It was, thought Penelope, rather impressive that Captain Reid should know the groom’s name, out of a camp so large as theirs. He had engaged most of the servants and handlers who were to see to their comfort on the voyage, but the syce, along with Freddy’s valet, his cook, and Penelope’s ayah, had come with them from Calcutta.

“You didn’t even know who he was, but you jumped into the Krishna after him.”

“You make it sound like it’s strange,” complained Penelope. “Someone had to do it. And I rather felt like a swim.” She tried to toss her hair, but it clung damply to the back of her dress and refused to comply.

Captain Reid eyed her approvingly. “They should make you an honorary member of the Zuffir Plutun.”

Penelope looked at him suspiciously. That was the problem with foreign terms; it was so hard to tell if one had just been insulted. “The what?”

“The . . .” Captain Reid cast about for a translation. “I suppose you would call it the Victorious Battalion. They’re the Nizam’s women’s regiment, brilliant in battle and completely fearless. A sort of latter-day Amazon.”

An Amazon. Penelope rather liked the sound of that. It sounded so much better than “impossible hoyden,” “unnatural girl,” or any other of her mother’s preferred terms for describing her sporting proclivities.

Penelope hid her pleasure behind an arched brow. “Was that a compliment, Captain Reid?”

“It was intended as one. Whether you choose to take it as such is entirely up to you. Ah,” Captain Reid stepped aside, making way for a bedraggled figure in a silt-striped white muslin robe. “I believe someone else desires a moment of your company.”

Mehdi Yar had lost his turban, and his hair stood up damply around his head. On the other hand, he was breathing, which Penelope took as a personal accomplishment.

Apparently, so did he.

“Sahiba,” he said, bowing low before her, “I owe you a great debt.”

“Nonsense,” said Penelope bracingly, acutely conscious of her straggling hair and sodden dress and Captain Reid’s watching over her shoulder. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“Would they?” murmured Captain Reid. Penelope frowned at him over her shoulder. It was like having a fly in one’s ear. A fly too large to swat properly.

“But you did,” said the syce, who appeared to incline to Captain Reid’s view of the world. Matter-of-factly, as though he were offering her a cup of tea at a church bazaar, he said, “My life and my honor are yours.”

With one last inclination of his head over his joined hands, he melted away to his place among the horses.

“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.