When all her things were packed, Linley still sat in the sanctuary of her tent. She dreaded leaving the quiet solitude. There, alone, she could collect her thoughts, far from the watchful eye of her father and the others. Even from Patrick.
Sometimes just the sight of him muddled her brain. He brought forth an onslaught of new and confusing emotions, and sometimes that frightened her. She never quite knew how to act around him. Slowly, she learned to flirt with him. To say things that shocked him because she sensed he liked that. Patrick liked it when she was honest with him, even when she told him things he didn’t want to hear. And she knew he liked to kiss her, although that was the latest development in their already confusing relationship.
“I’d knock, but there is no door.” Patrick’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
Linley almost jumped, fearing somehow that she’d conjured him up, or that he knew she’d been thinking about him. “What is it?”
“Your father would like to get started.”
She nodded, even though he could not see her. “All right, I’m coming.”
Linley stuffed the rest of her belongings into her pack and crawled out of the tent. Patrick waited for her on the other side. She was convinced he knew she had been thinking about him. It was written all over his face—or rather, her face—and that was the problem. She was never good at hiding secrets.
***
Rain dripped off the end of Linley’s hat, traveled down the front of her rain slicker and landed in the mud around her boots. The Talbot-Martin team walked all day in the direction Linley’s father thought would lead them to a place he vaguely remembered someone telling him about ten or fifteen years before. Now they stood at the edge of a river, unsure how to cross. It swelled over the banks from the rain, blurring the boundaries of land and water as it swept away anything in its path. Just across lay the lush green mountains they would still have to climb, and beyond that, the faintest misty gray of the Himalayas.
“How do you propose we get across?” Schoville asked, taking a step back as the river lapped the embankment where he stood.
Sir Bedford shook his head. “It’s too high to cross here. And the water is moving too fast.” He looked from one end of the river to the other, seeing only murky brown water rushing through the little tree-lined valley. “We should follow the bank until it narrows.”
“If it narrows at all,” Reginald said. “These look more like flood waters to me.”
Linley studied the river. With the monsoon beating down on them, she knew the river was flooded. And with rains sweeping across the whole of India, it would no doubt continue to flood. They either needed to turn back or find another route. “Who has the map?”
Archie stepped forward and pulled the map from under his rain slicker. He unfolded its tattered edges and held it out for her.
Linley traced the path of the water with her finger across the paper. “If we head downstream, it will take us miles out of our way…”
“Then we should head upstream,” her father said.
“I don’t know. The river looks even wider there.”
Patrick, who stood a very safe distance away from the water, finally spoke. “It doesn’t matter which way we go, this entire valley will be flooded in a day or two.”
“He’s right,” Linley said. “It isn’t safe here.”
Sir Bedford took the map from Archie’s hands and folded it up. “Then we’ll follow the river upstream.”
They walked single file alongside the river. Their feet slogged in the mud, every step dragging them down. Patrick used his long stalk of bamboo as a walking stick, jamming it into the ground and pulling himself out of the slop. Red mud caked his boots and his trousers up to his knees. The once sturdy straw Panama hat hung limply around his face, beaten into submission by the heat and the wet. He looked more like a weary Gypsy than a young marquess.
And he felt like one, too.
In front of him, Linley struggled in the muck. It was harder on her than the men. Her boots grew heavier and heavier as they bogged down with mud, tripping her up. She fell forward on her hands and knees, her feet slipping and sliding beneath her, refusing to gain traction against the slime.
Patrick swooped down to help.
He held tightly to her arm as they trudged through the mud together. He would not let her fall again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Look there!” Archie pointed into the mist that clung to the treetops.
Barely visible through the rain and the fog, a bamboo bridge spanned one side of the valley to the other. Suspended fifteen feet from the water’s surface, it bobbed in the wind, dipping down over the river below, swaying back and forth as the weathered bamboo creaked and groaned.
Sir Bedford pushed on a support rope, testing its strength. “Shall we go one by one, or cross it together?”