“His infinite wisdom?” said Captain Reid in disgust.
“Can you doubt it?” said the chief minister smoothly, but there was something about his watchful expression that reminded Penelope of the snake Captain Reid had called him, coiling to spring.
“The Nizam is all wise and all knowing. But”—Captain Reid pressed forward, with dogged determination—“these three men are not residents of the city. They are soldiers in the Subsidiary Force and thus under the jurisdiction of their commanding officers. Let them discipline their own.”
“When they appear drunk in the cantonments, then let your officers do their own disciplining,” said Mir Alam easily, with a nod to Freddy that seemed to include him in the conference. “On the streets of the Nizam’s own capital, they are subject to his justice.”
“Sounds sensible enough to me,” said Freddy, nodding sagely. He craned his head to see over his shoulder into the garden, where lanterns twinkled tantalizingly in the trees. “Sovereign ruler and all that. Shall we go into the entertainment?”
Captain Reid’s nostrils flared slightly, but he managed to hold on to his temper. Pity, that, thought Penelope. It would have been more amusing to see what would have occurred had he lost it.
“I wonder what Lord Wellesley would say about all this.” Captain Reid’s pretense of offhandedness was belied by the grim set of his jaw. He added, for the chief minister’s benefit, “Lord Frederick has just come directly from Lord Wellesley in Calcutta.”
The chief minister was unperturbed. “Have you? I have also had the great privilege of meeting your Lord Wellesley. A wonderful man. What is your opinion of this matter of the soldiers, Lord Frederick?”
“Taken for loitering drunkenly, you say?” said Freddy, who could have given lessons on the topic. Mir Alam inclined his head in affirmation. Lord Frederick shrugged. “Well, then. If they did the deed, no reason to let them off. Set an example for the rest of the chaps.”
Mir Alam’s cracked lips broke into a broad smile. The smile would have been an attractive one but for the malice that animated it and the disease that made a mockery of his once-pleasant-featured face.
“My feelings precisely. I knew we should get along famously, Lord Frederick.”
Freddy preened himself like one of the peacocks painted on the wall, undoubtedly picturing himself being singled out in dispatches home as a statesman of unrivaled tact and skill.
“How do you know Wellesley, then?” he asked the chief minister, cutting Captain Reid neatly out of the conversation.
Mir Alam looked modestly away. Modesty, thought Penelope, sat about as well on him as flirtation did on Captain Reid. “I worked very closely with his younger brother, Arthur Wellesley, during the siege of Seringapatam.”
Penelope could see the Nizam’s minister rising in Freddy’s estimation by the moment. For a period of months in 1800, the vanquishing of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger Sultan of Mysore had eclipsed even Gentleman Jackson’s latest prize bout in the popular imagination.
“Quite a victory, wasn’t it?” Freddy said expansively. “I spent some time in Seringapatam myself. After the battle, of course,” he added, managing to provide the distinct impression that he had tramped in as soon as the glacis had fallen, bayoneting the odd enemy along the way, rather than being comfortably billeted there a good three years after Mysore had fallen into British hands.
“I was better acquainted with Lord Wellesley’s predecessor, Lord Cornwallis.” For a moment, the chief minister’s face softened in reminiscence. What was left of his face, that was. “It was he who gave me this pretty thing,” he said, indicating the diamond-encrusted walking stick on which he was leaning. “As a token of his friendship.”
“Not bad,” Freddy said, eyeing the stick in a way that made Penelope suspect that some jewel merchants would soon be made very happy. “Not bad at all. Cornwallis is, of course, a connection on my mother’s side,” he added importantly.
According to Freddy’s mother, everyone was a connection on his mother’s side. Everyone with a page in Debrett’s peerage, that was. Penelope’s mother by marriage only counted the titled relations.
“He is very much missed here. Although,” Mir Alam added, with a sly sideways glance at Captain Reid, “not all of us present would agree to that.”
And, just to make sure Freddy got the point, he pointed his stick in the direction of Captain Reid. Penelope was impressed; the Nizam’s chief minister already had Freddy’s measure. Freddy’s gaze followed the diamonds like a compass seeking true north.
“I have no quarrel with the man,” said Captain Reid guardedly. “Merely with some of the policies he promulgated.”
“What policies might those be?” asked Penelope.
“Those that bar the children of Anglo-Indian alliances from the civil service and the military,” Mir Alam answered for him. “Is that not so, Captain Reid?”
Captain Reid made no move to deny it. He looked, suddenly, far older than Freddy, although Penelope suspected he might be the younger of the two in years. It might have been the bitter twist of his lips as he acknowledged the chief minister’s point with a curt nod of his head that made him look like a much older man.
Penelope heard a voice that sounded like her own saying, “You take a personal interest in Anglo-Indian alliances, Captain Reid?”
There was no reason for her to be so jarred by the prospect that he went home at night to something other than an empty camp bed in a spartan bachelor establishment. All she knew of him was what she had seen on the long trek from Calcutta to Hyderabad. She knew he was efficient at organizing, fluent in the local languages, and an excellent judge of horseflesh. But that had all been a matter of duty, snatched away from his real life, rather than the text of it.
Had he gone home and complained about the hideous people he had been forced to escort? The ridiculous woman who refused to ride in her palanquin like a proper lady and made trouble by jumping into the river after grooms? It was a surprisingly disconcerting thought.
“It is,” Captain Reid said simply, “a wasteful policy, barring those who know and love the country best from serving it.”
Penelope wasn’t interested in abstract philosophy; she wanted to know whether he had a personal reason to take an interest in the offspring of Anglo-Indian alliances.
“Ah, but which country?” said the chief minister. “Their mother’s or their father’s? How can you trust the loyalty of a man divided within his own bones? Lord Cornwallis was wise to avoid the risk.”
Captain Reid did not agree. “Leaving hundreds excluded through no fault of their own, with no choice but to enlist as mercenaries beneath a foreign flag.”
The rubies in Mir Alam’s headdress glinted like a host of red eyes. “As your brother did.”
So that was it, then. Not Captain Reid’s children, then, but his father’s. As from far away, Penelope remembered the last time she had seen someone’s face look like that. It had been Colonel Reid’s, at Begum Johnson’s party, talking about the stigma tainting the half-caste.
Captain Reid went very still. Penelope looked from Mir Alam to Captain Reid, watching as they locked eyes in a battle of wills, the one slight and bent, the other tall and straight, but momentarily alike in the animus that crackled between them.
It was Captain Reid who looked away first. “As both my brothers did,” he said levelly.
Penelope could see Freddy assessing Captain Reid’s tanned skin and dark coloring and working through his own conclusions.
“But you were in the Madras Cavalry, Reid,” Freddy said abruptly. “Weren’t you?”
While he must have known exactly what Freddy was getting at, Captain Reid gave him no satisfaction. He smiled tightly. “Yes.”
Penelope could see Freddy working that one out. If Captain Reid had been in the East India Company’s army, and the East India Company’s army didn’t accept half-Indians, then, ipso facto or whatever that Latin phrase was, Captain Reid couldn’t be half-Indian.
Even so, Freddy took a discreet step away, as though to disassociate himself from any possible taint. It was distressing enough for him having a half-Irish wife.
It would have been one thing if her grandfather had been heir to an Irish peerage, like Lord Wellesley. Irish peers might not be quite up to the level of their English counterparts, but a peerage rendered anyone at least marginally socially acceptable. No matter how hard her mother tried to hide it, Penelope’s maternal grandfather had been little more than a glorified horse trader. A successful horse trader, but a horse trader for all that.
Penelope’s father, comfortable in his baronetcy, Saxon to the backbone, more at home in the saddle than the drawing room, hadn’t minded in the slightest. He thought it rather a good deal, finding a chit who was easy on the eyes and came with a steady supply of good horseflesh. Penelope’s mother had minded. She had worked so hard at eradicating her origins that any mention of the Irish or the equine evoked a blank stare and an increasingly agitated fluttering of her fan. Discussions of breeding were enough to send her into a swoon—provided there was a soft surface behind her, that was, as Penelope’s paternal grandmother had caustically pointed out on more than one occasion.
It was all, Penelope considered, rather a good joke. Her father had married her mother for her stable; her mother had married her father to get away from it. By the time each had figured out their mistake, it had been too late to do anything about it. The “I do’s” had been said.
That sort of thing was becoming rather a family tradition.
Captain Reid didn’t seem to notice that he had been snubbed. He was frowning over his shoulder at a young man in an unfamiliar uniform who appeared to be trying to signal something to him in an awkward species of mime.
With a palpably false smile, Captain Reid turned back to their small group. “I have already monopolized far too much of your time. Enjoy the nautch, Lady Frederick.”
There went all her theories tossed into a cocked hat. If Captain Reid was in league with Mir Alam, she would eat Freddy’s best hat.
As an afterthought, Freddy offered her his arm as the chief minister led them into a vast courtyard that had been tricked out with piles of vividly woven rugs and soft cushions. The scent of attar of roses perfumed the air, mingling with the chief minister’s scented tobacco and the faint, smoky smell of the hundreds of candles inside their lanterns, strung up along a carefully charted wilderness of unfamiliar trees.
“Have you ever been to a nautch before, Lady Frederick?” the chief minister was asking her.
Penelope dragged her attention away from Captain Reid’s retreating back, nearly tripping over one of the tiles in the process. “No,” she said brightly. “I haven’t.”
“Then you are in for a treat.” Mir Alam smiled, baring teeth whose perfection only emphasized the ruin of his face. “Some of our foremost poets plan to recite tonight. And,” he added, with a nod in Freddy’s direction, “there will, of course, be dancing.”
“And a cannonade?” drawled Penelope.
Mir Alam’s smile curdled slightly. “Not tonight.”
“Pity,” replied Penelope flippantly. “I do so enjoy a good execution.”
“You don’t approve of my methods, Lady Frederick?” Penelope noticed that the minister had dropped the careful plural that he had employed while speaking with Captain Reid, abandoning the pretense of speaking for anyone other than himself.
“Nothing of the sort.” Had she said otherwise, Penelope had no doubt she would soon find herself on a more intimate acquaintance than she would like with the inner workings of large munitions. Watch your back, Captain Reid had said. In that, at least, he might have had a point. “It’s not my business to approve or disapprove. I am merely a visitor here.”
“An extended visit, one hopes,” said Mir Alam mendaciously. “Having come so far. We are a very long way from Calcutta.”
The words were an uncanny echo of Captain Reid’s warning earlier that evening. In this case, they were quite definitely uttered as a threat.
Freddy, being Freddy, remained completely oblivious. “It was a bally long trip,” he agreed. “Worse than getting to Scotland for the shooting.”
“You shoot, Lord Frederick?”
“What doesn’t fly away first,” interjected Penelope. Below an arch of lanterns, the performance had already begun. The plaintive tones of an instrument unfamiliar to Penelope scraped across the air. It made the skin prickle on her arms, like the passing of a banshee in her mother’s native land.
“There is very good hunting at my estate in Berar,” commented the minister, ignoring Penelope. “I would be delighted if you would do the honor of visiting me there.”
The words “estate” and “hunting” completed the process that the diamonds and rubies had begun. As far as Freddy was concerned, Mir Alam was a thoroughly decent chap. If he played cards, preferably badly, he might even be elevated to “jolly good fellow.”
Captain Reid, on the other hand, clearly fell under “not quite one of us.”
Tugging on Freddy’s sleeve, Penelope stood on her tiptoes to hiss in his ear, “Will you make my excuses for a moment?”
“What?” demanded Freddy under his breath, making an apologetic face at Mir Alam as he leaned over towards her.
Penelope rolled her eyes at him with the familiarity of matrimony. “You know.”
“Oh, right,” said Freddy. He gestured vaguely back the way they had come. “I think it’s that way.”
That was precisely what she wanted to hear. Penelope batted her lashes up at him. “I won’t be long.”
Below the arch of lanterns, the first of a string of dancers had emerged, undulating her way to the center of the courtyard.
“Don’t hurry back,” said Freddy jocularly.
“Beast,” Penelope shot back.
Waggling her fingers at Mir Alam, she wiggled her way back among the chattering groupings of courtiers, enjoying the relative freedom that came of being entirely on her own for the first time in what seemed like weeks. It was sometimes, she had learned, easier to be entirely on one’s own in a ballroom full of people than it was in one’s own bedroom. Especially when one shared that bedroom with a large man with a penchant for scattering his belongings across the widest possible radius.
After that coffee, she did have a vague notion of doing what she had implied and finding the nearest necessary. On the other hand, should she happen to run across Captain Reid along the way, that wouldn’t be her fault, would it? Penelope squished the voice in the back of her head that was emitting a very loud, very sorrowful Oh Pen. It sounded a great deal like Henrietta.
Well, really. It wasn’t as though she were planning to drag him out onto a balcony.
Captain Reid hadn’t gone far. She spotted him just off the main courtyard, in a covered corridor with a round fountain at the center, circled with marble pots of flowering plants. The corridor echoed the shape of the fountain, the vaulted roof held up by a series of ornately carved pillars in lieu of walls, leaving it open to the garden and the breezes.
Captain Reid stood with one elbow propped against the fountain, listening with great attention to a young man with a shock of light brown hair tied back in an old-fashioned queue. The ribbon with which he had tied it was beginning to fray around the edges.
“—not a little matter,” the other man was saying in a low, worried tone. “We’re talking about thirty-two hundred guns gone missing! How can you expect to conceal that?”
Chapter Ten
The two men stood by a running fountain, the sound of which blurred their voices. Inching her way around a pillar, Penelope drew closer, counting on their absorption in their own affairs to hide her from their notice.
“We haven’t much time,” the younger man was saying worriedly. “One can hardly fail to notice they’re not there!”
“Don’t worry,” said Captain Reid. “I’ll take care of it.”
“How?” The younger man looked around wildly, cau
sing Penelope to duck behind her pillar, missing whatever it was he had to say next. She deemed it safe to pop out again just as he was saying something that ended in “—money’s already gone.”
Frowning, Captain Reid stared off into space. Her space. His eyes focused on her face with an expression that Penelope would not exactly have called pleased.
“Reid?” urged the younger man. “What do you—”
Following Captain Reid’s gaze, he lapsed into blushing confusion.
An expert at brazening out sticky situations, Penelope strolled out from behind her pillar as though she had intended to do so all along.
“Lady Frederick,” said Captain Reid.
He sounded more resigned than alarmed, a state of affairs that pricked Penelope’s pride.
“Captain Reid,” she drawled, giving her hips an extra undulation as she closed the space between them. “I always do seem to run across you in the most . . . unexpected places.”
“Hardly unexpected, since I came with you from the durbar hall,” observed Captain Reid. “Lady Frederick, may I present to you Lieutenant Plowden. Lieutenant Plowden is with the Subsidiary Force.”
Red with more than sunburn, Plowden jackknifed into a bow so energetic Penelope could hear his teeth rattle. “Ma’am.”
“Perhaps you might be able to tell me, Lieutenant Plowden. What is this Subsidiary Force? I’m rather new here.”
Lieutenant Plowden looked to Captain Reid before answering. At Captain Reid’s slight nod, he explained haltingly, “We have a treaty with the Nizam, you see. In exchange for a subsidy from the Nizam, we maintain a force on his behalf.”
“I see,” said Penelope thoughtfully. Including thirty-two hundred guns. How much money had the Nizam paid for those? And how much of it had made its way into Captain Reid’s pocket? As a motive for malfeasance, money made a good deal more sense than politics.