The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [245]
He turned to look at Anjuli, and saw that she was drooping with fatigue and paying no attention to where she was going, but sitting slack in the saddle and allowing the limping horse to choose its own path between the stones and the low scrub. Even in that dim light her coat showed sadly crumpled and her attempt to confine the tangled mass of her hair into a single heavy plait, using her fingers for a comb, had not been particularly successful. Her head was turned away from him in order to hide the fact that she was crying, but even if he had not already known it intuitively the growing light would have betrayed her, for it glinted wetly on the outline of her averted face.
Perhaps a similar perceptiveness had made her aware of his gaze, because as he watched her she straightened her shoulders, and lifting a hand as though to push back her hair, brushed away the tell-tale wetness in a gesture that appeared so unstudied that anyone else would have been deceived.
It did not deceive Ash, and he felt his heart contract with love. There had been so much gallantry in that small, seemingly casual action, and in the determined straightening of her back. She had not asked for pity, and she would hide her grief and face the future with courage, and without complaining.
There was good Rajput blood in Juli, and the fire and rashness inherent in it had been cooled and balanced by a strong Cossack strain that was a legacy from her grandfather, old Sergei Vodvichenko – that hard-headed, aristocratic Soldier-of-Fortune who had sold his sword to the highest bidder and won battles for Ranjit Singh and Holkar and Scindia of Gwalior, and bequeathed his gold-flecked eyes and his high cheek bones to his granddaughter Anjuli, Princess of Karidkote.
Rajput and Cossack… it was a strange amalgam, and an unlikely one. But it had produced Juli, who was loving, faithful and passionate, and who possessed, in addition to courage, that particular brand of quiet fortitude that is rarer and far better than courage – together with the strength to keep a promise, once given, even if it meant the sacrifice of her own happiness.
Ash had once made her a promise and forgotten it. Though there was some excuse for that; he had, after all, been barely eleven at the time. Yet he was uncomfortably certain that had their positions been reversed and she had made him a similar promise, she would neither have forgotten it nor broken it. Juli, like Wally, took a disconcertingly literal view of such things; and it occurred to Ash that in some ways they were remarkably alike.
His mouth twisted in a wry grimace of self-contempt, and he reached out a hand to her. But he had left it too late, for even as he did so she reined in and pointed at something that moved in the half-light, separating itself from the shadowy bulk of the rocky outcrop ahead of them. An object that lurched away across the plain looking like a prehistoric animal with a double hump. It was the ruth.
‘Look!’ cried Anjuli. ‘It is Shu-shu. So they did not get back either.’
But it was not Shu-shu. It was only Kaka-ji and the driver of the ruth.
Ash stood up in his stirrups and shouted out to them, and then spurred forward, leaving Anjuli to follow slowly in his wake coughing in the white clouds of dust that had been churned up by Baj Raj's galloping hooves. By the time she came up with them, Kaka-ji had told his own story and heard something of theirs, and there had been no need for Ash to make any suggestions, for one look at Anjuli had