The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (41 page)

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.”

A bell was tolling, but it wasn’t tolling for Freddy Staines. It was tolling for me.

When my doorbell rang, I was still sprawled across my bed with one of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s notebooks propped against my knees. With a jolt, I tumbled out of the early nineteenth century, landing with a crash back in the twenty-first. It was Valentine’s Day and I—I took a quick glance at the neon travel clock balanced on the suitcase that did double duty as a night table—was running late.

“I’ll be right there!” I hollered, flinging Freddy and Penelope and the whole lot of them aside.

Rolling off the bed, I brushed futilely at my hair with one hand as I stuck a foot into a shoe and yanked at the heel strap with the other, trying to lurch towards the doorway and get my other foot into my other shoe all at the same time. Don’t laugh. We’ve all been there.

It wasn’t the fact that I undoubtedly had bed-head or that I’d just put my foot in the wrong shoe that was making my stomach lurch as though I’d gone on the wrong sort of amusement park ride. It was the man on the other side of the door. We hadn’t exactly ended our last conversation on the most positive of terms. It had been two whole days, and I had spent most of that time veering between self-justification and self-loathing, alternately assuring myself that I was absolutely in the right and kicking myself for being an insensitive ass.

I mean, Serena was his sister, so what right did I have to dictate to him how he should or shouldn’t behave to her? But I really had only been trying to help.

I’d been over that same patch of mental ground so many times that I felt like I’d worn a groove into my brain.

“Coming, coming, coming!” I called, lurching through the tiny hallway that doubled as a kitchen. Fortunately, my flat is about the size of a postage stamp. By the time the last word was out of my mouth, my hand was already on the doorknob, yanking open the door to reveal a tall, blond man holding a single red rose.

“Hi,” I said breathlessly.

Colin took in the hair standing straight up on one side of my head and the shoes I had managed to shove onto the wrong feet. The laugh lines on either sides of his eyes deepened.

“Napping?” he guessed, holding out the rose.

“Reading,” I corrected, accepting the flower. He didn’t look angry. Or sulky. He just looked . . . normal. Like a man about to take his girlfriend out for Valentine’s Day. “I was a million miles away.”

“Welcome back.” Taking the flower from my hand, he dropped it neatly into my sink (yes, my hallway/kitchen is that small) and gathered me into his arms for a proper hello kiss.

I took that to mean we were okay.

I’ll never understand boys, historical or modern. Here I had been, tormenting myself for the past forty-eight hours, convinced I had irreparably damaged the best thing I had going in years, and Colin had probably hung up the phone, gone to sleep, and not bothered thinking about it again. Not that I was complaining, mind you. I’d much rather make love than war. Or something like that.

Tottering on my mismatched stilettos, I clung to his shoulders. “Sure you want to go to the party?”

“No,” he agreed, resting his forehead against mine. “But we should probably put in an appearance.”

Right. It was Serena’s party. Damn, damn, damn. Open mouth, insert foot. I didn’t want to open that whole can of worms again. Worms plus foot would be very uncomfortable to swallow.

“Of course,” I said brightly. “It will be fun! Just let me grab my bag.”

Bright red and patterned in iridescent scarlet and hot pink beads, the bag was my concession to the occasion. “Don’t say it,” I warned Colin, as I saw him eyeing the bag with a look of masculine bemusement that looked like it was about to mature into a snide comment.

He held up both hands. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“It was a present from Pammy.” Left to myself, I don’t buy hot pink. Hot pink anything.

“Of course it was.”

I stuck out my tongue at him as he gallantly stepped aside to allow me to precede him through the door. His gallant gesture was self-defeating since I then had to wiggle back around him so I could lock the door.

We exchanged notes on our week as we made our way to the Tube. On Valentine’s Day night, hailing a cab was completely out of the question. All around us, there were signs of Valentine’s Day in progress; harried-looking men in sports coats hurriedly buying cellophane-wrapped flowers at the gas station/convenience store a block from my flat; groups of girls in tottery heels and defiantly red dresses, pink-cheeked in the February cold, trip-trapping their way towards the Tube; couples, in various stages of coupliness, meandering arm in arm or side by side or, in one case, one stalking several feet ahead, the other scurrying behind. Across the street, the gates of Hyde Park had already been locked, but the Park wall made an excellent place for blind dates meeting, agitated last-minute text messaging, and more than a bit of concerted smooching.

I tried to remember where I had been for Valentine’s Day last year and wished I hadn’t. Oh, right. Some things weren’t really worth remembering. Last Valentine’s Day, a mere two months after catching my then-boyfriend in the cloakroom of the Harvard Faculty Club with an art history student nearly ten years his junior, I had still been alternating between rage and despair. I had gotten sloshed on white chocolate martinis with two friends at the fancy dessert place in Harvard Square and stumbled home in a state of embarrassing inebriation to carry on a long and unhappy conversation with my mirror. Not the sort of memory one cares to dredge up, except by way of contrast.

I leaned into the hand resting on the small of my back, thought of the rose lying upside down in my kitchen sink, and breathed a silent prayer of thanks that I hadn’t managed to screw everything up with that ridiculous phone call two nights ago.

By the time we arrived at the gallery, I had my halo firmly in place. As far as relationship issues went, one needy sister was a fairly small cross to bear. I was going to be on my very best behavior and not make any fuss about sharing my Valentine’s Day with Serena. And who knew? It might even be fun.

Relinquishing our coats, Colin and I made our way, arm in arm, into Serena’s gallery. It was one of those terrifyingly posh modern places where they hang a single canvas per wall and the asking price per artwork is roughly the same as a down payment on a one bedroom flat. Not that they would do anything so indiscreet as affix a price tag to anything. That was for shops, not galleries. Instead, a tastefully clad assistant (i.e., Serena) would glide helpfully over and talk up the finer points of the piece until the question of purchase was reached after a decent interval of art appreciation, the intimation being, of course, that mere money could never be the point when Art was at stake, as though selling were somehow only a byproduct of the gallery’s proper mission of Encouraging Art.

“Isn’t your mother an artist?” I asked idly, as we strolled into the main gallery, having scooped up glasses of pink champagne from a tray by the entrance. The glasses were either genuine crystal or a very good facsimile. It was a far cry from red plastic tumblers in someone’s apartment in Cambridge.

“A painter,” confirmed Colin, nodding to an acquaintance in passing. “Some of her paintings are down at Selwick Hall. You’ve seen them.”

“The Italian scenes?”

“Like Canaletto on speed,” Colin agreed calmly.

I had thought they were quite good. “Did she get Serena this job?” I asked, guessing.

“No.” Was it my imagination, or did Colin’s lip actually curl? “Her husband did. He also works in the art world.”

Yep, that was definitely a curled lip, like curdled milk in smile form.

No one warns you, in college, that when you date someone you run a good chance of dating his family as well. This was a new experience for me. Grant, the evil ex, had been one of those oddly rootless types one finds frequently in the Ivy league. Grant had left the Midwest for Princeton at eighteen and never looked back. I knew he had a largeish family back in Michigan, with multiple brothers and sisters and even a few nieces and nephews floating around, but in the whole two years we had dated, I hadn’t met a single one of them. He had spoken to his mother on the phone for half an hour once every month, regular as clockwork and about as intimate.

Colin, on the other hand, came not only with a full complement of interesting ancestors, but plenty of living ones, all of whom kept intruding on the scene in one way or another. I couldn’t decide whether to be entertained, or very, very afraid. My mother would probably opt for the latter. She has very strong feelings about certain of my father’s relatives.

What was the stepfather doing dredging up jobs for Serena, when, from what I could gather, Serena wasn’t on speaking terms with either him or her mother?

“What do you think of the show?”

Not wanting to set off any more red flags about his family—I had done enough of that the other night—I let it go. For the moment. I could always ask Serena later.

I squinted at a very large bronze that might be either Europa being seduced by a bull, a squashed globe, or an interpretive exposition on global poverty in a postmodern world (that last comes from the little plaque in front of the sculpture). Personally, I didn’t see it. But it could have been worse. Crosses in urine, toilets masquerading as installation art, rooms constructed entirely of balloons that popped when you stepped on them.

Compared to the exploding balloon exhibit, I could cope with Zeus as commentary on global poverty.

Leaning comfortably against Colin’s arm, I took the measure of the room. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

“It helps to have low expectations,” my boyfriend agreed, looking doubtfully at his pink champagne before taking a gingerly sip.

Across the room, I could see Serena, pink-cheeked with champagne, in an animated discussion with a man in a black cashmere turtleneck and something that wasn’t quite a beret but wanted to be. They seemed to be deeply enmeshed in agreeing over the merits of a statue that looked to me like a squashed hamburger without the bun.

“We’re philistines, aren’t we?” I said, looking up at Colin.

“Irredeemably,” he agreed cheerfully, taking a more confident swig of his champagne. Apparently, he had concluded that just because it looked pink didn’t mean it tasted pink.