I awaited judgement as if being sentenced to Newgate.
Mr. Thornfield let his spoon clatter to the dish with a ring of finality. “If you think I’m intimidated by your weaponry, you’ve clearly not visited the billiards room. And there are practically stars in the Young Marvel’s eyes when she speaks of you, so . . . consider me mollified. You must feel odd being the only knife-brandishing governess outside of London?”
I tipped my glass to him, endlessly thankful he could not see my knees knocking.
“Yes, sir. You must feel odd being the master of a Sikh stronghold in the English countryside.”
“Pish—when I feel odd, it’s certainly not on that account, as I’m hardly the master of anything. You’ve ridden Nalin, you know of which I speak. I could threaten to have the whole pack of these lunatics, horse and human alike, sold for glue, and they’d all laugh in my face.”
“And how,” I ventured, my nerves calming fractionally, “did that strange circumstance come to pass?”
His severely arcing brows tensed below the pristine hair. “Frankly, I find myself a terrible topic for conversation.”
“I feel the same about myself, but I’m deeply interested in your household. How did you come to be acquainted with Mr. Singh, for instance?”
The tension in his shoulders melted. “We were practically schoolfellows, before. Shall I be shocking, Miss Stone?”
“Oh, yes, please.”
“Where on earth did she come by the cheek? London alone couldn’t have managed the feat,” Mr. Thornfield muttered. “You are aware from the advertisement I was involved in the Khalsa conflicts. You may know that I was born in Lahore?”
Silence befitted Mr. Thornfield; so I tried it out myself, blankly encouraging.
“Well, how I came to be born there prior to British annexation is brief in telling and rather broad in ripple effect generally, so I’ll out with it: my parents were complete scoundrels, Miss Stone.”
“Mr. Singh said your father was an entrepreneur?”
“So are pirates, according to the dictionary.”
I laughed until I could hardly breathe. Mr. Thornfield rumbled with amusement himself until I had calmed.
“Nathan Thornfield—that’s my father, mind you keep up—started life as a merchant in the loosest sense of the word,” Mr. Thornfield continued. “Genteel as a baronet, all polished monocles and pinches of snuff. But really, he was what romantics call an adventurer and cynics a rapscallion. Travelled like the pox—Australia, China, even America, the daft old crust. The codger ought to have been locked in a cage lined with pillows, if you take my meaning, but instead he made and lost several fortunes before settling in the Punjab with my mother, née Chastity Goodwill, and if that name don’t beat the Dutch, Miss Stone, the Dutch will rule the globe.”
Patience Goodwill and Chastity Goodwill. My pulse thumped against my drab grey dress as I recalled my aunt’s maiden name. Sisters—there is the connection.
“Mum wasn’t quite mad, by the by,” he added wryly. “She must sound so, gallivanting about like that with a complete knave. But the yellow fever had got hold of her altogether, and she was a passionate collector—Chinese vases, Bengali silks. When my father decided that Lahore was absolutely the ticket, I believe he bartered their way into the Punjab with French wine and Turkish opium; the Sikhs were sceptical, and he conducted one or two discussions on the wrong side of a tulwar.* Once he was in, they realised he’d a positive genius for getting them anything they wanted, and the Sikhs ain’t Quakers, mind. A hotter hive of lechery and treachery you’ve not seen since the Vatican.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“So does war.” This time his words boxed my ears gently. “But people do it anyhow.”
“Were Mr. Singh’s family your neighbours, sir?”
“Indeed so. My family was in the import-export line, and Sardar’s were trading indigo and suchlike.”
“I think he said jaggery?” I lied, for Sahjara had told me.
“Yes! Great brown cakes of sugar and great blue cakes of indigo, and they were so rich they could have used solid gold piss pots if they’d— Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“You really needn’t, you understand.”
Mr. Thornfield coughed, amused. “I am beginning to. Well. We grew up playing at cavalry in the streets of Lahore, daring each other to run beneath the legs of the war elephants when the Khalsa paraded, quarrelling like fishwives over which had to be the villainous Afghan and which the conquering maharajah, manly pursuits of that sort. Sardar would—”
“I’ve been given to understand that is not his actual name?”
“Oh, a snake in the grass! You’ve clearly been pumping the Young Marvel for gossip.”