The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

Chapter Seventeen

Penelope hadn’t imagined that it was possible to feel any lower than she already had, but she did. She felt lower than an untouchable, lower than the scraps missed by the sweepers in the streets.

The lights on the veranda stung her eyes, painfully bright after the soothing shadows of the gardens. The lantern light seemed to cut straight through her clothes. It sliced through the battle armor of paint and jewels to the huddled, whimpering creature crouching underneath. It was all she could do not to slink off to a burrow somewhere and lick her wounds in echoing silence. But she didn’t have the luxury for that.

A hand snaked over her shoulder to push open the drawing room door for her. Penelope could see a sliver of brown wrist showing against the edge of a white cotton glove. Penelope wrapped her own ungloved hands in the gossamer folds of her skirt, feeling her wedding band slip on her ring finger, too large without her glove to hold it in place.

“I can get that,” said Penelope tartly.

“I know you can,” said Captain Reid, and there was something in his voice that made Penelope cringe.

He wasn’t supposed to pity her. He wasn’t allowed to pity her. He was supposed to madly desire her so that she could swirl away laughing, with a cunning comment and a tap on the cheek.

Look how well that had turned out for her last time. With Freddy.

“Thank you for your escort, Captain Reid,” she said in a voice that effectively killed off any further conversation. She swished past him without meeting his eyes. It was bad enough hearing the pity in his voice. She didn’t need to see it as well.

Her husband, such as he was, had already found himself a pack of cards and someone to play them with. Freddy, Henry Russell, and two others were engaged in a spirited game of Pope Joan. He looked up abruptly as Penelope sauntered by and gave her an overly hearty smile. It felt like a bribe, so many pats on the head for good behavior in public.

Well, she didn’t feel like behaving.

“Do try not to lose the rest of my dowry, dearest,” she said in a voice that tinkled as sweetly as the cut crystals hanging from the chandelier.

Freddy slapped down a card, his blue eyes telegraphing a warning. “I wouldn’t” — slap — “be too worried. I’m feeling in a winning mood tonight.”

Penelope let her eyes drift deliberately towards the small knot of officers at the other side of the room. “Funny,” she said. “So am I.”

Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske and his friend Pinchingdale hailed her with flattering enthusiasm. Penelope leaned into their compliments like a beggar crowding close to a fire, hating herself for doing it. She shouldn’t need the flattery of second-rate roués to soothe her pride. But she needed to do something to gouge the pity out of Captain Reid’s eyes. She didn’t need him, not one bit. It was just that he was the first person she had run across after . . . well, after that. She shied away from the memory of that lush room with its equally lush occupant. It might just as well have been Pinchingdale, or Fiske. Anything in trousers would have done.

As if to prove her own point, Penelope laughed very loudly at something Pinchingdale had just said. She had no idea whether it was meant to be funny, but she supposed it must have been, because Pinchingdale puffed out his chest in a gratified way and reached for her hand, her scandalously ungloved hand.

Penelope slapped him away with an arch little flutter that was more a “come hither” than a “go hence.” “Naughty, naughty,” she crooned, and checked over her shoulder to make sure that Captain Reid was watching, watching her have an absolutely brilliant time, desired and desirable, crowded with amorous attentions.

When had it become about making Captain Reid jealous? She could see Freddy’s color rising, but the victory was an empty one. It wasn’t Freddy’s blood she wanted to make boil, but Captain Reid’s, and he was watching her in an entirely too-detached way, as though he knew exactly what she was doing — and felt sorry for her.

Very ungentlemanly, that. He wasn’t supposed to understand what she was doing, he was just supposed to succumb to it.

Dimly, Penelope acknowledged that she had missed a step somewhere. The whole point of seducing Captain Reid had been to make Freddy jealous. That was all right. To seduce Captain Reid out of revenge was perfectly fair and just; to want him because she wanted him . . . that would be adultery.

“Mr. Pinchingdale.” Penelope broke into a very long story involving an inheritance that ought to have been his but for the perfidy of his cousin in refusing to die at a convenient moment. She curved one hand to simulate a cylinder and shook it suggestively. “I find my glass is empty.”

“Far be it from me to contradict so charming a lady” — Pinchingdale, who fancied himself a rake, positively oozed oil as he took the opportunity to possess himself of Penelope’s ungloved hand — “but I see no glass in your hand.” One by one, he peeled back her fingers to reveal empty air.

With the flat of her hand, Penelope pushed playfully at his chest, sending him staggering. “My point precisely, dear Mr. Pinchingdale. Somewhere in this room, a glass simply yearns for my lips.”

“Fortunate glass!” exclaimed Mr. Pinchingdale. “Might one hope that the provider of the item might also feel the touch of your lips? As a form of . . . bounty.” From the direction of his gaze, it was another form of bounty he had in mind.

Not that Penelope was all that bounteous in that area. Not like the girl on the floor of the zenana, who had positively jiggled with overabundance.

Penelope cast him a look to smolder by. “That depends on the . . . bounty of your offering, Mr. Pinchingdale.”

“Bartering your favors, Lady Frederick?” inquired Fiske, as though the idea rather pleased him.

“My favors, like everything else, belong to my husband,” countered Penelope, blowing a careless kiss at that individual. “The laws of England are quite explicit in that regard.”

Fiske hitched a hip against an octagonal table that wobbled with his weight, sending a small statue bobbling for balance. “I wouldn’t have thought you one to abide by the letter of the law, dear lady. Not from what I’ve heard of your . . . career.”

Penelope gritted her teeth and smiled. He was referring to her marriage, of course. Her infamous, thoroughly reported, thrice-damned marriage. Of all the manifold indiscretions in her long and heedless existence, who would have thought that that particular one would lead to this? Driving Percy Ponsonby’s phaeton into the Serpentine had been far more satisfying.

On the other hand, it did provide her an opening. Leaning forward, she made a show of settling the statuette into position, running her hand suggestively over its curves. “Nor, from what I’ve heard of your career, do you care overmuch for the strictures of the law, my dear, dear Sir Leamington.”

Fiske continued to leer, but it had a somewhat perfunctory quality to it. Between his absurdly high shirt points, his eyes were watchful. “And what have you heard of my . . . activities, dear Lady Frederick?”

Penelope arched an eyebrow and her back. “Alarmed?”

Fiske bared his teeth. “Interested.” With a show of nonchalance, he added, “I saw you and our young Daniel in tete-à-tete earlier this evening.”

“Daniel? As in the lion’s den?” Not an inapt description of the company. In the corner of the room, the worthy Residency matrons were glowering at her from behind their fans, sharpening their claws on her reputation.

Didn’t they know she was immune to that sort of thing? Penelope smiled brilliantly at them, eliciting a wholesale retreat behind their fans. Mr. Cleave was also watching, with a concerned expression on his face that suggested he was debating with himself whether it was incumbent on him to intervene on her behalf. Penelope winked at him, partly to reassure him, partly to annoy the fan brigade.

As for Captain Reid . . .

The Bible had all sorts of interesting things to say about adultery. And coveting one’s neighbor’s ass.

Penelope turned back to Fiske with a toss of her head. “I should have thought there would be other Biblical locations more to your liking. Sodom and Gomorrah, perhaps. I hear they’re lovely this time of year.”

Fiske was not amused by her Biblical exegesis. “As in Daniel Cleave. Has Mr. Cleave been telling tales about me?”

Penelope batted her eyelashes with exaggerated innocence. “Are there tales to be told?”

Something in her expression must have reassured him of her ignorance, because Fiske smiled a cat-and-canary smile, a smile of deep, private satisfaction. “You would be surprised at the tales I could tell.”

Penelope leaned forward so that her bosom pressed against the yielding neckline of her gown. The sapphire pendant of her necklace dangled in the hollow between her breasts. It had been a present from Freddy, a morning gift. She could see Fiske’s eyes following the glittering bauble. She shifted to give him a better view. “Try me.”

“You offered Pinchingdale a kiss for a glass. What do I get in return for information?”

“That,” murmured Penelope, her breath stirring the hair at his temple as she leaned forward to whisper in his ear, “depends on what you have to offer.”

Fiske smiled an infuriatingly superior smile that made Penelope itch to slap him. “Is that what you told old Freddy?”

It was an effort to keep her voice low and sultry. “And what would you say,” she whispered, “if I were to tell you that I already know?”

Fiske wasn’t smiling anymore. Good. “What do you know?”

“About your little club. Among other things.” Penelope made her voice as suggestive as she knew how, which was very, very suggestive, indeed.

“Right.” Obviously, it meant something to Fiske. He dropped the leer and his voice. “What do you want?”

What was it that Henrietta had said the spy called himself? A fuchsia? A frangipani? No, another flower. After the conversation she had overheard on the balcony, Penelope thought it exceedingly unlikely that it was Fiske whose coming they were supposed to await, but it was worth a go. One never knew where a stray shot might hit, especially with such men as Freddy called his intimates. Ammunition was cheap.

Undulating towards him, Penelope tapped a finger against the roughly engraved ruby stickpin protruding from his cravat. “I find myself exceedingly partial to marigolds.”

Penelope’s gentle tap bowled him over backwards. Fiske rocked backwards and kept going, flailing for balance, with a look of startled alarm that might have been owing to the marigolds, the Madeira, or the fact that the table against which he had toppled wasn’t nearly equal to holding his weight. His mouth opened and closed in his favorite guppy imitation.

“Marigolds?” he croaked, latching on to Penelope’s arm to steady himself.

Penelope stumbled but held firm, arm to arm, practically in embrace. “One would do,” said Penelope, watching him closely. “If it were the right one.”

Freddy had had enough. With a prolonged scraping noise, he shoved his chair back to the table, grabbing Penelope by the arm as one might a wayward child.

“Will you excuse us, Fiske, old thing? I need to have a word with my wife .”

Brilliant. Freddy would choose just the right moment to remember his conjugal duties.

Penelope favored him with a smile dripping with acid. “Oh, is that what I am? It is, isn’t it? Funny, how easy that is to forget.”

Freddy manhandled her across the room, onto the balcony, where the mummers had long since packed up their props. Insects cruised idly through the guttering light of the remaining lanterns. “What was he telling you?”

Penelope slapped at a mosquito as it attempted a landing on her arm. “Darling, I hadn’t thought you cared. Are you afraid he’ll reveal all your little secrets? Or perhaps,” she added meditatively, “your not-so-little ones. Pity, the way those have of coming out. Or sometimes falling down flat on their arse.”

“You,” said Freddy through clenched teeth, “are embarrassing me.”

Penelope drew herself up to her full height. “You generally do that for yourself. I would imagine my contribution would be negligible.”

“You were flinging yourself at my friends!”

Personally, Penelope would have called it less of a fling and more of a shimmy, but she doubted syntactical precision was Freddy’s primary concern.

She ran her tongue across her lips in a deliberately sultry manner. “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

Freddy’s lips tightened with annoyance. “You’ve got it backwards. You’re the goose. I’m the gander.”

“More like a rooster, strutting your cock in every walk,” flung back Penelope, with deliberate crudeness.

Freddy’s hands formed an automatic fig leaf over the area in question. “Don’t be absurd.”

Penelope followed up her advantage, like a boxer closing in on an opponent. “You needn’t bother coming to bed tonight. I don’t want you there.”

“Did you think I was planning to?” Freddy’s blow snuck under her guard, hitting her where it hurt. Penelope stiffened as though slapped. Softening, Freddy held out a hand, his voice taking on a wheedling note. “Now, Pen — ”

Penelope jerked out of his reach. Was that all he thought she was worth? A fist to the ribs and then a pat on the head like a dog? That was Freddy for you, always convinced he could charm his way out of anything with a minimum amount of effort for himself. “Don’t ‘now, Pen’ me. Go ahead. Go play with your little strumpet. But don’t object if I amuse myself as I see fit.”

When charm didn’t immediately succeed, sullenness invariably followed. Now was no different. Freddy dropped the smile, his brows drawing together in a threatening way. “Don’t push me, Pen. Or I’ll — ”

Penelope laughed contemptuously. It was like being kicked by a cocker spaniel. “What? Divorce me?” They both knew how impossible that was. “Or just deny me your conjugal companionship? I assure you, it will be no great loss.” She looked pointedly at the placket of his breeches.

“Don’t worry. You’ll be free of me for the next few weeks.” When she looked at him blankly, he made a gesture of exasperation. “Berar? The hunting? I told you about it.”

No, he hadn’t. He must have told her . The other one. The thought that she was interchangeable, just another woman in his bed, made Penelope’s temples ache, like the beginning of a migraine. They didn’t even look anything alike. They didn’t speak the same language, for heaven’s sake. How hard could it be to keep them straight?

How many others were there?

In a tone of exaggerated patience, Freddy said, “The First Minister invited me to Berar for the hunting. Fiske, Pinchingdale, and I will be gone a fortnight.”

Penelope remembered the First Minister’s sinister, rotting face. What was it Captain Reid had called him? An asp? There was a story going around that even snakes wouldn’t bite him, for fear of dying of his venom. Penelope wondered, briefly, whether she ought to warn Freddy off, to repeat any of what Captain Reid had told her.

She looked at her husband, golden and arrogant in the lantern light, and felt a familiar surge of irritation. He was so sure of himself, so bloody sure.

Fine, then, thought Penelope, with a fine fit of Irish temper. Let him make his own bed and lie on it. With whomever he pleased.

“Enjoy,” she said flippantly. “Do try to shoot the birds and not yourself.”

She didn’t ask where he intended to sleep. She found that she didn’t want to know.

She stood on the balcony for a long time, the night breeze making her skin prickle beneath the fine sheen of nervous sweat that had formed during her fight with Freddy. In the distance, the blackbuck roamed through the Resident’s preserve while mynah birds called to one another through the scented trees. She had been left in possession of the field, but she had lost the battle.

Penelope’s ungloved hands tightened around the balustrade. Who was she fooling? It was a battle she had never had the slightest chance of winning. She had thought, for a time, that she might bind Freddy to her by sheer force of fascination — but she obviously hadn’t been fascinating enough. In this setting, she felt stunningly provincial, in a way she had never felt in London or Bath, too gangly in her form, too garish in her coloring, too blunt in her speech. You’re worth ten of him, Captain Reid had said. Out of pity, Penelope reminded herself. He hadn’t wanted her either. At least, not that way.

By the time Penelope returned to the drawing room, Mrs. Ure had eaten all the sweetmeats and dragged herself home to bed; the crowd at the card table had flung in their hands, settled their debts, and gone home; and all the rest had evaporated away to their own beds or other pursuits. Only the Resident and Captain Reid remained, discussing some matter of business at the deserted card table.

Penelope heard the words “guns” and “missing” before the Resident noted her presence and rose hastily from the table.

“Lady Frederick! I had thought you had gone home.”

“I was enjoying the view from your balcony.” How ironic that after her long series of indiscretions on balconies, her experience on this one should be so entirely chaste. It was decidedly déclassé to be caught lurking on balconies with one’s own husband or, even worse, by oneself.

The two men exchanged a look.

“If you will excuse me,” said Captain Reid, to his superior.

“Of course.” The Resident nodded his thanks, and before Penelope could protest that she didn’t appreciate being passed around like a parcel, he gave her a perfunctory smile and a “Good night, Lady Frederick,” leaving her alone with Captain Reid.

They faced each other across the debris of the night’s entertainment, the guttering candles, the dropped sweetmeats, the spilled wine.

“There was no need for you to offer to see me home,” Penelope said belligerently. “No one appointed you my guardian.”

“I’m not offering as a guardian,” he said tiredly, and Penelope noticed that, unlike the other men, he didn’t seem to have been drinking. It was past three in the morning and he would be up and riding by six. If she hadn’t been fool enough to proposition him, she would be riding with him. “I’m offering as a friend.”

“Oh.” For once in her life, Penelope found herself entirely at a loss for words. “Thank you.” The words felt foreign to her tongue. She didn’t say them often.

“No need for thanks,” he said practically. “It isn’t far.”

Maybe not in yards, but Penelope felt as though she had just gone a much longer distance than that. Her head hurt too much to parse it out. She was more grateful for the escort than she cared to admit. The Resident, with a fine sense for self-preservation, had placed Freddy in the bungalow farthest from the Residency proper. Without her gloves and shawl, Penelope felt oddly bare. Considering the depth of her bodice, it was absurd to feel quite so unclothed just from the lack of a little kid leather on her hands, but she did.

It made her feel very young and very unsure of herself, which was all, she told herself, pure bollocks. She hadn’t been unsure of herself when she was young, and now that she was an old, married matron, she ought to be even less so.

“Did you ever find your missing guns?” she asked, just to say something.

“My — ? Oh.” Whatever Captain Reid had been thinking about in the moonlight, it had been just as absorbing, and not entirely pleasant. He shook his head as though to clear it. “No. No, we haven’t.” He grimaced. “It’s something of a sticky situation, with everyone swearing right and left that he’s done what he was supposed to do.” They paused within striking distance of her bungalow. “You should be all right from here.”

The old Penelope would have cast him her sultriest look and asked mockingly if he didn’t consider himself man enough to see her to her door.

The strange, new Penelope who appeared to have replaced her didn’t do anything of the kind. She just took a step back, nodded her head once, and said stiffly, “Thank you.” Like a gawky schoolgirl, she jerked her head towards the front of the house. “Will I — see you tomorrow morning?”

It was too dark to make out his expression, but there was something comforting about the way he stood there, steady and solid.

“I’ll be where I always am,” he said.

Penelope drew in a deep breath, feeling more herself again. She would have missed her morning exercise, that was all.

“You’d better get some sleep then, hadn’t you?” she tossed over her shoulder, and scrambled up the steps to the veranda.

It felt good to get the last word. It felt even better to know that Captain Reid was still standing there, watching her, making sure she got safely home. Such as it was.

Someone had considerately left a single candle burning in the bedchamber, sending wobbly shadows undulating across the untouched bedclothes. There were no piles of clothes on the floor, no husband sprawled snoring across the center of the bed. True to his word, Freddy had taken himself off to bed elsewhere.

Penelope couldn’t bring herself to care.

Contorting her arms around her back to try to reach the tiny row of pearl buttons at the back of her dress, Penelope tried to reclaim the hurt and indignation she had felt earlier in the evening, but the closest she could come was a sense of mild exasperation, with herself as well as Freddy, and an overwhelming relief that he would be away for at least a fortnight.

A fortnight of early morning rides.

With an impatient tug, Penelope gave up on the buttons and yanked the dress up over her head. A pearl button skittered across the floor. It wasn’t a real pearl anyway, so it was no great loss. There were dozens of others like it, rather like Freddy. Penelope carelessly tossed the dress into a corner of the room and turned her attention to the pins in her hair. Drawing out the anchoring pin, she shook her hair free, enjoying the sound of its rustling around her shoulders — and heard an answering rustle from the side of the room.

Frowning, Penelope peered into the wavy surface of the mirror, where the satiny fabric of her discarded dress had begun to ripple, like moonlight on the water. Penelope stilled in the act of reaching for the clasp of her necklace. She really hadn’t had that much to drink.

Penelope put out a hand to steady the mirror, but the dress continued to rustle, undulating in waves on the floor. A forked tongue flicked out from beneath the embroidered hem.

In the wavering light of the single candle, a cobra wiggled itself free of the folds of satin and began coiling upwards on its speckled tail, its beady eyes fixed on Penelope.