“You left a cobra in Lady Frederick’s room,” said Alex, in a voice so low and deadly that even Penelope shivered at it.

“Not me,” said Cleave hastily. “Mehdi Yar. The groom. He did it. And it was never meant for you,” he added, turning anxiously towards Penelope. “It was meant for Lord Frederick. It never occurred to me that — ”

“We might share a bed?” Penelope said dulcetly.

Cleave blushed.

Penelope drew in a shuddering breath as a host of seemingly unrelated incidents tumbled into place. “And when that didn’t work,” she said, watching him closely, “you tried again. On the road to Berar. You knew no one would connect you with it, because you weren’t there. That was the groom again, wasn’t it?”

Cleave nodded.

“You planted him in our household in Calcutta,” recalled Penelope. “Even then you were planning this. But why? Why kill Freddy?”

“I didn’t really want to kill him,” said Cleave hopefully.

“Fine way you have of showing it,” said Alex, and Penelope knew that he was remembering, as she was, a certain cut girth.

Cleave swallowed hard. “It was Fiske, you see. He said he’d told Staines. No one would have believed Fiske, miserable little opium eater that he was, but Staines? He was the son of an earl. Who wouldn’t believe him over me?”

“Believe what?” Alex’s voice was like granite.

Penelope was beginning to feel slightly sick to her stomach. She couldn’t have said quite why. It might have been the way Guignon was enthusiastically reducing his pastry to pulp. Or it might have been the half-eager, half-sheepish expression on Cleave’s face as he tried to explain why he had systematically set out to murder her husband. The incongruous boyishness of it made Penelope’s stomach turn.

“He had found out about — well, that I — you know.”

“No,” said Alex in a deadly tone, “I don’t know. Would you care to enlighten us?”

“That I was selling secrets,” Cleave blurted out. “Nothing dangerous,” he added defensively. “Just little things that wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

The Frenchman snorted.

Penelope entirely concurred.

“Little things,” repeated Alex flatly.

“What else was I to do?” demanded Cleave shrilly. “You know what the East India Company’s idea of pay is like.”

“The rest of us manage somehow. Without resorting to treason.” Alex’s voice was drier than dust.

Cleave bristled. “You don’t know what it is to have a sick mother to support.”

“No, only four siblings,” murmured Alex, but Cleave didn’t seem to hear him.

“Her medicines are so dear. And the doctor’s visits and the carriage — she can’t be expected to walk — and the paid companion. It just goes on and on and all of it costs money. Money! Do you know how much my father left me? Nothing. Just his sword and his name — and only one of those was salable,” he added bitterly. “He died a hero’s death, fighting for the Company, and what did the Company ever give us in return?”

“A job,” said Alex softly. “A livelihood.”

Cleave laughed bitterly, his pleasant features twisted. “Some livelihood. India broke my mother’s health and took my father’s life. I was owed something. She was owed something.”

“So you decided to take it,” prompted Alex.

In the corner, the Frenchman’s jaws opened in an earsplitting yawn. True confessions were evidently not his idea of entertainment.

“Fiske saw me.” Cleave looked anxiously from side to side as though expecting to find Fiske there, watching. “He saw me passing information to Wrothan, damn him. He started demanding payment in return for silence. Just little amounts at first, but it added up over time. I’d meant to get out, to stop doing it, but I had to get in deeper, just to keep making Fiske’s payments. And then — ” He drew a shuddering breath.

“Then they told me about the treasure of Berar. I had my way out. If I could only get my hands on the treasure, I would be free.”

“And the little matter of the planned rebellion?”

Cleave seemed to have forgotten the Frenchman’s presence. He spoke only to Alex, his mild face more animated than Penelope had ever seen it. “That was the genius of it! It never had to happen. Without the gold, the princes would never rise. And I — I would have the gold. I was even going to give the bulk of it over to the government and claim I’d found it,” he added with pathetic eagerness. “I would have been rewarded — a hero! Don’t you see? All I have to do is get my hands on the gold and it will all come about.”

Guignon looked up from trimming his fingernails with a pastry knife. “There is no gold.”

“Jewels, then. Treasure. What does it matter? It’s all the same thing.”

Simply, as though to a very slow student, Guignon said, “There is no treasure.”

Cleave’s face was a study in incomprehension. “No — what?”

“No treasure,” repeated Guignon, without the slightest bit of hesitation. “There never was any.” He gave a Gallic shrug. “Oh, there might well be a lost treasure of Berar, but we never had it. It was just a carrot, to dangle before the princes, like mules, you see? The mule trots faster for the promise of reward.”

Cleave’s face drained of all color. He swayed slightly, catching on to the back of a packing crate to steady himself. “You mean it was all for nothing. All of it. Nothing.”

“Not nothing,” said Guignon genially. “It was all for a very good cause.”

His words brought back the memory of a piece of paper found lying on the pavement above, a paper that Cleave must have crafted in his persona as Marigold. The French had been poor, but the revolutionary rhetoric had been remarkably fluent.

“‘And the tree of Liberty shall blossom again in the courtyards of the East ,’” Penelope quoted softly.

“Precisely,” said Guignon, with great satisfaction. “What is a little lie to a grand end?”

In substance, it wasn’t all that different from the rationalization for his own actions Cleave had expressed only moments before. But something pushed him over the edge. It might have been his own words quoted back at him. It might have been the Frenchman’s air of smug superiority. It might have been the brioche crumbs that landed square in one eye. Whatever it was, Cleave snapped.

“You thrice-damned, frog-eating bastard!” he breathed out through his teeth, and snatched up one of the muskets, barrel first.

A look of mild apprehension appeared on Guignon’s epicene face, but before it could ripple down his layers of fat into movement, it was too late. Cleave swung the musket like a mallet.

The stock connected with Guignon’s head with a sickening crunch that made Penelope jump back a step. Penelope went careening into Alex, who was attempting to make a grab for Cleave. Alex staggered sideways as Penelope stumbled against him, putting out a hand to keep them both from falling together off an inconveniently placed keg of ammunition. The rim of the keg hit Penelope in the waist with sickening force.

Dizzy, Penelope clutched at the side of the tub, feeling her gorge rise as the series of strange sounds in the background crystallized into meaning. Guignon was on the ground, but Cleave’s arms still rose and fell, the blood-stained stock of the musket rising and falling with them, spattering flecks of blood as he panted, “Bastard, bastard, bastard!”

Alex grabbed at him from behind, catching the other man’s arms high over head as Cleave struggled to be let free, panting and sobbing and babbling words that Penelope could hardly hear over the ringing of her ears and the labored sound of Alex’s breathing as he fought to hold Cleave steady.

With the strength of the mad, Cleave wrenched free, turning on his old friend with a frenzied look in his eye. The musket lifted.

The sound of a shot reverberated through the room.

Chapter Thirty-One

The shot had not come from Cleave’s musket.

Cleave’s bloody musket tumbled harmlessly to the ground, as they all stared in confusion at one another. Penelope glanced down at her own pistol, still in her hand, still cool.

As the sound of the report died away, one booted foot stepped down onto the top stair. It was a well-used boot, scuffed along the sides, and it posed — there was really no other word for it — on the stair as though its owner were well aware of the effect it would have.

From where she stood, Penelope could only see the side of the stairs, but Alex had a clear view upwards, and she could see his face change as the newcomer descended, step by well-calculated step. Unlike Guignon, this man’s frame was athletic, with the well-developed leg muscles of a man who spends a great deal of time in the saddle. His coat fell carelessly open over a travel-stained linen shirt.

He held a smoking pistol in one hand.

“That’s a hell of a way to say hello,” said Alex.

Visible nearly up to his neck, the other man tucked the spent pistol carelessly away in his belt.

“You looked like you needed the help,” he said, and came fully into Penelope’s view.

His reddish brown hair had been tousled into a careless style reminiscent of the current London mode, but Penelope would have been willing to wager it was less by design and more by exertion. He had high, clean-cut cheekbones, a square chin, and a quirk in one brow that looked as though it were habitual.

Penelope knew exactly where she had seen him before. It had been in the marketplace in Hyderabad, smiling a rogue’s grin as he tossed his biryani to a beggar and sent them on a fool’s chase all the way to Raymond’s Tomb.