The Golden Leopard (44 page)

He assisted her to her feet, and when she asked, helped her undress. And when she was in bed, he thought that it was over. But she lifted her arms and smiled at him.

“Will you not make love to me? Perhaps not with so much energy as this afternoon, though. I feel a bit cotton headed. But I should like to go to sleep in your arms.”

He hadn’t anticipated this. He didn’t think he could bear it.

But . . . one more chance to hold her. Bury himself inside her. Give her what little of himself remained to be given.

Leaving his clothes in a heap beside the bed, he slipped in beside her and began gently to caress her. Dreamy and languid, she unfolded under his hands like a water flower, and when he slid into her moist center, her low sigh of pleasure whispered against his cheek. He loved her slowly then, and tenderly, fulfilling his wedding vow, the only one of them he was permitted to keep.
With my body, I thee worship.

He was still inside her when she quieted. Lifting himself on his elbows, he looked down at her face, and was surprised when her eyes opened again. Gazing up at him, she raised a hand and brushed the damp hair from his forehead.

“I am so very glad you came back from India,” she said, her voice husky with sleep. “And came back again, when you might have escaped with the leopard. I didn’t expect it, and yet I did. It is so very strange.” Her hand moved to his cheek and rested against it. “I have never trusted you, Duran. But somehow, I cannot say why, I have always believed in you.”

At the declaration of faith he had never expected or deserved, his eyes went on fire. She seemed to dissolve beneath him. He felt her hand leave his face, and when he was able to see again, her eyes had closed.

He remained there, enclosed in her body, for a long time, painting into his memory the wing of mahogany hair against her fine-grained skin, the curve of her chin, the heavy lashes fanned against her cheeks, the impertinent nose. Jessie. His wife. His beloved.

Sometime later, careful not to disturb her, he removed himself from her flesh and her bed, took up his clothes, and went to the dressing room to put them on. Leaving a single candle burning there and taking another with him, he closed the door, extinguished all lights in the room but the one he carried, and crouched in front of the carved wainscoting. At his touch the panel opened.

This was it, then. He should have ducked through and kept on going. That had been his intention. But he rose again, returned to the bed, and lifted the candle for one last, lingering moment. Golden light danced with the shadows on her face.

“I’m sorry, princess,” he told her soundlessly. “But think of it this way. I will never again lie to you. And this is the last time, my word on it, that I will ever leave you.”

Shortly after, he pulled the panel closed behind him and began his journey under the earth.

The air felt thick as water. It was like that night off the coast of Madagascar . . . no moon, no stars, no visibility whatever.

The Dartmoor fog. He’d heard about it. Sothingdon had described being trapped for hours on the moorlands, unable to see so far as his nose and afraid to move for fear of tumbling into a bog. His best hound had led him to safety.

And what was it Shivaji had said? Something about the pathway to death lying under the ground. Then . . .
You will be lost in white darkness.

Just what the world needed. A prescient assassin.

After some fumbling he replaced the trap door, kicked leaves and dirt on top of it, and with arms elevated like a sleepwalker’s, picked his way out of a shallow crater onto level ground. Shortly after, when his fingers brushed the rough bark of a tree, he decided this was as good a place to wait as any.

Settling down with his back against the tree trunk, he laced his fingers behind his neck and lifted his gaze in the direction of the obscured sky. Within the hour, the first light of dawn would creep up from the east, giving him a compass point to steer by. Assuming he was able to see it at all.

He spent what felt to him a great deal longer than an hour mapping in his mind what he knew of the estate. Always aware he might need to make a run for it, he’d paid close attention during the shooting expeditions to the landscape and its landmarks. He was fairly sure he could find his way to his destination.

Unless the Others stopped him. He’d planned to travel under protection of night. Now he hoped the fog would persist long enough to conceal him, at least until he arrived at Devil’s Tor. He didn’t have a good feeling about what was likely to happen after that.

He could go the opposite direction, of course. Board the coaster at Dartmouth, carry on to South America and more soldiering. There was always a battle going on somewhere, as Michael Keynes used to say. You need only get to it in time.

But none of those battles were meant for him. The only one that counted would take place a mile or so from where he was sitting. He had a promise to keep.

I have always believed in you.

The last words he would ever hear from Jessica’s lips. Nothing in his life had ever meant so much. More than escape, above all things else, he wanted to give her a reason for that unreasoning faith. But the only service he could provide her was to save the family from Talbot, so whatever the consequences, he would try. Pray God the son of a bitch showed up with his swords, ready to fight.

Like a ghostly apparition, not necessarily real or to be trusted, a glimmer of light teased him from his left. Not a glimmer, really. A sensation more felt than seen, but it beckoned him like a Siren’s song.

Rising, turning to face it, he still could not be sure. The impenetrable fog admitted no certain light and only a begrudging trace of air. But he did the mental calculations, formed a notion of where the high, misshapen hill with its outcroppings of granite, its escarpments and cul-de-sac and stone ring might be found. Then, moving slowly and feeling his way through the trees, he proceeded in a direction that might or might not be the right one.

Jessica sat up with a start,
her heart pounding, sweat streaming down her forehead and between her breasts. She felt weak. Groggy, as if her brain were wrapped in wool. Her eyes must have been sealed with glue. She had to force them open, and immediately they wanted to close again.

The room was dark. And Duran was gone. She knew it even before her hands reached for the empty space next to her, before she dragged herself from the bed and stumbled over to the dressing room. A slice of light showed at the bottom of the door. She entered, not expecting to find him, and used the candle burning there to ignite a lamp in her bedchamber.

The clothes he had been wearing, the ones he’d left beside the bed, were gone. Nothing else seemed out of place. She had noticed his comb and brush alongside his shaving gear in the dressing room. For something to do while her head cleared, she looked in the armoire and checked the drawers where his things were kept. It didn’t appear that anything was missing.

Nothing except Duran.

Perhaps he couldn’t sleep. He might have gone downstairs to read, or smoke a cigar, or locate a bottle of cognac. But it was nothing so simple as that. Her heart burned with the truth. Sure as he’d left her before, he’d left her again.

And with only three more days remaining. Could he not endure staying with her to the end of the contract? Perhaps he’d feared an awkward scene, her begging him to stay the way she had once begged him for a child. That had been an impulse. A mistake. She had no right to ask, or to assume he would think nothing of giving her his seed in the way a man thought nothing of offering a woman his handkerchief.

But he needn’t have worried. She had firmly resolved to make all she could of their time together, and then smile and wish him well as he walked away. She might even have succeeded in doing that. But as always, he’d forestalled her plan. He had done the thing she least expected, the thing she ought to have known he would do. Possibly he’d decided it would be kinder this way. That she would not be hurt this time by his vanishing trick.

If so, he had been wrong.

She kept worrying at the problem while she dressed. Their private contract was all but finished. Why shouldn’t he leave if he wished to? Gerald, if she was to believe Duran, would make no more trouble for the family. There was nothing else to hold her husband here.

She pulled on her half boots, shook down the skirts of her plainest dress, and tied back her hair with a length of ribbon. If asked, she couldn’t have said why she had clothed herself for walking. Her eyes kept drifting shut. She felt weak and her mouth tasted of ashes. She wanted to curl up in bed and sleep. Or cry. She wanted very much to cry.

But a voice was stirring inside her, cutting through the porridge in her head, telling her something was dreadfully wrong. Worse even than . . . Well, she mustn’t think on it.

The clock showed a little after six. Near to sunrise now. The servants would be at their breakfasts. She didn’t wish to disturb them, but if she went to the kitchen, someone would give her toast and tea. Perhaps some news.

With so few guests in residence, few of the wall sconces that lined the passageway were kept lit. She was just coming on the servants’ staircase when a figure seated cross-legged beside the door uncoiled itself and rose up.

Arjuna. She hadn’t seen him until he moved. But why in blazes was he here, on watch, when there was no longer—

And then she knew.

She smiled. He bowed. She moved on by him to the main staircase, descended a little way, and then stole back up to see what he was doing. Sure enough, he had gone to her bedchamber door and was standing in front of it, probably as undecided as she was feeling at the moment. But no. He raised the latch and stepped inside.

Oh, God. Why couldn’t she
think
?
Just when she started to figure something out, a curtain would drop over her mind.

Keep moving. Keep moving. But where? Soon they would know Duran had gone. What would they do then?

Instinct was driving her now. She rushed down the stairs to the ground floor and her father’s study. Most of his guns were stored in locked cases, but in a small cupboard he always kept a rifle and at least one pistol primed and ready to hand. She slipped the pistol, a small one, into her pocket. Fairly sure she’d not escape the house carrying the rifle, she raised the window casement and lowered it to the ground. She was about to follow it there when the slightest of sounds from just outside the door caused her to lower the window and speed across the room to the desk. She had just got there when the door swung open.

“Memsahib,”
said Shivaji, bowing.

Arjuna must have just roused him. He wore white muslin trousers under a knee-length, unbelted tunic, and his thick black hair, streaked with gray, hung straight and loose to his shoulders.

“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. And waited. This was his nightmarish game, and she didn’t know the rules.

He came straight to the point. “How, excepting the door, might one leave your bedchamber?”

She considered. Frowned. Brightened. “Through a window? But it would be a long way to the ground.”

“The windows are watched. How else?”

“There is no
else.
Why would there be?” She thought she sounded fairly convincing. And even if he knew she was lying, he couldn’t prove it. Not in time. She couldn’t imagine how Duran had worked out there was a concealed passageway, let alone the combination to open it. “Are you by chance looking for my husband? So was I, as a matter of fact.”

“You do not know where he is, or where he means to go?”

“Truly, I have no idea. But do you believe me?” She slouched against the desk, the fog in her head even thicker than the fog she’d seen outside the house. “We’ve done this before, haven’t we? Conversed in questions, I mean. That was the day you told me the story about the princess and the Lord of Death.”

Death. Her heart skipped a beat. But when there is pain, she reminded herself, it is better to walk directly into it. “Shall we cease the dancing about? At the posthouse, when Duran brought you back the leopard, you lied to me. You mean to kill him after all.”

A long pause. “I am sorry,
memsahib,”
he said. “There is nothing you can do for him now. You will remain here, please.”

The door had scarcely closed behind him before she was out the window.