The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (21 page)

“There’s not much to Lord Frederick, either,” Alex said caustically, before turning to Mah Laqa Bai, deliberating blocking his own view of both Lord Frederick and his lady. “I’m glad to see you here. I’ve been wanting to speak to you.”

Mah Laqa Bai tilted her head to one side. “I, too, have been wanting to speak to you.”

“I did stop by last week,” pointed out Alex.

Mah Laqa Bai’s eyes twinkled in a way that made her look about half her official age. “But I was otherwise occupied.”

Alex didn’t ask with whom. Sometimes, it was better not to know.

“Whoever he was is a lucky devil,” he said politely.

Mah Laqa Bai lifted a beautifully groomed eyebrow at him. “Don’t flatter me. You don’t do it nearly so well as your father.”

More things Alex didn’t want to know.

“There have been rumors,” he began, moving to the topic he had intended to address.

Mah Laqa Bai’s expression was as pleasant as ever, but he could sense her sudden alertness. “There are always rumors.”

“Rumors about the gold of Berar,” Alex said doggedly. “I had thought you might have heard something.”

It was a very long moment before Mah Laqa Bai answered. In the lantern light, Alex could discern the very faintest signs of lines beneath her carefully applied paint. “May I give you some advice? As a friend?”

Alex lowered his head in a wary nod. Anything that began that way couldn’t end well. Not to mention that the way she had said it made him feel about thirteen years old, freshly arrived at boarding school.

“For your own good, do not go prospecting too deeply into matters that do not concern you. The deepest well may hide the most poisonous snakes.”

“The deepest well?”

“Not the most elegant metaphor,” Mah Laqa Bai agreed calmly, “but none the less true for all that. Watch yourself. This is not a good time to incur Mir Alam’s anger.”

“Does Mir Alam have an interest in the gold?” Alex pressed on. The chief minister had been in exile in Berar when the gold had gone missing. Mir Alam and Mah Laqa Bai were, by all accounts, no longer lovers, but Alex wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the latter still played the role of confidante.

“Did you hear what he did to the widow of Aristu Jah?” Mah Laqa Bai countered. Without waiting for Alex to respond, she said, “He sent five troops of the Nizam’s guards to ransack her home. They dragged her bodily from her house. And that because her dead husband had incurred his enmity. Take care.”

Alex attempted to make light of it. “I have too little in the way of worldly goods for him to bother with me. I heard he made a pretty haul when he confiscated her belongings.”

“It is not only Sarwar Afza Begum against whom he has moved,” Mah Laqa Bai said reprovingly. “But Rajah Ragotim Rao and any other he believes has crossed him. Do not allow yourself to be added to that company.”

No need to tell her that it was too late for that.

Having delivered her warning, she added, in a more conversational tone, “You might also be interested to know that Major Guignon has been seen in Hyderabad.”

Brilliant. A mad ruler, a demented First Minister, a sultry Englishwoman bent on accusing him of everything short of barratry (and he had no doubt she would get around to that once it occurred to her), and now a rogue French officer.

He ought to have stayed in Calcutta.

“He’s banned by treaty.” Frowning, Alex remembered Tajalli’s theories about French plots. If Louis Guignon really had crept back into the city, it lent considerably more credence to Tajalli’s suspicions.

“By your treaty,” countered Mah Laqa Bai.

“Signed by the Nizam.”

“By the former Nizam.” Mah Laqa Bai spoke in her capacity as
omrah
. “I fail to see why we should have to relinquish the services of a talented commander—”

“Guignon wasn’t that talented,” murmured Alex. “The man was a pastry chef back in France.”

By all accounts, he made a tantalizing brioche, but his soldiering left something to be desired.

Mah Laqa Bai shot him a reproving glance. “I fail to see why we should relinquish the services of any commander we might choose to employ, whatever his individual merits, for the sake of people who can’t be bothered to keep their treaties.”

Her words bit like a steel-tipped lash. And they were fair. Alex had to acknowledge that.

Closing his eyes, he said, “The guns.”

“The guns,” Mah Laqa Bai agreed. “And the men. The Nizam, true to his promises, has paid the money owing on his part. Where are the men and arms your government has promised us? When the Nizam called upon them to restore order in the town during the festival of Muhurram, not half of those promised appeared, and of those who did, they had not sufficient firelocks among them.”

Ollie Plowden had told him the same, adding, on top of it, that not only were munitions missing, but also tents, carriages, and artillery, all listed as purchased and accounted for on the official record, none actually in place in the storehouses. The most likely explanation was that the commanders of the Subsidiary Force were pocketing the money the Nizam had sent them. James had caught them at it before, adding to the deterioration of a relationship between Residency and cantonments that was already strained.

It wouldn’t be the first time James had discovered discrepancies in the equipment and muster rolls, but never before had the graft approached anything like this scale. There was no getting around it. The commanders of the Subsidiary Force were robbing the Nizam blind.

Alex turned a troubled gaze on Mah Laqa Bai. “You do know that—”

Mah Laqa Bai’s expression softened. Silencing him with a finger to his lips, she said, “I know. If it were up to you, it would not be so. But . . .”

“But it isn’t up to me,” Alex finished for her. “Or, in the event, to James.”

Both looked to the tent where the Governor General’s new emissary sat sprawled on a pile of shot-silk cushions.

“Will it help if I say I’ll do what I can?” said Alex wryly.

Mah Laqa Bai laid a hand lightly on his arm. “All I can do is promise you the same.”

The smoothly polished stones of her rings were cool against his palm as he squeezed her hand. “You would tell me if there was anything afoot, wouldn’t you? Anything dangerous?”

“Haven’t I just?” she said lightly, but Alex noticed that she didn’t quite meet his eyes.

Alex’s stomach sank. He hadn’t realized how much he had been relying on her help until she had denied it.

Fair enough. If their positions were reversed, he would have been expected to do the same, to place his loyalty to his country before personal affection.

It sounded simple enough in theory. In practice, Alex wondered what it was like to have such marvelously unclouded loyalties. Mir Alam might talk of men torn between their mother’s lands and their father’s, but what of men like him? British by blood, but born in India, raised in India, more comfortable with curry than claret, more at home at a nautch than a ball. He had spent his four long years at school in England talking about India, writing to India, planning his return to India. If it came down to it, which would he choose?

He knew his father’s answer: England. Having eaten the East India Company’s salt for thirty long years, his father would, in the end, despite children, wives, and lovers, always be the Company’s man. There were times when Alex wished it could be that simple. When it came down to it, he didn’t really belong to anywhere at all—not to the East India Company, not to England, not to the town where he had grown up, or the province in which he currently served.

Christ. He didn’t even have a proper mother tongue. He had spoken Tamil before English, and Telagu before Tamil, the legacy of the series of ayahs who had taken over as his mother had faded first to nothing more than a soft Welsh voice in a pile of bed linen and from there to nothing more than flat lines on a painted miniature.

“I think,” said Mah Laqa Bai, lightly touching his arm and jarring him out of his reverie, “you should make it up with the lady who is not your lover.”

“You merely want fodder for another poem.”

Mah Laqa Bai tapped a finger against his cheek. “My dear boy, I already have more than enough of
that
on my own.” Glancing sideways at the stiffened silk canopy beneath which Lady Frederick sat, she added slyly, “I believe your Lady Vinegar is jealous. Look how she scowls at me.”

Despite himself, Alex looked. He shouldn’t, he knew, any more than he should feel a surge of smugness at the prospect. It was simply one of Mah Laqa Bai’s stratagems, an attempt to keep him safely occupied, away from Mir Alam, and out of danger. But he looked nonetheless.

“You see?” said Mah Laqa Bai, leaning mischievously into Alex’s arm. Lady Frederick’s lips tightened.

“It’s not what you think,” said Alex dourly. “She’s simply sizing up my neck for a noose.”

“Brilliant news!” exclaimed Freddy, looking up from a thickly scrawled piece of paper. “Fiske is coming to visit.”

“Brilliant,” echoed Penelope hollowly, taking the seat at the breakfast table that a servant held out for her. Her head ached as if with the aftereffects of overindulgence, even though she had taken nothing stronger than sherbet the night before. “Who is Fiske?”

“In my regiment,” pronounced Freddy around a piece of toast. “He was at Begum Johnson’s party. You met him.”

After a moment, Penelope’s sluggish memory dredged up a picture of a willowy man with a decidedly piscine leer. Brilliant.

“He’s passing through on his way to Mysore,” Freddy said, paper rustling as he shifted it in one hand to read down through the scrawled lines. Jam dripped from the toast he held in his other hand onto the linen tablecloth. “Excellent chap.”

There were letters sitting by Penelope’s place, as well. A packet must have come through. She flipped desultorily through the lot of them, avoiding watching as Freddy decapitated a soft-boiled egg with a sporting swipe of his spoon. The runny yellow innards looked the way her head felt.

Sleep had eluded her the night before. After Freddy had claimed his husbandly duties in a discouragingly perfunctory fashion, she had been left awake, staring at the mosquito netting, brooding over the mess she had made of the evening. There was no denying that she had made a cake of herself with Captain Reid. A great, big plummy cake, served up on a sterling silver platter. With custard sauce.

Penelope sniffed. If he didn’t want people thinking he was up to no good, he shouldn’t skulk about so.

Freddy edged his chair away. “Catching a cold, are you, old thing?” Freddy had a horror of colds.

“I’m fine,” said Penelope irritably, and reached for the pile of letters. It was a sad day when one couldn’t even indulge one’s feelings in an audible manner without being accused of contagion.

The letter on the top of the pile was from her mother. Penelope gave the seal a savage crack.

Her mother hoped she was behaving herself and not boring her husband with any of her silly fidgets. She was sure Penelope wouldn’t mind if one of Penelope’s younger brothers took over her hunter while she was gone.
Such
an inappropriate mount for a lady and she didn’t know what Penelope’s father had been thinking to allow it. Penelope should be sure to pay her respects to Lady Clive while she was there; it didn’t concern her mother at all that Lady Clive was in Madras, clear on the other end of the country, or that Penelope had never met Lady Clive, never been introduced to Lady Clive, and had no interest in anything to do with Lady Clive. The letter ended with a lengthy disquisition on Freddy’s older brother’s health, in the clear hope that the heir to the earldom would have the good manners to kick up his clogs, leaving Penelope with the title her mother so ardently desired.

Crumpling up the thin sheet of paper, Penelope tossed it aside. It glanced off the marmalade pot before landing in the kedgeree.

“My mother sends her regards,” she told Freddy.

“Mmmph,”
said Freddy. “Badger Throckhurst fell into a soup tureen.”

Penelope went back to her post. There was a very thin letter in the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale’s characteristic scrawl, the paper poked through in the many places where the Dowager had thought it fit to emphatically jab her quill, and a much longer one from Henrietta, who informed Penelope with great glee and an excessive use of adverbs that Charlotte and her duke had reconciled and were to be married from Dovedale as soon as enough champagne could be procured.

Charlotte’s courtship had been complicated by the discovery of a nest of spies in a branch of the Hellfire Club, the same branch to which Freddy had belonged, although Henrietta skirted carefully around that bit. Too carefully. Penelope scowled at the letter. The club had originated in India, among Freddy’s old regiment. Charlotte was very concerned that Penelope keep an eye out for a mysterious Marigold, although Henrietta thought it unlikely that the spy ring should still be in operation by the time her letter arrived, now that they had squished the English branch.