The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (10 page)

As he drew closer, riding for all he was worth, he realized that the sound she was making wasn’t screaming; it was laughter. She was laughing, laughing with the sheer exhilaration of movement and the joy of the ride.

Bathsheba, that traitor, flung back her head and whinnied in equine response, as happy to be ridden as Lady Frederick was to ride.

Women!

Taking pity on him, Lady Frederick reined up, drawing Bathsheba around in a graceful circle to face him. Both women, female and horse, grinned at him for all they were worth.

“No oats for you,” said Alex to Bathsheba.

Unrepentant, Bathsheba swiped a hoof through the mud.

“Well?” Lady Frederick demanded, swinging herself lightly to the ground. “What do you say, Captain Reid? Am I to have my oats taken away, too?”

She stumbled slightly as she landed, but that was the only sign of weakness she betrayed. Her cheeks were flushed with the exercise, her amber eyes glinted with mischief, and her red hair stood out all around her like a river of flame. There were streaks on the skirt of her serge dress from the saddle leather, where she had pressed too hard and her bonnet was nothing but a straw-colored splotch half a mile down the road. As Alex watched, she began prospecting for pins in her hair, smoothing the heavy mass away from her face and twisting it into a careless coil.

“That was a damn fool stunt,” Alex said shortly, doing his best to disguise the raggedness of his breathing.

Hers appeared entirely unaltered. But, then, she had known she wasn’t being run away with, while Alex had been riding hell-for-leather to an entirely unnecessary rescue. So much for dealing with damsels in distress. What about his distress, damn it? What about the food rotting in the heat, the animals getting restless, the—well, something else had to be going wrong. He was sure he would find out as soon as he got Lady Frederick back down the road and into the palanquin where she belonged.

Lady Frederick looked at him from under her lashes. “Only because it was your horse.”

There was something infectious about the glint of mischief in her eyes. Alex refused to give way to it.

“On anyone’s horse,” Alex said sternly, feeling like someone’s governess. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. “You don’t know the terrain. The road could have been pitted with potholes or studded with nails—”

“Are the roads in India generally studded with nails?”

Alex gave her a look. “You know very well what I meant.” What was the use? He had had enough of diplomacy—and governessing. “You can break your own neck if you like,” he said bluntly, “but leave my horse out of it.”

Lady Frederick wasn’t the least bit offended. Patting Bathsheba’s neck, she said, “I would sooner break my own neck than harm such a beauty. Admit it. I ride beautifully.”

“That little exhibition just cost us a good half hour.”

“We’ll move much faster if you don’t cart me around in a palanquin like a parcel. You’ll make up your half hour and more.”

“Not when you get sunstroke. You may ride beautifully, Lady Frederick—”

“Ha!” said she triumphantly.

“—but you have no experience with the climate. Or with spending twelve hours a day in the saddle.”

Lady Frederick shrugged. “I can manage. And if I don’t, on my own head be it.”

“Your head isn’t the one Wellesley will come after if anything happens to you,” said Alex, with some asperity. He turned to look back down the road, where the members of the camp were, according to their temperaments, either craning their necks to enjoy the free show or seizing the opportunity for a last-minute nap. “We should be getting back. We’ve delayed our start long enough.”

“And our five days with Mr. Alexander didn’t?” The face she made spoke eloquently of Lady Frederick’s opinion of the East India Company’s agent in Masulipatam. There was a reason young Henry Russell had nicknamed the agent Old Mother Alexander. The man was as fussy as an old woman and twice as proper. “Were you waiting for more love letters, Captain Reid?”

“Buying tents,” he corrected succinctly, snagging Bathsheba’s reins and pointedly handing her those of her husband’s mount. “And cooking pots and blankets. I doubt you would enjoy sleeping directly on the ground. It tends to be prickly.”

Lady Frederick fluttered her lashes at him. “Rather like some individuals of my acquaintance.”

Alex had had enough of playing games. “If you’re looking for someone to flirt with, Lady Frederick, my father is back in Calcutta.”

“I rather thought you might need the practice more than he.”

“How very public-spirited of you.” Going down on one knee in the dust, Alex cupped his hands for her to mount.

“Oh, that’s me, all right,” said Lady Frederick airily, swinging up onto Aurangzeb with only the lightest pressure against Alex’s hands. It was a fluid, practiced movement, accomplished without any indication of effort whatsoever. “A regular one-woman philanthropic society.”

Dusting his hands on his breeches, Alex couldn’t resist asking, “Where did you learn to ride like that?”

He doubted it was standard practice for London debutantes.

“I’ve always ridden,” said Lady Frederick, setting her mount in motion with an ease that bore out her words. She looked at him challengingly as he brought his mount into pace with hers. “My grandfather bred horses.”

“And he let you ride them?” Bathsheba moved forward easily enough, but she seemed to cast a wistful look across at Lady Frederick. Brilliant. His horse and his charge were in cabal.

Lady Frederick grinned at a memory only she could see. “There was no ‘let’ about it.”

Alex imagined it would be rather hard to stop Lady Frederick doing anything Lady Frederick wanted to do. His sympathies were with her grandfather.

“I suppose,” said Alex resignedly, “that that is your way of telling me you shall be riding whether I like it or not.”

“We can bring the palanquin along if you like,” said Lady Frederick, generous in victory. “In case you want to use it.”

Over the next few days, they made better time than Alex had imagined they would. If Lady Frederick was feeling the strain of the unaccustomed activity, she hid it well, although he saw her wince once or twice when she thought herself unobserved, as she lowered herself into a sitting position in the dining tent.

The dwindling rains of the monsoon fell mostly at night, leaving the roads muddy but the skies clear during the day, casting an eerie mist over the early morning hours through which the cackling calls of monkeys swinging between the palms echoed oddly around them. Lady Frederick did a fair job of maintaining her veneer of bored sophistication, but from time to time Alex would see the façade slip as they passed roadside temples tenanted with many-legged gods and strewn with the remains of recent offerings, or crumbling suttee monuments onto which the images of long-dead warriors and their loyal ladies had been painstakingly carved in rounded relief. She held colloquy with the chattering monkeys from beneath the broad straw hat that had replaced her London bonnet, nearly unseated herself from her horse reaching for a palm gourd, and tucked a blue lotus flower in her hair in the style of the native women they had seen along the route.

Five days into the journey, Alex caught her attempting to make conversation in stilted Hindi with a group of short-skirted villagers, who clearly wanted nothing more than to be allowed to till their cotton fields in peace.

“They don’t speak Hindi,” Alex said, unsuccessfully trying to hide his grin.

He didn’t add that even if they did, they would have had a very hard time trying to make sense of her pronunciation. The grammar that she had been given, produced for the use of British soldiers recently come to India, was not known for its accuracy.

Lady Frederick turned her flushed face to his. Her skin had acquired a golden sheen from the sun, like sunlight on wheat, doubtless from her habit of impatiently shoving her hat back, as she was doing now.

“Then what do they speak?” she demanded, snatching off her hat and fanning her face with it. Crumpled strands of red hair stood out around her face like weeds. She looked a world removed from the creature of moonlight and muslin in Begum Johnson’s drawing room.

“Telagu. Besides,” he added, the grin breaking free, “even if they did speak Hindi . . .”

Lady Frederick stopped fanning. “What?”

“. . . You just told them to ‘row harder.’ Not exactly applicable, wouldn’t you agree?” And with that, he spurred ahead, in the happy assurance of having got the last word.

Lady Frederick cantered up beside him. “How do you say ‘good day’ in Telagu?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because ‘row faster’ has limited utility.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were on a boat,” said Alex blandly. There was something oddly enjoyable about talking pure nonsense with Lady Frederick. Obviously a sign that the heat was addling his brain, rather than hers. “And you will be on one soon enough.”

“Trying to send me back to Calcutta again, Captain Reid?”

“A boat going in the opposite direction. We need to cross the Krishna. It’s generally not a bad crossing, but during the monsoon . . .”

“Dangerous?” asked Lady Frederick.

“Potentially.” Under ordinary circumstances, the crossing was not a bad one. Swollen with monsoon waters, the normally placid expanse of river was fiendishly dangerous to cross. “The waters are too deep to be forded just now, so we’ll have to ferry everyone across. The animals don’t always submit well to that.”

Lady Frederick considered for a moment, as though searching for a hidden sting. After a pause, she said, “Let me know what I can do.”

“Don’t jump in,” said Alex.

“Don’t be silly,” said Lady Frederick, and rode on.

Freddy stretched his arms out over his head until the joints cracked. “It will be good to be back in the saddle, eh, old girl?”

“Are you talking to me, or the horse?” inquired Penelope.

Freddy slapped her hard on the rump. “Whichever you prefer.”

They were crammed onto the ferry along with their mounts, their grooms, and their personal servants, waiting to be pulled across to the other side. They had spent the better part of the day by the banks of the Krishna, watching as group after group was ferried across the choppy brown waters by a ferry that was little more than a raft on a pulley. Some of the animals had put up a bit of a fuss at being herded onto the rickety wooden conveyance, having to be coaxed and prodded aboard. Penelope didn’t blame them. The river was running fast beneath the warped planks of the ferry and it smelled vile in the humid heat.

From her vantage point on the ferry, Penelope could see Captain Reid efficiently dispatching the jumbled mass of men and animals on the opposite bank, sending groups ahead with tents and provisions to their next camping stage. She had seen the same scene played out in variants at every stage of their journey, the creation of order out of chaos as tents were raised or struck, provisions loaded or unloaded, and an unwieldy group of more than eighty souls propelled along the road. By the time she and Freddy reached the next stage, their tent would be up, their beds laid out, water provided warm for washing, and their dinner ready to be served.

The prolonged wait by the bank had been too much for Freddy, who was chafing to get back on horseback. Despite the fact that they were only halfway across, Freddy’s groom—or, if Penelope were trying to be local about it, his syce—held out two cupped hands for Freddy to mount.

“Oughtn’t you to wait till we land?” suggested Penelope. The raft didn’t strike her as the sturdiest construction, and Aurangzeb, Freddy’s mount, stood worryingly near to the edge.

Freddy grabbed hold of the bridle, wedging one booted foot into the stirrup. “Don’t be absurd. What can possibly happen?”

As he heaved himself upwards, a loud, cracking noise rent the air. Penelope grabbed on to her own horse’s bridle as Buttercup shied at the noise, half-expecting to see the raft coming apart beneath them.

It wasn’t the raft that had given way, but Freddy’s girth. Freddy teetered for balance, one foot sticking comically up in the air, as his saddle lurched sideways. With an expression of frozen disbelief that would have been amusing under other circumstances, Freddy plummeted sideways, straight at his horrified syce. Seeing the danger too late, his syce made a belated and futile attempt to back out of the way.

It was like watching dominos, very large, very human dominos. Freddy slammed straight into the syce’s shoulder, sending him toppling backwards off the edge of the raft into the churning waters of the Krishna. Freddy landed heavily on his stomach on the deck, blinking as he tried to get the air back into his lungs.

“Oh no,” said Penelope involuntarily, a statement that did nothing at all to rectify the fact that the groom’s head appeared to be heading below, rather than above, the muddy waters.