They were crammed onto the ferry along with their mounts, their grooms, and their personal servants, waiting to be pulled across to the other side. They had spent the better part of the day by the banks of the Krishna, watching as group after group was ferried across the choppy brown waters by a ferry that was little more than a raft on a pulley. Some of the animals had put up a bit of a fuss at being herded onto the rickety wooden conveyance, having to be coaxed and prodded aboard. Penelope didn’t blame them. The river was running fast beneath the warped planks of the ferry and it smelled vile in the humid heat.

From her vantage point on the ferry, Penelope could see Captain Reid efficiently dispatching the jumbled mass of men and animals on the opposite bank, sending groups ahead with tents and provisions to their next camping stage. She had seen the same scene played out in variants at every stage of their journey, the creation of order out of chaos as tents were raised or struck, provisions loaded or unloaded, and an unwieldy group of more than eighty souls propelled along the road. By the time she and Freddy reached the next stage, their tent would be up, their beds laid out, water provided warm for washing, and their dinner ready to be served.

The prolonged wait by the bank had been too much for Freddy, who was chafing to get back on horseback. Despite the fact that they were only halfway across, Freddy’s groom — or, if Penelope were trying to be local about it, his syce — held out two cupped hands for Freddy to mount.

“Oughtn’t you to wait till we land?” suggested Penelope. The raft didn’t strike her as the sturdiest construction, and Aurangzeb, Freddy’s mount, stood worryingly near to the edge.

Freddy grabbed hold of the bridle, wedging one booted foot into the stirrup. “Don’t be absurd. What can possibly happen?”

As he heaved himself upwards, a loud, cracking noise rent the air. Penelope grabbed on to her own horse’s bridle as Buttercup shied at the noise, half-expecting to see the raft coming apart beneath them.

It wasn’t the raft that had given way, but Freddy’s girth. Freddy teetered for balance, one foot sticking comically up in the air, as his saddle lurched sideways. With an expression of frozen disbelief that would have been amusing under other circumstances, Freddy plummeted sideways, straight at his horrified syce. Seeing the danger too late, his syce made a belated and futile attempt to back out of the way.

It was like watching dominos, very large, very human dominos. Freddy slammed straight into the syce’s shoulder, sending him toppling backwards off the edge of the raft into the churning waters of the Krishna. Freddy landed heavily on his stomach on the deck, blinking as he tried to get the air back into his lungs.

“Oh no,” said Penelope involuntarily, a statement that did nothing at all to rectify the fact that the groom’s head appeared to be heading below, rather than above, the muddy waters.

Still flat on the deck, Freddy winced as he gingerly flexed his back. There were cries and exclamations and whinnying of horses. Penelope didn’t wait to see what they might do. Unhooking Buttercup’s lead, she tied it hastily around her waist, cinching the knot into security.

“Here,” she said, thrusting the other end at her bewildered spouse. “Hold this.” And without stopping to think, she plunged into the turgid waters of the Krishna.

It was colder than she had thought it would be, colder and chop-pier. Penelope came up sputtering, spitting out foul-tasting water, flavored with silt and crocodile dung and goodness only knew what else. The lead yanked painfully against her lower ribs. Thank God Freddy was holding firm. Either that, or he had handed it to someone else who was. Penelope didn’t bother to check.

Ahead of her, she saw a flash of something pale against the dark waters, a hand briefly rising above the surface. She tried to strike out in that direction, but her sodden skirts tangled in her legs, pulling her down. It was all she could do to stay above water herself. Bloody clothes. Whatever would Freddy tell them back home when he tried to explain how he had so quickly become a widower?

The lead jerked her upright again as she started to go under. Penelope flailed with both her arms against the water for traction as she scanned for that disappearing burst of human flesh.

There it was, a hank of sodden white cloth beginning to turn as brown as the water. Penelope grabbed blindly at the struggling figure in front of her, grasping at cloth and missing.

“Grab on to me!” she shouted, but the water was loud in her ears and her own voice sounded dim to her, choked with water and interrupted by a fit of coughing.

Striking out again, she got cloth, a good handful of cloth, and held on for all she was worth, hoping she wasn’t accidentally choking the man in the process. That would be a fine kettle of fish, to save him from drowning only to strangle him with the collar of his own robe.

Raising her other arm, Penelope signaled wildly in the direction of the boat. At least, she hoped she was signaling at the boat. Stinging sprays of water clouded her vision, reducing the whole of her world to the buffeting of the waves and the dead weight yanking against the cloth in her hands.

The rope jerked hard against her ribs, knocking the wind out of her, but at least she was moving, propelled back against the current of the water. Fumbling with the floating folds of his robe, Penelope managed to grab the drowning man beneath the armpits, yanking him up against her chest as she let herself be hauled back, making sure his head stayed above water.

Penelope thought vaguely that now she knew how a fish on a line must feel, as the rope jerked her backwards in unsteady strokes. The man in her arms was completely inert, his head lolling back against her chest, his beard like a trickle of ink along his robe. Penelope couldn’t tell whether he was still breathing. The slap of the water, buoying them up and down, made it hard to gauge.

Someone reached down and heaved her burden away from her, while a pair of ungentle hands grasped her under the armpits and hauled her up over the edge. Penelope lay gasping for air like a fish in a net. For the moment, nothing mattered but the glorious working of her lungs, in and out. No one had bothered to untie the lead, and she could feel it seizing against her ribs as her lungs expanded with air. Such a lovely thing, breathing. Somewhere nearby, she could hear choking and sputtering going on as someone worked over the syce, pumping the water out of his lungs.

A large face hove into view over her. Funny, how bizarre a man’s features could look turned upside down. But there was no mistaking him. Penelope wondered vaguely if it was he who had reeled her in and, even more vaguely, when it was that the boat had docked.

“When I said I wouldn’t jump in the water,” Penelope managed to get out, with a shadow of her usual bravado, “I hadn’t thought that someone else might do it first.”

Bravado wasn’t quite so easy when one was flat on one’s back.

But Captain Reid didn’t tax her with it. Instead, he held out a hand, helping her to a sitting position.

“Are you all right?” he asked, squatting down beside her.

“A little damp” — Penelope experimentally shook her wrists, splattering the deck with fat drops of water — “but otherwise tip-top.”

Her voice was hoarse, but still recognizably her own. Penelope luxuriated in the sensation of good, hard wooden planks beneath her backside, splinters and all, sun-warmed and solid. A sudden thought struck her.

“Are the horses all right?” she asked anxiously.

Captain Reid choked on a laugh. “Perfectly,” he said. “Far better than you. Do you think you can stand?”

“Of course,” said Penelope, with more confidence than she felt.

Her legs felt about as stable as undercooked soufflé, but she took the hand he offered her, making a show of shaking out her soaking skirts as a pretense to hide the fact that she wasn’t quite as steady on her legs as she ought to be. Water dripped down the folds of her skirt and pooled around her legs, leaving puddles on the planks. Her hair dripped in sodden clumps down her back, the majority of her hairpins being currently engaged in bobbing their way down the river. Penelope thought inconsequentially that she did seem to lose a great many hairpins where Captain Reid was involved.

Blinking against the water trickling down from her hairline, Penelope dashed the back of her hand against her eyes.

Without comment, Captain Reid handed her a very large, very white handkerchief.

Penelope applied it to her face. “I would have used my own,” she explained rather indistinctly, “but . . .”

“No need,” said Captain Reid, as Penelope finished mopping her face with his handkerchief, which was no longer so white nor so tidy as it had been a moment before. “I understand perfectly.”

The handkerchief had been marked in one corner with his initials. Instead of thread, the monogram had been lovingly stitched with strands of reddish brown hair, threaded again and again to satiny thickness against the white cambric. It was a terribly intimate sort of thing, hair, the sort of present one made only to a family member or a lover.

Penelope crumpled the handkerchief in one hand.

“Where is Freddy?” she asked crisply. “Lord Frederick, I mean.”

“Safely on shore. Mehdi Yar broke his fall,” Captain Reid added dryly.

“Who? Oh — Freddy’s groom.” It had never occurred to her to ask his name before she jumped into the water after him. He had been just a body in the water to be hauled in again. At home, the coachman was always called John, regardless of his real name, just as Cook was always Cook, whatever Cook might have been before she became Cook.