The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (44 page)

Tight-lipped, Alex watched as a groom helped Penelope onto Buttercup. There was no point in arguing with her in this sort of mood; better to let her ride off the worst of her shock. It was just shock, Alex told himself. She would be fine by and by, Penelope. She was tough. Resilient. Stubborn.

Why didn’t he feel reassured?

Since there was nothing else he could do, he caught the eye of the groom. Alex recognized the man, one of the Residency’s staff. Alex angled his head towards Penelope, signaling the groom to stay close. Not that it made much difference, but it made him feel better. Like he was doing something for her.

“Quite a spot of bother, this,” said Fiske beside him. “Not exactly one for the dispatches, eh?”

“Spot of bother,” Alex repeated slowly. Well, that was one way of putting it. The bearers assigned to Lord Frederick’s palanquin re-shouldered their mortal burden. Knowing that Lord Frederick’s corpse lay in the midst of the caravan gave it the air of a funeral cortege, rather than the hunting expedition it had been.

Unless the game had never been grouse.

A snake might very well have crawled into Lord Frederick’s blankets. But for a snake to fatally bite Lord Frederick a mere three days after a cobra had been discovered in his and his wife’s bedroom was too much of a coincidence to stomach.

There were too many bloody snakes for coincidence.

Too many bloody snakes, and too many two-legged reptiles who might have planted them. It needn’t even have been a real snakebite. The double-pronged thorn of the kikar tree, dipped in poison, would replicate the shape and symptoms of snakebite, with none of the irritating element of chance involved in using the genuine article. A brief prick, and the sleeping victim would be doomed even before he awoke. All that would be left to do would be to take the body of a dead snake and place it by the victim’s wound, where it could be conveniently “discovered” the following morning. It was a fairly fool-proof strategy. Anyone spotting the deadly snake would be likely to take a bludgeon first and ask questions later. By the time the hullabaloo died down, the snake would be well and truly dead. As dead as Lord Frederick Staines.

Alex’s skin crawled despite the heat. Who had killed Lord Frederick Staines? And what did that mean for Lord Frederick’s bereaved wife?

Fiske was the most obvious culprit, Fiske, who was watching Penelope mount her horse, his mouth going in and out in that fish-like way of his. He looked smug. But, then, he always looked smug. It would have been easy enough for him to arrange for that cobra in the Staineses’ bungalow—but they had assumed before that the cobra had been meant for Penelope, to prevent her revealing Fiske’s putative identity as the Marigold. Lord Frederick might have known, or found out. Or a cautious spy might simply have deemed it expedient to root out both husband and wife, agreeing with English law that the two were, in essence, one body.

Unless it wasn’t Fiske at all.

If Penelope were to be believed, someone had tried to kill Lord Frederick before. Alex could almost have smiled when he remembered how Penelope had originally sought to lay the blame for that at his door, accusing him of attempting to murder her husband. Almost. The syce would have been the most logical suspect in that instance, as the man with the opportunity to weaken the girth and send Lord Frederick tumbling. It had been the syce, Mehdi Yar, who “found” the snake in Lord Frederick’s tent that morning. There was just one problem with that theory. Alex would have been willing to swear that the groom had been one of Wellesley’s plants, an informant planted in Calcutta by no less an authority than the office of the Governor General himself. In that case, why would Wellesley’s plant kill off Wellesley’s own chosen envoy?

Unless, of course, Wellesley’s plant had caught Wellesley’s envoy red-handed in a spot of double-dealing.

Alex’s head ached with more than heat. Lord Frederick Staines as the Marigold? It was impossible. He had just got to India four months ago. But that wasn’t quite true, was it? Lord Frederick had been in India before, at a time of extreme turmoil, in the center of a set known for their dissolute and self-serving behavior. It was Penelope herself who had told him that Lord Frederick’s old mate, Wrothan, had been running a spy ring out of his Hellfire Club. The two had been as thick as thieves in Mysore. The phrase might be more than just a metaphor.

Alex positioned himself in the column of riders a little way behind Penelope, near enough to keep an eye on her.

She had never explained how she knew quite so much about the Marigold. Did she—

No. The idea was absurd. It was impossible to imagine Penelope as a cold-blooded assassin, planting a cobra in her own room, arranging her husband’s death, either as a double-dealing agent for Wellesley or as a representative of whatever this bloody flowery cabal might be. It wasn’t that he thought her incapable of it; it just wasn’t in her style. If she had wanted to kill her husband, she would have done it simply, cleanly, with a bullet through the breast, not this convoluted charade of snakes and poison. Subtlety wasn’t among Penelope’s vices.

Alex’s heart twisted at the thought of her, his impetuous, impulsive, passionate Penelope.

His recently bereaved Penelope. Penelope who might still be in danger from whoever had killed her husband. Alex made himself stop mooning and forced himself to concentrate. The snakes were still out, and there were more of them than he cared to count. Penelope might not be one for the subtle and convoluted, but Alex knew someone who was.

So had Lord Frederick. Intimately.

Alex maneuvered his mount forward, next to Fiske’s. Fiske was riding beside Penelope, and Alex signaled him to fall back, leaving Pinchingdale by Penelope’s other side. Getting Fiske away from Penelope was only a pleasant by-product of his real purpose. With Lord Frederick dead, Fiske was the de facto senior member of the original expedition, the one most likely to have the information Alex needed.

“Is that woman still in the camp?” Alex asked in an undertone, or at least as much of an undertone as one could manage and still be heard, surrounded by thudding hooves and creaky baggage ropes.

“Woman?” said Fiske blandly.

The man knew very well who he meant. “Nur Bai.”

Another person who might well want Lord Frederick dead, for personal reasons, professional reasons, or both. There had been rumors during her time as mistress to Major Guignon that she had become so on the instruction of Mir Alam, but where her ultimate loyalties lay were known to no one but the lady herself.

“Oh.” The syllable oozed through Fiske’s perpetually rounded lips like an eel’s. A poisonous one. “So you knew about Freddy’s little bit of fun.”

Little bit of fun? He doubted Nur Bai would appreciate the sobriquet. If Lord Frederick had called her that, no wonder there was a snake in his bed.

“He wasn’t exactly subtle about it.” That had come out a little more vehemently than intended. Alex hastily wiped his face blank. “Is she gone?”

“I can’t imagine why she would still be here.” Fiske pursed his lips. “She seemed a practical enough daughter of the game to me. Can’t very well service a corpse, can she?”

“Thank you for that lovely image,” Alex said dryly.

Fiske laughed. No, giggled. A high-pitched, fluting giggle. Alex looked at him with a mix of disdain and incredulity he couldn’t quite suppress. And this was the man they had suspected of being a master spy, responsible for the cold-blooded murder of his former messmate?

Perhaps. Even as he hee-hawed, Fiske’s pale eyes were as hard as ice and twice as cold.

“If you’re looking to replace old Fredders,” Fiske said carelessly, his tone at odds with his eyes, “I doubt you can afford her.”

With an effort, Alex kept his voice pleasant. “I simply wanted to make sure there would be no awkward encounters between Lord Frederick’s mistress and his wife. His widow.”

He could hear Penelope’s voice in his head, accusing him of thinking of her only as Lord Frederick’s wife, his chattel, like his horse or his stock. But that was how Fiske would think of her, as an object, a category. Better for Fiske to keep thinking of her that way, as Lord Frederick’s widow, his relict, someone of no further importance—and, especially, of no further danger to him.

“No cat fights, eh?” Fiske looked as though the prospect rather pleased him. “Oh well. The dusky beauty appears to have cleared out, as far as I can tell.”

Alex nodded stiffly. He would have to check for himself, of course. “Good.” And, then, just to make sure he had a plausible reason for his concern, “We don’t want any discredit to redound to the Residency from this affair.”

“No,” said Fiske thoughtfully. “One wouldn’t want to embarrass oneself with any of one’s . . . affairs.”

Before Alex could react, the other man raised a languid hand and cantered forward to reclaim his place beside the ominously silent form of Lord Frederick’s widow.

“And then old Freddy tripped over the hem of his robe, and pitched right into the ceremonial brew!”

Fiske giggled as his latest how-I-remember-Freddy story bar reled to a rollicking close. Pinchingdale obliged with a hee-haw. Even the new widow permitted herself a small, ironic smile, directed into the campfire, as though she could see her husband reflected in the flames, facedown in a butt of mead, sputtering, bare shins thrashing in the air.

Alex sat on the edge of the group, near them but not part of them. Their first night on the road had turned into an informal wake for Lord Frederick Staines, each man vying to tell more outrageous stories of the dead man’s exploits: his fearlessness on the hunt; his successes on the field of battle (more sartorial than military if the stories were anything to go by); his popularity with the ladies, his clubs, his friends, his family, his tailor.

It was a world foreign to Alex, but not to Penelope. She didn’t so much as blink at the introduction of names like Badger Throckhurst. Apparently, she knew Badger. He had had a mishap with a punch bowl and Freddy—Lord Frederick—had made money off it on some sort of long-standing wager in one of the umpteen London clubs to which he belonged, the names of which meant nothing to Alex, but a great deal to Fiske and Pinchingdale, who belonged to them, too. It was Penelope who had contributed that story, her voice rusty from disuse and rough with brandy, drunk neat from Fiske’s flask.

This was good for her, Alex knew. Good for her to talk about her husband’s life, to remember him as he had been, with other people who had known him and, more importantly, liked him. Under the influence of the fire and the brandy and the stories, the pasty color had left her cheeks. There was still an odd fragility about her, as though she were held together by a brace of pins that might drop out at any moment, but a muted version of her old sarcasm had replaced the stony calm in which she had ridden all afternoon.

Except when it came to Alex. The few times he had ventured a comment, the blankness had returned to her eyes and she had looked right through him, as though he weren’t there.

He stopped trying after the first few times.

This was what she needed, he told himself. It was only natural for her to look to her husband’s memory, to try to come to terms with his death. She might not have loved her husband, but he had been her husband, and his death had come as a shock. She needed time to come to terms with it. It shouldn’t matter who was comforting her, so long as she was comforted.

That was his official line. In truth, he gritted his teeth every time Fiske opened his mouth and he had to swallow a scowl every time the loathsome man brought a smile, no matter how anemic, to Penelope’s lips. He squirmed every time she reached to take the flask from Fiske’s hands, her lips touching where Fiske’s lips had touched.

Alex was supposed to be the one comforting her, not Fiske. Especially not Fiske, the very man who might be the cause of her husband’s death. It was bloody ridiculous, even if there had been no other considerations involved. Alex was supposed to be the one she turned to in her time of need, the one she looked to across the campfire, the one from whose flask she drank. All right, so he didn’t have a flask. It was the idea of it that counted.

How in the hell did his bloody father do it? Women fell for the old Colonel right, left, and center, forsaking home and hearth just for a chance at his smiles. And here he was, with just one woman in the whole wide world whom he wanted, and for all the attention she paid him, he might as well have been another log on the fire, here today, gone tomorrow. Disposable.

He might try to salvage his hopes by putting it down to shock and grief, but Fiske’s casual reminiscences opened a whole vista of problems Alex had been too blinded to consider. Yes, Penelope was finally free. But free to what? This world Fiske evoked, this world of restricted clubs and even more restricted parties; this was Penelope’s real world, her real home, only a six-month voyage away. With Lord Frederick gone, what reason did she have to stay in India?