Star of the East: A Lady Emily Christmas Story by TASHA ALEXANDER Page B

mother’s servants were unlikely to be candid with me. I had best leave that to Sebastian. Sunita had not brought any books with her, but she had left, on the small writing table near the window, a stack of envelopes. Two were addressed to her younger sisters in India, one was to a dressmaker, and the last to a Miss Dorothea Beale in Cheltenham. There was nothing else of note to be found.
    Always careful to preserve propriety, my mother had put the gentlemen as far as possible from the Blue Room. I followed two corridors to Ranjit’s room, which was in a state of some disarray. A deck of cards lay scattered and abandoned on a table, a pair of gloves dangled on the edge of a chair, and a haphazard pile of books rested on the floor in the corner. The prince’s taste in reading was eclectic—he had two volumes of the history of the natural sciences, a copy of Darwin’s Origin of the Species , Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and a well-battered copy of Chamber’s Descriptive Astronomy that had been purchased secondhand from Mudie’s Select Library in London. In the dressing room, flung on the floor, was a long piece of scarlet cloth. I assumed this to be the sad remains of the turban he had worn the previous evening.
    Ned Drayton occupied the room across from Ranjit, and appeared, in all ways, to be much neater than his friend. He had been wearing his evening shoes at dinner, of course, but the only other footwear in his dressing room was a pair of boots that showed signs of hard wear on the soles. His clothes were all fashionable enough, but two of his jackets had been mended. On the bedside table were two volumes of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills and The Phantom ’Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales, both from my father’s library. Inside the former was a scrap of paper with a list of names (Anne, Hugo, Hilda, and Margaret) that appeared to have been used as a bookmark, but whether Ned, my father, or some other person altogether had placed it there was impossible to say. There were no other books, papers, or correspondence to be found in the room.
    Back in the corridor, I started in the direction of the rooms my mother had assigned to the maharaja and maharini. I hesitated, feeling that I ought not search them. I could not in good faith say that I suspected either of them in the theft, and it felt too much like spying on my own parents. Invading either of their rooms was, so far as I was concerned, absolutely out of the question.
    Footsteps on the stairs told me that I was not the only one of our group to have decided to retire early, so I slipped into the Chinese Bedroom before anyone saw me, my heart pounding as I considered how easily I might have been caught somewhere I ought not have been. The menacing Chinaman on the wallpaper scowled at me and I felt a sense of general unease. In another moment, I heard someone directly outside the door, and my heart raced even more. When it opened to reveal my husband, I all but collapsed in a fit of relieved laughter.
    “Good heavens,” he said. “I did not believe for a moment that you had gone upstairs with a headache, but you do look a fright. Are you quite well?”
    “I have been skulking about everyone’s rooms and feel very much like I did when I lived in this house—constantly on the verge of finding myself in very deep trouble and disgrace.”
    “Anything worth finding?” he asked, slipping off his jacket and hanging it over the back of a chair.
    “I have not yet decided,” I said. “What about you? Was the talk over port of any use?”
    “Other than it having the effect of making me very much want to throttle Capet, no, but I don’t know that I can credit the emotion to the conversation. I have never been overly fond of the man. Has he left you any roses yet?”
    “No. Perhaps I have fallen in his esteem.”
    “We should be so lucky. Or rather I should be so lucky. You might enjoy the attention.”
    “It does seem to have the