He had been, to put it mildly, less than pleased when Wellesley had summarily summoned him to Calcutta, expecting him to drop all his duties in Hyderabad and spend more than a week in travel for an hour’s interview. He had been even less pleased when the Governor General had informed him that he was to play nursemaid to the new envoy, a special envoy the Resident had never requested and certainly didn’t need. Wellesley had not been amused when he pointed that out.

But all that was as nothing compared to the reality of Lord Frederick and his wife. Maybe, if he were very, very lucky, he would wake up in his own bed and find that this had all been a bad dream. One could always hope.

The bad dream, alarmingly corporeal in his London-tailored evening clothes, waved a languid hand at the two men standing beside him. “Do you know . . . ?”

Alex did know them. Daniel Cleave had been in school with him in England. Like him, Cleave had been the son of an officer in the Madras Native Cavalry, sent back to Britain for schooling. Unlike him, Cleave’s father had died in action, and he remained for some years in Tunbridge Wells with his widowed mother before returning to take up a post on the political side of the service. He was, as he had been in school, thorough, conscientious, and entirely incapable of seeing the larger picture. It was that very myopia that had elevated him to the post of Wellesley’s private secretary; the Governor General, thought Alex bitterly, being afflicted with exactly that same shortness of sight.

The other man he knew largely by reputation. Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske had been up to his obviously plucked eyebrows in a sordid secret society run by one Arthur Wrothan, pandering to the perversions and prejudices of recent English expatriates. There had been one incident that had trickled even to Alex’s ears, one involving the Anglo-Indian daughter of an officer in the Bengal Light Cavalry. Fiske and his cronies had gotten off with a rap on the knuckles. The girl had died.