The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (12 page)

“I only jumped after him because
you
fell on him.” Shifting on her seat, Penelope shot her husband an incredulous look. “There must be a hundred people in the camp. What do you call all of them? Fairies?”

Freddy was not amused. “
English
people,” he specified. “People who will have certain expectations of behavior.”

Penelope looked at him from under her lashes, striking where she knew it would hurt. “To bow to other people’s expectations is too, too frightfully bourgeois. I’m surprised at you, Freddy.”

Standing over her, his hands on his hips, Freddy regarded her with baffled irritation. “Must everything be an argument, Pen?”

Beneath the irritation, he looked tired, almost as tired as she was. All she had to do was hold out a hand, smile at him, lift up her face to be kissed, and it would all be forgotten. At least, this particular argument would be. It was, she knew, as much of an olive branch as Freddy was capable of offering.

Penelope lifted both her shoulders in a shrug. “If you insist on making it so.”

Freddy folded his arms across his chest, looking down his not-quite-Norman nose at her. “You promised to obey.”

“You promised to love. We both said a lot of silly things at that altar. And, no,” she added, as his eyes slid down from her face in a direction she knew all too well, “making love doesn’t count.”

Stung, Freddy’s head snapped up. “That’s not what you thought last winter.”

Penelope arranged her face along familiar lines of bored sophistication. “I was under the influence of mistletoe. What was your excuse?”

“Insanity,” Freddy said shortly, and stalked out beneath the flap of the tent.

As the canvas flap slapped shut behind him, Penelope pressed her balled fists to her forehead. That had not been wise. She could hear Henrietta’s
Oh, Pen
in a ghostly whisper across a thousand miles of ocean.

Her bruised ribs chafed against the still-damp material of her dress. Her skin was raw from where the rope had rubbed repeatedly against her. Her whole body felt battered and buffeted and drained of all energy. It had been silly to insist on riding from the river to the camp. She ought to have taken the offer of the palanquin and dozed her way to camp.

Perhaps Freddy was right and she oughtn’t to have jumped into the river in the first place.

But, then, who would have? Penelope rested her elbows against her knees, propping her head in her hands, her damp hair falling straight around her face, screening the world in red. It never curled unless she curled it, stick-straight and as much of a disappointment to her mother as everything else about her.

She was tired, so tired, tired and soggy and drained, and all she wanted was someone to put a warm blanket around her shoulders and hug her close. Back in London, the last time she had careened into a large body of water, Henrietta had been there, to comb out her hair and hug and scold her and tell her she was an idiot and bring her tea and want to know what exactly the water of the Serpentine tasted like, all in the same breath. There had been a proper bed with proper blankets and a maid coming in to tend the fire and Lady Uppington bustling about with disgusting smelling possets, which Penelope had poured out into the chamber pot as soon as she wasn’t looking. Lady Uppington had wanted to know what the Serpentine had tasted like, too, although only after delivering a proper maternal lecture on the follies of driving other people’s curricles into large bodies of water. So much love and so much care and all of it so very far away.

With difficulty, Penelope worked free the buttons on the short jacket of her riding habit. The wet fabric clung stubbornly to her arms, tailored too close for convenience. She peeled it painfully off, sleeve by sleeve, every movement feeling like a minor battle. The blue dye had soaked through to the cambric shirt below, and the once-white fabric clung bluely to her skin, like the painted pelt of a Pictish princess.

She had gone as Boadicea to a masquerade last Season, brandishing a spear and thirsting for the opportunity to drive a chariot into battle, rather like—what was it that Captain Reid had called her?—an Amazon.

Penelope didn’t feel much like a warrior maiden at the moment.

It was bloody tiring being so fractious all the time. Had Boadicea ever felt tired? Worn out? Unhooking the suspenders that held up her riding skirt, Penelope let the weight of the wet wool drag it to the floor, leaving her clammy and blue in her chemise. The hand mirror revealed that not only was she vaguely blue, but she had streaks of dirt across her face and there was mud caked in her hair. She didn’t look like Lady Frederick Staines, consort of the new Envoy to the Court of Hyderabad, or even like the dashing Miss Penelope Deveraux, scourge of the London Season. Snarl-haired and hollow-eyed in her discolored chemise, she looked like the less-prosperous class of harlot.

What had possessed her to pick a fight with Freddy just now?

Penelope spat on a handkerchief, scrubbing the square of cloth against a streak of dried mud on one cheek. It was just so irresistible when he was so . . . well, Freddy. But he was all she had here, stranded in the middle of a strange land with unfamiliar birds chattering around her head and flowers to which she couldn’t give names unfurling unfamiliar blossoms on curiously shaped trees.

Shrugging into a light muslin dress and flinging a shawl over it against the dropping temperatures of the evening, Penelope poked her head out of the flap of the tent. Cotton fields lay to one side, the Musi River to the other. Penelope could already see the dots of dozens of cook fires reflecting eerily off the waters of the river, like Chinese lanterns in a garden. From the bank came the muted sound of mealtime conversations, as foreign as the scent of the rice and spices steeping in the pot-bellied pots. By the makeshift paddock, the hamals had lit a great fire of cotton scrub to keep the flies from the horses. The smoke grimed the evening air, blending with the falling dusk, creating shadows against shadows.

“Freddy,” she called softly, but no one answered.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess where he might have gone. Either he had grabbed up his gun and tramped off into the brush to see what he could shoot as a way of soothing his wounded feelings, or he would have made for the sepoy encampment, where the guard that made up part of their escort lay. Lieutenant Breese, their commanding officer, had only an East India Company commission. Under normal circumstances, Freddy might have been inclined to snub him. But in a party in which Englishmen were scarce, he was still an officer and a gentleman—of sorts—and thus good enough to play cards with.

Unless, of course, something else had befallen Freddy. There was that broken girth. . . .

Moving with more haste than grace, Penelope threaded her way towards the sepoy encampment on the very edge of their camp. Through the canvas of the largest tent, she thought she could see the outline of two men at a table, a bottle between them. Freddy and Lieutenant Breese? Most likely.

For a moment, Penelope stood staring at their silhouettes, caught between relief and irritation. To think she had always mocked Charlotte for having too loose a grasp on reality! That was what she got for letting her imagination run away with her. Freddy in danger, indeed. Freddy getting foxed, more like. More fool she, to come running out like an avenging Amazon to defend his person against miscellaneous malefactors. He neither needed nor wanted her for that. Or for anything else, save what could be found between the sheets.

Penelope’s head throbbed and the shadow images in the tent seemed to shimmer against the canvas.

Too much river water, she told herself. Too much heat and exertion. She was just plain worn out, and that was the only reason she felt a completely inexplicable impulse to sit down in the cotton scrub and cry. It was nothing more than physical weakness, and a good night’s sleep would put her right as rain again, like a toddler who had spent the day too much in the sun and needed to be put to bed.

Penelope gathered her skirt to turn back, but the hanging branch of an acacia tree scratched across her arm, tangling in her shawl. Penelope yanked at the fabric, not caring what she tore, just so long as she got away before Freddy saw her standing there, like some pathetic waif in the night, or a dog left outside its master’s door. Blast it! Penelope tugged, but the fabric was as stubborn as she was, clinging to its twig like an eloping heiress to her lover. Muttering nasty things under her breath, Penelope changed tactics, fumbling at the fabric with impatient fingers, trying to disengage it from whatever malevolent collection of splinters was holding it fast.

“Do you need help?” asked a now-familiar voice.

The branch sprang free, releasing the scent of fresh flowers into the damp night air.

“I’m quite all right on my own,” said Penelope stiffly, grateful for the darkness that hid the damp blue chemise beneath her too-thin frock and the appalling condition of her hair. She shouldn’t have been surprised at his appearance. Captain Reid had an unsettling talent for being everywhere she didn’t want him to be. She yanked her shawl firmly over her shoulders, knotting it to keep it from going astray. “As you can see.”

“Of course,” said Captain Reid, and she hated him for it, hated him for having caught her unprepared, hated him for being kind. Such kindness wasn’t a gift but a goad, scraping against one’s skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive. “Shall I see you back to your tent?”

Penelope bristled at the implied criticism, all the more infuriating for being justified. It was not the brightest thing to wander about alone at night in a camp of eighty men and miscellaneous beasts. Not that she would ever admit that to Captain Reid. “In case tigers attack me over the next ten yards?” she said belligerently.

“Merely as a courtesy,” he said mildly, and she felt doubly shamed. “But if you know your own way . . .”

Penelope fought back with the only weapon in her arsenal. Her voice was as cloyingly sweet as the flowering branch and just as thorny as she looked up at him from under her lashes. “Will you miss me if I get lost along the way, Captain Reid?”

Captain Reid stepped back, as clear a rejection as a slap across the face. “I’m sure your husband would,” he said stiffly.

In Lieutenant Breese’s tent, the shadow Freddy reached for a card, kicking back in his chair to stare at his hand with the sort of intensity he never reserved for her. Not since last December, at any rate.

Penelope’s laughter etched acid across the evening air. “I wouldn’t wager on that, Captain Reid. And, no,” she added bitingly, “you needn’t see me back.”

Without waiting for his response, she made a full turn and stomped off in the direction of her own tent. She ought, she supposed, to make an effort, to sway her hips or toss her hair, but it didn’t seem worth it. Captain Reid might respect her Amazonian tendencies, but he had made quite clear he had no use for her in any other way. It was a bizarre and baffling turn of events, and one that Penelope had no interest in analyzing. One could only accept so much rejection in one evening.

Even so, she was very aware of Captain Reid’s shadow in the lee of the acacia tree, watching her safely back to her tent.

Watching Lady Frederick pick her way back across the camp, Alex was aware of an unexpected and inconvenient emotion: pity.

It didn’t do to feel sorry for Lady Frederick. It didn’t take the stiff set of her back to tell him that she wouldn’t be grateful to him for it. What did he have to pity her for, after all? Her earrings alone would pay his salary for a year. It was senseless to dwell on the waste of it, a clever woman married to a lout of a husband. She had chosen her lout. And Alex had other responsibilities.

Pushing away from the tree trunk, Alex headed determinedly in the other direction, away from the camp. It had been, he told himself briskly, a bit of luck that Lady Frederick had been too distracted to demand where he was going in the middle of the night. And she would have. Alex’s lips curved in the ghost of a grin. Oh, that she would.

Leaving the camp behind, Alex skirted the edge of the road they had traversed earlier that day. It was a well-traveled road, and there were other parties who had made shift for themselves for the night by the water of the river Musi, eschewing the dubious comforts of the nearest
dak-gharis
or caravanserai. Across the river, a troupe of Brinja rees, the ubiquitous grain merchants of India, had camped with their herd for the night, while farther along a party of Dutch jewelers from Masulipatam had paused on their journey to the fabled diamond market of Hyderabad.

Among all these travelers, the tent of a local nobleman, however large and well-appointed, was scarcely worth noting. The others in the column had ridden past without giving it a second glance. As Alex approached, a man emerged from the tent to lounge decoratively by its side. He might have stepped out of a Persian painting, fair complexioned and dark haired, with a small, thin mustache, dressed in a richly figured robe banded with pearls at the wrist and forearms. On his head, he wore a jaunty silk cap with a single curling feather. All that was missing was a hookah in one hand.