Chapter 17 #2
“Yes, yes,” Vijay agreed dismissively. “Can’t have them all done in for ivory or used to haul artillery through the jungle. Your guide wouldn’t stand for that, now would she?” He gave Vanika’s hair an affectionate ruffle. “Vanika’s father is my mahout—the elephant handler.”
Neil stared down at the skinny child. “Guide?”
Vanika crossed her arms imperiously. “I should like to see you try to reach Ranyapali on your own. Nobody finds the Adrija Khond if we do not want them to.”
Adam watched the girl with an air of warm amusement, his arm slung around the chestnut mare. “You’re Adrija?”
Kalb greeted the girl by jumping up to cover her face with kisses. She hugged the dog back. “Of course, I am,” she retorted.
“She’s part of the Kōnja clan,” Vijay elaborated. “Her grandfather was the abbaya—the local leader.”
“Is that why you’re attending school with the princes?” Ellie asked.
Vijay laughed. “She wasn’t supposed to be—but she kept sneaking in, and she proved better with her mathematics and her Sanskrit than any of the boys. So I told her to stay.”
Neil regarded the lanky girl with a twist of worry. “But will it be safe?”
Vanika frowned at him. “Safe for me to go back to my own village?”
He thought of Borthwick’s cold gray eyes measuring him from across the room and how readily the whip had fallen into the man’s hand—and why a whip at all?
Because it would hurt more, Neil realized with a chill.
“She won’t be going beyond the village,” Mr. Chowdhury declared.
Vanika peeled herself away from Kalb, who dropped to her feet and gazed up at her with unbridled adoration. She glared mutinously at the solicitor.
Vijay came to Mr. Chowdhury’s side. “Agreed. You’re to bring Connie and the others to your grandmother’s house and no further. Is that clear?”
“Fiiiiine,” Vanika promised with eloquent resignation.
“But I’m forgetting myself!” Vijay exclaimed with a clap of his hands. “It seems I owe two of you a hearty congratulations!”
With a guilty lurch in his guts, Neil realized the maharaja was referring to his fake engagement.
The guilt evaporated into an even less comfortable sensation as Constance hooked a hand through Neil’s arm and plastered herself to his side.
He could feel the curve of her hip brushing against his leg.
Don’t think of trousers, he pleaded with himself desperately.
“That’s very kind of you, Uncle Vijay,” Constance asserted, treating her royal relative to a blinding smile.
“Kind!?” Vijay exclaimed. “Let me tell you how cross I was at learning that the two of you had kept such a delicious secret from me! I might just forgive you for it—if you’d promise to bring our Connie back to India to visit us every few years.”
Neil felt an unexpected burst of indignation. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Constance’s eyebrow cocked with surprise.
“It’s a long trip,” Vijay challenged.
“This is Connie’s other home,” Neil retorted. “It doesn’t matter how far it is.”
Vijay’s eyes twinkled as he addressed Mr. Chowdhury. “I told you I liked him.”
Neil went over a bit dizzy.
“Are we going, then?” Vanika cut in impatiently. “Or are we planning to stand around chatting in the drive all day?”
?
Neil rode over wide green meadows dotted with wildflowers. The clear morning light had given way to high gray clouds pierced here and there by golden rays. He was grateful for the cover overhead, as it somewhat softened the thick heat of the afternoon.
Sweat beaded on his skin. He had stripped to his shirt and waistcoat but kept the scabbard. The weight across his back was starting to feel familiar.
There was no road, only a dry track of packed earth that wended between shivering grasslands and sprawling, ancient trees. Their twelve-year-old guide navigated the trails with ease despite a complete lack of signs or other markers of direction.
They passed clusters of tall mango trees. Trumpetbushes burst with yellow next to small farmhouses. Cows grazed in unfenced fields accompanied by wandering chickens.
Adam and Ellie rode ahead, alongside Vanika.
It had taken Adam some coaxing to get Ellie into the saddle.
Neither she nor Neil had ever had much cause to ride when they had lived at home.
Neil had made up for it since, especially once he had gone to Egypt, and was now fairly comfortable with the whole process—unlike Ellie, who had looked at the horse as though she suspected it might bite her.
“I don’t see what’s wrong with walking,” Ellie had grumbled.
When Kalb wasn’t sprinting after some small animal, he trotted happily alongside while Adam and Vanika kept up a running line of easy chatter. The girl was clearly taken with Neil’s friend, her head stuffed with stories about dashing American gunslingers.
Neil rode several paces behind them… with his fake fiancée.
Not that Constance would be engaged to him for long. Their mad arrangement would most likely be over in a month or so.
Wouldn’t it?
He tried to imagine pretending to be marrying Constance for more than a month. A trickle of sweat ran down his back.
They passed a tumbled pile of ruined houses set under the leaning branches of an almond tree. The thatch on the roofs had mostly rotted away.
“There seem to be a lot of empty villages around here,” Neil noted.
“I think those are from the famine,” Constance replied with uncharacteristic solemnity.
“What famine?”
She watched the path as it twisted across the landscape under the looming clouds. “It was thirty years ago. A third of the people died.”
“Here?” Neil studied the landscape around them, which did seem to be very sparsely populated.
Constance’s eyes were sad. “In Odisha.”
“A third of Odisha? But that must have been…”
“Over a million people,” Constance filled in.
Neil reeled as he tried to absorb the sheer scale of what she described.
He thought of other empty buildings that he had seen as they had traveled from Puri to Nandapur.
He hadn’t paid them much mind at the time, but now those collapsing walls and broken fences took on a terrible significance. “But… how?”
“There was a drought. The authorities didn’t have enough reserves to feed everyone.”
Her words caught in Neil’s ear. He remembered a radical classmate of his at Cambridge who had railed about the impact of British policy on the horrific famine in Ireland during the middle of the century. “Didn’t have enough—or couldn’t be bothered redistributing what they had?”
Constance watched the ruined homes recede behind them. “Aai told me that my grandfather believed very firmly that the administration could have done more than they did.”
“Your grandfather was English, wasn’t he?” Neil asked.
“He was the Agent for Nandapur—that’s the chief local administrative officer, representing the Raj to the royal court. It was all very scandalous. Indian Civil Service members weren’t supposed to marry natives—even royal natives. I think he nearly lost his post over it.”
“When was this?” Neil asked.
“Just after the mutiny. I still don’t know exactly how it came to happen—if Aai pursued my grandfather because she thought an alliance with an Englishman would protect the family or because she wanted to escape from some other match that her father had arranged for her.
Or maybe she just fell for him. One can’t always account for love. ”
Neil gazed at Constance’s elegant profile. “I suppose not.”
“After the famine, my grandfather told Aai that he couldn’t do it anymore—serve as Agent and see all this suffering but not really be able to change anything about it.
He asked her if she would go back to England with him.
She agreed. She thought there would be more opportunities for my mother and her sisters there. ”
“Your mother has sisters?”
Constance shot him a wry look. “She has three of them.”
“And they all live in England?”
“Well, all except Auntie Hannah. She moved to Canada.”
“I didn’t realize you had aunts.” Neil felt a touch ashamed at the admission.
“I would hardly have expected you to investigate my family tree while I was painting glue onto the seat of your chair,” Constance cheerfully replied.
“I had forgotten about that one,” Neil grumbled.
Constance’s eyes sparkled wickedly. “How could you forget that one? You had to crawl out of your own trousers to escape.”
Neil ran a hand over his face. “Yes, well. I suppose it just got lost in between all the other ways you attempted to torment me.”
He wondered how much else he had overlooked about Constance during those early years.
He might have grown up with her, but he’d hardly been quizzing her about her hopes and dreams between rescuing his scorched term papers and shaking moles out of his boots.
In the brief few weeks since they had become reacquainted, he was constantly stumbling across new discoveries, all of them adding to his respect and admiration for the woman who rode beside him—astride, in her damnably well-fitting trousers.
Neil forced his attention from the curve of her thigh back to the road.
“A million people,” he said, unable to shake the thought from his mind.
“How could anyone let something like that happen? If a famine had threatened to take out a third of the population of Essex, I should imagine a great deal more would’ve been done about it!
Did this one not matter as much because they were Indians? ”
Constance studied the achingly green landscape, painted here and there with sunlight where it broke through the clouds.
“I doubt the English did as much for Odisha as we might have done for our own people.” She caught herself.
“Their own people? I’m not really sure which side I’m supposed to be on in all of this. ”
His chest tugged with an ache of admiration and sympathy. “I’m afraid I’m woefully unqualified to help you answer that question.”
Constance reached over to pat him consolingly on the knee as they rode. “You still have your uses.”
“Do I?” Neil wondered skeptically.
“Certainly,” Constance assured him, eyes still twinkling. “And I’ll be sure to let you know all about them—just as soon as I figure out what they are.”
Neil struggled to hide a smile. “Why do I find myself recalling that time you put pepper in my tea?”
Constance snorted.
A rumble of soft, distant thunder echoed across the fields.
“Should we find a place to stop?” Neil pressed. “It looks like it might rain.”
“It’s the monsoon,” Constance countered. “If we insist on avoiding the rain, we won’t get anywhere until October. Come on!”