The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

by Lauren Willig

  Together, prompted a dulcet little voice in her head.

  “Miserable,” she finished, more forcefully than she had intended. “Stranded out in the hills in disgrace with nothing to do but snap at each other.”

  Alex’s hand stroked softly up and down her arm. “Does the disgrace bit bother you?”

  Since he had asked it honestly, Penelope did him the courtesy of actually thinking about it before answering, rather than shooting off the flippant answer that came too easily to her lips.

  “No,” she said at last, twining her fingers absently through the dark hair on his chest. “I’ve been in disgrace before. I’m very good at being in disgrace,” she added, and was rewarded by the rumble of a chuckle beneath her ear.

  “Then, why?” he asked.

  There was something about being in the dark with someone that made one say too much, too frankly. “It’s not my disgrace that matters. I don’t mind ruining myself, but it wouldn’t do to drag you down along with me.”

  “It wouldn’t be you doing all the dragging,” said Alex mildly. She felt the brush of his lips against the top of her head. “I do believe there are two of us involved.”

  “Wouldn’t it?” retorted Penelope. “Without me, there would be no dragging to be done.”

  “You might as well say that without the sun there would be no sunstroke. And yet we couldn’t do without it.”

  Was he saying that he couldn’t do without her?

  “It’s all a moot point, anyway,” grumbled Penelope, stirring restlessly against her human bolster, “because I’m not ruining you, and that’s that.”

  After three days, he knew her well enough to know when she couldn’t be swayed. “Fair enough,” he said at last, adding, provocatively, “but I call that ungenerous of you.”

  Penelope levered herself up on an elbow so she could look down at him, her braid falling over one shoulder. “Oh, ungenerous, am I?” she taunted.

  And then neither of them said anything at all, for quite some time.

  There was a curiously ferocious quality to their lovemaking, as if it were a competition to see which of them could elicit the greater response from the other. It was as though they were trying to scour their mark into each other, like lovers’ initials charred into the trunk of a tree, relic of a lost romance. Teasing, taunting, titillating, they grappled together long after the fire had burned down to embers and the night-blooming flowers on the lake had opened their petals to the night sky, perfuming the air with their too-sweet fragrance.

  Afterwards, Penelope lay awake, feigning the regular breath of sleep. Beside her, she could sense that Alex was doing the same. His shoulders were too stiff and his breath too shallow for anything but pretend sleep. Besides, he wasn’t snuffling.

  She would miss his snuffling. She would miss the circuitous arguments over whose turn it was to scour the dishes and the long-winded, nonsensical conversations about nothing in particular. There were more things to miss than she had ever imagined there could be, a thousand Alexes, forking a snake out of their bedroll with a long twig, smiling up at her as he skinned a rabbit, dipping a hand into the lake to test its waters, doing, fixing, arguing, being.

  What would it be like to take him up on his offer and be like this always? For a moment, the image drifted tantalizingly in front of her, as sweet and insubstantial as the scent of the flowers on the lake.

  Nonsense, Penelope told herself roughly. It was all pure nonsense.

  It was the sort of harebrained daydream Charlotte might have come up with. What sort of happiness could they have, with Freddy forever looming over them? He would be within his legal rights to storm in and haul her back by her hair, from wherever they might choose to hide. Both the law and public opinion would back him. Even if they did succeed in getting successfully away, any children they might have would be bastards, shunned from polite society. They wouldn’t bear the same sort of systematic barriers that prevented Alex’s half-Indian siblings from entering their chosen professions, but there were legal disadvantages to bastardy, as well as the social ones.

  Besides, how would they live? Her own dowry had long since disappeared into Freddy’s ample pockets; any money she had came from him. If Alex had anything other than his pay, she would be greatly surprised. It wasn’t that she needed luxury. She could do just as well without the jewels and expensive muslins. She was happier in boy’s breeches than a satin gown. But one needed something to live on. They couldn’t eat charred rabbit forever, however idyllic it might seem for the space of an enchanted tryst. Desire would fade, in time, and leave only disenchantment in its wake. He would grow to hate her in time. Sacrifice didn’t ennoble; it only embittered.

  Not that the alternative was terribly attractive. Penelope rolled over onto her side, resting her head on one arm. It was useless to think that they could go on as they were back in Hyderabad. She might be willing to do it, cuckolding Freddy with the same abandon with which he had cuckolded her, but Alex wouldn’t. It was only the very oddity of their circumstances that had won her these past four days, as remote from the world as any fairy-tale princess’s overgrown palace.

  She could, she knew, make his control snap if she tried hard enough. In a fit of madness, they might make love against the pillars of Raymond’s Tomb or tumble together in the prickly discomfort of the hydrangea bushes in the Residency gardens. If they were lucky, they might not even be caught. But it wouldn’t bring them closer. Instead, every stolen physical encounter would drive a deeper wedge between them, killing off the easy companionship that had begun to mean so much to her. As matters stood, she could have him as lover or friend, but not both.

  There was justice for you. She had taken Freddy without caring, just because. Now, when she cared, she couldn’t have.

  Justice was highly overrated.

  Penelope woke up with a headache pinching the flesh between her brows. There was no morning kiss or playful banter. They avoided each other’s eyes as they dressed. They were like two prisoners sharing the same cell on the morning of an execution, waiting for their names to be called.

  It was noon before they reached the main road to Berar. They were close enough now to the probable location of the treasure that it made sense to follow Fiske’s party more closely.

  Squinting down to road, Penelope saw a cloud of dust in the distance. Alex raised the spyglass he kept in his saddlebag. “That’s our boy,” he said, squinting through the glass knob. And then, “But why are they going in the wrong direction?”

  Freddy’s caravan was on the move, but it was moving the wrong way. They might still be a fair way down the road, but it didn’t take close observation to tell that the cavalcade was traveling towards them, away from Berar.

  “They can’t have been there and back already!” Penelope exclaimed.

  “No,” said Alex with conviction. “We didn’t dawdle that much. They were supposed to stay for a full two weeks’ hunting.”

  Penelope could tell that he didn’t like the situation any more than she. “Do you think Fiske got his hands on what he came for and persuaded them to turn back?”

  “It’s hard to see how,” muttered Alex. “A whole visit arranged—they’re dealing the First Minister a considerable insult by rejecting his hospitality.”

  “Unless the First Minister is involved,” suggested Penelope, twisting in her saddle as a new idea struck her. “Or he never invited them in the first place. Fiske might have made up the invitation.”

  “Did it ever occur to you . . . ,” Alex began with difficulty. “That is, have you ever thought—”

  “Yes?” Penelope raised an eyebrow, waiting.

  “That it might not be Fiske but your husband?”

  Penelope had to blink several times before she could be sure that she had heard him properly. “My husband what?” she asked, in a hard voice.

  “Your husband was in the same regiment as Fiske. He was a member of that same club. He took as mistress the known consort of a French officer.”
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  And it was Freddy who had told her about the First Minister’s invitation to Berar. Penelope remembered that letter of Henrietta’s that had so mysteriously disappeared after she had left it by Freddy at breakfast. And, from very far away, she could see a small orange-cloth flower being pressed to the courtesan’s lips and tossed—straight into Freddy’s lap.

  “Nonsense,” she said coldly. “It’s Fiske. Just because you don’t like Freddy—”

  But that was treading too close to dangerous territory. “You’re wrong,” she said instead.

  Alex didn’t quite meet her eyes. “For your sake, I hope I am.”

  “Why?” said Penelope flippantly. “Are you afraid that if he were executed for treason you might be stuck with me permanently?”

  Alex’s startled gaze caught hers. “Pen—”

  Penelope applied her heels to her mount. “If they’re already on their way back, there’s no point in following them, is there?” she said rapidly. “We’ll have to intercept them instead.”

  And she was off down the road before he could say anything more.

  An elephant lumbered in the center of the party, preceding a long line of donkeys and pack mules, but this time, Fiske wasn’t on it. She could see him riding in front of the party, cleverly staying ahead of the dust cloud. There was another man beside him, but it wasn’t Freddy. Beneath his fashionable hat, Penelope recognized the curly head of Mr. Jasper Pinchingdale. Barring the inevitable dust of travel, both men were as fresh and clean as though they had stepped out of their dressing rooms. That, she supposed, was what all the pack mules were for. Penelope scanned the mass of animals and men for Freddy. She spotted Aurangzeb, being led by Freddy’s groom, but of Freddy himself there was no sign.

  “Ahoy, there!” she called, waving a hand playfully above her head.

  Neither Fiske nor Pinchingdale recognized Penelope at first, with her dirty face and her hair in a long plait down her back.

  Penelope swished her braid and grinned at them, a practiced, gamine grin. “I’d wager you didn’t expect to see me here.”

  “Lady Frederick?” gasped Mr. Pinchingdale, losing his grasp on his urbane sophistication and nearly on his horse as well. Next to him, Fiske was doing his very best guppy imitation. Penelope wasn’t fooled. A guppy Fiske might be, but he was a deuced dangerous guppy.

  Penelope spread a dazzling smile impartially between the two of them. “I’ve come to surprise Freddy. I bullied Captain Reid into escorting me.” Her tone reduced him to a superior sort of servant, which was, she had no doubt, how Freddy chose to view him. He would as soon suspect her of canoodling with one of the footmen. “It’s no fair that you gentlemen should get all the fun of the hunting.”

  Their frozen stares was enough to make Penelope start to feel more than a little self-conscious. All right, so she might be a bit bedraggled, but how did they think one would look after riding four days? Not everyone spent five hours a day on her toilette.

  Abandoning them as a bad job, Penelope craned to look over their shoulders. “Where is Freddy?”

  She didn’t miss the look Pinchingdale and Fiske exchanged, or the quick slide of Pinchingdale’s eyes to a palanquin being carried by four bearers a little way behind them. So that was it, was it? Penelope felt her smile curdle on her lips. That explained why Aurangzeb was riderless in the middle of the afternoon. Trust Freddy to bring his mistress with him on a simple little hunting trip. That was Freddy for you. He liked to be supplied with all the creature comforts. Home away from home, as it were.

  Well, too bad for him.

  Swinging off her horse, she tossed the reins to a groom. “In the palanquin, is he, lazy old thing?”

  “Um, Lady Frederick,” began Pinchingdale awkwardly. “I don’t think—”

  Oh, he didn’t, did he?

  “Don’t worry,” said Penelope gaily. “I’ll soon roust him out.”

  Under the frozen gaze of Fiske, Pinchingdale, all four bearers, sixty-odd servants, and one elephant, she yanked open the curtains of the palanquin.

  Freddy was inside. But he wasn’t resting. And he wasn’t with his mistress. His hands rested neatly on his chest. His legs were stretched straight out in front of him, boots blackened and shining. But his once-handsome features were swollen and distorted and there were two gold coins where his eyes had been, weighting the eyelids shut.

  Pinchingdale cleared his throat. “I was trying to tell you. Lord Frederick is dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A bell was tolling, but it wasn’t tolling for Freddy Staines. It was tolling for me.

  When my doorbell rang, I was still sprawled across my bed with one of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s notebooks propped against my knees. With a jolt, I tumbled out of the early nineteenth century, landing with a crash back in the twenty-first. It was Valentine’s Day and I—I took a quick glance at the neon travel clock balanced on the suitcase that did double duty as a night table—was running late.

  “I’ll be right there!” I hollered, flinging Freddy and Penelope and the whole lot of them aside.

  Rolling off the bed, I brushed futilely at my hair with one hand as I stuck a foot into a shoe and yanked at the heel strap with the other, trying to lurch towards the doorway and get my other foot into my other shoe all at the same time. Don’t laugh. We’ve all been there.

  It wasn’t the fact that I undoubtedly had bed-head or that I’d just put my foot in the wrong shoe that was making my stomach lurch as though I’d gone on the wrong sort of amusement park ride. It was the man on the other side of the door. We hadn’t exactly ended our last conversation on the most positive of terms. It had been two whole days, and I had spent most of that time veering between self-justification and self-loathing, alternately assuring myself that I was absolutely in the right and kicking myself for being an insensitive ass.

  I mean, Serena was his sister, so what right did I have to dictate to him how he should or shouldn’t behave to her? But I really had only been trying to help.

  I’d been over that same patch of mental ground so many times that I felt like I’d worn a groove into my brain.

  “Coming, coming, coming!” I called, lurching through the tiny hallway that doubled as a kitchen. Fortunately, my flat is about the size of a postage stamp. By the time the last word was out of my mouth, my hand was already on the doorknob, yanking open the door to reveal a tall, blond man holding a single red rose.

  “Hi,” I said breathlessly.

  Colin took in the hair standing straight up on one side of my head and the shoes I had managed to shove onto the wrong feet. The laugh lines on either sides of his eyes deepened.

  “Napping?” he guessed, holding out the rose.

  “Reading,” I corrected, accepting the flower. He didn’t look angry. Or sulky. He just looked . . . normal. Like a man about to take his girlfriend out for Valentine’s Day. “I was a million miles away.”

  “Welcome back.” Taking the flower from my hand, he dropped it neatly into my sink (yes, my hallway/kitchen is that small) and gathered me into his arms for a proper hello kiss.

  I took that to mean we were okay.

  I’ll never understand boys, historical or modern. Here I had been, tormenting myself for the past forty-eight hours, convinced I had irreparably damaged the best thing I had going in years, and Colin had probably hung up the phone, gone to sleep, and not bothered thinking about it again. Not that I was complaining, mind you. I’d much rather make love than war. Or something like that.

  Tottering on my mismatched stilettos, I clung to his shoulders. “Sure you want to go to the party?”

  “No,” he agreed, resting his forehead against mine. “But we should probably put in an appearance.”

  Right. It was Serena’s party. Damn, damn, damn. Open mouth, insert foot. I didn’t want to open that whole can of worms again. Worms plus foot would be very uncomfortable to swallow.

  “Of course,” I said brightly. “It will be fun! Just let me grab my bag.”

>   Bright red and patterned in iridescent scarlet and hot pink beads, the bag was my concession to the occasion. “Don’t say it,” I warned Colin, as I saw him eyeing the bag with a look of masculine bemusement that looked like it was about to mature into a snide comment.

  He held up both hands. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “It was a present from Pammy.” Left to myself, I don’t buy hot pink. Hot pink anything.

  “Of course it was.”

  I stuck out my tongue at him as he gallantly stepped aside to allow me to precede him through the door. His gallant gesture was self-defeating since I then had to wiggle back around him so I could lock the door.

  We exchanged notes on our week as we made our way to the Tube. On Valentine’s Day night, hailing a cab was completely out of the question. All around us, there were signs of Valentine’s Day in progress; harried-looking men in sports coats hurriedly buying cellophane-wrapped flowers at the gas station/convenience store a block from my flat; groups of girls in tottery heels and defiantly red dresses, pink-cheeked in the February cold, trip-trapping their way towards the Tube; couples, in various stages of coupliness, meandering arm in arm or side by side or, in one case, one stalking several feet ahead, the other scurrying behind. Across the street, the gates of Hyde Park had already been locked, but the Park wall made an excellent place for blind dates meeting, agitated last-minute text messaging, and more than a bit of concerted smooching.

  I tried to remember where I had been for Valentine’s Day last year and wished I hadn’t. Oh, right. Some things weren’t really worth remembering. Last Valentine’s Day, a mere two months after catching my then-boyfriend in the cloakroom of the Harvard Faculty Club with an art history student nearly ten years his junior, I had still been alternating between rage and despair. I had gotten sloshed on white chocolate martinis with two friends at the fancy dessert place in Harvard Square and stumbled home in a state of embarrassing inebriation to carry on a long and unhappy conversation with my mirror. Not the sort of memory one cares to dredge up, except by way of contrast.