Nonsense, he told himself sharply. Melinda had been friends with his own parents, and he’d known her most of his life. Hers was a story that had appealed to a boy’s sense of adventure. As a child she’d survived the Great Indian Mutiny and the bloody, vicious siege of Lucknow. She had married her cousin against all advice, and then after her husband’s death she had not led a retiring life. She had visited friends all over India, traveling on her own. Finally she had journeyed back to England by a circuitous route that had been of her own choosing, a shockingly forward thing for a well-brought-up woman to do, disappointing those who had expected her to be murdered in her bed for disregarding their dire warnings. Now she lived with her Indian staff in a house that had been in her family for many years, amidst a collection of treasures that she had readily shared with an inquisitive little boy.

At length he found himself at the foot of her drive, the summer borders rampant with color. Melinda loved color and often said that she had lived too long in the desert stretches of India, where the few trees offered only fragile shade and the land was barely fit for camels and goats.

When the door opened, the Indian woman standing there stared at him in disbelief, and then said, “You are a ghost. Come to bring us terrible tidings.” But the smile in her eyes belied her words.

He returned the smile. “I’ve come to beg a room for a day or two. Do you think Melinda will spare one for me?”

“She will be happy indeed. It’s been too long.” Leading him into the cool shadows of the hall, she added, “I think you haven’t forgotten your way? Or must I come and announce you?”

He said, “I know my way.”

“But still I will come with you, if only to see the Memsahib’s face when she finds you in the doorway.”

He tapped lightly on the first door in the passage across from the broad staircase and heard a voice call testily, “It’s about time. I saw you come up the drive. Let me look at you and then give me a kiss.”

Laughing, Rutledge did as he was told, crossing the room to kiss the wrinkled cheek of a woman who had kept her youthful beauty into old age, her iron gray hair still framing her face and dark eyes as it had done for as long as he could remember, and giving her a presence that few women possessed.

She held his hand for a long moment and then said, “What’s happened?”

“Nothing has happened. I missed you.”