Excerpt:
That decided
her. Grayson had been adamant she must say nothing that could precipitate the
danger he feared. But she wouldn’t be saying anything. She wouldn’t be involved
in any confrontation. In the strictest sense, she wouldn’t be going against his
wishes. If she crept to the room while the palace slept, no one need ever know.
She could make a brief search and return before anyone was
awake.
She slipped
noiselessly out of bed and dressed in the clothes she’d worn the previous day.
Grayson was still sleeping soundly when she let herself out of the suite and
tiptoed into the corridor. Despite the brave words to herself, her fingers were
tightly crossed that she could find her way back to the study and without meeting
a fellow night wanderer. It turned out to be a more difficult journey than
she’d anticipated. On several occasions, she turned in the wrong direction and
found herself looking at a blank wall or down an unfamiliar corridor, and all
the
time her heart was in her mouth at every creak of a wooden door or sigh of the
palace walls. But eventually she stood outside the room she sought. Its door
was no
longer
ajar and that halted her. She could have no idea what, or even who, was behind
its blank facade. She breathed deep and gathered her courage. She needed all of
it to turn the door handle.
There was
nobody. For a moment, she was overwhelmed with relief and had to grasp the back
of the nearest chair to steady herself. She waited until her breathing had settled
before she gave the room a swift scan. She must be quick, she couldn’t afford
to linger. Grayson would be awake in less than an hour and ready to leave on
his own adventure. She made for the desk. It was the most obvious place to
look, but a cursory glance at the papers strewn across its surface, made plain there
was little to interest her here. She bent down to the drawers on one side of
the desk, methodically flicking through their contents and making sure she
replaced everything as she found it. One side completed, but again nothing of
interest. On to the drawers on the far side. She found them locked and her
pulse beat a little quicker.
This could
be it. Inside could be the letters she sought, the diary, the journal, anything
that Karan had written in his time in Brighton. She tugged at each of the three
compartments in turn, hoping the locks were too old to withstand an assault,
and forgetting in her furious concentration that she’d intended to leave no
trace of her visit. The drawers remained obstinately shut. Frustration made her
careless and she shuffled the papers here and daisy’s
long road home there on the desktop, looking for anything that might be strong
enough to break the locks. A tray of pens, a sheaf of blotting paper and a
paper knife, were all she found. Nothing she could use.
But perhaps,
after all, it wasn’t the desk she should focus on. The bookcases that lined
every wall might hold what she wanted. She walked slowly from one set of
shelves to another, searching first the lower tiers and making sure she felt
behind each row of books, then when that proved unsuccessful, dragging a chair
to each bookcase in turn and clambering to the very top shelves. Still nothing.
It had to be the desk. She bounced back across the room.
There was a madness
in her now; the more frustrated she became, the more she believed there was
something in this room, something locked in this desk, something that Talin Verghese
did not want to be seen. If so, it had to concern his
dead
son, and she had to get those drawers open. She went back to the desk and
picked up the paper knife. It looked a feeble tool, but it was the only thing
possible. She bent over the top drawer and had begun prodding and poking the
lock with the knife, when a voice from the doorway made her heart jump in
fright.
‘Are you
quite mad?’
It was
Grayson. Thank heaven for that at least.
‘I have to get
these last three drawers open,’ was her sole explanation.
‘What are
you thinking of? This is a private office, and if I’m not mistaken the Rajah’s
personal domain. And you’re burgling it?’
‘It looks
bad, I know.
‘Looks bad!’
Grayson’s expression was explosive. ‘It looks bloody lethal—for us. Now come
back to the room, for God’s sake.’
‘I can’t. I
have to open these drawers.’ Her whole life, it seemed, depended on opening
them. It was stupid, but if she had been drowning and the drawers were weighing
her to the ocean floor, she would have clung to them still.
Grayson took
only an instant to decide. He strode over to the desk and took the paper knife
from her hand. In three swift clicks, he’d opened three drawers.
She
gaped at him.
‘What did
you expect?’ His anger hadn’t abated. ‘That I couldn’t open locked drawers? Now
get on with it.’
She
scrambled through their contents as quickly as she could, but finished
desolate. ‘There’s nothing.’
‘How
surprising. Now let’s get the hell out of this place.’
‘Excuse,
sahib, memsahib.’ A servant had slipped from behind one of the pillars lining
the corridor and was watching them from the open door. Grayson slammed the
drawers shut, his face the picture of chagrin.
‘We couldn’t
sleep,’ he lied blatantly, ‘and decided to explore a little and then became
lost.’
‘Of course,
sahib. Please to come with me. I will escort you to your suite.’
In single
file, they trooped back to the apartment, their feet as heavy as their hearts.
As soon as the door had closed on their escort, Grayson turned to her in a
fury.
‘You realise
what you’ve done, don’t you? Compromised the whole
expedition.
How could you?’
Despite his
anger, she stood her ground. ‘I had to get into that room and this was my only
chance. I can’t speak to Verghese. I can’t speak to his advisers or his
servants. You’ve laid the law down on that. So how else can I get to what I
need?’
‘What I
need,’ he mimicked. ‘It’s always what you
need, isn’t it? Everyone and everything else can go to hell.’
‘That’s not
true. How can you, of all people, say that?’
She turned
away from him and walked to the closed windows, her arms folded across her
chest as though to keep the hurt she felt enclosed within.
‘I owe you
my life, Daisy. Don’t you think I don’t remember that every single day? You’re
brave, you’re determined, you’re loyal—up to a point. But if push comes
to
shove, it’s what you want that will count. And with this obsession of yours, push does
come to shove fairly frequently, doesn’t it? And this time, we’re talking a
matter of life and death.’
‘It’s not
like that,’ she said desperately. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘I never do,
according to you. But what I do understand is that you’re prepared to act as
selfishly as you choose. So selfishly that you’ll endanger not just your own
life
but
others’ too.’
She had
never seen him so furious. His jaw was rigid and in the muted light his blue
eyes were the darkest navy, glinting and angry. She was forced to concede then that
she had done a very stupid thing and the fight went out of her.
‘I’m sorry.
I’m truly sorry. I was so sure that I would find something.’
She must
have been in the grip of madness, she thought, to think she could rifle the
Rajah’s sanctuary and not be discovered. Even to think she could uncover any
kind of clue.
‘But you
didn’t find anything, did you? And just suppose you had.’ His voice was quiet
but brittle. ‘Is that more important than finding Javinder, than saving
Javinder?’
‘No,’ she
mumbled miserably.
‘That’s what
it amounts to, doesn’t it? You’ve put your own concerns before a young man’s
safety and, to add insult to injury, you found nothing.’
She had
found nothing and her heart ached for it.
‘I’m going
back to bed.’ He began untying the robe he’d worn. ‘There’s little point in
doing much else. Whatever plan I had is in tatters. From now on, they’ll be
watching us every minute of the day and night.’
And without
as much as a glance at her, he stalked into the adjoining room, leaving her
staring at the closed door. The servants wouldn’t be gossiping after all, she
thought forlornly. She was filled with sorrow, her legs weak, her feet
shuffling into the bedroom they’d shared just an hour ago. The outline of his
body was still there in the sheets, the pillows that had nursed his head still
dented. The most
abject
misery gripped her. It was as though the ribbon of her life had unspooled and,
in that instant, been wiped blank. The quest, the obsession—and Grayson was
right, the need to discover her history had become an obsession— had died an
abrupt death. Why had she thought it so very important?
Daisy's Long Road Home is published on August 27, 2015. Buy from Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/qczgcbv
Visit Merryn at http://merrynallingham.com/
