—33—
I’d had the telegram for weeks by the time Tanveer and his father finally arrived. A ball was to be held in the maharaja’s honor, and Tanveer would be there with him.
The day finally came. Nina offered me a bedroom in her townhome in which to get ready, aware only that the maharaja’s son was my old friend and I looked forward to seeing him. No one knew of our deep connection, the letters we wrote monthly or more.
I was shaky with anticipation, unable to eat, and had to be helped into the gown I’d had sent up from Herewich for the occasion, one of the frocks made for the parties last summer.
It was my favorite, a simple deep-gold sheath with layers of embroidered green gauze over the shoulders and skirt.
The square neckline showed off my collarbones and the peacock necklace my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday, a delicate piece inlaid with small emeralds, shell, and blue topazes, woven of thin cords of silver.
She’d had it made before we left India. It was quite my favorite thing in the world.
Rocky and Nina accompanied me to the ball, both invited on their own merits, or rather family standing, and I was relieved to have escorts who knew me. Nina held my arm as we swept up the grand entrance, flanked by footmen. “Why, Elsie, you’re shaking! Are you well?”
“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten to eat all day,” I confessed.
She gave me a sidelong look. I pretended not to see.
The ball was held at a London mansion, hosted by the Countess of Asheworth, who liked to be the vanguard of everything.
The maharaja was quite popular with such women.
My mother had sent her condolences, for all her attentions were focused on nursing my father.
He’d fallen ill with cancer over the winter, and Mother didn’t want to leave him.
You must bring Tanveer to visit, she wrote. I long to hear news of his mother.
I promised I would make the trip to Herewich, but in truth I did not know if he would be free to make a social call of that ilk.
Or if I would even spend much time with him myself.
Or how it would feel between us after so long.
Letters, after all, were not the same as being face to face, and we were maturing in very different landscapes.
In truth, I was quite sure the opposite was true. And what then?
As Nina, Rocky, and I entered the grand ballroom, the room swirled with scores of people dressed in jewels and silks and feathers. A quartet played upbeat music, and the air sparkled with conversation and tinkling laughter, all muted by the pounding of my heart.
I halted abruptly, annoyed with my foolishness. It was unlike me to be so rattled!
Rocky and Nina paused with me. “Are you all right?”
I took a breath, settled myself into my body.
“Yes,” I said definitely. We walked the long side of the room.
I looked for Tanveer anxiously, but did not see him, even as we traversed the lower end of the glittering space.
What if he had decided not to come? What if, like the time he’d written that letter trying to end our communication, he was choosing to keep our friendship at arm’s length?
I spied Helen Bonhome from Slade, Diana from Nina’s party, and—I scowled—my brother. “What is he doing here?”
“Who?”
I pointed with my fan. “My brother.”
“No doubt looking for a suitable husband for you,” Nina said with some amusement. “Shall I distract him?”
My brother fawned over Nina, both for her beauty and social standing. “Please,” I said.
But Rocky halted. “Is that your maharaja?”
I whirled. “Where?”
“Nearby the punch bowl.”
I scanned the crowd and located him. My heart plummeted, for it was only the maharaja himself, wearing a spectacular turban hung with strings of pearls and fastened with a great ruby.
His mustaches were as showy as ever, wings across his lower face, and he wore a brocaded suit.
A tiny woman held out her hand to be kissed, and he made a grand show of bending over it.
As a child, I’d always thought him rather fat and jolly, but I now saw a virility that would have escaped me as a girl.
“That is indeed the maharaja. My friend is his son, the prince.”
Then, as if Moses parted the waters, a path broke in the crowd, and I saw Tanveer.
He was far more simply dressed than his father, in a Western-style dinner jacket cut impeccably, his hair hidden beneath a simple dark-blue turban.
For a long moment, the world halted, and all my attention fell on him.
In that exact instant, he spied me, too, and a smile broke across his face. He started toward me, and it shook me from my daze. I hurried toward him as if he were a torch high in the night sky.
We met with outstretched hands.
With greed, I drank in his face, dark brows, and graceful cheekbones and the nose it had taken so many years to grow into, and his eyes, wide and deep and full of a light that I knew must be reflected in my own.
At last I managed a single word, his name. “Tanveer!” Afraid I might weep, I gripped his hands fiercely.
“Elsie!” The word held a dozen layers. His voice was his voice, but it had deepened over two years, and he was taller, even, than when I had left him. “You are so entirely yourself. I am so glad to see you!”
I only managed a nod, feeling my friends join us, their curiosity a living creature winding around us.
Tanveer and I held on to each other’s hands, tightly. He abruptly lifted one of mine to his lips, a gesture courtly to outsiders. I found myself focused on his eyelashes, sweeping down. At the brush of his mouth, even over my gloves, a wild joy swelled in my chest.
“I cannot believe you are truly here,” I breathed, blinking.
He said simply, “Nor I.”
I felt quite faint with the reality of his physical presence. Ridiculous. Steeling myself, I introduced my friends. “Prince, may I introduce my cousin Lady Nina Pendry and my friend Lord Richard Draycott, Rocky.”
“Very nice to meet you,” he said with a nod. “Lady Turner has written about you both.”
“Has she indeed,” Rocky said, raising his brows at me.
“You are the sculptor, I believe?” Tanveer said, and again I was startled by the layered sound of his voice.
“I am. Wonderful to meet you, Your Highness.”
Tanveer said to Nina, “And you have been very kind, yes?”
Nina nodded, swished her skirt in a little half curtsy, half flirtation, giving me a quick sideways glance. “Delighted to make your acquaintance. We must have you out to the country. The weather is perfect this time of year.”
“I should enjoy that,” he said, still using his courtly voice.
“Wonderful.” She gestured toward my brother. “I’m away. Perhaps we’ll speak later.”
He nodded.
Rocky simply said, “Excuse me.”
And then we were alone, face to face. We only looked at each other, lost, in this moment, now. “I am so glad you’re here,” I whispered in English, and then in Hindustani: “I wish I could hug you.”
His smile blazed once more. “You remembered!”
“I practiced,” I admitted.
“Shukriya.” He kissed my hand again, and stood for a long moment, only looking. “You are so beautiful, Elsie. I had forgotten.”
I laughed. “Forgotten!”
“When I read our letters, I do not think of your face, exactly. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I think of the . . . essence of you, in layers, all of them a little ghostly.”
“Well said, as ever.” He inclined his head. “You do look different.”
“How?”
He lifted a hand as if to touch me, dropped it, tucked his hands behind his back. “Your hair, of course. I thought I would hate it, but I do not.”
I curtsied ironically.
“You’ve learned to dress up, haven’t you?”
I smiled. “I couldn’t be a tomboy forever, could I?” I drank in the breadth of his shoulders, the shape of his mouth. “You sound different.”
“Do I?”
“Your voice is deeper.” The fluttering sense of faintness returned, and I peered upward, trying to press every detail of his face into memory. The angle of his large eyes, the sooty brows, the warm brown of his skin. “And you have a little bit of beard.”
“And you have become a grand lady.”
“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or a criticism.”
“Only an observation,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder. “Shall we walk, Elsie?”
“Please.”
He held out his arm, and I grasped it lightly, entirely too aware of his size and shape beside me, the flesh of the person behind the words I so treasured.
His other hand fell over my fingers. As we promenaded, I could think of not one word to say.
Nor did he speak. We simply walked the perimeter of the room, constrained by—what? Eyes? Custom?
“How is Gurdaya?”
“Not well, I’m afraid. She rails against her situation. She fights with her husband.” His fingers over my hand moved restlessly, charged and electric, each tiny brush transmitting the power of the entire ballroom. In Hindustani, he said, “She’s like a caged tiger.”
I paused for a moment to see if I could call up the words for what I wanted to say in Urdu, and tried, “I wish I could rescue her.”
He gave me a sidelong look. “You want to digest her?”
I laughed. “Tell me the right word.”
“Main usay bachana chahti hoon,” he said.
“Ah. I said pachana, did I?”
“Good. I’m impressed.”
I said correctly in Urdu, “Main usay bachana chahti hoon.” I wish I could rescue her.
“As do I, but it is not ours to do.”
“Who, then? There must be something that could be done. Why can’t she run away to England and live with me here?”
He shook his head. “Her husband is very powerful and wealthy, and while he may not love her, our families have made agreements. It would be an act of war to free her.”
“War?” I stopped. “War with whom? Doesn’t she have the right to make her own life?”
He tucked his hands behind him, and met my gaze squarely. “No.”
Rage edged my vision. “It is so unfair!” I spat.
“Yes.” He glanced around us pointedly. “Shall we take the air, Lady Turner?”
So many eyes watched our exchange curiously, and too much of myself spilled publicly. “Yes, please.”
He offered his arm once more. “Some things do not change,” he said mildly.