So what else was there? I remembered those albums, and my conversation with Mrs. Selwick-Alderly about Colin’s parents. Even if Colin’s mother had run out on his father, that wasn’t precisely unusual these days. Sad, but not unusual. My friend Pammy was the product of not one, but three broken homes, and look how she turned out.

“Serena’s had a hard time.”

For heaven’s sake. Not that again. Yes, I knew, Serena had had a bad breakup the previous year. But, then, so had I. If Colin wanted to compare bad breakup notes, I thought that public infidelity, at my department Christmas party, no less, was right up there with some jerk using Serena to get to her family archives. It’s always fun heading back to the history department on a Monday morning, knowing that about half the department have seen your boyfriend — your very official boyfriend of two years’ standing — kissing someone else in the cloakroom of the Faculty Club, while the other half may not have witnessed the deed, but have all heard about it. With embellishments.

It had been painful and humiliating and I had done some nasty things with voodoo dolls, but you didn’t see me starving myself into a size zero and sobbing into my Cheerios over it a year later.

The more I thought about it, the more militant I felt. What had happened to the good old stiff upper lip? I was beginning to get more than a little fed up with the whole poor-Serena-the-martyr narrative. To be fair to Serena, it was never a line she had tried to play. It was all coming from Colin.

Being a protective big brother was one thing, but this was something else.

Which was why I said, in an intolerably bossy tone, “At some point, you’re going to have to stop coddling her.”

Stupid. Stupid. Never ever use the phrase “have to” with a boy. Or anyone else for that matter. It’s the fastest way to end a conversation. Or a relationship.

“Let’s just drop it, shall we?”

“You’re angry with me, aren’t you?” I said unnecessarily.

Silence. I stared at a curl of wallpaper that had started to peel away from the wall. The underside had turned an ugly mustard yellow. I could hear the creak of Colin’s chair as he tipped it back on its hind legs. “It’s been a long day.”

“Right,” I said. I knew I should ask him why, ask him how his day had been, change the subject, but I couldn’t make my lips form the words.

“I’ll see you on Valentine’s Day,” Colin said. He didn’t need to sound quite so grim about it.

“Okay,” I said, in a small voice. “I’ll see you then.”

At Serena’s party. There was no escaping it, was there?

Pressing the “end” button on my mobile, I dragged myself down to my basement flat, hauling my bag by the strap so that it bumped along the steps behind me like a child’s toy.

After that, I only wished I knew what kind of Valentine’s Day it was going to be.

Chapter Seventeen

Penelope hadn’t imagined that it was possible to feel any lower than she already had, but she did. She felt lower than an untouchable, lower than the scraps missed by the sweepers in the streets.

The lights on the veranda stung her eyes, painfully bright after the soothing shadows of the gardens. The lantern light seemed to cut straight through her clothes. It sliced through the battle armor of paint and jewels to the huddled, whimpering creature crouching underneath. It was all she could do not to slink off to a burrow somewhere and lick her wounds in echoing silence. But she didn’t have the luxury for that.

A hand snaked over her shoulder to push open the drawing room door for her. Penelope could see a sliver of brown wrist showing against the edge of a white cotton glove. Penelope wrapped her own ungloved hands in the gossamer folds of her skirt, feeling her wedding band slip on her ring finger, too large without her glove to hold it in place.

“I can get that,” said Penelope tartly.

“I know you can,” said Captain Reid, and there was something in his voice that made Penelope cringe.

He wasn’t supposed to pity her. He wasn’t allowed to pity her. He was supposed to madly desire her so that she could swirl away laughing, with a cunning comment and a tap on the cheek.

Look how well that had turned out for her last time. With Freddy.

“Thank you for your escort, Captain Reid,” she said in a voice that effectively killed off any further conversation. She swished past him without meeting his eyes. It was bad enough hearing the pity in his voice. She didn’t need to see it as well.

Her husband, such as he was, had already found himself a pack of cards and someone to play them with. Freddy, Henry Russell, and two others were engaged in a spirited game of Pope Joan. He looked up abruptly as Penelope sauntered by and gave her an overly hearty smile. It felt like a bribe, so many pats on the head for good behavior in public.

Well, she didn’t feel like behaving.

“Do try not to lose the rest of my dowry, dearest,” she said in a voice that tinkled as sweetly as the cut crystals hanging from the chandelier.

Freddy slapped down a card, his blue eyes telegraphing a warning. “I wouldn’t” — slap — “be too worried. I’m feeling in a winning mood tonight.”

Penelope let her eyes drift deliberately towards the small knot of officers at the other side of the room. “Funny,” she said. “So am I.”

Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske and his friend Pinchingdale hailed her with flattering enthusiasm. Penelope leaned into their compliments like a beggar crowding close to a fire, hating herself for doing it. She shouldn’t need the flattery of second-rate roués to soothe her pride. But she needed to do something to gouge the pity out of Captain Reid’s eyes. She didn’t need him, not one bit. It was just that he was the first person she had run across after . . . well, after that. She shied away from the memory of that lush room with its equally lush occupant. It might just as well have been Pinchingdale, or Fiske. Anything in trousers would have done.

As if to prove her own point, Penelope laughed very loudly at something Pinchingdale had just said. She had no idea whether it was meant to be funny, but she supposed it must have been, because Pinchingdale puffed out his chest in a gratified way and reached for her hand, her scandalously ungloved hand.

Penelope slapped him away with an arch little flutter that was more a “come hither” than a “go hence.” “Naughty, naughty,” she crooned, and checked over her shoulder to make sure that Captain Reid was watching, watching her have an absolutely brilliant time, desired and desirable, crowded with amorous attentions.

When had it become about making Captain Reid jealous? She could see Freddy’s color rising, but the victory was an empty one. It wasn’t Freddy’s blood she wanted to make boil, but Captain Reid’s, and he was watching her in an entirely too-detached way, as though he knew exactly what she was doing — and felt sorry for her.

Very ungentlemanly, that. He wasn’t supposed to understand what she was doing, he was just supposed to succumb to it.

Dimly, Penelope acknowledged that she had missed a step somewhere. The whole point of seducing Captain Reid had been to make Freddy jealous. That was all right. To seduce Captain Reid out of revenge was perfectly fair and just; to want him because she wanted him . . . that would be adultery.

“Mr. Pinchingdale.” Penelope broke into a very long story involving an inheritance that ought to have been his but for the perfidy of his cousin in refusing to die at a convenient moment. She curved one hand to simulate a cylinder and shook it suggestively. “I find my glass is empty.”

“Far be it from me to contradict so charming a lady” — Pinchingdale, who fancied himself a rake, positively oozed oil as he took the opportunity to possess himself of Penelope’s ungloved hand — “but I see no glass in your hand.” One by one, he peeled back her fingers to reveal empty air.

With the flat of her hand, Penelope pushed playfully at his chest, sending him staggering. “My point precisely, dear Mr. Pinchingdale. Somewhere in this room, a glass simply yearns for my lips.”

“Fortunate glass!” exclaimed Mr. Pinchingdale. “Might one hope that the provider of the item might also feel the touch of your lips? As a form of . . . bounty.” From the direction of his gaze, it was another form of bounty he had in mind.

Not that Penelope was all that bounteous in that area. Not like the girl on the floor of the zenana, who had positively jiggled with overabundance.

Penelope cast him a look to smolder by. “That depends on the . . . bounty of your offering, Mr. Pinchingdale.”

“Bartering your favors, Lady Frederick?” inquired Fiske, as though the idea rather pleased him.

“My favors, like everything else, belong to my husband,” countered Penelope, blowing a careless kiss at that individual. “The laws of England are quite explicit in that regard.”

Fiske hitched a hip against an octagonal table that wobbled with his weight, sending a small statue bobbling for balance. “I wouldn’t have thought you one to abide by the letter of the law, dear lady. Not from what I’ve heard of your . . . career.”

Penelope gritted her teeth and smiled. He was referring to her marriage, of course. Her infamous, thoroughly reported, thrice-damned marriage. Of all the manifold indiscretions in her long and heedless existence, who would have thought that that particular one would lead to this? Driving Percy Ponsonby’s phaeton into the Serpentine had been far more satisfying.

On the other hand, it did provide her an opening. Leaning forward, she made a show of settling the statuette into position, running her hand suggestively over its curves. “Nor, from what I’ve heard of your career, do you care overmuch for the strictures of the law, my dear, dear Sir Leamington.”

Fiske continued to leer, but it had a somewhat perfunctory quality to it. Between his absurdly high shirt points, his eyes were watchful. “And what have you heard of my . . . activities, dear Lady Frederick?”

Penelope arched an eyebrow and her back. “Alarmed?”

Fiske bared his teeth. “Interested.” With a show of nonchalance, he added, “I saw you and our young Daniel in tete-à-tete earlier this evening.”

“Daniel? As in the lion’s den?” Not an inapt description of the company. In the corner of the room, the worthy Residency matrons were glowering at her from behind their fans, sharpening their claws on her reputation.

Didn’t they know she was immune to that sort of thing? Penelope smiled brilliantly at them, eliciting a wholesale retreat behind their fans. Mr. Cleave was also watching, with a concerned expression on his face that suggested he was debating with himself whether it was incumbent on him to intervene on her behalf. Penelope winked at him, partly to reassure him, partly to annoy the fan brigade.

As for Captain Reid . . .

The Bible had all sorts of interesting things to say about adultery. And coveting one’s neighbor’s ass.

Penelope turned back to Fiske with a toss of her head. “I should have thought there would be other Biblical locations more to your liking. Sodom and Gomorrah, perhaps. I hear they’re lovely this time of year.”

Fiske was not amused by her Biblical exegesis. “As in Daniel Cleave. Has Mr. Cleave been telling tales about me?”

Penelope batted her eyelashes with exaggerated innocence. “Are there tales to be told?”

Something in her expression must have reassured him of her ignorance, because Fiske smiled a cat-and-canary smile, a smile of deep, private satisfaction. “You would be surprised at the tales I could tell.”

Penelope leaned forward so that her bosom pressed against the yielding neckline of her gown. The sapphire pendant of her necklace dangled in the hollow between her breasts. It had been a present from Freddy, a morning gift. She could see Fiske’s eyes following the glittering bauble. She shifted to give him a better view. “Try me.”

“You offered Pinchingdale a kiss for a glass. What do I get in return for information?”

“That,” murmured Penelope, her breath stirring the hair at his temple as she leaned forward to whisper in his ear, “depends on what you have to offer.”

Fiske smiled an infuriatingly superior smile that made Penelope itch to slap him. “Is that what you told old Freddy?”

It was an effort to keep her voice low and sultry. “And what would you say,” she whispered, “if I were to tell you that I already know?”