It might be more rewarding to pursue one’s own investigations. If only one knew who to pursue.

Await my coming, the note had said. Whose coming? There had been no salutation on the note, no closing courtesies, no direction on the back, nothing to indicate the author or the intended recipient. The man they had chased to the top of the hill might have dropped it before it could be delivered; it might be his arrival elsewhere that was spoken of. But would a Frenchman write such poor French?

He might, Penelope decided, absentmindedly gnawing on the finger of her riding glove. She certainly knew Englishmen whose grasp on their own grammar was wobbly at best — Turnip Fitzhugh came to mind — and she had only Captain Reid’s word on the identity of the man on the hill. He might not have been a Guignon. He might have been a Smith or a Jones or a Fotheringay-Smythe.

Or a Fiske.

Like an echo, Penelope could hear Freddy’s voice, thick with toast. Fiske is coming to visit .

Penelope frowned at the back of Captain Reid’s head. Fiske looked nothing like the man on the hill, at least not what she remembered of him. The coincidence of phrasing was nothing more than that — a coincidence.

Or was it? Fiske had been a member of Freddy’s regiment. To be more accurate, Fiske was still a member of the regiment to which Freddy had once belonged. The same regiment out of which, according to Henrietta, a ring of French spies had been operating.

What else had Henrietta said? She had been too busy sulking to pay much attention to Henrietta’s tales of espionage and immorality.

Henrietta was always stumbling across spies. Henrietta’s older brother, Richard, had gone about France under the sobriquet of the Purple Gentian, pinching French aristocrats from the Temple Prison and leaving amusing little notes under Bonaparte’s pillow, while Henrietta’s gallumping oaf of a husband performed the odd job for the War Office — presumably when they couldn’t find anyone better, thought Penelope unkindly. She and Miles had never gotten along. Her insistence on referring to him as a gallumping oaf might, she was willing to admit, have had something to do with that, but if one were a gallumping oaf, one had to expect to be called that from time to time. Or all the time.

After years of flowery aliases and Purple Gentian this and Black Tulip that, it all tended to go in one ear and out the other, much like her mother’s repeated admonitions about her behavior. Just this once, though, Penelope wished she had bothered to pay attention.

Taking advantage of the broadening of the path, Penelope edged her mare up alongside Captain Reid’s.

“Freddy’s friend Fiske.” Penelope’s tongue slipped slightly on all the alliteration. She soldiered manfully on. “You know him, don’t you?”

Startled, he looked at her sideways. On horseback, they sat nearly eye to eye. He had, Penelope noticed, an exceptionally good seat. Her grandfather would have approved.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because he’s flinging himself on our hospitality on the way to Mysore, and I want to know what I’ll be obliged to endure over the dinner table. Well? What do you think of him?”

“I know him primarily by reputation,” Captain Reid hedged. “You’d do better to ask your husband.”

“In other words, you don’t like him,” said Penelope with relish. “Why?”

“I don’t know him well enough to like or dislike him. We don’t really move in the same circles. I,” he added deprecatingly, “am not a great player of cards.”

Fleetingly, Penelope remembered standing alone in Begum Johnson’s drawing room, as the card room drew Freddy like a fly to dung. The only queen of Freddy’s heart was the sort that did somersaults on green baize.

“I don’t imagine you would be,” agreed Penelope. “You bluff very poorly. Now that you’ve got all that out of your system, what do you really think? Come, come, Captain Reid. This is no time to develop a sense of discretion.”

“Are you accusing me of prior indiscretions?” he asked smilingly.

“No more indiscreet than my own,” said Penelope frankly, thinking of their conversation the night before. “Neither of us is framed for namby-pamby niceties.”

Captain Reid bowed his head slightly, but not before Penelope saw his lips twitching. That, she thought triumphantly, was his Achilles’ heel. No matter how much he tried to hide it, he had a sense of humor. “I stand well complimented.” He fell silent, but it was a thinking sort of silence. After a moment, he said, “I meant it when I said I don’t know Fiske well. The army chaps tend not to think highly of the po liticals. It’s one of the reasons,” he added, looking off down the lane, “that we’ve had such bother with the Subsidiary Force.”

“But you were in the army, too.”

“The wrong army,” said Captain Reid frankly. “I was in an East India Company regiment. It’s not at all the same thing.”

“Why not?”

“Stay here long enough and someone will be bound to tell you.” As Penelope made a face at him, he relented. “Our troops are sepoys — Indians — rather than British soldiers. Even worse, we commit the social solecism of earning our commissions rather than purchasing them as a gentleman ought. Our officers, for the most part, are career soldiers, not gentlemen looking for a brief change of scene.”

“In other words, like my husband,” said Penelope. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t look so stony. I’m not going to go repeat it to him. And for what it’s worth, I agree with you. It’s a remarkably silly system. I wouldn’t trust Freddy to general his way out of a drawing room, much less a siege.”

Captain Reid squinted thoughtfully. “It isn’t always a disaster. There’s Lord Lake, who’s a decent strategist, and Lord Wellesley’s brother, Sir Arthur, who’s more than decent. And I imagine your husband would have no qualms about leading a charge straight into the heart of the enemy if the occasion arose.”

“Yes,” agreed Penelope, “shouting tallyho and swinging his saber all the way. He’d probably think he was out after a fox.”

“Sometimes,” said Captain Reid reflectively, “that’s all that’s needed, just making sure the men keep charging in the right direction. A fox or an enemy, it doesn’t matter which, so long as he keeps them moving forward.”

“Hmm,” said Penelope, without much interest. “But Fiske . . .”

Captain Reid frowned at a pair of men trotting their way through the Residency gates. “Blast,” he said. “They’re early.”

“So you did have an appointment!”

Captain Reid looked as though he didn’t know whether to be exasperated or amused. “Is it just me you believe to be a terminal liar, or do you harbor the same suspicions of everyone?”

“Everyone,” Penelope said promptly. “So few people have the backbone to say what they mean when they mean it.”

“I believe other people call it tact,” said Captain Reid dryly.

“In which I have already shown myself much lacking?” finished Penelope for him. “See? You do it, too. Only more obliquely.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“It was meant as such,” replied Penelope, offering back a phrase he had once used to her, by the side of the river Krishna. There was no answering flicker of recognition on Captain Reid’s face. And why should there be? It was of no matter. Tossing her head, Penelope extended a languid hand to him. “Good day, Captain Reid. Thank you for the ride.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, but he made no move to move on. Instead, he seemed to be debating something with himself. His fingers tightened fleetingly over hers. “Watch yourself with Fiske,” he said.

And then, before she could question him further, he had released her, riding at a brisk trot along the gravel path towards the Residency proper. Blast the man! Penelope considered riding after him, but she doubted it would be of any use. He would only plead the pressure of his appointment. Sulkily, she surrendered her reins to one of the grooms and allowed herself to be helped from her horse. Reid knew something about Fiske that he wasn’t telling. But what?

Ask your husband, he had advised her. Fine. She would. Looping the train of her riding habit up over one arm, Penelope stomped into the house.

“Freddy!” she bellowed.

It wasn’t the regiment proper that Henrietta had mentioned as being the problem, was it? The regiment had been a recruiting ground for gentlemen interested in the practice of polite perversions. Could perversions be polite? Impolite perversions, then. It wasn’t inconceivable that that was what Reid had known about and condemned. There was something of the Presbyterian minister about him, all stiff-faced morality. It made an interesting change.

“Freddy!” she hollered.

He wasn’t in the drawing room or the bedroom or the tiny room that did service as a book room. Following a servant’s direction, Penelope made for the back of the house, to the complex of rooms that made up the zenana quarters, although goodness only knew what Freddy would want there. According to the other wives, all the bungalows in the Residency had them, a suite of rooms designed to accommodate a bibi , or native mistress, along with the complex of companions and servants considered necessary for such an individual. “For the bachelors,” Mrs. Dalrymple had explained primly, although Penelope doubted it was only the bachelors who had made use of such an arrangement.

True to the servant’s word, she found Freddy in the corridor that connected to the old zenana quarters.

“You were looking for me?” he said, hastily drawing the door shut behind him.

“What in the world are you doing back here?” demanded Penelope, trying to peer around him. “You aren’t planning to stick me into a zenana like the Resident’s wife, are you?”