Once in the hall, I paused, and yes—a muted glow from the drawing room combined with the muted thrum of male voices told me to hurry, or all would be for nothing. The lights were out, a single pretty bell-shaped lamp of fractured rose glass remaining; by daylight, it was one of my favourite sources of illumination, for it made the drear midwinter light blush charmingly. Now, in the surrounding darkness, all seemed feverish and bruised.
“—thrash the dog from here back to Calcutta, and then good riddance, says I,” growled Mr. Thornfield.
My entire frame snapped to alertness.
This was not Mr. Thornfield’s usual baritone—it was a voice meant to carry across dunes and canyons, bereft of pretension, barely even English though he possessed no foreign accent. This was who Charles Thornfield actually was, or at least had been, when living under vast Eastern skies.
“For heaven’s sake, Charles.” Mr. Singh sighed. “You always say that first, and it has never been helpful. Not a single time.”
I limped close enough to the slightly open door to hear them clearly.
“I haven’t another solution,” Mr. Thornfield insisted. “Sardar, I need hardly tell you the man is a menace in the extremest degree—and who knows what burchas* he has in his employ.”
“Which is why I cannot comprehend why you indulged in his request to see Sahjara.”
The voice was so stern that my scalp prickled.
“I was wrong to try it,” Mr. Thornfield answered instantly. “Pray don’t be angry, I’ve already taken myself to task. But what if meeting Sack again had . . . jostled something loose in what seems to be a fixed state?” A wistful pitch of yearning had crept into Mr. Thornfield’s voice and I pictured him as I knew he must look, muscled shoulders taut and dark brows threatening his stately nose. “What if seeing him had made a difference?”
“Charles, Sahjara is not an experiment!” Mr. Singh hissed. Then he sighed once more, and I heard liquor being poured, and I craned my neck further. “That was uncalled-for and yet I delivered it, rather an unforgivable sin in a khansamah,* wouldn’t you say? Accept my apologies. Tell me your object in letting Sahjara within five miles of Sack, then.”
“We will never be safe until a permanent solution is found!” Mr. Thornfield rasped. “When he arrived, shocked as I was, I imagined that if she saw his face again, his own plan might snake round and bite him in the arse. That she might—”
“Ah,” Mr. Singh said sadly. “You thought Sahjara might recall everything, maybe even the trunk. Which would allow us to—”
“Grant the vermin king Sack’s wishes like simpering djinn—”
“And send him on his way, and then we could live as we please.”
“Not that the exquisite scoundrel wouldn’t have been practically invited to rob us blind in that case, which would chafe me terribly.”
“Yes, Charles, we kept horses and hounds once, but now . . .” Mr. Singh trailed off, exasperated.
“It’s not about the money!” A pause occurred, and Mr. Thornfield’s voice was calmer thereafter. “No, no, this blasted huge draughty English house is . . .” I bristled. “This house is wild and weird and cold, bloody cold and wonderful. Sahjara loves it, and I am finding it ever more charming that my bollocks clack against my teeth when I piss.”
“Are you? My bollocks have not yet quite got accustomed to making the leap past my kidneys.”
“But now Highgate House is ours, you understand that Sack will never stop,” Mr. Thornfield ended in a much lower tone. “I told him I inherited it, but he must not have believed me. He must have thought we still have the trunk, that I bought the estate. What else could explain it?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Singh confessed. “The fact of his being here was, I agree, the greatest mystery of all.”
Briefly, I heard only the crackling of the fire; when Mr. Thornfield spoke next, it was almost too deep and too soft to catch.
“Sardar, if I have arrived at the point where I think experimenting with Sahjara’s brains is reasonable, then perhaps it’s best if—”
“No,” Mr. Singh said calmly.
“No?” Mr. Thornfield’s voice grew ever more serrated. “You don’t even—”
“No, you are not embarking upon a crazed quest to murder Augustus Sack, who has assured us that the entire scandal will come out via any one of a dozen solicitors if we so much as touch him. Neither are you murdering a dozen solicitors.”