The Golden Leopard (14 page)

He placed the candle in a silver-gilt holder on the other side of the mantelpiece, arrested by the dancing flame. It seemed to take life from a stream of air, but the windows were clear the other side of the room, closed and draped with heavy damask curtains.

The air must be coming down the chimney shaft. That would explain it. Taking the candle, he set it on the flagstone hearth. After a moment, the flame went still. Puzzled, he moved the candle from place to place on hearth and mantel, but the distinctive fluttering only recurred when he put it on the left side of the mantel. Experimenting further, he detected movement when he held the candle against the carved oak wainscoting to the left of the fireplace.

What the devil? Air was seeping into the room from behind the wall, that was certain, but he couldn’t tell from where.

A tiny click drew his attention to the door, which opened to admit a shaft of pale light from the passageway. Arjuna’s face appeared, along with a beckoning hand.

After a last pause by the bed, where he saw no change in Jessie’s appearance, Duran unwillingly obeyed the summons to his own room.

Shivaji was waiting for him. “You must leave the lady to her servants now. To be discovered in her room would create difficulties for you both.”

Duran opened his mouth to object and closed it again. She would not be glad to awaken to a scandal. His own head had begun to throb, but he could put that down to sleeplessness and tension. A pinprick compared to what she had suffered. Was suffering even now.

He glanced back at the door, wanting to rush through it and to her bedside again. He had seen her through the night. He wanted to watch her open her eyes, smiling because the pain was gone. He needed to make sure it was over.

Shivaji was speaking again. “. . . depart at ten o’clock. You will wish to bid farewell to your host.”

“Not that again!” Duran’s hand ached to plant itself on Shivaji’s chin. “I leave when I’m sure Lady Jessica is well and after I have secured her help. Not before. Not one bloody minute before.”

By the end he was shouting, or near to, and Shivaji had grappled him by the shoulders.

“Control yourself,” came the smooth, unruffled voice. “Information passes quickly among servants. We have been as discreet as possible, but your presence in the lady’s bedchamber may already be known. I cannot permit our mission to be compromised by a dispute with her family.”

“Then you ought to have recruited a eunuch.”

“If you do not lower your tone,” Shivaji advised him coolly, “I shall be forced to silence you.”

“You’re queasy about noise? Very well, then. We’ll take it to the moors.” Duran spun on his heel and wrenched open the door. “Follow me or put a knife in me.”

“Ah,” said the craftsman mournfully. “That would be most unfortunate.”

Since then Duran had learned that the bracelet could take considerable banging about without damage to itself or to him, and only a deliberate effort to pry out the jewels, scrape off the gold, or unlock the clamp would set loose one of those deadly needles. Even so, the poison-studded bangle was a constant reminder of his powerlessness. He despised it.

A soft whistle floated from a rise of hills to his left. The sound reminded him of a bird—he didn’t know the name of it—reputedly favored by Shiva the Destroyer.

Shivaji, his own personal destroyer, must have emerged from the servants’ door behind the house and passed him by when he wasn’t looking. Leaving
him
to follow, which was, he supposed, as it should be. At least the delay gave him a little time to reel in his straying wits and put together a plan.

He struck out across the sheep-manicured lawn, his feet imprinting the dew-damp grass, his eyes searching the rocky hills for a sign of his quarry. Between the landscaped gardens and the hills stretched a long tract of moorland that all the guests had been warned to avoid. There was no sure footing there.

The pearl-gray sky cupped the black tor like an oyster shell. He picked his way over the hissing ground, not committing his full weight until the mud stopped short of his ankles. He’d charged out without putting on his boots or availing himself of the privy room, which he was now beginning to regret. Covering the last hundred yards in a dash, he ducked behind an outcropping of granite stones to relieve himself

Shortly after, the summoning whistle sounded again, echoing off the hills and seeming to come from everywhere at once. He emerged from the sheltering stones and began his climb to the top of Devil’s Tor.

Concentration eluded him. His thoughts kept sliding back to the room where Jessie was sleeping. He hoped to God she was sleeping. That he would be permitted to see her again. In the next few minutes he had to convince Shivaji to let him remain at High Tor, but he’d already used every argument he could think of to get himself here in the first place.

The path into the steep hills curled and dipped, winding around boulders and skirting treacherous bogs. At times, one wrong step would have sent him off a high escarpment. He was fairly out of breath when the path made a sharp turn and opened onto an odd sort of clearing. Standing stones, taller than he by a foot or more, circled a flat space perhaps twenty yards in diameter.

Poised dead center, unyielding as a slab of granite, was Shivaji.

Aware of cold sweat streaming between his shoulder blades, Duran sauntered to the nearest of the stones and slouched against it with his arms folded. “How neglectful of me,” he said. “I forgot to bring a gun.”

“It would have been taken from you along the way.”

“Oh, quite. By the Others.”

“Believe what you will.” A hint of impatience edged Shivaji’s soft words. “You wish to speak with me, I believe, on the subject of our departure.”

Duran had thrown himself against the assassin’s iron will often enough to know the futility of argument. This time, curious to see if it would make a difference, he meant to tack in the direction Shivaji wanted him to go. “In fact, I’ve no particular objection to leaving,” he said with a shrug. “Shooting at birds is an overrated pastime, and since you allow me no money for wagering at cards, the evenings are tedious. There’s only one female of interest on the premises, and she wishes me to the devil. By all means, let us be off.”

There was the slightest hesitation before Shivaji spoke. “A short time ago you felt otherwise.”

“Not at all. Given a choice, I’d always take London over this backwater. But did you not wish me to track down the nizam’s toy?”

As always, baiting Shivaji was a staggering waste of time. “So I do,” he said in his tranquil voice. “You are accomplishing nothing here. In London you will contrive to examine the passenger records of ships departing Madras following the theft of the leopard.”

“And will the thief have inscribed ‘accompanied by a purloined icon’ beside his name, do you suppose? Because if he didn’t, I cannot imagine how we’ll distinguish him from the other passengers.”

“Then,” Shivaji continued mildly, “you will employ our replica to draw the attention of collectors. Should one of them bear a name that appears on the passenger list—”

“Yes, yes, I know that part of the plan. It’s
my
plan. But the timing is all wrong. There’s no use flogging our fake icon in London while everyone of consequence is in the country. And there’s also the small matter of persuading the East India Company to give me access to the shipping records. I am not precisely in their good graces.”

“Then you must convince them of your good intentions.”

“If it comes to that.” Easy enough to concede the impossible. They were more likely to haul him into a storeroom and beat the stuffing out of him. “But we still need Lady Jessica, who can put us directly in touch with the collectors. And what have we to lose? Should nothing come of my new proposal, we can revert to the original plan in the spring.”

“The spring will be too late, Duran-Sahib. Only a little time remains to you.”

The air deadened.

“What do you mean?” But already he knew the answer. He had been tricked. “The nizam gave me a
year.”

“You have misunderstood. The time commenced at the moment he issued his ruling.”

“B-but that’s absurd,” Duran said, disaster beating like wings in his throat. “The journey alone has eaten up the better part of a year.”

“It required eighteen weeks to create the replica. We were nearly seven months on ship, and we have passed sixteen days in England. By my calculations, twenty-five days remain to you. I would advise that you make good use of them.”

Twenty-five days?
Duran sagged against the stone at his back. It was the only thing keeping him upright, that stone and, perhaps, a thin tracery of pride. Dear God. Willy-nilly, his year had shrunk to less than a month. No time to raise money. To plot an escape. No time to spend with Jessica.

Profoundly shaken, he produced a harsh laugh. “Good use? We both know this leopard hunt is a sham. There’s one chance in a million it made it to England, or anywhere else, in one piece. By now any thief with a grain of sense would have pried out the gems, melted the gold, and sold the lot. The nizam must have known that. So far as I can tell, I’m as superfluous to his schemes as drawers on a whore. Why didn’t you slit my throat in a Madras alley and have done with it?”

“To preserve the illusion of the search,” Shivaji replied after a rare hesitation. “We were certain to be followed to Madras. It was necessary to take ship.”

“And were we followed here as well?”

“That is unlikely. As you have realized, the nizam never intended you to arrive in England. But his people must believe in your quest, for while they await your promised return with the leopard, they will not permit the noble prince’s enemies to remove him from the throne.”

“Then he miscalculated. He should have given me a
decade
to find it.”