The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (6 page)

“No,” said Alex shortly. “Holcar is based in the north. Hyderabad is more southerly.”

Lady Frederick smiled beatifically up at him, but her amber eyes glinted with a hint of hellfire. “If the war is in the north and Hyderabad is in the south . . .”

“I’m afraid it’s not so simple as that,” Alex said stiffly.

“No, nothing ever is, is it,” agreed Lady Frederick. “I generally prefer to see for myself.”

“You might,” said Alex, striving for cordiality, “prefer to see for yourself after the monsoon. The trip is not a pleasant one during the rains.”

He looked pointedly at his father.

With an abrupt cough, his father belatedly picked up his cue. The Colonel beamed at Lady Frederick with all the force of his considerable charm. “You wouldn’t want to be missing the Calcutta season, Lady Frederick. We have routs and balls and theatrical entertainments. You couldn’t be so cruel as to deprive us of your company, could you, now?”

“Yes, do stay,” contributed Fiske, his guppy mouth conducting its own fishy orgy of innuendo. “I promise to personally see to your entertainment. I’m sure Freddy won’t mind, will you, old bean?”

“You needn’t trouble yourself,” said Lady Frederick, with an inscrutable look in the direction of her husband. “I had enough of society in London.”

She might think so now, but Alex doubted she would be of that opinion three months from now. He had never known a less appealing cluster of people than the handful of English ladies washed up with their husbands in Hyderabad, bitter with boredom and universally discontented with their lots. Of all the Residency ladies, only Mrs. Ure, the physician’s wife, appeared content, and that was because her one passion was food, a passion that she satisfied daily to the extreme detriment of both the Residency larder and her figure.

It was true that Begum Johnson had lived for some time away from English society, but she was different; she had been born in India, grown up in India, knew it and loved it as he did. They didn’t make women like her anymore.

Alex’s thoughts turned to his two sisters, Kat and Lizzy, sent home to Kat’s maternal grandmother in England to learn to become proper English gentlewomen. He knew it was necessary; he knew that Lizzy, born of his father’s extended liaison with a Rajput lady, would have a better life in England, where prejudice towards half-castes was less pronounced than among the increasingly insular British community in India; but he still hated to think of them turning their backs on their early upbringing, taking on the senseless airs and graces so prized by lady visitors to Calcutta, becoming foreign to him. Becoming, in fact, like Lady Frederick.

It only took one look at her to know that Lady Frederick Staines was entirely unfit to undertake the trip to Hyderabad. Her muslin dress looked as if it might rip if anyone so much breathed on it. There were pearls twined in her flaming red hair along with white flowers fresh from the Governor General’s own gardens. They were fragile blossoms, English flowers of the sort that flourished in India only in the English areas, with fussing and watering and careful handling. In the candlelight, her skin, liberally displayed by the scooped neck and short sleeves of her gown, appeared to be nearly the same color as the petals and possessed of the same haunting scent.

And would, Alex reminded himself, bruise just as quickly as those petals. That skin of hers wouldn’t last two minutes in the sun. The first part of the journey could be accomplished by boat, but how would she fare on the grueling seven-day trek from the coast to the British Residency in Hyderabad? Once there—if Mrs. Dalrymple and her cronies complained of boredom, it could be worse for a London lady. On top of the boredom, there would be the hundred small irritations born of an unfamiliar climate, the intestinal disorders, the sunstroke, the prickly heat, and boils that would mar that impossible skin. Lady Frederick was a thing of mother-of-pearl and moonlight, designed for costly drawing rooms in a cold climate. Not for India and certainly not for Hyderabad.

She might, thought Alex callously, do well enough in Calcutta. The cold season was almost upon them and there would be balls and entertainments enough even for a spoiled daughter of the aristocracy. There would be plenty to fawn over her for the sake of her husband’s title.

“I don’t think you realize quite how dull a provincial residency can be,” Alex warned. “We have none of the amenities to which you are accustomed. There are no concerts, no balls, no—” He struggled to recall the complaints he had heard from the Englishwomen resident in Hyderabad.

“No milliners,” finished the Colonel for him. “Nor dressmakers, either.”

Lord Frederick appeared entirely unconcerned about his wife’s haberdashery. “As long as the shooting is good, I’m sure we’ll jog along all right. Right, old thing?” Without waiting for his wife’s response, he looked to Alex. “We leave tomorrow.”

Alex wondered just why he was so anxious to go. Was it Wellesley prodding him? Or something else?

“With all due respect, there are arrangements to be made. It’s not exactly the same as traveling from London to Surrey.” Alex couldn’t quite manage to keep the asperity out of his voice.

“I don’t see why not,” said Lord Frederick. “It’s always bally raining there, too.”

Fiske hee-hawed and Cleave contrived a restrained chuckle. Alex managed not to bang his head against the wall. “Yes,” he said mildly, “but there are fewer elephants in Surrey.”

“What the lad means,” intervened his father, with the glibness for which he was known throughout the cantonments of India, “is that it takes time to arrange a fitting entourage for a personage of your stature. You wouldn’t want the Hyderabadis to think you were a person of no account, now, would you?”

That appeared to resonate with their young lordling. He nodded in a thoughtful way, his lips pursing. “A week Tuesday, then.” Reaching into his waistcoat pocket, he flipped a gold coin in Alex’s direction. “See that you hire a few extra elephants.”

Well, they already had an ass.

Alex’s father slipped the guinea from Alex’s nerveless fingers and handed it back to Lord Frederick. “You can settle accounts with the Governor General,” he said.

Alex didn’t need his father’s warning look to tell him that departure was the better part of valor. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said in a voice like granite, “I’ll go see to those arrangements. Lord Frederick, Lady Frederick. Cleave. Fiske.”

“Good man.” Lord Frederick favored him with a perfunctory nod before turning back to Fiske. “Now about that filly . . .” Alex heard him saying as he walked away.

Alex concentrated on putting one foot in front of another and breathing deeply through his nose. The Begum’s house was as familiar to Alex as his own quarters. He turned to the left, pushing open the door to the deserted book room. Behind him, he could hear the slap and shuffle of his father’s boots against the marble floor.

“Easy, my lad, easy,” warned his father, peering down the corridor and pushing the door shut behind them. “Keep a rein on that temper of yours.”

Alex regarded his father sourly. His father had many virtues, but restraint of any kind was not known to be one of them. Otherwise, Alex would never have had quite so many half-siblings.

Besides, he had no temper. He was a remarkably even-tempered man. Except in the face of sheer stupidity. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a good deal of that going around Calcutta.

“That,” Alex said pointedly, jerking his head towards the room they had just vacated, “is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Just so long as you don’t allow it to happen to you,” returned his father equably. Beneath their wrinkled lids, his faded blue eyes were surprisingly shrewd. Self-indulgent he might be, but no one had ever called him stupid. “I’m within an ace of wrangling that district commissionership for you. So don’t go fouling it up out of some high-minded notion.”

At the moment, Alex was feeling more bloody-minded than high-minded. It was all very well for his father to counsel prudence, but as far as Alex could see, he was damned either way.

“Fine,” said Alex. “Let’s say I hold my tongue and cart Lord and Lady Freddy meekly off to Hyderabad a week Tuesday. What happens when that idiot sparks off a civil war? I doubt I’ll receive commendations when Mir Alam’s lads kick us out of Hyderabad, lock, stock, and barrel. With matters the way they stand, Wellesley’s new pet could undo in a moment what Kirkpatrick took six years to accomplish.”

His father regarded him patiently. “It’s not all on your shoulders, Alex.”

“Then whose?” Alex demanded, frustration ringing through his voice. “Wellesley doesn’t trust Kirkpatrick to piss without someone writing a secret report on it; Russell isn’t a bad sort, but he’s untried—”

“—and a bit too much in love with himself,” the Colonel humored him by adding.

Alex glowered at his father. Just because he had said it before didn’t make it any less true or any less problematic. “Precisely. The new Nizam is a tin-pot Nero who gets his amusement using silk handkerchiefs to throttle his concubines. He’ll go wherever Mir Alam tells him to, just so long as Alam doesn’t cut off his supply of expensive hankies and cheap women. And Mir Alam is half rotted with leprosy and demented with the desire to be revenged upon the British, because he blames us for his bloody exile four years ago.”

“It is unfortunate, that,” admitted his father.

“ ‘ Unfortunate’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s a bloody fiasco. And do you know what makes it even worse?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me, lad,” said his father, patting him fondly on the shoulder.

Alex ought to have resented the pat, but he was too busy with his main rant to waste time on peripheral grievances. “It was Wellesley that bloody saddled us with Mir Alam! He met him years ago in Mysore and decided he was a good chap. But, no, he couldn’t be bothered to look into what might have happened in the interim! He’s too busy poking into Kirkpatrick’s bedchamber, like a bloody peeping Tom!”

“Whoa, there.” The Colonel’s hand tightened on his arm. “Keep your voice down. You don’t want to be losing your post for a moment’s ill-humor.”

“It’s more than a moment,” said Alex tiredly, feeling the rage wash out of him, leaving him feeling like a fish washed up on the beach. “It’s been months, ever since Wellesley pushed Mir Alam’s appointment as First Minister. And what’s the point of hanging on to my post if there’s nothing I can do with it? Except play lackey to a walking disaster,” he added bitterly. “It’s like being asked to play host to one’s own executioner.”

“Patience,” advised the Colonel.

“For what?” demanded Alex. “More of the same?”

Looking to the left and right, the Colonel tapped a finger against the side of his nose. “Word to the wise, my boy,” he said sotto voce. “It isn’t generally known yet, but the word is that Wellesley is on his way out. Apparently the folks back home on the Board of Control are none too happy with the Governor General’s expenditures.”

Alex looked at his father closely. “How ‘none too happy’?”

His father regarded him shrewdly. “Between the cost of the war with the Mahrattas and that grand Government House the Governor General has been building, they’re feeling the pinch in their purses, lad. You can guess how unhappy that makes them.”

Alex absorbed the information. “Is there any word on whom they might send to replace him?”

The Colonel shook his head. “It’s all just rumor, as yet. But if you get yourself disciplined before Wellesley goes, it won’t matter who the new man is.”

He would have to be right, wouldn’t he? Feeling like a small boy caught out in some petty carelessness, Alex inclined his head in the briefest of acknowledgments. “Point taken.”

His father clapped him on the shoulder, the reward after the scolding. “It will be all right, my boy, just you wait and see.”

“When do you sail?” Alex asked, deeming it wise to change the subject while he was still ahead.

Having served for four decades in the Madras Native Cavalry, his father had finally deemed it time to retire from active service. After a childhood in Charleston, a lifetime soldiering in India, and amours of various extractions, the Laughing Colonel, scourge of Madras, was retiring to Bath to be closer to his daughters. Alex’s Jacobite grandparents must be turning in their graves.

“That depends in part on you.” The Colonel paused to allow the impact of his words to sink in. Alex folded his arms across his chest, signaling to his father that he knew exactly what he was up to. Feigning obliviousness, the Colonel carried on innocently, “I shouldn’t like to go until I see you settled. Although it will be that glad I am to see Kat and Lizzy again.”

“Give them my love when you see them,” said Alex. It seemed a more manly way of saying good-bye than
I’ll miss you
.

As much as he hated to admit it, he would miss the old reprobate. His father might have had eccentric notions of family life, but they had been affectionate ones, for all that. The Colonel had never repudiated any of his offspring, no matter how irregular the circumstances. Of five living siblings, only Alex and his sister Kat were technically legitimate, but the Colonel had always treated all of his children with exactly the same rambunctious affection, no matter which side of the blanket they had tumbled out of. He had seen to their schooling and found placement for Alex in his own cavalry unit. For George, who was barred from the East India Company’s army by virtue of being the offspring of an Indian woman, he had wrangled a command in the service of a native ruler, the Begum Sumroo.

As a young man eager to make his own mark on the world, Alex had often found his father’s constant oversight irksome. He had left the cavalry for the political service, left Madras for Hyderabad, done everything he could to make his own way in his own way, gritting his teeth at the invariable “Oh, Reid’s boy, are you? Splendid chap!” that greased his way even as it did damage to his molars. But over the years, he and his father had come to a comfortable sort of understanding.