servants inhabited another wing. Apart from Sahjara three doors down from my bedroom, whom I prayed would not come downstairs, I was alone.
“D’ye always keep such midnight hours?” he purred, revealing yellowed teeth.
“Get away from here! I’ll call the master of the house.”
He slanted a canny look at me. “And why haven’t ye already? I suspect he ain’t here to come when ye do shout.”
Morbidity is not the same as stupidity, so I wheeled and made for the kitchen, intending to shriek my face off for whichever Singh or Kaur could hear me; but I found my throat caught in a vise, hashish-laden breath creeping across my cheekbones.
“I meant t’ question the half-bred lass, but ye might be a sight better,” the rotting relic of foreign wars spoke in my ear. “Tell me now where the trunk is and ye can sleep sound and safe.”
“They don’t have it!” I choked. “Let me go!”
How long we wrestled in that entryway I cannot recall, though I know I landed a number of ineffective blows. I was once more a being of edges and angles, fighting viciously to preserve not only the little girl upstairs I hoped was not roused by our clamour but the woman downstairs, making it.
“That’s the most whoreson lie I’ve heard since leaving Delhi,” his fat lips spoke against my ear.
Howling now, though to no one in particular, I fought to free my hands; he had caught both under one burly sweat-smelling arm.
If I could get to my knife.
I can get to my knife.
I will get to my knife.
Laughing in cruel wheezes like the rasp of a hacksaw, he shoved me facedown over the arm of the sofa in the drawing room after he had dragged me there, filling my nose with sweat and leather and lust, and I knew what happened next, had already faced the prospect. His bones bruised my wrists where they were pinioned, his other hand clumsily jostling at my skirts as he raised them.
“D’ye squeal like cows hereabouts, or just eat ’em?” he asked, rancid teeth brushing my neck.
I heard the approach of measured footsteps on the drive, and the front door opening.
Reader: I screamed, and if I could have screamed loud enough, I would have pierced him clean through.
“Damn ye straight t’ hell,” he growled.
A scorching pain blazed through my head as my assailant seized me by the follicles and led me into the shadows of the large chamber; the noises from the hall ceased.
“I’ll see the whole lot o’ ye vipers in hell,” my captor hissed.
He pressed pocket-warm metal against my gullet, and I had no choice save to follow as he dragged me by the scalp. When Mr. Thornfield and Mr. Singh burst into the room, I yet supposed the weapon a dull knife, but after the brute brandished the thing, I saw that it was a pistol in his hand.
Upon glimpsing my assailant, both men’s faces distorted as if a sword had met their bellies.
“How is it possible you’re yet alive?” Mr. Thornfield cried, unsheathing the blade he carried.
“Oh, aye, always so shocked when the rent comes due,” crooned the man holding me hostage. “Give me the small one who knows where the bounty is buried—or else the trunk, better still—and we’ll argue nae further.”
“We don’t have it,” Mr. Singh protested urgently. “And Miss Stone knows nothing of your monstrous intrigues. Let her loose or—”
“Or what?”
“They aren’t lying to you,” I croaked, still feeling the phantom clench of a fist round my throat.
“It’s nae in the Punjab.” He rubbed against my cheek, boar’s bristles abrading me. “It’s nae in jolly old London town. And ye claim it’s nae here, but mayhaps a bullet will jog someone’s faculties.”
“No!” Mr. Thornfield cried.
“Oh, d’ye prefer this aimed at you, then?”
The scorching grip against my hair blazed into a bonfire even as the badmash removed his gun from my neck and swung it in the direction of Charles Thornfield.
Mr. Singh, whose movements were generally so calculated you could have set your watch by them, lifted a futile palm in horrified protest; the master of the house looked endearingly relieved, as if having a pistol aimed at his forehead was preferable to its being aimed at mine. My immediate circumstances branded themselves upon my memory—the setting half-moon, the distant scuffles as the servants were roused, the fact Mr. Thornfield was gazing into my eyes rather than the barrel of the weapon now levelled at him. The sheer horror of the scene nearly finished me.