“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.