The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (28 page)

Sussex, 2004

S
elwick Hall looked as though it had been besieged.

We stood there, Colin and Jeremy and I, among the shards of china, staring at the wreckage. A small table lay on its side, the flowers that had been so pretty in their vase strewn about the floor like Ophelia’s weeds. Behind us, the open front door banged in the wind.

Colin hastily turned to secure it. The sound of the bolt clicking was as loud as a shot.

“You can’t blame me for this one,” said Jeremy quickly.

Colin’s expression was implacable. This was beyond anger. This was his home and it had been violated. “Unless you hired someone.”

Jeremy was all outrage. “Do you really think—”

“Tell me what else I’m supposed to think,” said Colin, his voice hard.

Whatever Jeremy might have said was cut off by a loud crash from the back of the house, a crash and a bang, as though someone had gleefully tossed an entire tray of china in the air and then dropped the tray after it.

Colin flinched as though he had been struck.

“The bastard’s still here,” he said.

“Couldn’t we just call the police and wait here?” I suggested hopefully.

“He’ll be halfway to the next county by then,” said Colin with a tight-lipped determination that made me think of old Westerns on Sunday afternoon TV. Only this wasn’t a movie and Colin wasn’t Clint Eastwood. He was a reasonably mild-mannered former investment banker. Someone could get hurt, most likely Colin. “I’m going after him.”

“Wait!” I grabbed up an umbrella from the umbrella stand. It was one of those sturdy British models built to last a thousand rains. More important, it had a sturdy steel tip. It might not be quite Miss Gwen’s sword parasol, but it was better than nothing. “Take this. Just in case.”

Jeremy grabbed up an umbrella out of the stand. He hadn’t looked before he grabbed. It was hot pink with a ruffled edge. “I’m coming, too.”

“Checking out your handiwork?” said Colin, edging down the hallway like James Bond on the trail of the villain with the nuclear reactor.

“Screw you,” said Jeremy.

Only he didn’t say “screw.” His knuckles were white on the umbrella handle, and there was sweat on his brow. Guilt, anger, fear, goodness only knew what, had made him lose his cool, and lose it in a big way.

He raised the hot pink umbrella. “I’ve had enough of your—”

I grabbed Jeremy’s arm and squeezed. Hard.

“Save it for later, will you?” I hissed. “Both of you. Villain first. Fighting later.”

The glance Jeremy cast me wasn’t exactly fond, but he complied, ostentatiously rubbing his arm.

In the darkness, the familiar corridors felt like something out of a horror movie, rendered unfamiliar by the toppled tables and shattered vases, unspeakable dangers lying in wait around corners that didn’t seem to curve quite where they should. The doorframes loomed like the menacing portals in one of Poe’s dark fantasies, and the familiar creak of the floorboards echoed in my ears, making me hunch my shoulders and glance anxiously behind me.

Not that behind was the problem. Whatever the danger was lay ahead. Colin led the way, his umbrella held aloft, Jeremy next, while I took up the rear, where I could keep an eye on Jeremy.

The trail of destruction led to the back of the house, to the long salon that stretched across the garden front. Despite the depredations of the Victorian improvers who had remodeled much of the house out of recognition, that room had remained pretty much the same since the eighteenth century, aside from the addition of a conservatory on one side that sprouted from the side of the house like a toadstool.

Moonlight played against the long glass windows, making the glass seem to sway and shimmer. Was that someone moving by the French doors? No. Just a curtain, wafting back and forth in one of those strange breezes that came out of nowhere. Colin swore they were just from ill-fitting window frames, not ghosts.

Colin said a lot of things. In the moonlight, in the dark room, our own fear a palpable presence among us, ghosties and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night seemed entirely logical.

“The door is still locked,” said Colin in a low voice. “He must be in here somewhere.”

Those are words you only want to hear in a movie, with a bowl of popcorn on your lap and an afghan tucked around your knees.

I turned, slowly. Moonlight and shadow played tricks with my eyes. In the corner of the room, something moved.

“Over there,” I whispered hoarsely, clutching at Colin’s arm and missing by a mile.

Everything happened at once. The villain made a desperate leap for freedom. Jeremy ran forward, swinging his umbrella. Colin flicked on the light.

In the sudden glow, Jeremy batted at empty air with his umbrella. Colin pivoted, saying, “Where did he go? Where did he go?”

And I sat down hard on the floor, shaking with slightly hysterical laughter.

“Boys. Boys!” I had a little trouble getting the words out. I pointed, shakily, at the rosewood card table in front of me, which was rocking lightly back and forth. “I think I’ve found the culprit.”

Cowering under the table was a large black dog, his coat matted with mud and burrs.

Colin and Jeremy stood there, blinking like idiots, still holding their umbrellas, while the source of all our worries hunkered down and rubbed his nose against his paw, letting out a low, unhappy whimper.

I knew just how he felt.

“It’s that lost dog,” I said unnecessarily. My voice sounded very shrill and very loud. “Didn’t you see the posters in the pub? We should call the pub and find out who the owner is.”

Colin hunkered down next to me. “Come on,” he urged, patting his thigh. To the humans, he said, “We must have left the door unlocked. The catch doesn’t always catch.”

Jeremy lowered his umbrella. “Not our finest hour.”

“No,” Colin agreed, and I knew he was thinking of more than the latch. He looked soberly at Jeremy. “I owe you an apology.”

I clambered unsteadily to my feet. “I’ll go call the pub.”

The cousins needed some time alone. I only hoped they wouldn’t revert to form and bludgeon each other while I was gone. I took some comfort from the reflection that if Jeremy were to go after Colin, those ruffles on the pink umbrella should cushion the blow.

Skirting the destruction in the hall—that poor dog must have really been frantic, and who could blame him?—I made my way to the kitchen. The number of the pub was on a frayed piece of paper by the phone, along with such other important numbers as the fire station, the oil company, and the Indian takeaway.

The people at the pub were only too happy to hear that Fuzzy had been found. They promised they would call the owner and let her know. I hung up the phone with mutual expressions of esteem, repressed the urge to call back and ask if they delivered gin and tonics, and spent a few minutes contemplating my own reflection in the kitchen window, trying to make sense of a decidedly tumultuous evening.

We had all been behaving like complete idiots. Unless, of course, Fuzzy was at the center of a gang of international jewel thieves, but somehow I doubted that. Remembering my own suspicions of Jeremy, I felt more than a little bit ashamed. The truth was that Colin spent too much time living in his spy thriller and I in the past. When you put those two together, you wound up with a serious case of overactive imagination.

True, I didn’t think I was ever going to actually actively like Jeremy, but there was a bit of a gap between finding someone annoyingly smarmy and suspecting him of hiring a hit man.

I didn’t even know how one would go about hiring a hit man.

Hopefully, Jeremy didn’t either. Colin thought he did, but that was only because he read too many thrillers.

Deciding to give the men a little more time, just in case they were having some sort of deep familial epiphany, I took down the can of coffee from the cupboard and spooned a generous helping into the machine, sniffing the familiar and comforting scent of the coffee grounds. While the coffee perked, I buttered bread for the promised grilled cheese. Now that the danger was over, I was suddenly ridiculously, ravenously hungry.

I’d give that to blind terror—it certainly burned calories, even if in the end the whole thing had turned out to be more Abbott and Costello than
The Convent of Orsino
.

I dropped the first sandwich into the pan, where it landed with a satisfying sizzle. I still had one more book left to read of that blasted—er, lovely—novel, and I strongly suspected I was wasting my time. The whole thing about the jewel being in the mirror was all very interesting, but I couldn’t see where that led us. Unlike Jeremy, I was fairly sure that was a metaphor. But a metaphor for what?

Perhaps there were no jewels; perhaps the whole thing was a metaphor for knowing oneself, or something equally smug and unsatisfying.

No. I flipped a sandwich with a spatter of grease. I’d read those letters, and if Henrietta Dorrington was to be believed, the jewels not only existed; they had come here, to—and possibly through—Selwick Hall.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had said something about there being a presentation copy of
The Convent of Orsino
here at Selwick Hall, a big, fancy one.

It had belonged to Colonel Reid’s youngest daughter, she had said, who had married Richard’s son. I jumped back as the sandwich pan spat hot grease at me. Quickly, I turned off the gas, moving the pan to a cool burner as I stood there with the spatula in one hand, staring blindly into space. That made no sense. I’d seen the Selwick family tree. I didn’t remember all the myriad branches, but I did know that Richard and Amy didn’t start producing little spies in training until early 1806.

Lizzy Reid had been seventeen in 1805. Unless she was the ultimate Regency cougar, she would have been far too old for Richard and Amy’s son.

Miss Gwen was in her forties when she married Colonel Reid, a little old for childbearing, but certainly not impossibly so. I stood there, staring at the cooling sandwiches, as the truth dawned. When Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said Colonel Reid’s youngest daughter, she meant Miss Gwen’s daughter.

Assuming she was conceived fairly rapidly, this nameless girl child would have been born just about the same time as Richard and Amy’s eldest. Given all the ties between the families, there were good odds they’d been raised together, or close to it. A girl with Colonel Reid’s charm and Miss Gwen’s bullish determination? That poor little Selwick boy never had a chance.

A distressing corollary occurred to me. This meant, among other things, that Colin was descended from Miss Gwen.

I decided I didn’t want to think about that bit.

Piling the sandwiches haphazardly on a plate, I started down the hall, absentmindedly taking a bite out of the topmost sandwich. I’d forgotten to halve them, but the men would just have to deal. I was too busy playing with a new and fascinating idea. If Miss Gwen were going to leave a clue to the location of the missing jewels, where better than in the volume she left to her daughter?

Odds were that if there were any jewels, the daughter had long since converted them to cash and used them to re-lead the roof of Selwick Hall (I made a note to self to check the early Victorian Selwick account books to see if there were any large and unaccounted expenditures soon after the Reid-Selwick nuptials), but at least we’d have the satisfaction of knowing that it wasn’t all a myth, that the jewels had, in fact, passed through Selwick Hall.

Colin and Jeremy were both in the salon where I’d left them, Colin on the floor with the dog, Jeremy sitting on one of the settees. They weren’t exactly hugging, but at least they didn’t look quite so ready to pulverize each other.

“Guys?” I said.

“You brought sandwiches!” said Jeremy in the tones of someone who is determined to play nice. “Thank you.”

I’d forgotten I was holding them. “Right. You’re welcome. But there’s something I think you’d better come see.”

Colin got hastily to his feet. “Another intruder?”

“No, nothing like that.” I set the sandwiches down before I accidentally gesticulated with them. “But I think I have an idea of where we might look for the jewels. . . .”

Two hours later, we had eaten the sandwiches. We had drunk the coffee. And we had handed Fuzzy over to a grateful and slightly hysterical owner. What we hadn’t done? Found the presentation copy of
The Convent of Orsino
.

“It’s not here,” said Jeremy, sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of tattered early Ian Flemings that we had removed to get to the books behind.

Colin’s ancestors, like all avid readers, were book double stackers. Jeremy had removed his blazer, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He looked closer to human than I had ever seen him.

“I hate to agree,” said Colin, his voice echoing down from his perch on the top of the library ladder, “but I think he’s right.”

“Your aunt Arabella said it was here,” I said stubbornly.

“She’s not entirely omniscient,” said Colin, clambering down the ladder. “Every now and then—”

He stopped short at the base of the ladder.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No,” said Colin. “I’m a cretin.”

From the expression on his face, I assumed he meant someone of limited mental capacity rather than someone who hailed from the isle of Crete.

Colin shook his head, looking like a man who had been dealt a blow with a ruffled parasol. “We’ve been looking right past it for the past two hours.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jeremy from the floor.

“It’s the purloined letter,” said Colin. “We didn’t notice it because it was right in front of us. There.”

On a table in the corner, on stands, stood a miscellany of books.

It would be a misnomer to say that they were on display. It was more that someone had at one point bunged them down there and no one had bothered to dust them since. There was a large, leather-bound copy of
Robinson Crusoe
, a late Victorian travel memoir by someone I’d never heard of—and
The Convent of Orsino
, fully a foot and a half tall and staring us straight in the face. The cover was a miracle of poor taste, covered with brass carbuncles that were clearly meant to be some sort of decorative feature.