If she had thought about it at all, Penelope would have expected Calcutta to be sunny.

But then, she hadn’t given it much thought, not any of it. It had all happened too quickly for thought, ruined in January, married in February, on a boat to the tropics by March. The future had seemed unimportant compared to the exigencies of the present. Penelope had been too busy brazening it out to wonder about little things like where they were to go and how they were to live. India was away and that was enough. Away from her mother’s shrill reproaches (If you had to get yourself compromised, couldn’t you at least have picked an older son? ); Charlotte’s wide-eyed concern; Henrietta’s clumsy attempts to get her to talk about it , as though talking would make the least bit of difference to the reality of it all. Ruined was ruined was ruined, so what was the point of compounding it by discussing it?

There was even, if she was being honest, a certain grim pleasure to it, to having put paid to her mother’s matrimonial scheming and poked a finger in the eye of every carping old matron who had ever called her fast. Ha! Let them see how fast she could be. All things considered, she had got out of it rather lightly. Freddy might be selfish, but he was seldom cruel. He didn’t have crossed eyes or a hunchback (unlike that earl her mother had been throwing at her). He wasn’t violent in his cups, he might be a dreadful card player but he had more than enough blunt to cover his losses, and he possessed a reasonable proficiency in those amorous activities that had propelled them into matrimony.

Freddy was, however, still sulky about having been roped into wedlock. It wasn’t the being married he seemed to mind — as he had said, with a shrug, when he tossed her a betrothal ring, one had to get married sooner or later and it might as well be to a stunner — as the loss of face among his cronies at being forced into it. He tended to forget his displeasure in the bedroom, but it surfaced in a dozen other minor ways.