My Beautiful Enemy (4 page)

“I was fine,” she said. “Mrs. Reynolds was the one who suffered injuries.”

When Mrs. Reynolds had satisfied everyone that despite the bandages under her turban, she was quite all right, Marland Atwood turned to Catherine. “But to single-handedly fight off a villain, Miss Blade, how did you manage it?”

For once, Catherine was happy that Mrs. Chase, even if she had seen something beyond her own misery, would not come forth with details of Catherine’s strength and dexterity. “I had the advantage of surprise on my side, a great deal of luck, and the experience of taking a pot to a miscreant’s head once in a while.”

Marland Atwood laughed. “My goodness, Miss Blade. Do remind me to remain in your good grace at all cost.”

Leighton Atwood’s lips curled in a sardonic smile. “Yes, indeed. Do remind us.”

M
arland Atwood leaned forward. “Do you know what? Miss Blade’s bravery made me remember the time Leighton faced down a lethal beast.”

“What is that?” Miss Chase turned toward her fiancé. “I’ve never heard you mention any such deed.”

“You never told her?!” Marland Atwood exclaimed in disbelief. He grinned at his brother. “You must have become quite a catch if Miss Chase accepted you without ever hearing that stirring tale.”

“Well?” Miss Chase prompted, eager admiration in her eyes. “Won’t you tell us, Leighton?”

“There isn’t much to tell. A boy got too close to a tiger and I pulled him back.”

Marland Atwood shook his head. “And if you listen to him, you’d have thought that our men in India daily ran in front of full-grown tigers. Allow me to tell it better. Sir Randolph Clive was a nabob who lived like a maharaja. He kept elephants and pet tigers. And one day, in the middle of a garden party, one of the tigers got loose.”

“My goodness gracious,” said Miss Chase.

Leighton Atwood turned the base of his water goblet a few degrees. There was no expression of modesty on his face, only detachment, as if he himself played not the least role in the tale.

He did not like being talked about, it struck Catherine. He did not like being the center of attention.

“Pandemonium ensued, of course, when the guests realized that a wild beast was in their midst,” Marland Atwood continued. “The panicky ones climbed trees; the more sensible ones made for the house. And in all this commotion, no one realized that Sir Randolph’s toddler son had left the house to pet the tiger, thinking it a big cat. The boy walked until he was no more than two feet away from the tiger.”

“Oh no,” Miss Chase whispered.

“The situation was precarious indeed. The tiger growled, a rumble full of menace. The boy stopped—but only for a moment.” Marland Atwood paused dramatically. “Then he began advancing again. Women fainted. Men stood paralyzed. The servants came with Sir Randolph’s rifles. But Sir
Randolph, that ass—pardon my language, ladies—would not allow anyone to shoot it.”

“Then what happened?” demanded Miss Chase, her hand on Leighton Atwood’s shoulder.

“Then Leighton, cool as a cucumber, strolled up to the child, took him by the hand, bid the tiger to ‘Stay where you are,’ and delivered the boy to his eternally grateful mother.”

“What valor!” gushed Mrs. Chase.

“Most impressive,” declared Mrs. Reynolds.

“Most impressive indeed,” Catherine murmured—not that she wasn’t impressed, but of course he would have been the one to take charge when everyone else lost their heads. “And when was this, if I may ask?”

“Six or seven years ago,” answered Marland Atwood. “But nobody has forgotten it.”

How strange to think that in the eight years since their parting, Leighton Atwood had not merely survived, but had led a normal life, a life that included such things as attending garden parties, traveling on trains and ocean liners, and finding himself a suitable woman to marry.

“Ladies,” said Leighton Atwood, “you should know my brother was not present in person.”

“But I’ve heard it from a dozen eyewitnesses,” Marland Atwood retorted gleefully. “Of course, wouldn’t you know it, everyone who related the tale to me had been on the verge of doing something heroic, but Leighton beat him to it.”

“What a story.” Miss Chase beamed. She leaned into Leighton Atwood. “You should have told me. Are there any other harrowing tales you are keeping secret from me, Captain?”

His eyes met Catherine’s for the briefest second, an opaque, almost serene gaze. “No, my dear, there’s nothing important about me that you do not already know.”

Chinese Turkestan

1883

L
eighton enjoyed an oasis. But unlike the oases of the Arabian deserts, this particular oasis had no date palms. Though it did have farmlands and orchards that suddenly leaped into the view of the weary traveler, the verdant acres lively and defiant against the endlessly arid Takla Makan Desert, never far to the south.

There were also no natural springs. The crops and the fruit trees were irrigated by melted snow that had traveled miles from the nearest mountain, along an ancient and complex system of underground tunnels that had been constructed entirely by hand.

There were, however, Bactrian camels, a train of them just outside the courtyard of the open-air restaurant, feasting on grass and oats. Inside the courtyard, beneath the shade of grapevines growing on overhead trellises—he wondered what the French would think of the
terroir
—the clientele consisted mostly of traders and travelers, lured by the sizzling fragrance of spiced mutton grilling over an open fire and the yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread.

Once, great caravans had teemed on these routes, carrying
precious bolts of Chinese silk across the vast steppes of central Asia to the coast of the Caspian Sea, to Antioch, and finally to Rome, to feed the empire’s ever ravenous desire for luxury fabrics.

The rise of great ocean-faring vessels had rendered the land courses obsolete hundreds of years ago. The caravans that still plied the route were small, sometimes no more than a few camels, trading between towns. And most of the legendary cities of yore were either lost or reduced to mere shadows of their former glory.

Yet a sense of continuity still lingered in the air. Marco Polo had drunk the same sweet, cool wine as that in Leighton’s cup, made from oasis-grown white grapes. A thousand years before that, Buddhist missionaries from India had braved the same perilous paths, carrying the teachings of the Tathagata into the western provinces of China.

Leighton, too, had traveled to China once—alone, with almost nothing in his pocket, and little more than an irrational hope in his heart.

Now he was again in China, at least technically. But Chinese Turkestan, currently controlled by the Ch’ing Dynasty, was of a different character altogether, a place of endless desert, vast blue skies, and snowcapped mountain ranges.

A new customer walked into the courtyard, a young Kazakh dressed in a knee-length robe and a fur-lined, long-flapped hat. They were in a predominantly Uyghur part of Tarim Basin, but one encountered Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Han Chinese, and even Mongols on the road. The diners looked up for only a moment before returning to their food and conversation. Leighton popped another chickpea into his mouth.

“Bring me soup and bread,” the young Kazakh ordered as he sat down. “Mind you skim the fat off the soup. And the bread had better be still warm.”

Leighton cast another glance at the Kazakh. Why did he think he had seen that face before?

The Kazakh now had a dagger in hand, scraping at the dirt underneath his nails. The weapon was six inches of deadly, gleaming blade, and he wielded it with no more care than if it were a toothpick. A man seated close to the entrance of the courtyard, who had been looking at the Kazakh with the interest of a pickpocket, turned back to his stew of sheep’s brain.

The Kazakh’s food arrived. He sheathed his dagger and attacked the round disk of bread, pausing only to wash it down with soup. Halfway through his meal, he flicked Leighton a hard look.

All at once it came to Leighton. Not when or where he had seen the Kazakh, but that last time he saw the face, it had belonged to a
girl
.

The memory was hazy, almost dreamlike, the kind of recollection that felt more imagined than real. Add to it the Kazakh’s unfriendly bearing, grimy appearance, and affinity for sharp objects—Leighton was inclined to dismiss the notion out of hand.

And yet, now that the idea had arisen, he couldn’t help but notice that the Kazakh was a tad too old to have such a perfectly smooth face. And wasn’t his wrist, when it peeked out from his sleeve, a bit delicate in size for a man?

Not to mention his thick robe and close-collared shirt. At the edge of the desert, temperatures plunged directly after sunset. But now it was high noon on a spring day; the sun seared, the air hot and heavy even in the shade. Most of the other travelers had loosened their outer garments, but the Kazakh kept his closed and belted, even though he must be perspiring underneath.

She stopped eating—Leighton realized that he had changed the pronoun he used to think about the Kazakh. Instead she watched him, her gaze frosty. Her dagger, which had never left the table, was now once again unsheathed, the naked blade pointed directly at him.

He was not in Chinese Turkestan to make trouble. The goal
of the British was to pass entirely unnoticed on their intelligence-gathering mission. In fact, he was already leaving, on his way to meet his colleagues in Yarkand. There they would debate whether to brave the Karakoram Pass directly into Kashmir, or tackle the relatively easier Baroghil Pass, still two miles above sea level, for a more circuitous route back to the raj.

The wise choice would be to stop gawking at the girl, finish his meal, and ride out. Until he was on Indian soil, he was not entirely safe—the Ch’ing authority, who had recovered control over the territory only recently, was not kind to spies. And anything that could delay his return added to the risk of being found out.

Yet he could not shake the feeling that his seemingly unreliable memory of having seen her before was not something to be ignored. That it had not been a case of two random strangers passing each other, but an encounter of significance.

The nature of which significance just happened to elude him entirely.

He drank from his wine, then stood up, jug in hand, and seated himself opposite her—the unwise choice it was, then.

The people of these parts were by and large friendly and hospitable. It was not uncommon for strangers to sit down together and chat. “You look hot, friend,” he said in Turkic. “Have some of this wine.”

Up close, her eyes were the color of a desolate sea, charcoal grey tinged with blue. Her lips, greasy from lunch, were the dark red of aged claret.

Without a word, she picked up the wine jug he had pushed across the table at her, held it above her head, and poured a fine stream straight down her throat.

The grace and precision of her action, the way her throat moved as she swallowed—his awareness of her was suddenly the sort to elevate his heart rate.

“Good wine,” she said, sliding the jug back to him. “Many thanks.”

When he glanced down at the wine, he saw that the dagger had also found its way across the table, its tip no more than two inches from his chest. He turned it around, and with a flick at the pommel, sent it skidding directly back into its scabbard.

“Good blade,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. She slapped the table from underneath. The sheathed dagger leaped up a foot off the table, still perfectly horizontal. She knocked the dagger with her soup spoon. It flew directly at him.

He barely deflected it with the wine jug. The dagger fell to the table with a loud clatter.

One thing was clear: The show of force removed any doubt of her gender. Only a young woman traveling by herself would be so wary of being approached by a man offering wine and friendship.

“Is this how the Kazakhs repay hospitality?” he asked.

She glanced around at the startled diners. Quickly, eating and talking recommenced on the part of the latter. She turned back to him. “What do you want, stranger?”

“Am I a stranger to you?”

“I’ve never laid eyes on you before. Of course you are a stranger to me,” she said scornfully. But she did return the dagger to her belt.

“But I have seen you. I don’t remember when or where, except that I have seen you.”

“So what?” Her small teeth sank into a piece of carrot from the soup. “I have seen a thousand strangers on these roads. Passed them without a backward glance.”

She was full of thorns, and just short of loutish. But strangely enough, he felt more at ease with her than with a roomful of eminently proper English misses.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

He wasn’t usually so loquacious. Though he absorbed languages with the ease of white cloth in a vat of dyes, he rarely spoke unless spoken to, in any of those languages.

“West,” she answered tersely. “You?”

She was studying his face. There were places in the world where his green eyes would be a dead giveaway of his racial origin. But fortunately, in the heart of Asia, there existed natives with eyes of sky and forest, and every color in between. And he was now sufficiently tanned to pass for one of them.