The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

Chapter Twenty

When he arrived at the main gate, Penelope was waiting for him.

In her dark blue habit, she looked like a smudge against the landscape, a dark splotch against the pale stone of the walls. Not yet dawn, the sky was dark, the air still held its nighttime chill, and the sentries in their box were little more than smudges themselves, patently uninterested in the appearance of anyone whose purpose was not to relieve them from their posts.

Alex checked when he saw Penelope waiting for him, fighting a craven desire to turn right around and ride out the back way.

They had never resolved the question of her presence, at least, not to their mutual satisfaction. As far as Alex was concerned, he was going to Berar alone. He had said so. Repeatedly. And when that failed, he had resorted to a knave’s trick; he had told her he planned to leave at dawn. So here he was in the predawn dark, his saddlebags packed and his provisions ready, and here was she.

It was too bloody late for a fight. Or did he mean too early? He had never been to bed. He assumed she hadn’t either. Even so, there was nothing fatigued about her straight-spined stance as she sat her horse, waiting for him with the alert composure of a seasoned general watching for an enemy attack.

Eschewing the coward’s way out, Alex spurred forward. Penelope calmly clucked her own mount into motion, moving from her vantage point by the side of the gate to meet him in the open space beyond.

“No,” he said.

“Good morning to you, too,” Penelope said coolly, bringing her horse into step with his. “Going somewhere?”

Alex pulled abruptly to the side, far enough in the shadow of the walls to put them out of range of the sentries’ incurious gaze. He reined up, turning to face her. “You know very well where.”

“You were going to leave without me.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.” He had meant to leave it at that, but found he couldn’t. He caught himself groping after explanations, excuses. He shouldn’t need them. They had been over all this the night before. Even if they hadn’t agreed. With an exasperated sigh, Alex rubbed a hand over his bloodshot eyes. “We discussed this.”

“We clearly came to different resolutions.” Penelope leaned back in her saddle. “Let me make this clear. I don’t care about traveling rough or riding hard or any of those things. I would far rather be in the saddle than in the Residency drawing room.”

“It’s not that I’m worried about,” Alex said reluctantly. “Although I don’t think you’ll like the saddle sores after the second day of continuous riding.”

“Then what? My reputation?” Seeing the confirmation in his face, Penelope laughed, a laugh like cut glass, all brilliant glitter and jagged edges. “Darling Alex. Darling, innocent Alex, I haven’t any reputation left to lose. I divested myself of that a long time ago. Why do you think Fiske and that lot dare to treat me as they do? If I’m to have the opprobrium, I might at least have the freedom.”

It made Alex’s teeth grit to think of Fiske or any of his dissolute companions daring to sit in judgment of Penelope. Including her husband.

“Fiske treats most women as fair game,” he said sharply. “Not just you. If it is discovered that we were traveling alone together, it will be a very great deal of opprobrium — for a very small space of freedom. Are you sure you want to make that trade?”

“It is my trade to make.” Her face lit with a sudden, irresistible smile. Like the sun coming out from beyond the clouds, thought a dazzled Alex unoriginally, as she turned the full force of her considerable charm in his direction, saying deliberately, wheedlingly, “What can possibly be wrong with a lady hastening to join her husband, escorted by a dour and reliable member of the Residency staff? I think it’s terribly romantic, don’t you?”

He smiled reluctantly. “Is that what you told your ayah?”

“Yes, with strict orders not to tell anyone at all. Which means she will tell absolutely everyone. By dawn, the story will be all around the Residency. So you see, if I return now, it will cause more talk than if I go.”

Alex wasn’t quite sure he agreed with that logic, but he let it go. “And if I leave without you?”

“I will follow,” she said without hesitation. “Loudly. Conspicuously. Embarrassingly.”

She wouldn’t, really. If she followed, it would be silently and purposefully. But she would follow.

The devil of it was, he wanted her there. Which was, in his fatigue-fuddled brain, all the more reason why she shouldn’t be there. It was several days’ ride to Berar, days of riding together, foraging together, bunking together. It wasn’t the riding or foraging he was worried about.

As if reading his mind, Penelope said caustically, “You needn’t be afraid for your virtue. Who is Sir Galahad to be swayed by such a minor siren as I?”

“I’m not Sir Galahad,” said Alex tiredly, seizing on the least of the points. “And I don’t remember him having much trouble with sirens.”

Was Sir Galahad the one who slept with the king’s wife? Or was that another one? Either way, he wasn’t a knight of any table, round or otherwise.

“Odysseus, then,” said Penelope carelessly. “Whoever you imagine yourself to be, you needn’t fear that I’ll force my attentions upon you. You made your feelings on that score quite clear.” As if suddenly impatient with the whole discussion, she set her heels to Buttercup’s sides. “Are you coming? Or am I going without you?”

He had done the right thing by refusing her offers the night before. He had done it for her own good, to save her misery and regret. Then why did he feel like such a heel?

Alex hastened to catch up with her. “You don’t know where you’re going.”

It was only a pro forma protest and she knew it. He was not going to leave her to wander the countryside of Hyderabad by herself. Alex’s stomach experienced a sinking feeling, like a rock cake settling to the bottom of his gut. Bunk mates it was going to be. In separate bedrolls.

Penelope cast him a superior look. “How hard can it be?”

Harder than she knew.

“Without map, compass, or more than a rudimentary knowledge of the language? Just as a broad guess, I would say very.”

Penelope ducked her chin and looked up at him from under her lashes. “I like a challenge.”

And then she was away ahead, deliberately leaving him in her dust.

Stifling a cough, Alex shook his head, smiled wryly, and followed along behind, prepared to head her off should she take the wrong pass. She deserved to be allowed to make her point. Up to a point, that was.

She put on a good show, but he could see from the tension of her shoulders that she was still geared for battle. That was his Penelope, always ready with a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, prepared to come out swinging. Swinging, shooting, jumping into a river. The memory made him grin, despite his fatigue. Watching her plunge into the river had taken a good year off his life, but he couldn’t help but be impressed by the sheer, brash courage of it. It wasn’t many women who would plunge into a river in full spate after a drowning man or shoot down a cobra by candlelight. The woman he had first met, in a drawing room in Calcutta, might have been an entirely different creature, a construct of his own preconceptions and prejudices.

Yet, beneath all that bravado, there were times when she seemed as fragile as glass, protected from shattering only by that thick layer of nonchalance she cast up around her like a shield. You needn’t fear that I’ll force my attentions upon you , she had said, as though it weren’t entirely the other way around. He recalled the bleak expression on her face last night, in the garden, when he had come upon her on her way back from her bungalow. Bleak and lost, lost in a way that had nothing to do with maps or compasses or geographical terrain.

It hadn’t been a love match, she had said. Even so, he remembered the way she had followed after Lord Frederick that night after the river, watching his shadow through the wall of the tent like a beggar at a lighted window. He had never seen anyone look quite so alone as Penelope had that night.

What had they been to each other back in London? Had she thought she loved him then? Alex supposed Lord Frederick was charming enough, if one didn’t know him well. He was titled, polished, not entirely dull-witted. Even a clever woman could make the mistake of falling in love with a handsome face.

He hated the thought of her with Lord Frederick; he hated the thought that Lord Frederick still held the power to wound her so. For all that Penelope had tried to banish the topic, Lord Frederick had been all around them the night before: his house, his room, his bed. In that room, at that moment, it had been impossible to know whether Penelope’s attentions, physical and otherwise, had been truly for him, or whether he was merely a weapon wielded in a rearguard action against her husband, gouging out the memory of her husband’s mistress by bringing another man into her husband’s bed. It was not a particularly flattering thought.

He had hurt her, too, he realized, in turning her down. Just how much, he hadn’t suspected until that moment by the gate, when she had spurred her way forward ahead of him.

How to explain that it wasn’t the lack of wanting that was the problem? It wasn’t just physical desire, even though that was the sole currency by which Penelope appeared to measure her own worth. It would be easier if it were. The reality was much more complicated and much more worrisome. He appreciated her as a companion; he admired her as a comrade; he wanted her as a lover.

All innocuous enough each on its own. Put together . . . Christ. What a coil. His father couldn’t have done better. She was the wife of a man who was technically his superior, a visitor to his province, a lady under his protection. It was the devil of a time to finally discover just what it was that had made James decide to risk his job and his neck for the love of Khair-un-Nissa, or his father’s Rajput concubine to put knife to chest when his father had strayed, this fierce, possessive, overwhelming something.

Oh, hell. Not just something. He might as well call it by its name. Love. Such a mild term for such a destructive force.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had decided long, long ago that when he fell in love, it was going to be appropriate. Orderly.

He had had it all figured out. Once he had established himself in the political service, settled in his own district with a reasonable sufficiency with which to support a wife, he was going to set about looking among the daughters of his father’s peers for a pleasant, sensible sort of girl, preferably one raised in India, who knew the land, the language, and the people, who wouldn’t cherish any false expectations about the sort of life he would be able to provide for her. Simple as that. They would marry, raise a family, and that would be that, all open, above-board, and legitimate. Legitimate was very important.

The only one of those qualifications Penelope fit was that she was female.

Yet, there it was. And, for all his good resolutions, he had hurt her last night and he didn’t know how to put it right.

“That was a damned fine shot last night,” he said awkwardly, trotting along beside her. Compliments, his father always swore. A sure way to any woman’s bed. Not that her bed was his goal, of course. “Taking down that cobra.”

If Penelope was softened, she didn’t show it. “It took you long enough to acknowledge it.”

That was truer than she knew.

“You were too busy complimenting yourself to let me get a word in,” said Alex bracingly.

“If I don’t, who will?” She had meant it to be flippant, but didn’t quite carry it off. Penelope looked away, gesturing at random at the passing fields. “This landscape reminds me of the Highlands, all craggy, with those bursts of green.”

“The Highlands?” Alex, having never been, looked skeptically around them. It still looked like Hyderabad to him. “I shouldn’t think they have many mangos there. Or banyan trees.”

“Haven’t you been? I thought your father was Scottish.”

“At a remove,” said Alex. He grinned reminiscently. “Although he can muster a fairly convincing brogue when he’s in his cups. And he does insist on singing the most appalling collection of sentimental Scottish ballads at the slightest provocation.”

“I shall remember that,” said Penelope, and Alex turned his mind away from the thought that it was highly unlikely his father and Penelope should ever cross paths again.

Why should they, after all? he asked himself harshly. No matter how he might feel about her — and he very carefully shied away from naming that feeling — they were from different worlds, he and Penelope, and they would return to them.

Eventually.

But that eventually would come no matter how far away it might feel now, in the no-man’s-land of the back roads of the Deccan. Penelope came from title, wealth, privilege. He came from a long line of charming scoundrels, outlaws in all but name. There were Reids dot-ting the English-speaking world, adventurers, wanderers, gamblers. Dreamers. In Alex, that had all been tempered by the stern strain on his mother’s side.

At least, so he had thought. Perhaps he wasn’t quite so immune from the flighty fancies of his father’s family as he had imagined, lusting after the impossible and spinning tales designed to make it true.

“My grandparents fled Scotland after the ’45,” said Alex abruptly. “They were Jacobites. Traitors, as your side would have it.”

“Oh, so it’s my side now?” mocked Penelope. “I’ll have you know that my very own uncle was court-martialed for his part in the rising in Dublin in ’98. It was quite embarrassing for my mother. She tried to pretend she wasn’t related to him.”

Penelope’s lips curved with a malicious satisfaction that gave Alex a fair inkling as to the nature of her relationship with her mother.

“How embarrassing for your mother,” Alex said dryly. Nice to know that there were other people with treasonous siblings out there.

Jack. Another matter he didn’t want to think about. They were piling up, like sandbags at a siege.

Penelope raised an eyebrow, every inch the debutante. “Of course, Lord Edward Fitzgerald was involved in the rising, too, so there was at least some social cachet to it.”

Alex choked on a laugh. “Indeed?”

Penelope nodded serenely. “A grandson of the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, no less. It was the only saving grace as far as Mother was concerned.”

“She wasn’t at all concerned for her brother?”

Penelope shrugged. “As far as my mother was concerned, once her surname changed, so did her family. I never met my uncle, nor any of my cousins, for that matter. I gather there are a number of them.”

Alex had never met his cousins either — there were scads of them back in Charleston, uncles and aunts and cousins and so forth — but there had always been letters, scores of letters back and forth between his father and his father’s siblings, marking marriages, births, deaths, feuds, reconciliations, fortunes lost and won. The letters were frequently torn, crumpled, months, even years late, but still they came; just as George wrote dutifully to Lizzy, and Kat sent scathing commentary and embroidered handkerchiefs to him.

The only one left out was Jack, and that was of his own accord, not for want of attempts to drag him body and soul back into the warmth of the family circle.

“Did your family mind?” Alex asked curiously. “Your coming here?”

Penelope clearly found the question an odd one. “Why should they? My brothers scarcely noticed me when I was home. And my mother was primarily concerned that I use the opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with Lady Clive.”

It had been a wrench for his father to send his Lizzy and Kat to England two years before and just as much of a wrench to go and join them and leave Alex and George behind. He had fussed over all of their departures like a mother hen, clucking and brooding. Penelope’s picture of complete indifference was as alien to him as — well, as the rest of her London world.

It was impossible for him to imagine a world without the solid foundation of a family’s affection. No matter how far any of them roamed, that was home in the end, one another, even when they drove one another mad.

No wonder Penelope clung even to the unreliable attentions of a Lord Frederick Staines if that was all she had left behind. So much for the so-called civilized world. The thought of the household Penelope described, the emptiness of it, chilled Alex to the bone, despite the sun that was already making its presence felt as dawn gave way to morning.

Alex chose his words carefully, keeping his tone light. “I take it you’re to embroil yourself only in aristocratic treasons?”

Penelope smiled narrowly. “Precisely.”

It was definitely time to change the subject. “Have you eaten anything this morning?”

She squinted against the sun. “Not that I recall.”

Alex nodded, back on solid ground again. “We should stop now anyway, give the horses a rest.”

“And ourselves, too?” said Penelope delicately, as though trying to tease out of him an admission of weakness.

Alex grinned at her. “Yes. I don’t know about you, but I could use a soft stretch of ground and a long drink of water. It’s too damn hot to stay this long in the saddle without a break.”

Turning his horse off the road, they picked their way carefully across the uneven ground, stopping in a quiet grove shaded by mango and banyan trees. At the center of the grove sat the remains of a shrine, with Gothic arches in a cinquefoil pattern. The roof had fallen in on one side and tree branches poked through the ruined masonry, but it filled its purpose. It was quiet and shady and there was grass for the horses.

Penelope levered herself off her horse with a distinct sigh of relief.

“Sore?” asked Alex, reaching up to help her down.

“Not at all,” lied Penelope, shaking her head so briskly that she caught him a blow with the brim of her high-crowned hat. “Just hungry.”

“If you explore my saddlebags, you’ll find tiffin,” Alex suggested. His voice was hoarse from the dust of the road. He cleared it self-consciously. “And water.”

“Brilliant,” said Penelope, flashing him a smile to match. While he set their mounts to grazing, tethering them to the remains of a Gothic-looking arch, she rooted about in the bag he had tossed her. “I’m surprised you trust me to go through your things,” she said conversationally, her head bent over the bag.

“We are a team, aren’t we?” said Alex in a rallying tone. “Comrades in arms. Partners in adventure.”

Penelope shook back her hair, holding aloft one of the metal tiffin containers. “Messmates, even.”

Mate had been an unfortunate choice of words. But, then, comrade in arms wasn’t much better.

“Toss that over here,” Alex said heartily. Too heartily. Next thing, he would be pounding her on the back and calling her “matey.”

Food. That was what he needed. A nice, filling meal and then a long, uninterrupted sleep. Alone, he specified, before his unregenerate imagination could get any unfortunate ideas.

Too late.

Penelope tossed, perfectly gauging the trajectory and distance. Alex gave a brief, instinctive nod of appreciation as he caught the tin neatly between his hands.

Penelope ducked her head back over the saddlebag, and began industriously piling up a small stack of metal containers on the blanket Alex had spread out across the ground. “What are you feeding us?” she demanded.

Alex passed her the opened tin. Penelope stuck her index finger in, conveying a whopping fingerful to her mouth.

“Mmm, goo,” she said, making enthusiastic sucking noises.

“Aubergines,” Alex corrected, shifting uncomfortably. Utensils. He ought to have thought of utensils. Who knew that the omission would cause such pain? “There should be spoons at the bottom of the saddlebag.”

He sounded, he thought with disgust, like someone’s governess, prim and starchy. Although as far as he knew, it would be anatomically impossible for any governess worthy of the name to be suffering the precise problem he was suffering at this moment.

Fortunately, Penelope chose that moment to dig back into the saddlebag, giving Alex a much-needed moment to compose himself, before triumphantly producing two somewhat battered spoons and one fork. She tossed them onto the blanket before peering back into the saddlebag. “Am I to take out all of this, or must we husband our resources?”

“We should be able to buy our food going forward,” said Alex, busying himself opening a second container. He managed a tired grin. “Failing that, you can shoot it.”

“I hope you like the taste of cobra,” said Penelope blandly. “It’s my specialty.”

“If you shoot it,” Alex promised extravagantly, “I can cook it.”

They dug into their food with more hunger than ceremony. It was pleasant in the shade. Peaceful. The leaves of an overhanging banyan tree cast restful shadows across the blanket. Around the side of the shrine, Alex could hear the gentle whifflings and slurping noises as the horses grazed, taking their own nourishment as their owners ate theirs.

Cleaning off her spoon with a lick of her tongue, Penelope wiped it carelessly on the side of her habit before dropping it back in the saddlebag.

“How long, do you think, before we get to Berar?”

“We could get there fairly expeditiously,” said Alex, cleaning his own spoon far more meticulously with a clean square of cloth. “Traveling as we have.” Penelope preened at the implicit compliment. “I imagine your . . . Lord Frederick and his friends will be traveling far more slowly. The grooms told me they were going in a proper procession, elephants and all.”

“And stopping for leisurely meals, too, no doubt, knowing Freddy,” said Penelope, leaning back on her elbows to squint up at the shifting canopy of leaves overhead. “Afternoon naps, even.”

“I wouldn’t mind one of those,” admitted Alex ruefully, rubbing a hand against the new growth of his chin. There had been no time for sleeping or for shaving. The bristle of new beard was already beginning to shadow chin and jaw in physical demonstration of how long it had been since he had last woken up in his own bed, with his own shaving kit. He didn’t want to count the hours. It would only make him more tired.

Penelope put out a finger to lightly brush the bristles on his jaw.

“You must be exhausted,” she said, tracing her way up along the side of his lips.

Catching her hand, Alex lifted it to his lips, pressing a kiss against the palm.