The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

by Lauren Willig

  “What is it exactly that you do?” I urged, leaning slightly forward in my chair and trying to feign an expression of interest in the hopes that it would inspire Serena to do the same. It inspired Serena to undertake a careful inspection of her arugula. “I’m not sure Colin’s ever told me.”

  He told me. As my eyes glazed over, I wondered if that had really been quite the right technique. Asking an accountant to explain—in depth—what he does for a living isn’t the sort of move calculated to cause the impressionable to swoon. Not the right kind of swoon, at any rate. The arugula was far more interesting.

  But perhaps Serena didn’t think so. As I snuck a peek at her averted face, her eyes suddenly lit up like the Fourth of July. A becoming hint of color bloomed in her cheeks and the hollows under her eyes didn’t seem quite so pronounced as usual.

  I’d never seen anyone react that way to accounting principles before, but, hey, if it worked for Serena . . .

  It wasn’t the accounting. Half-rising from her chair, Serena angled her wrist in a tentative wave. Martin petered to a belated stop. Scraping my chair around, I saw Colin’s friend Nick loping his way towards us.

  “Hello, all,” said Nick, dragging up a chair from another table and plunking himself unceremoniously down into it. “How goes it?”

  Our table was quite definitely meant for four—a cozy four—but that didn’t bother Nick. He cheerfully tilted backwards in his purloined chair, blocking the aisle.

  An outraged waiter made a noise that wanted to be a growl when it grew up. Hearing it, Nick glanced up and raised a casual hand. “I’ll have a coffee. And can you toss me a menu? Cheers.”

  Frigidly, the waiter handed over a menu with only a little less ceremony than Lord Lytton presiding at the official durbar proclaiming Queen Victoria Empress of India.

  Letting his chair rock forward with a clunk, Nick flicked open the menu, leaving the waiter with no choice but to retreat, speechless, to the nether regions of the kitchen to procure the desired caffeinated beverage. I presume he spat in it a few times in the privacy of the kitchen.

  I felt like spitting myself. Serena wasn’t supposed to be twinkling for Nick; she was supposed to be twinkling for Martin.

  Aside from the fact that she and Martin were Just Perfect for Each Other (if only they would wake up and realize it), I was pretty sure our mutual friend Pammy had designs on Nick. That was all I needed, for Serena to get herself mashed flat in Pammy’s wake. And we all knew what that meant: Colin having to swoop in to pick up the pieces again, while I gritted my teeth and did my best to be patient and understanding. Even though she might be technically the prettier of the two, Serena didn’t stand a chance against Pammy. No one did. Pammy was the romantic equivalent of an artillery barrage. There was nothing to do but dive for cover as soon as you saw it—I mean, her—coming. Resistance was futile.

  Pammy had tried to impress the wisdom of this approach upon me, but I had proved a poor student in that. I was more of the princess-in-tower school of dating, where you drop your hair out the tower window and desperately hope your chosen prince will take the hint and choose to climb up. If he doesn’t, you hastily coil your hair back up, retreat into the tower, and pretend you never meant it in the first place. Hair, what hair? Never seen that hair in my life.

  I leaned more comfortably into the crook of Colin’s arm, marveling at the wonder of having an arm to lean into. Under those circumstances, it was hard to get too worked up about Nick’s gate-crashing.

  Letting the menu drop to the table, Nick grinned at me. “Eloise, right?”

  We’d only met two times before. They do say third time is the charm. Maybe it takes three times for boys to assume that you’re there to stay and it’s worth their while to remember your name. Not exactly a pleasant thought. I bitterly disliked the thought of any other girl sitting there beneath Colin’s arm.

  “That it is,” I said cheerfully. “Nigel?”

  “Nick,” he corrected, without rancor. Okay, fine, so it had been petty of me. He was so good-natured, it was hard to be annoyed, even if Serena’s chair was now angled a good forty-five degrees away from Martin, towards Nick. Martin had a resigned expression on his face, as though he was used to this happening. Since they had all gone to University together, he probably was.

  “And what do you do, again?” Nick asked, keeping the charm on high.

  “I’m a grad student. I’m working on my dissertation.”

  “About spies during the Napoleonic Wars,” Colin contributed for me, squeezing my shoulder affectionately.

  Awwwww.

  Martin looked away. It must be hard for him, I thought, when he had been used to being the one in the couple, now suddenly being on his own, forced to watch other people being all couple-y. I knew how that felt.

  “Napoleonic spies? That sounds right up your alley,” said Nick to Colin. Turning back to me, he added, “Did you know that Colin’s family—”

  “Ah, your coffee,” said Colin rather gratuitously. It was hard to avoid noticing Nick’s coffee, as the waiter set it down in front of him with an audible clunk that sent coffee swimming over the rim and into the saucer. “Nick works at the BBC,” he informed me, as the waiter retreated in a glow of petty triumph.

  “Can you make them put Monarch of the Glen back on?” I suggested, pouring more cream into my own coffee. “I’m sick of Emmerdale.”

  “That’s ITV,” said Nick unapologetically, “not us. So I’m afraid you’re stuck with it.” He threw a wink at Serena, who actually produced a small giggle.

  Hmmm.

  “We should have a show about your spies,” suggested Nick, raising his coffee cup. “What have they been up to?”

  “Oh, all sorts of skullduggery,” I replied, in the same bantering tone. “Kidnapping King George, blowing up theatres, plotting mayhem in India . . . You’re right. It would make a brilliant series. Much more fun than a dissertation.”

  “India?” asked Colin curiously, leaning sideways to look at me.

  “Oh.” What with one thing and another, I hadn’t quite gotten around to mentioning that to him yet. There had been other things to do last night. Flushing, I admitted, “It’s sort of a tangent. You see,” I explained to the others, “my dissertation mostly focuses on the behavior of spy networks in England and France during the Napoleonic Wars. But, recently, I came across a reference to a French spy network deployed in India during the period. It might make an interesting chapter. History departments are big on the non-Western these days.”

  At least, that’s what I had been telling myself. You can always find an excuse for doing what you feel like doing if you try hard enough. And it was true that having a non-Western angle played well in the academic job market. Mostly, though, my curiosity had been piqued.

  “What were the Frogs doing in India?” asked Nick idly, rocking his chair back and forth.

  “They’d always been there,” I said, with a confidence that came of having spent the last week reading up on the topic. “Well, since the 1660s, at any rate. They had trading posts there, just as the British did. When Bonaparte rose to power, in the 1790s, they still had strongholds in Mauritius and Pondicherry and a lot of the local rulers had French officers in charge of their armed forces. It’s kind of neat, actually,” I added, twisting my head to look back at Colin. “In Hyderabad, the Nizam—that’s the ruler—employed both an English force and a French force, with their own separate camps on different sides of the river. I guess he thought the competition would keep them on their toes.”

  “Did it?”

  I shrugged. “It kept a lot of spies in business. The French had people in the English camp and the English had people in the French camp and the Nizam had people in both camps.”

  “It sounds like fashion designers,” suggested Serena tentatively.

  “Or celebrity chefs,” contributed Nick, grinning at her, “guarding their top-secret recipes.”

  “The English Resident—that’s a sort of ambassador—p
ersuaded the Nizam to get rid of the French camp eventually, but it was all very touch and go. In fact, Lord Wellesley made it a condition of a bunch of peace treaties with local rulers in 1803 that anyone who had hired French officers had to ship them back to France.”

  “Wellesley as in Wellington?” asked Colin.

  “Right family, wrong brother. This Wellesley was the older brother. He was the Governor General of India right around the turn of the nineteenth century. Little Wellesley—the one who became Wellington—got his start soldiering under him in India.”

  I considered trying to explain about the Mahratta Wars, but thought better of it. People’s eyes were beginning to glaze over the same way mine had when Martin was talking about accounting. I would bore Colin with it later.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, grimacing apologetically around the table. “I’ve been doing background reading on this all week, so I’m a little obsessed right now. I’ve sort of hit a dead end, though.”

  Having exhausted the Institute of Historical Research’s collection of monographs on late-eighteenth-century India, I wasn’t quite sure where to go for the primary sources. It was my time period, but quite definitely not my field.

  “I wonder what happened to all the old East India Company documents,” mused Colin, his fingers tapping against the back of my chair. “They had to go somewhere after they tore the East India House down.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never done any work with Indian documents.” There was a very nice new professor in the history department back at Harvard whose specialty was eighteenth-century India, but I had only met him very briefly at a department cocktail party the previous spring, hardly enough of an acquaintance to feel comfortable e-mailing and nagging him for advice. I was sure he would have no idea who I was. After the first thirty or so introductions, one grad student begins to look much like another.

  “You could ask Aunt Arabella,” suggested Serena. “She spent a good deal of time in that part of the world.”

  “Really?” I remembered Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat, with its chintz and white moldings and unexpectedly exotic accoutrements, relics of the last gasp of Empire. There had been a tufted Zulu spear and many-legged Indian gods sitting side by side with the usual Dresden shepherdesses and Minton candy dishes.

  Because it had been Mrs. Selwick-Alderly who had introduced me to Colin—so to speak—I had warm and fuzzy feelings for her, even if we weren’t quite on “Aunt Arabella” terms yet.

  “Her husband was stationed out there during World War Two,” said Colin. “And they stayed on until the transfer of power in 1947. If nothing else, she should at least have some idea of where you can start to look.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  Feeling like I had hogged the conversation long enough, I quickly turned to Serena and asked her a question about the party her gallery was throwing for Valentine’s Day. Nick and Martin both pledged their attendance. I knew Serena had invited Pammy, too. This was going to get very interesting very quickly. I wondered, distractedly, whether Pammy might be rerouted to Martin. But he wasn’t really her type. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good-looking; he was pleasant enough with his close-cropped, curly dark hair and broad-shouldered build. But Pammy tended to go more for Masters of the Universe types, not Eeyore. As she was fond of saying, she didn’t take on reclamation projects.

  I decided to table the whole question for later. It was still a good week till Valentine’s Day. I had time to sound out Pammy and lay my plans. In the meantime, I was just happy. Happy to be out on a sunny Sunday, happy to be with Colin, happy, happy, happy. It helped that I had had about seven cups of coffee at lunch. I was flying high on caffeine and contentment.

  I hugged Colin’s arm close to my side as we strolled away from the restaurant. “That was fun.”

  It was frigid cold out, but without having to arrange it between us, we set out to walk back to my flat. That was another thing we had in common, I thought happily; we both liked walking places. It would have been a shame to waste all that lovely sunshine by going down into the dark depths of the Tube. With Colin going back to Sussex tomorrow morning, I didn’t want to waste a single, golden moment.

  “I hadn’t realized you were researching India,” he said, as we walked down a street lined with stucco town houses.

  “I wasn’t,” I admitted. “But the last time I was up at Selwick Hall with you, I found a couple of letters from Penelope Deveraux.”

  “From who?”

  I wasn’t surprised by the blank look. Colin had mentioned that as a young man he had read through some of the family papers related to the Pink Carnation, but there was no reason for him to remember Penelope. She had been only peripherally involved in the Pink Carnation’s activities. “She was a friend of the Purple Gentian’s younger sister.”

  “And that makes her—?” prompted Colin.

  “Absolutely nothing,” I replied, quoting Spaceballs. “Actually, what it makes her is Henrietta’s correspondent. She got herself into a bit of trouble and was married off in a hurry and sent to India until the scandal could die down at home. When I was rooting around in your archives, I found a couple of letters from her to Henrietta.”

  There had been two letters, both from the autumn of 1804, one marked Calcutta, the second, written a month later, from Hyderabad. It was the second letter that had mentioned a spy called the Marigold.

  I had come across a previous reference to the Marigold in a different set of papers, connected to the same group who had tried to kidnap King George and replace him with an imposter under the guise of a recurrence of his old madness. The connection had piqued my interest. Plus, I kind of wanted to know what happened to Penelope. It is amazing how attached one can get to the historical subjects in the course of research. It becomes a bit like gossiping about old friends. You want to know how things turned out for them.

  Boy that he was, Colin wasn’t interested in the personal bits, like just how Penelope had gotten herself into trouble and with whom. He cut straight to the chase. “Where do the spies come in?”

  “Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Here’s what I have so far. . . .”

  Chapter One

  There were times when Lady Frederick Staines, nee Miss Penelope Deveraux, deeply regretted her lack of a portable rack and thumbscrews.

  Now was one of them. Rain drummed against the roof of the carriage like a set of impatient fingers. Penelope knew just how it felt.

  “You spoke to Lord Wellesley, didn’t you?” she asked her husband, as though her husband’s interview with the Governor General of India were one of complete indifference to her and nothing at all to do with the way she was expected to spend the next year of her life.

  Freddy shrugged.

  Penelope was learning to hate that shrug. It was a shrug amply indicative of her place in the world, somewhere just about on a level with a sofa cushion, convenient to lean against but unworthy of conversational effort.

  That hadn’t been the case eight months ago.

  Eight months ago they hadn’t been married. Eight months ago Freddy had still been trying to get her out of the ballroom into an alcove, a balcony, a bedroom, whichever enclosed space could best suit the purpose of seduction. It was a fitting enough commentary on the rake’s progress, from silver-tongued seducer to indifferent spouse in the space of less than a year.

  Not that Freddy had ever been all that silver-tongued. Nor, to be fair, had he done all the seducing.

  How was she to have known that a bit of canoodling would land them both in India?

  Outside, rain pounded against the roof of the carriage, not the gentle tippety tap of an English drizzle, but the full-out deluge of an Oriental monsoon. They had sailed up the Hooghly into Calcutta that morning after five endless months on a creaking, pitching vessel, replacing water beneath them with water all around them, rain crashing against the esplanade, grinding the carefully planted English flowers that lined the sides into the muck, all but ob
scuring the conveyance that had been sent for them by the Governor General himself, with its attendant clutter of soaked and chattering servants, proffering umbrellas, squabbling over luggage, pulling and propelling them into a very large, very heavy carriage.

  If she had thought about it at all, Penelope would have expected Calcutta to be sunny.

  But then, she hadn’t given it much thought, not any of it. It had all happened too quickly for thought, ruined in January, married in February, on a boat to the tropics by March. The future had seemed unimportant compared to the exigencies of the present. Penelope had been too busy brazening it out to wonder about little things like where they were to go and how they were to live. India was away and that was enough. Away from her mother’s shrill reproaches (If you had to get yourself compromised, couldn’t you at least have picked an older son?); Charlotte’s wide-eyed concern; Henrietta’s clumsy attempts to get her to talk about it, as though talking would make the least bit of difference to the reality of it all. Ruined was ruined was ruined, so what was the point of compounding it by discussing it?

  There was even, if she was being honest, a certain grim pleasure to it, to having put paid to her mother’s matrimonial scheming and poked a finger in the eye of every carping old matron who had ever called her fast. Ha! Let them see how fast she could be. All things considered, she had got out of it rather lightly. Freddy might be selfish, but he was seldom cruel. He didn’t have crossed eyes or a hunchback (unlike that earl her mother had been throwing at her). He wasn’t violent in his cups, he might be a dreadful card player but he had more than enough blunt to cover his losses, and he possessed a reasonable proficiency in those amorous activities that had propelled them into matrimony.

  Freddy was, however, still sulky about having been roped into wedlock. It wasn’t the being married he seemed to mind—as he had said, with a shrug, when he tossed her a betrothal ring, one had to get married sooner or later and it might as well be to a stunner—as the loss of face among his cronies at being forced into it. He tended to forget his displeasure in the bedroom, but it surfaced in a dozen other minor ways.