breath and tried to regain her composure.
“You might let go. I won’t run off.”
Macconnach found that idea unlikely, but he complied, and asked the question that was roiling in his mind.
“What sort of trickery did you just employ there?” He’d had the benefit of watching the event play out from afar. While she was skilled at her craft, he had been all over the world, and had seen the very best at work with their sleights of hand. Isabel was defiant in the face of his question.
“I suppose you intend to tell my father.”
“I intend nothing, Miss Alderton. You’ve demonstrated quite clearly this evening that you will not listen to any reason, nor take any advice.”
“Twaddle. But if you must know, I merely used a small prop. You must have taken note of it, but the reason for it was because of how Durga is portrayed. Naturally, I couldn’t come up with an extra eight arms, and had to settle for her third eye.”
She began to wind her hair up. “At any rate, they seem to have been amenable to the whole thing. The village head and the families of the couple have agreed to allow me to attempt to chase away whatever ill spirit might be hanging about.”
“I fail to see how you can hope to be successful in convincing them that you have, in fact, chased away anything. The mind believes what it believes, and when a whole populace believes it together, it’s all the more dangerous.” He did have a touch of experience with that from his time in Cairo.
“If I follow their procedures, all should be well in the end, because I also intend to make sure there is no human cause for their misery.”
“So you say. You ought not leap to conclusions so early on.”
“Humans have ample imagination, Major. As I have just demonstrated, one person can wreak all sorts of mischief in a small town.”
“I believe I take your meaning. Why should anyone cause trouble for these people, though? They seem simple and honest enough.”
“As you say, it is too early to suppose anything. They have been kind enough to me over the past few months, but I have not yet been privy to anything beyond the superficial.”
“Perhaps you ought to tell me what has been going on here. Then, I might be able to assist you.”
Isabel had her back to him as she worked to get her hair back into a more suitable shape. She paused as he spoke, wondering whether he was truly to be trusted. Beyond that, was he discreet enough to be of any value as she worked over this problem?
For his part, not knowing exactly what was wrong, Macconnach could only go by his gut. There was something, almost in the air itself. He watched Miss Alderton for a moment, and then closed his eyes, taking a deep breath.
There was the steady stagnation that came with heavy, moist air, and the smell of burned animal flesh and hair. Beyond that, he allowed his senses to reach out tentatively. What was it? He could feel it, electric, and insubstantial, but it was there.
He allowed it to creep closer to him, whatever it was, to get a sense of what it might be. A feeling of unease began to nibble at him, while images of death and decay tried to flash into his mind.
“What are you doing?” Miss Alderton’s voice broke his concentration; Macconnach let his breath out in a rush, and opened his eyes.
“Not a thing.” He stared back, meeting her eyes evenly. She was, while intelligent and crafty, about as subtle as one of the local elephants used for clearing jungle tracts.
"Well, then, I’ll see you back, shall I?"
"I am a grown man, Miss Alderton." He struggled to retain some dignity.
"That you may be. There is, however, the matter of your jacket, and that you may not be able to find your way until morning." She casually tossed off these words, and slipped back into the darkness at the edge of the village. He sat for a moment longer, chewing his lip.
"Blast." He jumped up and followed. Back in utter darkness, his eyes struggled to readjust, and he stepped gingerly, hoping not to fall.
Five meters away from the encampment, he saw her. She was just finished pinning her hair back, readying to replace the sari over her head.
"Do you not wish anyone to know you were outside the walls, then?"
Her expression was unreadable as he neared her.
"Not least of all because I don’t need anybody else accompanying me." Her voice sounded cold in the blackness between them, and his confidence left him.
"I am sorry for altering your evening’s plans. If you’d like me to leave you now, I shall." Isabel abandoned her efforts with the sari and strode up to him.
"You are a bloody minded man, aren’t you? This shall be our secret, because you found me out, and because I chose to include you in it.” This wasn’t exactly true, but she wasn’t interested in truth, per se.
“You mustn’t tell my father this,” she went on, “but I have been something of an adherent to Eastern philosophy for quite some time. Here, as in the ancient world, people do not believe in chance. Something gave you cause to walk where you would see me, and then to follow me."
Again she had touched on the edges of a secret, the existence of which she could not imagine or fathom.
They reached the tree where Macconnach’s heavy woolen coat dangled from a branch. He stared at it, knowing that putting it back on would signal the end to this strange evening. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her what he had been attempting to do back on the edges of the village.
There was no way to frame so that it sounded anything less than completely barmy. Besides, how could he tell her that, and not tell her the other detail. What her father had really brought him, Macconnach, to India for.
ॐ
Isabel was, in her own way, a creature of logic, possibly more so than most men of her acquaintance. For all her thoughts of intuition, she was more like her father than she cared to admit.
Normally, this “evil” in the nearby village would have been business that the General would have seen to with her, but he was different now. Losing Mother had taken a toll on Papa, she could see that quite clearly.
Macconnach, on the other hand, might prove to be a suitable replacement. He was a bit peculiar, very unlike his peers, and had not attempted any sort of romantic overtures thus far. Strange, but welcome.
His eyes, almost black, had pierced her from across their few meters of distance back in the village. He had a strong-set jaw, with the still-fashionable whiskers worn in his own way. He wore his hair slightly longer than the current style, much like engravings she had seen of the Highland men, wild and unkempt, and it was coal-black like her own.
He wore the symbols of an infantry officer, but her father had told her he was more in the line of intelligence these days.
His jacket bore the scars of his duty abroad in the name of King William, expertly mended, but there all the same. She rather suspected that the man was like his jacket. She could see it there behind the black fire of his gaze.
Oftentimes, she had wondered aloud what things her father had seen in his younger days. Her brother had long since tired of her incessant questioning.
Her mother had been horrified by her daughter’s fascination with what Isabel termed, "the toils and tolls of warfare." And here was a man who seemed to show it all to her without ever speaking a word.
And yet, there was something more than unusual about him. She recalled his demeanor as she had turned, to find him, face turned to the night sky, unmoving, as though he had been waiting for something.
It had been a strange sight, to be sure. She almost thought he had gone away from his body, just for a moment, but then, that was not possible. It was not possible. She bade him a good night, he gave her a short bow, and turned on his heel to rejoin his men.
Isabel was left to cross the remainder of the grounds alone, which felt for the first time as though she was crossing an open ocean. Peacocks called hauntingly as she wended her way into a small palace.
This housed her father, his senior staff, and her. She and the general
luckily had themselves distanced away from anyone else, a fact that allowed her to glide silently into his library unnoticed. A single oil lamp burned within.
"How are things in the village, my dear?" Her father sat facing away from her as she moved to the book-laden shelves.
"Intriguing as always, Papa."
He turned to her with a knowing smile, watching as she picked over the lighter volumes.
"You seem a bit distracted. Nobody gave you any trouble as you came or went, I trust?" His tone was light and careless.
At that, she started ever so slightly. How could he already have heard anything? Isabel looked upon her father’s still-young face, and saw nothing in it but concern for her. She smiled at him fondly.
"Never, Papa. Nobody ever sees me leave."
ॐ
He smiled as well, and went back to his perusal of Plato. She watched him for a few moments as he sat reading, tapping the pages in time to his pace. He was not an old man, only forty years of age.
Though there were not so many years dividing them, he had, as in every aspect of his life, carefully maintained a manicured separation between himself and his children. When his wife, her mother, had still been living in every sense of the word, he had treated her in every way as his equal.
His children he had given far more credit for intelligence than they likely even deserved at their then-tender ages, and had discoursed with them fondly, affectionately.
But he had kept a wall between the children and the parents. Isabel and her brother had oft referred