Not Quite a Husband (21 page)

“Oh God, Leo, I’m sorry,” she blurted. “I’m so sorry!”

“It’s all right, Bryony.”

It was not all right. Things were going dreadfully wrong. “I really,
really
am sorry.”

He reached up and cupped her face. “Listen, nothing has happened to us. And nothing might yet.”

Or everything could happen to them. He was so beautiful, his eyes the color of tide pools, she could not bear to think, God, to think that—

“I love you,” she said hopelessly. “I love you. I love you. I—”

He took her by the collar and yanked her toward him until their noses almost touched. For a lightning-bright moment, she thought he would kiss her. But he only said, very clearly and firmly, “Shut up, Bryony.”

She blinked in confusion and shock.

“We are not dying—not yet, in any case. So save your farewells for when we actually are. Now pull yourself together.”

She stared at him a second longer—she would not have believed it of herself, but it would seem he’d just snapped her out of a case of mild hysterics. “Right,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Right.”

She ate the biscuit while he loaded her derringer and stuffed it into her pocket. She managed to not moan again in panic as he emptied a case of spare cartridges into her other pocket. And she listened to him with actual attention as he said, “The next time there are men blocking the road, it doesn’t matter which side of the road I veer toward, ride to my outside. Understand?”

She nodded.

“Good. Let’s go.”

The road climbed before it descended again. Bryony’s arms hurt from holding the reins since dawn. Her seat and thighs ached in acute, unhappy ways. But the discomforts she forgot in an instant each time she caught sight of white-clad men. Fortunately, they usually traveled in threes and fives rather than groups of fifty or a hundred. The one sizable group they passed stood to the side of the road, talking animatedly among themselves.

Their road took them in a steady east-southeast direction. At twilight, they entered a wider valley
with a river flowing through its center, and the road, wending between fields of rice and maize, turned due south. Where this particular tributary met the Swat River stood the fort at Chakdarra. It was not too far now.

Ahead, in the thickening gray-blue dusk, a turbaned man appeared, riding across the valley. His path would intersect theirs in minutes. Leo drew his revolver. Bryony swallowed and drew the pistol from her pocket also.

But as they closed the distance, she realized that not only was the man not dressed in white, he was in uniform—a sowar, a cavalry soldier of Indian descent serving under British authority.

Leo had already put away his revolver and hailed the sowar. They all reined to a halt.

“Are you from the garrison at Malakand?” Leo asked.

“The fort at Chakdarra,
sahib
. Eleventh Bengal Lancers,” said the sowar. His English was spoken at the speed of Italian and singsongy, but perfectly comprehensible. He pointed west. “I was sketching at the foot of the hills.”

Since Bryony didn’t think his commanding officer would provide him a mount and an afternoon off for his personal enjoyment, she assumed by sketching he meant some sort of land survey.

“I was starting back for the fort when I was set upon,” continued the sowar. “There were men, at least a hundred of them. They took my compass, my field glass, and one rupee and six annas from me. I must return to the fort immediately to warn everyone.”

Bryony looked anxiously toward the direction the sowar had pointed. But she could not see anything except the air and the slopes fading together into a smudged indigo. At the top of the hills, a lone pine thrust into an unseen sky, lit by the last scattered rays of a distant sunset.

The sowar galloped away on his fresher, faster horse. The first stars were already out in the eastern sky, tiny and isolated, as if they were lonely outposts in a galactic wilderness.

“Scared?” Leo asked.

“Witless.”

He handed her his silver flask. She took a large gulp, almost finishing what remained of Mr. Braeburn’s special whiskey.

When she gave the flask back to him, he took hold of her hand. They both wore riding gloves, yet she felt his warmth solidly.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

His features were shadowed by the coming of night, beginning to become indistinct. But his eyes
were clear and lucent—and calm, when she was all cold sweat and dread.

“Yes,” she said.

He smiled, a smile that went straight to her heart. “Then trust me when I say we will be all right.”

It was strange to lay his hand on the waist of a fully dressed woman and feel, instead of ruffles and bows, the pocket of his coat, with the button just slightly loose on the flap. But this adoption of masculine attire was only a surface affair. Beneath his jacket and his shirt, she still wore her corset, a smooth, hard impediment against the pressure of his hand. He was certain that if it had been at all possible, she’d have worn her petticoats too beneath the trousers.

Ten minutes after their encounter with the sowar, Leo’s horse had thrown a shoe, and they were forced to share Bryony’s horse, a sturdy, cheerful mare which did not seem to mind too much the additional weight. But their speed, already less than impressive—this particular mountain breed was more durable than swift—suffered even further.

They did not speak. The sliver moon and the stars were mere decorations in the firmament, their light too diffuse to be of any use at all. In the near complete darkness, she needed all her attention on the road.

The night smelled of cool water, ripening orchards, and more faintly, turned manure. And there sitting behind her, not doing much except keeping his eyes and ears open and holding on, Leo was strangely optimistic.

He could attribute his optimism to the reassuring ordinariness of the manure, surely the very odor of rustic peace. He could further attribute it to the distance they’d already covered; by his calculation, they’d sight Chakdarra any minute now. But he suspected that in truth, his sanguinity had more to do with the back-to-chest closeness between Bryony and himself than anything else.

The warmth of her body, the expansion and contraction of her diaphragm with her breaths, which he felt only barely through the constriction of her corset, the lithe tension in her torso as she moved as one with the horse—it was easy, or at least easier, to believe that they would be all right in the end, when he held her so.

“Look ahead!” Leo whispered.

Bryony did and just barely made out the horizontal glimmer in the distance. “Is that the Swat River?!”

“I think so.”

A huge weight lifted from her chest.
Yes
.

“Thank goodness! I hope they don’t mind putting us up for th—”

“Shh.”

Something in his voice throttled her incipient euphoria. “What is it?”

“Stop.”

She reined in the horses and listened, not sure what she was supposed to hear above the sound of the tributary hurrying toward the Swat.

“Do you hear that?”

She didn’t. Then she suddenly did. People on the move. A very large number of people on the move, coming down the slopes to either side of the river.

“Run for it.”

She dug her knees into the mare’s flank. She’d slowed nearly to a walk because she could hardly see. But now she must gallop. She stared fiercely ahead, determined to distinguish the road from the nearly uniform darkness of the ground.

“Faster!” he hissed in her ear.

She saw the cause of his urgency. A particular spur of the human tide coming down the hills had almost reached the road—all clad in white, silent, swift, and purposeful.

The pony seemed to sense her fright. Or perhaps the road had assumed a greater downward grade. It ran more swiftly despite its weariness and heavy load.

They dashed past the vanguard of the rebellion—for certain it was going to be an uprising now—with only a few yards to spare. The air hissed. Bryony shrank instinctively down in the saddle. A rock sailed over her head. Another fell short and thudded against the road behind them. Yet another hit something. The other pony, which they kept on a lead, neighed in pain—it had been struck on the flank, but it too kept running.

She had a vague impression that the hills on either side of the valley were receding: The valley was widening.

“Are we getting close?”

“Closer,” was all the answer Leo gave.

The thundering hoof falls of the horses rendered her deaf to the rest of the world. But she imagined she heard things, a crowd closing in on them, so dense that thousands of sleeves brushed against one another in a persistent shushing.

She became aware of the Swat River again, wide and black. They were nearly at the confluence of the two rivers. But where was the fort?

“There!”

There, further to the right, she could just make out the fort’s outline, atop a knoll that rose over the edge of the river. It was rather smaller than she’d
hoped for, but a fort nevertheless by its shape and height.

“How do we approach?”

“I have no idea. It’s connected to the bridge, so there has to be a southern entrance.”

That would require her to ride around the edge of the knoll until she found the bridge. She did not think. She gave over her fate to the stalwartness of the mare and to the accuracy of Leo’s direction. More to the right. Straight. Watch out for a slight curve to the south.

The knoll loomed just ahead. Safety was within reach.

Then Leo said something she’d only ever heard men utter in extreme pain. Men sprinted at them, those in the very front actually fleet enough to intersect them. And were those swords glinting in the starlight? Her heart froze.

“Give me the stirrups and pay no attention.”

She vacated the stirrups and pushed away all thoughts of impending doom—of half-successful decapitation, fully successful evisceration, and the two quarts of blood loss she could sustain before she was no good to anyone anymore. She only rode, murmuring meaningless syllables to soothe and encourage the brave filly who’d faithfully carried
two strangers who had yet to feed her an apple or a sugar cube.

Leo asked for the lead rope of the horse and gave it a hard thwack on the hindquarter. It neighed and shot forward—he was using it to disperse the crowd ahead of them. She followed closely in its wake, praying for the best.

Behind her Leo’s weight shifted: He’d stood up on the stirrups. Her jacket pulled up abruptly at the right shoulder—he used her for a ballast. She ignored everything and focused only on the road.

There was the clang of metal right by her ear: the barrel of his rifle clashing against a sword. And then it was the butt of the rifle on the side of someone’s head—she knew a concussion when she heard one. The rifle swung—with an acute swoosh—this time it sounded like a clavicle giving away.

His grip on her jacket pulled the collar into a choke hold around her throat. She could barely breathe even with her lips parted wide, panting for all she was worth. Were those stars she was seeing at the edge of her vision? No, she must not do anything so useless as submitting to the vapors. She would not permit it. She would never forgive herself.