by Лорен Уиллиг
“Thank you for that lovely image,” Alex said dryly.
Fiske laughed. No, giggled. A high-pitched, fluting giggle. Alex looked at him with a mix of disdain and incredulity he couldn’t quite suppress. And this was the man they had suspected of being a master spy, responsible for the cold-blooded murder of his former messmate?
Perhaps. Even as he hee-hawed, Fiske’s pale eyes were as hard as ice and twice as cold.
“If you’re looking to replace old Fredders,” Fiske said carelessly, his tone at odds with his eyes, “I doubt you can afford her.”
With an effort, Alex kept his voice pleasant. “I simply wanted to make sure there would be no awkward encounters between Lord Frederick’s mistress and his wife. His widow.”
He could hear Penelope’s voice in his head, accusing him of thinking of her only as Lord Frederick’s wife, his chattel, like his horse or his stock. But that was how Fiske would think of her, as an object, a category. Better for Fiske to keep thinking of her that way, as Lord Frederick’s widow, his relict, someone of no further importance — and, especially, of no further danger to him.
“No cat fights, eh?” Fiske looked as though the prospect rather pleased him. “Oh well. The dusky beauty appears to have cleared out, as far as I can tell.”
Alex nodded stiffly. He would have to check for himself, of course. “Good.” And, then, just to make sure he had a plausible reason for his concern, “We don’t want any discredit to redound to the Residency from this affair.”
“No,” said Fiske thoughtfully. “One wouldn’t want to embarrass oneself with any of one’s . . . affairs.”
Before Alex could react, the other man raised a languid hand and cantered forward to reclaim his place beside the ominously silent form of Lord Frederick’s widow.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“And then old Freddy tripped over the hem of his robe, and pitched right into the ceremonial brew!”
Fiske giggled as his latest how-I-remember-Freddy story bar reled to a rollicking close. Pinchingdale obliged with a hee-haw. Even the new widow permitted herself a small, ironic smile, directed into the campfire, as though she could see her husband reflected in the flames, facedown in a butt of mead, sputtering, bare shins thrashing in the air.
Alex sat on the edge of the group, near them but not part of them. Their first night on the road had turned into an informal wake for Lord Frederick Staines, each man vying to tell more outrageous stories of the dead man’s exploits: his fearlessness on the hunt; his successes on the field of battle (more sartorial than military if the stories were anything to go by); his popularity with the ladies, his clubs, his friends, his family, his tailor.
It was a world foreign to Alex, but not to Penelope. She didn’t so much as blink at the introduction of names like Badger Throckhurst. Apparently, she knew Badger. He had had a mishap with a punch bowl and Freddy — Lord Frederick — had made money off it on some sort of long-standing wager in one of the umpteen London clubs to which he belonged, the names of which meant nothing to Alex, but a great deal to Fiske and Pinchingdale, who belonged to them, too. It was Penelope who had contributed that story, her voice rusty from disuse and rough with brandy, drunk neat from Fiske’s flask.
This was good for her, Alex knew. Good for her to talk about her husband’s life, to remember him as he had been, with other people who had known him and, more importantly, liked him. Under the influence of the fire and the brandy and the stories, the pasty color had left her cheeks. There was still an odd fragility about her, as though she were held together by a brace of pins that might drop out at any moment, but a muted version of her old sarcasm had replaced the stony calm in which she had ridden all afternoon.
Except when it came to Alex. The few times he had ventured a comment, the blankness had returned to her eyes and she had looked right through him, as though he weren’t there.
He stopped trying after the first few times.
This was what she needed, he told himself. It was only natural for her to look to her husband’s memory, to try to come to terms with his death. She might not have loved her husband, but he had been her husband, and his death had come as a shock. She needed time to come to terms with it. It shouldn’t matter who was comforting her, so long as she was comforted.
That was his official line. In truth, he gritted his teeth every time Fiske opened his mouth and he had to swallow a scowl every time the loathsome man brought a smile, no matter how anemic, to Penelope’s lips. He squirmed every time she reached to take the flask from Fiske’s hands, her lips touching where Fiske’s lips had touched.
Alex was supposed to be the one comforting her, not Fiske. Especially not Fiske, the very man who might be the cause of her husband’s death. It was bloody ridiculous, even if there had been no other considerations involved. Alex was supposed to be the one she turned to in her time of need, the one she looked to across the campfire, the one from whose flask she drank. All right, so he didn’t have a flask. It was the idea of it that counted.
How in the hell did his bloody father do it? Women fell for the old Colonel right, left, and center, forsaking home and hearth just for a chance at his smiles. And here he was, with just one woman in the whole wide world whom he wanted, and for all the attention she paid him, he might as well have been another log on the fire, here today, gone tomorrow. Disposable.
He might try to salvage his hopes by putting it down to shock and grief, but Fiske’s casual reminiscences opened a whole vista of problems Alex had been too blinded to consider. Yes, Penelope was finally free. But free to what? This world Fiske evoked, this world of restricted clubs and even more restricted parties; this was Penelope’s real world, her real home, only a six-month voyage away. With Lord Frederick gone, what reason did she have to stay in India?
Alex knew what he wanted the reason to be.
He also knew how pitifully unlikely it was. In all their gilded days together, there had never been any talk of love.
The important thing, Alex reminded himself, was keeping Penelope safe. He might not be able to make her love him, but he could keep her alive. It was something, at least. Pathetic, but something.
He waited until both the fire and the conversation had died down, tongues slowed with drink and fatigue, heads and eyelids beginning to droop. Penelope slowly rose from her seat, stretching joints made stiff with sitting.
Alex jumped into the waiting silence before she could begin the general exodus to bed.
“Lady Frederick,” he said, doing his best to sound casual, formal, distant, nothing more than a representative of the Residency that had once housed her husband. “I wondered if I might have a quick word.”
“I am tired,” she said, stony-faced, looking past Alex rather than at him. “I believe I shall go to bed.”
“It is rather important.” Alex tried to keep the frustration he felt out of his voice. He wanted to grab her by the arm, shake her, make her look him in the eye. This wasn’t about them, he told himself. It was about Penelope and her safety. It was for her, not for him.
Fiske unfolded himself from his place by the fire, raising a languid arm to block Alex’s path. “The lady said she was tired, Reid.”
Since when had Fiske appointed himself Penelope’s protector? The gall of it all set Alex’s teeth on edge.
“My hearing is still perfectly good,” he said tightly, watching Penelope slip away from him behind the barrier of Fiske’s arm. He didn’t like where they had set up her tent. It was too far on the edge of the camp, too easy for an assassin to access.
“If your hearing is not at fault, it must be the subtleties of civilized conversation that you miss,” oozed Fiske.
Civilized? This was the man who had brutalized a fourteen-year-old in a mock pagan ceremony for the sheer depravity of it, and he had the nerve to call Alex uncivilized? Alex burned with important anger as he looked at Fiske’s smug, overbred face, lips peeled back from crooked teeth in a lazy smile.
It was far too tempting to
knock those teeth loose from that smug smile, but that was just what Fiske wanted. He wanted Alex to lose his temper. The moment he attacked Fiske, Fiske would have him up on charges faster than he could blink.
Alex swallowed his simmering anger and forced himself to speak levelly. “I simply wanted to make certain that we have no further incidents with snakes on this journey,” he said shortly.
Fiske’s face was the picture of innocence. “Why should you think we might?”
Alex leveled a long, assessing look at his unwanted traveling companion. “I find that reptiles tend to travel in packs.”
Abandoning the consuming task of sniffing his brandy, Jasper Pinchingdale lifted his curly head in alarm. “Do they?”
He clearly hadn’t registered the insult to himself. It was better that way.
“I doubt we need to worry,” said Fiske carelessly. “So long as all the usual precautions are taken.”
Alex smiled without humor. “You can be assured that I intend to see that they are. Good night.”
It was an empty threat. Short of detailing one of the bearers to stand watch by Penelope’s tent at night — which he had already done — there was very little he could actually do. The men he had spoken to in the cavalcade, Residency employees all, had informed him that Nur Bai had indeed left the caravan, breaking off with her own retainers and with the proclaimed intent of carrying on to Mir Alam’s hunting lodge in Berar. That didn’t mean she actually had. Nor would it have prevented her from leaving half a dozen of her creatures scattered among the traveling circus that made up the camp. With hundreds of servants and bearers, it was nearly impossible to evaluate all the inhabitants.
All Alex could do was make sure Penelope was on her guard.
The placement of her tent might be a danger, but it was also a boon. He waited until Pinchingdale and Fiske were safely immured in their own canvas constructions before slipping over to the edge of the encampment. He knew she was awake. A candle burned within, casting her silhouette against the canvas. She didn’t seem to be undressing or reading or doing much of anything at all. She simply sat, her head bowed over her folded hands, pausing, from time to time, to take a long swig from the flask she had coolly walked off with when leaving the fire. Fiske’s flask. Alex might have worried about poison, but that Fiske had drunk from it, too. No man poisoned his own well.
Feeling like an idiot slinking through the shadows, Alex fell to his knees beside the tent flap, angled so that the bulk of it hid his body from the rest of the camp.
He tugged on the flap. “Psssst,” he hissed. Then, when she didn’t answer. “Penelope.”
Penelope’s nose poked out of the fold. Her nose and one eye. One very bloodshot eye. It did not regard him favorably.
“Don’t,” she said stonily. “Just don’t.”
It took a moment for the implication to hit, and when it did, Alex rocked back on his heels. She couldn’t possibly think that he was there for . . . Oh.
“This isn’t about that,” he whispered hastily.
The flap opened a little wider, just wide enough for Penelope to give him a freezing stare.
“About what?” she said, in a tone designed to reduce to nothing anything between them that might ever have been a something. She followed it up with the equally chilling “Why are you here?”
Because I love you didn’t seem like the appropriate answer.
Alex could smell the brandy on her breath. It was the only warm thing about her. All the anger, all the self-loathing she had obviously been feeling had found an outlet. Him.
“I was worried about your well-being,” he said with dignity.
“Well, don’t be.” The tent flap started to fold down.
This was not how this was supposed to go. Alex made a quick move to block the fall of canvas. “Have you given any thought to that damn snake?”
Penelope looked at him with something akin to loathing. “What do you think I’ve been contemplating? My toenails? Of course, I’ve thought about the snake. Again and again and again. What do you want me to do, find an asp to clutch to my breast?”
“Um, no.” Taken aback by the unexpected attack, Alex hastily regrouped. “You might still be a target, Penelope. What if someone tries to pull a similar trick with you?”
In the uncertain light, Penelope’s face was all bones and hollows, like a skull. She smiled a singularly unpleasant smile. “And what if they do? Good night, Captain Reid.”
The tent flap swung emphatically down. The discussion was closed.
Only it wasn’t, damn it.
Alex tugged at the canvas. The flap held firm, clearly anchored by something on the other end. A flat voice emerged from inside the tent. “Do that one more time and I will start screaming. I mean it.”
Alex didn’t doubt she meant it.
Fine. She needed time alone. He could accept that.
“Just be careful,” he hissed, and crawled off to his own tent, checking first to make sure that the sentry he had planted near Penelope’s temporary lodging was well in place. That would have to do for tonight. By morning — well, surely by morning — Penelope would have seen sense. Alex couldn’t have produced a definitive definition of what he meant by sense, but he was fairly sure it had something to do with resuming speaking to him and taking elementary precautions for her own safety.
Penelope did neither of those things. When the morning dawned, she was there with the others, clothed in a habit that had been miraculously cleaned overnight by the staff, her hair brushed and pinned. She took her place at the front of the rank, between Fiske and Pinchingdale, both of whom treated her with an exaggerated solicitude that would have made Alex laugh if only Penelope had been laughing with him. Instead, she treated him just as her husband had once done; with the chilly indifference of the aristocrat to a subordinate, speaking to him only when necessary and, even then, addressing her comments past him rather than to him.
This wasn’t Penelope.
Watching her, straight-backed in the saddle, hair brushed and coiled, he remembered her with sweat streaking lines through dust on her face, profanely attempting to put together a fire under his tutelage, jumping into the river after a groom, stealing his horse and riding it, hairpins flying.
That had been Penelope. This was Lady Frederick as he had first met her in Calcutta, hard-edged, sharp-tongued, warding off the world from behind a shield of sarcasm and devil-may-care bravado, and desperately unhappy behind it. She was the first one in the saddle in the mornings and the last to dismount, leaping obstacles with a recklessness that smacked less of her usual bravado and more of a shattering lack of concern with whether she lived or died.
Alex gritted his teeth and bided his time, despising himself for his own helplessness. What was he supposed to do? Take her in his arms and — what? he mocked himself. Kiss her tears away? Remind her that she had never liked the rotter anyway? Offer her sex as a substitute for grieving? Charming behavior, that would be, worthy of Fiske at his best. Alex was only surprised that Fiske hadn’t tried it.
It drove him mad to think that their time together might have been nothing more than an interlude to her. A few days before, he would have been willing to swear that it hadn’t been, but the steady offensive of indifference drove him to distraction, and to decidedly ignoble emotions.
He was not, he discovered, nearly so self-sacrificing as he had believed himself. If he were, he would have been ready to nobly respect Penelope’s unspoken wishes, pretending that nothing of an intimate nature had ever occurred between them. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t just pack her off to England, to ballrooms full of Fiskes and Freddys. He worried about Penelope, about her health, her safety, but his worry wasn’t entirely unmixed with what Alex could only view as selfish self-interest. He couldn’t seem to help caring about her, and if she wanted to repudiate that, she would have to do it from her own mouth.
It was three days before Alex found an opportunity to speak to Penelope alone, free from the perpetual presence
of her twin shadows, Fiske and Pinchingdale. They had paused to wait out the hottest part of the day in the shelter of an abandoned caravanserai, napping as their inclination and status required: Fiske and Pinchingdale in the tents their servants had scurried ahead to set up for them; the members of the caravan disported in whatever bits of shade they had managed to wrangle from their fellows.
Penelope’s tent had been set up with the rest, but she didn’t make use of it. As Alex rubbed down a profusely sweating Bathsheba, he saw Penelope disappearing around the side of the ruined building, the train of her abused riding habit dragging dustily in the earth behind her.
Without thinking, Alex tossed the cloth to a groom and followed.
There must once have been a courtyard in the center of the building, where tired travelers might refresh themselves. The fountain was empty, the foundations cracked and dry, and weeds pushed up between the flagstones. Rosebushes grew wild on one side of the courtyard, twining up the arched frames of empty windows, and wild herbs grew fragrant underfoot.
Penelope sat on the edge of the ruined fountain, the skirt of her habit flowing like water around her. With her hair fallen in a long, red rope over one shoulder and the unpruned rosebushes climbing all around her, she looked, thought Alex, like a princess in a story, waiting to be woken by a prince’s kiss.
Alex grimaced. If only it were that easy. With his finesse, he seemed to have turned her into a frog. A very angry, fighting frog.
Hearing the brush of his boots against the foliage, she looked up sharply. For a moment, Alex surprised her in an expression of open confusion; her face looked softer, younger than it had for days. She swallowed convulsively and hastily pushed herself up off her perch, pulling her skirts together to brush past him.
She couldn’t even muster a hello? One hello after all they had shared?
“Wait.” The word was torn out of his chest, less a request and more a command. Softening his voice, he said, no less urgently, “Damn it, Penelope. Why won’t you talk to me?”