The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

Chapter Twenty-Six

“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?

Alex knew what he wanted the reason to be.

He also knew how pitifully unlikely it was. In all their gilded days together, there had never been any talk of love.

The important thing, Alex reminded himself, was keeping Penelope safe. He might not be able to make her love him, but he could keep her alive. It was something, at least. Pathetic, but something.

He waited until both the fire and the conversation had died down, tongues slowed with drink and fatigue, heads and eyelids beginning to droop. Penelope slowly rose from her seat, stretching joints made stiff with sitting.

Alex jumped into the waiting silence before she could begin the general exodus to bed.

“Lady Frederick,” he said, doing his best to sound casual, formal, distant, nothing more than a representative of the Residency that had once housed her husband. “I wondered if I might have a quick word.”

“I am tired,” she said, stony-faced, looking past Alex rather than at him. “I believe I shall go to bed.”

“It is rather important.” Alex tried to keep the frustration he felt out of his voice. He wanted to grab her by the arm, shake her, make her look him in the eye. This wasn’t about them, he told himself. It was about Penelope and her safety. It was for her, not for him.

Fiske unfolded himself from his place by the fire, raising a languid arm to block Alex’s path. “The lady said she was tired, Reid.”

Since when had Fiske appointed himself Penelope’s protector? The gall of it all set Alex’s teeth on edge.

“My hearing is still perfectly good,” he said tightly, watching Penelope slip away from him behind the barrier of Fiske’s arm. He didn’t like where they had set up her tent. It was too far on the edge of the camp, too easy for an assassin to access.

“If your hearing is not at fault, it must be the subtleties of civilized conversation that you miss,” oozed Fiske.

Civilized? This was the man who had brutalized a fourteen-year-old in a mock pagan ceremony for the sheer depravity of it, and he had the nerve to call Alex uncivilized? Alex burned with important anger as he looked at Fiske’s smug, overbred face, lips peeled back from crooked teeth in a lazy smile.

It was far too tempting to knock those teeth loose from that smug smile, but that was just what Fiske wanted. He wanted Alex to lose his temper. The moment he attacked Fiske, Fiske would have him up on charges faster than he could blink.

Alex swallowed his simmering anger and forced himself to speak levelly. “I simply wanted to make certain that we have no further incidents with snakes on this journey,” he said shortly.

Fiske’s face was the picture of innocence. “Why should you think we might?”

Alex leveled a long, assessing look at his unwanted traveling companion. “I find that reptiles tend to travel in packs.”

Abandoning the consuming task of sniffing his brandy, Jasper Pinchingdale lifted his curly head in alarm. “Do they?”

He clearly hadn’t registered the insult to himself. It was better that way.

“I doubt we need to worry,” said Fiske carelessly. “So long as all the usual precautions are taken.”

Alex smiled without humor. “You can be assured that I intend to see that they are. Good night.”

It was an empty threat. Short of detailing one of the bearers to stand watch by Penelope’s tent at night — which he had already done — there was very little he could actually do. The men he had spoken to in the cavalcade, Residency employees all, had informed him that Nur Bai had indeed left the caravan, breaking off with her own retainers and with the proclaimed intent of carrying on to Mir Alam’s hunting lodge in Berar. That didn’t mean she actually had. Nor would it have prevented her from leaving half a dozen of her creatures scattered among the traveling circus that made up the camp. With hundreds of servants and bearers, it was nearly impossible to evaluate all the inhabitants.

All Alex could do was make sure Penelope was on her guard.

The placement of her tent might be a danger, but it was also a boon. He waited until Pinchingdale and Fiske were safely immured in their own canvas constructions before slipping over to the edge of the encampment. He knew she was awake. A candle burned within, casting her silhouette against the canvas. She didn’t seem to be undressing or reading or doing much of anything at all. She simply sat, her head bowed over her folded hands, pausing, from time to time, to take a long swig from the flask she had coolly walked off with when leaving the fire. Fiske’s flask. Alex might have worried about poison, but that Fiske had drunk from it, too. No man poisoned his own well.

Feeling like an idiot slinking through the shadows, Alex fell to his knees beside the tent flap, angled so that the bulk of it hid his body from the rest of the camp.

He tugged on the flap. “Psssst,” he hissed. Then, when she didn’t answer. “Penelope.”

Penelope’s nose poked out of the fold. Her nose and one eye. One very bloodshot eye. It did not regard him favorably.

“Don’t,” she said stonily. “Just don’t.”

It took a moment for the implication to hit, and when it did, Alex rocked back on his heels. She couldn’t possibly think that he was there for . . . Oh.

“This isn’t about that,” he whispered hastily.

The flap opened a little wider, just wide enough for Penelope to give him a freezing stare.

“About what?” she said, in a tone designed to reduce to nothing anything between them that might ever have been a something. She followed it up with the equally chilling “Why are you here?”

Because I love you didn’t seem like the appropriate answer.

Alex could smell the brandy on her breath. It was the only warm thing about her. All the anger, all the self-loathing she had obviously been feeling had found an outlet. Him.

“I was worried about your well-being,” he said with dignity.

“Well, don’t be.” The tent flap started to fold down.

This was not how this was supposed to go. Alex made a quick move to block the fall of canvas. “Have you given any thought to that damn snake?”

Penelope looked at him with something akin to loathing. “What do you think I’ve been contemplating? My toenails? Of course, I’ve thought about the snake. Again and again and again. What do you want me to do, find an asp to clutch to my breast?”

“Um, no.” Taken aback by the unexpected attack, Alex hastily regrouped. “You might still be a target, Penelope. What if someone tries to pull a similar trick with you?”

In the uncertain light, Penelope’s face was all bones and hollows, like a skull. She smiled a singularly unpleasant smile. “And what if they do? Good night, Captain Reid.”

The tent flap swung emphatically down. The discussion was closed.

Only it wasn’t, damn it.

Alex tugged at the canvas. The flap held firm, clearly anchored by something on the other end. A flat voice emerged from inside the tent. “Do that one more time and I will start screaming. I mean it.”

Alex didn’t doubt she meant it.

Fine. She needed time alone. He could accept that.

“Just be careful,” he hissed, and crawled off to his own tent, checking first to make sure that the sentry he had planted near Penelope’s temporary lodging was well in place. That would have to do for tonight. By morning — well, surely by morning — Penelope would have seen sense. Alex couldn’t have produced a definitive definition of what he meant by sense, but he was fairly sure it had something to do with resuming speaking to him and taking elementary precautions for her own safety.

Penelope did neither of those things. When the morning dawned, she was there with the others, clothed in a habit that had been miraculously cleaned overnight by the staff, her hair brushed and pinned. She took her place at the front of the rank, between Fiske and Pinchingdale, both of whom treated her with an exaggerated solicitude that would have made Alex laugh if only Penelope had been laughing with him. Instead, she treated him just as her husband had once done; with the chilly indifference of the aristocrat to a subordinate, speaking to him only when necessary and, even then, addressing her comments past him rather than to him.

This wasn’t Penelope.

Watching her, straight-backed in the saddle, hair brushed and coiled, he remembered her with sweat streaking lines through dust on her face, profanely attempting to put together a fire under his tutelage, jumping into the river after a groom, stealing his horse and riding it, hairpins flying.

That had been Penelope. This was Lady Frederick as he had first met her in Calcutta, hard-edged, sharp-tongued, warding off the world from behind a shield of sarcasm and devil-may-care bravado, and desperately unhappy behind it. She was the first one in the saddle in the mornings and the last to dismount, leaping obstacles with a recklessness that smacked less of her usual bravado and more of a shattering lack of concern with whether she lived or died.

Alex gritted his teeth and bided his time, despising himself for his own helplessness. What was he supposed to do? Take her in his arms and — what? he mocked himself. Kiss her tears away? Remind her that she had never liked the rotter anyway? Offer her sex as a substitute for grieving? Charming behavior, that would be, worthy of Fiske at his best. Alex was only surprised that Fiske hadn’t tried it.

It drove him mad to think that their time together might have been nothing more than an interlude to her. A few days before, he would have been willing to swear that it hadn’t been, but the steady offensive of indifference drove him to distraction, and to decidedly ignoble emotions.

He was not, he discovered, nearly so self-sacrificing as he had believed himself. If he were, he would have been ready to nobly respect Penelope’s unspoken wishes, pretending that nothing of an intimate nature had ever occurred between them. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t just pack her off to England, to ballrooms full of Fiskes and Freddys. He worried about Penelope, about her health, her safety, but his worry wasn’t entirely unmixed with what Alex could only view as selfish self-interest. He couldn’t seem to help caring about her, and if she wanted to repudiate that, she would have to do it from her own mouth.

It was three days before Alex found an opportunity to speak to Penelope alone, free from the perpetual presence of her twin shadows, Fiske and Pinchingdale. They had paused to wait out the hottest part of the day in the shelter of an abandoned caravanserai, napping as their inclination and status required: Fiske and Pinchingdale in the tents their servants had scurried ahead to set up for them; the members of the caravan disported in whatever bits of shade they had managed to wrangle from their fellows.

Penelope’s tent had been set up with the rest, but she didn’t make use of it. As Alex rubbed down a profusely sweating Bathsheba, he saw Penelope disappearing around the side of the ruined building, the train of her abused riding habit dragging dustily in the earth behind her.

Without thinking, Alex tossed the cloth to a groom and followed.

There must once have been a courtyard in the center of the building, where tired travelers might refresh themselves. The fountain was empty, the foundations cracked and dry, and weeds pushed up between the flagstones. Rosebushes grew wild on one side of the courtyard, twining up the arched frames of empty windows, and wild herbs grew fragrant underfoot.

Penelope sat on the edge of the ruined fountain, the skirt of her habit flowing like water around her. With her hair fallen in a long, red rope over one shoulder and the unpruned rosebushes climbing all around her, she looked, thought Alex, like a princess in a story, waiting to be woken by a prince’s kiss.

Alex grimaced. If only it were that easy. With his finesse, he seemed to have turned her into a frog. A very angry, fighting frog.

Hearing the brush of his boots against the foliage, she looked up sharply. For a moment, Alex surprised her in an expression of open confusion; her face looked softer, younger than it had for days. She swallowed convulsively and hastily pushed herself up off her perch, pulling her skirts together to brush past him.

She couldn’t even muster a hello? One hello after all they had shared?

“Wait.” The word was torn out of his chest, less a request and more a command. Softening his voice, he said, no less urgently, “Damn it, Penelope. Why won’t you talk to me?”

“We’re talking now, aren’t we?” she said, as though it were a matter of supreme indifference to her, and made to brush past him.

Alex blocked her, feeling like a cad, but too desperate to care. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Fine,” she said flatly. She turned to pluck at a leaf on the rosebush, shiny and sharp-edged. “Talk.”

Having received his mandate to talk, Alex found that both his tongue and his brain had ceased normal function. He had held so many conversations with her in his head over the last few days that it was hard to know where to start — or what had actually been said and what hadn’t.

But since he couldn’t leave her standing there waiting indefinitely, “I worry about you,” he said lamely.

Wrong approach.

“You shouldn’t.” A thorn pricked her finger, leaving a crimson blot of blood in its wake. Penelope regarded the tiny dot of blood dispassionately. Rubbing her hand against the skirt of the habit, she shrugged. “I’m no concern of yours.”

That was precisely the opposite of what he had wanted to hear.

“Yes, you are,” said Alex urgently, wishing he had the guts to deploy something more than words. “I — ”

But he couldn’t say it. It was an impossible time to tell a woman he loved her, all but over the corpse of her husband.

“Captain Reid, Captain Reid,” said Penelope, in that tone of polite mockery he was beginning to learn to hate. It was the same one she used with Fiske and Pinchingdale, as delicately deadly as a stiletto. She wouldn’t even bloody use his first name. “There’s no need, you know. Just because we — ”

Alex flung up a hand in an instinctive gesture of negation. Whatever she was about to say, he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want what they had had together reduced to the most base of carnal terms. It had been more than that. Hadn’t it? His lungs ached as though he had been running a mile.

Penelope’s eyebrows lifted, but she respected the unspoken barrier. With a shrug — a shrug as dreadful as the words she had been prevented from uttering — she said, “I hold you under no obligation to me.”

It was a clear dismissal.

Alex stood his ground, searching her face for signs of the woman who had accompanied him to Berar. “But I do. I brought you here.”

Penelope laughed lightly. It rang with a false note in the quiet garden. “Trussed and bound?” she said contemptuously. “No. Everything I did, I did of my own accord. You had no part in it.”

Right. That was quite enough of that. It was one thing letting her grieve, another thing to be relegated to the position of hired stud, put out to pasture after his turn in the paddock. It had been his affair as well as hers and she could bloody well remember that.

“Didn’t I?” he said provocatively. “I seem to remember two being involved in some of those activities.”

She hadn’t expected that. She turned on him with the sort of freezing stare designed to reduce a man to gibbering apology, a slow spark of anger kindling in her eyes, like gold to the flame.

With a nonchalance he was far from feeling, Alex plucked a petal from a rose, rolling it between his fingers so that its musky fragrance permeated the air between them. “Forgive me. I wasn’t aware you were the only one allowed to refer to it.” He paused before saying, deliberately, unforgivably, “You weren’t so cold four days ago.”

“Four days ago,” Penelope said, through clenched lips, “Freddy wasn’t dead.”

“It’s not fair hiding behind Freddy,” Alex said harshly. The mashed remains of the rose petal crumbled through his fingers. “You had precious little time for him when he was alive.”

Penelope stared at him in shock. “That’s not — you can’t — ”

“Did you love him?” Alex demanded. He hadn’t meant to say it, but once it was out, there was no taking it back.

Ugly laughter rasped through Penelope’s throat. “Does it matter? Now?”

“Did you?”

Heedless of thorns, Penelope turned and banged a fist into the vine-covered wall. “No! Is that what you wanted to hear? No, I didn’t love him. I never loved him. I never even liked him. I married him out of — out of boredom. I married him on a bloody whim, and do you know what happened? He died of it. There. Happy now?”

Blood seeped down her wrist where a thorn had torn the side of her hand, but she seemed not to notice.

“No,” Alex said soberly.

What could he say? That he wanted her to be happy? The sentiment seemed absurd in the face of her wild-eyed despair. He hadn’t realized quite how much emotion she had been holding tamped down beneath the fragile social crust of the past few days.

Tentatively, like a skater shifting out onto uncertain ice, he said, “You weren’t even there when it happened. It’s not your fault that Lord Frederick died.”

Penelope’s hands balled into fists in the folds of her habit. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she said with withering scorn. “You don’t know at all.”

“Try me,” he said, keeping his voice hard, granite to her granite, rough and unyielding.

It worked.

“If you must know, I compromised him,” she said defiantly.

Alex had never heard anything so absurd. “I should have thought that he compromised you .”

Penelope glowered at him. “He wouldn’t have if I hadn’t given him ample opportunity.”

Alex looked at her flushed and angry face and thought that several things made a great deal more sense. “Is that what they told you?” he asked softly.

Penelope made an impatient gesture, brushing aside his words. “I announced to the world at large that we had been in a bedroom alone together. I did, not Freddy.”

“On purpose?”

“By accident,” she admitted grudgingly. “But the result was the same. He had to marry me. He would never have come out here but for me. And it bloody well killed him.”

“Penelope — ”

Ignoring him, she clenched and unclenched her bloody hands, pacing the paving, wearing a circle into the stones. “I was the one who drove him to India.”

“What did you do?” demanded Alex softly. “Hit him over the head with a truncheon? Drag him onto the boat trussed and bound ?”

“I made him come out here,” Penelope repeated stridently. “I made him come out here and it bloody killed him. I killed him. I killed Freddy.”

“A snakebite killed him,” Alex said bracingly. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Can’t I?” Penelope’s face twisted. “I’ve been a disaster since the day I was born. Just ask my mother; she’ll tell you.”

“Mothers aren’t always the most reliable sources.”

“Ask Freddy then. Oh, wait. You can’t, can you?” Penelope’s face screwed up but she got it under control again, saying roughly, “I’m a walking blight and if you have any sense you’ll get well away from me before I curse you, too.”

Alex shook his head gently. “I could never do that,” he said, and realized it was true. He was in too deep. For the first time, he understood the doomed lovers of the epics, taking steps that had always seemed monumentally stupid to him before, flinging aside reputation, pride, honor, all for that elusive chameleon called love.

Apparently, Penelope had never understood it either. “Why?” she shot back at him, every word a taunt. “Do you just like playing with trouble? Or are your heroic instincts acting up again?”

Alex watched her, like a hunter stalking a hind. “There’s nothing heroic about it.”

Penelope snorted. “I know you. Gallant Captain Reid who can’t bear to leave a stranded kitten in a tree.” Alex had never, to his recollection, even seen a kitten in a tree, but Penelope was off and running, her words tumbling out faster and faster, higher and higher pitched. “For heaven’s sake! Your brother stands condemned of treason in front of you and you still bend over backwards to shelter him.”

Her voice broke on the last words. Alex, who had been prepared to take umbrage, stopped, arrested by the unprecedented sight of tears trickling down Penelope’s cheeks. She fought a losing battle for control over her own body. He watched as her face contorted, her hands clenching and unclenching, as her whole body shook with the sobs she refused to give in to.

“I compromised my husband,” she spat out hoarsely. “I cuckolded him. I dragged him out here to die. Yes, die.” Turning her head, Penelope dashed angrily at her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. Blood and tears mingled in pinkish stripes across her face. The effect was gruesome. She screwed up her face, sucking up snot through her nose. “Let me tell you this, Captain Reid. Some people aren’t worth the saving. Get out while you still can.”

She looked like something designed to frighten small children, eyes narrowed to slits, cheeks puce, face contorted. Alex took a step towards her. “No.”

Penelope pushed against him with both hands, blood, tears, and snot dripping unheeded down her chin. She pushed again, harder, her voice taking on a hysterical edge, “Go, damn you! Damn you, damn you, damn you. What in the hell are you doing here with me? Do you just like being kicked again and again? Or are you saving up for a halo?”

“You bloody fool,” Alex said tenderly, and took her in his arms. He rubbed his hands soothingly up and down her back, feeling her muscles jerk with suppressed tears and halfhearted protests. She drew in a ragged breath against his chest, snuffling up snot and choking on a sob. Alex pressed his cheek against the top of her head, her sun-warmed hair warm against his skin and smelling only slightly rank from a day without washing. “You bloody, bloody fool. You’ve got it all cock-a-hoop. Don’t you realize I — ”

“My, my,” intruded an all-too-familiar voice, at just that inopportune moment. Booted feet slapped decisively against the ancient paving. The sound brought Alex’s head up with a snap, but not soon enough. “What have we here?”