by Лорен Уиллиг
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.