by Лорен Уиллиг
“We’re talking now, aren’t we?” she said, as though it were a matter of supreme indifference to her, and made to brush past him.
Alex blocked her, feeling like a cad, but too desperate to care. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Fine,” she said flatly. She turned to pluck at a leaf on the rosebush, shiny and sharp-edged. “Talk.”
Having received his mandate to talk, Alex found that both his tongue and his brain had ceased normal function. He had held so many conversations with her in his head over the last few days that it was hard to know where to start — or what had actually been said and what hadn’t.
But since he couldn’t leave her standing there waiting indefinitely, “I worry about you,” he said lamely.
Wrong approach.
“You shouldn’t.” A thorn pricked her finger, leaving a crimson blot of blood in its wake. Penelope regarded the tiny dot of blood dispassionately. Rubbing her hand against the skirt of the habit, she shrugged. “I’m no concern of yours.”
That was precisely the opposite of what he had wanted to hear.
“Yes, you are,” said Alex urgently, wishing he had the guts to deploy something more than words. “I — ”
But he couldn’t say it. It was an impossible time to tell a woman he loved her, all but over the corpse of her husband.
“Captain Reid, Captain Reid,” said Penelope, in that tone of polite mockery he was beginning to learn to hate. It was the same one she used with Fiske and Pinchingdale, as delicately deadly as a stiletto. She wouldn’t even bloody use his first name. “There’s no need, you know. Just because we — ”
Alex flung up a hand in an instinctive gesture of negation. Whatever she was about to say, he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want what they had had together reduced to the most base of carnal terms. It had been more than that. Hadn’t it? His lungs ached as though he had been running a mile.
Penelope’s eyebrows lifted, but she respected the unspoken barrier. With a shrug — a shrug as dreadful as the words she had been prevented from uttering — she said, “I hold you under no obligation to me.”
It was a clear dismissal.
Alex stood his ground, searching her face for signs of the woman who had accompanied him to Berar. “But I do. I brought you here.”
Penelope laughed lightly. It rang with a false note in the quiet garden. “Trussed and bound?” she said contemptuously. “No. Everything I did, I did of my own accord. You had no part in it.”
Right. That was quite enough of that. It was one thing letting her grieve, another thing to be relegated to the position of hired stud, put out to pasture after his turn in the paddock. It had been his affair as well as hers and she could bloody well remember that.
“Didn’t I?” he said provocatively. “I seem to remember two being involved in some of those activities.”
She hadn’t expected that. She turned on him with the sort of freezing stare designed to reduce a man to gibbering apology, a slow spark of anger kindling in her eyes, like gold to the flame.
With a nonchalance he was far from feeling, Alex plucked a petal from a rose, rolling it between his fingers so that its musky fragrance permeated the air between them. “Forgive me. I wasn’t aware you were the only one allowed to refer to it.” He paused before saying, deliberately, unforgivably, “You weren’t so cold four days ago.”
“Four days ago,” Penelope said, through clenched lips, “Freddy wasn’t dead.”
“It’s not fair hiding behind Freddy,” Alex said harshly. The mashed remains of the rose petal crumbled through his fingers. “You had precious little time for him when he was alive.”
Penelope stared at him in shock. “That’s not — you can’t — ”
“Did you love him?” Alex demanded. He hadn’t meant to say it, but once it was out, there was no taking it back.
Ugly laughter rasped through Penelope’s throat. “Does it matter? Now?”
“Did you?”
Heedless of thorns, Penelope turned and banged a fist into the vine-covered wall. “No! Is that what you wanted to hear? No, I didn’t love him. I never loved him. I never even liked him. I married him out of — out of boredom. I married him on a bloody whim, and do you know what happened? He died of it. There. Happy now?”
Blood seeped down her wrist where a thorn had torn the side of her hand, but she seemed not to notice.
“No,” Alex said soberly.
What could he say? That he wanted her to be happy? The sentiment seemed absurd in the face of her wild-eyed despair. He hadn’t realized quite how much emotion she had been holding tamped down beneath the fragile social crust of the past few days.
Tentatively, like a skater shifting out onto uncertain ice, he said, “You weren’t even there when it happened. It’s not your fault that Lord Frederick died.”
Penelope’s hands balled into fists in the folds of her habit. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she said with withering scorn. “You don’t know at all.”
“Try me,” he said, keeping his voice hard, granite to her granite, rough and unyielding.
It worked.
“If you must know, I compromised him,” she said defiantly.
Alex had never heard anything so absurd. “I should have thought that he compromised you .”
Penelope glowered at him. “He wouldn’t have if I hadn’t given him ample opportunity.”
Alex looked at her flushed and angry face and thought that several things made a great deal more sense. “Is that what they told you?” he asked softly.
Penelope made an impatient gesture, brushing aside his words. “I announced to the world at large that we had been in a bedroom alone together. I did, not Freddy.”
“On purpose?”
“By accident,” she admitted grudgingly. “But the result was the same. He had to marry me. He would never have come out here but for me. And it bloody well killed him.”
“Penelope — ”
Ignoring him, she clenched and unclenched her bloody hands, pacing the paving, wearing a circle into the stones. “I was the one who drove him to India.”
“What did you do?” demanded Alex softly. “Hit him over the head with a truncheon? Drag him onto the boat trussed and bound ?”
“I made him come out here,” Penelope repeated stridently. “I made him come out here and it bloody killed him. I killed him. I killed Freddy.”
“A snakebite killed him,” Alex said bracingly. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Can’t I?” Penelope’s face twisted. “I’ve been a disaster since the day I was born. Just ask my mother; she’ll tell you.”
“Mothers aren’t always the most reliable sources.”
“Ask Freddy then. Oh, wait. You can’t, can you?” Penelope’s face screwed up but she got it under control again, saying roughly, “I’m a walking blight and if you have any sense you’ll get well away from me before I curse you, too.”
Alex shook his head gently. “I could never do that,” he said, and realized it was true. He was in too deep. For the first time, he understood the doomed lovers of the epics, taking steps that had always seemed monumentally stupid to him before, flinging aside reputation, pride, honor, all for that elusive chameleon called love.
Apparently, Penelope had never understood it either. “Why?” she shot back at him, every word a taunt. “Do you just like playing with trouble? Or are your heroic instincts acting up again?”
Alex watched her, like a hunter stalking a hind. “There’s nothing heroic about it.”
Penelope snorted. “I know you. Gallant Captain Reid who can’t bear to leave a stranded kitten in a tree.” Alex had never, to his recollection, even seen a kitten in a tree, but Penelope was off and running, her words tumbling out faster and faster, higher and higher pitched. “For heaven’s sake! Your brother stands condemned of treason in front of you and you still bend over backwards to shelter him.”
Her voice broke on the last words. Alex, w
ho had been prepared to take umbrage, stopped, arrested by the unprecedented sight of tears trickling down Penelope’s cheeks. She fought a losing battle for control over her own body. He watched as her face contorted, her hands clenching and unclenching, as her whole body shook with the sobs she refused to give in to.
“I compromised my husband,” she spat out hoarsely. “I cuckolded him. I dragged him out here to die. Yes, die.” Turning her head, Penelope dashed angrily at her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. Blood and tears mingled in pinkish stripes across her face. The effect was gruesome. She screwed up her face, sucking up snot through her nose. “Let me tell you this, Captain Reid. Some people aren’t worth the saving. Get out while you still can.”
She looked like something designed to frighten small children, eyes narrowed to slits, cheeks puce, face contorted. Alex took a step towards her. “No.”
Penelope pushed against him with both hands, blood, tears, and snot dripping unheeded down her chin. She pushed again, harder, her voice taking on a hysterical edge, “Go, damn you! Damn you, damn you, damn you. What in the hell are you doing here with me? Do you just like being kicked again and again? Or are you saving up for a halo?”
“You bloody fool,” Alex said tenderly, and took her in his arms. He rubbed his hands soothingly up and down her back, feeling her muscles jerk with suppressed tears and halfhearted protests. She drew in a ragged breath against his chest, snuffling up snot and choking on a sob. Alex pressed his cheek against the top of her head, her sun-warmed hair warm against his skin and smelling only slightly rank from a day without washing. “You bloody, bloody fool. You’ve got it all cock-a-hoop. Don’t you realize I — ”
“My, my,” intruded an all-too-familiar voice, at just that inopportune moment. Booted feet slapped decisively against the ancient paving. The sound brought Alex’s head up with a snap, but not soon enough. “What have we here?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Comforting the widow, Reid?” inquired Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske.
Penelope stumbled as Alex’s hold abruptly loosened, leaving her cold and exposed. She felt battered, disheveled, and entirely adrift.
Fiske assessed her ravaged face with an appraiser’s eye. “Zounds,” he said softly. “Tears. How touching. Are they real?”
Alex stepped between Penelope and Fiske, shielding her with his body. “What do you want, Fiske?”
With deliberate insolence, Fiske thrust his hands into his pockets and lounged back on his heels. “It might be more to the point to ask what you want with a woman so recently bereaved, Reid.”
Penelope had never seen Alex so angry, not even on the memorable occasion of the cobra. No, not even when she had accused him of embezzling funds from the Nizam’s treasury.
“Question my motives all you like,” he said sharply, every word cracking like a pistol shot, “but never impugn the honor of the lady.”
He meant it, Penelope realized, with mingled awe and horror. He really meant it. Although how he could mean it, when he knew what she . . . when she and he . . . Penelope blinked away a morass of muddled memories, hands and lips and tangled blankets and snarled hair by the campfire in the dawn light. Honor. This wasn’t just plucking a kitten from a tree; it was scaling a rickety branch for a stranded tiger, stupid and noble and pointless and certain to end very, very badly.
She wanted to grab at his arm and shout at him not to be a fool, but it was too late. A crushing sense of inevitability descended on Penelope as she watched Fiske’s lips spread in a slow, knowing smile.
“Honor?” Fiske emitted a sharp bark of laughter. He nodded insolently towards Penelope. “No offense, my dear. We all know how you came to marry poor Freddy.”
“Would you care to take that back?” suggested Alex conversationally.
Fiske crossed his arms across his chest. “Why should I?”
Alex’s lips twisted into a grim smile. “Allow me to provide you with the reasons.”
Penelope wished she could pretend not to understand what was meant by that, but there was no way anyone could, especially not a trigger-happy, honor-mad army man who had fought duels in the past over matters so slight as a disagreement about the set of his lapels. Her head pounded and her chest ached and her throat burned, but somehow, through the drumming of her blood in her ears, she heard her own voice, raised in remonstrance.
“Don’t,” she said sharply. She pushed out from behind Alex, placing herself between the two men. “Just — don’t.”
Fiske smiled lazily down at her, as though it hadn’t been her honor he had been calling into question a few moments before. “Too late for that, old girl,” he said patronizingly. “Matter of honor and whatnot.”
“Yes,” said Penelope fiercely. “My honor. Which, I believe, we have already agreed isn’t worth fighting over.” It hurt to voice it, but it needed to be done. She managed a tortured smile and drew herself up in her best imitation of her usual demeanor, mad hair, blood-streaked face and all. “So we’re done here, yes?”
Alex looked over her head as though she hadn’t spoken. “You’ll name your seconds?”
“Blast you!” Penelope struck at his arm. “There won’t be any firsts! How many times do I have to say it? I won’t have you fighting over me. It’s not worth it.”
Fiske looked benevolently down at her. He was thinner than Alex, but taller, willowy where the other man was more compactly built. He would have the advantage of reach in a fight with swords. “Maidenly qualms, my dear? I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”
The derisive amusement Fiske injected into the word “maidenly” brought Alex forward on the balls of his feet, ready to settle with his fists what he had already proposed doing with his sword.
Penelope drove an elbow into his ribs before he could get past her. She could hear the indrawn hiss of his breath, but she didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. Focusing all her attention on Fiske, she said shortly, “I won’t ruin another man’s life — whether it’s yours or his. Fight if you must,” she added, with hard-won flippancy. “But not over me.”
With the peculiar instinct of men the world over to scent a good fight, their raised voices had attracted spectators.
“Who is fighting?” asked Jasper Pinchingdale eagerly, strolling into the courtyard, followed an assorted entourage of grooms, bearers, and functionaries, whose actual function remained a mystery to Penelope.
“No one,” said Penelope forcibly.
Neither Fiske nor Alex — nor, for that matter, Pinchingdale — paid the slightest bit of attention to her. Regardless of her role in the inception of it, at this stage, she was nothing more than an insignificant intruder into the matters of men.
Penelope felt a cold sweat breaking out beneath the heavy wool of her habit. Why didn’t anyone else seem to realize that this was a dreadful idea? That men could die this way?
That Alex could die this way.
Penelope wanted to thump them all. How could they be such idiots? Wasn’t one fatality enough for any journey?
Unless, of course, someone wanted another fatality.
The prospect hit her like a punch to the gut. Penelope’s head buzzed with confused suspicions and inchoate fears. The Marigold. She had forgotten all about that. It seemed like a million years ago that she and Alex had discussed Fiske’s potential culpability in the predawn dark of the bedchamber she had shared with Freddy. All of that seemed very far away, but it wasn’t, and Alex knew it. It had been Alex who had warned that Freddy’s death might be more than an accident, and urged her to be on her guard.
Why couldn’t he listen to his own advice?
The two opponents exchanged a long, level look. “We can settle this back at the Residency,” said Alex in a hard voice.
Fiske readjusted his gloves. “I shall look forward to the sport.”
“How very sporting of you,” said Alex dryly.
“I’ll put odds on you, old man,” said Pinchingdale to his messmate, brightening at the prospect of a b
it of blood and bookmaking. Remembering his purpose, he added, “Just came to tell you that we seem to be all packed up and ready to go. Proper beds at the Residency tonight!”
Fiske’s mouth opened and closed like a guppy’s. “Except for those of us who wake at dawn.”
With an inconsequential comment to Pinchingdale, he pointedly turned his back on Alex. Whatever it was he had said, it must have been amusing. Penelope could hear Pinchingdale’s arrogant laughter floating away with the sound of their retreating footsteps.
From the entryway, someone signaled to Alex, undoubtedly about one of the hundred tasks to do with getting the cavalcade back underway. Alex held up a hand, indicating that he would be along in just a moment.
Turning to Penelope, Alex looked at her searchingly. “Are you all right?” he asked gently.
All right? Had there ever been a more idiotic question in the history of the world?
Every emotion she had ever had boiled and churned and spilled over like acid, burning through whole layers of skin, leaving her naked and exposed and vulnerable. She felt as though her guts had been dragged out through her nose and left lying all over the cobblestones.
“You idiot,” she fumed. “You pigheaded, mule-brained, feeble-minded man. You walked right into that like — like an idiot sheep to slaughter. Did you ever stop to think that he might have done it on purpose?”
“Yes,” he said calmly. Penelope gaped at him. Taking advantage of her momentary speechlessness, he added, in a voice that brooked no dispute, “Fiske can’t be allowed to say such things about you with impunity.”
“Why not, when it’s true?” demanded Penelope frantically. “Others have said worse.”
Alex’s face set in lines of pure granite. “Not anymore.”
He appeared to be missing the point. Images of Freddy, waxy-skinned and lifeless, flashed through her head, oddly intermingled with images of Alex, Alex sprawled like a dropped doll on a patch of trodden ground, mouth slack, eyes hollow. They were all muddled together in her head, death after death after death, and all on her account. She had thought she could save him by staying away. Why, oh, why had he been fool enough to seek her out?