Chapter Twenty-Two

For three days, Penelope had her Eden without fig leaves. She was exhausted, dirty, and saddle sore. She couldn’t remember when she had last been so happy. She learned to skin rabbits and made an enemy of a monkey and discovered the hard way that an overripe mango was exceedingly messy to eat.

They traveled slowly, camping early for the night and spending little of it in sleep. True to their agreement, neither mentioned the end of the journey, but it was there nonetheless. It lent a heightened awareness to everything and kept them awake long after fatigue would otherwise have driven them to slumber, determined to eke out every moment given them. It was a precious, finite time and they both knew it. Leaves were greener, food spicier, the light brighter; everything clear, clean-edged, perfect, down to the last choking cloud of dust from the road. Even charred meat, product of Penelope’s unsuccessful foray into fire-top cookery, had its own peculiar savor.

As they neared the border of Berar, the real world that they had pushed aside began to crowd back in upon them. They both did their best to ignore it, but Penelope could tell it was there. It was there in the way Alex would sometimes start to say something and then move rapidly away. It was there in the controlled violence with which he would scuff out the smoldering remains of their campfire, belaboring the fragments with his boot until there was nothing left but ash. It was there in her own short bursts of temper, her impatience with a girth that wouldn’t tighten and a fire that wouldn’t kindle. Even the landscape echoed the sense of impending loss; the farther they went from Hyderabad, the more desolate their surroundings became, littered with deserted villages, burned houses, and trampled fields; legacy of the recent fighting in the area between British and Mahratta troops. By the third day, they began to come across carts with broken wheels and shattered crockery, the detritus of parties of refugees who had painstakingly picked their way south, away from the ruins of their homes. There was even a small skeleton.

Penelope, who had thought herself proof against maidenly tremors, had to avert her eyes. Pariah dogs had been at the child’s corpse. They buried it in a shallow grave, piled with stones to discourage the dogs, before moving on.

Penelope could feel reality pressing in on them. She shut her eyes and pushed back against it with both hands, desperately trying to keep it at bay.

As they rode along yet another back path, between fields that showed the recent ravages of military engagements, Alex broached one of the forbidden topics. “You never did tell me how you knew about the Marigold.” He raised an eyebrow. “Unless your hus — unless the special commission was all a pretense, and you’ve really been on the trail of the spy all this time.”

“I’m just sleeping with you to winkle out your secrets,” said Penelope kindly. “It’s what we secret agents do.”

She liked the image of herself as a secret agent. Why hadn’t she ever thought of that before?

Because she had been too busy making meaningless mischief to consider embarking on anything constructive. Besides, if she had gone to Henrietta’s brother and told him she wanted to be a spy, he probably would have sprinted in the other direction. He had been on the receiving end of one too many of her practical jokes over the years to repose any confidence in her ability to follow orders neatly.

“What have you found out?” Alex asked, amused.

“Only that you make strange snuffling noises when you sleep on your back. And you take up more than your share of the bedroll.”

“Snuffling noises?”

“You know. Like this.” Penelope did a very successful imitation of a pig with adenoidal issues. Her horse sidled at the noise and Penelope reached forward to stroke her between the ears. “There, there, darling, not you. You’re a perfect lady.”

Alex rolled his eyes in masculine disgust.

“At any rate,” said Penelope more prosaically, “I heard about the Marigold from a friend of mine. Another friend managed to get entangled in the activities of, well, a sort of club that Freddy was involved with.”

“I think I know the club you mean,” murmured Alex. There was something in his voice that made Penelope look sharply at him, but his eyes were fixed on the road ahead, his profile perfectly bland.

“Don’t tell me you’re a member, too,” said Penelope with a laugh. “That I won’t believe. But did you know a man named Arthur Wrothan?”

“I do know Wrothan,” said Alex slowly. “I’m surprised you know of him.”

“Did,” corrected Penelope. “You did know him. He’s dead.”

“I can’t say I’m sorry to hear it.”

“I’m sure you aren’t the only one,” said Penelope, adjusting the brim of her hat against the sun. “Wrothan caused a great deal of bother to some very important people. He was running a spy ring out of the Hellfire Club, using it to pass along secrets to the French.”

Alex nodded. “And that’s why you looked to Fiske. Fiske was a member of Wrothan’s group in Mysore.”

He said the last with the conviction of someone who didn’t surmise, but knew.

“For someone who wasn’t a member, you seem to know an awful lot about it,” teased Penelope.

There was no answering smile. “Their group touched upon a . . . a friend of the family.”

“A girl?” asked Penelope sharply, surprised by the sudden rush of jealousy she felt.

“Yes. It’s not a pleasant story.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Alex, if you haven’t learned by now that I’m not miss-ish, there’s no dealing with you. If you start trying to protect my tender ears, I’ll . . . well, I’ll think of something.”

“I’m sure you would. All right, then. There was a girl I knew — no ,” he elaborated. “Not in that way. She was the daughter of one of my father’s corporals and she must have been all of fourteen at the time. She looked young for her age, too, still in pigtails and pinafores. She and my sister Lizzy had made mud pies together before they became too old and grand for it.”

Penelope smiled reminiscently at the memory of some of her own mud pies. The fact that the last of them had only been last year and her mother had practically gone into a decline at the sight of her dress was entirely immaterial.

“Her situation was complicated,” Alex was saying, “by the fact that her mother had been a local woman.”

“I gather that’s not all that unusual,” said Penelope, remembering what Mr. Cleave had told her of Alex’s past.

Alex’s eyes met hers. “No,” he agreed. “Not unusual at all. But her father wasn’t an important man, or a wealthy one, and some men viewed Annie as easy pickings.”

“What does this have to do with the club?” Penelope asked, although she was beginning to have a fair idea. It gave her a slightly sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that had nothing to do with the murky water she had drunk earlier.

“Did you know that your friend Fiske has the pox?”

“No.” Penelope blinked, surprised by the seeming non sequitur. “But it doesn’t surprise me.” With Fiske’s rollicking habits, syphilis couldn’t have been far behind. She was only amazed that Freddy had managed to come through his own carousing free of disease.

“Many people believe that, er, concourse” — it was rather adorable, thought Penelope, after three days of rampant concourse, to see how he stumbled over pronouncing the word — “with a virgin will cure the French pox.”

“It’s certainly more pleasant than a mercury treatment,” said Penelope at her very worldliest.

“Except for the virgin,” pointed out Alex, and Penelope suddenly, sinkingly realized just how the pieces fit together.

Penelope’s thighs must have involuntarily tightened, because her mare chose that moment to go fussy. Calming the agitated animal gave her a respite to school her face and her thoughts.

“Was Freddy involved?”

Alex’s silence was all the answer she needed.

“Of course, he was,” she answered herself. “It would be just like him. He would have thought that she was fair game.”

Like a chambermaid or an orange seller or any one of the other categories of female that registered on the male mind merely as available flesh. Penelope hadn’t been born into that category, but she had done her best to put herself into it by her behavior. Even then, there were lines that couldn’t be crossed, at least not without severe repercussion. Like marriage. When it came down to it, no matter how murky her bloodlines or how poor her behavior, she was still a baronet’s daughter, and that meant something in the bizarre code that governed the behavior of the young rakes of the ton .

She had never realized before, in all her days of chafing at chaperonage and thumbing her nose at convention, just how great were the protections that hedged her about or how fortunate she had been to have them.

She couldn’t even imagine what it must be like, at fourteen, to be dragged into a dark cavern of a room full of men, men everywhere, men leering and pawing and shouting bawdy comments, with candles guttering and incense smoking and no one to help or protect you. To hear the horrible tearing sound of your own clothes rending and know there was no recourse. To have strange hands holding you down while a stranger pushed between your legs, brutally, without affection; all his cronies cheering him on. To know that your screams and struggles did nothing more than to excite them and that, in the end, there was nothing to do but turn one’s head and try not to cry.

“What happened to the girl?” she asked with a catch in her voice.