Slipping into the room, Penelope eased the door shut behind her and took stock of her surroundings. Captain Reid’s quarters were smaller than the cabin she shared with Freddy, a narrow rectangle with space for little more than the basic amenities. The room already displayed all the obvious signs of masculine occupation. A shirt was tossed carelessly across the narrow berth and the Captain’s shaving kit jostled for space with a set of battered, wood-backed brushes on the narrow washstand. There was a book left open on the bed, something to do with irrigation and agricultural improvements. After shaking it vigorously to check for hidden letters, Penelope left it alone.

There were more books in a narrow bookcase, which had been bolted to the floor, a motley collection of works, apparently abandoned by a series of occupants over time, unless they were overflow from young Captain Wheeley’s own library. He did seem the sort to wallow in Lyrical Ballads in his spare time. Penelope didn’t waste any time on them. She had found what she was looking for.

On the warped table by the bookshelf, a portable writing desk lay open, several pages distributed across its surface, as though the writer had left them to dry before going off to dinner. They were closely written, in a tidy hand.

They were also completely illegible.

The hand might be tidy, but it was a script that Penelope had never seen before, all dots and curlicues like eyelashes scattered across the page. It was a letter to be sure — there was something that looked like a salutation at the top — but about what? And to whom? It felt like a cruel joke. On her.

There were other pages beneath, though, pages that looked as though they might be written in English. Penelope had only managed to wiggle the first one free, one that began with the salutation, “Dear Lizzy” — a woman’s name, but not exactly a loverly beginning — when a horrible sound made her freeze like a rabbit in a hedgerow.

Someone was turning the doorknob.

His servant, Penelope prayed, shoving the page back beneath the others and springing away from the desk. Please let it be his servant. It would still be embarrassing, but she could make up a silly excuse about having lost her way or felt faint or some other nonsense.

It wasn’t a servant.

Captain Reid stood in the doorway, regarding her with an expression that could only have been described as nonplussed. Penelope would have enjoyed seeing him so had she not been showing to even worse advantage. It sapped all the pleasure from it.

“Lady Frederick?”

The very title came out as a question. Well, Penelope couldn’t begrudge him that. One did tend to question the status of women who showed up unannounced in one’s bedchamber.

Penelope would have given anything to flee. Unfortunately, Captain Reid stood between her and the door, and there was nothing outside the window but water. Water and crocodiles. Penelope couldn’t see the crocodiles, but she deemed it safer to presume their existence.

There was nothing to do but brazen it out. Fortunately, she had had a good deal of experience at being brazen.

Tossing Captain Reid an arch look, Penelope fluttered her fingers at the closely written pages on the writing desk. “Love letters, Captain Reid?” she said. “The lady is fortunate, indeed.”

If he was perturbed at finding her pawing through his belongings, he hid it well. “Did you want something, Lady Frederick?”

“Yes.” It was the curved script on the letter that gave her the idea. Penelope shook back her hair and smiled up at him with the assurance of one well practiced in wiggling out of sticky situations. “I was looking for an Indian grammar. I had thought you might have one.”

“An Indian grammar,” Captain Reid repeated.

“Yes,” repeated Penelope, daring him to challenge her. “Is it really so odd that one would wish to learn the language of the place one intends to occupy? One wouldn’t live in England without learning English.” Of course, one was born in England, so one never had to bother with learning it, but that was quite another matter. “If I were to live in Italy, I would learn Italian. If I were to live in France — ”

“I believe I have the general idea,” said Captain Reid, cutting Penelope off in the midst of her continental tour. Had he believed her excuse? She couldn’t tell. The angle of the light was in his favor, falling from behind him so that his face remained in shadow, while hers was lit like a sinner’s conscience at the call of the last trump. “You may find it more difficult than you anticipated.”

“I’ve always been rather quick at learning a language.” It was true enough. It had driven Henrietta mad that Penelope had managed to master the rudiments of Italian while Henrietta was still struggling with basic pronunciation. Penelope was lazy, but she was quick — at least, that was what her sorely tried governesses had reported to her mother.

“Languages,” Captain Reid corrected. “I’m afraid you’ll find not one Indian language but many. Hindustani is the most common, but by no means universal.”

“What do they speak in Hyderabad?”

“Deccani. It’s an offshoot of Urdu.” That might have helped had she had any idea what Urdu was. One thing was clear, it wasn’t Italian, French, or German. “My advice is to hire a munshi once we arrive. A tutor,” he translated. “Although I doubt you’ll have much use for it.”

“Why?” Penelope took a step towards him, bringing them only a hand’s breadth apart in the tiny cabin. The lantern on its peg in the corner swayed with the movement of the ship, creating a ripping river of gold on the scarred wood floor between them. “Because you think I’ll leave?”

With a wry smile, Captain Reid shook his head. “No. Because the English community tends to keep to itself. And I imagine your husband will follow them in that.”

“There’s nothing to say that I need to follow my husband.”

“You said it yourself. Whither he goest . . .”

“That was purely a matter of geography, not the mind.”

“Freethinking, Lady Frederick?”

She hated that name. It was like a shackle around her neck, engraved with the name of her master. She took a step back, her face openly mutinous in the light of the single lamp. “I don’t like being told what to do.”

Captain Reid quirked an eyebrow. “I shall remember that.”

Unexpectedly, Penelope grinned. “No, I don’t expect you will. But I shall keep reminding you.” Turning her back on him quite deliberately, she scanned the books scattered across the shelves. “Do you have that Hindustani grammar for me?”

“This one.” He reached from behind her to tip a book out of the row. His sleeve brushed her shoulder in passing. It was a coarser weave than Freddy favored, which must have been why it seemed to leave such a trail across her bare skin. She could smell the clean scent of shaving soap on his jaw and port on his breath, almost overwhelming the small space, as though not being able to see him somehow made him larger than he was, blowing his presence out of proportion in the brush of fabric against her back, the whisper of breath against her hair.

Penelope twisted around, so that the bookshelf pressed into her back, pinning her between the writing desk on one side and Captain Reid’s extended arm on the other. She tipped her head back to look him in the eye, the ribbons in her hair snagging against the shelf.

Captain Reid made no move to remove his arm. They were face-to-face, chest-to-chest, close enough to kiss. But for the fact that they weren’t on a balcony, and there was no champagne in evidence, it might have been a dozen other encounters in Penelope’s existence, a dozen dangerous preludes to a kiss. But this wasn’t a ballroom, and this man wasn’t any of the spoiled society boys she had known in London. He studied her face in the strange, shifting light, as the ship rocked back and forth and they rocked with it, pinned in place, frozen in tableau, his own face dark and unreadable in the half-light.

One might, thought Penelope hazily, her eyes dropping to his lips, attempt to seduce information out of him. From what she had heard, it was a far-from-uncommon technique. One needn’t go too far, after all. A sultry glance, a subtle caress . . . a kiss. It was all for a good cause — and it could be so easy.

Or maybe not.

Captain Reid was no Freddy. Stepping abruptly back, he favored her with a stiff, social smile, the sort one would give a maiden aunt who was being tedious at a party, but to whom one was bound to be polite.

With a brusque motion, he thrust the red-bound book into her hands, gesturing her, with unmistakable finality, towards the door. “Here is your grammar, Lady Frederick. I wish you . . . an instructive time with it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Penelope, with more bravado than she felt. “It has certainly been most instructive.”

Chapter Four

The scent of Lady Frederick’s perfume lingered behind her, as pungent as crushed frangipani petals, in the confined cabin. Shaking his head to clear it, like a sleepwalker slapping himself into wakefulness, Alex forced his attention to his writing desk, where the letter he had been writing to George appeared to have dried. It was, he thought, rather a good thing he had written in Urdu. The description he had provided of Lord and Lady Frederick had not been a flattering one.

Why in the devil had she suddenly felt the burning need for a Hindi grammar? And why come to his room to find it? It would have been just as easy to have made the request at dinner.

Shuffling the pages together, Alex snaked a glance over at the bookshelf. She hadn’t been trying to . . . No. Too absurd. Alex shook his head and went on shuffling. He rooted about with one hand, feeling for the sealing wax. And yet. There had been that odd moment, by the bookshelf, where a letter opener could scarcely have sliced through the space between them. Admittedly, there wasn’t that much space in the cabin to begin with, but . . . Opening the glass door of the lantern, Alex abstractedly thrust the wick of the wax at the small flame.