The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

by Lauren Willig

  When they did speak, they spoke of insignificant things; of the weather, or the scenery, or Mrs. Ure’s latest act of extreme gluttony. Off-limits were Captain Reid’s family, anything to do with Freddy, Hyderabadi politics, and the mysterious movements of French spies. She had never produced the note she had found and he had never said a word more about Guignon. They had never come to any sort of agreement on the topic; it had just sorted itself out that way, by mutual and tacit agreement. Those dawn hours, while Freddy still slept and the parched land rested from the sun, were like the territory outside a disputed castle, a place of truce rather than treaty.

  She had never had a male friend before. Lovers, yes. Flirtations. But never a friend. It made an intriguing change.

  Catching her eye on him, he smiled at her, a man-to-man, good comradely sort of smile. Penelope caught herself preening and made herself stop.

  Mr. Cleave’s light eyes flicked from one to the other with obvious interest. “Are you and Alex—friendly?”

  The hesitation in his voice might have been just that, nothing more than the same diffidence that made him look so anxious in declaiming an ability to translate for her, but it seemed to imply something more. Penelope bristled.

  “Captain Reid and I ride together,” she said, more curtly than she might otherwise have done. “Horses,” she clarified bitingly.

  Deep color washed over Mr. Cleave’s cheekbones. “I certainly never meant to imply—”

  Penelope looked at him assessingly. “Didn’t you?”

  Having forced the retraction, she was more offended by the disclaimer than the initial assumption. Why shouldn’t they be . . . friendly? Didn’t he think she was attractive enough? Seductive enough? Penelope glanced sideways at Captain Reid. He stood directly beneath one of the lanterns that had been laced about the veranda. It struck red sparks off his black hair. What would it have been like had their morning rides been something else entirely?

  Entirely misinterpreting the speculative expression on her face, Mr. Cleave rushed to defend his old schoolfellow from the calumny he felt he had accidentally brought upon him.

  “Reid isn’t anything like his father,” Mr. Cleave said hastily. “At least, there have never been any whispers of it.”

  “Like his father?”

  “Surely, you’ve heard—oh.” Mr. Cleave broke off in considerable confusion. “You haven’t, have you? Since you had made his acquaintance, I thought you must have known. . . . Well, never mind, then.”

  “You can’t just ‘never mind’ me after that,” said Penelope persuasively, leaning towards him in a way that made him go a very deep red. “I might make myself ill with curiosity. And you wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”

  “Oh, well.” Mr. Cleave inserted a finger beneath his collar, as though his cravat had grown too tight. “It’s just that the Colonel has a somewhat checkered reputation with women. It wasn’t that unusual at the time,” he added, accidentally heaping coals on the fire. “Many men took up with Indian women. But Colonel Reid—well, he was rather flamboyant about it. One of them killed herself. It was all,” he said, with obvious distaste, “rather unpleasant.”

  “Not Captain Reid’s mother?”

  “Oh no,” he hastened to assure her. “Not his mother. Jack’s mother. She was a Rajput lady, you see. Rather highly born. Her family disowned her when she took up with Colonel Reid.”

  “He must have been quite dashing in his day,” said Penelope speculatively, recalling a pair of twinkling blue eyes in a weathered face, volubly disclaiming any interest in games of chance. “A charming rogue.”

  In the corner of the veranda, Captain Reid grinned at something the Resident had just said. For a moment, Penelope saw a very fleeting resemblance. Then it was gone, and Captain Reid was himself again, the very antithesis of roguishness. He might, Penelope suspected, have had his own share of charm had he not tried so very hard to suppress it.

  “Not so charming for his wife—Reid’s mother,” said Mr. Cleave, flicking at a mosquito.

  Penelope could see that it wouldn’t have been. That, she thought practically, was the problem with charming rogues. They seldom confined their charm to one target.

  “He was unfaithful to her?”

  “Only at the very end,” said Mr. Cleave, with painstaking justice. “Mrs. Reid was ill for some time. India didn’t suit her.”

  He spoke as one who had seen it all personally. “How do you know all this?”

  “My mother was quite close with Mrs. Reid. They came here together as brides. This country is not kind to Englishwomen, Lady Frederick.”

  “Perhaps that depends on the Englishwoman,” said Penelope tartly.

  “My mother’s health wasn’t equal to it.” There was no mistaking the bitterness in his tone. “India reduced her to a state of perpetual invalidism and provided her with none of the riches she was promised. This is a country that makes some, but ruins untold others in the process.”

  Penelope brushed aside his philosophical musings. “What happened to the boy? The one whose mother killed herself?”

  “You mean Jack.” He pronounced the name as though it were synonymous with pitch.

  “And what does he do?” asked Penelope, amused. “Cattle-rustling? The odd bit of highway robbery?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr. Cleave, with more animation than she had seen him show so far. “He’s—”

  “Still telling tales, Daniel?” Mr. Cleave started guiltily, banging his elbow against the balustrade. Captain Reid cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re not still smarting over the incident of the toy soldiers, are you?”

  Clutching his bruised elbow, Mr. Cleave flushed a bright red. “That was over twenty years ago, Reid! And they were my soldiers.”

  “You must forgive Daniel. He was an only child.” The casual comment made the other man sound about five.

  Penelope could feel him squirm against the stone balustrade. “Come, now, Reid,” Mr. Cleave protested. “Jack was a bully, whichever way you look at it.”

  “Aren’t we a bit old to be refighting schoolroom battles?” Captain Reid said lightly, but his expression didn’t tally with his voice. Penelope had the impression that beneath his casual demeanor he was angry, deeply angry.

  It would be rather nice, she thought, to have someone come to one’s defense like that. It was impossible to imagine either of her brothers, aged twelve and thirteen respectively, doing anything of the kind.

  Mr. Cleave’s expression was painfully earnest as he looked up at his old schoolfellow. “It’s not schoolroom battles that are the problem, Alex.”

  A palpable tension crackled between them. Penelope saw Captain Reid’s lips press tightly together, closing over whatever it was he wanted to say—but wouldn’t, while she was there to hear.

  “Will you excuse me, gentlemen?” she said, whisking neatly between them. In her flat-heeled slippers, she was nearly as tall as Mr. Cleave. “My husband seems to have disappeared with my shawl.”

  Both gentlemen offered their assistance, as by rote, but it was clear that they both wanted nothing more than to be allowed to get on with their argument. Fair enough. Penelope was rather keen for them to get on with it, too. She wanted to know what they had to say. She swished past them with as much rustling, swishing, and fluttering as she could muster.

  Once inside, she abruptly stopped swishing, gathering her skirts close to her legs to minimize the noise of her passage. Long windows, open for the circulation of air, looked out onto the veranda. Dragging over a chair, Penelope positioned herself beside one. If anyone asked, she was simply . . . resting her feet. No, inspecting her hem. Yes, that was it. A snagged hem was always a popular excuse. Scooting a little closer, she leaned her cheek against the white wainscoting.

  At first, she heard nothing more interesting than the cry of the birds from the garden and the echo of Fiske’s voice, slightly slurred by either distance or drink.

  “Well?” said Captain Reid in a voic
e as hard as packed dirt. “What is it, Daniel?”

  Cleave’s voice, apologetic and anxious. “You know I wouldn’t trouble you with this if it wasn’t urgent. . . .”

  “What does Lord Wellesley want?”

  Cleave cleared his throat painfully. “I know he is your brother—” “Perceptive of you.”

  “—But that doesn’t change what he has become.”

  “What?” The word cut the air like broken glass. “What has he become, Daniel?”

  Cleave’s voice was so soft she could hardly hear him. “A traitor.”

  Oh my. Penelope nearly overbalanced into the open window. This was getting interesting.

  Captain Reid sounded defensive, but not, Penelope thought, entirely surprised. “On what grounds?” he asked.

  “You know who he was working for,” said Mr. Cleave apologetically.

  Who? This was the problem with eavesdropping, not that one seldom heard good of oneself, but that the people on whom one was eavesdropping were lamentably chary with proper explanations.

  “He was working for Scindia,” said Captain Reid flatly. The name was a vaguely familiar one. He might be, Penelope thought, something to do with the late war everyone had been talking about.

  “He may have been nominally employed by Scindia, but he was working for General Perron,” countered Cleave, giving the name a French twist. “And you know what that means.”

  Captain Reid’s voice cracked like grapeshot. “Would you call George a traitor for working for the Begum Sumroo?”

  “No. But—”

  “But what?” said Reid harshly. “I fail to see how you can be a traitor to a country that never acknowledged you as its own.”

  “Why are you fighting so hard for him? He hasn’t for you.”

  “Because we were children together. Because he’s my brother. Christ. Do I need more reason than that?”

  “That isn’t all, Alex. If it was, do you think I would have troubled you with it?”

  “If Wellesley asked you to, yes.” There was no mistaking the contempt in his voice.

  Mr. Cleave responded with a quiet dignity that was more than Penelope would have expected of him. “It’s my duty, Alex. My obligation. I should have thought you would have understood that.”

  The silence hung heavy between them, all the more dramatic for the sounds of revelry from farther down the balcony. Penelope wished she dared to risk a peek out the window.

  After a moment, Cleave resumed, in the tone of one determined to make the best of a bad business. “And there’s more to it than that. We have—” Cleave’s voice faltered, as though what he was about to say was distasteful to him. “We have reason to believe that Jack has been serving as go-between for the leaders of the French cause in India, lobbying on their behalf with rulers he believes might have cause to break with England. He’s been offering them gold in exchange for allegiance.”

  “Gold from Berar.”

  “So you have spoken to him!”

  The fight had gone out of Captain Reid’s voice. Instead, he sounded bone-achingly weary. “No, Daniel, I haven’t. Not since Christmas four years ago. I heard rumors about the treasure of Berar from other sources.”

  “What other sources?”

  “If I told you, they wouldn’t remain useful for very long, now, would they?”

  “Is that your final word on the matter?”

  “Am I on trial now, Daniel?” Captain Reid’s voice was dangerously quiet, but even in her secluded window embrasure, Penelope felt the sting of it. “My record is as solid as yours and my word as good.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Of course, I didn’t mean—But what am I going to tell Wellesley?”

  “Whatever you were bloody well going to tell him in the first place. I don’t know, Daniel. I can’t be your conscience.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I’m my brother’s keeper, not yours.”

  “Lady F!” A pair of gloved hands grasped Penelope about the waist, swinging her about to blast Madeira in her face. “What are you doing hiding away in here?”

  “Just resting my hem,” said Penelope nonsensically, wiggling away from Sir Leamington Fiske. There was little hope that they hadn’t heard him out on the balcony. Raising her voice, she said, “You haven’t seen Freddy, have you? I’ve been looking for him.”

  Fiske struck a heroic pose. He looked like a fish posing for a statue. “I’d rather feast my eyes on you.”

  “Watch out for indigestion.”

  Fiske blinked at her.

  “Later,” Penelope said soothingly, brushing a hand lightly against his sleeve. She had suffered Fiske’s advances for the past week in the hopes of getting information out of him, and had gotten rather good at leading him on while ceding nothing. But right now she wanted to think. “Later.”

  “What’s wrong with now?”

  “Now,” said Penelope charmingly, “I need to find Freddy. He was supposed to bring me my shawl.”

  Fiske released her with good grace. Penelope wondered if he was quite as foxed as he seemed. “When you find him, send him over to me, will you? We have a little wager that wants settling.”

  “I shall,” promised Penelope vaguely.

  Having told everyone she was going to find Freddy, it seemed that it was incumbent upon her to do so. She set off towards her own bungalow in a gray study, only half-aware of the rich scents of the night flowers, the now-familiar movements of servants moving about their tasks, the slither and rustle of animals in the underbrush.

  As she walked on, she wondered whether she might have been wasting her time, these past two days, in attempting to wheedle confidences out of Fiske. Fiske, using every opportunity to fondle whatever came into reach, had implied a great deal, but confirmed nothing. When teased about French tastes, he had made a very crude joke about French letters. When Penelope had deliberately chosen to interpret that as a comment about correspondence, Fiske had made lewd comments about his prior correspondents. She had credited Fiske’s lewdness to cunning. But what if he was simply lewd? The only French letters he received might well be the kind that came in boxes of twenty.

  If everything she had overheard was to be credited, this Jack made a far better prospect for agitator than Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske.

  Before Penelope could pursue that fascinating line of thought further, her attention was arrested by a familiar voice speaking in a decidedly unfamiliar way. It was Freddy’s voice, low and intimate, murmuring something she couldn’t quite hear. He sounded quite intent on whatever it was.

  His voice had come from the unused zenana quarters at the back of the house. Semidetached from the body of the house, they opened onto their own enclosed courtyard. Untenanted, there was no reason for anyone to visit them, not even the servants. Penelope hadn’t bothered to look inside since the Resident had first shown them around their new home, well over a month before.

  What on earth did Freddy want in the old zenana quarters?

  Wiggling through a gap in the shrubbery, Penelope shoved her way into the interior courtyard. There was no door into the encircling rooms, only cane screens that allowed for the air to circulate, while keeping out light and bugs. She could see thin slits of light through one screen, a sign that someone was very much in residence.

  “Oh yes,” said Freddy emphatically, obviously quite in agreement with the unknown person.

  Lifting an edge of the screen, Penelope slid underneath. And stopped stumblingly short.

  When she had first seen the zenana quarters, they had been empty and decaying, with patches of damp on the walls from the recent monsoon rains, falling chunks of plaster, and even a bird’s nest in one corner of the ceiling. Now, gay hangings covered the walls, richly woven tapestries portraying lithesome ladies dancing in gardens much like the one Penelope had just left, sporting themselves beside the waters of cool fountains, or reaching into the air to catch a falcon on the wrist, while a lordly gentlemen in Jacobean costume sat in the shade of arched pavilions, the tip of
a hookah resting between his parted lips. Silken cushions lay in careless piles upon richly woven carpets. A stringed instrument sat propped against one wall, the smooth wooden surface inset with precious mother of pearl. On a delicately carved table rested a filigreed carafe and glasses, cool in the warmth of the room, next to a display of honeyed sweetmeats piled in gluttonous array on a silver tray. Everything was rich and rare and lovely, a seduction of all the senses, from the haunting scent of flowers to the lilting song of a dainty songbird in a filigree cage, as pleasing to the eye as to the ear.

  But nothing was quite so lovely or so rare as the woman in the middle of the room.

  Her dark hair, perfect black, tumbled down her back, loosed more than held by the pearl band that circled her forehead. There were bangles on her arms and little else. Aside from the fall of her hair and the long necklace that fell between her breasts, she was entirely naked. She had the sort of figure Penelope had seen in temple friezes on their journey, all breast and hip, as smooth and round as well-worked ivory, carved to excite a man’s lust. She was balanced on one leg, as graceful as an opera dancer. The other was wrapped around Freddy’s right hip.

  Freddy seemed more than happy with that disposition. His large hands were tangled in the wanton fall of her hair, his head thrown back and his eyes half-closed. His chest, bared by his open shirt, expanded and contracted in time to his uneven breathing. His companion rose farther up on tiptoe, bringing a delighted gasp to Freddy’s lips and a contraction of his fingers in her hair.

  Penelope emitted a squeaking noise.

  She hadn’t meant to. It just came out, like the last bubbles on the deck of a sinking ship.

  An expression of extreme alarm crossed Freddy’s face. She could see his eyes shift back and forth, mark the exact moment he had spotted her, standing at the back of the room. He stumbled violently back, sending his houri tumbling flat on her rump in a decidedly indelicate position.

  Not quite so indelicate as his. The flap of his breeches dangled open, like a bad joke in a third-rate farce.

  “Um, Pen.” Freddy pinned a wobbly smile on his face. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”