The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (32 page)

It was too dark to make out his expression, but there was something comforting about the way he stood there, steady and solid.

“I’ll be where I always am,” he said.

Penelope drew in a deep breath, feeling more herself again. She would have missed her morning exercise, that was all.

“You’d better get some sleep then, hadn’t you?” she tossed over her shoulder, and scrambled up the steps to the veranda.

It felt good to get the last word. It felt even better to know that Captain Reid was still standing there, watching her, making sure she got safely home. Such as it was.

Someone had considerately left a single candle burning in the bedchamber, sending wobbly shadows undulating across the untouched bedclothes. There were no piles of clothes on the floor, no husband sprawled snoring across the center of the bed. True to his word, Freddy had taken himself off to bed elsewhere.

Penelope couldn’t bring herself to care.

Contorting her arms around her back to try to reach the tiny row of pearl buttons at the back of her dress, Penelope tried to reclaim the hurt and indignation she had felt earlier in the evening, but the closest she could come was a sense of mild exasperation, with herself as well as Freddy, and an overwhelming relief that he would be away for at least a fortnight.

A fortnight of early morning rides.

With an impatient tug, Penelope gave up on the buttons and yanked the dress up over her head. A pearl button skittered across the floor. It wasn’t a real pearl anyway, so it was no great loss. There were dozens of others like it, rather like Freddy. Penelope carelessly tossed the dress into a corner of the room and turned her attention to the pins in her hair. Drawing out the anchoring pin, she shook her hair free, enjoying the sound of its rustling around her shoulders—and heard an answering rustle from the side of the room.

Frowning, Penelope peered into the wavy surface of the mirror, where the satiny fabric of her discarded dress had begun to ripple, like moonlight on the water. Penelope stilled in the act of reaching for the clasp of her necklace. She really hadn’t had that much to drink.

Penelope put out a hand to steady the mirror, but the dress continued to rustle, undulating in waves on the floor. A forked tongue flicked out from beneath the embroidered hem.

In the wavering light of the single candle, a cobra wiggled itself free of the folds of satin and began coiling upwards on its speckled tail, its beady eyes fixed on Penelope.

In the mirror, the snake’s obsidian eyes fixed on Penelope, its pointed tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.

Something about the beady eyes in that wrinkled face, with the hood arching to either side reminded her of the malevolent, ruined face of Mir Alam, the man even a snake wouldn’t bite.

Too bad it wasn’t Mir Alam in the room instead of her. The two reptiles could have had a reunion.

Penelope held herself very still, rather hoping that the snake might take her for a piece of furniture, of no more interest than the post on the bed or the legs of the chair. It was not, she feared, the sort of creature with whom one could come to an amiable arrangement. The snake blocked both the door to the veranda and the door to the hall. She would have to run directly across its path either way and she was willing to wager it could strike faster than she could run.

What did one do about a cobra? Not scream or run or flail, she knew that much. Not that there was any danger of that. Her body had frozen out of sheer instinct and seemed to be intent on turning into a pillar of salt on the spot. Did snakes eat salt? Penelope dismissed that thought as immaterial. What she needed was a scythe, a sword, even a poker or a shovel. But there was nothing of the kind, not even one of Freddy’s ivory-handled canes. The servants were all asleep. There would be no one to hear her if she screamed for help. No one except the snake, of course, who was uncoiling in her direction with a slow determination that Penelope found distinctly unnerving.

Freddy kept a pistol in the dresser drawer.

Penelope’s fingers tingled with nervous energy. It wasn’t much, but it was a chance. If only he had left it where it was supposed to be. It would be just like Freddy to flounce off on a whim, leaving her alone with a cobra. Please, God, Penelope thought, let him not have taken the pistol with him.

Keeping her eyes on the creature in the mirror, Penelope felt blindly for the drawer handle, wincing at the screeching noise the drawer made as she drew it open. Venom dripped off the snake’s fangs, or perhaps that was just the sweat beading off her brow, clouding her vision. Her shift clung damply to her chest as she inched her fingers forward, trying to keep her back as painfully still as any dowager might demand. She could feel the drops of sweat trickling down her spine. Each seemed to take an eternity to travel its way down, vertebra by vertebra, each drop assuming mammoth proportions.

By a miracle, the pistol was where it was meant to be. Penelope didn’t need to look to know what it was, or to feel the familiar weight of it in her palm. She didn’t dare avert her eyes from the creature in the mirror, swaying gently on its tail as the light of the single candle cast its shadow against the far wall, as ominous as any mariner’s nightmare of ship-devouring serpents.

Keeping her elbow stiff, Penelope drew the pistol out of the drawer. It was primed and cocked, and she gave silent thanks that, whatever Freddy’s other flaws, he kept his firearms in good order. It was, he felt, one of the marks of a gentleman, like good horseflesh and shiny boots and a well-dressed wife.

One shot. That was all she would get. Penelope conjured the memory of old targets, playing cards hung from a line in the back garden, with her father cheering her on while her mother lurked disapproving behind bedroom drapes. Under her father’s tutelage, she had shot the pips out of playing cards, but that had been before London, before society demanded that she replace pistol with fan as her weapon of choice. The target had been smaller then, she reminded herself, and the cards had swayed in the breeze just like the snake.

Penelope swallowed hard, her tongue clinging stickily to her palate. It felt like forever that she had stood there, locked in silent battle, but it couldn’t have been more than sixty seconds by the clock, the space of two drops of sweat making their slow journey down her spine. He who hesitates is lost, once more into the breach, and all that rot.

As she pivoted, fast and furious, she spared a moment’s thought to regret that she hadn’t kissed Captain Reid in the garden that night, with all the moonflowers blooming. It was, after all, in the manner of a last meal.

Affronted, the snake reared up on its tail, hissing its outrage with all the venom in its scaly little soul.

Penelope didn’t bother to pray. As the cobra arched straight for her, she closed one eye, picked her mark, and pressed the trigger home.

 

Standing outside the bungalow, Alex watched to make sure Penelope got safe inside, thinking thoughts that made him a very inappropriate sort of chaperone. A candle flickered into light through the slats of the screens, casting her silhouette against the wall, tall and graceful. There was no answering male shadow. Lord Frederick was presumably otherwise occupied for the night.

In the bungalow, Penelope was shaking out her hair, dropping pins carelessly as she went. The shadow Penelope lifted her arms above her head to reach the last pin, poised like a dancer on a temple frieze. The vagaries of reflection turned her dress to mist, to nothing more than a smudge along the supple lines of her body.

His entire body tightened at the sight. Christ, but she was—not beautiful. Sensual. Desire embodied in female form. It had taken every ounce of will he possessed not to take her up on what she was so blatantly offering in the garden that night. One moment more and they would have been locked together, with his lips on hers and his fingers in her hair and that would have been that.

Grass-stained clothes and crushed moonflowers—and ruined reputations and a broken marriage, Alex reminded himself. Lord Frederick might be an ass, but that didn’t mean he had to be. She deserved better than to be used so. Penelope. The name suited her much better than Lady Frederick. It fit her, stubborn, brave, resourceful, and just as abandoned as that other Penelope had been, left behind to ward off her suitors while her husband sailed off to dally in the company of seductive sorceresses and assorted sirens.

It was foolish to wish that he had said yes instead of no in the garden, foolish and selfish.

Rubbing one hand against the beginnings of a headache, Alex forced himself to turn away and to think instead of Jack and Cleave and the unwelcome intelligence Cleave had brought. It had been generous of him in its way, all the more so knowing how very much Cleave disliked Alex’s brother and had since they were all children together. By going to Alex, Cleave had offered him a chance, a chance to find Jack and warn him—of what? That Wellesley had a price on his head? If Jack were involved in the sorts of activities Cleave implied, then that certainly wouldn’t be news to him. Alex mocked himself for his credulousness. It was more likely that Cleave hoped he might use the ties of family to prevail upon Jack to turn himself in, and with him precious information on his contacts and activities.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad bargain that Cleave offered—for Cleave. Cleave would get the promotion he so ardently desired; Alex would get a pat on the back and the district commissionership that not all his father’s charm had managed to wrangle for him; and Jack . . . If Cleave’s employer were honorable, Jack might get the option of exile or imprisonment rather than a noose around his neck. Some bargain.

Damn him. Damn Jack, damn Cleave, damn Wellesley, damn their bloody father for never bloody thinking before he hopped from romance to romance and bed to bed, leaving in his wake this legacy of bitterness and muddled loyalties.

As if in agreement, a sound like a rumble of thunder echoed in his ears.

Only, it wasn’t thunder. It was the muffled report of a gun. And it had come from inside the Staineses’ bungalow.

Alex sprinted for the veranda, his imagination churning with nightmare images of Penelope, sprawled dead on the floor, red blood spreading across the white muslin of her gown, bubbling up at the corner of her lips, while those wicked amber eyes stared forever dulled at the punkah swaying rhythmically back and forth above. There had been murder in Lord Frederick’s eyes when he had hauled his wife away from Fiske earlier that evening. Staines wouldn’t be the first man to imagine himself wronged and to settle it with a bullet.

Using the balustrade as lever, Alex vaulted over the side, pushing the cane screen roughly aside. Inside, he saw Penelope, her hair all about her shoulders, dressed in nothing but a shift. She was upright. She was standing. She was alive.

Thank God.

After his imaginings, it was relief enough to see her upright, breathing, alive, whole and unmarred, with no bullet holes charring her skin. Her hair blazed like flame around her white face. In one hand, she held a pistol from which a plume of smoke still trailed.

Alex looked abruptly at the floor. But there was no sign of the lady’s husband, dead or otherwise. No blood, no brains, no powder-singed cravat. Instead, there was the jumbled body of a snake, the spotted scales shining faintly against the darker boards of the floor.

“The devil,” breathed Alex, and, indeed, the smoke tasted like brimstone in the back of his throat. It didn’t take any great herpetolog ical knowledge to identify the body as that of a cobra. The bullet must have gone in somewhere just beneath the eyes, leaving the distinctive hood intact.

Alex looked involuntarily at the gun in Penelope’s hand. That had been either a bloody brilliant shot, or a devilishly lucky one. He wasn’t sure he could have done it, not in that uncertain light and with the odds of failure what they were.

Penelope casually hefted the pistol, twirling it to make the silver facing glisten in the candlelight. “I told you I was a good shot.”

“That,” said Alex flatly, “is a cobra.”

“You mean that
was
a cobra,” corrected Penelope giddily, tossing the spent weapon onto the bed. She missed. The heavy piece of metal glanced off the side of the mattress, clattering to the hardwood floor.

There were bright patches of color high on each cheekbone and her shift clung damply to her body, even though the night was cool. Her amber eyes glinted feverishly in the light of the single candle, cursed gems at the heart of a haunted mine.

Alex crossed the room in three long strides, grasping Penelope by the arms. “Did it touch you? Bite you?” he demanded tersely, scanning her fevered face.

Her bare arms were clammy beneath his hands, damp with a sheen of sweat that gave the lie to her cocky grin, the grin of a soldier coming out of a cannonade, powder-grimed but whole. “I didn’t give it time.”