Лорен Уиллиг - The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

There was even, if she was being honest, a certain grim pleasure to it, to having put paid to her mother’s matrimonial scheming and poked a finger in the eye of every carping old matron who had ever called her fast. Ha! Let them see how fast she could be. All things considered, she had got out of it rather lightly. Freddy might be selfish, but he was seldom cruel. He didn’t have crossed eyes or a hunchback (unlike that earl her mother had been throwing at her). He wasn’t violent in his cups, he might be a dreadful card player but he had more than enough blunt to cover his losses, and he possessed a reasonable proficiency in those amorous activities that had propelled them into matrimony.

Freddy was, however, still sulky about having been roped into wedlock. It wasn’t the being married he seemed to mind — as he had said, with a shrug, when he tossed her a betrothal ring, one had to get married sooner or later and it might as well be to a stunner — as the loss of face among his cronies at being forced into it. He tended to forget his displeasure in the bedroom, but it surfaced in a dozen other minor ways.

Including deliberately failing to tell her anything at all about his interview with Lord Wellesley.

“Well?” demanded Penelope. “Where are we to go?”

Freddy engaged in a lengthy readjustment of his neck cloth. Even with his high shirt points beginning to droop in the heat and his face flushed with the Governor General’s best Madeira, he was still a strapping specimen of aristocratic pulchritude, the product of generations of breeding, polishing, and grooming from the burnished dark blond of his hair to the perfectly honed contours of his face. Penelope could picture him pinned up in a naturalist’s cupboard, a perfect example of Homo aristocraticus .

“Hyderabad,” he said at last.

“Hyderawhere?” It sounded like a sneeze.

“Hyderabad,” repeated Freddy, in that upper-class drawl that turned boredom into a form of art. “It’s in the Deccan.”

That might have helped had she had the slightest notion of where — or what — the Deccan was.

In retrospect, it might have been wiser to have spent some time aboard ship learning about the country that was to be her home for the next year, rather than poking about in the rigging and flirting with the decidedly middle-aged Mr. Buntington in the hope of readjusting Freddy’s attention from the card table. The upshot of it all was that she had learned more than she ever wanted to know about the indigo trade and Freddy had lost five hundred pounds by the time they reached the Cape of Good Hope.

“And what are we to do there?” she asked, in tones of exaggerated patience.

“I,” said Freddy, idly stretching his shoulders within the confines of the tight cut of his coat, “am to be Special Envoy to the Court of Hyderabad.”

And what of me? Penelope wanted to ask. But she already knew the answer to that. She was to be toted along like so much unwanted baggage, expected to bow to his every whim in atonement for an act that was as much his doing as hers. An ungrateful baggage, her mother had called her, tossing up to her all the benefits that had been showered upon her, the lessons, the dresses, the multitude of golden guineas that had been expended upon her launch into Society.

It didn’t matter that Penelope would have preferred to have run tame in Norfolk, riding the wildest of her father’s horses and terrifying the local foxes. She was, she had been told, to be grateful for the lessons, the dresses, the Season, just as she was to be grateful that Freddy had condescended to marry her, even if she knew that his acquiescence had been bought and bullied out of him by the considerable wealth and influence of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale.

The thought of the Dowager brought a pinched feeling to Penelope’s chest, as though her corset strings were tied too tight. Penelope elbowed it aside. There was no point in being homesick for the Dowager or Lady Uppington or Henrietta or Charlotte. They would all have forgotten about her within the month. Oh, they would write, letters that would be six months out of date by the time they arrived, but they had their own families, their own concerns, of which Penelope was, at best, on the very periphery.

That left only Freddy.

“What, no residency of your own?” goaded Penelope. “Only a little envoy-ship?”

That got his attention. Freddy’s ego, Penelope had learned after their abrupt engagement, was a remarkably tender thing, sublimely susceptible to poking.

Freddy looked down his nose at her. It might not be quite a Norman nose, but Penelope was sure it was at least Plantagenet. “Wellesley had a special assignment for me, one only I could accomplish.”

“Bon vivant?” suggested Penelope sweetly. “Or official loser at cards?”

Freddy scrubbed a hand through his guinea gold hair. “I had a run of bad luck,” he said irritably. “It happens to everyone.”

“Mmm-hmm,” purred Penelope. “To some more frequently than others.”

“Wellesley needs me in Hyderabad,” Freddy said stiffly. “I’m to be his eyes and ears.”

Penelope made a show of playing with the edge of her fan. “Hasn’t he a set of his own?”

“Intelligence,” Freddy corrected. “I’m to gather intelligence for him.”

Penelope broke into laughter at the absurdity of Freddy playing spy in a native palace. He would stand out like a Norman knight in Saladin’s court. “A fine pair of ears you’ll make when you can’t even speak the language. Unless the inhabitants choose to express themselves in mime.”

“The inhabitants?” Freddy wrinkled his brow. “Oh, you mean the natives . Wouldn’t bother with them. It’s James Kirkpatrick the Governor General wants me to keep an eye on. The Resident. Wellesley thinks he’s gone soft. Too much time in India, you know.”

“I should think that would be an asset in governing the place.”

Freddy regarded her with all the superiority of his nine months’ stint in a cavalry unit in Seringapatam. From what she had heard, he had spent far more time in the officer’s mess than the countryside. “Hardly. They go batty with the heat and start reading Persian poetry and wearing native dress. Wellesley says there’s even a chance that Kirkpatrick’s turned Mohammedean. It’s a disgrace.”

“I think I should enjoy native dress,” said Penelope, lounging sideways against the carriage seat, like a perpendicular Mme. Recamier. The thin muslin of her dress shifted with her as she moved, molded to her limbs by the damp. “It should allow one more . . . freedom.”

“Well, I’ll be damned before I go about in a dress,” declared Freddy, but he was looking at her, genuinely looking at her for the first time since he had rolled out of bed that morning.

Letting her eyelids drop provocatively, Penelope delicately ran her tongue around her lips, reveling in the way his gaze sharpened on her.

“You’ll probably be damned anyway,” murmured Penelope, allowing the motion of the carriage to carry her towards him, “so why fuss about the wardrobe?”

With an inarticulate murmur, Freddy caught her hard around the waist. Penelope twined her arms around his neck, pressing closer, despite the wide silver buttons that bored through the muslin of her dress, branding his crest into the flesh above her ribs.

At least they had this, if nothing else. She knew his smell, his taste, the curve of his cheek against the palm of her hand as one knew the gaits of a favorite horse, with a comfort grown of eight months’ constant use. Penelope wiggled closer, running her hands against the by-now-familiar muscles of arm and shoulder, giving herself up to the fleeting counterfeit of intimacy offered by his hand pressed against her back, his lips moving along the curve of her neck.