ountains of black clouds, like something out of the Old Testament, crested over the valley as they reached the dak bungalow. The main monsoon season in Dir was in winter. Leo had hoped not to run into the more unpredictable summer rains, but now the vanguard of the summer rains was upon them.

Trees had become scarce along this stretch of the Panjkora. They still covered the upper slopes, but the lower slopes of the valley were often shoddily clad, brown bare earth amidst a scarcity of greenery that could have been the result of either thin, barren soil or, more likely, deforestation.

After the rain, the condition of the road was certain to deteriorate. But at least tonight, at the dak bungalow, they did not need to worry about tents blowing away, small-scale mudslides, or other such unpleasantness of traveling in inclement weather.

Dak bungalows were simple structures of a few rooms built and maintained as rest stops for the men who labored on behalf of the Empire’s mail service. Travelers who wished to avail themselves of rooms in the dak bungalow paid a rupee for each room and extra for meals.

In Kashmir, there were dak bungalows every fourteen miles. Some dak bungalows where Leo had stayed had a chicken coop looked after by a murghi wallah, a few cows cared for by a gowala, and a khansama who cooked for and served the travelers. This particular bungalow had no resident attendants or barnyard animals, but in most other respects, it was very much a standard dak bungalow, a one-story masonry house with a central vestibule and the rest of the space subdivided into bedroom-and-bathroom suites. A wide wraparound veranda provided plenty of space for the coolies to bed down, protected from the elements.

Saif Khan made chicken curry, steamed vegetables, and chapatis. Leo and Bryony dined in the small, white-plastered vestibule that held, besides one table and the rickety chairs on which they sat, nothing else except a stand on which rested a book of register, for travelers to sign their names and offer any remarks they had on the condition of the bungalow.

After dinner she suggested a game of chess. He agreed, even though the sight of a chessboard hit him like a cudgel, to think of all the games they could have played. And everything else he would not have lost if he had not been so stupid.

She played fast. She had a vision of the board that he could only envy, an instinct for the game that made his more deliberate strategizing seem cumbersome and lead-footed.

Tonight she played more sloppily than usual. But then, in their previous game, she’d let him have every piece of importance and then checkmated him with nothing but three pawns.

“You are not guarding your right flank,” he said. “Is it a trap or are you not paying attention?”

“Of course it is a trap,” she said.

She sat with her chin pressed into the palm of her hand, her long lashes casting mysterious shadows over her eyes. She lifted those lashes, and his heart skipped several beats, for her eyes were full of hunger.

He took her king bishop pawn. “Well, trap or not, you’ll pay for it.”

She moved her queen rook pawn. “Be my guest. Take everything.”

He’d never known her to speak seductively. And indeed she did not here either. But her words, coupled with the way she looked at him, long, intent glances, set siege to him. Within his thin defenses, his desire ran amok.

He abolished her queen rook pawn. “What else have you got?”

She picked up her king rook, set it down, picked up a pawn, set it down, picked up her queen, and set it down. Finally she looked up at him again, some unknown agitation in her eyes. “You said you wanted me to stay in London.”

“I think you should have a place to call home again,” he answered cautiously.

“Are you willing to offer me some incentives?”

Was be willing to offer incentives? “What kind of incentives?”

“Cambridge is only an hour from London. Perhaps we can find a chess club with mixed membership and meet for a game from time to time.”

“I don’t think so,” he said instantly.

His answer seemed to flabbergast her. She must have thought he’d welcome something of the sort.

“What about by correspondence?” she said more tentatively. “It eliminates the inconvenience of meeting in person and we can keep a dozen games going at the same time.”

It seemed such a little thing to grant, chess games by correspondence. How harmless could they be, a few missives here and there, pieces of paper with nothing on them but algebraic notations of chess moves?

Except between them, it could never be only chess.

He could see himself reaching for the post, discarding everything but the note from her. He’d take it to his study, where he’d have the games set out, and shut the door. Once assured of privacy, he would linger over the boards, savor her every move, and then spend his evening planning counterattacks: here a smooth ramming of a knight, there a bold insertion of a rook, and now and then a naughty thrust from a bishop.

A moment of tremendous satisfaction when he had everything arranged just so, his moves recorded, his reply ready to go. And then, heartbreak, at this absurdity that passed for lovemaking in his life, at the futility of it all.

“No.”

She was bewildered. “Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t write a letter?”

“I cannot be your friend.”

She rose abruptly. He came to his feet. “I’m sorry, Bryony.”

She shook her head, her teeth clamped over her lower lip. “My mistake. I thought—I thought perhaps you would like a second chance.”

She did not give second chances—she had as good as told him that in the afternoon. This was her physical lust speaking. When her ardor cooled, when they hit that inevitable rough patch, she would retrench again deep into herself.

“I would have, at any point during our marriage.”

If he’d known what was the matter, he’d have groveled. He’d have atoned. He’d have handed over the scalpel himself if she’d demanded his testes as penitence.

“Isn’t it better late than never?”

“Some things are not meant to be. We are not meant to be.”

She took two steps toward him. Her hand reached out and caught a strand of his hair. He froze. But she did not stop there. Her fingers caressed his ear. Then she cupped his cheek, and rubbed her thumb over his lower lip.

“We were not meant to be, perhaps. But people change and grow up.”

If their previous conversation taught him anything at all, it was that she hadn’t changed. That she remained as adamantly unforgiving as ever.

He took her hand and returned it to her.

Her reaction was to kiss him, a kiss hot with both lust and confusion. God help him. Arousal came to him as a tidal wave. He was hard and ravenous. He wanted her. He wanted to bury himself in her and forget everything.

He yanked away from her. “Bryony, please. Don’t.”

Perhaps if she had not made love to him that night, he might have succumbed, believing that surely she could not offer her body without having first forgiven him. But she had made love to him while the memory coiled within her like a disease, like the malarial parasite that could conceal itself for years before emerging in a devastating attack.

Her face crumbled. “So all that talk of loving me for years and years, I guess it doesn’t matter after all.”

The knife in his heart twisted.

“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” he said. “Look at you and your father.”

Except Toddy, everyone she’d once loved she’d eventually shuffled off to the fringes of her life, ignored or banished outright.

“What does my father have to do with anything?”

“If you can’t forgive him for neglect, how can you forgive me for having done you active injury?”

She looked away from him to the bare wall. For a minute she said nothing. “What are you trying to convey, precisely?”

“It is not possible for us to build a new life together. You need a saint, Bryony. You need someone like Toddy, someone who has never done and will never do you wrong, who will never anger or alienate you, in whom your faith never needs testing.”

She glanced at him, her gaze ice and shadows. “You imply that I am not capable of love.”

He hadn’t meant to imply that. But the thing was, talk long enough, and one’s beliefs manifested themselves one way or another.

“I don’t believe you are capable of the kind of love that can withstand the weight of what we bring to it.”

He didn’t believe either of them was, frankly.

“And you would not give us a chance to prove otherwise?”

“Would you board a train knowing that the rails end over a cliff? Or a steamer that already leaks?”

“I see,” she said, her voice bleak. “I’m sorry for wasting your time. Shall we finish the game now?”

The storm broke shortly afterward and raged through the night. The wind eventually died down toward dawn, but the rain continued unabated.

Bryony was not a fidgety person, but that morning she could not remain still. She paced in her room like a caged wolf, opened and closed the shutters with a rhythmless aggression that would have occasioned much note-taking had she been the inmate of an asylum. When she was convinced no one could hear her, she banged the back of her head against the wall—in frustration as well as in misery.

How ironic that had they been rained in one day earlier, she’d have been secretly overjoyed that nature had stepped in to extend their time together. But now she only wanted to finish the rest of their travels this minute, to not remain a second longer than necessary in the company of a man who was as determined to remove her from his existence as a dedicated butler going after the tarnish on the silver in his keeping.

The rain finally stopped in the middle of the afternoon. Bryony was ready to depart immediately. But Leo insisted on first sending the guides ahead to check the condition of the road.

“The tree cover on the slope is insufficient. There is a possibility of substantial debris swept down in a storm like this,” he explained.

She nodded and turned to go back to her room.

“Bryony.”

She stopped, but did not turn around. “Yes?”

He was silent for several seconds. “No, it was nothing. Please don’t mind me.”

A blistering sun emerged as the clouds dissipated. Faint curls of steam rose from the ground. The guides returned far sooner than Leo had anticipated and brought with them a group of travelers—not Dir levies, but sepoy messengers from the Malakand garrison, carrying sacks of letters and dispatches for the Chitral garrison. Leo offered them tea and probed them for news.

The Malakand garrison, located eight miles southwest of Chakdarra, with a strength of three thousand men, held both the Malakand Pass and the bridge across Swat River at Chakdarra.

In recent days the bazaar at Malakand had been wild with rumors. But as the sepoys were Sikhs, the traditional adversaries of Muslims, their attitude toward the Mad Fakir and his followers was one of disdain rather than fascination.

“Let the Swatis march on Malakand,” said the oldest of the sepoys. “The Indian army will destroy them. And then we will have peace for a generation.”

“Are the officers aware of the problem?” Leo asked.

They were, the sepoys acknowledged. The political officer at Malakand had issued a warning two days ago on the twenty-third of July. The troops had rehearsed alarm drills. But no one believed anything would really come to pass, and even the warning only stated that an attack was possible, but not probable.

The Swatis invited the English to settle their disputes. They were happy about the services the small civil hospital at Chakdarra provided. And their valley was a green sward of prosperity, everyone’s coffer fattened by feeding and otherwise supplying the garrison. Why should they be so foolish as to throw it all away on the advice of someone who was very likely insane?

Leo nodded his head, happy to have the frothing rumors put in such rational and blunt light—even if the Sikh sepoys’ opinions were biased, they were still based on information obtained much closer to the source.

And then the sepoys went on to describe just how unconcerned the camps as a whole were about the prospect of an uprising. Apparently, alarm drills aside, the daily routine for the soldiers had not changed at all. Officers from Chakdarra Fort and the Malakand garrison played polo every evening on an open field miles away from the protection of their cantonment, armed with nothing but unloaded pistols.

The sepoys related this last with nods of approval at their British officers’ sangfroid, not noticing that the smile had started to fade from Leo’s face. They spoke briefly of the condition of the road—which after the storm was something between an inconvenience and an annoyance. Their tea finished, the sepoys thanked Leo and resumed their journey.

The entire conversation had taken place on the veranda outside Bryony’s room, so she could hear their discussion via shutters kept ajar. Now her shutters opened fully.

“Shall we get going then?” she said, her impatience barely contained. “The sepoys managed the road without any problem. Surely we can muddle through too.”

“It’s late in the day, Bryony.”

“Nonsense,” she retorted. “We can get in a good four hours. That’s at least one march.”

She rarely spoke in such a strong tone. In fact, he’d never seen her in a fractious mood. But she was now. She had no desire to cooperate with him. She wanted to leave. And she wanted to leave this moment.

In which case, she would not like what he was about to say to her.

“I don’t think we should go on.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”

He took a deep breath. “Have you ever read any accounts of the Great Mutiny?”

“Of course. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Because I’m reminded of it. It wasn’t that we had no warnings as the mutiny approached; it was that the people in power refused to believe that such a thing could be possible, that those they considered happy lackeys could rise up against their sage masters. As it turned out, the masters weren’t so sage and the lackeys not so happy.”

“That was forty years ago. There’s nothing comparable here,” she said.

“There was fighting in Malakand around the time of the Siege of Chitral. The Malakand garrison was established only after that, to hold open the road to Chitral. It is highly improbable that in two years’ time, the Swatis would have forgotten their former hostility altogether.”

“So you are criticizing the professional opinions of the officers at Malakand and Chakdarra?” she asked pointedly.

“I know it sounds presumptuous, but I think their daily polo games send a signal not of confidence, but of complacency. Were I a native with rebellion in my heart, I would be encouraged that my enemy is asleep at the post.”

She was silent. He pushed on. “Let’s stay here, where it’s safe and more or less comfortable, and wait until the next set of messengers come up from Malakand with news.”

“But that could easily mean we’d be stuck here a whole week.”

“A week isn’t so much delay when you consider that we are facing an unknown danger that could easily escalate out of control.”

“No.” Her hand gripped the edge of a shutter, her knuckles white. “I cannot disagree more. If there is to be danger, we are much better off behind the front lines. Once we are south of Malakand, whatever the tribes of Upper Swat Valley decide will be of little importance to us.”

“That is assuming we can make it behind the front lines in time. It would be safer to remain in a neutral territory, rather than risk being caught in the crossfire.”

“If there is to be such a thing as a crossfire, as the officers at Malakand evidently do not believe, I’m hardly confident of Dir’s neutrality.”

“The Khan of Dir receives sixty thousand rupees a year from us. He would be a fool to take part in any sort of sedition that might impoverish his treasury so much.”

“I don’t doubt that the Khan, in his infinite wisdom, thinks first and foremost of his treasury. But the fakir aims only to fan the passions of the common man. Who is to say that in staying here, we wouldn’t make ourselves an easy target for hotheaded young men from nearby villages?”

He cursed the unfortunate timing of things. “If this is about last night,” he said wearily, “then I take back everything I said. At this moment there is nothing more important to me than your safety. Stay and you can have whatever you want with me.”

As soon as he said it he knew it was the wrong thing to say. She flushed, turned even paler than before, and took a step back from the window. “How noble of you, to sacrifice your virtue to my unforgiving rapacity. No, thank you, I don’t want anything to do with you. And you are wrong. There is no more danger ahead of us than behind us or all around us.”

He sighed. Further arguments served no purpose—her mind was already made up. He had two choices: Either he could take the autocratic route and remind her that she could not advance a step without him, or somehow he must find a way to massage her into compliance without stripping away all her dignity in the matter.

If only he’d kept his mouth shut before offering to prostitute himself for her acquiescence, he could have used seduction as a tool. Now the only thing he could think of was firearms.

“All right, let’s settle this at twenty paces.”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

But he’d already walked away. A moment later, she heard him coming into the dak bungalow. She stepped into the vestibule. “What did you say again?”

He didn’t answer. He went into his room and came out with a rifle slung over one shoulder, a steel mug in his hand, and the handle of a pistol sticking out of his coat pocket. “Come with me.”

They walked out of the dak bungalow, to curious looks from the coolies, and marched for nearly a quarter of a mile before he stopped and tied the steel mug from the branch of a small tree. Then he walked away from it.

“That’s more than twenty paces,” she said when he stopped.

“Forty, since the tree can’t move twenty paces on its own,” he said.

With that, he loaded the rifle from the breech, raised it, fired, and hit the mug with a loud metalic clang.

“Your turn.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you insist on meeting danger head-on, show me you can protect yourself. I’ll give you three chances. You hit the mug, I’ll make arrangements to get us to Malakand as swiftly as possible. You fail, we venture no further south until either the trouble clears or it becomes evident that there will be no trouble. Choose your weapon, rifle or pistol.”

“This is ridiculous. I’m not a crack shot.”

“No, what is ridiculous is that I’m giving you a chance—any chance—to dictate the course of our action. If I’m wrong and nothing happens in Swat Valley, we lose a week of our life to boredom. If you are wrong and things go awry, we lose our lives. Full stop.”

“Balderdash. Our soldiers in the Swat Valley were there for the previous campaign. They know the local population far better than we do. It is their professional judgment that they have nothing to fear. I prefer to put my stock in their expertise, rather than your intuition.”

“Then let’s shoot for it. Here’s your pistol.”

And it was her pistol, a double-barrel Remington derringer. She’d forgotten altogether that she had one. He must have kept it with him when he and the coolies packed her things before they left Rumbur Valley.

She grabbed the pistol. In a righteous huff, she took aim and pulled the trigger. The pistol jumped in her grip, the noise startling her, but there was no echoing clank against the steel mug, only a dull thud somewhere.

She fired again. Again, nothing.

As she extended her hand for one more cartridge, he said, “May I remind you that this is binding? You accepted the challenge, you accepted the terms.”

She pivoted the barrels upward and reloaded. “Is it as binding on you as it is on me?”

“Of course,” he said.

Bastard. This was no contest. It was a trick to get her to accede to his wishes, while making it appear as if she’d been given a fair shake at her wishes.

No, I will not remain here with you.

It was hot. She perspired under the rear flap of her hat. She took it off and felt the sun beating down against her unprotected nape. The river was wide and swift here. A single rope hung over it. A man in a chair suspended from the rope was crossing the river toward their side. He stared at Bryony in astonishment.

She raised the pistol slowly and sighted the mug. She must succeed. And she would. She wanted to leave far more than he wanted to stay. If there was to be no new beginning for them, then their story had ended three years ago, and their epilogue ended the night before. It was time to close the book.

She pulled the trigger. And saw the jerky swing of the steel mug before she heard the jarring hit. She dropped her arm to her side and stood a moment, breathing hard.

Deliverance.

She turned toward him. He was still staring at the mug in disbelief.

“Did you say ’as swiftly as possible?” she asked brightly.

She thought they would depart immediately. Instead, Leo huddled for a while with the guides, who then left by themselves.

“Where have they gone?”

“To set up a rudimentary stage system for us,” he said curtly. “We will leave at first light tomorrow and make for Malakand.”

“In one day?”

“I can’t in good conscience caravan on as if nothing is the matter. Since you want to get behind the front line, I will get you there as fast as I can.”

“How far are we from Malakand?”

“Seventy miles or thereabout.”

“And how many changes of horses will we have?”

“Two.”

On the road into Kashmir, ponies were changed every six miles. Here they would have to use the same horses for twenty-five miles.

“What about the coolies?”

“They will remain here until the guides return for them and then head south. I will wait for them at Malakand. Don’t worry about your things. I’ll have them shipped to London.”

She nodded. “Very good.”

“Prepare for a long day. The horses are not bred for speed; we’ll be lucky if we can manage seven miles an hour on average.”

“Understood.”

He sighed and put his hands on her arms.

“You can still change your mind, Bryony,” he said. “Let us wait here in safety rather than going forward to tempt Fate.”

“Nothing will happen. We will arrive in Malakand tomorrow night sore but well.”

“And if not?”

A chill ran down her back. Until this moment she’d been immune from any and all fear with regard to the Mad Fakir and his doings—but that was because Leo had shouldered all the responsibilities for their safety. Now the onus had shifted. Should anything go wrong, all the blame rested squarely with her.

“I believe I’ve already proved that my marksmanship is up to the task,” she said. “The die is cast. Let’s have no more doubts or demurrals.”

He moved away from her. “I hope you are right,” he answered. “I hope to God you are right.”