by Лорен Уиллиг
After a startled moment, he grinned back, levering himself up off the ground. “A good thing, too. You’re the better shot.”
Reaching for her, he helped her do up the last two buttons of her habit. His fingers, so deft on the reins, fumbled with the tiny, cloth-covered buttons. He had not, Penelope surmised, had a great deal of practice with ladies’ clothing, unlike Freddy, who could get a lady out of her corset in about five seconds flat. Looking at the bowed top of his dark head as he squinted over her buttons, she felt a painful wave of fondness. Or maybe that was just the pressure of the close-fitting jacket around her ribs.
His fingers lingered on the last button, his knuckles brushing her chin. Glancing up, she found he was looking at her searchingly. “Are you sorry?” he asked.
Penelope raised both eyebrows. “Are you?”
His hands shifted from her stock to her shoulders, smoothing the woolen fabric. “Only if I’ve done anything to cause you distress.”
This conversation was causing her distress. Penelope wished he would just kiss her again. She didn’t want to have to talk about it all, parsing emotions and meanings; she just wanted to enjoy it. But she had some respect for Alex’s tender sensibilities, so instead of just shrugging and yanking him down for a kiss, she smiled reassuringly up at him.
“Those were not noises of distress you were hearing,” she said provocatively. “In fact, quite the contrary.”
Alex dropped a kiss on her nose, presumably because it was there. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know. But it is what I meant.”
“So you’re using me for my body, then.” He tried to make a joke out of it, but didn’t quite succeed.
“What’s the use of pretending to anything else? We both know how this has to end.” Penelope rested her palms against the light material of his shirt, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her hands. “Can’t we just enjoy it for what it is?”
“What about your husband?”
“He doesn’t matter,” said Penelope, and meant it. Freddy could go hang. It wasn’t about revenge anymore. What it was about, she wasn’t quite sure. All she knew was that she wasn’t ready for it to end. “How long do we have until we reach the others?”
“About four days. Perhaps less.”
“Can we — would you — ” Penelope cleared her throat. “Can’t we just take these days as our own? No strings, no reproaches, no regrets. Just this, nothing more.”
“I don’t like it.” Penelope could feel his chest rise and fall as he dragged in a deep breath. Looking down at her, he managed a wry sort of smile. “But I’d rather have a little bit of you than none of you at all.”
Light-headed with relief, Penelope beamed giddily at him. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she let it out. “You won’t regret it,” she assured him. “But there are rules. No mentioning Freddy. No talking about what will happen after.”
“No future,” finished Alex grimly.
“You,” said Penelope reproachfully, “think far too much. Don’t. Wouldn’t you rather be in the present? The future is only a series of possibilities, the majority of which may never come about. But this — this is here and now and sure.”
Alex took her hands, his thumbs stroking against her palms. “You might tell yourself this now, but how will you feel four days from now?”
“That’s still four days from now. If there were a future,” said Penelope, as much for herself as him, “there would be all sorts of other things to worry about, like where we were to live and who wants the window open and whether we ought to send the children back to school in England or keep them here.” It was unnerving how quickly hypothetical images could become concrete in one’s head. Penelope shook them away and went resolutely on, her voice shriller than usual, “Marriage isn’t all the sentimentalists claim it to be, you know. You would worry about my spending and bemoan my flightiness and deprecate my low relations — ”
“In this case,” broke in Alex calmly, “I believe I’m the one with the low relations. And you’re not flighty. Impulsive, certainly, but not flighty.”
Penelope blinked. Freddy had said . . . But that didn’t signify. By her own rules, she wasn’t allowed to think of Freddy. “Oh. Well. But you do see my point, don’t you? This way, we can just appreciate each other for what we are, without having to worry about all those other bits. It’s really the best of all possible worlds, when you think about it.” She smiled up at him, her hands smoothing upwards from his chest to his shoulders. “Just us, just here, just now.”
Alex’s limber mouth twisted into the sort of smile a man might wear as he gallops knowingly into the cannon’s mouth. Rueful. Resigned.
“Do you have any apples to offer while you’re at it?” he said wryly.
“Does that mean you’ll be a fallen man with me?”
“If we’re going to be thrown out of the garden, we might as well enjoy it while we’re in it,” he said philosophically, as his head dipped again towards hers. A breath away from her lips, he added, “But I draw the line at fig leaves.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
For three days, Penelope had her Eden without fig leaves. She was exhausted, dirty, and saddle sore. She couldn’t remember when she had last been so happy. She learned to skin rabbits and made an enemy of a monkey and discovered the hard way that an overripe mango was exceedingly messy to eat.
They traveled slowly, camping early for the night and spending little of it in sleep. True to their agreement, neither mentioned the end of the journey, but it was there nonetheless. It lent a heightened awareness to everything and kept them awake long after fatigue would otherwise have driven them to slumber, determined to eke out every moment given them. It was a precious, finite time and they both knew it. Leaves were greener, food spicier, the light brighter; everything clear, clean-edged, perfect, down to the last choking cloud of dust from the road. Even charred meat, product of Penelope’s unsuccessful foray into fire-top cookery, had its own peculiar savor.
As they neared the border of Berar, the real world that they had pushed aside began to crowd back in upon them. They both did their best to ignore it, but Penelope could tell it was there. It was there in the way Alex would sometimes start to say something and then move rapidly away. It was there in the controlled violence with which he would scuff out the smoldering remains of their campfire, belaboring the fragments with his boot until there was nothing left but ash. It was there in her own short bursts of temper, her impatience with a girth that wouldn’t tighten and a fire that wouldn’t kindle. Even the landscape echoed the sense of impending loss; the farther they went from Hyderabad, the more desolate their surroundings became, littered with deserted villages, burned houses, and trampled fields; legacy of the recent fighting in the area between British and Mahratta troops. By the third day, they began to come across carts with broken wheels and shattered crockery, the detritus of parties of refugees who had painstakingly picked their way south, away from the ruins of their homes. There was even a small skeleton.
Penelope, who had thought herself proof against maidenly tremors, had to avert her eyes. Pariah dogs had been at the child’s corpse. They buried it in a shallow grave, piled with stones to discourage the dogs, before moving on.
Penelope could feel reality pressing in on them. She shut her eyes and pushed back against it with both hands, desperately trying to keep it at bay.
As they rode along yet another back path, between fields that showed the recent ravages of military engagements, Alex broached one of the forbidden topics. “You never did tell me how you knew about the Marigold.” He raised an eyebrow. “Unless your hus — unless the special commission was all a pretense, and you’ve really been on the trail of the spy all this time.”
“I’m just sleeping with you to winkle out your secrets,” said Penelope kindly. “It’s what we secret agents do.”
She liked the image of herself as a secret agent. Why hadn’t she ever thought of tha
t before?
Because she had been too busy making meaningless mischief to consider embarking on anything constructive. Besides, if she had gone to Henrietta’s brother and told him she wanted to be a spy, he probably would have sprinted in the other direction. He had been on the receiving end of one too many of her practical jokes over the years to repose any confidence in her ability to follow orders neatly.
“What have you found out?” Alex asked, amused.
“Only that you make strange snuffling noises when you sleep on your back. And you take up more than your share of the bedroll.”
“Snuffling noises?”
“You know. Like this.” Penelope did a very successful imitation of a pig with adenoidal issues. Her horse sidled at the noise and Penelope reached forward to stroke her between the ears. “There, there, darling, not you. You’re a perfect lady.”
Alex rolled his eyes in masculine disgust.
“At any rate,” said Penelope more prosaically, “I heard about the Marigold from a friend of mine. Another friend managed to get entangled in the activities of, well, a sort of club that Freddy was involved with.”
“I think I know the club you mean,” murmured Alex. There was something in his voice that made Penelope look sharply at him, but his eyes were fixed on the road ahead, his profile perfectly bland.
“Don’t tell me you’re a member, too,” said Penelope with a laugh. “That I won’t believe. But did you know a man named Arthur Wrothan?”
“I do know Wrothan,” said Alex slowly. “I’m surprised you know of him.”
“Did,” corrected Penelope. “You did know him. He’s dead.”
“I can’t say I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I’m sure you aren’t the only one,” said Penelope, adjusting the brim of her hat against the sun. “Wrothan caused a great deal of bother to some very important people. He was running a spy ring out of the Hellfire Club, using it to pass along secrets to the French.”
Alex nodded. “And that’s why you looked to Fiske. Fiske was a member of Wrothan’s group in Mysore.”
He said the last with the conviction of someone who didn’t surmise, but knew.
“For someone who wasn’t a member, you seem to know an awful lot about it,” teased Penelope.
There was no answering smile. “Their group touched upon a . . . a friend of the family.”
“A girl?” asked Penelope sharply, surprised by the sudden rush of jealousy she felt.
“Yes. It’s not a pleasant story.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Alex, if you haven’t learned by now that I’m not miss-ish, there’s no dealing with you. If you start trying to protect my tender ears, I’ll . . . well, I’ll think of something.”
“I’m sure you would. All right, then. There was a girl I knew — no ,” he elaborated. “Not in that way. She was the daughter of one of my father’s corporals and she must have been all of fourteen at the time. She looked young for her age, too, still in pigtails and pinafores. She and my sister Lizzy had made mud pies together before they became too old and grand for it.”
Penelope smiled reminiscently at the memory of some of her own mud pies. The fact that the last of them had only been last year and her mother had practically gone into a decline at the sight of her dress was entirely immaterial.
“Her situation was complicated,” Alex was saying, “by the fact that her mother had been a local woman.”
“I gather that’s not all that unusual,” said Penelope, remembering what Mr. Cleave had told her of Alex’s past.
Alex’s eyes met hers. “No,” he agreed. “Not unusual at all. But her father wasn’t an important man, or a wealthy one, and some men viewed Annie as easy pickings.”
“What does this have to do with the club?” Penelope asked, although she was beginning to have a fair idea. It gave her a slightly sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that had nothing to do with the murky water she had drunk earlier.
“Did you know that your friend Fiske has the pox?”
“No.” Penelope blinked, surprised by the seeming non sequitur. “But it doesn’t surprise me.” With Fiske’s rollicking habits, syphilis couldn’t have been far behind. She was only amazed that Freddy had managed to come through his own carousing free of disease.
“Many people believe that, er, concourse” — it was rather adorable, thought Penelope, after three days of rampant concourse, to see how he stumbled over pronouncing the word — “with a virgin will cure the French pox.”
“It’s certainly more pleasant than a mercury treatment,” said Penelope at her very worldliest.
“Except for the virgin,” pointed out Alex, and Penelope suddenly, sinkingly realized just how the pieces fit together.
Penelope’s thighs must have involuntarily tightened, because her mare chose that moment to go fussy. Calming the agitated animal gave her a respite to school her face and her thoughts.
“Was Freddy involved?”
Alex’s silence was all the answer she needed.
“Of course, he was,” she answered herself. “It would be just like him. He would have thought that she was fair game.”
Like a chambermaid or an orange seller or any one of the other categories of female that registered on the male mind merely as available flesh. Penelope hadn’t been born into that category, but she had done her best to put herself into it by her behavior. Even then, there were lines that couldn’t be crossed, at least not without severe repercussion. Like marriage. When it came down to it, no matter how murky her bloodlines or how poor her behavior, she was still a baronet’s daughter, and that meant something in the bizarre code that governed the behavior of the young rakes of the ton .
She had never realized before, in all her days of chafing at chaperonage and thumbing her nose at convention, just how great were the protections that hedged her about or how fortunate she had been to have them.
She couldn’t even imagine what it must be like, at fourteen, to be dragged into a dark cavern of a room full of men, men everywhere, men leering and pawing and shouting bawdy comments, with candles guttering and incense smoking and no one to help or protect you. To hear the horrible tearing sound of your own clothes rending and know there was no recourse. To have strange hands holding you down while a stranger pushed between your legs, brutally, without affection; all his cronies cheering him on. To know that your screams and struggles did nothing more than to excite them and that, in the end, there was nothing to do but turn one’s head and try not to cry.
“What happened to the girl?” she asked with a catch in her voice.
“She died,” said Alex bluntly. “She and her child, both. They were both riddled with the disease.”
“How . . . sad.”
“It’s a common enough story,” said her lover matter-of-factly. “It’s one of the reasons my father sent my sisters home to England. They would probably have been safe enough — my father’s situation is very different from that of poor Annie’s father — but they’ll have a more assured future there.”
“How many siblings do you have?” asked Penelope, seizing on the change of subject.
“There are only five of us,” said Alex, adding, with lines of amusement that deepened beside his eyes, “though sometimes it just feels like more. I have a twin sister and then the three others.”
“You have a twin ?” It was hard to imagine two of Alex, especially a female version.
“Kat. Technically, she’s the elder. She elbowed her way out twenty minutes ahead of me.”
“Good for her,” said Penelope. “I believe I would like her. She sounds like a woman of great decision and character.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” said the fond brother.
“What of the other three?”
“Lizzy is the youngest. She’s only seventeen. George is three years older.”
“And then there’s Jack in the middle,” supplied Penelope, watching him closely.
“Yes. Jack.”
There was no point in beating about the bush. “I heard your conversation on the balcony that day.”
Alex looked as though there were a great deal he wanted to say, none of it pleasant. “Two hundred years ago, they would have burned you as a witch,” he said bluntly.
“It’s the red hair,” said Penelope, holding up the end of her braid to admire it. Over the past few days, she had lost enough hairpins to make any other style unfeasible. “Unmistakable sign of, er, concourse with the devil, don’t you agree?”
Alex scratched at the stubble on his chin. “Since that places me in the role of the devil, I’m not sure I should.”
“No,” agreed Penelope. “You’re not the one wearing the horns in this situation.”
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. She realized her mistake the moment the words were out of her mouth. She had crossed that unspoken boundary they had carefully constructed around them, blocking out the unpleasant realities of the situation. Any mention of cuckoldry was strictly forbidden. The question of adultery bothered Alex far more than it did her, even though he wasn’t the one wearing the horns.
Penelope rushed on, hastily substituting one unpleasant topic for another. “Do you really think your brother is in league with the French?”
“Cleave seems to think he is,” said her lover tersely, but Penelope knew it wasn’t his brother driving his lips into a thin line. He was having one of his attacks of conscience again.
Penelope poked him in the arm with the butt of her whip. “That’s not an answer.”
Alex twisted conspicuously in the shadow, scanning the sides of the road.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a stake.” As Penelope stuck out her tongue at him, Alex relaxed back into his saddle, looking far more like himself. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to believe that Cleave is mistaken, but the evidence all militates otherwise. Cleave doesn’t like Jack — ”
“I’d say he out and out detests him,” contributed Penelope cheerfully.