The Sandalwood Princess (4 page)

Clutching her awkward bundles to her, she hiked up the skirts of her sari, ran blindly to the end of the passage, and turned the corner.

A dark form swept out of a gateway, a hand covered her mouth, another wrapped round her waist and dragged her backwards into the shadows.

“Drop it.”

To her shock, it was the same voice she’d heard only minutes before.

She dropped the lacquered jewel box, then drove her elbow into her attacker’s stomach and tore away from him. A foot shot out, tripping her. She stumbled, and the packet of silks slid out from under her arm. Still tightly clutching the Laughing Princess, Amanda regained her balance, only to be hauled up against the robber’s body. The hand closed over her mouth again, choking her.

“Drop it, curse you!” he gasped.

Amanda squirmed, frantically trying to break free of the suffocating embrace. One strong hand pressed painfully over her mouth. The other crushed her rib cage. She stomped on his foot, pushed, kicked, and elbowed, all the while clutching the sandalwood figure as though it were her firstborn. That was all she wanted. Why wouldn’t he take the rest and let her go? But he was pulling at her hands now.

Again she jammed madly with her elbow. This time he abruptly released her, and her own force unbalanced her. She fell against him, felt him dropping with her. They crashed to the ground . . . and she found herself pinned beneath him.

“Foolish woman,” he said, panting. While the weight of his hard body held her down, he began prying her fingers loose from the figure.

“No!” she shrieked, as he wrenched the statue from her grasp. “You bastard! No!”

There was a heartbeat’s pause, and Amanda realised she’d cried out in English.

“A thousand pardons, memsahib,” he said.

Then he leapt to his feet... and vanished into the night with the Laughing Princess.

White hot, it churned round her, blinding her: Rage. Amanda dragged herself up onto her knees and screamed, “You filthy bastard! You bloody, thieving swine!” Silence answered. She pounded her fists into the dirt in impotent fury.

Something else pounded, somewhere beyond the vast,
surrounding wall of rage. Footsteps? She raised her head, just as a figure staggered into the narrow entryway.

“Oh, missy, what has that pig done to you? Fiend. A hell-fiend. We will find him. We will tear him in pieces and rip out his heart while it yet beats. We will—”

“Padji?” she croaked, disbelieving.

He fell to his knees beside her. “Aye, it is Padji, the worthless slave who has failed you.” He took her hand and pressed it to his lips, repeatedly, while he muttered inarticulate lamentations.

Amanda pulled her hand away. “You’re alive,” she said. “I thought he’d murdered you.”

“A blow only. Haifa breath’s less force and I should not have sunk under it. A moment less in blackness and I should have caught him and killed him, and thrown his polluted head at your feet. Ah, we have been tricked, and it is my folly. Aiyeeeeeee,” he wailed. “I am a dead man.”

“Do be quiet,” Amanda snapped. “There’s no point staying here moaning about it. We’ve got to get home.”

The servants were all abed, and Roderick and Eustacia were still out when Amanda and Padji reached the house. This was exceedingly fortunate, for Roderick would have made an international incident out of the attack—after, that is, his wife had finished dropping in and out of fourteen fits of hysterics.

Mrs. Gales, Amanda’s companion, possessed a less turbulent disposition. A tall, ample-figured woman in her mid-forties, the auburn-haired widow had small use for emotional displays. India was a treacherous, incomprehensible place, and the natives were, in general, demented. If one made a fuss about every objectionable episode that occurred, one would live in a constant state of fuss. This, to Mrs. Gales’s mind, constituted a prodigious waste of time and energy.

Though distressed by her employer’s shocking experience, the widow perceived no reason to compound the unpleasantness with swoons or hysteria. Instead, she calmly advised Amanda to wash and change. Mrs. Gales meanwhile saw to Padii’s facial injuries in her usual efficient manner, ordered him to sit quietly in a corner, then set about making tea.

With the removal of grime and the resumption of proper English attire, Amanda discovered she didn’t look nearly as ghastly as she felt. Her modest yellow muslin frock concealed her few outer bruises. Her mouth was sore, her jaw ached, and her ribs felt as though she’d been run through a gristmill. Nonetheless, her looking glass showed nothing obviously amiss.

As she entered the parlour, she found Padji in a considerably more colourful state. His face was bruised and cut where the paving stones had scraped it, and a large lump had sprung up on the back of his head. The villain had aimed beautifully, he grimly admitted. The man had struck with the sword hilt just below the cushioning turban.

“Indeed, the fellow sounds remarkable,” said Mrs. Gales as she handed Padji a cup of tea. He shook his head and commenced to rocking to and fro in a melancholy manner. Mrs. Gales shrugged and placed the cup on the floor beside him.

“I can scarcely credit it,” she said to Amanda. “That one man should attack so large and well-armed a party. How could he have robbed you while he was running away from four bearers? There must have been two robbers at least”

Amanda shook her head. “It was the same one. He must have tricked them somehow, then doubled back for me.”

“So it was,” Padji grumbled. “A master of deceit. How did he know my mistress’s signal?”

Amanda put down her teacup and looked at him. “Is that what the strange bird sound was?” she asked. “Is that why you stopped?”

Padji covered his face with his hands. “I am a dead man. She will tear my tongue from my throat. She will flay my flesh and pour burning poison into the wounds. ‘Protect my daughter,’ she told me, and I foiled. She will bury me alive and sing curses over my grave.”

“She’ll do no such thing,” Amanda said briskly. “The man merely robbed me. I wasn’t raped or murdered. Calcutta is filled with thieves. I shall send a note, explaining.”

“No!” he shrieked, jumping up. “You must not tell her. She will know soon enough. My mistress learns everything. But there is time. I will go with you on the ship, and when she discovers, I will be far away.”

“Go with us!” Mrs. Gales echoed. “Are you mad?”

“I must go. There is no place in all India I can hide. Her spies will find me out. They will put out my eyes with burning brands, because I was a blind man who did not see the Falcon as he swept down upon her beloved daughter. They will—”

“The Falcon?” Amanda cut in before he could commence another litany of horrors.

Padji covered his mouth with his hands.

Amanda rose from her chair and approached him. “That was the Falcon?”

“Forgive me, precious one. I am mad with grief. I know not what I say.”

“Do you not?” Amanda responded. “Very well. I shall send to the rani for servants to guide you back, lest you lose your way in your confusion.”

Padji fell to his knees before her. “No, missy, no, I pray you. She will make me die a thousand times.”

“Then tell me what the Falcon wanted with me. He might have taken the jewels and silks easily enough. Why did he want only the Laughing Princess?”

“O beloved of my mistress, there are matters I do not understand. I have followed her since I was a child, slept in mud and eaten maggots when I must, yet even to me she does not reveal everything.”

“If he wanted the statue, it must be of great value,” Amanda said.

“Aye, so he must have believed.” He raised his
head
to gaze at her. “You told me you dropped the box of jewels and the silks, but you fought him for the Laughing Princess. So what must he think, but that this statue is of the greatest value of all?”

“Damn,” Amanda said softly. Padji was right, of course. A cleverer woman—the princess, for instance—would have instantly dropped the object she most valued and fought over trinkets. Amanda had lost her most treasured gift because she’d let emotion rule instead of reason. “It is not others who betray us,” the rani had once told her, “but we who betray ourselves.”

Amanda had lost only a wooden statue, perhaps a hundred years old, perhaps much less. As antiquities went—and India was thick with them—the Laughing Princess’s monetary value was slight. To her, though, it was a piece of legend, a piece of India. More important, it was a gift of sentiment, the only treasure the rani’s false lover had left her, the only physical reminder of one brief, intense passion … and betrayal. It was a gift to her “daughter,” she had said. That word was perhaps dearest of all.

Amanda’s own mother had existed briefly, a figure in a haze, a beautiful princess forever locked in the prison of her own fairy tale world. Smoke... and incense...

Amanda shook herself out of her reverie to find her two companions staring at her.

“What’s done is done,” she said. “Perhaps it will turn up. If the thief was the Falcon, and if he’s as clever as reputed, he’ll realise the figure’s worthless and discard it. You may even find it on your way home,” she told Padji. “If, that is, your knees haven’t frozen into that position.
Will
you get up?”

“But I go with you,” he said, gazing up at her with misty brown eyes.

Amanda stared back incredulously.

“You most certainly do not;” Mrs. Gales said. Then, as though recollecting he was a native, and therefore congeni
tally irrational, she patiently explained, “We could never arrange your passage at this late date, even if Lord Cavencourt permitted it, which I strongly doubt. The end of our long war with Napoleon has left a great many former soldiers in need of employment. Lord Cavencourt cannot in good conscience pay a foreigner for what an English servant can do.”

“Unless, of course, the foreigner is French,” Amanda put in dryly, “and an excellent chef.”

“My dear girl, you know I never meant—”

“I know, Leticia, but that argument won’t wash.”

“I can cook,” Padji cried, still gazing soulfully up at Amanda, his hands now folded in supplication. “I am an excellent cook, even the English food.” He launched into a staggering list of his gastronomic accomplishments, down to the art of soft-boiling eggs.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda said gently. “Truly—because I’ll miss you dreadfully. But even if we could arrange it—which I know we can’t—to take you would be most unwise, and not fair to you at all. This is your country. You’d hate England. It’s cold and damp, and many people will treat you unkindly because you’re a foreigner and your skin is dark.”

“I will be despised,” he said. “I will live as an untouchable, a leper. But I will serve you faithfully. And my mistress will not fill my mouth with scorpions and—”

“Lud, but you have the most ghastly imagination, Padji. Oh,
will
you get up? What are you thinking of, to be grovelling in this way, a great strong man like you?”

Padji rose. “Then you will take me with you?”

Amanda sighed. “The ship sails tomorrow. To arrange passage at the last minute requires a great deal of money and influence. That means my brother must arrange it, and I assure you he won’t.”

“But if it can be arranged, you will let me serve you?”

“It can’t be,” she answered, her gaze flickering from the
huge Indian to Mrs. Gales. “Roderick would never permit it, let alone help.”

“Never fear, mistress, O beautiful and compassionate one, whose eyes burn with golden flames and—”

“Padji, you must- “

“Tomorrow. I will arrange it all, and tomorrow I will commence a new life, as your adoring slave.”

Oblivious to her half-hearted and Mrs. Gale’s emphatic protests, Padji commenced a speech on the thousand ways he’d serve his new mistress. He’d just begun soaring to improbable heights of self-sacrifice—the eating of flies being deemed somehow necessary to satisfactory service — when the Cavencourt carriage was heard at the gate. Padji promptly crawled out a window and escaped through the garden.

Roderick accompanied his
sister, her companion, and her maid on board ship, dutifully saw their belongings properly arranged, repeated for the hundredth time what Amanda must do upon reaching England, checked for the fiftieth time the papers entrusted to her, gave her a peck on the cheek, and departed.

Not ten minutes after he’d gone, one of the mates appeared, requesting Miss Cavencourt’s appearance in wardroom. The captain wished to speak with her.

“Miss Cavencourt has scarcely had time to catch her breath,” Mrs. Gales said reprovingly, with a glance at the weary, unhappy Amanda. “Is the matter so urgent it cannot wait?”

The man apologised, but declared they could not weigh anchor until the problem was resolved.

Alarmed and puzzled, Amanda went with him, Mrs. Gales following with stiff disapproval.

As soon as Amanda entered the wardroom, her heart sank. Beside Captain Blayton, Padji stood at proud attention.

“We have a problem, Miss Cavencourt,” said the captain after a brief, apologetic preamble. “In fact, we have had any number of problems in the last twelve hours,” he added irritably.