Chapter 8
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Eight
Ten minutes later
Neil stood in front of a sixteenth-century Mughal summer palace and muttered a curse.
Evening had fallen. The thick clouds overhead were tinted a rich purple. Light from the windows spilled across the crushed gravel of the drive as a gust of rain-scented wind sent flower petals dancing over the stones.
With a crunch of footsteps, Constance joined him.
Her gold dinner dress was gone, replaced by a pair of white trousers and a tunic belted at the waist by a red sash.
A white turban hid the thick waves of her hair.
She had stolen her new ensemble off the laundry line by the club facilities building, forcing Neil to watch the path as she shucked out of her gown and corset.
His ears still rang with the sound of rustling cloth.
Neil gave Constance’s disguise a careful study. The loose clothes concealed the feminine shape of her body, but he wasn’t sure how anyone could look at her face and not know that she was a woman.
But then, how likely was anyone to look at her face? She was playing the part of a servant, a category of people who were invisible in a place like this.
He prayed that she could stay invisible.
A figure lurked at the bottom of the stairs. The light fell across a khaki uniform and cap, marking the man as a member of Borthwick’s Indian Police detachment. The orange spark of a cigarette flared against the gloom.
“Just stick to the plan,” Constance assured him in a whisper. “It’ll be fine.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Neil muttered under his breath.
The constable straightened as they approached. “Yes?” he asked in heavily accented English, his eyes flicking over Neil’s formal British attire.
“Dr. Bartholomew Culpepper calling for Colonel Borthwick,” Neil announced.
He half expected the constable to push back about the lateness of the hour, the unscheduled visit—or the utter ridiculousness of his alias.
The man’s face revealed nothing. Instead, he called up to the door, where another policeman stepped out of the shadows. The two had a brief exchange in Odia, and the second man slipped into the building.
Neil waited with the first constable, the silence growing painfully awkward. Should he try to make some kind of small talk? He quickly dismissed the idea and tried not to look too closely at the rifle slung over the man’s shoulder.
The second constable returned. “The colonel will see you. Your boy?”
It took Neil a moment to realize that he was talking about Constance. He tried not to panic at the idea of either policeman undertaking a more detailed inspection of his supposed servant.
“He stays with me,” Neil quickly demanded in what he hoped sounded reasonably authoritative.
The constable by the door accepted this with a shrug. “This way, sahib.”
Neil stepped into a high-ceilinged hall. To his left, ornate arches framed rooms furnished with French settees and teak side tables. Only the richly patterned tiles and the distinct curves of the stonework spoke to the building’s Mughal past.
A grand staircase rose to Neil’s right, carpeted by a dull runner held down with brass studs.
His guide led them through the hall to a door that opened into a garden. The enclosed space was abundant with the scent of jasmine. A sprawling jacaranda tree, a month past bloom, cast deeper shadows over a patch of ferns.
Beyond the wall, violet light flickered across the distant edge of the clouds.
The man from the festival sat at a small wrought iron table. Borthwick was still in uniform, even as he sipped on a crystal glass of scotch.
“Culpepper, was it? Can’t say I know the name.” He pinned Neil with a cold gray stare. “Or you.”
“We haven’t met,” Neil admitted. “I was a professor at Durham for a number of years before leaving to pursue independently funded research projects.”
He clung to the story, which he’d quickly concocted on their way there.
Constance had wanted him to pretend to be an Oxford don who had fallen into disgrace after running off with the dean’s daughter.
Are we trying to bluff Borthwick or write a sensational novel? Neil had pressed back.
“And how may I help you, Dr. Culpepper?” Borthwick’s tone mingled the same curiosity and irritation Neil would have been feeling at an unexpected and unsociably late call.
Nothing about it signaled that the man in front of him was a threat. Neil felt a creeping sense of danger regardless. “Actually, I was sent here to help you.”
“By whom?”
Neil swallowed against a dry throat. God, he was terrible at this.
“Lord Aldbury. He thought I might be able to shed some light on that little historical puzzle you’re working on.”
Padma had said that Borthwick was an associate of Aldbury’s but had been short on the details of their relationship. Neil hoped he was making a reasonable leap of deduction—and not stumbling over a cliff.
The garden was shadowed with gloom. Neil found it hard to read the nuances of Borthwick’s expression as the colonel absorbed his story.
Did Neil need to brazen this out—or grab Constance and throw them both over the garden wall before someone got off a shot?
He thought of what Constance had said while he waited for her by the laundry line.
We know far more than we ought to about who they are and what they’re doing here. We can use that.
“It’s a late hour for a call,” Borthwick noted neutrally.
“Aldbury made it out to be rather urgent,” Neil replied. “I came directly from the train—just stopped at the club for dinner. I can’t think straight when I’m hungry.”
He was nattering on like an idiot. He needed to get out of here. He had done what they had come here for. Borthwick was in the building. Wasn’t that all they needed to know?
Constance’s words floated back to him.
I am not walking out of this awful place with nothing.
A low roll of thunder sounded in the distance. The wind set a few small dry leaves dancing around Neil’s polished shoes.
“I could take a look at it now, if you like,” Neil offered.
His heart pounded in the wake of his own words. This was insane.
Borthwick silently studied him. Neil couldn’t even begin to read what was going on in the man’s mind.
“Why not?” the colonel abruptly concluded.
Without further ceremony, he rose and strode into the house.
“Follow him!” Constance hissed.
Hell, Neil thought inwardly, fighting the urge to panic.
He forced his feet to move, hurrying back into the ornate Mughal hall after the spymaster.
“Have you been in India long, Dr. Culpepper?” Borthwick asked without looking back at him.
“Just a day or so.” Neil swallowed thickly, studying Borthwick from behind. The man had a whip hanging from his belt. The coil of dark, braided leather was held in place by a brass snap.
Neil didn’t know much about military equipment, but it seemed like a very odd accessory for a secret policeman.
It was even odder that the man would have been wearing it while sipping scotch on his patio.
“Where were you before?” Borthwick casually demanded.
“Egypt.”
Borthwick stopped.
Neil froze, conscious of Constance’s presence at his back. The hall was lit by only a single lamp, but it glared like a spotlight after the gloom of the garden.
“Egypt,” Borthwick echoed thoughtfully. “Interesting. What were you doing there?”
Neil reached for a response that was as close to the truth as he could get without stumbling into something Borthwick might actually have heard about. “Excavating an Old Kingdom funerary chapel in the Giza necropolis.”
Borthwick absorbed Neil’s answer. Nothing in his expression gave any clue as to what he thought about it.
The colonel turned away to climb the stairs. “What brought you to India, then? Presumably, it wasn’t Lord Aldbury. You would hardly have had time to get here from Egypt on his word.”
Neil had half anticipated the question and quickly rattled off his story.
“I’m researching a paper on Gupta-era architecture.
I’ve a theory that the Persians actually brought Late Period Egyptian influences with them when the Achaemenid Empire invaded, which carried over into later municipal building styles. ”
“Hmm,” Borthwick commented neutrally.
Was he bored? Neil hoped the man was bored. Bored was much safer than interested.
They reached the top of the stairs, Neil’s nerves jangling with his sense of how far they had come into the palace—and how far they were to an escape should they need one.
His attention dropped once more to the whip at Borthwick’s belt.
“That’s not standard issue, is it?” he blurted out.
Borthwick’s eyes glittered with a spark of amusement. “No. Surprisingly useful piece of equipment, though.”
Useful. Neil wondered what that meant—and felt even more deeply uncomfortable.
Borthwick led him into one of the rooms that faced the drive. The space was set up as a library. A heavy oak desk in the center held a stack of blank paper and little else.
One wall was lined with bookshelves, though Neil could tell that the volumes were merely decorative. A few landscape paintings hung on the walls, just as dull as the ones in the clubhouse.
A plinth by the window held a marble statue of a robust Englishman in Georgian dress and a wig. Neil could just make out the name on a plaque beneath it.
CLIVE
Borthwick swung back one of the paintings to reveal a safe set into the wall. He twisted the dial for the lock, and the door popped open.
The colonel took a carved wooden box from inside and set it down on the desk without any ceremony. “There you are.”
Without waiting for Neil to respond, he moved to the window to study the incoming storm. The opening reached from just above the floor to nearly the height of the ceiling, some twelve feet overhead. The narrow glass had been swung aside to admit the evening breeze.
Neil risked a quick glance at Constance. She had positioned herself in the corner of the room and answered his look with a glare. He could readily interpret the meaning of it.
What are you standing around for?
He moved to the desk.