The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (13 page)

It wasn’t a costume. Tajalli Ali Khan was exactly what he purported to be, which made his choice as messenger all the more brilliant.

“How fortunate,” said Tajalli cheerfully, “that our paths should cross like this just as I return from acquiring a new falcon.”

“Liar,” said Alex, embracing his friend in the local fashion. “Did James send you?”

“Of course,” said Tajalli. Extracting something from the folds of one sleeve, he handed over a small, rolled scroll of paper. “He sent you this.”

Alex didn’t need to unroll it to know that it would be in code. James might trust Tajalli, but only so far. It wasn’t a slight; he only trusted anyone so far. The courts of India were rife with espionage and counterespionage, with everyone from the rulers to the British residents keeping his own stables of spies. Despite all their vigilance, Alex knew that they had informers among the Residency staff, just as their own informers were sprinkled through the household of the Nizam, the First Minister, and the major players in the durbar. Ever since a disconcerting experience during which key documents had reached their enemies before reaching Calcutta, James had been very careful to put almost everything in code.

“I did get that falcon, though,” Tajalli added blandly, as Alex neatly palmed the small scroll of paper. “Wait till you see her. You’ll be sick with envy.”

“Until I win her off you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

The two friends grinned at each other in perfect harmony.

Their backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar. The son of a Hyderabadi nobleman, Tajalli could trace his lineage straight back to the Prophet. He had been raised to be exactly what he was, the consummate courtier, quick to turn a phrase, fearless at the hunt, at ease with pomp in a way Alex could never be. He had never experienced the hardscrabble life of an army camp, never had to worry about preferment or advancement, never turned his purse inside out to find it empty. It gave Tajalli no pause to spend on a single night’s entertainment what Alex earned in a year. That new falcon had probably set him back a pretty penny, more than Alex could ever countenance spending on a whim.

Yet they were friends, and had been friends since the first month of Alex’s appointment in Hyderabad, when they had found themselves flung together on a cheetah hunt hosted by the Resident. Alex admired his friend’s insouciant ease of manner, even while he knew he could never hope to emulate it.

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring a few elephants, while you were at it,” said Alex, looking pointedly at the gaudy tent. “Or maybe a few dancing girls to strew roses in your path?”

“I’m being inconspicuous by being conspicuous,” retorted Tajalli. They spoke court Persian, the lingua franca of the aristocratic Mughal world, which had the additional bonus of being unlikely to be understood by any of the servants, sepoys, or miscellaneous followers of either of their camps. “Can you really see me disguised as a servant?”

Alex looked at Tajalli. Even had he been wearing a plain cotton
jama
and speaking Urdu, his friend would never be able to pass as anything but what he was. The set of his shoulders and the angle of his head marked him for what he was as surely as did the pearl bracelet on his wrist.

“No,” Alex said bluntly. “You’d stand out like an elephant in a herd of cattle. What made you volunteer to play messenger boy for Kirkpatrick?”

Tajalli spread both hands in a gesture that gave the appearance of responding while indicating absolutely nothing at all. It also showed the rings on his fingers to excellent advantage. “I was bored. It’s been damnably tedious with you away these past few weeks.”

Alex suspected there was more to it than that, but he decided to bide his time. Tajalli would tell him when he was good and ready.

“Poor you,” said Alex, peeling back the tent flap and ducking under. “Nothing but hunting and nautch girls to while away the empty hours.”

“It’s a damnable shame,” agreed Tajalli, giving him a slight push to speed him along. “Look who else I’ve brought to greet you.”

A figure moved in the dim interior of the tent, rising off the piles of rugs and cushions that Tajalli considered essential for even the briefest of jaunts.

“George!” exclaimed Alex.

“Surprised you, didn’t I?” said his brother with evident satisfaction. The elaborately pierced lamp picked out the copper tints in his hair, part of George’s legacy from their father. “I knew you wouldn’t expect me.”

Alex hadn’t, but he was damnably glad to see him. He thumped his brother on the back in greeting. “Shouldn’t you be in Sardhana? How did you persuade the Begum to give you leave?”

George’s eyes shifted away. “It’s not ‘leave’ precisely. The Begum had an errand she wanted me to run in this part of the world.”

“And you’re not happy about it.” George had always been an open book. At least, he gave the impression of being so, an impression that was frequently very useful to him, especially in his dealings with women. It was, Alex thought, as much a part of his legacy from their father as his coppery hair and Scots blue eyes.

It was a legacy that had passed Alex entirely by. He took after his mother’s side, dark-complexioned Welsh preachers with stiff spines and morals to match.

George grinned at him. “Something like that,” he admitted. “I’ll tell you what I can of it.”

“I wouldn’t ask for more,” said Alex, and meant it. “Don’t tell me anything that might come back to bite you.”

Now that the Begum Sumroo was bound by treaty to the British, their interests were theoretically in alignment, but Alex knew it would take only a moment to change that. If George were to be caught ferrying information to the British side, his life could be forfeit. Any confidence that might endanger his little brother wasn’t worth knowing.

It was a damnable situation they were in. Beginning when George was just out of swaddling clothes, a series of orders had come down from the Governor General’s office, disqualifying anyone with an Indian parent from serving in the East India Company’s army. With his Rajput mother, George was banned by his birth from joining his father’s regiment, forced to seek service instead as a mercenary in the employ of a native ruler.

It never ceased to amaze Alex that George seemed to bear no resentment at all against his father or his father’s people for the restrictions they had placed upon him for no greater fault than an accident of birth. Alex resented it for him. It was one of the reasons that Alex had decided to leave the Madras Cavalry. It didn’t feel right to belong to a force that wouldn’t take his own flesh and blood, simply because the blood ran darker on one side. Even that was a misnomer. George was fairer than he was and always had been, from the moment he had bounced into the world. He had been a fat, fair, chuck-ling baby with a cap of red curls that had gradually darkened to the color of an antique shield as he grew from a toddler’s dress into boots and breeches.

The situation had gone from merely offensive to actively dangerous the year before, when George’s employer, the Begum Sumroo, had joined with her overlord, Scindia, against the British. Scindia had slaughtered those British-bred mercenaries still in his pay at the start of the conflict. The Begum Sumroo, loyal to her own—and with an eye for a good-looking young man—had refused to take such drastic measures, but George’s position had been an uncomfortable one, exposed to suspicion and resentment from his messmates in the Begum’s camp, forced to maintain a distance from his family.

Despite it all, he had maintained his sunny disposition. George was and would always be George.

Unlike Jack.

George plopped down onto a silk-covered cushion. “I got your letter from Calcutta right before I left the Begum. How
is
the new Special Envoy to the Nizam?”

“As awful as anticipated,” admitted Alex. Making a comical face, he added, “Today, he fell on his groom and knocked him into the river.”

“On purpose?” asked Tajalli with interest.

“No, by accident.”

Tajalli made a scornful, snorting noise.

“Had he done it on purpose, it would have been rather clever,” said Alex thoughtfully. “The groom is a plant from Calcutta, one of Wellesley’s men. I’m sure of it.”

“Sent to keep an eye on—what is his name?”

“Lord Frederick,” Alex provided. “Or Freddy, as his wife calls him. No, I don’t think so. Lord Frederick is exactly what he seems and not worth the watching, either by Calcutta or anyone else. I do wonder if the point of sending Lord Frederick was less about Lord Frederick, and more a means of getting Wellesley’s man into the Residency to keep an eye on James. Again,” he added darkly.

“So you think the groom is the real spy?” asked Tajalli.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. It might as easily be the cook, the valet, or Lady Frederick’s ayah. All of them were hand-picked by Wellesley’s staff.”

George leaned forward on his cushion. “What do you think of Lady Frederick?” he asked.

Alex smelled a rat. “Did Father write you?”

“No,” demurred George, at his most guileless. If his eyes opened any wider, they would be in danger of popping right out. “Why?”

“Never mind,” said Alex. “Lady Frederick is . . . not what I expected.”

That was the understatement of the century.

“Worse?” asked George with an irrepressible grin.

“Different,” said Alex, with great finality. “But you didn’t come to meet me just to ask me about my trip. What’s going on?”

His brother and his best friend exchanged a long look. “You start,” said George generously.

“No, no,” demurred Tajalli. “It really begins with you.”

“For the love of God,” intervened Alex. “I don’t care who tells it as long as someone does.”

“So impatient,” complained Tajalli, with a wag of his head.

“Always,” agreed George. “Never takes the time to sit back and smell the frangipani.”

“That’s because I was too busy looking after you lot,” said Alex with some asperity. “What is it?”

Leaning back against his cushions, George steepled his hands together at the fingertips in the classic pose of the storyteller.

“You’ve heard of the Rajah of Berar’s treasure, of course,” he began importantly.

“You mean the hoard he claims disappeared at the siege of Gawilighur last December? Everyone’s heard that tale.” Heard it, looked for it, failed to find it. Wellesley had had teams of soldiers combing the fort, and Alex suspected more than one soldier had done a little unauthorized treasure hunting of his own. Not a rupee had been found. “It’s a classic fairy story. All it wants is a dragon.”

There it was again, that look, a look from his brother to his friend, the sort of look that said they knew something he didn’t know.

Alex folded his arms across his chest. “What?” he demanded.

“It’s not a fairy story,” said Tajalli. “At least, someone claims it’s not.”

George leaned forward, so that the light of the lantern fell across his face, illuminating the bone structure that was so uncannily like their father’s. “Someone sent a message to the Begum Sumroo offering her a tenth part of the Rajah of Berar’s treasure if she would break her treaty with the British and join in a new alliance against the British.”

“A new alliance with whom? Holcar?” To be fair, the northern Mahratta leader appeared to being doing pretty well against the British all on his own.

“Not just Holcar,” said George seriously. “The entire Mahratta Confederacy. And Hyderabad.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Alex reflexively. “The Nizam would never—”

He broke off, suddenly unsure of the truth of what he had been about to say. The Hindu Mahrattas had always been to the Islamic state of Hyderabad what the French were to the English, a constant threat upon their borders, to be neutralized with defensive diplomacy when not being pushed off by force of arms. It was largely due to the Mahratta threat that the British even had a military foothold in Hyderabad; the old Nizam having treated with the British for a military force to protect his domains against his Marathi neighbors.

But the recent war had changed all that. The Maratha Confederacy was—at least momentarily—broken. The new threat to Hyderabad’s sovereignty was no longer the Marathi. It was the British.

“Exactly,” said Tajalli, watching as Alex’s mouth clamped shut. “The new Nizam isn’t the old one.”

“And Mir Alam isn’t Aristu Jah,” Alex agreed. The new First Minister might once have been a friend of the British, but a combination of exile and leprosy had twisted his mind and his allegiances. “Fine. I see your point. For the sake of argument, let’s say that someone is trying to broker an alliance between the Marathi and Hyderabad against the British. Who’s at the heart of it? Holcar? Scindia?”

George shifted on his cushion, looking uncomfortable. “It’s unclear who he represents,” he admitted reluctantly. “Whoever it is calls himself the Marigold.”

“The
Marigold
?” repeated Alex.

“As in the flower,” provided George helpfully. “He signs his notes with a rather attractive little orange flower. It’s actually quite well drawn. Very detailed.”

“You must be joking.”

“It isn’t a joke,” protested George, with all a little brother’s indignation at not being taken seriously. “It’s a conspiracy.”

“Of flowers.”

“No, just run by a flower,” said Tajalli, with his usual irrepressible good humor. “It is rather amusing, isn’t it? But perhaps that’s what this Marigold wants, to amuse us into a false sense of security. Who would be afraid of a gentle blossom?”

“It’s not even poisonous,” agreed Alex in disgust. “What sort of alias is that?”

“The alias of a clever man who wants us to think he’s not,” suggested Tajalli.

“Or a clever woman,” pointed out George, who worked for one. “Don’t underestimate the zenana.”

Alex felt that they were rather straying from the point. “Or someone who just likes to draw flowers. If this . . .
Marigold
approached the Begum Sumroo, I imagine he must also have made contact with someone in Hyderabad.” The pieces clicked neatly into place. He looked hard at Tajalli. “That’s where you come into it, isn’t it? That’s why you volunteered to play messenger.”