“So you think the groom is the real spy?” asked Tajalli.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. It might as easily be the cook, the valet, or Lady Frederick’s ayah. All of them were hand-picked by Wellesley’s staff.”

George leaned forward on his cushion. “What do you think of Lady Frederick?” he asked.

Alex smelled a rat. “Did Father write you?”

“No,” demurred George, at his most guileless. If his eyes opened any wider, they would be in danger of popping right out. “Why?”

“Never mind,” said Alex. “Lady Frederick is . . . not what I expected.”

That was the understatement of the century.

“Worse?” asked George with an irrepressible grin.

“Different,” said Alex, with great finality. “But you didn’t come to meet me just to ask me about my trip. What’s going on?”

His brother and his best friend exchanged a long look. “You start,” said George generously.

“No, no,” demurred Tajalli. “It really begins with you.”

“For the love of God,” intervened Alex. “I don’t care who tells it as long as someone does.”

“So impatient,” complained Tajalli, with a wag of his head.

“Always,” agreed George. “Never takes the time to sit back and smell the frangipani.”

“That’s because I was too busy looking after you lot,” said Alex with some asperity. “What is it?”

Leaning back against his cushions, George steepled his hands together at the fingertips in the classic pose of the storyteller.

“You’ve heard of the Rajah of Berar’s treasure, of course,” he began importantly.

“You mean the hoard he claims disappeared at the siege of Gawilighur last December? Everyone’s heard that tale.” Heard it, looked for it, failed to find it. Wellesley had had teams of soldiers combing the fort, and Alex suspected more than one soldier had done a little unauthorized treasure hunting of his own. Not a rupee had been found. “It’s a classic fairy story. All it wants is a dragon.”

There it was again, that look, a look from his brother to his friend, the sort of look that said they knew something he didn’t know.

Alex folded his arms across his chest. “What?” he demanded.

“It’s not a fairy story,” said Tajalli. “At least, someone claims it’s not.”

George leaned forward, so that the light of the lantern fell across his face, illuminating the bone structure that was so uncannily like their father’s. “Someone sent a message to the Begum Sumroo offering her a tenth part of the Rajah of Berar’s treasure if she would break her treaty with the British and join in a new alliance against the British.”

“A new alliance with whom? Holcar?” To be fair, the northern Mahratta leader appeared to being doing pretty well against the British all on his own.

“Not just Holcar,” said George seriously. “The entire Mahratta Confederacy. And Hyderabad.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Alex reflexively. “The Nizam would never — ”

He broke off, suddenly unsure of the truth of what he had been about to say. The Hindu Mahrattas had always been to the Islamic state of Hyderabad what the French were to the English, a constant threat upon their borders, to be neutralized with defensive diplomacy when not being pushed off by force of arms. It was largely due to the Mahratta threat that the British even had a military foothold in Hyderabad; the old Nizam having treated with the British for a military force to protect his domains against his Marathi neighbors.

But the recent war had changed all that. The Maratha Confederacy was — at least momentarily — broken. The new threat to Hyderabad’s sovereignty was no longer the Marathi. It was the British.

“Exactly,” said Tajalli, watching as Alex’s mouth clamped shut. “The new Nizam isn’t the old one.”

“And Mir Alam isn’t Aristu Jah,” Alex agreed. The new First Minister might once have been a friend of the British, but a combination of exile and leprosy had twisted his mind and his allegiances. “Fine. I see your point. For the sake of argument, let’s say that someone is trying to broker an alliance between the Marathi and Hyderabad against the British. Who’s at the heart of it? Holcar? Scindia?”

George shifted on his cushion, looking uncomfortable. “It’s unclear who he represents,” he admitted reluctantly. “Whoever it is calls himself the Marigold.”

“The Marigold ?” repeated Alex.

“As in the flower,” provided George helpfully. “He signs his notes with a rather attractive little orange flower. It’s actually quite well drawn. Very detailed.”

“You must be joking.”

“It isn’t a joke,” protested George, with all a little brother’s indignation at not being taken seriously. “It’s a conspiracy.”

“Of flowers.”

“No, just run by a flower,” said Tajalli, with his usual irrepressible good humor. “It is rather amusing, isn’t it? But perhaps that’s what this Marigold wants, to amuse us into a false sense of security. Who would be afraid of a gentle blossom?”

“It’s not even poisonous,” agreed Alex in disgust. “What sort of alias is that?”

“The alias of a clever man who wants us to think he’s not,” suggested Tajalli.

“Or a clever woman,” pointed out George, who worked for one. “Don’t underestimate the zenana.”

Alex felt that they were rather straying from the point. “Or someone who just likes to draw flowers. If this . . . Marigold approached the Begum Sumroo, I imagine he must also have made contact with someone in Hyderabad.” The pieces clicked neatly into place. He looked hard at Tajalli. “That’s where you come into it, isn’t it? That’s why you volunteered to play messenger.”

Tajalli made a resigned face. “Naturally. The Marigold sent my father a very nice ring as a token of his esteem.”

“In exchange for — ?”

“My father’s influence with the other members of the durbar. At least, so far as I know. I am not,” he said, and Alex glimpsed a hint of something steely behind his friend’s pleasant mask, “exactly in my father’s confidence.”

“If you were,” said Alex, with an equal measure of steel, “you would not be here.”

Tajalli inclined his head in acknowledgment of the point. His father, Ahmed Ali Khan, had been one of the most vociferous supporters of the French faction at the Nizam’s court during those tense days not so long ago when both the French and the English maintained corps of troops outside the city of Hyderabad, each vying for the Nizam’s favor. But Ahmed Ali’s political opposition had only reached the level of personal vendetta when news came out of the English Resident’s secret marriage to a Hyderabadi lady of quality, Khair-un-Nissa. Apart from his revulsion at a descendant of the Prophet marrying an infidel, Ahmed Ali had a more personal reason to be affronted. Khair-un-Nissa had been promised in marriage to Tajalli’s older brother. The girl’s marriage to the Resident was an insult that made the Montagues and Capulets look like good neighbors.

Alex sometimes wondered how much his own friendship with Ahmed’s son owed to the son’s desire to flout his father. He liked to think there was more to it than that, but there were times when he found Tajalli as difficult to decipher as the intricately penned verse on a Persian scroll.

“Whoever it was knew to go to your father,” said Alex. “Whoever it was knew that he would be sympathetic.”

“He hasn’t made any secret of his sympathies.” Tajalli held out both hands, palm up. “You know how word travels.”

His expression very clearly indicated that further discussion about his father would be unwelcome. Tajalli might be allowed to criticize him, but for an outsider to do was to cross an unwritten line.

Fair enough. Alex felt much the same way about his own father. Turning back to George, he asked, “Did you see this man when he waited upon the Begum?”

“Man, woman, camel — no idea,” said George, shaking his head. “The Begum is too canny to allow me near anything like this. Doesn’t want to expose me to temptation,” he added, with a grin.

“But she trusts you to relay her letters,” pointed out Alex.

“All in code,” countered George without rancor. “You can’t expect her to trust me that far. It’s rather nice of her, really, not to put me in positions in which my loyalty would be tested.”

“Nice” wasn’t quite how Alex would have put it, but he decided to let it go. The Begum Sumroo hadn’t risen from dancing girl to ruler of her own state by being nice.

“Fortunately for you,” George continued cheerfully, “Fyze doesn’t feel at all the same way. She was the one who told me about the orange flowers and all that.”

“I see,” said Alex slowly. George had for some time had an understanding with one of the Begum’s favorites, an association that had served to cement his position in the Begum’s court. It helped that George appeared to be genuinely fond of the girl.

Tajalli grinned. “Nicely done.”

“It’s not like that,” protested George, looking hurt. “I wouldn’t have asked her if I hadn’t thought she would volunteer.” Being George, he actually believed it. “She said there was something odd about the syntax of the letters.”

“Odd how?” asked Alex.

George squinted at the gaily striped canvas of the tent. “Slightly awkward. As though the writer weren’t quite proficient in the language but was trying to sound as though he were. Although,” he added, “that could be a result of it having all been mangled into code and back again.”

“What language was it written in?”

“Persian,” supplied George. It was the official language of the Mughal court, the common tongue of aristocrats and scholars across the Islamic world. It certainly wasn’t definitive, but it strengthened Alex’s suspicion that the source of the notes was probably Marathi. And why wouldn’t it be? Holcar was currently engaged in a struggle against the British; if his resources were secretly failing, he might be looking to drum up allies.