The Great Ellini (Book One of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twelve: The Carpet Inspector

Jack liked playing games. They were the secret of not fighting battles and not killing people.

They were also the secret of staying sane in Oxford, where he was bored and trapped and—and something else. Some source of misery he couldn't quite put his finger on. Mostly, it got caught up in the swirl of boredom, alcohol and medication that was his life now, but tonight it was niggling away at him like an unscratchable itch. He didn't even know where he was itching.

And he knew he wasn't bored, because he was showing the new woman—Miss Syal—around the Faculty, and she was fascinating.

He took her to the Faculty Lounge and seated her at a table just in front of the vast, lantern-lit alleys of bookshelves.

He didn't usually like to sit here. He could feel the books prickling at his back, whispering Oxford-like phrases of belonging, promising him a place among them if he would only open them up, peruse them, worship them the way everyone else in this city did.

Jack refused. He refused to learn Latin—he refused to understand what a syllogism was, or how you spelled it. He confined his reading to the penny-dreadfuls the housemaids shared with him from time to time. He might have to stay here, but he was not going to belong.

At any rate, he braved the bookshelves with Miss Syal, because he could see the way they attracted her gaze. She stared at the floor too much—in the privacy of his own head, he had started to think of her as 'the carpet inspector'—but the books drew her out of herself. It was quite funny, to see her break off her determined study of the rug to stare at them.

It was quite funny to watch her anyway. She was hysterically curious, and seemed to be afraid of pauses any longer than two seconds, because she never stopped asking him questions.

How had he survived the massacre of the other Generals in India? Did he miss the country? Did he still keep in contact with the new-breeds he'd liberated from the prison colonies? What was it like being a soldier in peacetime? Did he find it difficult to occupy himself? Did he dream about sieges and cavalry charges?

And she never sneered or raised her eyebrows at the oddness of his answers. The worst reaction you could get from Ellini Syal was polite puzzlement. And the best were those nervous giggles, which indicated that she was, of course, alarmed, but it was an acceptable level of alarm—even an entertaining one—and you had permission to keep going until she screamed.

"Well, then," he said, at the next two-second pause, before she could ask him another question. "You owe me a long story, Miss Syal. Now you've seen more of my situation, you know that you needn't be afraid of wasting my time. I need new ways of wasting my time, and I'm hoping you'll prove to be one of them. So tell me how a woman of Indian descent comes to be living here—and so well-spoken? You're the illegitimate daughter of an Earl, yes? Or a Duke? Royalty, even?"

She shook her head, laughing. "I'm entirely legitimate," she protested. "My parents were three years married before they had me."

"How?"

"The usual way."

Jack half-hoped she was going to look up at him then, but she didn't. "How did they meet?" he said, restraining a smile.

He leaned back in his chair and took a swig from his hipflask. Then, on impulse, he offered it to her. He partly did it to shock her—to surprise some eye-contact out of her—but it didn't work. She reached for the flask without looking at him and put it to her lips, not even pausing to wipe it first. It was a strangely intimate thing to do.

She screwed up her face as she swallowed the whisky, and then went on in a throaty voice that made him catch his breath for a second. It was like the beginnings of excitement, except that no excitement followed.