by Лорен Уиллиг
“ — but he wouldn’t lie about him. He’s too . . .”
“Mewlingly honest?”
“Yes, that. And Jack’s career hasn’t precisely been designed to quell those sorts of suspicions. Not that it was his fault,” Alex added hastily. “I suppose Cleave has told you about Jack’s mother?”
“About her suicide? Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with it.”
“Daniel always was a hopeless telltale,” said Alex inconsequentially. “Even when we were little. It wasn’t her suicide that was the problem, but her nationality. According the East India Company’s laws, no one without two European parents can enter the military or the civil service. Jack was damned before he started.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, looking very tired and more than a little fed up. Penelope had the feeling he had been over this particular argument many times before. “What choice did he have but to go over to the other side? At least they didn’t turn him away because his blood wasn’t pure.”
Penelope held up an imperious hand to signal a stop. “Wait. No, not you,” she informed her horse, before turning back to Alex. “Are you saying that if your mother hadn’t been English — ”
“Welsh.”
Penelope dismissed that with a shrug. Wales had belonged to England since the fourteenth century or thereabouts. Or was it the twelfth? Charlotte would have known. Whatever it was, it had been a very long time. “Same difference. If she hadn’t been, then you wouldn’t have been able to do what you’re doing now?”
“None of it,” said Alex. “Unless it was in a decidedly under-the-table capacity. There are ways around it. General Palmer’s son, William, served here, under a British commander in the Nizam’s army. Since it’s technically the Nizam’s force rather than the East India Company’s, the usual prohibitions don’t apply. But Jack went into Scindia’s army, where he came under the command of General Perron.”
“A Frenchman,” Penelope cleverly surmised. Alex’s French pronunciation was surprisingly good. She wondered if that came from his schooling, or the now-defunct French force in Hyderabad.
“The very thing. Not only a Frenchman but a banner-waving, liberty-tree-planting enthusiast for the Revolution. He changed the troop’s colors to the tricolore .” Alex’s expression was wry. “Jack told me he thought I should understand why the concept of liberté , égalité , and fraternité had particular resonance for him.”
“Ouch.”
“He’s — well, he’s had a hard time,” said Alex.
Penelope wasn’t impressed. “So have many people, and they don’t go about joining revolutionary armies.”
“It wasn’t really a revolutionary army. It was a perfectly normal army with a revolutionary general.” Alex strove for a lightness he obviously wasn’t feeling. “Otherwise, it would be just the same as if he had gone to serve for the Nizam or any other ruler in India.”
“Hmm,” said Penelope, but let it go. “You are missing something, you know. Even if your brother is a raving revolutionary, he can’t be the Marigold.”
“Why not?”
“Fiske,” said Penelope with assurance. “If Fiske is the Marigold, your brother can’t be.”
The brief glow of hope faded from Alex’s face. He shook his head. “Fiske wouldn’t be able to undertake a project of this magnitude alone. If the Marigold really is, as I’ve been told, trying to raise all of the Mahratta territories and Hyderabad against the English, it will take more than one man.” A grin lightened his dark features. “Even a man on an elephant.”
Penelope’s amber eyes glinted with shared amusement. Fiske’s triumphal entry into Hyderabad had been wonderfully ridiculous, especially with his friend Pinchingdale clinging to the side of the howdah, his face a green that boded ill for anyone walking below.
For a moment, they grinned at each other in perfect harmony, both enjoying the memory of the absurd spectacle Fiske had made.
Alex looked away first.
“And there’s something else,” he said with the air of a man determined to come clean at all costs.
“You want an elephant!” guessed Penelope.
“Do you remember that man we chased up to Raymond’s Tomb?”
She would have to be pretty thick not to remember something that had happened a mere three weeks ago.
“Vividly,” she said with a toss of her braid.
“That wasn’t Guignon. That was Jack.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Hunh,” said Penelope, which felt like a perfectly reasonable response at the time. She liked the way it sounded, so she repeated it. “Hunh. Right.”
She tried to remember what the man had looked like, but she had only a blurry impression of dark hair that glinted red where the sun struck it and a flurry of hooves that belonged, not to the man, but to his mount. He had a very good seat, she gave him that much. And a decidedly dashing air about him. At the time, she had ascribed that to being French, which just went to show how expectation could inform appearance.
She looked measuringly at Alex. Dashing really didn’t come into it. Reliable, yes. Competent, yes. Incredibly good company when he wanted to be, yes.
Dashing, no.
“I don’t know why I lied,” Alex confessed. “Habit, I guess.”
Penelope cocked an eyebrow, a skill that had taken ages to learn, but had paid off in spades over the years. “Are you in the habit of lying for him?”
“Not like that,” said Alex quickly. “Just little things when we were younger, food missing from the kitchen, broken bric-a-brac, that sort of thing. . . . He didn’t thank me for it,” he added.
“Then why did you do it?”
“I’m his big brother. It’s part of the job. And I knew that my punishment would be lighter than his would have been.”
He didn’t explain why and Penelope didn’t ask. She doubted it would be presuming too much to assume that the son of the deceased Mrs. Reid received a very different sort of treatment from status-conscious servants than would the by-blow of the Colonel’s concubine.
It would, she thought wistfully, be rather nice to have that sort of champion. She had had one of a sort when her grandmother had been alive, exerting a leavening presence between the dissimilarities of her parents, scolding or condoning according to her own pattern. Her father might have taken up the role, but he had been too indolent to do so, preferring to spend his time with his racing forms and his breeding books, abandoning Penelope in the end to her mother and the thousand and one boring strictures that Penelope systematically set out to flout.
Penelope straightened in the saddle. Not that she needed a champion, of course. She was perfectly capable of fighting her own battles — or unearthing her own spies, if it came down to it.
“Is there really a Guignon?” she asked, at random.
“Very much so. I have it on good authority that he’s been skulking around the province again. That’s why his name came so easily to mind.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you to lie so effectively,” said Penelope admiringly.
“You were distracted,” said Alex generously. “And on uncertain terrain. I had the advantage of you.”
In one thing, she still had the advantage of him. After an internal wrangle, Penelope said brusquely, “While we’re coming clean, I have a confession to make.”
“If you tell me you’re the Marigold, I won’t believe you.”
“I, um, found something at the tomb that day. A little piece of paper. It was a message, presumably from the Marigold, advising the recipient to await his coming for the great work to be set into motion. Or something like that. I can’t remember the exact phrasing.”
Alex scrubbed his hand against his eyes, looking unutterably bleak. “That proves it, then. Cleave was right.”
“You don’t know that Jack dropped it.” Odd to be talking about a man she had never met on first-name terms, and a nickname, at that. But, then, it would be even odder thinking about him as Mr. Reid. Lieutenan
t Reid? Penelope had no idea what sort of titles they handed out in Scindia’s armies.
“Then who did? The pixies?”
“French pixies,” agreed Penelope. “Back in Hyderabad without leave. Shall we stop soon? It will be dark before long.”
The real world would be with them soon enough. Penelope refused to spend their last night together on depressing reflections that could only cause one of them pain. This was their last night in Eden and she intended to make the most of it, even if the snakes were already beginning to slither about in the underbrush and half-eaten apples littered the ground beneath the tree, conveying their cursed burden of partial knowledge.
She didn’t need to explain what she meant. He knew. Without another word, he nodded ahead. “If I recall, there’s a lake not fifteen minutes from here. We can camp there.”
They plunged determinedly into mundanities: where to camp, what to eat for dinner. Alex teased Penelope about her cooking and Penelope retorted that if she wasn’t such a good shot there would be nothing for them to eat, and so the yards passed on, and with every hoofbeat, Penelope could hear echoing in her ears, It’s over, it’s over, it’s over .
Not yet, she told herself fiercely. Not yet.
The lake was a small one, tucked away in a copse of banyan trees, the water thick with lily pads bearing brilliantly blue lotus flowers. Penelope’s riding habit had begun its life as a similar color, but three days of dust and grime had turned it into a mottled gray.
“I smell,” said Penelope with disgust, turning her head to sniff at her shoulder. Wearing the same habit for three days in very hot climatic conditions did not do wonders for one’s personal hygiene. She wished she had thought to bring a change of clothes, or at least of linen.
Undaunted, her lover drew her to him, uttering those romantic words, “So do I.”
“Yes, worse than me,” agreed Penelope pertly, and kissed him hard on the lips, before pushing away. She yanked at the buttons on her habit. “I am having a bath, and I am having one now .”
Alex cast a critical eye over the dark water of the lake, made darker by the dropping dusk. “You don’t want to jump into that. You don’t know what’s in it.”
“An apt metaphor for life, I imagine.” Dropping to her knees, Penelope wiggled her fingers in the water to test the temperature. The water felt like heaven against her heat-swollen hands. “One I’ve never heeded.”
“Let me.” Taking a cloth, Alex dipped it into the water, wrung it out, and applied it to Penelope’s sticky shoulders.
“Mmm,” sighed Penelope, tilting back her head, as the cool water trickled down between her breasts. She could feel it mingling with the sweat that already dampened her shift. “Heaven.”
Raising her hands in the air, she waited for him to peel her shift off her body. The night breeze felt heavenly on her sweaty body. The mosquitoes weren’t quite so heavenly, but Penelope was prepared to be philosophical about that. Penelope could feel her skin prickling from the air and the water and pure, undiluted anticipation. Desperately wanting his mouth on her breasts, she thrust her chest out, but perversely, maddeningly, he continued his own set course, dragging the damp cloth down the hollow of her belly, stroking across each hip, before —
Returning to the lake to dip the cloth again in water.
“You really are quite maddening,” she informed him hoarsely.
On one knee, Alex’s dark eyes glinted up at her. “Am I?” he said, decisively wringing out the cloth. The touch of the damp fabric against the inside of one ankle made Penelope shiver. He worked the cloth slowly up the inside of her leg, his eyes intent on hers.
Penelope swallowed hard. “But in a very nice way,” she amended, as the cloth worked its way up the other side, pausing, tantalizingly, just between her legs, brushing and retreating. She bit down hard on her lip, stifling a gasp, as he worked the cloth up between the delicate folds, the moisture of her body mixing with the cool of the lake water while the twisted piece of fabric worked back and forth against a point of extreme sensitivity.
“Very, very nice,” she said breathlessly.
Alex moved lower, his lips following the path of the cloth, and Penelope thankfully gave herself over to thinking of nothing at all.
It was only long afterward, after making love and eating supper and making love again, as they lay together beneath a single blanket, the small flame of their fire reflecting off the waters of the lake, that Alex ignored his own advice and ventured into dangerous waters of quite another variety.
“We should reach the border tomorrow,” he said casually. Too casually.
“Is there any way of making the border move back?” asked Penelope drowsily. “Just a few miles would be nice.”
“I’m afraid not.” Alex’s voice was serious. They were clearly going to have A Talk, whether she wanted to or not.
Penelope buried her head in his chest and wished they could stay this way for always. Without talking about it.
“What happens next?” Alex asked, as she had known he was going to.
“You know what happens,” said Penelope, although she found it far harder to do so than she had three days before. Almost four days now, she corrected herself. She wouldn’t want to cut their time together short by so much as an hour. “You have your work in Hyderabad. Freddy and I will eventually return to London.”
“Do you want to go back?” Alex asked seriously.
Penelope bit her lips. “No,” she admitted.
Funny, that the prospect should seem such a bleak one. Only a month ago, she would have been glad to go back to London, to take tea with Henrietta and Charlotte again and listen to the familiar rant ings of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. But she was becoming accustomed to India. She liked it. She liked the strange, spicy food and the sunshine that turned her face to freckles and the curious, gnarled faces of monkeys that scowled and chattered at her from between the branches of the trees.
And she liked Alex. She liked him too much. But that didn’t bear thinking about, so Penelope didn’t. Or, at least, she tried not to. She had always been very good about not thinking about things. It was much easier to act, as rashly as possible, trusting to the resulting ruckus to blot out any danger of reflection or introspection.
Shifting, Alex wrapped his arms more comfortably around her. “You know,” he said, his vocal chords burring against her ear. “There are ways.”
“Ways?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said thoughtfully, “and India is a large country. If you were to retire to the hills for your health — ”
“ — You could come with me?” It was a pretty fairy tale, but that was all it was, no more realistic than one of Charlotte’s novels. She didn’t have a fairy godmother to wave a wand and make it all turn out right.
“Yes.”
Penelope shook her head against his chest. “And leave here? You wouldn’t.” More matter-of-factly, she added, “I wouldn’t want you to. You would hate me before long if you did.”
He paused just a moment too long before answering, long enough to know that her words had struck home. “I wouldn’t hate you.” But he didn’t sound quite as certain as he had before.
Penelope tried not to sound as desolate as she felt. “Resent me, then. It’s close enough. Either way, you would be unhappy. And I would be unhappy for making you unhappy and then we would both be unhappy, and where would we be?”
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 dar
k 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.