The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (4 page)

At least, it had been working ideally.

Over the past few months, Gwen had marked a change in her charge. Ever since Bonaparte’s coronation, the Pink Carnation had embarked upon a policy of “watch and see,” compiling dossiers of information through slow and painstaking effort rather than acts of derring-do. She didn’t seem to be deriving the same relish from their activities that she once had. Admittedly, the game had become more dangerous. Fouché, Bonaparte’s minister of police, had consolidated his hold, wiping out many of the networks of couriers on which they relied. They had also lost their long-term War Office contact, Augustus Whittlesby.

If Jane were another sort of woman, Gwen might have wondered if Whittlesby’s departure had something to do with her malaise. The poet had made no secret of his admiration for Jane. She had sworn her heart wasn’t touched, but— Jane was twenty-three now, an age when other women would be thinking of home and hearth.

Other women, Gwen reassured herself, tamping down a frisson of alarm. Not the Pink Carnation. They had work to do still; Jane knew that. She wasn’t the sort to abandon her post for so unremarkable a creature as a man. Heaven only knew, she’d seen enough prime specimens over the years. A waste of good linen, most of them.

No. It was the lack of a challenge that had been plaguing the Pink Carnation; that was all. Gwen rubbed her gloved hands together. She’d tell Jane about this evening’s gleaning. That should catch the Pink Carnation’s fancy.

What person was proof to the allure of a missing mythical jewel?

Gwen let herself in through the servants’ entrance of the Hotel de Balcourt, the home of Jane’s cousin Edouard, a prime example of the failings of the male sex. Balcourt housed them reluctantly, turning a blind eye to their activities, less out of cousinly feeling than out of fear that if he were to turn them in, they would share with the authorities certain rather interesting documents in Jane’s possession regarding Edouard’s cross-Channel trade in muslin and brandy. It was an arrangement that suited them all quite well. They ignored the barrels of brandy in the cellar and Edouard ignored their odd comings and goings.

In her room, Gwen pressed the button that opened the secret back of her armoire. Here, hidden behind the respectable ranks of day dresses and evening gowns, she kept her real wardrobe: the breeches, the waistcoats, the serving maids’ dresses, the floppy hat of a coastal fisherman, a wide array of wigs, and a small arsenal of firearms. She folded her purple frock coat back among its fellows, right above a footman’s livery and the uniform of a minor officer in the imperial guard. With the ease of long practice, she sponged off her false whiskers, setting them aside to dry.

There was a light knock on the door. Gwen rapidly shut the secret panel, although there was reasonably only one person who would be knocking on her bedchamber door at this time of night.

“Yes?” she called.

The Pink Carnation slipped neatly into the room, shutting the door behind her.

“Miss Gwen?” Through all they had experienced together, Jane still employed the conventional honorific. Old habits died hard. Partners they might be, but Gwen was still Jane’s chaperone.

“I’m glad you’re still awake,” said Gwen briskly, shaking her hair free of the tight queue in which she had bound it. “I have news.”

“So have I,” said Jane. She was in her nightdress, her long light brown hair streaming down her back, like Ophelia about to hand out weeds. Her face was pale and worried in the uncertain light of the candles. “Agnes has gone missing.”

Agnes? Gwen’s head was stuffed with sultans and emperors; it took an effort to bring it back to the quiet of the English countryside. Frowning, she managed to dredge up the image of a quiet girl with a long face and light brown hair, a pale copy of Jane. Agnes was the youngest of the Wooliston sisters and, in Miss Gwen’s opinion, too docile to be memorable.

Jane held up a piece of paper, ill written and marred by blots. “I’ve had a letter from my father.” That in itself was news enough. Bertrand Wooliston could write? Who knew? “Agnes has disappeared from Miss Climpson’s seminary.”

“Are you sure they haven’t just misplaced her? She’s not very noticeable.” Allowed to join the adults, Agnes had blended into the background at the Christmas festivities at Uppington Hall that past year, noticeable only for taking up an extra seat at the table.

Jane shook her head. “She’s been missing for well over a week now. They notified my parents first. They haven’t been able to find her.”

Gwen doubted they had looked very far. Bertrand Wooliston had eyes only for his ewes, and his wife was decidedly myopic.

She put a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder. “She’s probably just run off with some scrounging half-pay officer,” she said reassuringly.

Jane gave a choked laugh. “I wish I could believe that were all it might be.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” Gwen picked up Betrand Wooliston’s note from the table. The seal had been lost somewhere along the way. Not surprising. The postal routes between England and France were dodgy at best. Technically, commerce and correspondence between England and France were still strictly forbidden. In practice, a thriving postal service went on across the Channel, often with a side of muslin and brandy. “All young girls are flighty.”

Jane looked at her askance. “Were you?”

“Flighty” wasn’t the word she would have used. Headstrong, yes. Defiant and proud and infinitely foolish.

There were times when Jane reminded her uncannily of herself at a similar age. Oh, not in comportment. She had never had Jane’s Olympian calm; she had always preferred to express herself directly. But Jane’s self-containment was its own form of stubbornness. In that, they were alike.

“Your sister is probably halfway to Gretna Green by now,” said Gwen heartily. “Let’s just hope she picked a handsome one.”

Jane shook her head. With her hair down, she looked very young and very vulnerable, hardly the mistress of the spy operation that had terrorized Bonaparte for the past two years. “She’s not alone. Another girl has gone missing too.”

“Even better,” said Gwen. “They’ve run off together. They’ve probably gone to London to see Kemble perform, or some such fool thing.”

Jane laced her fingers together. Aristocratic, Gwen’s father would have called her hands, with his merchant’s instinct for divining the details of his betters. “If that were the case,” she said quietly, “they would have been back by now.”

Gwen looked at the controlled face of her charge. “Are you suggesting foul play?”

“You think I’m overwrought.”

Gwen gave a harsh bark of laughter. “You don’t know what overwrought is.” Her sister-in-law did a fine line in overwrought. A delay in dinner could bring out a performance worthy of Mrs. Siddons. “But foul play? It hardly seems likely. The girl is sixteen—”

“Seventeen,” corrected Jane.

“A distinction without a difference. She’s practically a babe in arms. How many enemies can she have?”

“She might not,” said Jane. “But I have.”

The words polluted the air between them, stinking like the Seine. Gwen looked at Jane’s pale, anxious face. She wanted to argue her into comfort, to smash her theory into harmless little bits. But she couldn’t.

“It’s unlikely,” she offered instead, knowing just how weak it sounded.

Jane’s face was set in a way none of her suitors would have recognized. “But not impossible,” she said.

No, not impossible. No matter how careful they were, leaks occurred. Too many people knew Jane’s double identity: former agents, former contacts, her loathsome toad of a cousin. And those were only the ones they knew about. Various French agents had sworn to unmask the Pink Carnation or die trying.

The Black Tulip actually had died in the attempt—or so they had been led to believe. The Tulip had an inconvenient habit of resurrection. If the Tulip, or someone like him, had Agnes . . . Not that she believed that Agnes had been kidnapped. The very idea was ridiculous.

But it wasn’t impossible.

Jane read her conclusion in her face. “You see? We have to find her.”

Gwen rubbed at her cheek where her false whiskers had irritated her skin. “Not so fast, young lady. Have you considered you might be walking into a trap? If someone has discovered your identity—not that I’m saying that they have—but if they have . . .” The Black Tulip hadn’t been known for mercy.

“How could I leave Agnes to suffer on my behalf?” Jane’s indignation made Gwen feel small, small and selfish. “If I put her into danger, it’s my duty to get her out again.”

Gwen’s eyes met Jane’s. “Have you considered that if you leave, you might not be able to come back?”

Travel across the Channel was still technically forbidden. If it were known that they traveled back and forth to England, it would arouse suspicion. For brief and necessary clandestine visits, Jane usually pretended an illness, “taking to her bed” at the Hotel de Balcourt, with Gwen at her side to nurse her. It only added to her mystique of fragile delicacy. In public, they went disguised, under other personae: the forbidding Ernestine Grimwold and her dithery niece Miss Gilly Fairly, or the widowed Mrs. Fustian and her daughter. They were themselves only within the safety of the family circle, and that sparingly.

“Miss Fustian,” suggested Jane with unaccustomed hesitation, “might seek employment in Miss Climpson’s school.”

Gwen shook her head. “No. You look too much like Agnes. The students will suss it out in ten minutes, maybe less. Unless . . .”

She had an idea, an idea insane enough that it just might work. Part of her, the craven, selfish part, wanted to shake it away, to pretend helplessness. After all, wouldn’t it make more sense to stay in Paris and delegate the task to one of their agents in England? The former Purple Gentian would leap at the assignment. If he were out of commission, there were half a dozen others who would take on the task with a great deal of enthusiasm and varying levels of skill.

And Jane would never forgive herself.

Reluctantly, Gwen said, “There might be a way.”

Jane regarded her warily. “Does this have to do with wearing your false whiskers?”

“No,” said Gwen. “We disguise ourselves by having no disguises at all. We go as ourselves.”

Jane gave her a frustrated look. “I know you don’t approve of the venture, but there’s no need to speak nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense. It’s our best chance,” said Gwen rapidly. “We evade suspicion by being entirely aboveboard. What is there to hide, after all?”

Jane cocked an eyebrow. It was an effective trick, one the chit had picked up from her early mentor, the Purple Gentian. Gwen had practiced it herself, but it required one attribute she had never mastered: the gift of sustained silence.

“No, not like that.” Gwen waved Jane’s silent protest aside. “You apply to the Emperor for permission to travel. You tell him your sister has eloped and your family needs you. He, of all people, should understand the concerns of wayward sisters. Look at his! A scandal, all of them.”

Jane sat down on the edge of Gwen’s bed, a slender figure in a white nightdress. “You might be right,” she said slowly.

Gwen harrumphed. “Of course I’m right. Aren’t I always?”

What was she doing? The last thing in the world that she wanted was to go back to England. Here in Paris, she had presence, she had standing, she had fear, if not respect. Back in England, she was just Miss Meadows, spinster. The very idea made her stomach cramp.

She looked down at Jane’s bowed head, the color of old whiskey in the candlelight, and felt something like pity twist in her gut, pity and a bit of envy. Her family had never given her cause to love them as Jane loved hers. They had abandoned her when she had most needed them and ground salt in her wounds when she was most vulnerable.

All for the best, of course. It had toughened her up, made her what she was. But there was no need for Jane to be toughened so. The girl had enough on her head already.

No need to repine, Gwen promised herself. It needn’t take more than a week or so. They would find Agnes, give her a good ticking off, and come right back to their life in France.

“Get your things together,” Gwen said regally. “We’re going to England.”

The building sat on a low rise, shaded by a stand of trees. In spring, it might have been a happy place, but not now. A bolt of lightning forked through the sky as Sir Magnifico clattered into the courtyard, his senses rent with misgiving. Where were the joyful carols of the cloistered ladies? The voices of the virgins were hushed and anxious, as muted as the rain that dripped down the cold, gray stone.

Was it an ancient curse that lay over the building? Or some more recent evil?

—From
The Convent of Orsino
by A Lady

E
ngland wasn’t at all what Colonel William Reid had expected it to be.

Back in the mess in Madras, his fellow officers were always nattering on about the lush green of the fields, the cerulean blue of the sky, the delicate touch of a spring breeze, as soft and sweet as a lover’s kiss. They hadn’t mentioned the driving rain that got beneath a man’s collar, or the mud of the roads that sucked at cart wheels and caked the bottom of a man’s boots. If the wind was the touch of a lover, this was less a kiss and more a hearty slap across the face.

Shivering in his newly purchased, many-caped coat, William felt like a piece of wet washing, damp down to the skin, and then some besides. Winter, yes. He’d expected winter to be cold. But this was spring, for the love of all that was holy. Birds should be on the wing and buds on the thorn, or wherever it was that buds went.

So much for April in England, of which the poets sang so sweetly and so falsely. William would have traded it in a moment for May in Madras. Faith, he’d even take July in Jaipur, sweating in his regimentals in the blazing sun, hotter than hell and ready to wilt.

Not that he had that choice. It was England for him now, will he nill he, a classic case of blithely making one’s bed, only to discover, when the time came to lie on it, that it was full of lumps. He was good at that.

And didn’t I warn you?
He could hear his mother’s outraged Highland brogue in his head, exaggerated by time and distance.

His mother would be turning in her tartan grave if she knew that he’d chosen to take up residence in England in his old age. They’d been committed adherents to the King over the Water, his parents; fled from Inverness in ’45 in the wake of the disaster at Culloden. Committed from a distance, that was. In the safety of the Carolinas, their commitment had extended mostly to derisory epithets about the English and toasting the Pretender’s health, such as it was. They’d had some lovely glasses made up, crystal, with thistles, and some Jacobite motto or other scrolled about the bowl. Latin, it was, but what the words had been, he couldn’t say.

Memory blurred. Or perhaps it was the drizzle driving into his eyes, that maddening, peculiarly English form of precipitation, not quite mist, not quite rain, but something in between, all but impossible to keep off. Give him a proper thunderstorm any day, like the sort they’d had in his youth in the Carolinas, winds howling, thunder crashing, not like this, insidious, invidious, and damnably damp.

For choice, he would have stayed in India. He’d had nearly forty good years there, posted all around the country, from Calcutta to Bombay. He’d served in the East India Company’s army. Not as lucrative, perhaps, as the royal army, apt to be sneered at by snobs, but he couldn’t see himself taking the King’s shilling, not then, not now. Old prejudices died hard. It had been a polyglot group with whom he’d fought in the Madras cavalry, most of them wanderers like himself, all out to make their fortune in the fabled land of jewels and spices.

He missed India, missed it with a visceral longing he’d never felt for Charleston. He had come of age in India; he had learned his trade there, made his friends, fallen in love. It was in India he’d married and buried his Maria; in India he’d raised his children, three boys and two girls, only two of them what you might call legitimate. What did it matter? Legitimate, illegitimate, British, half-caste, what have you, they were all his children and he loved them all alike: conscientious Alex, prickly Jack, sunny-natured George, stubborn Kat, and his youngest, his sweet Lizzy. If the circumstances of his family life were sometimes a little . . . irregular, well, it was India, and such things were common there.

Common, yes, but not always easy. He’d learned that the hard way. Of his three sons, two were barred employment in the very regiment to which he’d given so many years’ service, simply by virtue of having a native woman for a mother. William had got George settled, finding him a place in the retinue of a local ruler, the Begum Sumroo. As for Jack . . . It didn’t matter that Jack’s mother had been a lady of quality in her own land; he’d been barred all the same, barred as though his mother were the lowest bazaar strumpet.

The boy had taken it hard. Jack had ridden away, offering his sword to whomever would employ him against the men who had denied him his place. They hadn’t spoken since. Jack’s absence was a wound in William’s heart that wouldn’t heal.

The worst of it, though, had been sending his daughters away. It had been nearly a decade ago now, Kat seventeen, Lizzy an imp of seven, all curls and dimples. For their education, he’d bluffed, but the truth was it wasn’t safe for them, not for Lizzy, who was a half-caste, child of a native mother. There were some young bucks who thought a half-caste girl fair game. He’d seen it happen, to his horror, to the daughter of a friend, raped and tossed aside. She’d died of the pox—and the shame, some said. Her father had aged ten years in as many months. And William had packed his girls onto a ship bound for England, bundling them off in the face of all their protests.

Just a few years, he’d told his girls as he handed them onto the launch in Calcutta harbor, Kat glowering, Lizzy clinging to his neck. Then he would come to England and join them and what grand times they would have then! But then had come Tippoo Sultan’s rising in the south and unrest in the north and what with one thing and another a few years had stretched to another and another, until here he was, ten years later, standing on the stoop of a young ladies’ seminary in Bath, a bouquet of wilted flowers in one hand, prepared to surprise a daughter he wasn’t sure he would recognize. When he’d last seen her, she’d had two missing teeth and a scrape on her left knee. He could picture that scab as he could picture his own hand, every moment of their parting branded on his memory.

Would she be happy to see him, his Lizzy? He hoped so. He felt like a nervous suitor, about to call on a young lady for the first time. William straightened his collar and cleared his throat.

“It’s Miss Elizabeth Reid I’m here to see,” he said to the woman standing at the door, a young woman with soft dark hair, in a modest gray dress that matched the weather. She was a small woman, with the mushroom-like complexion of someone who had never encountered a tropical sun. She had identified herself as the French mistress, Mlle. de Fayette.

She also looked distinctly wary. William supposed he couldn’t blame her, faced with a strange man holding a bouquet of battered flowers, standing at the doorstep. One couldn’t be too careful with a house full of impressionable young ladies.

“I have the fear—,” she began, taking a step back. “That is, I am most desolate, but—”

“It’s her father, I am,” William said quickly. He swept a quick half bow, smiling to show her that he wasn’t a rake, rogue, or seducer, but just a parent come to call. “Colonel William Reid. Lizzy might have mentioned me?” He tipped the French mistress a wink. “Not that a mere father is much in the mind of a young girl.”

If anything, Mlle. de Fayette looked even more distressed.

Was he losing his touch in his old age?

“Colonel Reid,” she said, rolling out the syllables of the title in the Continental fashion. She twisted her hands together, pale against the dark material of her dress. “I am of the most sorry. Miss Reid, she is—it is of the most unfortunate!”

“What’s she done now?” William asked resignedly. “In disgrace, is she?”

That sounded like his Lizzy. He could hear the lamentations of his housekeeper back in Madras, ten years past, in different accents, but the same general tone. Lizzy had a way of wreaking havoc, but with a smile so sweet it was hard to take against her.

“Miss Reid, she—” Mlle. de Fayette bit her lip, hard enough to leave a mark. “We would have sent the letter, but we did not know where—”

The hairs on William’s neck prickled. This wasn’t just a case of Lizzy eating the jam out of the biscuits or trying to climb the trellis on a dare.

“A letter?” he said, as casually as he could. “And what would that be about, then? She’s not got herself sent down, has she?”

“No, no. That is—” The woman in the doorway made a notable effort to compose herself. She pressed a hand to her lips.

“There, there. I’m sure it’s not so bad as all that,” said William reassuringly. “Whatever she’s done, I’ll see it put right. Now, what’s the minx done now?”

“Minx indeed!”

William’s head snapped up as a voice rang imperiously through the hall.

A woman strode forward, wafting Mlle. de Fayette out of the way. The glass prisms on the wall sconces quivered with the force of her movement. Next to the diminutive French mistress, the newcomer looked like an Amazon, although a great part of her height were the tall plumes that curled from her elaborate purple turban.

She moved with rangy grace, her skirts moving briskly against her long legs. Paris tailoring, unless William missed his guess, the material fine and cut narrow. An expensive rig for the proprietress of a young ladies’ academy.

“Are you the parent of Miss Reid?” she asked in ringing tones.

It felt like an accusation.

William retaliated with the full arsenal of his charm. “I have that honor,” he said easily. “But I fear I haven’t yet the pleasure of your acquaintance, Madame—”

The woman sniffed. It was a most effective sniff, conveying the full range of her displeasure. “Don’t call it a pleasure until you’ve had a chance to judge.” Using the point of her parasol, she neatly prodded the younger woman out of the way. “In or out? Make up your mind. You’re letting in the most appalling draft.”

William chose in. The door snapped shut behind him. Mlle. de Fayette stepped prudently out of the way.

William smiled determinedly at the woman in purple, whose commanding air seemed to imply that she must be the preceptress of this academy. Either that or the ruler of a small but warlike kingdom. William had met rajahs with less of an air of command.

He sketched a bow. “And is it Miss Climpson I have the honor of addressing?”

The woman drew back as though struck. “What an appalling notion,” she said. “Most certainly not.
I
am Miss Gwendolyn Meadows.” She said it much as one might say,
I am Cleopatra
.

Was he meant to know who she was?

“A pleasure,” William said again. He deliberately included both women in his smile. He had one objective: finding his Lizzy. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to enlighten me, it’s my daughter I’m after looking for, Miss Elizabeth—”

“Hmph,” said Miss Meadows, smacking the ground with her parasol hard enough to strike sparks. “You won’t find her here.”

William dodged out of the way, shocked into brevity. “Why not?”

Miss Meadows looked down her nose at him, a rather impressive trick given that he would have wagered on her being some few inches shorter than he. “Your Elizabeth has run off with our Agnes.”

“She’s—what?” Who in the blazes was Agnes?

“Run off,” said Miss Meadows succinctly. “Run. Off. Do pay attention, Colonel Reid. Really, it’s quite simple. Your Elizabeth has run off with our Agnes.”

William was stung into retort. “How do you know your Agnes didn’t run off with my Lizzy?”

Miss Meadows looked superior. “Really, Colonel Reid. Do be sensible. Agnes isn’t the running kind.”

Whereas his Lizzy—what did he know of his Lizzy? He’d had a letter a month for ten years, just that. Twelve letters a year times ten, with an extra on his birthday . . .

William pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Forgive me, ladies. I’ve just come six months by ship, five days by coach, and the rest of the way uphill by foot. My wits are not my own. Are you telling me that my daughter has gone missing?”

Mlle. de Fayette opened her mouth, but Miss Meadows got in first. “That is precisely what we have been telling you. Elizabeth and Agnes have both gone missing. Presumably with each other. Theoretically of their own volition. Does that answer your question?”

Hardly. William’s head was reeling with questions. He settled for the most pressing. “What’s been done to find them?”

Miss Meadow’s lips pursed. “Precious little. Come with me.” She jerked her head down the hall. “You’ll want to speak to Miss Climpson—for what good it will do you.”

She set off down the hall, her skirts swishing around her legs, heels tapping briskly against the wood floor.

William hurried after her, his wet boots squelching. “Are you employed at the school, then?” he asked dubiously. Somehow, he’d got the idea that schoolmistresses were meant to be quiet, downtrodden creatures.

“Quiet” and “downtrodden” were not terms one could apply to Miss Meadows.

“Merciful heavens, no! You couldn’t pay me to be a teacher.” The idea was horrifying enough to stop Miss Meadows in her tracks. Drawing herself up, she regarded him with great dignity. “I am Agnes’s older sister’s chaperone.”

It sounded like a French exercise. “I see,” said William, although he didn’t see at all. “And that makes you . . .”

“The only one with any common sense in this debacle.” Miss Meadows stopped in front of the open door of a drawing room decorated in shades of blue. It was adorned with an alarming variety of porcelain knickknacks, mostly of the cherub variety. Porcelain cherubs simpered from the mantel, more cherubs lurked at the corners of the windows, and a truly appalling assembly of them smirked from a large oil painting in the center of the ceiling.