“Will she die, do you think?” Grey asked eventually. It was the thought uppermost in his own mind; it must be so for Trevelyan as well.

“No,” the Cornishman snapped. “She will not.” He leaned on the rail, staring moodily into the racing water.

Grey didn’t speak, merely closed his eyes and let the glitter of the sun off the waves make dancing patterns of red and black inside his lids. He needn’t push; there was time now for everything.

“She is worse,” Trevelyan said at last, unable to bear the silence. “She shouldn’t be. I have seen malaria often; the first attack is normally the worst—if there is cinchona for treatment, subsequent attacks grow less frequent, less severe. Scanlon says so, too,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“Has she suffered long with the disease?” Grey asked, curious. It was not a malady that often afflicted city-dwellers, but the lady might perhaps have acquired it in the course of traveling with Mayrhofer.

“Two weeks.”

Grey opened his eyes, to see Trevelyan standing upright, his short hair flicked into a crest by the wind, chin raised. Water stood in his eyes; perhaps it was caused by the rushing wind.

“I should not have let him do it,” Trevelyan muttered. His hands clenched on the rail in a futile rage tinged with despair. “Christ, how could I have let him do it?”

“Who?” Grey asked.

“Scanlon, of course.” Trevelyan turned away momentarily, rubbing a wrist across his eyes, then dropped back, leaning against the rail, his back to the sea. He folded his arms across his chest and stared moodily ahead, intent on whatever dire visions he harbored within.

“Let us walk,” Grey suggested, after a moment. “Come; the air will do you good.”

Trevelyan hesitated, but then shrugged and assented. They walked in silence for some time, circling the deck, dodging seamen about their tasks.

Mindful of his leather-heeled boots and the heaving deck, Grey strode carefully at first, but the boards were dry, and the motion of the ship a stimulus to his senses; despite his own predicament, he felt his spirits rise with the blood that surged through his cheeks and refreshed his cramped limbs. He began to feel truly himself again for the first time in days.

True, he was captive on a ship headed for India, and thus unlikely to see home again soon. But he was a soldier, used to long journeys and separations—and the thought of India, with all its mysteries of light and histories of blood, was undeniably exciting. And Quarry could be trusted to inform his family that he was likely still alive.

What would his family do about the wedding preparations? he wondered. Trevelyan’s abrupt flight would be an enormous scandal, and an even greater one if word got out—which indubitably it would—of the involvement of Frau Mayrhofer and of her husband’s shocking murder. He was not disposed to believe the lady’s claim to have killed Mayrhofer; not after seeing the body. Even in health, for a woman to have done that . . . and Maria Mayrhofer was slightly built, no larger than his cousin Olivia.