Forbidden Jewel of India. Louise Allen

safe. I never made any promises about comfort.’

      She was silent. Then, ‘Why do you dislike me, Major Herriard?’

      Pavan pecked, unused to a jerk on his rein. ‘What? I do not know you. And I am not used to young ladies.’

      There was a snort and he glanced across at her. The little witch was grinning. ‘That is not what I heard.’

      ‘Respectable young ladies,’ he said repressively.

      ‘No?’ She was still laughing, he could hear it, although she was managing to keep her face straight. ‘Is your wife not respectable?’

      ‘I do not have a wife.’ Not any longer. Nick gritted his teeth and concentrated on scanning the undulating plain before them, plotting a route away from the stands of trees that might harbour a striped death.

      ‘But why do you not have a wife? You are very old not to have a wife.’

      ‘I am twenty-nine,’ he snapped. ‘I had a wife. Miranda. She died.’

      ‘I am sorry.’ She sounded it; the mocking edge had gone from her voice. ‘How many children do you have? Will you marry again soon?’

      ‘I have no children and, no, I have no intention of marrying again.’ He tried to remind himself that this intense curiosity about family was simply the normal Indian polite interest in a stranger. He was inured to it, surely, by now?

      ‘Oh, so you were very much in love with her, like Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal. How sad.’ When she was not being imperious or snappy her voice was lovely, soft and melodious with something deeply female in it that went straight to the base of his spine.

      ‘No, I was not—’ Nick snapped off the sentence. ‘I married too young. I thought it was expected of me as a career officer. I married a girl I thought was suitable, a sweet little dab of a thing with no more strength to cope with India than a new-born lamb.’

      ‘What was she doing here, then?’ Anusha brought her horse alongside.

      ‘She was newly arrived in India as part of the Fishing Fleet.’ She murmured a query and he explained. ‘The shiploads of young ladies that come out from England. They are supposed to be visiting relatives, but actually they are on the catch for a husband.

      ‘I should have taken one look at Miranda Knight and realised that the country would ruin her health within the year. And it did. If I had not married her she would have gone back to England, wed a stout country squire and be the mother of a happy family by now.’

      ‘She must have loved you to marry you and risk staying here,’ Anusha suggested.

      ‘Do not turn this into a love story. She wanted a suitable husband and what did I know about marriage and how to make a wife happy with my background?’

      ‘What background?’

      He glanced at Anusha, saw her read his mood in his face and close her lips tightly. After a moment she said, ‘I beg your pardon,’ in careful English. ‘I forgot that the Europeans do not like personal questions.’

      He was going to be alone with her for days, weeks probably. It was foolish to make a mystery out of himself. Best to get the questions over and done with now. ‘My parents made a suitable, loveless match. It turned very rapidly into boredom on my father’s part, then anger when my mother persisted in wanting … more. I am not certain I would know what a happy marriage looks like.’

      How simple it sounded put like that. All those years of distress and unhappiness, not just for his mother but for the little boy in the middle, aching for the love that both parents were too busy tearing each other apart to give. He was not a little boy now, and he knew better than to expect love. Or to need it.

      ‘Oh.’ She rode in silence for a while. Then, ‘So you have many mistresses now? Until you marry again?’

      ‘Anusha, you should not be discussing such things.’ She regarded him quizzically. Of course, she was used to an entirely different model of marriage and sexual relationships. ‘There is no reason for me to marry again. I do not live like a holy man—a sadhu. But neither do I have more than one mistress at a time, and none at the moment.’

      ‘And did you have a mistress while you were married? No, do not say Anusha like that. I want to understand.’

      ‘No, I did not. Some men do. I do not think it right.’ And his resolve had been sorely tried after a few weeks of Miranda’s vapours. However careful he was, however gentle, she had decided that sex was crude, unpleasant and for one purpose only. Her relief at becoming pregnant and having a good reason to bar him from her bed had been all too obvious. The familiar guilt came back like an aching bruise: he should have had the self-control to stay out of her bed until she had grown acclimatised to India, talked to her. Not got her with child.

      Women before and since had assured him they found bliss in his arms. It seemed he was an acceptable lover and a failure as a husband.

      ‘I am sorry if I should not have asked these things. Thank you for explaining,’ Anusha said in English, sounding not at all contrite.

      ‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied in the same language. She was demanding, both emotionally at some level he was not used to, as well as practically. And she was distracting him, taking him away from the present and into the past, and that was dangerous.

      The hairs were prickling on the back of his neck—he had learned to listen to his instincts. Nick wheeled Pavan. The grass was still long and lush although the ground was dry. The light wind was already blurring the marks of their passage so it would be hard to see how many horses had just passed.

      Anusha had turned with him. ‘There is no one behind us,’ she said. ‘Is there?’

      The prickling unease was still under his skin. Nick stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes. There, in the distance, was a small puff of dust kicked up by a group of riders coming at the gallop. ‘There is. See?’