The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (26 page)

“She’s bringing a friend, she said,” reported Serena, with a nice appreciation for the ambiguity of the remark.

“That could mean anything,” I said in disgust. “I’ll have to call her and ask. Oh, and did you know that Martin’s coming?”

As an attempt at casual, it failed miserably.

Serena looked at me from under the shiny waves of her hair, with an expression of resigned tolerance that made me feel very, very young and very, very gauche. For a moment, she looked a great deal like her great aunt. “I don’t fancy Martin,” she said patiently.

“No?”

“No,” she repeated firmly, adding, “but it was sweet of you to try.”

Chagrined, I stared out the window as our cab nearly took the side mirror off a double-parked SUV. “What about Nick?” I asked, throwing Pammy to the wolves. Pammy could take care of herself.

“Nick,” said Serena carefully, “doesn’t fancy
me
.”

“He certainly
likes
you,” I said.

There it was again. That resigned curve of the lips, like the cover of old Judy Collins albums, where she’s singing about being imprisoned behind the isinglass windows of her eyes. “No,” she said. “It’s just not on. Nick likes me as his friend’s sister. That’s all.”

“Mmmph,”
I said. If Miles Dorrington could learn to think of Henrietta Selwick as something other than a little sister, why couldn’t Nick Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was take another look at Serena?

“No,” repeated Serena quietly but firmly.

“Okay.” Fortunately, the cab chose that moment to screech up to the curb, so in fumbling for the fare, the topic was dropped. While I was dropping pound coins on the floor of the cab, Serena efficiently paid the cabbie, rounding the fare off to the next number rather than falling prey to the American rule of fifteen percent. The cabbie, who must have heard my accent, looked disappointed.

I managed to reclaim my rolling change and get myself out of the cab without further incident, thinking soberly that I had to make myself stop treating Serena like a backward child, just because she wasn’t as manically outgoing as most of the people of my acquaintance. For all that Serena’s shyness made her seem younger, we were the same age. Depending on the date of her birthday, she may even be a few months older.

How had I come to start babying her like that? I guessed it came partly from knowing her through Pammy, who treated everyone, including me, like substandard preschoolers needing her firm hand and wise advice. There was also the fact that I’d wound up taking care of Serena on the second meeting of our acquaintance, holding her head over a toilet bowl at a party while she lost the remains of her supper. On top of that, there was Colin, who had all the protective condescension of any big brother for a delicate younger sister and who had strongly conveyed all of that to me. Not that any of those made a particularly good excuse.

It really was pretty presumptuous of me to try to give Serena advice about Nick and Martin, whom she had known far longer than I had. These were her people, not mine. When it came down to it, all of this was her world, not mine. She knew the streets, the people, the currency, the social cues in ways I didn’t and probably never would.

There are times when I don’t like myself much, and this was one of them. I felt like the worst sort of American stereotype, pushy and naïve all at the same time.

“Where do we go?” I asked with unaccustomed humility. Not wanting to brave the thronged street around the theatre, the cab had set us down some way from our goal.

Serena tugged her glove up on her wrist. “Just there,” she said, nodding.

Despite the movie’s having been out for a few weeks already, it was a popular showing, with people milling about in clumps as they filtered their way inside. Long posters hung on the side of the building, advertising the hero of the film in various dashing poses. I might like my nineteenth-century spies in knee breeches, but there was, I thought, really something to be said for martinis shaken, not stirred. “He’s
so
cute,” I said with a sigh, linking my arm through Serena’s.

“Yes,” she agreed distractedly, and I realized she wasn’t looking at the poster.

Following her gaze, I could see a shock of red hair, visible among the shorter heads in the crowd. It was a different shade of red than mine, with more brown in it, cut in that casually expensive male style that looks as though someone just took a hedge trimmer to it. His teeth were very white against his ski-tanned skin as he smiled lazily down at his companion. His arm was slung cozily around her shoulders.

It wasn’t Pammy—after umpteen years of school together, I would know Pammy from any angle—but it was someone of the same type, medium height, trendily dressed, with short, fluffy, expensively highlighted hair.

Of all the theatres in London we could have chosen . . . Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It was small consolation that now I didn’t have to worry about choosing between Pammy and Serena; they both appeared to have been edged out before the competition even started.

I looked over at Serena and saw her watching me watching them. The Judy Collins look was back on her face, all resigned forbearance.

“See?” said Serena quietly.

It would be hard not to. I wanted to thump Nick over the head with an extra-large box of Milk Duds. Since that wasn’t an option, there was only one thing to be done.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go get some popcorn.”

“Whatever is that man doing with a bolster stuck down his dress?” demanded Penelope.

In the gardens of the Residency, a makeshift stage had been delineated by means of curtains and lanterns, illuminating a farce being played out by a local troupe of mummers, mostly in dumb show.

“That chap is a man, dressed as a woman, trying to sneak into a zenana,” explained Daniel Cleave, leaning an elbow against the balustrade next to her. A slightly apologetic smile replaced the habitual look of anxiety on his fine-boned face. “Once you’ve seen these fifty times or so, you tend to get a sense of the plot. It will be the unwise horseman being fooled out of his clothes by traveling minstrels next.”

“All his clothes?” demanded Penelope archly.

The mild-mannered civil servant blushed. “Just the outer ones, generally,” he said. “At least, when there are ladies present.”

On the stage, the bosomy imposter had managed to shoulder his way into the zenana, largely by dint of bowling over the eunuchs with his enormous chest, and was attempting to clutch a winsome zenana lady in his amorous embrace, in which he was considerably hampered by his bolster.

“Take it off!” hollered Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske from farther down the veranda.

The sentiment was echoed by his messmate, Ensign Jasper Pinchingdale, who punctuated his advice with a fist in the air that nearly sent him toppling over the railing.

Cleave, Fiske, and Pinchingdale had arrived two days before, bringing with them an escort of eight elephants, eleven camels, and one hundred and fifty servants. Freddy had been overjoyed to have the company of not one, but three new card players, although Mr. Cleave had proved a sad disappointment in that regard. He had, he had said, not the head for high wagers, and business to discuss with the Resident besides. So Freddy and Pinchingdale and Fiske had played cards, while Penelope had made a clandestine foray into Fiske’s baggage without discovering anything more interesting than the fact that Fiske apparently thought it necessary to travel with enough medicaments to stock an apothecary’s shop, with the emphasis on opium in every form one could devise.

One elephant had been devoted to carrying nothing but bottles of port, Madeira, and claret, although, from the way Fiske, Pinchingdale, and Freddy had been going, Penelope suspected its burden would be much lighter by the time they left Hyderabad for Mysore. Fiske and Pinchingdale had clearly been partaking liberally already, but of Freddy there was no sign. Showing a marked lack of interest in mummery, he had strolled back to their bungalow with the expressed intention of fetching Penelope’s shawl for her. Since Penelope hadn’t indicated any desire for it, she suspected that his marital solicitude arose out of a desire for a quick cigar well away from the disapproval of the ladies. Altruism was not a part of Freddy’s makeup.

Below them, the buffoons had ceded the stage to a singer, who was singing in mournful tones in a language Penelope didn’t understand at all. Grumbling, Pinchingdale and Fiske pushed away from the railing, wandering back into the Residency to avail themselves of more of the Resident’s Madeira.

“Am I missing anything terribly exciting?” Penelope asked her companion.

“You should ask Reid to translate for you. His Persian is better than mine,” said Cleave apologetically. “I deal mainly in Bengali these days.”

She could see Captain Reid and the Resident standing a little way down the veranda, deep in conversation. The Resident wore his usual garb of a long, stiffened brocade robe over a pair of loose trousers. With a small red cap on his head, and his narrow whiskers cut in the Persian style, he seemed as exotic and foreign as the keening lament of the singer or the scent of tropical flowers from the vast pleasure gardens he had helped to design. Next to him, Captain Reid looked jarringly normal. His evening clothes were as poorly tailored as his riding dress.

Over the past weeks, they had fallen into a habit of morning rides together. There had never been any official arrangement; it just somehow happened that Captain Reid always happened to be trotting past her bungalow at just the same time that Penelope was having her horse brought round. They were seldom very long rides—Reid always seemed to have appointments to get back to—but they had become more the cornerstones of her daily existence than she liked to admit.

When they did speak, they spoke of insignificant things; of the weather, or the scenery, or Mrs. Ure’s latest act of extreme gluttony. Off-limits were Captain Reid’s family, anything to do with Freddy, Hyderabadi politics, and the mysterious movements of French spies. She had never produced the note she had found and he had never said a word more about Guignon. They had never come to any sort of agreement on the topic; it had just sorted itself out that way, by mutual and tacit agreement. Those dawn hours, while Freddy still slept and the parched land rested from the sun, were like the territory outside a disputed castle, a place of truce rather than treaty.

She had never had a male friend before. Lovers, yes. Flirtations. But never a friend. It made an intriguing change.

Catching her eye on him, he smiled at her, a man-to-man, good comradely sort of smile. Penelope caught herself preening and made herself stop.

Mr. Cleave’s light eyes flicked from one to the other with obvious interest. “Are you and Alex—friendly?”

The hesitation in his voice might have been just that, nothing more than the same diffidence that made him look so anxious in declaiming an ability to translate for her, but it seemed to imply something more. Penelope bristled.

“Captain Reid and I ride together,” she said, more curtly than she might otherwise have done. “Horses,” she clarified bitingly.

Deep color washed over Mr. Cleave’s cheekbones. “I certainly never meant to imply—”

Penelope looked at him assessingly. “Didn’t you?”

Having forced the retraction, she was more offended by the disclaimer than the initial assumption. Why shouldn’t they be . . . friendly? Didn’t he think she was attractive enough? Seductive enough? Penelope glanced sideways at Captain Reid. He stood directly beneath one of the lanterns that had been laced about the veranda. It struck red sparks off his black hair. What would it have been like had their morning rides been something else entirely?

Entirely misinterpreting the speculative expression on her face, Mr. Cleave rushed to defend his old schoolfellow from the calumny he felt he had accidentally brought upon him.

“Reid isn’t anything like his father,” Mr. Cleave said hastily. “At least, there have never been any whispers of it.”

“Like his father?”

“Surely, you’ve heard—oh.” Mr. Cleave broke off in considerable confusion. “You haven’t, have you? Since you had made his acquaintance, I thought you must have known. . . . Well, never mind, then.”

“You can’t just ‘never mind’ me after that,” said Penelope persuasively, leaning towards him in a way that made him go a very deep red. “I might make myself ill with curiosity. And you wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”

“Oh, well.” Mr. Cleave inserted a finger beneath his collar, as though his cravat had grown too tight. “It’s just that the Colonel has a somewhat checkered reputation with women. It wasn’t that unusual at the time,” he added, accidentally heaping coals on the fire. “Many men took up with Indian women. But Colonel Reid—well, he was rather flamboyant about it. One of them killed herself. It was all,” he said, with obvious distaste, “rather unpleasant.”