Penelope briefly considered telling Alex about the note she had found and just as quickly discarded the idea. No point in raising unnecessary questions about how and where she had come upon it and why she hadn’t thought to bring it to his attention before. Of course, Penelope told herself self-righteously, that was when she hadn’t quite realized what it was. And how was she to know back then that Alex was to be trusted? It had all made perfect sense at the time.

Penelope looked up to find Alex staring at her as though she had grown a second head. “What are you?” he demanded dazedly.

Penelope positioned herself to best advantage, bosom forward, shoulders back, chin tilted. If he wanted to know, there it all was, on display.

“Exactly what I seem,” she drawled.

Alex regarded her thoughtfully, examining her face, as though taking her apart, feature by feature, until the mechanics were laid bare beneath.

“Somehow I doubt that,” he said, and Penelope had the sense that he was referring to more than just spies. But he didn’t pursue it further. “How — ,” he began, and then broke off, shaking his head. “No. Scratch that. So there really is a Marigold, then?”

“Of course,” said Penelope with great conviction, exuding superiority even though the only authority she had for it was Henrietta’s letter, which she still hadn’t managed to find.

“I had heard rumors, but it seemed . . .”

“Too silly?” Penelope laughed at the expression on his face. “I know a Gentian, a Carnation, and a short-lived Calla Lily. Nothing is too silly. It’s all the notices in the paper. Ever since the success of that Scarlet Pimpernel fellow years and years ago, they all play up for the reviews, tossing flowers about in the hopes of getting into the illustrated papers. You’d be amazed what people will get up to.”

“Including your friend Fiske?” said Alex, bringing them doggedly back to the matter at hand.

“Not my friend,” corrected Penelope. “Freddy’s. I had thought — well, no need to get into that, but let’s just say I had almost decided to absolve him, but his reaction to a casual little mention of marigolds was decidedly damning.”

“Casual?”

“Well, maybe not that casual,” Penelope admitted. “But I certainly got a reaction. He nearly toppled over.”

Alex looked frowningly at her. “Don’t you think a real Marigold — if there were one — would have better sense than to react so violently to the mention of his name?”

“In general, perhaps. But I caught him off guard,” said Penelope smugly. “He certainly didn’t expect anything of the kind from me . In Fiske’s eyes, I was nothing more than a . . . a walking set of bosoms. He certainly won’t make that mistake again.”

“That may not be a good thing,” murmured Alex, scrupulously avoiding staring at her chest. “You were probably safer when he thought of you, er, that way.”

Penelope brushed that aside, well away on her own train of thought. “It does all make sense, when you think about it. He decided to end the danger by ending me. But he couldn’t be seen murdering his best friend’s wife.”

“Of course not,” Alex said. “I could see where that would be difficult for him.”

“Not at all good ton ,” agreed Penelope caustically. “So he had to find a way to eliminate me that would look like an accident. Hence, the snake.”

Penelope marveled at her own cleverness. It was a perfectly beautiful theory. Even the Pink Carnation couldn’t have done better.

Her stubborn companion, on the other hand, didn’t seem nearly as impressed. “Would he have had time?”

“Of course!” said Penelope. “He left the party at least a full hour before I did, maybe more. How long can it take to plant one little cobra?”

“Not so little,” said Alex soberly, his gaze flicking to the snake corpse still cluttering up a portion of Penelope’s bedroom floor.

Penelope had to admit that the sight of it did serve as a slight check on her high spirits. But it was no matter. Forewarned was forearmed and all that. Fiske was a measly little toad and she could certainly deal with him .

“One of us should search his room,” she said with great decision. “He’ll be away all this next week, so it should be easy enough.” At Alex’s quizzical look she elaborated. “He and Freddy are going to Berar. For the hunting.”

The mention of Berar acted on Alex as Marigold had on Fiske. “Where are they going?” he demanded, looming over her in a way that made her tilt her head back at a very uncomfortable angle.

“To Berar. Oh, do sit down! You’re making me dizzy, hovering like that.”

Alex leaned over her, disregarding her instructions about looming. “Are you sure he said Berar?” he demanded.

“Quite sure,” said Penelope, lifting her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn. “The point is that he’ll be gone.”

Alex looked at her tight-lipped. “The point is that he’ll be in Berar.” After a moment, he said abruptly, “Have you heard of the lost treasure of Berar?”

“It sounds like a bedtime story,” Penelope commented, leaning sinuously back against the pillows. She looked up at him from her supine position. “I don’t suppose you’re planning to come to bed and tell me.”

Clasping his hands behind his back, Alex wandered over to the window. “During the siege of Gawilighur last year,” he said, as much to himself as her, “a vast treasure belonging to the Rajah of Berar mysteriously disappeared.”

“Into someone’s pockets, no doubt,” volunteered Penelope from the bed. “There’s nothing mysterious about that.”

Alex turned to face her. “Yes, but whose?” he said spiritedly, and Penelope thought how very oddly domestic it was, he by the window, she in the bed, chatting like an old married couple. As she and Freddy never had. “Someone claiming to be called the Marigold has been going around, offering people chunks of that lost treasure in exchange for their support in a rising against the English.”

“The machine you have put together,” murmured Penelope.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Penelope, lifting a languid hand from the coverlet. “Just something I read somewhere. Go on.”

Alex stopped by the edge of the bed. “There’s really no ‘on’ to go. That’s it. If your Fiske — ”

“Not my Fiske.”

“ — is the Marigold, and the gold of Berar is still in Berar . . .” Penelope pushed herself up to a sitting position. “He’s going to fetch the gold! To make good on those payments and set the wheels of his machine in motion.”

Alex sat down again on the edge of the bed. “So it would seem.”

Leaning forward, Penelope grasped his upper arm. “Then we have to follow him.”

“That would — We?”

“We,” repeated Penelope firmly. “Goodness only knows what a botch you would make of it without me.”

“Can we fight about this in the morning?” suggested Alex mildly, starting to rise. “It is very late.”

Grabbing him by the hand, Penelope tugged him back down. After years of driving her own pair in the Park, her arm muscles were in peak condition. Alex subsided onto the coverlet with a startled oomph . “And let you sneak out while I’m still asleep. Oh, no, no, no.” He had the good grace to look guilty, confirming that he had been planning to do precisely that. The man couldn’t lie to save his life. All the more reason he needed her along on this journey. “I’m going with you.”

Alex cocked an eyebrow, but he didn’t make the mistake of trying to get away again. “Would it be very trite to say, no, you’re not?”

“Ridiculously trite. And completely pointless.”

“It’s a long ride over rough terrain.”

“We’ve traveled over rough terrain together before.”

“Yes — with more than fifty servants, a cook, and a separate dining tent! I’ll be sleeping rough, in the fields most likely and taking only what can fit into my saddlebags.”

“I’m not afraid of privation.”

“You’ve never experienced it.”

There was too much truth in that for Penelope’s comfort, but she didn’t let that daunt her. “You’re wasting time,” she said instead. “If I don’t go with you, I’ll go without you. Which would you prefer?”

“I won’t be bringing my groom,” he said.

Penelope’s amber eyes slanted up at him. “Good. Then I shan’t bring mine either.”

Chapter Twenty

When he arrived at the main gate, Penelope was waiting for him.

In her dark blue habit, she looked like a smudge against the landscape, a dark splotch against the pale stone of the walls. Not yet dawn, the sky was dark, the air still held its nighttime chill, and the sentries in their box were little more than smudges themselves, patently uninterested in the appearance of anyone whose purpose was not to relieve them from their posts.

Alex checked when he saw Penelope waiting for him, fighting a craven desire to turn right around and ride out the back way.

They had never resolved the question of her presence, at least, not to their mutual satisfaction. As far as Alex was concerned, he was going to Berar alone. He had said so. Repeatedly. And when that failed, he had resorted to a knave’s trick; he had told her he planned to leave at dawn. So here he was in the predawn dark, his saddlebags packed and his provisions ready, and here was she.

It was too bloody late for a fight. Or did he mean too early? He had never been to bed. He assumed she hadn’t either. Even so, there was nothing fatigued about her straight-spined stance as she sat her horse, waiting for him with the alert composure of a seasoned general watching for an enemy attack.

Eschewing the coward’s way out, Alex spurred forward. Penelope calmly clucked her own mount into motion, moving from her vantage point by the side of the gate to meet him in the open space beyond.