Penelope emitted a squeaking noise.

She hadn’t meant to. It just came out, like the last bubbles on the deck of a sinking ship.

An expression of extreme alarm crossed Freddy’s face. She could see his eyes shift back and forth, mark the exact moment he had spotted her, standing at the back of the room. He stumbled violently back, sending his houri tumbling flat on her rump in a decidedly indelicate position.

Not quite so indelicate as his. The flap of his breeches dangled open, like a bad joke in a third-rate farce.

“Um, Pen.” Freddy pinned a wobbly smile on his face. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Chapter Fifteen

“I don’t expect you did,” said Penelope distantly. “You might at least have secured the screens.”

She looked contemptuously at the woman on the floor, who returned the expression with interest, no mean feat while lying entirely unclothed on one’s back. But, then, thought Penelope with freezing scorn, she had probably had some practice at that.

“Um.” Freddy had the grace to turn a deeper color of red, though he still contrived to look more affronted than affronting. Ignoring the woman at his feet, he cast Penelope a reproachful look. “Shouldn’t you be watching the mummers?”

“Why should I, when there’s such entertainment to be had here?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, in a cold, hard voice, “I want her out.”

It was unclear how much English the courtesan understood, but she certainly understood that. Drawing a length of cloth over her nakedness, she sat back on her heels with the expression of one prepared to engage in a lengthy spot of squatter’s rights.

“Now, Pen — ” Freddy held out a conciliatory hand, the same hand that had, a moment before, been supporting some of the more rounded parts of the other woman’s anatomy.

Penelope looked at it with an expression of pure loathing. “I want her out. Out now .”

Freddy made a shooing motion — not to his mistress, to Penelope. “Let’s discuss this outside, shall we?” he said hopefully, shoving his shirt into his breeches as he spoke. Penelope was surprised he knew how. She had only ever seen him remove clothing, usually in conditions of extreme haste. Not that he always removed all his clothing. Or hers. Sometimes . . .

Penelope yanked back her wandering thoughts. What did it matter? It wasn’t as though she could stake her claim by a catalogue of the quantity and variety of his lovemaking. It wasn’t a matter of earning one’s position, so many tumbles to security.

Letting herself be herded through the screen, she said, in a tight voice, “You can’t install a mistress in the same house as your wife. It’s in poor taste, if nothing else.”

“She’s not a mistress,” countered Freddy, with a bright-eyed enthusiasm that might have been either inspiration or afterglow. “She’s a bibi .”

“Calling it by another language,” said Penelope, through clenched teeth, “does not render it any less offensive. I should have your balls for this. Oh, don’t look so shocked. We both know you have them. And now,” she said, flinging an arm in the direction of the screen, “so does she . And why,” she continued, her voice rising dangerously, “am I the one standing outside like a . . . like a beggar, while that strumpet gets to lounge about inside?”

Looking nervously over his shoulder, Freddy made soothing, hushing noises, as though she were a horse who had just balked at a fence. “Don’t cut up rough, old girl. This is just how it’s done out here.”

“Not in my house, it’s not,” Penelope said militantly.

“Your house?”

“Don’t,” warned Penelope. “Not when you’ve already spent my dowry. Possibly on drabs like her. How many have there been, Freddy? None on the boat, I suppose. You would have had to ship them in on little dinghies and that wouldn’t have been terribly convenient. But in Calcutta, there were all those nights you were playing cards with Fiske. What were you really playing at, Freddy?”

It had been a bolt in the dark. Penelope hadn’t expected confirmation until she got it, in the shifting of his eyes from hers, the working of his mouth as he tried to contrive a creditable explanation.

Penelope’s stomach contracted as though she had been punched. Her tongue felt too thick for her mouth; she could feel it gagging her.

Freddy’s hands moved in quick, impatient gestures as he worked himself into a soothing state of self-righteous indignation. “This is absurd,” he blustered. “Why are we fighting about this? I’m married to you, however it came about. Anyone else is only a — ”

“Diversion?” supplied Penelope, forcing her too-heavy tongue to move.

“Precisely,” he said, nodding emphatically, pleased that she understood so well. “It isn’t that you aren’t, well, satisfactory, old thing — ”

“Much obliged, I’m sure,” said Penelope, white-lipped.

“ — but a man does need a little variety. It’s like having toast for breakfast every morning.” Freddy warmed to his theme. “Toast is all very well and good, perfectly filling and all that, but sometimes you want a nice, big piece of ham.”

“Which one of us is the toast?” asked Penelope. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. Next I suppose you’ll be wanting marmalade, too.”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” said Freddy in a long-suffering way.

Penelope’s voice was drier than burnt toast. “I know. Now that you’ve taken up the zenana, where am I to put my concubine?”

Freddy mustered a very credible “ha-ha,” although he was still clearly suffering from the aftereffects of having been discovered in fla grante delicto.

“What makes you think I’m joking?”

Freddy delivered a stinging swat to her backside, a gesture with him that passed for affection. Lust involved other parts of the anatomy. And apparently other women, as well. “You’re a good sort, all in all, Pen. You know how the game is played.”

Penelope stood stiff and unresponsive as he slung an arm around her shoulders in a quick, careless hug, a curiously sexless gesture, the embrace of a comrade, not a lover. A lie, like everything else. They had never been comrades, only lovers. And now not even that. She could smell the scent of that woman on him, all flowers and musk, warm skin and sex.

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “I do.”

If Freddy had been a wiser man, he would have been very, very afraid.

Not being a wiser man, Freddy let out his breath in a gusty sigh of relief.

“I’ll buy you some emeralds,” he promised. “They’ll look smashing with your hair. What do you say to that?”

“Smashing,” Penelope echoed. “What a splendid arrangement for me — she gets all the work, and I get all the pay.”

Freddy had the sense to look wary, as though he intuited that he had been insulted, but wasn’t quite sure how and didn’t like to inquire. “Quite so, quite so,” he said with forced heartiness.

Gathering the rags of her dignity about her, Penelope took a step out of reach, towards the opening in the shrubbery through which she had entered a lifetime before.

“Don’t be too long, will you, darling?” she said. “Fiske and that lot are looking for you. And we must keep up appearances, mustn’t we?”

If Freddy recognized that her voice was several degrees colder than Norfolk in winter, he gave no sign. “I told Mother I could have done worse than to marry you,” he said cheerfully.

High praise, indeed.

Penelope didn’t wait to see where he went. She didn’t need to. He had doubtless returned to his mistress — to pick up where he had left off? Or to apologize to her for his shrew of a wife, soothing her wounded feelings with promises of jewelry. What would he offer her? Sapphires? Rubies? Or would he buy them both emeralds, and get a discount for the bulk purchase, two women for the price of one? Penelope found she was shaking so hard she could hardly walk, shaking as though she had contracted a chill, even though there was a fine sheen of sweat on her skin, despite the pleasant cool of the evening air.

The worst of it was that there was nothing she could do. Oh, she supposed she could cry a headache, but why give Freddy the satisfaction? Penelope plucked with restless fingers at the fabric of her dress as she walked. She would have to go back and flutter her lashes and hang on Freddy’s arm as though nothing at all were out of the ordinary, as if he hadn’t delivered the crushing insult of installing a mistress under the same roof as his wife. The irregular circumstances of their marriage provided Freddy all the license he needed to do whatever he liked. “But I married you,” he would say if she complained, and all the triple-chinned tabbies scattered in Residencies across India would agree with him that it was more than she had deserved. She was hoist by her own petard, whatever a petard might be.

The massive joke of it all was that nothing had happened on that fatal Twelfth Night nine months ago. Well, not precisely nothing. But Freddy certainly hadn’t gotten what he’d been so ardently angling for. There had been kisses in plenty, kisses and illicit caresses, and fumbling at the hem of her petticoat that she had thwarted with a wiggle and a throaty laugh. She had looked laughing at the obvious evidence of desire outlined against the tight knit of his breeches, slipping away with a kiss and a promise — well, the promise of a promise. Just enough to keep him intrigued. She had left him cursing behind her, alternately cursing and pleading, hot for another assignation and not at all in possession of what he had come for.

But that didn’t matter, did it? It wasn’t what had happened or hadn’t happened that mattered; the mere fact of her having been known to be inside a bedroom with him had been enough to damn her. She was used goods and Freddy was accounted a gentleman for condescending to marry her once he had already sampled the wares.