The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

by Lauren Willig

  Her words bit like a steel-tipped lash. And they were fair. Alex had to acknowledge that.

  Closing his eyes, he said, “The guns.”

  “The guns,” Mah Laqa Bai agreed. “And the men. The Nizam, true to his promises, has paid the money owing on his part. Where are the men and arms your government has promised us? When the Nizam called upon them to restore order in the town during the festival of Muhurram, not half of those promised appeared, and of those who did, they had not sufficient firelocks among them.”

  Ollie Plowden had told him the same, adding, on top of it, that not only were munitions missing, but also tents, carriages, and artillery, all listed as purchased and accounted for on the official record, none actually in place in the storehouses. The most likely explanation was that the commanders of the Subsidiary Force were pocketing the money the Nizam had sent them. James had caught them at it before, adding to the deterioration of a relationship between Residency and cantonments that was already strained.

  It wouldn’t be the first time James had discovered discrepancies in the equipment and muster rolls, but never before had the graft approached anything like this scale. There was no getting around it. The commanders of the Subsidiary Force were robbing the Nizam blind.

  Alex turned a troubled gaze on Mah Laqa Bai. “You do know that—”

  Mah Laqa Bai’s expression softened. Silencing him with a finger to his lips, she said, “I know. If it were up to you, it would not be so. But . . .”

  “But it isn’t up to me,” Alex finished for her. “Or, in the event, to James.”

  Both looked to the tent where the Governor General’s new emissary sat sprawled on a pile of shot-silk cushions.

  “Will it help if I say I’ll do what I can?” said Alex wryly.

  Mah Laqa Bai laid a hand lightly on his arm. “All I can do is promise you the same.”

  The smoothly polished stones of her rings were cool against his palm as he squeezed her hand. “You would tell me if there was anything afoot, wouldn’t you? Anything dangerous?”

  “Haven’t I just?” she said lightly, but Alex noticed that she didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  Alex’s stomach sank. He hadn’t realized how much he had been relying on her help until she had denied it.

  Fair enough. If their positions were reversed, he would have been expected to do the same, to place his loyalty to his country before personal affection.

  It sounded simple enough in theory. In practice, Alex wondered what it was like to have such marvelously unclouded loyalties. Mir Alam might talk of men torn between their mother’s lands and their father’s, but what of men like him? British by blood, but born in India, raised in India, more comfortable with curry than claret, more at home at a nautch than a ball. He had spent his four long years at school in England talking about India, writing to India, planning his return to India. If it came down to it, which would he choose?

  He knew his father’s answer: England. Having eaten the East India Company’s salt for thirty long years, his father would, in the end, despite children, wives, and lovers, always be the Company’s man. There were times when Alex wished it could be that simple. When it came down to it, he didn’t really belong to anywhere at all—not to the East India Company, not to England, not to the town where he had grown up, or the province in which he currently served.

  Christ. He didn’t even have a proper mother tongue. He had spoken Tamil before English, and Telagu before Tamil, the legacy of the series of ayahs who had taken over as his mother had faded first to nothing more than a soft Welsh voice in a pile of bed linen and from there to nothing more than flat lines on a painted miniature.

  “I think,” said Mah Laqa Bai, lightly touching his arm and jarring him out of his reverie, “you should make it up with the lady who is not your lover.”

  “You merely want fodder for another poem.”

  Mah Laqa Bai tapped a finger against his cheek. “My dear boy, I already have more than enough of that on my own.” Glancing sideways at the stiffened silk canopy beneath which Lady Frederick sat, she added slyly, “I believe your Lady Vinegar is jealous. Look how she scowls at me.”

  Despite himself, Alex looked. He shouldn’t, he knew, any more than he should feel a surge of smugness at the prospect. It was simply one of Mah Laqa Bai’s stratagems, an attempt to keep him safely occupied, away from Mir Alam, and out of danger. But he looked nonetheless.

  “You see?” said Mah Laqa Bai, leaning mischievously into Alex’s arm. Lady Frederick’s lips tightened.

  “It’s not what you think,” said Alex dourly. “She’s simply sizing up my neck for a noose.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Brilliant news!” exclaimed Freddy, looking up from a thickly scrawled piece of paper. “Fiske is coming to visit.”

  “Brilliant,” echoed Penelope hollowly, taking the seat at the breakfast table that a servant held out for her. Her head ached as if with the aftereffects of overindulgence, even though she had taken nothing stronger than sherbet the night before. “Who is Fiske?”

  “In my regiment,” pronounced Freddy around a piece of toast. “He was at Begum Johnson’s party. You met him.”

  After a moment, Penelope’s sluggish memory dredged up a picture of a willowy man with a decidedly piscine leer. Brilliant.

  “He’s passing through on his way to Mysore,” Freddy said, paper rustling as he shifted it in one hand to read down through the scrawled lines. Jam dripped from the toast he held in his other hand onto the linen tablecloth. “Excellent chap.”

  There were letters sitting by Penelope’s place, as well. A packet must have come through. She flipped desultorily through the lot of them, avoiding watching as Freddy decapitated a soft-boiled egg with a sporting swipe of his spoon. The runny yellow innards looked the way her head felt.

  Sleep had eluded her the night before. After Freddy had claimed his husbandly duties in a discouragingly perfunctory fashion, she had been left awake, staring at the mosquito netting, brooding over the mess she had made of the evening. There was no denying that she had made a cake of herself with Captain Reid. A great, big plummy cake, served up on a sterling silver platter. With custard sauce.

  Penelope sniffed. If he didn’t want people thinking he was up to no good, he shouldn’t skulk about so.

  Freddy edged his chair away. “Catching a cold, are you, old thing?” Freddy had a horror of colds.

  “I’m fine,” said Penelope irritably, and reached for the pile of letters. It was a sad day when one couldn’t even indulge one’s feelings in an audible manner without being accused of contagion.

  The letter on the top of the pile was from her mother. Penelope gave the seal a savage crack.

  Her mother hoped she was behaving herself and not boring her husband with any of her silly fidgets. She was sure Penelope wouldn’t mind if one of Penelope’s younger brothers took over her hunter while she was gone. Such an inappropriate mount for a lady and she didn’t know what Penelope’s father had been thinking to allow it. Penelope should be sure to pay her respects to Lady Clive while she was there; it didn’t concern her mother at all that Lady Clive was in Madras, clear on the other end of the country, or that Penelope had never met Lady Clive, never been introduced to Lady Clive, and had no interest in anything to do with Lady Clive. The letter ended with a lengthy disquisition on Freddy’s older brother’s health, in the clear hope that the heir to the earldom would have the good manners to kick up his clogs, leaving Penelope with the title her mother so ardently desired.

  Crumpling up the thin sheet of paper, Penelope tossed it aside. It glanced off the marmalade pot before landing in the kedgeree.

  “My mother sends her regards,” she told Freddy.

  “Mmmph,” said Freddy. “Badger Throckhurst fell into a soup tureen.”

  Penelope went back to her post. There was a very thin letter in the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale’s characteristic scrawl, the paper poked through in the many places where the Dowager had thought it
fit to emphatically jab her quill, and a much longer one from Henrietta, who informed Penelope with great glee and an excessive use of adverbs that Charlotte and her duke had reconciled and were to be married from Dovedale as soon as enough champagne could be procured.

  Charlotte’s courtship had been complicated by the discovery of a nest of spies in a branch of the Hellfire Club, the same branch to which Freddy had belonged, although Henrietta skirted carefully around that bit. Too carefully. Penelope scowled at the letter. The club had originated in India, among Freddy’s old regiment. Charlotte was very concerned that Penelope keep an eye out for a mysterious Marigold, although Henrietta thought it unlikely that the spy ring should still be in operation by the time her letter arrived, now that they had squished the English branch.

  Penelope’s lips twisted in a decidedly unbecoming expression as she paged through the letter. Evil had been vanquished, good had triumphed, and everyone was happy, happy, happy. Charlotte’s duke and Henrietta’s Miles got along famously, according to Henrietta. Miles had even put the duke up for his club. Charlotte sent her love and was planning to write as soon as the wedding madness was over, with some pressed flowers from her wedding bouquet so that Penelope would have been there at least in part. Or at least part of something that had been there would be with Penelope. Well, Penelope knew what she meant. They all sent lots of love and missed her to bits and hoped she was having a glorious time in India, riding elephants and draping herself in rubies as big as her thumb.

  Lovely, thought Penelope sourly. Everyone was one great big happy family except her. And she had brought it all on herself. She couldn’t even cry injustice. Charlotte was everything the novelists approved: meek, docile, kind to small children and smaller animals, filled with love and goodwill towards her fellow man. She had never got into a scrape that Penelope hadn’t dragged her into first, and her idea of rebellion was to stir an extra spoon of sugar into her tea. And Henrietta was just Henrietta, deep down basic goodness without a mean bone in her body, wholesome and nourishing, like a well-baked loaf of bread. Whereas Penelope . . .

  Penelope shoved her chair abruptly away from the table. A servant scrambled for it as the legs caught on the carpet edge, sending it rocking back and forth.

  “I’m going for a ride,” she said shortly.

  “Mmmph,” said Freddy.

  “Yes, I will have a nice ride,” she said caustically, and was rewarded by one puzzled blue eye emerging from behind a seven-month-old Morning Post.

  She swept out before he could answer.

  The last thing she wanted was to actually talk to anyone, much less Freddy. She just wanted to go. It didn’t matter where, just as long as she was moving. Moving, moving, moving, without having to think. She was in no mood to dwell on other people’s happily-ever-afters.

  But that was just what Captain Reid had taken her to task for doing last night, wasn’t it? Acting without thinking. Well, with any luck, she’d unthinkingly ride her horse straight into a gully and then he’d be shot of her and she wouldn’t have to think about anything ever again.

  But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t quite stop thinking. The thoughts rustled around in her brain like moths in a clothespress, eating their way through her composure and her temper. She made short work of her wardrobe, scrambling into her riding habit, blazed past the startled munshi who had come to work with her on her Urdu, and stood snapping her riding crop on the veranda, waiting for Buttercup to be brought around. Naturally, she hit herself in the ankle. Fortunately, she was wearing sturdy boots beneath her habit, so the only welt it left was on her temper.

  She had not enjoyed her first nautch. While Freddy was ogling that creature with the overdeveloped chest and Captain Reid was being pawed by a woman old enough to be his mother—well, old enough to be his aunt, but it was still revolting—she had taken the opportunity to question the Resident’s Chief Secretary, Henry Russell, about Captain Reid’s claims. Russell was highly thought of by Wellesley; Penelope had heard the Governor General commend him out of his own lips. He could be trusted to give her an unbiased answer.

  He had. Only it wasn’t at all the answer she had wanted.

  Yes, he had said, Wellesley did have a bee in his bonnet about Kirkpatrick’s marriage. Didn’t understand it himself; lovely lady Khair-un-Nissa, and he was sure if the Governor General ever met her . . . Reid? Honest? To a fault. Quite dull about it, actually. He hoped she hadn’t been too bored on the journey down. He would have gone himself to see to her comfort on the journey, but the Resident couldn’t possibly spare him—and besides, Kirkpatrick had thought it would be nice for Reid to see his father again before the old man left for England. An amusing chap, Reid’s father. Oh, she had met him? Pity the son hadn’t inherited any of the father’s address, but there it was. No one could deny that he was a hard worker, and quite good at what he did, but he played no cards, only danced when pressed to, and hadn’t a coat worth looking at.

  It was only with great difficulty that Penelope had extricated herself from Russell, who misinterpreted her inquiries as being directed at securing his attentions rather than his information—almost as much difficulty as she had had extracting Freddy from the cleavage of that little nautch girl, whose breasts seemed to grow more prominent with each undulation. Penelope, whose charms lay in aspects other than that sort of endowment, had felt increasingly sour as the evening wore on. It wasn’t as though she could pull up her skirt and wave a leg in front of Freddy’s face, although she had been sorely tempted at various points.

  Her horse duly brought round, Penelope was just arranging her leg over the pommel of her sidesaddle (Freddy had been aghast at any suggestion of her riding astride once they arrived at the Residency) when she saw another rider heading past their bungalow on his way to the main gates.

  Naturally. It would be Captain Reid.

  Penelope resisted the urge to drop off her horse and hide behind its flank. Squaring her shoulders, she accepted her crop from the groom, waving him aside as she spurred grimly after Captain Reid.

  “Captain Reid!” Penelope urged her horse forward, intercepting him before he could reach the gate.

  There was no way for him to pretend he hadn’t heard her. Captain Reid reined in his horse, but he didn’t pretend to be happy about it.

  “Lady Frederick,” he said, with a stiff nod of his head.

  Bathsheba was far happier to see Penelope than was her rider; the mare nickered gently as Penelope reined up beside her.

  “You needn’t worry,” Penelope said, reaching out to rub Bathsheba’s nose. “I’m not going to start flinging accusations at you.”

  “Arson?” he suggested. “Barratry? I believe you missed those last night.”

  He sounded more wry than angry. Penelope didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. Belligerence would have been easier to deal with than toleration.

  “What is barratry?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” he admitted. “But you can accuse me now and then look it up later.”

  “I believe I can forego that pleasure. Look,” she said brusquely. “I seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. No. Never mind that. There never even was a stick.”

  “Perhaps just a very small twig,” offered Captain Reid blandly.

  “Not even that.” If one was to go to the bother of apologizing, there was no point in doing it by half measures. “As you said, I leapt to conclusions. If I were a man, you would have been within your rights to call me out.”

  “Within my rights, but excessively foolhardy if I had. I imagine you’re a very good shot.”

  “I am,” Penelope agreed without false modesty, taking hold of the olive branch he offered. “I doubt you would have survived the engagement.”

  “Please,” he protested. “At least do more the honor of assuming it would have been a close run thing.”

  Penelope conducted a deliberate assessment of Captain Reid’s person. In the interest of determining the steadiness of his
shooting arm, of course. He bore it with remarkable fortitude before quirking a brow, silently inviting her verdict.

  “I believe it would have been,” she acknowledged. “But I would have won.”

  “We can test that one of these days in the field,” he offered. “Aiming at sand grouse rather than each other?”

  “Can we?” Realizing she sounded overeager, Penelope hastily resumed a tone of extreme aristocratic boredom. “But I should let you be on your way. I’m sure you’re off somewhere frightfully official.”

  “Nothing that admirable. I’m on my way to see a friend’s new falcon.” On an impulse, he offered, “Would you like to join me?”

  “Yes!” Her face lit with such enthusiasm that he hadn’t the heart to rescind the invitation. “That is, I haven’t had much practice at hawking. I should like to see it. My father doesn’t keep birds.” Penelope realized she was saying too much, too fast, and abruptly occupied herself readjusting her grip on her reins. “Where is your friend?”

  “In the city.” From his expression, he was already questioning the wisdom of having invited her. “If you don’t wish to—”

  Usually, Penelope would have scorned to batten onto someone else’s generosity, but she was wild to get out of the Residency. The prospect of another morning of Embroidery and Writing Letters to Home in the demure confines of one of the Residency parlors acted on her like mosquito bites. The very thought of it made her twitch.

  Penelope kicked her mount into movement before he could complete the thought. “Lead the way,” she said briskly.

  For a moment, he looked as though he might demur, but he acquiesced with good humor. They rode through the Residency gates in a silence that, if not companionable, at least was not actively hostile. After being too long pent, to be outside the Residency walls was very heaven. As they crossed the river, Penelope tipped back her head, letting the sunshine fall full on her face and breathing deep of the wonderful, strongly scented air.