As the boys moved on from bubbly to the canapés, I watched as the new arrival tapped Serena casually on the shoulder, with the easy intimacy of someone who felt he had every right to do so. Curiouser and curiouser, as one of my favorite characters might say.

Serena had been so busy ignoring Nick and Pammy that she never saw him coming. She started visibly, spilling champagne in a sparkling stream down the front of her dress, droplets catching on fuzzy bits of cashmere where they glittered like sequins under the bright track lighting.

But even that couldn’t quite account for the look of distress on her face, or the way she backed away from him as though he were a poisonous serpent come to bite her. She pointedly ignored the cocktail napkin he held out to her, liquid dripping from the bottom of her glass onto the distressed wood floor as she stood staring at him from eyes that suddenly looked far too large for her thin face.

Who was he?

He looked familiar. He did. But I couldn’t place why. He wasn’t the evil ex. I should know. The evil ex had asked me out, and not, honesty compels me to add, for the sake of my personal charms. He had asked me out for the same reason he had dated and dumped Serena: in the hopes of getting closer to answers about the elusive — and potentially lucrative — Pink Carnation.

“Who is that?” I hissed, poking Colin in the arm.

“Huh?” said Colin, breaking off mid-sentence. He had been saying something about rugby. At least I assumed it was rugby. It was all gibberish to me, although his friend appeared to be agreeing heartily with whatever it was.

Fortunately, a tray of hors d’oeuvres came around and the other man — Berry? Budgy? It had been something like that — made a flying tackle for a tiny square of high-piled tuna tartare with a rosemary sprig sticking out of it, like the flag of a hostile power laying claim to a small island. It might be raw fish, but sustenance was sustenance and Budgy was obviously hungry. I could see the same maneuver being repeated all around the room by equally ravenous husbands, boyfriends, and dates, all who had been promised refreshments and served fish food.

Taking advantage of his companion’s momentary distraction, I jerked my head towards the other side of the room. “Who is that? With Serena?”

“Where?” he asked, absently rubbing his wounded arm.

I pointed.

Colin’s expression went from friendly to stony in an instant. It was a truly awe-inspiring transition.

“Damn,” he said.

That was certainly informative. “Well?” I prompted. “Who is he?”

Drawing in a long, irritated breath, Colin folded his arms across his chest. “That,” he said succinctly, “is my mother’s husband.”

Oh.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Colin grimly. “Oh.”

No wonder Serena was looking vaguely green. I only had the sketchiest knowledge of Colin’s recent family history, but from the little bits and pieces people had dropped, I had gathered that (a) Colin’s father had been diagnosed with some sort of cancer; and (b) Colin’s mother had decamped with another man, with whom she now lived in Italy.

From what I gathered, Serena had definitely been a daddy’s girl. She couldn’t have taken kindly to the immediate addition of a replacement. Especially when the replacement had to be a good decade younger.

I looked at the man standing next to Serena with renewed interest, trying to work out how old he must be in relation to Colin’s mother. She had looked awfully young in those pictures in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s albums, but even if she had been a teenage bride, she must be at least in her late forties by now, a good decade older than her second husband. No wonder Colin and Serena were so cagey about her second marriage; it must have been incredibly embarrassing having to introduce a stepfather as close in age to them as to their mother.

Not to mention that it had never been made entirely clear to me whether the second husband had made his way onto the scene before or after their father’s death. The impression I had gotten, although I couldn’t say with any authority how, was that Colin’s mother had bolted at the first hint of a lingering illness, abandoning her husband at his most vulnerable moment.

To be fair, though, Colin had never actually specified anything of the kind. That was all me reading between the lines. For all that he clearly wasn’t thrilled to see his mother’s husband in England, it sounded as though Colin had at least remained on speaking terms with his mother. When his mother had been involved in a car accident in Siena a few months ago, he had gone haring off to Italy to make sure she was okay, and I knew he had spent at least part of the Christmas holidays with her and the second husband. So the story couldn’t be that bad. Either that, or Colin had simply shrugged his shoulders, wrestled with his own demons, and taken the practical approach in coming to terms with his one remaining parent. Knowing Colin — or at least, beginning to know Colin — I could well believe that, too. If he had been the sort to hold a grudge, we wouldn’t be out together tonight.

That thought made me feel very warm and fuzzy and prepared to take a generous approach to the rest of the world.

I linked my arm through Colin’s, letting my full weight rest against his side as I whispered, “Should I go rescue Serena?”

He considered it for a moment and then shook his head. “She’s going to have to get used to speaking to him sooner or later.”

As I watched, Colin’s mother’s husband turned to say something to a man on the other side of him, bringing his face fully into view. And as he did, that elusive resemblance clicked into place.

I had seen him before, but not in the flesh. He was considerably older now, taller, more filled out in the chest and shoulder, with a deeper tan and the beginning of a hint of gray in his smooth dark hair, but it was unmistakably the same man I had seen pressed between plastic in the pages of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s photo album.

The man married to Colin’s mother was Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s grandson Jeremy.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Freddy’s hair looked obscenely golden against the swollen ruin of his face.

That wasn’t Freddy. It couldn’t be. Not that inert, bloated form, from which the stench of corruption was beginning to rise in the warmth of the October day. Freddy was — oh, Freddy was a dozen things, but none of them this.

This was someone else’s stinking flesh, not Freddy’s. Not Freddy who had always been so particular about his toilette. Even on the long voyage from England to Calcutta, he had been meticulous about bathing, using cologne to mask the deficiencies caused by a dearth of fresh water. Freddy would never have allowed his hair to go unbrushed, his features to be distorted, his flesh to decay. At any moment now, he was going to stroll up behind them, making a moue of distaste at the stinking lump of mortality in the palanquin, and say something like, Must we?

But it wasn’t Freddy’s voice Penelope heard behind her, it was Al ex’s, quietly asking, “What happened?”

“It was a snake.” Even Jasper Pinchingdale’s usual bravado was muted by the presence of death, although his formulaic hush didn’t quite mask an undertone of irritation. It was obvious that he considered it a glaring social solecism for his host to go and die on him in such an abrupt and inconsiderate manner.

“A banded krait,” oozed Fiske’s voice, too close to Penelope’s ear. “His syce found it when he went to wake poor Freddy this morning. It must have crawled into his tent with him while he was sleeping.”

“Surely someone must have heard something.” That was Alex’s voice again, coming from a very long way away, as of someone she had known long ago. “A cry. A gasp. Something.”

It was Fiske again, shedding innuendo like a snake’s scales. “Freddy preferred to set his tent a bit apart.”

Penelope heard her own voice, flat and emotionless. “He had brought his mistress with him, hadn’t he?”

There was a rustling behind her, the sound of embarrassed men shifting from foot to foot. “Lady Frederick — ,” Pinchingdale began awkwardly.

“Hadn’t he?” Penelope repeated.

It was Fiske who answered her, his voice arch. Whatever his feelings for Freddy, he was delighting in her discomfort. Fiske was the sort who never forgave a slight and Penelope had slighted him by rejecting his advances in Calcutta. Leaving aside the whole matter of marigolds. “Regardless of who else might have been — ahem — present earlier in the evening, Freddy always made sure his tent was otherwise untenanted by the time he was ready to slumber. But you would know that, wouldn’t you, Lady Frederick?”

She did. Freddy had never seen the point of continuing intimacies after sex. He preferred to remove to his own bed, where the sheets were crisp and pure and pristine.

Freddy. Freddy, Freddy, Freddy. It was all too much like him for doubt, every last, damning detail. No matter how little her eyes believed it, this thing, this thing in front of her, was what had been Freddy. There wasn’t any other Freddy to come striding out of the bushes, casually demanding her attention. Whatever there had been of him that marked him as himself was gone, leaving nothing but flesh in its wake, already dotted with decay.

The gold coins covering his eyes branded molten circles in her eyes. Penelope shut them hard, wincing against golden discs, circle after circle after circle, like a wedding ring, or a brand, burning against the undersides of her eyelids.

Groping out blindly, Penelope braced her hands against the edge of the palanquin, fighting against a sudden wave of dizziness. Against the closed lids of her eyes she could see Freddy. He was smiling at her, as he first had, all those months ago at Girdings House, his hair as glossy as his boots, his cravat a miracle of engineering, his cheeks flushed with cold, port, and that indefinable eau de rake that Penelope found more compelling than any combination of virtues. Like a cat to catnip, Henrietta had once exclaimed, half in jest, half in despair, and so it was.