He smiled and then laid his head between her breasts again. “Good,” he said. He rolled over, into the dirt, pulling her into the crook of his arm. Her hand found the patch of hair on his chest, began to twirl it between her fingers. She breathed deeply, enjoying the scent of him, of the sweat and dirt and lingering cologne. He looked up at the flowers in the canopy, which had already started to drop their petals. “This is amazing,” he said.
Elswyth shrugged. “It was an accident. I couldn’t help it. It just felt so good, and the vitæ started building… It didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Silas frowned. He stroked the petals of the flower next to him. Elswyth’s fingers traced the scars on his chest.
“Silas,” she said quietly, “what are these? Where did you get them?”
“Hm?” he said. It was as though she took him away from something, some small reverie. “Ah. Gifts from my father.”
“Your father did this?”
He paused and then nodded.
“Why?” Elswyth asked.
He sighed, looking down at the scars and then back at her. “I spent the first years of my life with my mother’s family, did you know that? My father recognized me as his son and took me as hisward when I was ten. But he wanted a British son because he had no heir by his legal wife. And so every time my father caught me acting tooforeign, he would punish me. I erred frequently, thus the scars.”
Elswyth’s heart sank. His voice was so even, so without emotion, a hint of his usual wry detachment returning.
“To do that to a child…”
“He did worse things to children. Believe me.”
Elswyth paused. Her hand drifted up to the necklace of black pearls that Silas wore around his neck. “And this?”
Silas reached down and took her hand. He moved it away from the necklace, gently but firmly.
“It was my wife’s,” he said.
Elswyth’s hand froze. She pulled it away, unsure.
Silas took her hand. “I’m sorry I never told you. She… she died.”
“I’m so sorry. I should not have touched it.”
“It’s all right. This was her mangala sutra. Her wedding necklace.”
Elswyth thought for a moment, considering. “I still wear my mother’s necklace,” she said, “the one she wore when I was a child.”
He shrugged. His hand moved up to the necklace, toyed with the beads. “It’s only an old habit, I suppose. But it helps me remember her.”
Elswyth adjusted her head on his chest. She listened to the beating of his heart. “What happened to her?”
“It’s a sad story,” Silas said. He kissed the top of her head. “We don’t need to tell it right now.”
Elswyth shrugged. She played again with the hair on his chest. “I want to know everything about you.”
Silas sighed. “Ever curious,” he said. “My father wanted me to marry a princess from one of the Indian princely states. He couldn’t marry me to an English noblewoman, not given the nature of my birth. But there were plenty of royal families in India eager for a political connection to Lord Harrow. My mother was a princess, so I have noble blood on that side as well. And since I’m the last living member of her family, Lord Harrow intended to legitimize my claim through a beneficial marriage and install me as the prince of Rajpur.”
Elswyth froze with her hand woven through his chest hair. She thought of what Captain Burr had said at the Forscythes’ dinner—how Silas’s mother had been a princess. How his father had killed the royal family of Rajpur and made Silas watch. But certainly they were not the same family. No one, not even Lord Harrow, could be that cruel.
“While my father planned my wedding to one of his ally’s daughters, I was apprenticing for an Indian professor. Aranyani was his niece. She wanted to become an ornithologist.”
Aranyani.He said the name like it was a bird in his hands, like saying it too loudly would scare it away.
“She was nothing to my father. Another useless scholar. But she was everything to me. We spent three months together on an expedition. By the end of it, we were in love. We were married without my father’s knowledge.
“When he found out, he was furious. We fled to London, and I introduced her to society as my lawful wife. I thought that if I introduced her to the queen, if she came out in society, then we would be safe. He couldn’t separate us, couldn’t pretend as if our marriage never happened and marry me off for political gain. I was wrong, of course.”
