We’ll be sailing in a moment—aren’t you coming on deck?’ Averil called from the next compartment, just the other side of one canvas wall.
Courage, Dita, she thought, clenching her hands into tight fists. You can’t stay here for three months. She had grown up knowing that she was plain and so she had learned to create an aura of style and charm that deceived most people into not noticing. She was rebellious and contrary and she had taught herself to control that, so when things went wrong it was only she who was hurt. Or so she thought until her hideous mistake with Stephen Doyle meant the whole family had had to deal with the resulting gossip. And in India she had coped with the talk by the simple method of pretending that she did not care.
But I do, she thought. I do care. And I care what Alistair thinks of me and I am a fool to do so. The young man she had adored had grown up to be a rake and the heir to a marquisate and she could guess what he thought about the girl next door who had a smirched reputation and a sharp tongue. Hypocrisy. Had the tender intensity with which he had made love to her eight years ago been simply the wiles of a youth who was going to grow up into a rake? It must have been, for he showed no signs of remembering; surely if he had cared in the slightest, he would recall calling her his darling Dita, his sweet, his dear girl …
‘I’m coming!’ she called to Averil, fixing a smile on her face because she knew it would show in her voice. ‘Just let me get my bonnet on.’ She peered into the mirror that folded up from the dressing stand and pinched the colour into her cheeks, checked that the candle-soot on her lashes had not smudged, tied on her most becoming sunbonnet with the bow at a coquettish angle under her chin and unfastened the canvas flap. ‘Here I am.’
Averil linked arms with the easy friendliness that always charmed Dita. Miss Heydon was shy with strangers, but once she decided she was your friend the reserve melted. ‘The start of our adventure! Is this not exciting?’
‘You won’t say that after four weeks when everything smells like a farmyard and the weather is rough and we haven’t had fresh supplies for weeks and you want to scream if you ever see the same faces again,’ Dita warned as they emerged on to the deck.
‘I was forgetting you had done this before. I cannot remember coming to India, I was so young.’ Averil unfurled her parasol and put one hand on the rail. ‘My last look at Calcutta.’
‘Don’t you mind leaving?’ Dita asked.
‘Yes. But it is my duty, I know that. I am making an excellent marriage and the connection will do Papa and my brothers so much good. It would be different if Mama was still alive—far harder.’
In effect, Dita thought, you are being sold off to an impoverished aristocratic family in return for influence when your family returns to England. ‘Lord Bradon is a most amiable gentleman,’ she said. It was how she had described him before, when Averil had been excited to learn that Dita knew her betrothed, but she could think of nothing more positive to say about him. Cold, conventional, very conscious of his station in life—nothing there to please her friend. And his father, the Earl of Kingsbury, was a cynical and hardened gamester whose expensive habits were the reason for this match.
She only hoped that Sir Jeremiah Heydon had tied up his daughter’s dowry tightly, but she guessed such a wily and wealthy nabob would be alert on every suit.
‘You’ll have three months to enjoy yourself as a single lady, at any rate,’ she said. ‘There are several gentlemen who will want to flirt.’
‘I couldn’t!’ Averil glanced along the deck to where the bachelors were lining the rail. ‘I have no idea how to, in any case. I’m far too shy, even with pleasant young men like the Chatterton brothers, and as for the more … er …’ She was looking directly at Alistair Lyndon.
As if he had felt the scrutiny Alister looked round and doffed his hat. ‘Indeed,’ Dita agreed, as she returned the gesture with an inclination of the head a dowager duchess would have been proud of. Alistair raised an eyebrow—an infuriating skill—and returned to his contemplation of the view. ‘Lord Lyndon is definitely er. Best avoided, in fact.’
‘But he likes you, and you are not afraid of him. In fact,’ Averil observed shrewdly, ‘that is probably why he likes you. You don’t blush and mumble like I do or giggle like those silly girls over there.’ She gestured towards a small group of merchants’ daughters who were jostling for the best position close to the men.
‘Likes me?’ Dita stared at her. ‘Alistair Lyndon hasn’t changed his opinion of me since that encounter at the reception, and the accident we had on the maidan only made things worse. And don’t forget he knew me years ago. To him I am just the plain little girl from the neighbouring estate who was scared of frogs and tagged along being a nuisance. He was kind to me like a brother is to an irritating little sister.’ And who then grew up to discover that she was embarrassingly besotted by him.
‘Well, you aren’t plain now,’ Averil said, her eyes fixed on the shore as the Bengal Queen slipped downriver. ‘I am pretty, I think, but you have style and panache and a certain something.’
‘Why, thank you!’ Dita was touched. ‘But as neither of us are husband-hunting, we may relax and observe our female companions making cakes of themselves without the slightest pang—which, men being the contrary creatures they are, is probably enough to make us the most desirable women on board!’
Dinner at two o’clock gave no immediate opportunity to test Dita’s theory about desirability. The twenty highest-ranking passengers assembled in the cuddy, a few steps down from the roundhouse, and engaged in polite conversation and a certain jostling for position. Everyone else ate in the Great Cabin.
Captain Archibald had a firm grasp of precedent and Dita found herself on his left with Alistair on her left hand. Averil was relegated to the foot of the table with a mere younger son of a bishop on one side and a Chatterton twin on the other.
‘Is your accommodation comfortable, my lord?’ she ventured, keeping a watchful eye on the tureen of mutton soup that was being ladled out to the peril of the ladies’ gowns.
‘It is off the Great Cabin,’ Alistair said. ‘There is a reasonable amount of room, but there are also two families with small children and I expect the noise to be considerable. You, on the other hand, will have the sailors traipsing about overhead at all hours and I rather think the chickens are caged on the poop deck. You are spared the goats, however.’
‘But we have opening windows.’
‘All the better for the feathers to get in.’
Dita searched for neutral conversation and found herself uncharacteristically tongue-tied. This was torture. The way they had parted—even if he had no recollection of it—made reminiscence of their childhood too painful. She was determined not to say anything even remotely provocative or flirtatious and it was not proper to discuss further details of their accommodation.
‘How do you propose to pass the voyage, my lord?’ she enquired at last when the soup was removed and replaced with curried fish.
‘Writing,’ Alistair said, as he passed her a dish of chutney.
The ship was still in the river, its motion gentle, but Dita almost dropped the dish. ‘Writing?’
‘I have been travelling ever since I came to the East,’ he said. ‘I have kept notebooks the entire time and I want to create something from that for my own satisfaction, if nothing else.’
‘I will look forward to reading it when it is published.’ Alistair gave her a satirical look. ‘I mean it. I wish I had been able to travel. My aunt and uncle were most resistant to the idea when I suggested it.’
‘I am not surprised. India is not a country for young women to go careering around looking for adventures.’
‘I did not want to career around,’ Dita retorted, ‘I wanted to observe and to learn.’
‘Indeed.’