Duty Before Desire (6 page)

At that, her eyes narrowed dangerously. “
Why not me?
What am I, Sheri, the old nag in the stable no one else wanted to ride to the hunt?”

“No!” He shot to his feet. “No, of course not, Elsa.” He took her hands. “Marry me. We're friends. We love one another.”

“As friends,” she clarified, pulling her hands free. “You've cracked, dearest. We'd never suit, and you know it.” Turning back to her vanity, she selected a perfume bottle and dabbed fragrance on her neck and wrists. “Now then, if we're done with that foolishness, finish telling me about your day.”

Elsa's quick refusal shouldn't have surprised him, but it did. While they'd never been lovers, there was an undeniable affection between them, and he'd thought they had a sort of unspoken understanding. Neither of them was inclined to marry, but … well …
In Case of Crisis …

Sheridan scratched his ear. “I took my supper at home. Lady Tyrrel came 'round.”

Elsa's eyes widened. “Her again? Then you enjoyed a better pudding last night than I did, you scoundrel, even though I dined at a duke's table.”

Sheri had gone out to Sybil's carriage to prevent her from making another public spectacle. She'd thrown herself at him, declaring once more that she wanted to leave Tyrrel and elope with Sheri. He shuddered at the memory. “Hardly.”

Elsa rose and crossed to the closet that housed her vast collection of gowns. “You've ruined the woman for her own husband,” her voice floated out. “What else?”

“Wear something cheerful today, won't you?” Sheri returned. “The amber brocade, perhaps. Brighten up a gloomy day.”

“Sheridan!” Elsa's head popped out the closet door. “Are you going to ignore the subject of the poor girl?”

“What poor girl?”

A slipper sailed out of the closet and struck him in the chest.

“
Oof
. Good shot.”

“You beast!” Elsa called. “No wonder Miss Parks fainted dead away at the sight of you.”

Sheri lobbed the shoe back, smacking the door just over Elsa's head. She shrieked and ducked for cover.

He shifted lower into the chair and crossed his arms over his chest, trying to keep at bay the memory of Arcadia Parks's loss of consciousness and his reaction to it. Cradling her in the protection of his arms, he'd almost felt like the stupid gallant Deborah wanted to turn him into. For his pains, he'd been scorned and rebuffed.

“It wasn't quite like that,” he returned, keeping to himself the part about Miss Parks emptying her stomach before falling into the mess.

“You didn't even catch the poor girl, I heard,” Elsa continued, returning with the amber frock over her arm.

“How can you possibly know that?” he asked, bewildered. “Norman and her maid were the only ones there.”

“I have my ways,” she said in a mysterious tone.

“And stop calling her a
poor girl
,” Sheridan snapped. “She's related to the Delafields; I doubt she's impoverished.”

“Poor girl,” Elsa quipped.

He hadn't caught the poor girl, though, had he? Nor had he cut a heroic figure when he'd fussed over her like an anxious nursemaid. The whole episode had been quite an embarrassment for him.

“Elsa,” he groaned, “you're the only woman who knows me and loves me, anyway.”

After hanging the selected dress on a hook in the wall beside the vanity, she joined him in his chair, nudging him over with her hip. Sheri obligingly wrapped his arm around her shoulders while she nestled against his chest.

“I do love you, you know,” she said. “Behind the ridiculous quizzing glass, beyond the womanizing rake, I know there's a good man in there.”

“You're the only person who thinks so. I could marry you for that. In fact, I think I shall.”

She started to draw away, shaking her head. “Sheri …”

“Think about it,” he protested. “We're precisely the same. Our sense of humor, our zest for carnality, our—”

“We're
not
the same.” Now there was real hurt in her eyes. “I've already done my duty at the altar, something you've blithely avoided all these years.” Her brow furrowed, and the faint lines around her eyes deepened.

Sheri knew her marriage to Lord Fay hadn't been a love match, but she looked downright haunted. What hadn't she told him?

“I have no reason to marry ever again,” she continued with heat, “and I won't—not unless I choose it. You think you know everything about me, Sheridan, but you don't. I would never break the vows of my marriage, and I wouldn't tolerate a husband who does, either. Not again. I'd rather die alone and have my corpse eaten by the dozen cats I'll surely own by that time than endure another miserable union. It's love or nothing for me.”

He blinked in surprise. He'd never heard his friend speak like this. Cautiously, he reached a hand out and took her forearm in a gentle grip. “Was there someone, Elsa? Is there?”

She smiled sadly and shook her head. “But maybe there will be, someday. I deserve to be loved, don't I? And so do you, Sheri. I want that for you. Let's not waste ourselves on one another.” Then she turned her back on him and drained her cup. He watched her twitch as though a shiver passed down her spine.

The dressing room door opened then, and Foster returned with a heavy mug, which she plonked down on a side table beside Sheridan without a word.

Elsa blinked and surreptitiously wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “You should go call upon Miss Parks,” she said as she lowered herself to her vanity stool so that her maid could resume her interrupted hair dressing. “Make sure she's recovered from the shock of meeting you.”

Sheridan wanted to stay, to say something more, something comforting perhaps, but he knew when he was being dismissed. “Perhaps I shall. It would be just my luck, though, to take one look at the poor girl and cause her to expire for good.”

“Jalanili, open your lazy eyes. It's a sunny day, even if the air is as cold as a goat's devil heart. You should get out of bed today.”

With a groan, Arcadia turned and covered her head with the pillow, stoutly refusing to acknowledge her ayah's wheedling.

“That Lord Sheridan sent flowers for you. They are cowslip, according to Lady Delafield. She says they convey wishes of good health. Don't you wish to see?”

It had been a week since the park, seven days since Arcadia had humiliated herself in front of Lord Sheridan, as she'd learned her rescuer was called—and all those important English people.

One hundred sixty-eight hours since she'd been threatened with a knife and robbed of the only possession she cared about. The attack hadn't lasted longer than a minute, but it had caused endless distress. When she closed her eyes, once more she felt the blade parting the threads of her clothes. Once more she knew fear.

No, she did not wish to see flowers from the Englishman at the center of that dreadful memory.

She curled in a ball on her side, her arms wrapped around her head. “Leave me alone,” she moaned. “I think my fever has returned.”

A hand snaked under the blanket and pinched her calf.

“Ow!” Arcadia's eyes flew open. Poorvaja stood at the bedside, hands planted on hips and a look on her face that declared she would not be played the fool. Her long braid swept forward over her shoulder, coming almost to her waist. One cocoa-brown finger tapped impatiently against the pleats of her aubergine sari.

“You've had no fever for two days,” the Indian woman declared, “and your stomach has not troubled you since you awoke yesterday. It's time to be up and moving about again, unless you plan to make an invalid of yourself, like some soft English lady would do.” She raised an imperious brow over a black-brown eye. “Is that your scheme? Now that we are in your England, do you intend to be waited on hand and foot, and carried about in a paladin chair?”

“No, it's just …” Arcadia started. “It's just not home.”

“And perhaps it never will be,” Poorvaja said bluntly. “But still you must get out of bed and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

There was a knock. The folds of Poorvaja's sari swished around her bare ankles as she crossed thick rugs to the door. Lady Delafield hovered beneath the doorjamb and peered at Arcadia.

“How are you this morning, niece? Better?”

“Burning with fever,” Poorvaja supplied.

Lady Delafield turned her head sharply. “What? But yesterday you said she was improving!”

“Some Indian sicknesses are like this.” Poorvaja gestured expansively at the bed. Arcadia went limp and did her best to look fevered. “They can go away and come back again for months—years, even. I think it must be dengue fever.”

Lady Delafield paled and rapidly backed out of the door. “Perhaps I should send for the physician again,” she called from a safe distance.

“No use,” Poorvaja said, shooing the lady of the house away. “Your English doctors can do nothing for the dengue. She'll probably be dead tomorrow.”

She slammed the door on her ladyship's stricken cry.

Arcadia clapped her hands over her mouth to smother a laugh. It was, she realized, the first time she'd so much as smiled since arriving on these wretched shores.

Her laughter died in her throat a moment later, when she recalled that her mother had, in fact, died of dengue fever when Arcadia was nine. Lady Lucretia Parks, like so many of the Raj before her, could not survive India.

Poorvaja seemed to realize her mistake in attributing Arcadia's phantom illness to dengue. “There now,” she said, briskly pulling back the counterpane. “I have bought you some time free of your aunt, and in a few hours, you can impress her with your miraculous recovery.”

“Thank you.” Arcadia swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I wish she'd leave us alone forever, so we could go back to India.”

Poorvaja sighed, her plum-colored lips parting to reveal white teeth. She looked out the window for a moment, then back to Arcadia. “Come, Jalanili, let us sit and breathe.”

As she'd done for the entirety of her life, Arcadia took Poorvaja's hand, and the ayah led her to the rug. Neither heeded their exposed legs as they sat cross-legged on the floor facing one another.

“Close your eyes.” Poorvaja slipped into Hindustani, a language comfortable to them both. “Turn your attention inward, Jalanili. Fill your belly, and feel your breath connect you to the earth.”

They passed some time in this fashion, with Poorvaja leading Arcadia through some meditative breathing.

When the older woman seemed to be preparing to end the practice, Arcadia said, “Shall we practice some postures?”

“Do you feel well enough?”

Arcadia nodded.

“Very well. It will be good for us to train both our minds and bodies in this new place.”

They moved through several yoga postures. After several days of inactivity, Arcadia's muscles protested the rigorous stretching, but she knew she'd feel much more herself soon. They concluded with
Śava-âsana
, the pose of the corpse. Lying on her back, Arcadia felt her limbs grow heavy against the soft rug, but it was a healthier languor than the fatigue imposed by illness.

“How do you feel?” Poorvaja asked.

“Better,” Arcadia admitted.

A small smile played around her ayah's mouth. “You see?” Poorvaja touched two fingertips to Arcadia's sternum. “You have brought India with you. Peace is as close as your breath, Jalanili, not on another continent.”

Sitting up on her heels, Arcadia tucked her night rail around her thighs. “But I was free there,” she protested. “They've taken that away from me, Poorvaja. I lost Papa, and then India, and now they're going to make me marry.”

Gracefully, the maid rose to her feet and crossed to the clothespress. “Who is this all-powerful
they
? Do not resent your aunt and uncle for carrying out your father's wishes. Instead, resent them for making you wear that awful corset.”

Arcadia chuffed a laugh at Poorvaja's attempt to ease the stinging reminder that it had been Sir Thaddeus's will that laid out the plans for his daughter's return to England after his death. Warranted or not, his wishes still felt like a betrayal. After years of encouraging his daughter to adapt to India—allowing her to thrive like an orchid, rather than forcing her to be the sad, scraggly English rose the women of the Raj insisted on planting in their gardens—he had, at the last, uprooted her from the only home she'd known and cast her across an ocean to relatives she did not know, for the purpose of marrying her off to a stranger.

Arcadia raised her arms as Poorvaja approached with clean underthings. “I don't want to marry,” she said, her voice muffled by the white chemise billowing around her head.

“A young woman should marry.”

“
You're
not married,” she pointed out.

Poorvaja shot her a dark look. “That is unkind, Arcadia.” The maid's use of her given name, rather than the pet name by which she usually called her charge, conveyed the seriousness of her disapproval.

Arcadia's ayah had been married to a well-to-do farmer when she was thirteen years old, and became a mother shortly after turning fourteen. Sadly, the baby did not live long, and just days later, the farmer was crushed by an overturned oxcart. The family of Poorvaja's husband expected the young widow to perform
sati
, self-immolation, alongside the bodies of her husband and child. When she refused, her in-laws cast her off and shipped her back to her own family. In short order, she was hired by Sir Thaddeus Parks to serve as ayah to his soon-to-be-born infant daughter.

Poorvaja spoke little of this painful, turbulent time in her past, but Arcadia had pieced together the major details from bits she'd heard over the years.