silence of the desert night, his inhalation was audible. "No," he whispered, and somehow, with his cat-eyed vision, found her hands. "Never that. Come out of there, sweetheart."

Boneless with relief, she let him pull her forward, into the open air, into his lap. And in this wild darkness, in the middle of an empty earth, she grieved for both of them—indeed, for every human in this wretched world, who must face the trials life offered, negotiate the changes wrought by time. There was so little joy to cling to, so few certainties. Yet humans continued to endure. Continued to hope. The undeniable compulsion to survive powered them onward, like Sisyphus on his mountain.

When many minutes had passed, she asked, very quietly, "When does the price of our survival become too dear?"

He spoke into her hair. "That is not the sort of thing you decide until you've also decided to die."

She turned her face into his shoulder. His fingers closed over the back of her neck. She mistook it, for a second, as a gesture meant to comfort. Then his grip tightened slightly, and he held her harder against him, and she realized it was something else entirely. Possessiveness? That was the closest she could come to naming it. His touch said that he was taking the right to do this: to hold her to him, even if she wished to go.

She could not resent it. It actually seemed rather wondrous. His hands had performed miracles. Her life had rested in them, balanced in their capable grace. And now they rested on her, and their grace infused her as well.

Overwhelmed by the thought, she reached up to take his palm, to study the callused surface, the elegant, tensile length of his fingers. She traced the faint groove he had called the life line. He drew a sharp breath, his fingers closing abruptly over her own.

She looked up. The shadows veiled him from her, but she could feel his presence all along her skin. Heat, and vibrancy, and that restrained, careful power. She had seen how the Anglo-Indians in Delhi watched him as he passed through their drawing rooms, how their manner swung between sycophancy and contempt. He would have to be restrained around such people, especially when he could—if he liked—crush them so easily.

His face lowered to hers, so close that she felt his ragged exhalation against her lips. "Emma, you can trust me with your life. But I am not your brother. You cannot trust me in this."

"I have no brother," she said softly. "Nor mother, nor father, now. If I trust you with my life, I trust you with everything I have."

Something changed in him—a sudden focus to his silence, or the abrupt suspension of his breath. "Oh, you foolish girl." He carried her hand to his face, placing it against the rough stubble on his jaw. Caught by that intensely masculine sensation, she barely noticed as his hair brushed by her chin. And then he laid his lips into the curve of her neck.

He sucked lightly there for a moment; and then his teeth scraped up the underside of her chin, and conscious thought collapsed.

His mouth felt lightly up her jaw, shaping the outline of hers. As she inhaled, his tongue just barely entered her, teasing the sensitive flesh, tracing the corners. Yes, this was what she wanted. Enough of thinking, and analyzing, and mourning for a future that would not come to pass. She wanted
this.
Each flickering taste created its own dream of the future, luring her to yearn for something more, something … harder, more fierce. His lips were gentle, but she did not feel gentle; she felt alive, furiously alive, and his warmth and solidity called to her. Her hand slipped into his hair, pulling him fully against her.

If he read her thoughts, she was not surprised. Either way, he gave her what she wanted. His mouth fully opened on her own, gifting a hot, deep kiss as he pressed her back into the dirt.

The fabric between them registered in flashes across her mind. It seemed at first a slight annoyance, as she imagined how hot he would be to the touch. Then, in brief, tantalizing episodes, it translated to her—and then denied her—the flexing of his abdomen. The dig of his ribs. The push of his breath as he inhaled. She wanted it gone. It concealed too much.

He grasped her face in his hands to slant her head, to give him deeper access, to fill her.
Yes, do it,
she thought,
consume me, swallow me whole.
Odd feelings with no root tore though her. She felt frenzied, almost angry, ready to jump out of her skin. He would take her before she went. How would she go? Would she die? Would she face the water again? Could anyone keep the promises she suddenly wanted from him? The questions fluttered up through her mind; then his hand was under her skirt, tracing a pattern on the back of one thigh, and they scattered like startled birds. His fingers slid down, gripping her a few inches above her knee, as his mouth ran down her throat.

His sudden pause brought her eyes open. He held himself over her, breathing hard, and as the moon finally emerged from the clouds, it revealed some complex and impenetrable thought on his face. For an unnerving second, she felt the space again, the immensity. It seemed to open
between
them. She became aware of the silent weight of the ruins, the broken pillars towering in shadow beyond his head.

And then he backed away from her and came up on his knees to strip off his tunic.

He was beautiful. Broad-shouldered, with a musculature carved in shadow and moonlight. Her hands jumped ahead of her mind, reaching out to explore the new territory; he accepted her sweeping strokes with closed eyes. Easy to pull him back down to her. To slide her palms lower and lower down his back, past the indentations at the base of his spine, to the swell of his flexing buttocks. He lifted himself on one arm to nuzzle into the cloth over her breasts.

She said breathlessly, "Take it off."

His surprise registered as a sudden hesitation, and then as a laugh against her shirt. "Not so proper now, are we?"

"I was never good at it," she said. "Take it off."

"As my lady bids," he murmured. He slid her shirt up over her stomach, pausing twice to press a kiss against newly exposed flesh. She grew impatient, and pushed him away. With a twist and a wriggle, she had the shirt over her head. The warm night air felt like another caress along the skin she had bared. She laid her head back on the crumpled shirt, watching him look at her, watching his eyes on her breasts.

He glanced back up to her face. "God, you are beautiful."

She did not feel anything so boring as beautiful. She felt fierce. But she held her tongue, because he would not understand it.

Perhaps he saw it, though. He smiled at her before he lowered his head.

The sight of his lips closing around her nipple took her breath away. She had never looked at herself; it was discouraged, it was sinful. But here she was, bare to him, sucked by him. Sucked like a candy, with the appropriate small noises of pleasure. Her free nipple peaked sharply; she saw her body did not know propriety either. It had been made for this. Oh, the things she had not known! That the soft, sucking noises would make heat build between her thighs. That he could use his teeth—lightly, then not so lightly—to make a slight pain an even greater pleasure.

A lifetime of training in comportment meant nothing when one's knee was touched just so. One's legs fell apart so effortlessly to let a man settle between them.

He was hard and thick against her. "Emma." His mouth opened, but no words came; he seemed to have trouble getting them out. He swallowed. "Here … like this… Are you sure?"

"You invited me to shock you," she said.

In answer, his thumb dragged roughly over her bottom lip. She caught it between her teeth and bit lightly.

He gasped, and then used his thumb to pull her lip down, to open her to a rough kiss. Rougher and rougher. She liked it. She had always suspected there were other rules, rules she might understand better than the ones she'd been given. She rocked her hips into his; he pulled away and moved down her body, back to her breasts. It dislodged that part of him that had been pressed up against her. She missed the other. "Tell me what to call it," she said breathlessly.

He looked up, his teeth holding her nipple between them. He gave it a delicate flick with his tongue before releasing it. "What?"

As her hand slid down his abdomen, ridged and hard to the touch, the light rasp of her nails drew a broken sound from him. A narrow trail of hair guided her fingertips. She closed her hand over the pulsing length at his groin. "This," she said.

It took him a moment to respond. His voice was soft. "Vocabulary?"

"Yes. The improper sort."

His weight shifted off her; and then his hand was at the waist of her skirt, loosening the ties. She arched up so he could draw it off her, rearrange it under her naked body. His hands spread apart her thighs; she looked down to see him watching himself as he did it. "Your quim," he said, and his eyes caught hers as his fingers slid into her folds. His thumb pressed on a particular spot that made her whole body twitch. "Wholly improper," he said, and gave her a dark smile before bending down.

She gasped as she felt the wet heat of his tongue. It delved into her, now rubbing, now stroking; long, generous licks, as if he were hungry, and she were his sustenance. Unbearable bliss. Her knuckles were at her mouth; she was biting them. She needed something. She needed something more.

His fingers pressed against her entrance.
Yes.
That was it. She lifted herself in a silent plea. His hand pushed slowly inside. He stretched her. Wider now, two fingers and then three. And still his tongue worked steadily, aggressively. Devouring her.

The sensation built, from an inconstant flicker to a steadily mounting hum. And then all at once it was everywhere, distending her nerves until they snapped, ricocheted, pleasure careening, her hips spasming. He held her still as he continued to work her.

"Stop—stop; it's too much."

His mouth pulled away; he rose back over her. "Oh no," he said, breathing unsteadily. His mouth was wet. "You threw down the gauntlet."

"Yes," she said weakly, for now they were face-to-face again, and he fit against her perfectly, and her … her
quim
pulsed where the male part of him prodded it. "I did."

"But I'll stop," he said, and laid a kiss under her ear. The spot seemed to interest him; he started to pull away, then reconsidered, leaning down again to explore it further. His teeth closed gently around her skin as his hips pushed into hers.

"Oh! That…"

His broken laughter was husky in her ear. "More vocabulary."

"Yes." She moaned as he did something with his hips, which caused the length of him to rub against the spot still sensitized from his mouth. "Your…"

"Cock," he murmured. "Yours if you want it." His breath caught as she squirmed. "But—ah, Emma, God above! Decide, if you please."

"Yes," she whispered. "I want it."

His mouth fitted to hers. Slowly he began to push inside her. The sensation was strange; so much thicker than his fingers—delicious—and suddenly—
painful
.

He paused. "This may—"

"Hurt," she said, and dug her fingernails into his buttocks. Yes. It seemed fitting that it should. A sweet hurt, atop so many bitter ones. "Go on."

She bit down on his shoulder as he pressed forward. It was too much—it was not going to be possible—it was … done. She inhaled in startlement. He was inside her. Such a feeling of fullness. As he withdrew, she cried out a protest—and then he pushed back in, and hot currents rippled down the backs of her legs, bringing tears to her eyes. He paused inside her—
inside her
—and put his thumb to the corner of her eye.

"Emma," he said quietly. "Are you—"

She pushed her mouth into his blindly, brutally; her hands came up to knot in his hair, her knees curling up to his sides to hold him to her. He made a noise, a rough exhalation, and began to move again. The rhythm called forth something within her; there was no space between them now, nothing in her mind but silence and this beating, pounding rhythm; and the sound of her own muffled moans, and his low gasp as she slid her foot down his calf. His thrusts grew stronger, faster, and her heartbeat and breath kept rime. She arched into him: weightless, set free; and helplessly pinned, a delicious conundrum, with no choice but to submit, to yield to him, to lick the sweat from his cheek and let go of everything else. Everything but him.