The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Hunh,” said Penelope, which felt like a perfectly reasonable response at the time. She liked the way it sounded, so she repeated it. “Hunh. Right.”

She tried to remember what the man had looked like, but she had only a blurry impression of dark hair that glinted red where the sun struck it and a flurry of hooves that belonged, not to the man, but to his mount. He had a very good seat, she gave him that much. And a decidedly dashing air about him. At the time, she had ascribed that to being French, which just went to show how expectation could inform appearance.

She looked measuringly at Alex. Dashing really didn’t come into it. Reliable, yes. Competent, yes. Incredibly good company when he wanted to be, yes.

Dashing, no.

“I don’t know why I lied,” Alex confessed. “Habit, I guess.”

Penelope cocked an eyebrow, a skill that had taken ages to learn, but had paid off in spades over the years. “Are you in the habit of lying for him?”

“Not like that,” said Alex quickly. “Just little things when we were younger, food missing from the kitchen, broken bric-a-brac, that sort of thing. . . . He didn’t thank me for it,” he added.

“Then why did you do it?”

“I’m his big brother. It’s part of the job. And I knew that my punishment would be lighter than his would have been.”

He didn’t explain why and Penelope didn’t ask. She doubted it would be presuming too much to assume that the son of the deceased Mrs. Reid received a very different sort of treatment from status-conscious servants than would the by-blow of the Colonel’s concubine.

It would, she thought wistfully, be rather nice to have that sort of champion. She had had one of a sort when her grandmother had been alive, exerting a leavening presence between the dissimilarities of her parents, scolding or condoning according to her own pattern. Her father might have taken up the role, but he had been too indolent to do so, preferring to spend his time with his racing forms and his breeding books, abandoning Penelope in the end to her mother and the thousand and one boring strictures that Penelope systematically set out to flout.

Penelope straightened in the saddle. Not that she needed a champion, of course. She was perfectly capable of fighting her own battles — or unearthing her own spies, if it came down to it.

“Is there really a Guignon?” she asked, at random.

“Very much so. I have it on good authority that he’s been skulking around the province again. That’s why his name came so easily to mind.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you to lie so effectively,” said Penelope admiringly.

“You were distracted,” said Alex generously. “And on uncertain terrain. I had the advantage of you.”

In one thing, she still had the advantage of him. After an internal wrangle, Penelope said brusquely, “While we’re coming clean, I have a confession to make.”

“If you tell me you’re the Marigold, I won’t believe you.”

“I, um, found something at the tomb that day. A little piece of paper. It was a message, presumably from the Marigold, advising the recipient to await his coming for the great work to be set into motion. Or something like that. I can’t remember the exact phrasing.”

Alex scrubbed his hand against his eyes, looking unutterably bleak. “That proves it, then. Cleave was right.”

“You don’t know that Jack dropped it.” Odd to be talking about a man she had never met on first-name terms, and a nickname, at that. But, then, it would be even odder thinking about him as Mr. Reid. Lieutenant Reid? Penelope had no idea what sort of titles they handed out in Scindia’s armies.

“Then who did? The pixies?”

“French pixies,” agreed Penelope. “Back in Hyderabad without leave. Shall we stop soon? It will be dark before long.”

The real world would be with them soon enough. Penelope refused to spend their last night together on depressing reflections that could only cause one of them pain. This was their last night in Eden and she intended to make the most of it, even if the snakes were already beginning to slither about in the underbrush and half-eaten apples littered the ground beneath the tree, conveying their cursed burden of partial knowledge.

She didn’t need to explain what she meant. He knew. Without another word, he nodded ahead. “If I recall, there’s a lake not fifteen minutes from here. We can camp there.”

They plunged determinedly into mundanities: where to camp, what to eat for dinner. Alex teased Penelope about her cooking and Penelope retorted that if she wasn’t such a good shot there would be nothing for them to eat, and so the yards passed on, and with every hoofbeat, Penelope could hear echoing in her ears, It’s over, it’s over, it’s over .

Not yet, she told herself fiercely. Not yet.

The lake was a small one, tucked away in a copse of banyan trees, the water thick with lily pads bearing brilliantly blue lotus flowers. Penelope’s riding habit had begun its life as a similar color, but three days of dust and grime had turned it into a mottled gray.

“I smell,” said Penelope with disgust, turning her head to sniff at her shoulder. Wearing the same habit for three days in very hot climatic conditions did not do wonders for one’s personal hygiene. She wished she had thought to bring a change of clothes, or at least of linen.

Undaunted, her lover drew her to him, uttering those romantic words, “So do I.”

“Yes, worse than me,” agreed Penelope pertly, and kissed him hard on the lips, before pushing away. She yanked at the buttons on her habit. “I am having a bath, and I am having one now .”

Alex cast a critical eye over the dark water of the lake, made darker by the dropping dusk. “You don’t want to jump into that. You don’t know what’s in it.”

“An apt metaphor for life, I imagine.” Dropping to her knees, Penelope wiggled her fingers in the water to test the temperature. The water felt like heaven against her heat-swollen hands. “One I’ve never heeded.”

“Let me.” Taking a cloth, Alex dipped it into the water, wrung it out, and applied it to Penelope’s sticky shoulders.

“Mmm,” sighed Penelope, tilting back her head, as the cool water trickled down between her breasts. She could feel it mingling with the sweat that already dampened her shift. “Heaven.”

Raising her hands in the air, she waited for him to peel her shift off her body. The night breeze felt heavenly on her sweaty body. The mosquitoes weren’t quite so heavenly, but Penelope was prepared to be philosophical about that. Penelope could feel her skin prickling from the air and the water and pure, undiluted anticipation. Desperately wanting his mouth on her breasts, she thrust her chest out, but perversely, maddeningly, he continued his own set course, dragging the damp cloth down the hollow of her belly, stroking across each hip, before —

Returning to the lake to dip the cloth again in water.

“You really are quite maddening,” she informed him hoarsely.

On one knee, Alex’s dark eyes glinted up at her. “Am I?” he said, decisively wringing out the cloth. The touch of the damp fabric against the inside of one ankle made Penelope shiver. He worked the cloth slowly up the inside of her leg, his eyes intent on hers.

Penelope swallowed hard. “But in a very nice way,” she amended, as the cloth worked its way up the other side, pausing, tantalizingly, just between her legs, brushing and retreating. She bit down hard on her lip, stifling a gasp, as he worked the cloth up between the delicate folds, the moisture of her body mixing with the cool of the lake water while the twisted piece of fabric worked back and forth against a point of extreme sensitivity.

“Very, very nice,” she said breathlessly.

Alex moved lower, his lips following the path of the cloth, and Penelope thankfully gave herself over to thinking of nothing at all.

It was only long afterward, after making love and eating supper and making love again, as they lay together beneath a single blanket, the small flame of their fire reflecting off the waters of the lake, that Alex ignored his own advice and ventured into dangerous waters of quite another variety.

“We should reach the border tomorrow,” he said casually. Too casually.

“Is there any way of making the border move back?” asked Penelope drowsily. “Just a few miles would be nice.”

“I’m afraid not.” Alex’s voice was serious. They were clearly going to have A Talk, whether she wanted to or not.

Penelope buried her head in his chest and wished they could stay this way for always. Without talking about it.

“What happens next?” Alex asked, as she had known he was going to.

“You know what happens,” said Penelope, although she found it far harder to do so than she had three days before. Almost four days now, she corrected herself. She wouldn’t want to cut their time together short by so much as an hour. “You have your work in Hyderabad. Freddy and I will eventually return to London.”

“Do you want to go back?” Alex asked seriously.

Penelope bit her lips. “No,” she admitted.

Funny, that the prospect should seem such a bleak one. Only a month ago, she would have been glad to go back to London, to take tea with Henrietta and Charlotte again and listen to the familiar rant ings of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. But she was becoming accustomed to India. She liked it. She liked the strange, spicy food and the sunshine that turned her face to freckles and the curious, gnarled faces of monkeys that scowled and chattered at her from between the branches of the trees.

And she liked Alex. She liked him too much. But that didn’t bear thinking about, so Penelope didn’t. Or, at least, she tried not to. She had always been very good about not thinking about things. It was much easier to act, as rashly as possible, trusting to the resulting ruckus to blot out any danger of reflection or introspection.

Shifting, Alex wrapped his arms more comfortably around her. “You know,” he said, his vocal chords burring against her ear. “There are ways.”

“Ways?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said thoughtfully, “and India is a large country. If you were to retire to the hills for your health — ”

“ — You could come with me?” It was a pretty fairy tale, but that was all it was, no more realistic than one of Charlotte’s novels. She didn’t have a fairy godmother to wave a wand and make it all turn out right.

“Yes.”

Penelope shook her head against his chest. “And leave here? You wouldn’t.” More matter-of-factly, she added, “I wouldn’t want you to. You would hate me before long if you did.”

He paused just a moment too long before answering, long enough to know that her words had struck home. “I wouldn’t hate you.” But he didn’t sound quite as certain as he had before.

Penelope tried not to sound as desolate as she felt. “Resent me, then. It’s close enough. Either way, you would be unhappy. And I would be unhappy for making you unhappy and then we would both be unhappy, and where would we be?”

Together, prompted a dulcet little voice in her head.

“Miserable,” she finished, more forcefully than she had intended. “Stranded out in the hills in disgrace with nothing to do but snap at each other.”

Alex’s hand stroked softly up and down her arm. “Does the disgrace bit bother you?”

Since he had asked it honestly, Penelope did him the courtesy of actually thinking about it before answering, rather than shooting off the flippant answer that came too easily to her lips.

“No,” she said at last, twining her fingers absently through the dark hair on his chest. “I’ve been in disgrace before. I’m very good at being in disgrace,” she added, and was rewarded by the rumble of a chuckle beneath her ear.

“Then, why?” he asked.

There was something about being in the dark with someone that made one say too much, too frankly. “It’s not my disgrace that matters. I don’t mind ruining myself, but it wouldn’t do to drag you down along with me.”

“It wouldn’t be you doing all the dragging,” said Alex mildly. She felt the brush of his lips against the top of her head. “I do believe there are two of us involved.”

“Wouldn’t it?” retorted Penelope. “Without me, there would be no dragging to be done.”

“You might as well say that without the sun there would be no sunstroke. And yet we couldn’t do without it.”

Was he saying that he couldn’t do without her?

“It’s all a moot point, anyway,” grumbled Penelope, stirring restlessly against her human bolster, “because I’m not ruining you, and that’s that.”

After three days, he knew her well enough to know when she couldn’t be swayed. “Fair enough,” he said at last, adding, provocatively, “but I call that ungenerous of you.”

Penelope levered herself up on an elbow so she could look down at him, her braid falling over one shoulder. “Oh, ungenerous, am I?” she taunted.

And then neither of them said anything at all, for quite some time.

There was a curiously ferocious quality to their lovemaking, as if it were a competition to see which of them could elicit the greater response from the other. It was as though they were trying to scour their mark into each other, like lovers’ initials charred into the trunk of a tree, relic of a lost romance. Teasing, taunting, titillating, they grappled together long after the fire had burned down to embers and the night-blooming flowers on the lake had opened their petals to the night sky, perfuming the air with their too-sweet fragrance.

Afterwards, Penelope lay awake, feigning the regular breath of sleep. Beside her, she could sense that Alex was doing the same. His shoulders were too stiff and his breath too shallow for anything but pretend sleep. Besides, he wasn’t snuffling.

She would miss his snuffling. She would miss the circuitous arguments over whose turn it was to scour the dishes and the long-winded, nonsensical conversations about nothing in particular. There were more things to miss than she had ever imagined there could be, a thousand Alexes, forking a snake out of their bedroll with a long twig, smiling up at her as he skinned a rabbit, dipping a hand into the lake to test its waters, doing, fixing, arguing, being.

What would it be like to take him up on his offer and be like this always? For a moment, the image drifted tantalizingly in front of her, as sweet and insubstantial as the scent of the flowers on the lake.

Nonsense, Penelope told herself roughly. It was all pure nonsense.

It was the sort of harebrained daydream Charlotte might have come up with. What sort of happiness could they have, with Freddy forever looming over them? He would be within his legal rights to storm in and haul her back by her hair, from wherever they might choose to hide. Both the law and public opinion would back him. Even if they did succeed in getting successfully away, any children they might have would be bastards, shunned from polite society. They wouldn’t bear the same sort of systematic barriers that prevented Alex’s half-Indian siblings from entering their chosen professions, but there were legal disadvantages to bastardy, as well as the social ones.

Besides, how would they live? Her own dowry had long since disappeared into Freddy’s ample pockets; any money she had came from him. If Alex had anything other than his pay, she would be greatly surprised. It wasn’t that she needed luxury. She could do just as well without the jewels and expensive muslins. She was happier in boy’s breeches than a satin gown. But one needed something to live on. They couldn’t eat charred rabbit forever, however idyllic it might seem for the space of an enchanted tryst. Desire would fade, in time, and leave only disenchantment in its wake. He would grow to hate her in time. Sacrifice didn’t ennoble; it only embittered.

Not that the alternative was terribly attractive. Penelope rolled over onto her side, resting her head on one arm. It was useless to think that they could go on as they were back in Hyderabad. She might be willing to do it, cuckolding Freddy with the same abandon with which he had cuckolded her, but Alex wouldn’t. It was only the very oddity of their circumstances that had won her these past four days, as remote from the world as any fairy-tale princess’s overgrown palace.

She could, she knew, make his control snap if she tried hard enough. In a fit of madness, they might make love against the pillars of Raymond’s Tomb or tumble together in the prickly discomfort of the hydrangea bushes in the Residency gardens. If they were lucky, they might not even be caught. But it wouldn’t bring them closer. Instead, every stolen physical encounter would drive a deeper wedge between them, killing off the easy companionship that had begun to mean so much to her. As matters stood, she could have him as lover or friend, but not both.

There was justice for you. She had taken Freddy without caring, just because. Now, when she cared, she couldn’t have.

Justice was highly overrated.

Penelope woke up with a headache pinching the flesh between her brows. There was no morning kiss or playful banter. They avoided each other’s eyes as they dressed. They were like two prisoners sharing the same cell on the morning of an execution, waiting for their names to be called.

It was noon before they reached the main road to Berar. They were close enough now to the probable location of the treasure that it made sense to follow Fiske’s party more closely.

Squinting down to road, Penelope saw a cloud of dust in the distance. Alex raised the spyglass he kept in his saddlebag. “That’s our boy,” he said, squinting through the glass knob. And then, “But why are they going in the wrong direction?”

Freddy’s caravan was on the move, but it was moving the wrong way. They might still be a fair way down the road, but it didn’t take close observation to tell that the cavalcade was traveling towards them, away from Berar.

“They can’t have been there and back already!” Penelope exclaimed.

“No,” said Alex with conviction. “We didn’t dawdle that much. They were supposed to stay for a full two weeks’ hunting.”

Penelope could tell that he didn’t like the situation any more than she. “Do you think Fiske got his hands on what he came for and persuaded them to turn back?”

“It’s hard to see how,” muttered Alex. “A whole visit arranged — they’re dealing the First Minister a considerable insult by rejecting his hospitality.”

“Unless the First Minister is involved,” suggested Penelope, twisting in her saddle as a new idea struck her. “Or he never invited them in the first place. Fiske might have made up the invitation.”

“Did it ever occur to you . . . ,” Alex began with difficulty. “That is, have you ever thought — ”

“Yes?” Penelope raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“That it might not be Fiske but your husband?”

Penelope had to blink several times before she could be sure that she had heard him properly. “My husband what ?” she asked, in a hard voice.

“Your husband was in the same regiment as Fiske. He was a member of that same club. He took as mistress the known consort of a French officer.”

And it was Freddy who had told her about the First Minister’s invitation to Berar. Penelope remembered that letter of Henrietta’s that had so mysteriously disappeared after she had left it by Freddy at breakfast. And, from very far away, she could see a small orange-cloth flower being pressed to the courtesan’s lips and tossed — straight into Freddy’s lap.

“Nonsense,” she said coldly. “It’s Fiske. Just because you don’t like Freddy — ”

But that was treading too close to dangerous territory. “You’re wrong,” she said instead.

Alex didn’t quite meet her eyes. “For your sake, I hope I am.”

“Why?” said Penelope flippantly. “Are you afraid that if he were executed for treason you might be stuck with me permanently?”

Alex’s startled gaze caught hers. “Pen — ”

Penelope applied her heels to her mount. “If they’re already on their way back, there’s no point in following them, is there?” she said rapidly. “We’ll have to intercept them instead.”

And she was off down the road before he could say anything more.

An elephant lumbered in the center of the party, preceding a long line of donkeys and pack mules, but this time, Fiske wasn’t on it. She could see him riding in front of the party, cleverly staying ahead of the dust cloud. There was another man beside him, but it wasn’t Freddy. Beneath his fashionable hat, Penelope recognized the curly head of Mr. Jasper Pinchingdale. Barring the inevitable dust of travel, both men were as fresh and clean as though they had stepped out of their dressing rooms. That, she supposed, was what all the pack mules were for. Penelope scanned the mass of animals and men for Freddy. She spotted Aurangzeb, being led by Freddy’s groom, but of Freddy himself there was no sign.

“Ahoy, there!” she called, waving a hand playfully above her head.

Neither Fiske nor Pinchingdale recognized Penelope at first, with her dirty face and her hair in a long plait down her back.

Penelope swished her braid and grinned at them, a practiced, gamine grin. “I’d wager you didn’t expect to see me here.”

“Lady Frederick?” gasped Mr. Pinchingdale, losing his grasp on his urbane sophistication and nearly on his horse as well. Next to him, Fiske was doing his very best guppy imitation. Penelope wasn’t fooled. A guppy Fiske might be, but he was a deuced dangerous guppy.

Penelope spread a dazzling smile impartially between the two of them. “I’ve come to surprise Freddy. I bullied Captain Reid into escorting me.” Her tone reduced him to a superior sort of servant, which was, she had no doubt, how Freddy chose to view him. He would as soon suspect her of canoodling with one of the footmen. “It’s no fair that you gentlemen should get all the fun of the hunting.”

Their frozen stares was enough to make Penelope start to feel more than a little self-conscious. All right, so she might be a bit bedraggled, but how did they think one would look after riding four days? Not everyone spent five hours a day on her toilette.

Abandoning them as a bad job, Penelope craned to look over their shoulders. “Where is Freddy?”

She didn’t miss the look Pinchingdale and Fiske exchanged, or the quick slide of Pinchingdale’s eyes to a palanquin being carried by four bearers a little way behind them. So that was it, was it? Penelope felt her smile curdle on her lips. That explained why Aurangzeb was riderless in the middle of the afternoon. Trust Freddy to bring his mistress with him on a simple little hunting trip. That was Freddy for you. He liked to be supplied with all the creature comforts. Home away from home, as it were.

Well, too bad for him.

Swinging off her horse, she tossed the reins to a groom. “In the palanquin, is he, lazy old thing?”

“Um, Lady Frederick,” began Pinchingdale awkwardly. “I don’t think — ”

Oh, he didn’t, did he?

“Don’t worry,” said Penelope gaily. “I’ll soon roust him out.”

Under the frozen gaze of Fiske, Pinchingdale, all four bearers, sixty-odd servants, and one elephant, she yanked open the curtains of the palanquin.

Freddy was inside. But he wasn’t resting. And he wasn’t with his mistress. His hands rested neatly on his chest. His legs were stretched straight out in front of him, boots blackened and shining. But his once-handsome features were swollen and distorted and there were two gold coins where his eyes had been, weighting the eyelids shut.

Pinchingdale cleared his throat. “I was trying to tell you. Lord Frederick is dead.”