The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (40 page)

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.