The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister #2)(58)

“I think,” Emily said shakily, “that you are the best dream I have ever had.”

He raised an eyebrow in question.

“My guardian thinks I’m taking a nap,” she explained. “I know. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I’m…trying to do better.”

He didn’t let go of her hair, but she could see his face tensing, his jaw shifting ever so slightly, his nostrils flaring.

“I see,” he said.

“You probably don’t. Pretty Emily. Clever Emily. Lying Emily. Almost my entire life is a falsehood.”

He looked into her eyes. “Mine is, too. I’m Indian. I’m the good-natured one, the one who doesn’t hear half of what is said in front of him. The one who doesn’t complain no matter what. I suppose I should not be surprised that you’re lying to your guardian after all. There are very few parents in England who would allow me to court their daughter, no matter what my prospects might be.”

Emily swallowed. “Court?” she said. Court was a word with hard edges, a word she didn’t quite understand. Flirt she might have understood. Bedazzle. She would have said that he was enjoying her company. But… He was going out this year. And her guardian didn’t even know what was happening.

“Aren’t you going back to India after you receive your degree?” she asked.

He contemplated her. “No.”

“You’ll…surely be marrying an Indian woman. I had…”

“It’s not likely,” he said again. “I have a friend here by the name of Lirington. His father has offered me a position when I graduate. I’m staying.”

“Here,” she said blankly. “Here with the boiled spinach and bread. Here with all of us Napoleons. You’re staying here? I know how much you miss your family. Why?”

He didn’t say anything for a very long time. Finally, he let out a long breath and turned away. “My eldest brother,” he said. “We were quite close even though I was ten years younger. I worshipped him, followed him everywhere. He told me all about his plans. He had always intended to go to England, he said. In India, they never saw him as anything other than another soldier, another fellow with brown skin. ‘There are so many of us here,’ he said, ‘they never see us as people.’ He told me that if things were going to change, he would have to go to the English in their home country. He’d planned to move here when he was twenty-five, to set up a business. To live here the rest of his life. To know them, and have them know him.”

He’d started speaking quietly; by the time he reached the end of his sentence, he had returned to normal volume.

He swallowed and looked away.

“Without that,” he said softly, “he feared that more lives would be lost by idiocy. The Sepoy Mutiny… That was started by criminal thoughtlessness. I don’t think it was ill intentioned, but it was foolish. If the English had listened, they would have understood what it meant. To them, it was just grease. Pig lard and beef fat are just parts of an animal. They didn’t understand that they were asking the Indian soldiers to go against their holy beliefs. That was the sort of thing Sonjit would tell me—that he could save lives and stop this stupidity, if only he could make the English understand.” Anjan swallowed. “As I said, I worshipped him.”

Emily only watched.

“During the Sepoy Mutiny, he took a knife to the gut. It wasn’t even during a battle; someone just ran up to him on the street, yelling. By the time he was brought home, it was too late to do anything except watch him die. When I saw him, he said, ‘Well, it looks as if I won’t be going to England.’” Anjan’s voice was tight. “So I promised him I would do it.”

She reached out and touched his hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He shook his head as if throwing off old memories. “I told my parents what he had said, told them I wanted to go in his memory. We…talked. I’d had a marriage arranged, but the girl died young, and they hadn’t arranged another yet. I told them they shouldn’t. That I’d be more accepted if I…”

He paused.

“If you what?”

“If I was unmarried,” he said, without blinking. “Or if I found a wife in England instead of bringing one with me. It was not a happy conversation. My parents argued over it for years, but they eventually gave in. Even so, I suspect my mother still hopes to surprise me with a nice Bengali girl.”

Emily stared at him. “You had a marriage arranged before you were ten?”

“It’s not what you think. My parents love me. They wouldn’t want me to be unhappy. They would have picked someone I would grow to love, someone with a temperament like mine. They did quite well for my brothers.”

He looked away again, and then slowly took off his hat. He turned it in his hands.

“The post is slow between here and India,” he finally said. “But I wrote and asked for their approval.”

Emily swallowed. She couldn’t imagine the enormity of what he was talking about. She’d been enjoying his company. Enjoying it very much, as it was. But this…

“Our children would have to spend time in Calcutta,” he told his hat. “She would insist on having a chance to spoil them. My mother, I mean.”

“Anjan,” Emily heard herself say. “Are you asking me to marry you? Because…”