by Лорен Уиллиг
Penelope followed his gaze, expecting to see a rat, at the very least, but instead all she saw was a man, staring coolly back at Captain Reid. He had just received from the vendor a bowl filled with a stewed concoction of rice and meats whose scent made Penelope’s stomach renew its grumbling with added enthusiasm.
As Penelope watched, the man raised one hand in insolent salute. With the other, he tossed the bowl to a beggar with a laughing instruction in the local tongue.
Bits of hot rice and fowl went flying as several other beggars immediately pounced on the bounty, sending food scattering in all directions. It made an excellent diversion. Through the hopping of angry pedestrians as they shook rice from between their toes, Penelope could see the man, whoever he might be, swinging himself up on horseback. He had, she noticed, a very good seat, although his horse wasn’t of a breed she had encountered before. The ears were the most curious aspect; they seemed to curve inward, like a goat’s horns. But she didn’t have time to check its configurations. With one last, backward wave, the man speedily made his exit down a side lane, leaving a melee of angry pedestrians and hungry beggars in his wake.
And one very unhappy Captain Reid. Penelope had never seen anyone’s lips go quite that white, short of frostbite. Captain Reid looked as though he had just been chewing icicles.
With one impatient movement, he gathered his reins together. Penelope suspected her presence was all that prevented him from indulging in a hearty bout of profanity.
“Stay here,” he tossed over his shoulder, and spurred his horse forward.
Did he really think she was just going to sit there and wait for him?
With one last, longing look at the food stalls, Penelope set off behind him. The moving waves of traffic, complicated by the high-crowned palanquins of the highborn, blocked the fleeing man from her view, and evidently from Captain Reid’s as well, based on the number of times he checked his horse, rising on his stirrups for a better view. Occasionally he would shout something in Urdu, and receive either a pointing arm or a shrug in response.
They twisted this way and that way, until even Penelope had lost all sense of her bearings winding in and out of the narrow lanes of the city. They passed through cluttered complexes of noisome hovels, in front of which sprawled beggars without even loincloths to cover their nakedness, and broad, marble-fronted palaces several times the size of St. James, from which the songs of birds could be heard from the hidden pleasure gardens within. And still they went on, past the city walls, past the ruins of a forgotten palace, up, up, and up the hillside.
As she navigated around a stubborn donkey, Penelope caught a flash of a man, much farther up the hill, bent low over the neck of his horse. He wore native dress; his white robe flapped against his calves as he urged his horse up the hill. Penelope thought she could see trousers beneath, though, and when the speed and incline served to dislodge his turban, the matted hair beneath was a reddish brown rather than black. There was a curious construction at the top of the hill, an open temple more suited to Athens than India, and an obelisk in the Egyptian manner.
As the flapping white robe disappeared behind the obelisk, Captain Reid clapped his heels against his horse’s flanks, urging his tired horse forward. Following suit, Penelope squinted up into the sun, which seemed to be lodged directly at the tip of the obelisk, like a ball impaled on a needle. It clouded the fleeing man in light-borne shadow, making dark blots against her eyes so that he seemed to disappear into the obelisk in an explosion of black dust.
Captain Reid arrived at the top of the hill before her, but only just, and judging from the complex of lines around his eyes, he had been no more immune to the sun’s effects than she. He swung off his horse before it had fully stopped, running behind the obelisk as though he expected to find the white-robed man crouched behind it. Penelope galloped to a stop as he stomped out from behind, a decidedly disgruntled expression of his face.
“If you wanted me to go home, you could have just said,” Penelope panted, resting her cheek against her horse’s neck.
“Damn,” Captain Reid said under his breath.
Below them, the pony scrambled his way down the hill, riderless. Pacing back and forth in short, jerky strides, Captain Reid placed one hand to his eyes, scanning the horizon for any sign of the missing rider.
Sliding off her horse, with stern abjurations to it not to move, Penelope ambled over to the temple. It was in the Greek style — at least, it looked Greek to her. And new, very new. The stone showed none of the wear and tear one would expect in a land of heat, sun, and monsoon. There wasn’t much to the structure, just a simple rectangle of pillars, with a triangular pediment in front. The whole was suspended on a thick platform of the same stone. There was no place at all for anyone to hide.
As Penelope prowled through the pillars, her attention was caught by a small scrap of pale paper on the floor of the temple. There was writing on it, and in a European hand.
Penelope scooped up the scrap and stuffed it in her pocket, shooting a quick look over her shoulder at Captain Reid. Good. He hadn’t noticed. He was still standing just next to the obelisk, frowning into the sun as though it had personally offended him.
“Well?” said Penelope, strolling over to join him, the scrap of paper burning a hole in the pocket of her riding habit. “Who was that?”
“A Frenchman. Named Guignon. He was second in command of the French force out here. They used to be quartered . . . just there.” He pointed at a spot on the landscape indistinguishable from any other spot on the landscape.
“Why not just call at his lodgings if you wish to see him that badly?”
“That’s the thing. He doesn’t have lodgings. He’s meant to be banned from the province.”
“Cheeky on his part to come sneaking back, then,” offered Penelope.
“It might not have been him,” Captain Reid added hopefully, speaking more to himself than her. “It might very well have been someone else entirely.”
“How good a view did you get?”
“Before he turned and ran? Enough of one to think — ” Frowning, he shook his head. “But I could have been mistaken.”
“If you were, why would he have run?” said Penelope practically.
“Because I was chasing him?” replied Captain Reid. Looking at Penelope, he seemed to recall himself. With a brisk shake of his head, he said, “It’s no matter. Never mind. I’m sorry to have dragged you all the way out here on . . . well, a whim.”
Whim wasn’t quite the word Penelope would have chosen. There were deep lines incised in Captain Reid’s brow that belied the light-hearted term.
“Do you always take it upon yourself to apprehend stray Frenchmen?” asked Penelope. “Or just this Frenchman?”
The walls were back up, as immovable as the obelisk. “Forgive me,” he said, with a palpably strained smile. “I’m afraid I’ve quite wasted your morning. We won’t have time to see the falcon after this. I have an appointment back at the Residency at ten.”
Penelope imagined that the apocryphal appointment could best be classified as avoiding Penelope, but decided to leave him be — for the moment.
“Where are we?” she asked instead, as he gave her a leg up onto her mount. “I don’t believe I’ve been here before.”
She hadn’t been anywhere outside the Residency, except for the Nizam’s citadel the night before, but there was no need to belabor that point. Freddy generally slept too late to ride with her in the cool of the morning, and she had not been invited to any of the hunting parties or evening entertainments in the town to which her husband had accompanied the Resident. When she had proposed a trip to the famed bazaars of the town, the Residency ladies had pled fatigue and heat and opined that it was much easier and more sanitary for the merchants to come to them. “So much more civilized,” had said Mrs. Dalrymple, the leader of the pack, and that had been that.
“Raymond’s Tomb,” said Captain Reid, swinging up onto his mare. “Raymond was the co
mmander of the French forces here. That’s his insignia on the obelisk. The large R .”
Penelope eyed the obelisk. The R was indeed there, incised upon a large square of darker stone than the rest of the edifice. “So this would be a logical place for a French fugitive to flee.”
Captain Reid cast her a long, inscrutable look. “Be careful going down the hill,” he said shortly. “This road can sometimes be slippery. I’ll go first.”
Penelope let him. As he picked his way down the hill ahead of her, his back to her, she slid one hand into the pocket of her habit, feeling the crinkle of that scrap of paper. The fact that it could still crinkle suggested that it hadn’t been exposed to the elements for long. Checking to make sure Captain Reid was still busily ignoring her, she drew the paper stealthily out of her pocket, pressing it flat against the folds of her skirt.
The writing was dark and clear against the page.
I am ready to sacrifice all. Await my coming to place the next steps in motion. Then, my comrade, the strength of the machine you have put together may display itself and the tree of Liberty shall blossom again in the courtyards of the East.
Chapter Twelve
The tree of liberty shall blossom? Penelope had never heard such melodramatic babble in her life, and that included some of Charlotte’s early efforts at epistolary fiction.
The note was in French, in a controlled, cursive hand. The syntax, however, wasn’t nearly so precise as the handwriting. It wasn’t that it was ungrammatical, precisely. It just wasn’t as elegantly constructed as it could be. She could have done better than that, thought Penelope critically. No one would ever accuse her of being bookish, but she did have a knack for languages.
“Lady Frederick?” Captain Reid turned his horse’s head, and Penelope hastily crammed the letter back into the pocket of her habit before turning on him a bright and beatific countenance. Perplexed at the sudden warmth of her smile, Captain Reid said quizzically, “We’ll take the short way back, if you don’t mind.”
“No,” said Penelope airily. “No, not at all.”
Lapsing back into silence, she meditatively crumpled the piece of paper in her pocket. She ought, she supposed, to hand it over to Captain Reid. That would be the sensible thing to do. The responsible thing to do. Penelope snuck a sideways glance at her escort, at the granite profile beneath a battered hat. If she gave the note to him, that would be the last she ever heard of it. With another man, she might have used it as a bargaining chip, teasing out the transfer in exchange for information. She did not think that would work with Captain Reid. The note would disappear into his pocket just as it had disappeared into hers, and she would be left once again to the Residency drawing room, being bored to death one antiquated anecdote at a time.
It might be more rewarding to pursue one’s own investigations. If only one knew who to pursue.
Await my coming, the note had said. Whose coming? There had been no salutation on the note, no closing courtesies, no direction on the back, nothing to indicate the author or the intended recipient. The man they had chased to the top of the hill might have dropped it before it could be delivered; it might be his arrival elsewhere that was spoken of. But would a Frenchman write such poor French?
He might, Penelope decided, absentmindedly gnawing on the finger of her riding glove. She certainly knew Englishmen whose grasp on their own grammar was wobbly at best — Turnip Fitzhugh came to mind — and she had only Captain Reid’s word on the identity of the man on the hill. He might not have been a Guignon. He might have been a Smith or a Jones or a Fotheringay-Smythe.
Or a Fiske.
Like an echo, Penelope could hear Freddy’s voice, thick with toast. Fiske is coming to visit .
Penelope frowned at the back of Captain Reid’s head. Fiske looked nothing like the man on the hill, at least not what she remembered of him. The coincidence of phrasing was nothing more than that — a coincidence.
Or was it? Fiske had been a member of Freddy’s regiment. To be more accurate, Fiske was still a member of the regiment to which Freddy had once belonged. The same regiment out of which, according to Henrietta, a ring of French spies had been operating.
What else had Henrietta said? She had been too busy sulking to pay much attention to Henrietta’s tales of espionage and immorality.
Henrietta was always stumbling across spies. Henrietta’s older brother, Richard, had gone about France under the sobriquet of the Purple Gentian, pinching French aristocrats from the Temple Prison and leaving amusing little notes under Bonaparte’s pillow, while Henrietta’s gallumping oaf of a husband performed the odd job for the War Office — presumably when they couldn’t find anyone better, thought Penelope unkindly. She and Miles had never gotten along. Her insistence on referring to him as a gallumping oaf might, she was willing to admit, have had something to do with that, but if one were a gallumping oaf, one had to expect to be called that from time to time. Or all the time.
After years of flowery aliases and Purple Gentian this and Black Tulip that, it all tended to go in one ear and out the other, much like her mother’s repeated admonitions about her behavior. Just this once, though, Penelope wished she had bothered to pay attention.
Taking advantage of the broadening of the path, Penelope edged her mare up alongside Captain Reid’s.
“Freddy’s friend Fiske.” Penelope’s tongue slipped slightly on all the alliteration. She soldiered manfully on. “You know him, don’t you?”
Startled, he looked at her sideways. On horseback, they sat nearly eye to eye. He had, Penelope noticed, an exceptionally good seat. Her grandfather would have approved.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because he’s flinging himself on our hospitality on the way to Mysore, and I want to know what I’ll be obliged to endure over the dinner table. Well? What do you think of him?”
“I know him primarily by reputation,” Captain Reid hedged. “You’d do better to ask your husband.”
“In other words, you don’t like him,” said Penelope with relish. “Why?”
“I don’t know him well enough to like or dislike him. We don’t really move in the same circles. I,” he added deprecatingly, “am not a great player of cards.”
Fleetingly, Penelope remembered standing alone in Begum Johnson’s drawing room, as the card room drew Freddy like a fly to dung. The only queen of Freddy’s heart was the sort that did somersaults on green baize.
“I don’t imagine you would be,” agreed Penelope. “You bluff very poorly. Now that you’ve got all that out of your system, what do you really think? Come, come, Captain Reid. This is no time to develop a sense of discretion.”
“Are you accusing me of prior indiscretions?” he asked smilingly.
“No more indiscreet than my own,” said Penelope frankly, thinking of their conversation the night before. “Neither of us is framed for namby-pamby niceties.”
Captain Reid bowed his head slightly, but not before Penelope saw his lips twitching. That, she thought triumphantly, was his Achilles’ heel. No matter how much he tried to hide it, he had a sense of humor. “I stand well complimented.” He fell silent, but it was a thinking sort of silence. After a moment, he said, “I meant it when I said I don’t know Fiske well. The army chaps tend not to think highly of the po liticals. It’s one of the reasons,” he added, looking off down the lane, “that we’ve had such bother with the Subsidiary Force.”
“But you were in the army, too.”
“The wrong army,” said Captain Reid frankly. “I was in an East India Company regiment. It’s not at all the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Stay here long enough and someone will be bound to tell you.” As Penelope made a face at him, he relented. “Our troops are sepoys — Indians — rather than British soldiers. Even worse, we commit the social solecism of earning our commissions rather than purchasing them as a gentleman ought. Our officers, for the most part, are career soldiers, not gentlemen looking for a brief change o
f scene.”
“In other words, like my husband,” said Penelope. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t look so stony. I’m not going to go repeat it to him. And for what it’s worth, I agree with you. It’s a remarkably silly system. I wouldn’t trust Freddy to general his way out of a drawing room, much less a siege.”
Captain Reid squinted thoughtfully. “It isn’t always a disaster. There’s Lord Lake, who’s a decent strategist, and Lord Wellesley’s brother, Sir Arthur, who’s more than decent. And I imagine your husband would have no qualms about leading a charge straight into the heart of the enemy if the occasion arose.”
“Yes,” agreed Penelope, “shouting tallyho and swinging his saber all the way. He’d probably think he was out after a fox.”
“Sometimes,” said Captain Reid reflectively, “that’s all that’s needed, just making sure the men keep charging in the right direction. A fox or an enemy, it doesn’t matter which, so long as he keeps them moving forward.”
“Hmm,” said Penelope, without much interest. “But Fiske . . .”
Captain Reid frowned at a pair of men trotting their way through the Residency gates. “Blast,” he said. “They’re early.”
“So you did have an appointment!”
Captain Reid looked as though he didn’t know whether to be exasperated or amused. “Is it just me you believe to be a terminal liar, or do you harbor the same suspicions of everyone?”
“Everyone,” Penelope said promptly. “So few people have the backbone to say what they mean when they mean it.”
“I believe other people call it tact,” said Captain Reid dryly.
“In which I have already shown myself much lacking?” finished Penelope for him. “See? You do it, too. Only more obliquely.”
“Was that a compliment?”
“It was meant as such,” replied Penelope, offering back a phrase he had once used to her, by the side of the river Krishna. There was no answering flicker of recognition on Captain Reid’s face. And why should there be? It was of no matter. Tossing her head, Penelope extended a languid hand to him. “Good day, Captain Reid. Thank you for the ride.”