She looked at her husband, golden and arrogant in the lantern light, and felt a familiar surge of irritation. He was so sure of himself, so bloody sure.

Fine, then, thought Penelope, with a fine fit of Irish temper. Let him make his own bed and lie on it. With whomever he pleased.

“Enjoy,” she said flippantly. “Do try to shoot the birds and not yourself.”

She didn’t ask where he intended to sleep. She found that she didn’t want to know.

She stood on the balcony for a long time, the night breeze making her skin prickle beneath the fine sheen of nervous sweat that had formed during her fight with Freddy. In the distance, the blackbuck roamed through the Resident’s preserve while mynah birds called to one another through the scented trees. She had been left in possession of the field, but she had lost the battle.

Penelope’s ungloved hands tightened around the balustrade. Who was she fooling? It was a battle she had never had the slightest chance of winning. She had thought, for a time, that she might bind Freddy to her by sheer force of fascination — but she obviously hadn’t been fascinating enough. In this setting, she felt stunningly provincial, in a way she had never felt in London or Bath, too gangly in her form, too garish in her coloring, too blunt in her speech. You’re worth ten of him, Captain Reid had said. Out of pity, Penelope reminded herself. He hadn’t wanted her either. At least, not that way.

By the time Penelope returned to the drawing room, Mrs. Ure had eaten all the sweetmeats and dragged herself home to bed; the crowd at the card table had flung in their hands, settled their debts, and gone home; and all the rest had evaporated away to their own beds or other pursuits. Only the Resident and Captain Reid remained, discussing some matter of business at the deserted card table.

Penelope heard the words “guns” and “missing” before the Resident noted her presence and rose hastily from the table.

“Lady Frederick! I had thought you had gone home.”

“I was enjoying the view from your balcony.” How ironic that after her long series of indiscretions on balconies, her experience on this one should be so entirely chaste. It was decidedly déclassé to be caught lurking on balconies with one’s own husband or, even worse, by oneself.

The two men exchanged a look.

“If you will excuse me,” said Captain Reid, to his superior.

“Of course.” The Resident nodded his thanks, and before Penelope could protest that she didn’t appreciate being passed around like a parcel, he gave her a perfunctory smile and a “Good night, Lady Frederick,” leaving her alone with Captain Reid.

They faced each other across the debris of the night’s entertainment, the guttering candles, the dropped sweetmeats, the spilled wine.

“There was no need for you to offer to see me home,” Penelope said belligerently. “No one appointed you my guardian.”

“I’m not offering as a guardian,” he said tiredly, and Penelope noticed that, unlike the other men, he didn’t seem to have been drinking. It was past three in the morning and he would be up and riding by six. If she hadn’t been fool enough to proposition him, she would be riding with him. “I’m offering as a friend.”

“Oh.” For once in her life, Penelope found herself entirely at a loss for words. “Thank you.” The words felt foreign to her tongue. She didn’t say them often.

“No need for thanks,” he said practically. “It isn’t far.”

Maybe not in yards, but Penelope felt as though she had just gone a much longer distance than that. Her head hurt too much to parse it out. She was more grateful for the escort than she cared to admit. The Resident, with a fine sense for self-preservation, had placed Freddy in the bungalow farthest from the Residency proper. Without her gloves and shawl, Penelope felt oddly bare. Considering the depth of her bodice, it was absurd to feel quite so unclothed just from the lack of a little kid leather on her hands, but she did.

It made her feel very young and very unsure of herself, which was all, she told herself, pure bollocks. She hadn’t been unsure of herself when she was young, and now that she was an old, married matron, she ought to be even less so.

“Did you ever find your missing guns?” she asked, just to say something.

“My — ? Oh.” Whatever Captain Reid had been thinking about in the moonlight, it had been just as absorbing, and not entirely pleasant. He shook his head as though to clear it. “No. No, we haven’t.” He grimaced. “It’s something of a sticky situation, with everyone swearing right and left that he’s done what he was supposed to do.” They paused within striking distance of her bungalow. “You should be all right from here.”

The old Penelope would have cast him her sultriest look and asked mockingly if he didn’t consider himself man enough to see her to her door.

The strange, new Penelope who appeared to have replaced her didn’t do anything of the kind. She just took a step back, nodded her head once, and said stiffly, “Thank you.” Like a gawky schoolgirl, she jerked her head towards the front of the house. “Will I — see you tomorrow morning?”

It was too dark to make out his expression, but there was something comforting about the way he stood there, steady and solid.

“I’ll be where I always am,” he said.

Penelope drew in a deep breath, feeling more herself again. She would have missed her morning exercise, that was all.

“You’d better get some sleep then, hadn’t you?” she tossed over her shoulder, and scrambled up the steps to the veranda.

It felt good to get the last word. It felt even better to know that Captain Reid was still standing there, watching her, making sure she got safely home. Such as it was.

Someone had considerately left a single candle burning in the bedchamber, sending wobbly shadows undulating across the untouched bedclothes. There were no piles of clothes on the floor, no husband sprawled snoring across the center of the bed. True to his word, Freddy had taken himself off to bed elsewhere.

Penelope couldn’t bring herself to care.

Contorting her arms around her back to try to reach the tiny row of pearl buttons at the back of her dress, Penelope tried to reclaim the hurt and indignation she had felt earlier in the evening, but the closest she could come was a sense of mild exasperation, with herself as well as Freddy, and an overwhelming relief that he would be away for at least a fortnight.

A fortnight of early morning rides.

With an impatient tug, Penelope gave up on the buttons and yanked the dress up over her head. A pearl button skittered across the floor. It wasn’t a real pearl anyway, so it was no great loss. There were dozens of others like it, rather like Freddy. Penelope carelessly tossed the dress into a corner of the room and turned her attention to the pins in her hair. Drawing out the anchoring pin, she shook her hair free, enjoying the sound of its rustling around her shoulders — and heard an answering rustle from the side of the room.

Frowning, Penelope peered into the wavy surface of the mirror, where the satiny fabric of her discarded dress had begun to ripple, like moonlight on the water. Penelope stilled in the act of reaching for the clasp of her necklace. She really hadn’t had that much to drink.

Penelope put out a hand to steady the mirror, but the dress continued to rustle, undulating in waves on the floor. A forked tongue flicked out from beneath the embroidered hem.

In the wavering light of the single candle, a cobra wiggled itself free of the folds of satin and began coiling upwards on its speckled tail, its beady eyes fixed on Penelope.

Chapter Eighteen

In the mirror, the snake’s obsidian eyes fixed on Penelope, its pointed tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.

Something about the beady eyes in that wrinkled face, with the hood arching to either side reminded her of the malevolent, ruined face of Mir Alam, the man even a snake wouldn’t bite.

Too bad it wasn’t Mir Alam in the room instead of her. The two reptiles could have had a reunion.

Penelope held herself very still, rather hoping that the snake might take her for a piece of furniture, of no more interest than the post on the bed or the legs of the chair. It was not, she feared, the sort of creature with whom one could come to an amiable arrangement. The snake blocked both the door to the veranda and the door to the hall. She would have to run directly across its path either way and she was willing to wager it could strike faster than she could run.

What did one do about a cobra? Not scream or run or flail, she knew that much. Not that there was any danger of that. Her body had frozen out of sheer instinct and seemed to be intent on turning into a pillar of salt on the spot. Did snakes eat salt? Penelope dismissed that thought as immaterial. What she needed was a scythe, a sword, even a poker or a shovel. But there was nothing of the kind, not even one of Freddy’s ivory-handled canes. The servants were all asleep. There would be no one to hear her if she screamed for help. No one except the snake, of course, who was uncoiling in her direction with a slow determination that Penelope found distinctly unnerving.

Freddy kept a pistol in the dresser drawer.

Penelope’s fingers tingled with nervous energy. It wasn’t much, but it was a chance. If only he had left it where it was supposed to be. It would be just like Freddy to flounce off on a whim, leaving her alone with a cobra. Please, God, Penelope thought, let him not have taken the pistol with him.

Keeping her eyes on the creature in the mirror, Penelope felt blindly for the drawer handle, wincing at the screeching noise the drawer made as she drew it open. Venom dripped off the snake’s fangs, or perhaps that was just the sweat beading off her brow, clouding her vision. Her shift clung damply to her chest as she inched her fingers forward, trying to keep her back as painfully still as any dowager might demand. She could feel the drops of sweat trickling down her spine. Each seemed to take an eternity to travel its way down, vertebra by vertebra, each drop assuming mammoth proportions.