“Well,” said Penelope brightly to Captain Reid, trying to make light of it, “I can’t imagine where I’ll put them. Do you think they’ll show to good advantage on my mantelpiece?”

“He means it, you know. You saved his life.”

“I only speeded the process. We weren’t that far from shore. He might have made it there on his own.”

“ ‘ Might.’ It’s not the same as ‘would.’ A man prefers not to deal in maybes when his existence is on the line.”

Penelope made a slight snorting sound.

Calmly appropriating her arm, Captain Reid led her off the ferry and onto the bank, where her own syce waited with her mare. “I wouldn’t brush it off so lightly if I were you. You might want to call in that debt someday.”

There was water still jiggling around between her ears. Angling her head to one side, Penelope banged at one ear with the flat of her hand. “Whatever for?”

“It never hurts to have friends, Lady Frederick.”

It might have just been the echo of the water in her ears, but there was something very odd in Captain Reid’s voice.

Stumbling against her sodden skirt, Penelope frowned up at him. “Are you telling me that I have something to fear?”

He considered the question for a moment too long.

Penelope wished she could crack that impassive façade like an eggshell, to see what was going on beneath.

“Not from me,” he said at last.

Penelope made a face at him. “I didn’t think I had.”

But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? With some difficulty, she managed to get her soggy self onto Buttercup, refusing Captain Reid’s suggestion of the palanquin. Freddy, of course, had already gone on ahead, too flown at the delight of being on horseback again to wait for his sopping wet wife.

For all that she enjoyed Captain Reid’s deadpan way with an insult, she hadn’t allowed herself to forget that he, as well as his employer, was under investigation by the Governor General’s office. A man could quip and quip and quip and still remain a villain.

Freddy had only fallen ill once they had embarked from Calcutta with Captain Reid. It was also rather curious that Captain Reid had known the name of Freddy’s syce, in a camp of quite so many people. Nearly as curious as Freddy’s syce urging Freddy to mount while on a crowded ferry in the middle of a river, a course of action that spoke, at best, of an extreme lack of common sense, or, at worst, of malicious intent. The Captain had received letters in Masulipatam; Penelope had seen him thrust them into his waistcoat pocket. Could they have been orders from the Resident of Hyderabad, instructing him to dispatch Wellesley’s spy en route?

On the other hand, girths had been known to fray and snap of their own accord, and Freddy’s saddle had taken its fair share of abuse over the past week. One would expect his groom to notice any significant wear and tear while saddling the beast, but Freddy, as was his way, had been decidedly importunate about having his horse saddled quickly, damn it, and no dawdling about it. And Penelope had had a good deal of opportunity to observe the Captain over the past few days. She rather doubted that a man of Captain Reid’s efficiency would go about trying to dispatch someone in such a bungling way.

A stomach ailment and a broken girth. Neither of those in themselves was the least bit remarkable. Taken together, the whole thing smelled decidedly fishy, and it wasn’t just the remnant of river water trickling down from her hair.

The object of Penelope’s solicitude, however, appeared to be feeling decidedly less solicitous of her. Freddy was lying in wait for Penelope when she arrived back in camp, standing outside their tent with a cheroot that he crushed out as soon as she slid off her horse.

Penelope couldn’t blame Freddy for wrinkling his nose at the sight of her. She longed for nothing more than dry linen and a hot bath, not necessarily in that order. Her damp clothes itched abominably and her hair smelled as though a crocodile had died in it.

But it wasn’t the eau de crocodile clinging to her person that was driving a furrow into Freddy’s brow.

“You won’t be able to go on like this once we get to Hyderabad, you know,” said Freddy, following her into the tent.

Plopping down onto a camp stool, Penelope vigorously wrung out her hair. “Like what?” asked Penelope, even though she knew very well what he meant.

Freddy took a hasty step back as foul-smelling droplets spattered his shiny boot tops. “Like — this.” He made a quick, impatient gesture that took in her sopping hair, her rumpled, river-stained skirt. “Riding astride. Jumping into rivers after grooms. There’ll be people there.”

“I only jumped after him because you fell on him.” Shifting on her seat, Penelope shot her husband an incredulous look. “There must be a hundred people in the camp. What do you call all of them? Fairies?”

Freddy was not amused. “English people,” he specified. “People who will have certain expectations of behavior.”

Penelope looked at him from under her lashes, striking where she knew it would hurt. “To bow to other people’s expectations is too, too frightfully bourgeois. I’m surprised at you, Freddy.”

Standing over her, his hands on his hips, Freddy regarded her with baffled irritation. “Must everything be an argument, Pen?”

Beneath the irritation, he looked tired, almost as tired as she was. All she had to do was hold out a hand, smile at him, lift up her face to be kissed, and it would all be forgotten. At least, this particular argument would be. It was, she knew, as much of an olive branch as Freddy was capable of offering.

Penelope lifted both her shoulders in a shrug. “If you insist on making it so.”

Freddy folded his arms across his chest, looking down his not-quite-Norman nose at her. “You promised to obey.”

“You promised to love. We both said a lot of silly things at that altar. And, no,” she added, as his eyes slid down from her face in a direction she knew all too well, “making love doesn’t count.”

Stung, Freddy’s head snapped up. “That’s not what you thought last winter.”

Penelope arranged her face along familiar lines of bored sophistication. “I was under the influence of mistletoe. What was your excuse?”

“Insanity,” Freddy said shortly, and stalked out beneath the flap of the tent.

As the canvas flap slapped shut behind him, Penelope pressed her balled fists to her forehead. That had not been wise. She could hear Henrietta’s Oh, Pen in a ghostly whisper across a thousand miles of ocean.

Her bruised ribs chafed against the still-damp material of her dress. Her skin was raw from where the rope had rubbed repeatedly against her. Her whole body felt battered and buffeted and drained of all energy. It had been silly to insist on riding from the river to the camp. She ought to have taken the offer of the palanquin and dozed her way to camp.

Perhaps Freddy was right and she oughtn’t to have jumped into the river in the first place.

But, then, who would have? Penelope rested her elbows against her knees, propping her head in her hands, her damp hair falling straight around her face, screening the world in red. It never curled unless she curled it, stick-straight and as much of a disappointment to her mother as everything else about her.

She was tired, so tired, tired and soggy and drained, and all she wanted was someone to put a warm blanket around her shoulders and hug her close. Back in London, the last time she had careened into a large body of water, Henrietta had been there, to comb out her hair and hug and scold her and tell her she was an idiot and bring her tea and want to know what exactly the water of the Serpentine tasted like, all in the same breath. There had been a proper bed with proper blankets and a maid coming in to tend the fire and Lady Uppington bustling about with disgusting smelling possets, which Penelope had poured out into the chamber pot as soon as she wasn’t looking. Lady Uppington had wanted to know what the Serpentine had tasted like, too, although only after delivering a proper maternal lecture on the follies of driving other people’s curricles into large bodies of water. So much love and so much care and all of it so very far away.

With difficulty, Penelope worked free the buttons on the short jacket of her riding habit. The wet fabric clung stubbornly to her arms, tailored too close for convenience. She peeled it painfully off, sleeve by sleeve, every movement feeling like a minor battle. The blue dye had soaked through to the cambric shirt below, and the once-white fabric clung bluely to her skin, like the painted pelt of a Pictish princess.

She had gone as Boadicea to a masquerade last Season, brandishing a spear and thirsting for the opportunity to drive a chariot into battle, rather like — what was it that Captain Reid had called her? — an Amazon.

Penelope didn’t feel much like a warrior maiden at the moment.

It was bloody tiring being so fractious all the time. Had Boadicea ever felt tired? Worn out? Unhooking the suspenders that held up her riding skirt, Penelope let the weight of the wet wool drag it to the floor, leaving her clammy and blue in her chemise. The hand mirror revealed that not only was she vaguely blue, but she had streaks of dirt across her face and there was mud caked in her hair. She didn’t look like Lady Frederick Staines, consort of the new Envoy to the Court of Hyderabad, or even like the dashing Miss Penelope Deveraux, scourge of the London Season. Snarl-haired and hollow-eyed in her discolored chemise, she looked like the less-prosperous class of harlot.

What had possessed her to pick a fight with Freddy just now?

Penelope spat on a handkerchief, scrubbing the square of cloth against a streak of dried mud on one cheek. It was just so irresistible when he was so . . . well, Freddy. But he was all she had here, stranded in the middle of a strange land with unfamiliar birds chattering around her head and flowers to which she couldn’t give names unfurling unfamiliar blossoms on curiously shaped trees.

Shrugging into a light muslin dress and flinging a shawl over it against the dropping temperatures of the evening, Penelope poked her head out of the flap of the tent. Cotton fields lay to one side, the Musi River to the other. Penelope could already see the dots of dozens of cook fires reflecting eerily off the waters of the river, like Chinese lanterns in a garden. From the bank came the muted sound of mealtime conversations, as foreign as the scent of the rice and spices steeping in the pot-bellied pots. By the makeshift paddock, the hamals had lit a great fire of cotton scrub to keep the flies from the horses. The smoke grimed the evening air, blending with the falling dusk, creating shadows against shadows.

“Freddy,” she called softly, but no one answered.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess where he might have gone. Either he had grabbed up his gun and tramped off into the brush to see what he could shoot as a way of soothing his wounded feelings, or he would have made for the sepoy encampment, where the guard that made up part of their escort lay. Lieutenant Breese, their commanding officer, had only an East India Company commission. Under normal circumstances, Freddy might have been inclined to snub him. But in a party in which Englishmen were scarce, he was still an officer and a gentleman — of sorts — and thus good enough to play cards with.

Unless, of course, something else had befallen Freddy. There was that broken girth. . . .

Moving with more haste than grace, Penelope threaded her way towards the sepoy encampment on the very edge of their camp. Through the canvas of the largest tent, she thought she could see the outline of two men at a table, a bottle between them. Freddy and Lieutenant Breese? Most likely.

For a moment, Penelope stood staring at their silhouettes, caught between relief and irritation. To think she had always mocked Charlotte for having too loose a grasp on reality! That was what she got for letting her imagination run away with her. Freddy in danger, indeed. Freddy getting foxed, more like. More fool she, to come running out like an avenging Amazon to defend his person against miscellaneous malefactors. He neither needed nor wanted her for that. Or for anything else, save what could be found between the sheets.

Penelope’s head throbbed and the shadow images in the tent seemed to shimmer against the canvas.

Too much river water, she told herself. Too much heat and exertion. She was just plain worn out, and that was the only reason she felt a completely inexplicable impulse to sit down in the cotton scrub and cry. It was nothing more than physical weakness, and a good night’s sleep would put her right as rain again, like a toddler who had spent the day too much in the sun and needed to be put to bed.