“No cat fights, eh?” Fiske looked as though the prospect rather pleased him. “Oh well. The dusky beauty appears to have cleared out, as far as I can tell.”

Alex nodded stiffly. He would have to check for himself, of course. “Good.” And, then, just to make sure he had a plausible reason for his concern, “We don’t want any discredit to redound to the Residency from this affair.”

“No,” said Fiske thoughtfully. “One wouldn’t want to embarrass oneself with any of one’s . . . affairs.”

Before Alex could react, the other man raised a languid hand and cantered forward to reclaim his place beside the ominously silent form of Lord Frederick’s widow.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“And then old Freddy tripped over the hem of his robe, and pitched right into the ceremonial brew!”

Fiske giggled as his latest how-I-remember-Freddy story bar reled to a rollicking close. Pinchingdale obliged with a hee-haw. Even the new widow permitted herself a small, ironic smile, directed into the campfire, as though she could see her husband reflected in the flames, facedown in a butt of mead, sputtering, bare shins thrashing in the air.

Alex sat on the edge of the group, near them but not part of them. Their first night on the road had turned into an informal wake for Lord Frederick Staines, each man vying to tell more outrageous stories of the dead man’s exploits: his fearlessness on the hunt; his successes on the field of battle (more sartorial than military if the stories were anything to go by); his popularity with the ladies, his clubs, his friends, his family, his tailor.

It was a world foreign to Alex, but not to Penelope. She didn’t so much as blink at the introduction of names like Badger Throckhurst. Apparently, she knew Badger. He had had a mishap with a punch bowl and Freddy — Lord Frederick — had made money off it on some sort of long-standing wager in one of the umpteen London clubs to which he belonged, the names of which meant nothing to Alex, but a great deal to Fiske and Pinchingdale, who belonged to them, too. It was Penelope who had contributed that story, her voice rusty from disuse and rough with brandy, drunk neat from Fiske’s flask.

This was good for her, Alex knew. Good for her to talk about her husband’s life, to remember him as he had been, with other people who had known him and, more importantly, liked him. Under the influence of the fire and the brandy and the stories, the pasty color had left her cheeks. There was still an odd fragility about her, as though she were held together by a brace of pins that might drop out at any moment, but a muted version of her old sarcasm had replaced the stony calm in which she had ridden all afternoon.

Except when it came to Alex. The few times he had ventured a comment, the blankness had returned to her eyes and she had looked right through him, as though he weren’t there.

He stopped trying after the first few times.

This was what she needed, he told himself. It was only natural for her to look to her husband’s memory, to try to come to terms with his death. She might not have loved her husband, but he had been her husband, and his death had come as a shock. She needed time to come to terms with it. It shouldn’t matter who was comforting her, so long as she was comforted.

That was his official line. In truth, he gritted his teeth every time Fiske opened his mouth and he had to swallow a scowl every time the loathsome man brought a smile, no matter how anemic, to Penelope’s lips. He squirmed every time she reached to take the flask from Fiske’s hands, her lips touching where Fiske’s lips had touched.

Alex was supposed to be the one comforting her, not Fiske. Especially not Fiske, the very man who might be the cause of her husband’s death. It was bloody ridiculous, even if there had been no other considerations involved. Alex was supposed to be the one she turned to in her time of need, the one she looked to across the campfire, the one from whose flask she drank. All right, so he didn’t have a flask. It was the idea of it that counted.

How in the hell did his bloody father do it? Women fell for the old Colonel right, left, and center, forsaking home and hearth just for a chance at his smiles. And here he was, with just one woman in the whole wide world whom he wanted, and for all the attention she paid him, he might as well have been another log on the fire, here today, gone tomorrow. Disposable.

He might try to salvage his hopes by putting it down to shock and grief, but Fiske’s casual reminiscences opened a whole vista of problems Alex had been too blinded to consider. Yes, Penelope was finally free. But free to what? This world Fiske evoked, this world of restricted clubs and even more restricted parties; this was Penelope’s real world, her real home, only a six-month voyage away. With Lord Frederick gone, what reason did she have to stay in India?

Alex knew what he wanted the reason to be.

He also knew how pitifully unlikely it was. In all their gilded days together, there had never been any talk of love.

The important thing, Alex reminded himself, was keeping Penelope safe. He might not be able to make her love him, but he could keep her alive. It was something, at least. Pathetic, but something.

He waited until both the fire and the conversation had died down, tongues slowed with drink and fatigue, heads and eyelids beginning to droop. Penelope slowly rose from her seat, stretching joints made stiff with sitting.

Alex jumped into the waiting silence before she could begin the general exodus to bed.

“Lady Frederick,” he said, doing his best to sound casual, formal, distant, nothing more than a representative of the Residency that had once housed her husband. “I wondered if I might have a quick word.”

“I am tired,” she said, stony-faced, looking past Alex rather than at him. “I believe I shall go to bed.”

“It is rather important.” Alex tried to keep the frustration he felt out of his voice. He wanted to grab her by the arm, shake her, make her look him in the eye. This wasn’t about them, he told himself. It was about Penelope and her safety. It was for her, not for him.

Fiske unfolded himself from his place by the fire, raising a languid arm to block Alex’s path. “The lady said she was tired, Reid.”

Since when had Fiske appointed himself Penelope’s protector? The gall of it all set Alex’s teeth on edge.

“My hearing is still perfectly good,” he said tightly, watching Penelope slip away from him behind the barrier of Fiske’s arm. He didn’t like where they had set up her tent. It was too far on the edge of the camp, too easy for an assassin to access.

“If your hearing is not at fault, it must be the subtleties of civilized conversation that you miss,” oozed Fiske.

Civilized? This was the man who had brutalized a fourteen-year-old in a mock pagan ceremony for the sheer depravity of it, and he had the nerve to call Alex uncivilized? Alex burned with important anger as he looked at Fiske’s smug, overbred face, lips peeled back from crooked teeth in a lazy smile.

It was far too tempting to knock those teeth loose from that smug smile, but that was just what Fiske wanted. He wanted Alex to lose his temper. The moment he attacked Fiske, Fiske would have him up on charges faster than he could blink.

Alex swallowed his simmering anger and forced himself to speak levelly. “I simply wanted to make certain that we have no further incidents with snakes on this journey,” he said shortly.

Fiske’s face was the picture of innocence. “Why should you think we might?”

Alex leveled a long, assessing look at his unwanted traveling companion. “I find that reptiles tend to travel in packs.”

Abandoning the consuming task of sniffing his brandy, Jasper Pinchingdale lifted his curly head in alarm. “Do they?”

He clearly hadn’t registered the insult to himself. It was better that way.

“I doubt we need to worry,” said Fiske carelessly. “So long as all the usual precautions are taken.”

Alex smiled without humor. “You can be assured that I intend to see that they are. Good night.”

It was an empty threat. Short of detailing one of the bearers to stand watch by Penelope’s tent at night — which he had already done — there was very little he could actually do. The men he had spoken to in the cavalcade, Residency employees all, had informed him that Nur Bai had indeed left the caravan, breaking off with her own retainers and with the proclaimed intent of carrying on to Mir Alam’s hunting lodge in Berar. That didn’t mean she actually had. Nor would it have prevented her from leaving half a dozen of her creatures scattered among the traveling circus that made up the camp. With hundreds of servants and bearers, it was nearly impossible to evaluate all the inhabitants.

All Alex could do was make sure Penelope was on her guard.

The placement of her tent might be a danger, but it was also a boon. He waited until Pinchingdale and Fiske were safely immured in their own canvas constructions before slipping over to the edge of the encampment. He knew she was awake. A candle burned within, casting her silhouette against the canvas. She didn’t seem to be undressing or reading or doing much of anything at all. She simply sat, her head bowed over her folded hands, pausing, from time to time, to take a long swig from the flask she had coolly walked off with when leaving the fire. Fiske’s flask. Alex might have worried about poison, but that Fiske had drunk from it, too. No man poisoned his own well.

Feeling like an idiot slinking through the shadows, Alex fell to his knees beside the tent flap, angled so that the bulk of it hid his body from the rest of the camp.