The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (11 page)

He had sent those ruffians reeling quite handily, but those same hands had been gentle, even tender, when he had touched her hair, her cheek, her—

Gwen gave the sheet a yank. That was quite enough research for the moment.

She looked at his face, the little pucker of pain between his brows. Instinctively, she reached out to touch his cheek, to sooth the hurt away. He moved in his sleep, and Gwen snatched her hand away like a thief caught rifling through someone else’s larder in the night. This was no time to go sentimental, she told herself sternly. He wouldn’t remember a bit of it in the morning. The man was out of his mind with fever. He didn’t know who she was. He’d thought she was someone else; that much was clear.

Who was she, this Lakshmi? Wife? Mistress? Whoever she was, those caresses had been intended for her, not for Gwen.

Enough. They were comrades; that was all. Comrades of war. Gwen seated herself at the little table, taking up her notebook and her pencil. Tearing a sheet from the back, she spread it flat against the scarred surface of the table. Next to her, on the bed, the Colonel was talking in his sleep again, arguing with someone only he could see. There was a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, although the room was chill, chill enough to make her skin prickle beneath the fine lawn of her nightdress.

They weren’t going to be making the stage tomorrow.

Gwen grimaced. It was the worst possible timing. If they had the girls neatly in tow, they might have stayed at this miserable inn a week or more while the Colonel recovered, the mystery solved, Jane’s misgivings disproved. But Lizzy and Agnes were still missing, Fiorila was inexplicably in Bath, and she was immured here, guardian of the Colonel’s sickbed. She might, she supposed, call on the Colonel’s daughter, the older one, but it seemed a poor trick to play. The girl had her hands full with her grandmother. She didn’t need a delirious father, as well. And however unsatisfactory their room at the inn, it was better than the floor of Mrs. Davies’s basement apartment.

No. There was no escaping it. She had her own honor. She wouldn’t leave a comrade in arms. Those unfortunate ruffians had rendered her neatly hors de combat until the Colonel’s fever abated.

She wished she’d pinked them harder.

A memory teased the edge of her consciousness. One of them, complaining to the other:
They said they wouldn’t be armed.
At the time, she hadn’t paid it much attention; she had been too busy keeping the ruffians at bay, caught up in the battle lust. But now . . . Gwen frowned over her piece of paper.

It hadn’t been a chance attack.

The footpads had followed them from Mrs. Davies’s house. They might have been lying in wait there already, waiting for whatever mysterious package the Colonel’s son was meant to have sent his sister. But then, if they’d been looking for opium, why not simply ransack the house? The bolt on the garden door was scarcely sophisticated. Two women alone, one of them bedridden, would have been easy prey for three large men.

No. More likely that the ruffians had followed them to Mrs. Davies’s before following them from it.

It was not a reassuring thought.

Unless the Colonel had some enemy he hadn’t seen fit to mention, it meant the one they were following was she. (Emotional agitation, Gwen had always contended, was no excuse for sloppy grammar.) True, the footpads had all converged upon the Colonel, but it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable strategy for a group of men, tasked with a kidnapping, to immobilize the man first and grab the woman second. Of course, that worked only with a lesser sort of woman, but since few had her dexterity with a sword parasol, Gwen was willing to allow the ruffians that.

If—and it was a very broad “if”—someone had discovered the identity of the Pink Carnation, what better way to get to the Carnation than to lure her back to England by kidnapping her sister and then rendering her unprotected by nabbing her chaperone?

Actually, Gwen could think of several better ways, involving fewer intermediate steps, but the French villains she had met over the last few years seemed to have a convenient weakness for convoluted plots. There had been Gaston Delaroche, with his extra-special interrogation chamber, complete with rack, thumbscrews, and the latest in designer iron maidens. Then there was the Black Tulip, who had been so entirely over the bend that he made Delaroche, a raving lunatic by anyone’s standards, seem sane by comparison.

Delaroche was safely in government custody, but the Black Tulip had never been caught.

Gwen caught herself biting a nail and made herself stop. The Black Tulip, so far as anyone knew, had accidentally incinerated himself nearly two years ago in the midst of a less-than-cunning plan to assassinate King George. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone else out there on the trail of the Carnation. These French spymasters sprung up like weeds, each more tenacious than the last. There had been rumors of another, called only the Gardener. Gwen had been able to discover next to nothing of him, which wasn’t entirely reassuring. It meant either that he didn’t exist, which would be good, or that he was clever enough to cover his tracks, which was quite the opposite of good.

The more she thought about it, the less insane it sounded, the possibility that those men had been after her, not the Colonel, not some imaginary shipment of opium. Whoever wanted the Pink Carnation wouldn’t be out purely for a quick kill. The Pink Carnation had access to all sorts of information: underground networks of French and British agents, locations, code names. A knife to the gut would only ensure that that information went with the Carnation to the grave. On the other hand, if someone were to kidnap those nearest and dearest to the Carnation and threaten them with harm unless the Carnation revealed her secrets . . .

The Colonel cried out in his sleep.

Gwen rose from her chair, grateful for the distraction. No matter what she might have seen over these past few years, no matter how deep her thirst for adventure, some things were still too unpleasant to contemplate. She had never come to terms with torture. She particularly despised the cooptation of noncombatants.

Noncombatants like Agnes. Like Lizzy Reid.

Like the Colonel.

Gwen smoothed the hair back from his brow. It was dark with sweat, clinging to his damp skin. His fever was rising again, despite the opium she had given him. Taking up the candle, she delicately peeled back a corner of the poultice she had bound over his wound. She didn’t see any of the telltale red streaks that would signal a truly dangerous infection, but the light was poor and the night was still young.

For the first time, the true magnitude of what Jane had said back in Paris was borne in upon her. If this attack had been directed at her, then his wound, his fever, his missing daughter, were all on her conscience. She remembered the laughing man who had accompanied her in the coach that morning, swinging her out of the way of that out-of-control carriage, teasing her about her novel. To see him brought low, like this . . .

They might merely have been footpads.

Gwen bathed the Colonel’s forehead as best she could with the water in the ewer by the bed. She had already used the last of her opium on him, and too much opium probably wasn’t the best idea in any event. If his fever hadn’t broken by morning, she would have the maidservant call a doctor. Not that a doctor was likely to do much she couldn’t do, other than take away perfectly useful blood and prescribe foul-smelling nostrums. She’d do better to tend him herself.

But first she needed to alert Jane.

Licking the tip of her pencil, Gwen wrote, “A and L not here. Misfortune encountered on the road. Unalterably delayed. Pursue inquiries in Bath.” After some thought, she added, “Eager to see opera. Please acquire tickets.”

That should be suitably oblique to confuse anyone who intercepted the communication but specific enough to alert Jane to the presence of Aurelia Fiorila.

She signed the letter “Mrs. A. Fustian.” Jane would understand without needing to be told. They had used the alias together often enough.

The League of the Pink Carnation had formed only a little over two years ago, but Gwen had known Jane far longer than that. She had known her from the time she was born, from a small tot with downy blond curls to a quiet child with pale brown hair and a book in her hand. All of the other children in the neighborhood—Jane’s siblings, her own nieces and nephew—had been afraid of her, but never Jane. From the beginning, they had had their own quiet rapport.

If she were to dip into maudlin sentimentality, she might even go so far as to say that she loved Jane like a daughter.

It was a good thing she didn’t go in for such sentiments. But all the same, she couldn’t shake a slight sense of foreboding.

In small, cramped letters on the bottom of the page, she added, “Be careful.”

London, 2004

“Y
ou must be joking,” said Colin flatly.

“See?” said Jeremy, all injured innocence. “Every time I try . . .”

“Enough,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, and even though she didn’t raise her voice, it silenced them both.

It was an excellent trick. I wondered if she could teach it to me. I could use it on my undergrads next year.

“I’ve had enough of this,” she said. “From both of you. How badly do you want the treasure? Or are you more interested in hurting each other?”

I could have answered that for her. Hurting each other. Definitely hurting each other. At least on Jeremy’s part. Colin just wanted to be left alone.

Not like I was biased or anything.

“This isn’t my fight,” Jeremy said suavely.

“Don’t try to lie to me, Jamie Alderly,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly majestically. The use of his childhood name pulled him up short, like a dog on a leash. Jamie Alderly sounded like a very different person from Jeremy Selwick-Alderly, transatlantic man of douche baggery. “I know the trick you pulled with that production company—and a nasty trick it was, too.”

Jeremy’s thin veneer of charm was beginning to show wear around the sides. He set his chin pugnaciously. “Caroline has a one-third right to the Hall.”

Caroline was Colin’s mother, Jeremy’s wife, bubbly and oblivious. She went through life with a champagne glass in one hand, completely unaware of anyone’s needs but her own. She was charming but, as Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had once told me, entirely irresponsible. I’d seen the truth of that for myself. She hadn’t batted an eyelash when her husband threw her son under the bus. Scratch that—she hadn’t even noticed. It was all “kiss, kiss, isn’t it lovely!”

“My mother wouldn’t care if Selwick Hall burned to the ground,” said my boyfriend, driven to the end of his rope. “In fact, she’d probably prefer it. She’d be able to collect the insurance money without a white elephant dragging her down.”

Then Jeremy uttered the truly unforgivable. “And Serena agreed.”

Serena was Colin’s sister. Jeremy had bought her for thirty pieces of silver, or, in more modern parlance, a part ownership of the gallery at which she’d been working for several years.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, “I heard about that, too.”

There was something in her voice that quelled even Jeremy.

“Do you want to live there, Jamie?” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had clearly had it. There was no mistaking the edge of exasperation in her voice. “Do you want to get the home farm back in order? I didn’t think so.” She turned to her nephew. “As for you, Colin—”

If Colin’s jaw got any tighter, it was going to shatter.

“Putting the Hall back together isn’t going to bring your father back.” For a moment, I thought Colin meant to get up and leave. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s expression as she looked at her great-nephew was ineffably sad. “The Hall isn’t a shrine.”

“No,” said Colin shortly. “It’s my home.”

He used to have a flat somewhere in London, but that was before I’d met him, before his father had died and he had become the Selwick of Selwick.

For the first time, I wondered, uneasily, if his aunt might not have something there, if Colin might not be happier in a sleek modern flat in one of the newly reclaimed areas down by the water, with a view of the river and hot and cold running tourists. After years of dates with men who thought the Scarlet Pimpernel was a form of pumpernickel, I’d been delighted by Colin’s interest in his own family’s history. He spoke my language. But for me, it was my career, my path to a PhD, a book, and, with any luck, a permanent teaching job on some pleasant campus with a good coffee shop and students who were marginally more literate than their peers.

For Colin, it had become an idée fixe.

Even this book he was working on, the spy novel that was meant to bring him fame and fortune, was an homage to his father, who had read him Ian Fleming novels and told him contraband stories of his days in MI6.

The life we were leading—it wasn’t really a normal twentysomething life, was it? Puttering about in the garden, trivia night with the vicar at the pub on Tuesdays, maybe a day trip into London to visit an aging relative if we were feeling really daring. I knew Colin had friends from his university days, I’d even met a couple of them, but they were living their own lives, here in London. We hadn’t seen them since I’d moved into Selwick Hall. Colin kept talking about getting together with Nigel and Martin, but we’d sunk into our lives in Selwick Hall, like feet slid into a pair of woolly socks, too comfortable to kick out of them and put on proper shoes.

I felt a little bit sick all of a sudden. Here I’d thought I’d been so good for him, coaxing him to open up about his mother and sister (with minimal success, but still), and instead I was only reinforcing his neuroses.

I loved him, but I was beginning to realize that underneath that charming BBC accent, he really was more than a little messed up.

“You mean,” said Jeremy, “one-third of it is your home.”

“Would you like me to draw a neat line down through the kitchen?” said Colin tightly. “Would you prefer I confined myself to the bit with the sink or the refrigerator?”

I couldn’t take it anymore. “Fine,” I said. “Do you want Colin to buy you out?”

I knew it was an empty threat. I know Colin couldn’t afford it. But I was curious to see how Jeremy would react.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said patronizingly, before adding, “Rather a nice deal, living there rent-free, isn’t it?”

“I make up for it in labor,” said Colin. “Or would you rather muck out the stables yourself?”

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s voice rose over their bickering. “Eloise, dear, will you pour?”

I would have loved to have poured the boiling liquid straight into Jeremy’s lap, but that would have been a waste of good caffeine. Tight-lipped, I followed instructions, lifting the heavy teapot and tipping it carefully over the silver strainer balanced on one of the delicate Spode cups.

“This,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, while I had my hands full with a pot of scalding liquid, “is exactly what I’m talking about. You can’t go on like this. Regardless of what may have happened in the past—”

If I hadn’t been holding the teapot, I would have been tempted to say a few choice words. “Regardless” just didn’t cover a man marrying his cousin’s mother.

“—you are family and you have to live with each other.” She lifted her silver head, looking first at one, then at the other, impeccably aristocratic in her blue wool pants suit. “I have a proposition to put to you both.”

“You don’t have an interest in Selwick Hall,” pointed out Jeremy.

Did the man think only in dollars and cents? I meant, in pounds and pence?

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly stared down her grandson. “No, but I have an interest in you. In both of you.” Then she played her trump card. “And I do know rather a bit about those jewels you both want. Are you agreed, or no?”

“All right,” said Jeremy reluctantly. “I’m game.”

It took Colin longer. “Why?” he asked.

For the first time, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s regal gaze faltered. “I am—not well.” She busied herself with her teacup. “It would give me considerable peace of mind to see the two of you come to terms.”

If it had been my family, this would have been followed by a noisy inquiry about her health. But Colin’s family didn’t work that way.

Colin nodded curtly. “I’m in.”

Which I knew really translated to,
I love you and I’m worried about you
. In Colin-speak.

Fortunately, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly knew that too. She reached out and pressed his hand with her papery, blue-veined one. “Thank you,” she said.

Rising from her seat on the sofa, she went to one of the many white-painted shelves that lined either side of the fireplace. The books were an eclectic mix, modern hardcovers jostling spines with the faded leather covers of lengthy matched sets. Unlike the collections of books designers bought by the yard at the Strand, these had all been purchased by some long-ago Selwick for content rather than aesthetics, read and battered and read again. On many, the titles had been all but rubbed from the spine.

This book was covered in faded red leather, the first in a series of identical volumes. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly set it down on the tea tray, next to the biscuits.

I craned my neck to read the title, which was inscribed with the maximum number of curlicues. “
The Convent of Orsino
?”

“The original title,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly smugly, “was
The Perils of Plumeria
.”

I gave a little hop in my chair.

Colin groaned.

Jeremy looked blank.

“So that’s Plumeria!” I turned to Colin, nearly knocking my tea over with one knee. “After all the hours I spent poking around in horticultural manuals . . . Does she have a tower?”

“Not that I remember,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, “but it’s been a rather long time since I read it.”

“What does this have to do with the jewels?” asked Jeremy.

“It’s that old rhyme,” said Colin reluctantly. “Hard by Plumeria’s bower, or whatever it was.”

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly looked at him sharply. She knew as well as I did that he knew exactly how the rhyme went. So much for immediate entente.

Jeremy, however, didn’t. He leaned back in his chair, propping one immaculately clad ankle against the opposite knee. “Of course. I remember now. We used to run around reciting it when we were little.”

“Yeah,” said Colin, and I wondered just what he was remembering, whether there had been a halcyon time when they had played together as boys.

Jeremy was only six years older than Colin. Had they played Robin Hood together in the woods outside Selwick Hall with Serena as Maid Marian? It put a rather different complexion on things.

I picked up the book, red tooled leather on the outside, a heavily engraved frontispiece on the inside. “By a Lady?”

“Not just any lady,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. “It was written by Miss Gwendolyn Meadows.”

“Are you sure?” There had been mention, from time to time, in Jane’s letters to Henrietta of Miss Gwen’s Gothic novel, but they had made it sound like a big joke.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly pointed to the flyleaf. Underneath the title, in a sprawling hand, was written, “To Amy: I trust you shall benefit from Plumeria’s example. G.M.”

That sounded like Miss Gwen all right. “Got it,” I said.

“Plumeria is the heroine of the novel,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly helpfully. “Rather an unusual heroine too.”

“If Miss Gwen wrote her, she must be,” I murmured. “But what does this have to do with the lost jewels of Berar?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, “but I gather that it was the runaway bestseller of 1806. It wasn’t eclipsed until Byron came out with
Childe Harold
in 1812. That,” she added, “is a first edition.”

Jeremy, who had been surreptitiously checking his phone, looked up with sudden interest.

I hastily put it down again, well away from the tea.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s not that valuable. Literary scholars haven’t been kind to our Miss Meadows.”

“No, I can’t imagine they would be,” I said, turning over the small morocco volume in my hands. Its spine proclaimed that it was Volume I of V.

“There’s a much grander copy at the Hall,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, “or at least there was when I was young. It belonged to Colonel Reid’s youngest daughter, who married Richard’s son. It’s the size of a dictionary, though, all five volumes in one. You’ll do better with this one.”

“Thank you?” I said. I still wasn’t quite sure what I was meant to do with it.

“Many years ago,” she said, “I was told that the clue was in the book. I wasn’t able to figure it out, but perhaps the three of you together will. Three minds, after all, are better than one.”

Not if two of them were occupied with plans for mutual destruction. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I thanked her nicely and slid the book into my capacious shoulder bag.

Colin glanced at his watch. “We should be going if we want to catch the early train back.”

I knew that really translated to
we should be going before I kill Jeremy
.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was always her most dangerous when she was her most serene. “No need,” she said airily. If she hadn’t been a dignified woman of over eighty years, I would have called her expression impish. “Jeremy will drive you up.”

This was apparently news to Jeremy, too.

“Well, you can’t all look for the jewels at the Hall if you aren’t all up there together.” As we all sat stunned, she lifted the teapot. “More tea?”

Ten months ago, she had pulled a similar move to get a reluctant Colin to take me up to the Hall with him. At the time, I had thought it was great. This time, I was on the other side of it. The teeth-gnashing side of it.

It didn’t help that Jeremy’s car was a convertible clearly designed for two. I offered to sit in the back, since my legs were shorter than Colin’s. I was voted down. I spent the drive back down to Sussex with my hair blowing across my face like Cousin It, Colin in the backseat behind me, legs folded to his chin, sending off waves of annoyance so palpable that they probably counted as toxic waste.

It felt like a very long drive.

No one spoke. We couldn’t think of anything neutral to say. Miss Gwen’s book burned in my bag against my leg. I was itching to take it out and start flipping through it—maybe someone had hidden a note in there? Nancy Drew was always finding things under the lining of old books—but (a) Jeremy was right next to me, (b) Jeremy wasn’t putting the damned top up and I didn’t want to risk it blowing away, and (c) Jeremy was right next to me. Collaboration went only so far.

Windblown and sullen, we all fished up in the front hall of Selwick Hall, kicking our feet against the hall rug and not looking at one another. The Hall felt different with a houseguest, especially an unwanted one. For the past few months, this had been, as odd as it was, my home. Colin’s home, of course, not mine, but this was where I wandered around in my pajamas with my hair unwashed and a toothbrush sticking out of my mouth. I knew how to navigate the kitchen with the light off to get to my favorite coffee mug, and I’d internalized the trick of not stepping on the squeaky step on the front stairs.