by Лорен Уиллиг
She had seen him and wanted him. She had wanted him as a child might want a shiny gold coin, not because she had any particular use for it, but because it glittered and it was pretty and other people didn’t want her to have it. It came flooding back to her now, across the ten-month divide, that knee-weakening brew of lust and hurt feelings and pure boredom that had driven her to smile back, a slow, challenging smile, and then, with a slight flick of her head, to draw him out with her into one of the many alcoves with which Girdings House abounded.
It seemed a different world, that frosty winter’s day at Girdings House, where the world was clothed in shades of icy blue and the only snakes were the ones in satin dresses, wielding feathery fans to hide their fangs. She had been smarting still over Henrietta’s marriage, that precipitate union that had thrust her abruptly out into the cold, a perennial third at their table for two. Charlotte’s clumsy attempts to fill the void had been more irritating than soothing. And even Charlotte, second-best though she might be, was drifting away from her. Penelope wasn’t stupid. She could read the writing on the wall in the way that Charlotte looked at the new Duke of Dovedale, all breathless adoration, like a puppy wriggling to be petted.
In the midst of it all, there had been Freddy, as tall and golden as the graven idol of a primitive people. Freddy, who had looked at her with admiration, turning his compliments flesh with his lips and hands. She had known it was nothing more than that, just hands and lips and empty compliments, but at least his lust was real, concrete, hers. She could feel it in the way his breath quickened beneath her touch, the way his eyes followed her as she left the ballroom, in the way she could bring him running with one flick of a finger, to freeze his extremities in a January garden for the sake of nothing more than a kiss and the lure of more.
For that brief period, he had been hers. Hers. She had so desperately wanted something of her own, even if it was only fool’s gold, base metal beneath a shiny veneer.
Selfish, that was what she had been. Selfish, heedless, thoughtless. All the epithets her mother had hurled at her came back to drive stinging craters into her flesh. She had killed him. She had killed him as surely as if she had poisoned him herself. But for her, Freddy would still be safely in London, drinking himself sick at White’s and making unwise purchases of horseflesh at Tattersall’s.
Freddy had never wanted to come back to India. London was his world. Had Penelope left well enough alone, Freddy would have lived to become a jaded old man, the sort who pinched young girls’ cheeks and generally died in ignominy in the arms of a whore and had to be hustled home so it could be pretended he had died in his bed. Freddy would have liked that. Penelope fought a hysterical urge to laugh, pressing her balled fists against her mouth to hold the laughter inside.
Someone caught at her hand and pressed a glass into it. Penelope’s fingers automatically closed around it. Liquid splashed against metal, like water lapping at the banks of the river Hades.
Without looking to see who it was, Penelope said, “I killed him. I did it.”
A strong, brown hand closed around her own. “Drink.”
For a moment, Penelope stared at it, that hand, so familiar and suddenly so unfamiliar. Only hours ago, she had rubbed against it with breathless pleasure as it had stroked the curve of her cheek. Only a day ago, she had leaned into that touch, as though there were nothing more to be wanted from the world. Bile rose in her throat, with sudden and inexplicable revulsion.
Penelope wrenched her hand violently out of his. The contents of the glass spattered down the front of her habit, brandy mingling with the grime to create trails of mud like dirty tears. Dirty. Corrupt. Spoiled.
“Penelope — ” His voice was low, concerned.
“Go away,” she said harshly. “I don’t want you here.”
What had they been doing while Freddy was dying? Last night, Fiske had said. She might have been in Alex’s arms while the krait was slithering into Freddy’s tent, sinking her nails into Alex’s back while the snake was sinking its fangs into Freddy’s flesh, crying out her pleasure while her husband contorted with pain. The full magnitude of her betrayal came tottering down on her like a fallen temple. She felt herself swaying beneath the weight of it.
Alex caught her before she could fall, his hands on her elbows, but his touch was an impersonal one. “Let’s get you something to sit down on,” he said, in a voice meant as much for the others as for her.
He was Captain Reid again. That was all right. She could deal with Captain Reid. It hadn’t been Captain Reid with whom she had — no. Not now. She couldn’t think of that now.
Around them, Penelope could hear the sounds of scurrying, as people bustled about trying to make accommodation for the bereaved widow. Had they done the same for Freddy’s mistress? Penelope felt her stomach heave with bile and loss.
“A snake,” she said, to no one in particular, sitting down heavily on the stool provided for her. Someone had hastily tossed a blanket over it, giving it the appearance of a makeshift throne. “A snake !”
The bastard would have to go and die in a way guaranteed to cause the maximum discomfort and inconvenience to everyone around him.
Looking down at Lord Frederick’s mortal remains, Alex couldn’t find it in him to think any of the proper, pious thoughts attendant upon the passage of mortality. Instead, he was cognizant of a strong sense of irritation. He wanted to take the corpse up by the lapels, shake him, and demand to know just what he was thinking, publicly carting his mistress about with him. Didn’t the man give a damn for the embarrassment it might cause his wife?
A moot point now.
Irritation was good. Irritation kept other emotions at bay: messy, dangerous emotions, like guilt, relief, worry. Easier to vent his irritation on Lord Frederick for those things he had done while still alive. Alex’s mind refused to quite grasp the crux of it all, that Lord Frederick Staines, the bugbear of his twilight imaginings these past months, was well and truly dead. Gone. No more. Leaving his wife, technically, free.
Free for what?
Alex looked down at Penelope where she sat heavily on the stool provided to her, head bent, air escaping through her pursed lips as she breathed determinedly in and out. Her face was an unpleasant waxy color, her eyes unfocused as she tried to get the workings of her body back under her own control. On her bent head, an uneven line of scalp showed where she had parted her hair, twisting back and forth like a snake in burning grass.
“Yes,” echoed Alex slowly, “a snake.”
“A krait,” corrected Fiske, in his odious voice.
Penelope looked blankly up at him. Her face might be wiped clean of expression, but her curiously colored eyes were as agitated as the churning interior of a volcano. Get sucked in there and a man would be burnt to nothing more than bare bone. “It doesn’t much matter which one it was, does it? It did its job.”
Fiske regarded her speculatively. “What an interesting way you have of putting things, Lady Frederick.”
Penelope didn’t answer. Instead, she braced her head on her hands, fingertips pressed hard against her temples, her palms shielding her eyes. Below, Alex could see the rise and fall of her chest, as though she were struggling for breath.
“She’s had a shock,” Alex said shortly. “You shouldn’t have let her see him.”
“She shouldn’t be here.”
For once, they were in agreement.
“She wanted to surprise her husband,” said Alex, between clenched teeth.
“Oh, Freddy would certainly have been surprised,” said Fiske, drawing his handkerchief between his fingers. “I am surprised you agreed to it.”
“What was I supposed to do? Let her go by herself?”
Fiske’s protuberant eyes wandered in seeming idleness from Alex’s angry face to Penelope’s bowed head. “Heaven forbid that Lady Frederick be balked of any of her desires.”
Those desires were the last thing either of them needed to think about, considering that she had —
that they had . . . Well, what they had been engaged in, perhaps at the very hour of Lord Frederick’s death. Not that it would have changed anything. No matter what the circumstances, Lord Frederick would still have gone off to Berar; the snake would still have found a way into his tent. He and Penelope had nothing to do with that. Nothing at all.
Alex only hoped Penelope would see it that way.
Bugger bloody Frederick bloody Staines. Bugger himself, while he was at it. One week. If Alex had only managed to keep his hands off her for one blasted week, it might all have been different. No guilt, no tainted associations. There was nothing to be done about it now, of course. Nothing to be done but to get Penelope someplace quiet and let her carry on grieving as best she could.
“Very gallant, Fiske,” said Alex curtly. Turning to Penelope, he added, in a gentler voice, “Do you need to lie down?”
Penelope’s eyes shifted sideways to the palanquin where Freddy lay in perpetual rest.
Her braid swung violently against her back. “No! No.” Pressing her palms against her knees, Penelope addressed herself to Fiske rather than Alex. It made Alex feel like as much of a ghost as the late Lord Frederick Staines. Penelope looked right past him as though he didn’t exist, saying forcefully, “I want Freddy buried from the Residency. In the English cemetery. He deserves that, at least. He deserves better than to be buried by the side of the road like a dog in a ditch.”
If Fiske were taken aback by her vehemence he didn’t show it, save for one startled blink. “Of course,” he said smoothly. “Naturally.”
Standing, Penelope looked from one man to the other, her eyes opaque circles in her pale face. “We’ll have to go quickly, then, won’t we? So he doesn’t — ”
“Of course,” repeated Fiske.
Penelope wobbled, but she stood alone, deliberately ignoring the arms both men thrust out towards her. “Then there’s no time to lose, is there?”
Alex made as if to catch her arm. “Shouldn’t you lie down?” he remonstrated.
She jerked away from his touch so abruptly that she nearly overbalanced. “No,” she said harshly, in a voice like sandpaper on stone. “I don’t want to lie down. I don’t. I don’t.”
She wouldn’t look at him, Alex realized in dismay. Wouldn’t touch him.
“You have had a shock,” he began carefully.
Penelope laughed, an ugly laugh, like a burning house crackling as it crumbled at the joints. “Not so great a shock as Freddy had.”
Without waiting for either of the men to respond, she marched off in the direction of her horse.
“You heard the lady,” said Fiske, He touched his handkerchief delicately to the sides of his lips. “The widow demands we ride.”
The widow looked like she was about to snap in two, but loyalty to Penelope prevented Alex from saying so to Fiske.
Tight-lipped, Alex watched as a groom helped Penelope onto Buttercup. There was no point in arguing with her in this sort of mood; better to let her ride off the worst of her shock. It was just shock, Alex told himself. She would be fine by and by, Penelope. She was tough. Resilient. Stubborn.
Why didn’t he feel reassured?
Since there was nothing else he could do, he caught the eye of the groom. Alex recognized the man, one of the Residency’s staff. Alex angled his head towards Penelope, signaling the groom to stay close. Not that it made much difference, but it made him feel better. Like he was doing something for her.
“Quite a spot of bother, this,” said Fiske beside him. “Not exactly one for the dispatches, eh?”
“Spot of bother,” Alex repeated slowly. Well, that was one way of putting it. The bearers assigned to Lord Frederick’s palanquin re-shouldered their mortal burden. Knowing that Lord Frederick’s corpse lay in the midst of the caravan gave it the air of a funeral cortege, rather than the hunting expedition it had been.
Unless the game had never been grouse.
A snake might very well have crawled into Lord Frederick’s blankets. But for a snake to fatally bite Lord Frederick a mere three days after a cobra had been discovered in his and his wife’s bedroom was too much of a coincidence to stomach.
There were too many bloody snakes for coincidence.
Too many bloody snakes, and too many two-legged reptiles who might have planted them. It needn’t even have been a real snakebite. The double-pronged thorn of the kikar tree, dipped in poison, would replicate the shape and symptoms of snakebite, with none of the irritating element of chance involved in using the genuine article. A brief prick, and the sleeping victim would be doomed even before he awoke. All that would be left to do would be to take the body of a dead snake and place it by the victim’s wound, where it could be conveniently “discovered” the following morning. It was a fairly fool-proof strategy. Anyone spotting the deadly snake would be likely to take a bludgeon first and ask questions later. By the time the hullabaloo died down, the snake would be well and truly dead. As dead as Lord Frederick Staines.
Alex’s skin crawled despite the heat. Who had killed Lord Frederick Staines? And what did that mean for Lord Frederick’s bereaved wife?
Fiske was the most obvious culprit, Fiske, who was watching Penelope mount her horse, his mouth going in and out in that fish-like way of his. He looked smug. But, then, he always looked smug. It would have been easy enough for him to arrange for that cobra in the Staineses’ bungalow — but they had assumed before that the cobra had been meant for Penelope, to prevent her revealing Fiske’s putative identity as the Marigold. Lord Frederick might have known, or found out. Or a cautious spy might simply have deemed it expedient to root out both husband and wife, agreeing with English law that the two were, in essence, one body.
Unless it wasn’t Fiske at all.
If Penelope were to be believed, someone had tried to kill Lord Frederick before. Alex could almost have smiled when he remembered how Penelope had originally sought to lay the blame for that at his door, accusing him of attempting to murder her husband. Almost. The syce would have been the most logical suspect in that instance, as the man with the opportunity to weaken the girth and send Lord Frederick tumbling. It had been the syce, Mehdi Yar, who “found” the snake in Lord Frederick’s tent that morning. There was just one problem with that theory. Alex would have been willing to swear that the groom had been one of Wellesley’s plants, an informant planted in Calcutta by no less an authority than the office of the Governor General himself. In that case, why would Wellesley’s plant kill off Wellesley’s own chosen envoy?
Unless, of course, Wellesley’s plant had caught Wellesley’s envoy red-handed in a spot of double-dealing.
Alex’s head ached with more than heat. Lord Frederick Staines as the Marigold? It was impossible. He had just got to India four months ago. But that wasn’t quite true, was it? Lord Frederick had been in India before, at a time of extreme turmoil, in the center of a set known for their dissolute and self-serving behavior. It was Penelope herself who had told him that Lord Frederick’s old mate, Wrothan, had been running a spy ring out of his Hellfire Club. The two had been as thick as thieves in Mysore. The phrase might be more than just a metaphor.
Alex positioned himself in the column of riders a little way behind Penelope, near enough to keep an eye on her.
She had never explained how she knew quite so much about the Marigold. Did she —
No. The idea was absurd. It was impossible to imagine Penelope as a cold-blooded assassin, planting a cobra in her own room, arranging her husband’s death, either as a double-dealing agent for Wellesley or as a representative of whatever this bloody flowery cabal might be. It wasn’t that he thought her incapable of it; it just wasn’t in her style. If she had wanted to kill her husband, she would have done it simply, cleanly, with a bullet through the breast, not this convoluted charade of snakes and poison. Subtlety wasn’t among Penelope’s vices.
Alex’s heart twisted at the thought of her, his impetuous, impulsive, passionate Penelope.
His recentl
y bereaved Penelope. Penelope who might still be in danger from whoever had killed her husband. Alex made himself stop mooning and forced himself to concentrate. The snakes were still out, and there were more of them than he cared to count. Penelope might not be one for the subtle and convoluted, but Alex knew someone who was.
So had Lord Frederick. Intimately.
Alex maneuvered his mount forward, next to Fiske’s. Fiske was riding beside Penelope, and Alex signaled him to fall back, leaving Pinchingdale by Penelope’s other side. Getting Fiske away from Penelope was only a pleasant by-product of his real purpose. With Lord Frederick dead, Fiske was the de facto senior member of the original expedition, the one most likely to have the information Alex needed.
“Is that woman still in the camp?” Alex asked in an undertone, or at least as much of an undertone as one could manage and still be heard, surrounded by thudding hooves and creaky baggage ropes.
“Woman?” said Fiske blandly.
The man knew very well who he meant. “Nur Bai.”
Another person who might well want Lord Frederick dead, for personal reasons, professional reasons, or both. There had been rumors during her time as mistress to Major Guignon that she had become so on the instruction of Mir Alam, but where her ultimate loyalties lay were known to no one but the lady herself.
“Oh.” The syllable oozed through Fiske’s perpetually rounded lips like an eel’s. A poisonous one. “So you knew about Freddy’s little bit of fun.”
Little bit of fun? He doubted Nur Bai would appreciate the sobriquet. If Lord Frederick had called her that, no wonder there was a snake in his bed.
“He wasn’t exactly subtle about it.” That had come out a little more vehemently than intended. Alex hastily wiped his face blank. “Is she gone?”
“I can’t imagine why she would still be here.” Fiske pursed his lips. “She seemed a practical enough daughter of the game to me. Can’t very well service a corpse, can she?”