The Lure of the Moonflower (17 page)

The abbot started to offer her his arm, regarded the amount of mud adhering to her person, and thought better of it. With a sweeping gesture, he ushered them towards an entrance just west of the church. “I am quite certain we can discover something for you, Dona Fluellen.”

Clapping his hands, the abbot said something in Portuguese. Lay brothers scattered in various directions, one with the donkey. The expression on the donkey’s face, as the brother attempted to drag it in the direction of the stable, bore a remarkable resemblance to Jack.

“Brother Pedro will show you to a room in the northwest wing,” said the abbot, and fled before Jane could begin talking again.

Brother Pedro spoke no English, but communicated with Jane by means of exaggerated mime.

Jack, on the other hand, wasn’t communicating at all, by English, mime, or otherwise. He walked beside Jane with an insolent swagger that spoke his displeasure louder than any number of words.

Brother Pedro led them through a dizzying series of high-ceilinged chambers, hung with so many paintings of popes and cardinals that their individual features resolved themselves into a blur of red robes. There was a great deal of gesturing, which Jane gathered was meant to indicate prelates of more than ordinary interest.

Brother Pedro paused in front of a particular painting. “Santo Tomás Becket,” he said proudly. When Jane merely looked at him, he said,
“Arcebispo de Cantuária? De Inglaterra?”
When that still didn’t get a response, he struck a pose and recited,
“‘Não haverá ninguém capaz de me livrar deste padre turbulento’?”

“Turbulent— Oh!” Jane took mercy on him. “Thomas à Becket? How nice. We have him at home. Bits of him, at least. Saints do tend to scatter so.”

Brother Pedro eyed her dubiously and reverted to mime.

Meanwhile, Jack had maintained his ominous silence. Jane felt his presence like a shadow beside her. She took his arm, leaning on it as a devoted flibbertigibbet would. “Ought we remind him you speak Portuguese?” Jane murmured

Jack’s arm was iron hard beneath her hand. “And ruin the show? Besides, I’m Welsh, remember?” He glanced down at her, his expression inscrutable. “That was very clever. . . . In a single blow, you accounted for both my accent and my complexion.”

He did not sound particularly admiring.

“I’ve heard it said the Anglo-Indian accent is rather like the Welsh. Although you sound more like—” She had been going to say his father. Jane caught herself. “Yourself. You defy categorization.”

“Compliments?” Jack smiled lazily down at her, and Jane was reminded of the tiger in the royal menagerie, playing with his prey. “Is that Mrs. Fluellen speaking or Jane?”

“For the moment, the two are one and the same.” It was one of the first principles of the game they played: if one didn’t live the role, the game was lost. “Do attempt to remember that you’re meant to be madly in love.”

Jack’s eyes glittered like oil paint, bright and opaque. “Am I? Or am I just a half-pay scoundrel who managed to win the affections of a gullible heiress?”

“If you don’t mind playing the scoundrel.” It came out sounding shrewish and petty. Jane gritted her teeth. She knew better than this. She was better than this. Taking a deep breath, she said coolly, “Yes, that works rather nicely. It gives you room to leer at the serving girls and ask them leading questions.”

“Are there serving girls in monasteries?”

“I’d never thought of that. Probably not. I suppose you wouldn’t be willing to leer at the novices?”

“I’m not that sort of half-pay officer,” Jack said definitively.

“For the good of the Queen?”

“She’s not my Queen.”

“No, but she is our mission,” said Jane quietly. “For good or for ill.”

Brother Pedro opened a door.
“Aqui é o seu quarto,”
he said with some relief, began to say something else, gave up, and fled.

“I had expected something more . . . spartan.” The room into which they had been ushered had been decorated sometime before the previous century. The materials were sober, but rich: a surprisingly broad bed, a writing desk, a heavily carved chair. The bed was cloaked in crimson damask, as rich as good wine. There was a small door in the corner, which Jane suspected led to a dressing room, where one’s servant would sleep.

Or in this case, where either she or Jack would sleep.

Jack shrugged, dropping his hat on the crimson coverlet and turning to examine the books on the writing table. Novels, from the look of it, most likely left by a previous guest. “The monks of Alcobaça are known for having more pipes of wine in their cellar than books in their library. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.”

“I imagine we’ll find out tonight.” Jane regarded Jack’s tense back, all lines and angles. She was reminded, incongruously, of an offended feline. And she couldn’t blame him, precisely, for being angry. In an attempt at an olive branch, she said, “I thought we might learn more at the prior’s table than in the kitchen.”

Jack turned abruptly, his face darker than the twisted posts of the bed. “You might have consulted me.”

“When?” Jane’s hands clenched into fists at her sides. “In the three seconds before the prior began to speak?”

“During that last mile’s walk to the abbey, perhaps?”

During that last mile’s walk, her mind had been on other things. Jane took a deep breath, knowing herself to be in the wrong, and hating herself for it. “There wasn’t— I didn’t— The bells were so loud.”

Was that the best she could do?
The bells were so loud?

Jack pressed his eyes shut, making an obvious attempt to get hold of his temper. In a controlled voice, he said, “If you had intended to change the plan, you might have told me. I don’t like surprises.”

That he was right didn’t make it easier.

Carefully, Jane said, “It is very hard to relinquish the habit of command.” Particularly when she felt in command of so little right now, not least her own emotions. Snapping her gaze away from Jack’s lips, Jane mustered a crooked smile. “Neither of us is very good at working in harness, are we?”

“I prefer not to think of myself as a mule.” Jack ran a hand through his tousled hair. “Jane—”

There was a sharp knock at the door. Servants never knocked, but apparently monks did.

“Oh, the devil with it,” said Jack savagely, and strode towards the door. He yanked it open. “Yes?”

Brother Pedro shoved a large pile of cloth into Jack’s arms, delivered a rapid monologue, and departed, carefully not looking at Jane.

“I think he believes he caught us in the middle of exercising the sacrament of marriage,” said Jack dryly. “We are instructed that water for washing is in the dressing room, and we are to be at supper in half an hour. Or something along those lines.”

Jack dumped the pile of cloth on the bed, where the garments lolled in a decidedly wanton fashion. It looked like the aftermath of a scene of passion, a silk dress, buttons all undone, tangled with a pair of breeches; silk stockings tumbling, willy-nilly, over the side of the bed; garters flung any which way.

Jane glanced guiltily over her shoulder. It hadn’t been like that with Nicolas. There had been no rending of bodices or flinging of garters. Her undressing had been executed as carefully as any lady’s maid could desire.

Did that lessen the sin, if there were no corresponding creases in one’s chemise?

Hiding her blushes, Jane leaned down and lifted what looked like—and, indeed, appeared to be—a pair of purple plum knee breeches banded in silver and gilt at the knee.

“I believe these are for you,” she said, attempting to match Jack’s dry tone, as though she handed a man his most intimate garments every day.

Jack took a step back, his brows beetling. Jane was surprised he didn’t make the sign against the evil eye. “They can’t expect me to wear this.”

“Don’t forget the jacket.” It was plum velvet, thirty years out-of-date, edged with tarnished gilt embroidery tortured into fanciful swirls and rosettes. Some grandee of a previous generation had left his court clothes behind. Either that or the abbot had exhumed a premonastic costume of his youth.

Jack looked deeply horrified. “You must be joking.”

“I might be, but I don’t believe the abbot is.” Since Jack appeared to be frozen with a raw fear that neither death nor danger had previously induced, Jane draped the garments over the screen in the corner on his behalf, adding to them a heavily embroidered white silk waistcoat and a pair of silk stockings, only lightly munched by moths. “Here. Put these on. You can’t sit at the prior’s table in all your mud.”

“It might be mud, but at least it’s not purple,” retorted Jack, but he retreated behind the screen all the same.

“Consider it imperial,” replied Jane, and felt a pang of longing for her old chaperone, Miss Gwen, and her fearsome purple parasol. For Miss Gwen, imperial and imperious were generally one and the same.

Only she wasn’t Miss Gwen anymore. She was Mrs. Colonel William Reid.

Jane glanced at the screen behind which various bumpings and mumblings could be heard. It had seemed so sensible, back in Lisbon, to avoid the entire tangle of admitting she knew Jack’s family. Jack’s relationship with his father was, by the latter’s own admission, fraught. Jack was more likely to comply with orders if he thought of Jane as an arm of Wickham, an agent, impersonal.

And Jane had wanted the armor that came of being the Carnation and only the Carnation. To tell him about Colonel Reid and Miss Gwen, of her sister Agnes’s friendship with Lizzy, of her little goddaughter, Plumeria, all the tangled ties that bound her to his family, struck too close to the heart of her, to whatever there still was that was Jane rather than the Carnation.

That, of course, was before she kissed him by the roadside.

Grimacing at herself, Jane snatched the remaining garments off the bed and retreated to the dressing room.

The dress was, mercifully, not of the same vintage as Jack’s borrowed ensemble. Good. It was very difficult to creep stealthily in three-foot-wide panniers. The dress was several years out-of-date and musty, but it was of silk, with slippers to match. The rich fabric had been heavily embroidered by someone with a taste for lopsided carnations. Pink carnations.

Chance, Jane told herself, untying her heavy wool skirt and letting it drop to the floor. The carnation was a popular flower in Portugal.

The dress had been made for a smaller woman. The bodice squeezed in a way that would, Jane thought wryly, look very fashionable in Paris. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. Loosening her hair from her braid, she twisted it into a knot at the back of her head, using some of the water from the basin to dampen the ends into curls around her face.

The curls wouldn’t curl. Giving it up as a bad job, Jane tied her locket around her throat, and, suitably armored, went forth into the bedroom and promptly tripped over her too-small silk slippers.

There was a grandee waiting for her, a grandee in a purple plum velvet coat, his brown hair brushed into a queue, his arms folded across his chest. The light of the candles glittered off silver and gold embroidery.

There ought, thought Jane, to have been orders on the man’s chest and a sword by his side. This was a man who could sweep through the halls of St. James, who threw down a winning hand of cards without a second thought, who danced with duchesses and sneezed at dukes.

“I look like I’m impersonating an aubergine,” said Jack, tugging irritably at the fall of lace at his throat.

“No,” said Jane, going without thinking to shake out the lace and settle it back in its proper place. “You don’t.”

She glanced up, and saw that he was looking down. And down. Jane froze for a moment, her hand against Jack’s chest, the embroidery scratchy against her palm. There had been no gloves with her dress, and no fichu.

Jane could feel a flush rising in her chest. She took a hasty step back, resisting the urge to tug at her bodice. She had worn lower décolletage at the Tuileries, without a hint of embarrassment. And used it, too, to her own advantage.

“Are we— Shall we go down to supper?”

Jack made a leg, an elegant, old-fashioned bow that wouldn’t have been out in place in Versailles. Instinctively, Jane sank into the matching curtsy, feeling dimly as though she had been presented with a changeling.

“Where did you learn that?” she asked, trying desperately to bring this man back to the Jack she had known on the road, the workaday Jack in his battered hat and shapeless jacket. “At your boarding school?”

Jack glanced at her from hooded eyes. “No. My father.”

Now was the time to introduce the topic of Colonel Reid. But Jane’s tongue seized on the words. “He must be . . . he must be very charming.”

“He is.” Jack held out an arm, lace ruffles dripping from his sleeve. His hands looked oddly bare. He ought to have rings: great rubies set in gold, curiously carved cameos, massive signets. “Shall we to dinner . . . darling?”

A
different lay brother appeared to escort them to the dining hall.

They had undoubtedly scared off poor Brother Pedro, thought Jack grimly, shaking back the fall of lace that was tickling the back of his fingers. The lace he could do something about. Jane’s ungloved fingers on his arm, her bosom pushed to proximity just beneath his nose—those were another matter. Jack could feel sweat gathering in the small of his back, beneath the heavy velvet.

Bloody court clothes. There was no way he was creeping the corridors in these. Anyone could see that silver-gilt embroidery a mile off, not to mention that it weighed more than the bloody donkey.

If Jane had only waited five minutes, they might have hammered out another plan, thought Jack irritably. She glanced up at him, all innocence in the candlelight, and Jack smiled back with his teeth, the sort of smile a fortune-hunter might give his prey.

Since that was the role she had assigned him.

“I feel like a trained monkey,” he muttered. “All I need is a cap with a feather.”

“That wouldn’t go with the ensemble at all.” They paused as the lay brother rapped at a door. Jane looked up at Jack, and there was something in her eyes that Jack couldn’t quite read. “I think you look . . .”

She paused, searching for the right word.

“Yes?” Jack prompted, hating how much it mattered to him.

The door opened before Jane could complete her thought.

“Welcome, welcome.” The abbot moved forward with the practiced grace of a politician, ushering them into a small dining parlor. Small, that was, by the standards of the monastery. It would have made four of the hut they had stayed in the night before. “I trust you found the accommodations to your liking?”

“We are not to dine in the refectory?” Jack drawled, casting an “I told you so” look at Jane.

Jane blinked dewily at the abbot. “I had so hoped to see the workings of an establishment such as yours, sir. I had heard that the refectory is so very impressive.”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” said the abbot. “Tonight is one of our great feasts. I had thought you might be more comfortable with your fellow travelers.”

“In other words,” muttered Jack in Jane’s ear, “contain the heretics.”

In his absurd clothes, he had been belled as surely as any leper. As Alarico, he might have mingled with the servants, questioned them, perhaps even slipped into the refectory in the guise of a lay brother in a borrowed robe. If the Queen was, indeed, at the monastery, the abbot had very effectively closed off any chance travelers who might not be so chance.

The abbot led them to the table, too long for a mere four place settings. “You are only four at table this evening.” He looked pointedly at Jack and Jane. “Most remain home with their families at this season.”

“We had so hoped to be in Porto with my father for Christmas,” murmured Jane, dabbing at her eyes with a scrap of lace. “Christmas isn’t Christmas without family.”

Jack glanced sharply at her, feeling a pang of guilt. That last hadn’t been altogether fiction. He had, in his annoyance over purple velvet, neatly managed to shove aside the root of his discomfort.

It was the being declared dead that I found so distressing. . . . There’s a little stone to me in the churchyard in Lower Wooley’s Town.

Not my fault
, Jack told his conscience, but his conscience wasn’t having it. His conscience didn’t like him terribly much right now. He didn’t like himself terribly much right now.

And the plum velvet wasn’t helping.

Jack shook back his ruffles and tried to look sufficiently jaded as the abbot led them to the table, where two men occupied a space designed for at least ten. One was tall and spare, garbed in a deep-burgundy coat that contrasted with his fantastically embroidered silk waistcoat. Next to him, Jack’s plum velvet seemed positively restrained. The man’s hair was white, a particularly luxuriant white, worn long in a way that evoked philosophers of old, or Prospero, alone in his island kingdom with his book and his staff.

It was, Jack thought, a very deliberate effect. The man’s appearance was as carefully choreographed as a production of the royal opera in Lisbon.

Seated across from the taller man was a little mouse of a man in shades of rusty black: rusty black coat, rusty black hair, rusty black eyes. Jack half expected him to start gnawing on a crust with a pair of long front teeth.

He didn’t. But he did regard Jack and Jane with beetled brows that might have benefited from a bit of a brush and a trim.

“We have only two other travelers with us this evening,” said the abbot, hurrying the introductions along with the air of one determined to see to the niceties under trying circumstances. “Senhor and Senhora Fluellen, may I present to you the Marquis de la Mare”—the taller man rose, bowing gravely—“and Mr. Samson, who has recently come from inspecting a glass manufactory in which he has an interest. Monsieur de la Mare has been with us for a week. Mr. Samson”—a faint expression of pain crossed the abbot’s face—“arrived yesterday. He has been delayed by damage to his conveyance.”

“And a terrible journey it was, too! Terrible! Terrible!” Mr. Samson’s eyebrows quivered. “The roads—disgraceful! And then to be stranded
here
—”

The abbot’s lips tightened. “I assure you, Mr. Samson, my men are fixing the matter as rapidly as possible.” Before the man could launch into continued complaints, the abbot added, “I am afraid I must leave you. If there is anything you require, do not hesitate to ask.”

One monarch, presumed missing? Jack held out a chair for Jane, doing his best not to twitch with impatience. Shut into this room, with these two, his chances for reconnoitering were slim.

It would have to wait until after supper. Being heretics, they would presumably be excused from the midnight mass. There was that, at least, thought Jack reluctantly. Had he remained Alarico, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to prowl the grounds while everyone else was at their devotions.

He took his seat across from Jane as she said to de la Mare, with the most delicate suggestion of alarm, “You are French, sir? I had not been aware that the French had come so far north as this.”

The marquis smiled benevolently at her. Or, rather, at her décolletage, where her gold locket dangled enticingly in the valley between her breasts. “You have nothing to fear from me, Madame Fluellen. I have been away from France longer than Bonaparte has been in it. I am a student of the world.”

And, apparently, of female anatomy.

“I have never before seen an establishment of this size,” said Jane, looking up at de la Mare beneath her lashes. “Even the palace of St. James cannot compare.”

The marquis poured rich red wine into Jane’s goblet. “It has been said of Alcobaça that its cloisters are cities, its sacristy a church, and its church a basilica.”

In other words, a perfect place to conceal a missing monarch and her entourage. Jack’s eyes met Jane’s across the table.

She lifted her goblet, turning the stem about in her fingers. “
Do
tell me more, Monsieur le Marquis.”

If the man was really a marquis, then Jack was the Prince of Wales.

“The origins of the monastery stretch back into history. . . .” The so-called marquis prosed on about mystical chalices and wonder-working saints and the endowment of this or that monarch.

Jack caught only bits of it. Mr. Samson, taking advantage of his own captive audience, was holding forth on the manufacturing of glass, the laziness of the local population, and those terrible thieves of customs inspectors in England, none of which impeded his shoveling course after course of rich food into his surprisingly spare frame.

Across the table, candlelight glimmered off the silk of Jane’s dress, casting interesting shadows across her face, highlighting the hollows beneath her cheekbones, the deep valley between her breasts. It was almost impossible to recognize in the poised lady across from him the woman with whom he had traveled on the road, her hair in a braid and soot on her cheek. But then there would be the tilt of her chin, the quirk of a brow, and there she was, like a smile glimpsed from behind a veil, all the more tantalizing for being only partly seen.

Illogically, Jack wished the road had gone on longer, that Alcobaça had been farther away.

If the Queen was at the monastery, then their association was almost finished. They would have to get the Queen to the coast, to the rendezvous—and then?

Jack thrust a forkload of food into his mouth, although he couldn’t have said, with any assurance, what he was eating.

“. . . locked.” Jack forced his attention back to the marquis, who appeared to have abandoned fairy tales about miracle-working monarchs and returned, at long last, to the present. “Water damage, they say.”

“Water damage?” Jack swallowed a mouthful of rice flavored with spices and mixed with seafood. “To what?”

“The hall of the novices.” Jane narrowed her eyes at him, but her voice remained dulcet. “Monsieur de la Mare was just telling me about their lovely art collection. I do so hope it hasn’t been hurt by the wet, don’t you? A Titian is a terrible thing to waste.”

“It is, indeed, a terrible thing to lock away from the world,” agreed de la Mare gravely. “His mastery of the tones of the flesh . . .”

Jack cleared his throat. Emphatically.

Monsieur de la Mare raised his eyes from Jane’s throat in a leisurely fashion and gave a very Gallic shrug. “I had hoped to be granted admission, but alas. They have it locked tighter than the lips of a virtuous woman.”

“It is very odd that you should say so, Monsieur de la Mare.” Jane affected a puzzled expression. “Most of the virtuous women of my acquaintance never cease speaking. Lecture, lecture, lecture, that’s all they do. I have two aunts who are both terribly worthy and neither ever stops to take breath.”

The marquis lifted a brow to Jack, man-to-man. “Perhaps it is that they have nothing better to do with their lips?”

Jack didn’t want to think what Jane might be doing with hers. Or, rather, with his.

“The novices,” he said, pulling his brain back up from his breeches. “What of them?”

De la Mare waved a dismissive hand. He wore, Jack noticed, three rings, one enameled with the figure of a skull, another incised with strange symbols. The third looked like a signet, but Jack had seen enough trick rings to be able to tell when a neatly hidden hinge masked a secret compartment. “There is, as you can see, no dearth of beds in the monastery. They have been housed elsewhere until the roof may be repaired.”

“How terribly inconvenient for them,” said Jane.

“Living in the lap of luxury . . . ,” Mr. Samson interrupted his steady consumption of Christmas supper to sputter through a mouthful of excellently baked cod. “I don’t know how you can stomach it. Hooded robes, wonder-working saints—it’s enough to make a man sick!”

“And yet,
mon ami
,” said de la Mare lazily, directing his gaze to the empty platters surrounding Mr. Samson, “you seem to have stomached a great deal.”

“Wonder-working saints?” Jack interjected quickly, before Samson could retort. “Do they have those hereabouts?”

Samson snorted. “I had the ill fortune to pass one on the road here. Wonder-working, my knee! The only wonder was how quickly they forced us into the ditch. Took my muleteer a full hour to dig us out again. An hour, sir!”

“What is an hour?”

“Time is money,” said Samson testily. “Not that I would expect you to understand, Mr. Dellymeer.”

De la Mare waved a dismissive hand. “Not being entirely occupied with getting and spending, my mind has room to entertain larger possibilities than, for example, the price of glass.”

Their sniping was almost a little too well choreographed. A broken carriage might be easily arranged. And such seeming rivalry could conceal a very effective partnership.

Jack rescued a lace ruffle before it dipped into the green sauce on his cod. He wasn’t reconciled to the plum velvet, but he was willing to admit that Jane’s change of plan might have had its merits.

Including, but not limited to, the décolletage on that dress.

“Glass . . . I do miss my looking glass,” mused Jane, effectively ending the argument before it could begin. “
Such
a favorite. It broke on the road. Do you believe, Marquis, that I shall have seven years’ bad luck?”

De la Mare sketched a courtly gesture. “The bad luck is the mirror’s, for losing its power to gaze on that fair face.” To Jack, he said, “If I were thirty years younger,
mon ami
 . . .”

“You would be back at Versailles,” riposted Jack. He raised his glass to the other man. “Presumably.”

If the man had ever seen Versailles, he was Louis XVI.

On second thought, make that Louis XIV. Decapitation had never been among Jack’s career goals.

The marquis raised his own glass in a barely perceptible toast. “We are, I think, both men of the world.” The white brows lifted. “But there is more than one way to make one’s fortune.”

“There is also,” said Jack, “more than one way to lose it. Do you play at cards, monsieur?”

“Frequently—but not on the night of our blessed Savior’s birth. Some other time, perhaps.” De la Mare rose from his chair with an ease at odds with the white of his hair. “I hear the bells calling me to mass.”

“Papists,” sniffed Samson. “I’m to bed.”

“Bed,” drawled Jack. “What an excellent idea. My dear?”

If he sounded possessive, well, that was part of the role, he told himself. That was his story and he was sticking to it, no matter how amused Monsieur de la Mare looked.

“Ah, to be young again,” said de la Mare, smiling benevolently upon Jack and Jane in a way that made Jack want to use his head as a nutcracker. “To be made immortal with a kiss. Until tomorrow, my friends.”

Bowing, he exited in the direction of the church. Mr. Samson, muttering his own good-nights, went the other way, in the direction of the guest rooms.

Which proved, thought Jack, keeping an arm looped lightly around Jane’s waist, absolutely nothing.

Other than the fact that Jane fit very nicely into the curve of his arm.