The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

Chapter Five

Freddy stretched his arms out over his head until the joints cracked. “It will be good to be back in the saddle, eh, old girl?”

“Are you talking to me, or the horse?” inquired Penelope.

Freddy slapped her hard on the rump. “Whichever you prefer.”

They were crammed onto the ferry along with their mounts, their grooms, and their personal servants, waiting to be pulled across to the other side. They had spent the better part of the day by the banks of the Krishna, watching as group after group was ferried across the choppy brown waters by a ferry that was little more than a raft on a pulley. Some of the animals had put up a bit of a fuss at being herded onto the rickety wooden conveyance, having to be coaxed and prodded aboard. Penelope didn’t blame them. The river was running fast beneath the warped planks of the ferry and it smelled vile in the humid heat.

From her vantage point on the ferry, Penelope could see Captain Reid efficiently dispatching the jumbled mass of men and animals on the opposite bank, sending groups ahead with tents and provisions to their next camping stage. She had seen the same scene played out in variants at every stage of their journey, the creation of order out of chaos as tents were raised or struck, provisions loaded or unloaded, and an unwieldy group of more than eighty souls propelled along the road. By the time she and Freddy reached the next stage, their tent would be up, their beds laid out, water provided warm for washing, and their dinner ready to be served.

The prolonged wait by the bank had been too much for Freddy, who was chafing to get back on horseback. Despite the fact that they were only halfway across, Freddy’s groom — or, if Penelope were trying to be local about it, his syce — held out two cupped hands for Freddy to mount.

“Oughtn’t you to wait till we land?” suggested Penelope. The raft didn’t strike her as the sturdiest construction, and Aurangzeb, Freddy’s mount, stood worryingly near to the edge.

Freddy grabbed hold of the bridle, wedging one booted foot into the stirrup. “Don’t be absurd. What can possibly happen?”

As he heaved himself upwards, a loud, cracking noise rent the air. Penelope grabbed on to her own horse’s bridle as Buttercup shied at the noise, half-expecting to see the raft coming apart beneath them.

It wasn’t the raft that had given way, but Freddy’s girth. Freddy teetered for balance, one foot sticking comically up in the air, as his saddle lurched sideways. With an expression of frozen disbelief that would have been amusing under other circumstances, Freddy plummeted sideways, straight at his horrified syce. Seeing the danger too late, his syce made a belated and futile attempt to back out of the way.

It was like watching dominos, very large, very human dominos. Freddy slammed straight into the syce’s shoulder, sending him toppling backwards off the edge of the raft into the churning waters of the Krishna. Freddy landed heavily on his stomach on the deck, blinking as he tried to get the air back into his lungs.

“Oh no,” said Penelope involuntarily, a statement that did nothing at all to rectify the fact that the groom’s head appeared to be heading below, rather than above, the muddy waters.

Still flat on the deck, Freddy winced as he gingerly flexed his back. There were cries and exclamations and whinnying of horses. Penelope didn’t wait to see what they might do. Unhooking Buttercup’s lead, she tied it hastily around her waist, cinching the knot into security.

“Here,” she said, thrusting the other end at her bewildered spouse. “Hold this.” And without stopping to think, she plunged into the turgid waters of the Krishna.

It was colder than she had thought it would be, colder and chop-pier. Penelope came up sputtering, spitting out foul-tasting water, flavored with silt and crocodile dung and goodness only knew what else. The lead yanked painfully against her lower ribs. Thank God Freddy was holding firm. Either that, or he had handed it to someone else who was. Penelope didn’t bother to check.

Ahead of her, she saw a flash of something pale against the dark waters, a hand briefly rising above the surface. She tried to strike out in that direction, but her sodden skirts tangled in her legs, pulling her down. It was all she could do to stay above water herself. Bloody clothes. Whatever would Freddy tell them back home when he tried to explain how he had so quickly become a widower?

The lead jerked her upright again as she started to go under. Penelope flailed with both her arms against the water for traction as she scanned for that disappearing burst of human flesh.

There it was, a hank of sodden white cloth beginning to turn as brown as the water. Penelope grabbed blindly at the struggling figure in front of her, grasping at cloth and missing.

“Grab on to me!” she shouted, but the water was loud in her ears and her own voice sounded dim to her, choked with water and interrupted by a fit of coughing.

Striking out again, she got cloth, a good handful of cloth, and held on for all she was worth, hoping she wasn’t accidentally choking the man in the process. That would be a fine kettle of fish, to save him from drowning only to strangle him with the collar of his own robe.

Raising her other arm, Penelope signaled wildly in the direction of the boat. At least, she hoped she was signaling at the boat. Stinging sprays of water clouded her vision, reducing the whole of her world to the buffeting of the waves and the dead weight yanking against the cloth in her hands.

The rope jerked hard against her ribs, knocking the wind out of her, but at least she was moving, propelled back against the current of the water. Fumbling with the floating folds of his robe, Penelope managed to grab the drowning man beneath the armpits, yanking him up against her chest as she let herself be hauled back, making sure his head stayed above water.

Penelope thought vaguely that now she knew how a fish on a line must feel, as the rope jerked her backwards in unsteady strokes. The man in her arms was completely inert, his head lolling back against her chest, his beard like a trickle of ink along his robe. Penelope couldn’t tell whether he was still breathing. The slap of the water, buoying them up and down, made it hard to gauge.

Someone reached down and heaved her burden away from her, while a pair of ungentle hands grasped her under the armpits and hauled her up over the edge. Penelope lay gasping for air like a fish in a net. For the moment, nothing mattered but the glorious working of her lungs, in and out. No one had bothered to untie the lead, and she could feel it seizing against her ribs as her lungs expanded with air. Such a lovely thing, breathing. Somewhere nearby, she could hear choking and sputtering going on as someone worked over the syce, pumping the water out of his lungs.

A large face hove into view over her. Funny, how bizarre a man’s features could look turned upside down. But there was no mistaking him. Penelope wondered vaguely if it was he who had reeled her in and, even more vaguely, when it was that the boat had docked.

“When I said I wouldn’t jump in the water,” Penelope managed to get out, with a shadow of her usual bravado, “I hadn’t thought that someone else might do it first.”

Bravado wasn’t quite so easy when one was flat on one’s back.

But Captain Reid didn’t tax her with it. Instead, he held out a hand, helping her to a sitting position.

“Are you all right?” he asked, squatting down beside her.

“A little damp” — Penelope experimentally shook her wrists, splattering the deck with fat drops of water — “but otherwise tip-top.”

Her voice was hoarse, but still recognizably her own. Penelope luxuriated in the sensation of good, hard wooden planks beneath her backside, splinters and all, sun-warmed and solid. A sudden thought struck her.

“Are the horses all right?” she asked anxiously.

Captain Reid choked on a laugh. “Perfectly,” he said. “Far better than you. Do you think you can stand?”

“Of course,” said Penelope, with more confidence than she felt.

Her legs felt about as stable as undercooked soufflé, but she took the hand he offered her, making a show of shaking out her soaking skirts as a pretense to hide the fact that she wasn’t quite as steady on her legs as she ought to be. Water dripped down the folds of her skirt and pooled around her legs, leaving puddles on the planks. Her hair dripped in sodden clumps down her back, the majority of her hairpins being currently engaged in bobbing their way down the river. Penelope thought inconsequentially that she did seem to lose a great many hairpins where Captain Reid was involved.

Blinking against the water trickling down from her hairline, Penelope dashed the back of her hand against her eyes.

Without comment, Captain Reid handed her a very large, very white handkerchief.

Penelope applied it to her face. “I would have used my own,” she explained rather indistinctly, “but . . .”

“No need,” said Captain Reid, as Penelope finished mopping her face with his handkerchief, which was no longer so white nor so tidy as it had been a moment before. “I understand perfectly.”

The handkerchief had been marked in one corner with his initials. Instead of thread, the monogram had been lovingly stitched with strands of reddish brown hair, threaded again and again to satiny thickness against the white cambric. It was a terribly intimate sort of thing, hair, the sort of present one made only to a family member or a lover.

Penelope crumpled the handkerchief in one hand.

“Where is Freddy?” she asked crisply. “Lord Frederick, I mean.”

“Safely on shore. Mehdi Yar broke his fall,” Captain Reid added dryly.

“Who? Oh — Freddy’s groom.” It had never occurred to her to ask his name before she jumped into the water after him. He had been just a body in the water to be hauled in again. At home, the coachman was always called John, regardless of his real name, just as Cook was always Cook, whatever Cook might have been before she became Cook.

It was, thought Penelope, rather impressive that Captain Reid should know the groom’s name, out of a camp so large as theirs. He had engaged most of the servants and handlers who were to see to their comfort on the voyage, but the syce, along with Freddy’s valet, his cook, and Penelope’s ayah, had come with them from Calcutta.

“You didn’t even know who he was, but you jumped into the Krishna after him.”

“You make it sound like it’s strange,” complained Penelope. “Someone had to do it. And I rather felt like a swim.” She tried to toss her hair, but it clung damply to the back of her dress and refused to comply.

Captain Reid eyed her approvingly. “They should make you an honorary member of the Zuffir Plutun.”

Penelope looked at him suspiciously. That was the problem with foreign terms; it was so hard to tell if one had just been insulted. “The what?”

“The . . .” Captain Reid cast about for a translation. “I suppose you would call it the Victorious Battalion. They’re the Nizam’s women’s regiment, brilliant in battle and completely fearless. A sort of latter-day Amazon.”

An Amazon. Penelope rather liked the sound of that. It sounded so much better than “impossible hoyden,” “unnatural girl,” or any other of her mother’s preferred terms for describing her sporting proclivities.

Penelope hid her pleasure behind an arched brow. “Was that a compliment, Captain Reid?”

“It was intended as one. Whether you choose to take it as such is entirely up to you. Ah,” Captain Reid stepped aside, making way for a bedraggled figure in a silt-striped white muslin robe. “I believe someone else desires a moment of your company.”

Mehdi Yar had lost his turban, and his hair stood up damply around his head. On the other hand, he was breathing, which Penelope took as a personal accomplishment.

Apparently, so did he.

“Sahiba,” he said, bowing low before her, “I owe you a great debt.”

“Nonsense,” said Penelope bracingly, acutely conscious of her straggling hair and sodden dress and Captain Reid’s watching over her shoulder. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“Would they?” murmured Captain Reid. Penelope frowned at him over her shoulder. It was like having a fly in one’s ear. A fly too large to swat properly.

“But you did,” said the syce, who appeared to incline to Captain Reid’s view of the world. Matter-of-factly, as though he were offering her a cup of tea at a church bazaar, he said, “My life and my honor are yours.”

With one last inclination of his head over his joined hands, he melted away to his place among the horses.

“Well,” said Penelope brightly to Captain Reid, trying to make light of it, “I can’t imagine where I’ll put them. Do you think they’ll show to good advantage on my mantelpiece?”

“He means it, you know. You saved his life.”

“I only speeded the process. We weren’t that far from shore. He might have made it there on his own.”

“ ‘ Might.’ It’s not the same as ‘would.’ A man prefers not to deal in maybes when his existence is on the line.”

Penelope made a slight snorting sound.

Calmly appropriating her arm, Captain Reid led her off the ferry and onto the bank, where her own syce waited with her mare. “I wouldn’t brush it off so lightly if I were you. You might want to call in that debt someday.”

There was water still jiggling around between her ears. Angling her head to one side, Penelope banged at one ear with the flat of her hand. “Whatever for?”

“It never hurts to have friends, Lady Frederick.”

It might have just been the echo of the water in her ears, but there was something very odd in Captain Reid’s voice.

Stumbling against her sodden skirt, Penelope frowned up at him. “Are you telling me that I have something to fear?”

He considered the question for a moment too long.

Penelope wished she could crack that impassive façade like an eggshell, to see what was going on beneath.

“Not from me,” he said at last.

Penelope made a face at him. “I didn’t think I had.”

But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? With some difficulty, she managed to get her soggy self onto Buttercup, refusing Captain Reid’s suggestion of the palanquin. Freddy, of course, had already gone on ahead, too flown at the delight of being on horseback again to wait for his sopping wet wife.

For all that she enjoyed Captain Reid’s deadpan way with an insult, she hadn’t allowed herself to forget that he, as well as his employer, was under investigation by the Governor General’s office. A man could quip and quip and quip and still remain a villain.

Freddy had only fallen ill once they had embarked from Calcutta with Captain Reid. It was also rather curious that Captain Reid had known the name of Freddy’s syce, in a camp of quite so many people. Nearly as curious as Freddy’s syce urging Freddy to mount while on a crowded ferry in the middle of a river, a course of action that spoke, at best, of an extreme lack of common sense, or, at worst, of malicious intent. The Captain had received letters in Masulipatam; Penelope had seen him thrust them into his waistcoat pocket. Could they have been orders from the Resident of Hyderabad, instructing him to dispatch Wellesley’s spy en route?

On the other hand, girths had been known to fray and snap of their own accord, and Freddy’s saddle had taken its fair share of abuse over the past week. One would expect his groom to notice any significant wear and tear while saddling the beast, but Freddy, as was his way, had been decidedly importunate about having his horse saddled quickly, damn it, and no dawdling about it. And Penelope had had a good deal of opportunity to observe the Captain over the past few days. She rather doubted that a man of Captain Reid’s efficiency would go about trying to dispatch someone in such a bungling way.

A stomach ailment and a broken girth. Neither of those in themselves was the least bit remarkable. Taken together, the whole thing smelled decidedly fishy, and it wasn’t just the remnant of river water trickling down from her hair.

The object of Penelope’s solicitude, however, appeared to be feeling decidedly less solicitous of her. Freddy was lying in wait for Penelope when she arrived back in camp, standing outside their tent with a cheroot that he crushed out as soon as she slid off her horse.

Penelope couldn’t blame Freddy for wrinkling his nose at the sight of her. She longed for nothing more than dry linen and a hot bath, not necessarily in that order. Her damp clothes itched abominably and her hair smelled as though a crocodile had died in it.

But it wasn’t the eau de crocodile clinging to her person that was driving a furrow into Freddy’s brow.

“You won’t be able to go on like this once we get to Hyderabad, you know,” said Freddy, following her into the tent.

Plopping down onto a camp stool, Penelope vigorously wrung out her hair. “Like what?” asked Penelope, even though she knew very well what he meant.

Freddy took a hasty step back as foul-smelling droplets spattered his shiny boot tops. “Like — this.” He made a quick, impatient gesture that took in her sopping hair, her rumpled, river-stained skirt. “Riding astride. Jumping into rivers after grooms. There’ll be people there.”

“I only jumped after him because you fell on him.” Shifting on her seat, Penelope shot her husband an incredulous look. “There must be a hundred people in the camp. What do you call all of them? Fairies?”

Freddy was not amused. “English people,” he specified. “People who will have certain expectations of behavior.”

Penelope looked at him from under her lashes, striking where she knew it would hurt. “To bow to other people’s expectations is too, too frightfully bourgeois. I’m surprised at you, Freddy.”

Standing over her, his hands on his hips, Freddy regarded her with baffled irritation. “Must everything be an argument, Pen?”

Beneath the irritation, he looked tired, almost as tired as she was. All she had to do was hold out a hand, smile at him, lift up her face to be kissed, and it would all be forgotten. At least, this particular argument would be. It was, she knew, as much of an olive branch as Freddy was capable of offering.

Penelope lifted both her shoulders in a shrug. “If you insist on making it so.”

Freddy folded his arms across his chest, looking down his not-quite-Norman nose at her. “You promised to obey.”

“You promised to love. We both said a lot of silly things at that altar. And, no,” she added, as his eyes slid down from her face in a direction she knew all too well, “making love doesn’t count.”

Stung, Freddy’s head snapped up. “That’s not what you thought last winter.”

Penelope arranged her face along familiar lines of bored sophistication. “I was under the influence of mistletoe. What was your excuse?”

“Insanity,” Freddy said shortly, and stalked out beneath the flap of the tent.

As the canvas flap slapped shut behind him, Penelope pressed her balled fists to her forehead. That had not been wise. She could hear Henrietta’s Oh, Pen in a ghostly whisper across a thousand miles of ocean.

Her bruised ribs chafed against the still-damp material of her dress. Her skin was raw from where the rope had rubbed repeatedly against her. Her whole body felt battered and buffeted and drained of all energy. It had been silly to insist on riding from the river to the camp. She ought to have taken the offer of the palanquin and dozed her way to camp.

Perhaps Freddy was right and she oughtn’t to have jumped into the river in the first place.

But, then, who would have? Penelope rested her elbows against her knees, propping her head in her hands, her damp hair falling straight around her face, screening the world in red. It never curled unless she curled it, stick-straight and as much of a disappointment to her mother as everything else about her.

She was tired, so tired, tired and soggy and drained, and all she wanted was someone to put a warm blanket around her shoulders and hug her close. Back in London, the last time she had careened into a large body of water, Henrietta had been there, to comb out her hair and hug and scold her and tell her she was an idiot and bring her tea and want to know what exactly the water of the Serpentine tasted like, all in the same breath. There had been a proper bed with proper blankets and a maid coming in to tend the fire and Lady Uppington bustling about with disgusting smelling possets, which Penelope had poured out into the chamber pot as soon as she wasn’t looking. Lady Uppington had wanted to know what the Serpentine had tasted like, too, although only after delivering a proper maternal lecture on the follies of driving other people’s curricles into large bodies of water. So much love and so much care and all of it so very far away.

With difficulty, Penelope worked free the buttons on the short jacket of her riding habit. The wet fabric clung stubbornly to her arms, tailored too close for convenience. She peeled it painfully off, sleeve by sleeve, every movement feeling like a minor battle. The blue dye had soaked through to the cambric shirt below, and the once-white fabric clung bluely to her skin, like the painted pelt of a Pictish princess.

She had gone as Boadicea to a masquerade last Season, brandishing a spear and thirsting for the opportunity to drive a chariot into battle, rather like — what was it that Captain Reid had called her? — an Amazon.

Penelope didn’t feel much like a warrior maiden at the moment.

It was bloody tiring being so fractious all the time. Had Boadicea ever felt tired? Worn out? Unhooking the suspenders that held up her riding skirt, Penelope let the weight of the wet wool drag it to the floor, leaving her clammy and blue in her chemise. The hand mirror revealed that not only was she vaguely blue, but she had streaks of dirt across her face and there was mud caked in her hair. She didn’t look like Lady Frederick Staines, consort of the new Envoy to the Court of Hyderabad, or even like the dashing Miss Penelope Deveraux, scourge of the London Season. Snarl-haired and hollow-eyed in her discolored chemise, she looked like the less-prosperous class of harlot.

What had possessed her to pick a fight with Freddy just now?

Penelope spat on a handkerchief, scrubbing the square of cloth against a streak of dried mud on one cheek. It was just so irresistible when he was so . . . well, Freddy. But he was all she had here, stranded in the middle of a strange land with unfamiliar birds chattering around her head and flowers to which she couldn’t give names unfurling unfamiliar blossoms on curiously shaped trees.

Shrugging into a light muslin dress and flinging a shawl over it against the dropping temperatures of the evening, Penelope poked her head out of the flap of the tent. Cotton fields lay to one side, the Musi River to the other. Penelope could already see the dots of dozens of cook fires reflecting eerily off the waters of the river, like Chinese lanterns in a garden. From the bank came the muted sound of mealtime conversations, as foreign as the scent of the rice and spices steeping in the pot-bellied pots. By the makeshift paddock, the hamals had lit a great fire of cotton scrub to keep the flies from the horses. The smoke grimed the evening air, blending with the falling dusk, creating shadows against shadows.

“Freddy,” she called softly, but no one answered.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess where he might have gone. Either he had grabbed up his gun and tramped off into the brush to see what he could shoot as a way of soothing his wounded feelings, or he would have made for the sepoy encampment, where the guard that made up part of their escort lay. Lieutenant Breese, their commanding officer, had only an East India Company commission. Under normal circumstances, Freddy might have been inclined to snub him. But in a party in which Englishmen were scarce, he was still an officer and a gentleman — of sorts — and thus good enough to play cards with.

Unless, of course, something else had befallen Freddy. There was that broken girth. . . .

Moving with more haste than grace, Penelope threaded her way towards the sepoy encampment on the very edge of their camp. Through the canvas of the largest tent, she thought she could see the outline of two men at a table, a bottle between them. Freddy and Lieutenant Breese? Most likely.

For a moment, Penelope stood staring at their silhouettes, caught between relief and irritation. To think she had always mocked Charlotte for having too loose a grasp on reality! That was what she got for letting her imagination run away with her. Freddy in danger, indeed. Freddy getting foxed, more like. More fool she, to come running out like an avenging Amazon to defend his person against miscellaneous malefactors. He neither needed nor wanted her for that. Or for anything else, save what could be found between the sheets.

Penelope’s head throbbed and the shadow images in the tent seemed to shimmer against the canvas.

Too much river water, she told herself. Too much heat and exertion. She was just plain worn out, and that was the only reason she felt a completely inexplicable impulse to sit down in the cotton scrub and cry. It was nothing more than physical weakness, and a good night’s sleep would put her right as rain again, like a toddler who had spent the day too much in the sun and needed to be put to bed.

Penelope gathered her skirt to turn back, but the hanging branch of an acacia tree scratched across her arm, tangling in her shawl. Penelope yanked at the fabric, not caring what she tore, just so long as she got away before Freddy saw her standing there, like some pathetic waif in the night, or a dog left outside its master’s door. Blast it! Penelope tugged, but the fabric was as stubborn as she was, clinging to its twig like an eloping heiress to her lover. Muttering nasty things under her breath, Penelope changed tactics, fumbling at the fabric with impatient fingers, trying to disengage it from whatever malevolent collection of splinters was holding it fast.

“Do you need help?” asked a now-familiar voice.

The branch sprang free, releasing the scent of fresh flowers into the damp night air.

“I’m quite all right on my own,” said Penelope stiffly, grateful for the darkness that hid the damp blue chemise beneath her too-thin frock and the appalling condition of her hair. She shouldn’t have been surprised at his appearance. Captain Reid had an unsettling talent for being everywhere she didn’t want him to be. She yanked her shawl firmly over her shoulders, knotting it to keep it from going astray. “As you can see.”

“Of course,” said Captain Reid, and she hated him for it, hated him for having caught her unprepared, hated him for being kind. Such kindness wasn’t a gift but a goad, scraping against one’s skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive. “Shall I see you back to your tent?”

Penelope bristled at the implied criticism, all the more infuriating for being justified. It was not the brightest thing to wander about alone at night in a camp of eighty men and miscellaneous beasts. Not that she would ever admit that to Captain Reid. “In case tigers attack me over the next ten yards?” she said belligerently.

“Merely as a courtesy,” he said mildly, and she felt doubly shamed. “But if you know your own way . . .”

Penelope fought back with the only weapon in her arsenal. Her voice was as cloyingly sweet as the flowering branch and just as thorny as she looked up at him from under her lashes. “Will you miss me if I get lost along the way, Captain Reid?”

Captain Reid stepped back, as clear a rejection as a slap across the face. “I’m sure your husband would,” he said stiffly.

In Lieutenant Breese’s tent, the shadow Freddy reached for a card, kicking back in his chair to stare at his hand with the sort of intensity he never reserved for her. Not since last December, at any rate.

Penelope’s laughter etched acid across the evening air. “I wouldn’t wager on that, Captain Reid. And, no,” she added bitingly, “you needn’t see me back.”

Without waiting for his response, she made a full turn and stomped off in the direction of her own tent. She ought, she supposed, to make an effort, to sway her hips or toss her hair, but it didn’t seem worth it. Captain Reid might respect her Amazonian tendencies, but he had made quite clear he had no use for her in any other way. It was a bizarre and baffling turn of events, and one that Penelope had no interest in analyzing. One could only accept so much rejection in one evening.

Even so, she was very aware of Captain Reid’s shadow in the lee of the acacia tree, watching her safely back to her tent.