As an afterthought, Freddy offered her his arm as the chief minister led them into a vast courtyard that had been tricked out with piles of vividly woven rugs and soft cushions. The scent of attar of roses perfumed the air, mingling with the chief minister’s scented tobacco and the faint, smoky smell of the hundreds of candles inside their lanterns, strung up along a carefully charted wilderness of unfamiliar trees.

“Have you ever been to a nautch before, Lady Frederick?” the chief minister was asking her.

Penelope dragged her attention away from Captain Reid’s retreating back, nearly tripping over one of the tiles in the process. “No,” she said brightly. “I haven’t.”

“Then you are in for a treat.” Mir Alam smiled, baring teeth whose perfection only emphasized the ruin of his face. “Some of our foremost poets plan to recite tonight. And,” he added, with a nod in Freddy’s direction, “there will, of course, be dancing.”

“And a cannonade?” drawled Penelope.

Mir Alam’s smile curdled slightly. “Not tonight.”

“Pity,” replied Penelope flippantly. “I do so enjoy a good execution.”

“You don’t approve of my methods, Lady Frederick?” Penelope noticed that the minister had dropped the careful plural that he had employed while speaking with Captain Reid, abandoning the pretense of speaking for anyone other than himself.

“Nothing of the sort.” Had she said otherwise, Penelope had no doubt she would soon find herself on a more intimate acquaintance than she would like with the inner workings of large munitions. Watch your back , Captain Reid had said. In that, at least, he might have had a point. “It’s not my business to approve or disapprove. I am merely a visitor here.”

“An extended visit, one hopes,” said Mir Alam mendaciously. “Having come so far. We are a very long way from Calcutta.”

The words were an uncanny echo of Captain Reid’s warning earlier that evening. In this case, they were quite definitely uttered as a threat.

Freddy, being Freddy, remained completely oblivious. “It was a bally long trip,” he agreed. “Worse than getting to Scotland for the shooting.”

“You shoot, Lord Frederick?”

“What doesn’t fly away first,” interjected Penelope. Below an arch of lanterns, the performance had already begun. The plaintive tones of an instrument unfamiliar to Penelope scraped across the air. It made the skin prickle on her arms, like the passing of a banshee in her mother’s native land.

“There is very good hunting at my estate in Berar,” commented the minister, ignoring Penelope. “I would be delighted if you would do the honor of visiting me there.”

The words “estate” and “hunting” completed the process that the diamonds and rubies had begun. As far as Freddy was concerned, Mir Alam was a thoroughly decent chap. If he played cards, preferably badly, he might even be elevated to “jolly good fellow.”

Captain Reid, on the other hand, clearly fell under “not quite one of us.”

Tugging on Freddy’s sleeve, Penelope stood on her tiptoes to hiss in his ear, “Will you make my excuses for a moment?”

“What?” demanded Freddy under his breath, making an apologetic face at Mir Alam as he leaned over towards her.

Penelope rolled her eyes at him with the familiarity of matrimony. “You know.”

“Oh, right,” said Freddy. He gestured vaguely back the way they had come. “I think it’s that way.”

That was precisely what she wanted to hear. Penelope batted her lashes up at him. “I won’t be long.”

Below the arch of lanterns, the first of a string of dancers had emerged, undulating her way to the center of the courtyard.

“Don’t hurry back,” said Freddy jocularly.

“Beast,” Penelope shot back.

Waggling her fingers at Mir Alam, she wiggled her way back among the chattering groupings of courtiers, enjoying the relative freedom that came of being entirely on her own for the first time in what seemed like weeks. It was sometimes, she had learned, easier to be entirely on one’s own in a ballroom full of people than it was in one’s own bedroom. Especially when one shared that bedroom with a large man with a penchant for scattering his belongings across the widest possible radius.

After that coffee, she did have a vague notion of doing what she had implied and finding the nearest necessary. On the other hand, should she happen to run across Captain Reid along the way, that wouldn’t be her fault, would it? Penelope squished the voice in the back of her head that was emitting a very loud, very sorrowful Oh Pen. It sounded a great deal like Henrietta.

Well, really. It wasn’t as though she were planning to drag him out onto a balcony.

Captain Reid hadn’t gone far. She spotted him just off the main courtyard, in a covered corridor with a round fountain at the center, circled with marble pots of flowering plants. The corridor echoed the shape of the fountain, the vaulted roof held up by a series of ornately carved pillars in lieu of walls, leaving it open to the garden and the breezes.

Captain Reid stood with one elbow propped against the fountain, listening with great attention to a young man with a shock of light brown hair tied back in an old-fashioned queue. The ribbon with which he had tied it was beginning to fray around the edges.

“ — not a little matter,” the other man was saying in a low, worried tone. “We’re talking about thirty-two hundred guns gone missing! How can you expect to conceal that?”

Chapter Ten

The two men stood by a running fountain, the sound of which blurred their voices. Inching her way around a pillar, Penelope drew closer, counting on their absorption in their own affairs to hide her from their notice.

“We haven’t much time,” the younger man was saying worriedly. “One can hardly fail to notice they’re not there!”

“Don’t worry,” said Captain Reid. “I’ll take care of it.”

“How?” The younger man looked around wildly, causing Penelope to duck behind her pillar, missing whatever it was he had to say next. She deemed it safe to pop out again just as he was saying something that ended in “ — money’s already gone.”

Frowning, Captain Reid stared off into space. Her space. His eyes focused on her face with an expression that Penelope would not exactly have called pleased.

“Reid?” urged the younger man. “What do you — ”

Following Captain Reid’s gaze, he lapsed into blushing confusion.

An expert at brazening out sticky situations, Penelope strolled out from behind her pillar as though she had intended to do so all along.

“Lady Frederick,” said Captain Reid.

He sounded more resigned than alarmed, a state of affairs that pricked Penelope’s pride.

“Captain Reid,” she drawled, giving her hips an extra undulation as she closed the space between them. “I always do seem to run across you in the most . . . unexpected places.”

“Hardly unexpected, since I came with you from the durbar hall,” observed Captain Reid. “Lady Frederick, may I present to you Lieutenant Plowden. Lieutenant Plowden is with the Subsidiary Force.”

Red with more than sunburn, Plowden jackknifed into a bow so energetic Penelope could hear his teeth rattle. “Ma’am.”

“Perhaps you might be able to tell me, Lieutenant Plowden. What is this Subsidiary Force? I’m rather new here.”

Lieutenant Plowden looked to Captain Reid before answering. At Captain Reid’s slight nod, he explained haltingly, “We have a treaty with the Nizam, you see. In exchange for a subsidy from the Nizam, we maintain a force on his behalf.”

“I see,” said Penelope thoughtfully. Including thirty-two hundred guns. How much money had the Nizam paid for those? And how much of it had made its way into Captain Reid’s pocket? As a motive for malfeasance, money made a good deal more sense than politics.

“There used to be a French force as well,” Lieutenant Plowden added in a rush, “but now there’s just us. There’s rather a lot of us, too. We’re off across the Brinjara Hills, just ten miles north of the city.” He flapped his arm in a direction that Penelope, who had an excellent sense of direction, was fairly sure was south rather than north. Well, she did have that effect on men, she thought tolerantly.

Not all of them, unfortunately.

“The cantonments have become a city all their own,” Captain Reid interjected in a blatant attempt to turn the topic of conversation to more neutral channels. “You’ll find it a bit of home away from home. There is even,” he added, like a governess dangling a treat in front of a recalcitrant child, “a Europe Shop that sells goods from England. You might want to pay a visit one day. Properly chaperoned, of course.”

“If I wanted to be at home, I would have stayed at home,” said Penelope tartly. She was sick of being fobbed off with promises of shopping. She didn’t even like shopping. Penelope favored Lieutenant Plowden with a melting gaze. “Do tell me if I’ve got this quite right, Lieutenant. The Nizam pays a certain amount of money to your commanding officers in exchange for men and arms.”

The candlelight picked out the downy fuzz on Lieutenant Plowden’s cheeks. He blushed slightly as he replied. “Yes, quite. You understand the matter perfectly, Lady Frederick.”

“Not quite perfectly,” said Penelope, looking at Captain Reid as she said it. “But I believe I begin to.”

Captain Reid’s gaze met hers with a jolt like steel striking steel. “Do you?”

His eyes were as hard as agates. He might, Penelope realized for the first time, be a dangerous man to cross, more dangerous by far than the conceited dandies she had so carelessly and effortlessly manipulated on London’s social stage.