The Lure of the Moonflower (3 page)

As for those rings, those foolish flashing rings . . . Most would-be assailants would be so dazzled by the gleam of gems on her hands that they wouldn’t notice that those hands were holding a knife until it was too late.

Grudgingly, Jack had to admit that whoever the woman was, she knew what she was doing.

Which made her both very intriguing and very, very dangerous.

The house to which she led him was a private residence. Jack followed her through a gate, across a courtyard, and up a flight of stairs to a narrow iron door. His fingers briefly touched the point of the knife he kept in a sheath at his wrist. The woman might have known the code phrase, but that didn’t mean this wasn’t an ambush. No secret organization was inviolable, no code unbreakable. The woman’s French was impeccable, her clothes Paris-made.

Which could mean anything or nothing.

How far did her masquerade go? Jack wondered. Was there a colonel who had her in keeping? It had been done before. Sleeping with the enemy was the surest way of securing information. A man might share with a mistress what he wouldn’t with a friend.

Jack’s imagination painted a picture of the rooms they were about to enter: lush carpets on the floor, a gilded mirror above a dressing table laden with mysterious creams and powders, a hip bath in one corner, silk draperies falling around a wide bed. The perfect nest for a French colonel’s woman.

Jack didn’t consider himself prudish or squeamish; a job was a job, and they all got it done as best they could. So why the instinctive feeling of distaste that this woman, this particular woman, might sell her body for information?

From a reticule that looked too small to contain anything of use, the woman took a heavy key and fitted it into the door.

It opened onto a spartan room, the walls whitewashed, the only furniture a table, a chair, and a divan that looked as though it doubled as a bed. There was no dressing table, no gilded mirror, no bed draped with curtains.

“Surely,” said Jack mockingly, “the colonel could afford better.”

The woman closed the door behind them with a snap. “There is no colonel.”

Now that they were inside, her movements were brisk and businesslike, with no hint of coquetry. She tossed the key on the table and crossed the room, testing the shutters on the window.

“No?” Jack lounged back against the doorframe, his hands thrust in his pockets. “You surprise me.”

“I doubt that.” The woman plucked the bonnet off her head, taking the dark curls with it.

Beneath it, her own hair was a pale brown, brushed to a sheen and braided tightly around and around. Without the coquettish curls, her face had the purity of a profile on a coin, the sort of face to which men ascribed abstract sentiments: Liberty, Honor, Beauty. All she needed was some Grecian draperies and a flag.

She dropped the bonnet on the table. “You have a reputation for keeping a cool head. Or have we been mistaken in you . . . Mr. Reid?”

Jack straightened slowly. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me.”

No names. That was the rule. Never names. Only aliases.

One by one, the lady plucked the rings off her fingers, setting them each in a bowl on the table. “Your full name is Ian Reid, but no has ever called you that. Your family calls you Jack. You were born in Madras to Colonel William Reid, a Scottish-American officer in the East India Company’s army and his—”

“Concubine?” drawled Jack.

“—companion,” the woman corrected primly, “a Rajput lady of high birth.”

His mother might have been a bazaar girl for all it mattered to the English community in Madras. Her high birth had meant only that she had felt her fall all the more, reduced from a princess among her own people to a cavalry officer’s kept woman.

Jack didn’t like to talk about his mother. He liked it even less when other people talked about his mother.

Years of taking hard knocks kept Jack’s face wooden. The only reaction was his very stillness, a stillness he knew betrayed him as much as any response. “Does this fascinating exposition have a point?”

The cool, controlled voice went inexorably on. “You served for some years in the army of the Maratha chieftain Scindia, before Scindia’s French allies recruited you, and renamed you the Moonflower.” The last ring clattered into the bowl. The woman stretched her bare fingers, like a pianist preparing to play, before glancing over at Jack. “You fell out with the French three years ago. People tend not to like it when you work for someone else while pretending to work for them. They like it even less when you abscond with a raja’s horde of jewels.”

Jack shrugged. “All’s fair, they say.”

The woman raised a pale brow. “In love or in war?”

From his limited experience, Jack didn’t see much difference between the two. Except that those one loved might hurt one the most. “They’re one and the same, princess.” His eyes lingered on her décolletage with deliberate insolence. “I had thought you would know.”

The woman brushed that aside, continuing with her dossier. “As a result of your little escapade with the jewels, you relocated to Portugal, where you have been positioned ever since.”

Jack tilted his hat lazily over his eyes. “You are well-informed,” he drawled. “Brava.”

The woman’s lips turned up in a Sphinx-like smile. “It
is
what I do.”

She sounded so pleased with herself that Jack decided that turn and turnabout was only fair play. He’d see how she liked it with the shoe on the other foot.

“We’ve ascertained that you know all about me.” Jack straightened to his full height, favoring her with a wolfish smile. “Now let’s talk about you.”

“I don’t—” she began imperiously, but Jack held up a hand.

Pushing back from the wall, he prowled in a slow circle around her. “You speak French beautifully, but it’s not your native tongue. You wear your French clothes well, but they’re a costume, not a personal choice. Left to yourself, you don’t go in for furbelows.”

His eyes went to her neck, where she wore a gold locket on a silk ribbon. The rest of her jewelry was showy, and undoubtedly made of paste. The locket was simple, and it was real.

Jack nodded at her neck. “Except, perhaps, one. That locket.”

The woman’s hand closed over the bauble, a small but telling gesture. “Very nice, Mr. Reid. You are quite perceptive.”

Jack smiled lazily. “That’s what they pay me for, princess. Now, do I go on—or are you going to tell me who you are?”

He half expected her to demur. Any other woman would have. Any other woman would have teased and played.

Instead, this woman, with her elaborate rings and plain locket, looked him in the eye and said simply, “You may know me as the Carnation. The Pink Carnation.”

Jack stared at her for a moment, and then he broke out in a laugh. “Pull the other one, sweetheart.”

L
aughter wasn’t quite the reaction that Jane Wooliston had expected.

Napoleon Bonaparte was said to break crockery at the mere mention of the name of the Pink Carnation. Hardened soldiers quailed; courtiers checked beneath their pillows for notes with the telltale pink flower; even Fouché, Napoleon’s Minister of Police, was rumored to look over his shoulder and walk a little faster when there was a hint of floral scent in the air.

Some of it, Jane knew, was a reflection of her own skill, of knowing when to strike and when to retreat and, most of all, how to remain in the game. There was something to be said for longevity. Other spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, had been unmasked, their leagues unraveled. Still others, Petunias and Orchids and a regular blight of Begonias, had hardly made it across the channel to France before being unceremoniously nabbed and dropped into the darker regions of the Temple prison.

But the Pink Carnation remained at liberty. And, by remaining so, acquired a reputation that owed a little to the truth and far more to the power of imagination. Any French reversal, from Napoleon’s failure to launch his fleet to the burning of his breakfast croissants, was laid at her door. The Imperial Guard heard her in every shutter that creaked in the night; they looked for her under the bed. Without intending to, Jane had become something greater than herself. She had become a myth, larger than life, cloaked in mystery.

There were times when she caught sight of herself in the mirror, of her own familiar face, just a face when it came down to it, eyes and nose and lips and skin pale from the protection of bonnets and hoods, and wondered at the absurdity of it all.

There were other times, however, when it was rather convenient to be a myth. Particularly when dealing with insubordinate agents. From everything she had read in his file, insubordination was Jack Reid’s middle name.

Or if it wasn’t, it should be.

Whatever Jack Reid did, one could be sure it was what he wasn’t meant to be doing. Sent as an apprentice to a printer, he ran away and hired himself out as a mercenary. Offered a permanent position in a prince’s retinue, he accepted a job spying for the French. When the French promoted him to a position of trust, he began feeding information to the English. Jack Reid had a talent for defying expectation, and, not so incidentally, orders.

He also happened to be very good at what he did. Everyone agreed on that. He had a knack for languages, an instinct for operating unseen. And Jane was in uncertain territory, in a country where she knew only as much of the language as could be crammed into five days of study, about to embark on a mission that would take her deep into a countryside well removed from her usual networks of agents and informers.

Like it or not, she needed Jack Reid. More than that, she needed his cooperation. She needed him to follow her lead without argument, without question. In their line of work, a moment’s hesitation could mean the difference between life and death.

It had been a calculated risk, revealing her nom de guerre. The more prudent course would have been to identify herself as the Moonflower’s contact, nothing more. But while a man might quibble at the orders of a fellow agent, especially if said fellow agent were both female and young, no one said no to the Pink Carnation.

Almost no one.

Jane didn’t waste her time arguing. That would only make her look weak. So she did what she did best: she waited. She waited until Jack Reid’s laughter subsided from a guffaw into a rich chuckle. She waited until his grin faded into a frown, until his amusement turned to uncertainty.

And then she arched one brow.

“If you have done amusing yourself, Mr. Reid,” said Jane, in a voice designed to evoke every governess and schoolmaster who had ever taken a ruler to his palm, “there is work to be done.”

There was nothing like dignity to make a man squirm.

Mr. Reid wasn’t so easily broken, however. His eyes moved over her with deliberate insolence, from her smoothly coiled hair to the absurd flounces at her hem. “The Pink Carnation has been in operation for five years, at least. You’re—what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five?”

She would be twenty-six in February, although there were times when she felt at least twice that.

Not that Jack Reid should throw stones. He wouldn’t be twenty-six until July, for all that he affected the world-weary air of a corsair who had raided the world twice over and found nothing in it to interest him.

It was the stubble, Jane decided. If that was stubble and not just artistically applied dirt on his chin. She’d used that trick a time or two herself, when circumstances required her to pose as a man.

“Age has nothing to do with it,” Jane said quellingly. “Alexander the Great conquered Greece at the age of twenty.”

Mr. Reid was unimpressed. “Alexander the Great lived in different times.”

Jane knew what he really meant. “And he didn’t wear a skirt.”

“Actually, he did. And a rather shorter one.” Jane resisted the urge to tug at her skirt as Mr. Reid conducted a lengthy perusal of the garment in question. “He also had cavalry.”

“You, Mr. Reid, are my cavalry. Such as you are. You are on loan, Mr. Reid. To the League of the Pink Carnation.”

“The Pink Carnation in person.” The Moonflower had switched from French to English, his diction clipped, well educated, with just a hint of a lilt. His French was good, but his English was better, laced with a cutting sarcasm. “From reports, I would have thought you would be seven feet tall and carrying a saber between your teeth.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” said Jane, “but I left my saber in my other reticule. Now, if we could turn to the matter at hand . . .”

“Ah, yes. My secondment.” He drew out the word, making it a mockery. “I assume you have orders for me?”

“Wasn’t the eagle’s nest enough for you? Or do you need documents drawn up by a lawyer and signed in triplicate?” Jane smiled condescendingly at the Moonflower. “It would be an amateur’s error to carry anything in writing. And I, Mr. Reid, am not an amateur.”

His pose was relaxed, but his eyes were far too keen, sizing her up, ferreting out her untruths.

“No, you’re not.” It wasn’t intended as a compliment. He folded his arms across his chest, regarding her with unveiled suspicion. “What could so illustrious a figure as the Pink Carnation wish of my humble self?”

Right now, the Pink Carnation wished him to perdition. Jane suspected the effect was both deliberate and carefully cultivated.

Jane seated herself in a straight chair, keeping her voice brisk, businesslike. It was always best to start as one meant to go on. She gestured to Mr. Reid to sit. “What do you know about Queen Maria?”

Instead of sitting, Jack Reid leaned lazily back against the wall. “Other than the fact that she’s stark, raving mad?”

Jane wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of showing annoyance. “Other than that.”

“I don’t know, princess,” said Reid, his voice silky. “You tell me.”

There were times when Jane dearly missed her old headquarters in Paris, where she had carried out her shadowy activities with a well-trained cadre of underlings who followed her orders without question.

But Paris was closed to her now.

Jane kept her voice level. “Queen Maria was meant to take passage on a ship bound for her colony of Brazil.”

Jack Reid tipped his hat down over his eyes. “She did. I saw her.”

Jane sat a little straighter. “Did you, Mr. Reid? Did you see her with your own eyes? Or do you merely repeat what others have reported?”

Jack Reid let his lids sink down over his eyes, the picture of boredom. “It was a closed carriage. But I certainly heard her. You could hear her from here to the Azores.”

It was hard not to feel just a little bit smug. “What you heard, Mr. Reid, was her sister, Dona Mariana. Dona Mariana shares Her Majesty’s unfortunate malady.”

Jack Reid shrugged. “The Braganzas are so inbred it’s a wonder they aren’t all barking like dogs. So she wasn’t in that carriage; she was in another one. Either way, she’s halfway to Brazil by now.”

Jane rose from her seat, resting her hands on the table. “Oh? I gather there was some . . . disorder . . . attending the court’s departure.”

Jack Reid snorted. “Some? It was a rout. I’ve seen whole armies in retreat with less baggage left behind. But they would hardly forget their monarch.”

“Are you so sure, Mr. Reid?” Jane strolled towards the window, giving Jack the option of either following or shouting at her back. “From what I have been told, everyone assumed that someone else had seen to the Queen. Her Majesty, it appears, is not an easy charge.”

Reid remained stubbornly where he was. “She’s mad and she’s violent. There’s more than one of her ladies-in-waiting who would happily see her overboard with no questions asked.”

“But for the fact that she is the Queen,” said Jane, turning to face him across the room. “That still means something.”

Reid smiled pityingly. “Does it? I hate to disillusion you, princess, but royal heads have been known to roll. A monarch is as mortal as any other man. Or woman.”

It sounded like a warning. Perhaps it was. But Jane wasn’t that easily intimidated.

“It means something to her people. And,” Jane added quietly, “it means something to the men who seek to rule those people. In the wrong hands . . .”

She didn’t need to say more. Jack Reid gave a low bark of laughter. “Are you telling me that someone spirited the Queen away from the docks? And no one noticed? Try again, princess.”

Jane met Mr. Reid’s eyes. Between his slouch and her high-heeled slippers, they were nearly of a height. “It was two days before anyone realized that she was missing. By then, it was too late to turn back.”

Jack Reid’s lips twisted. “I’d always known the Regent wasn’t the sharpest knife in the block, but this—this rises to a new triumph of incompetence. I doff my hat to Don John, the man who lost first his kingdom and then his mother. One wonders what he will manage to misplace next.”

“They weren’t misplaced,” Jane reminded him. “They were taken. Both of them.”

Jack Reid shrugged, the muscles of his shoulders moving beneath the rough material of his jacket. “I can’t imagine anyone will miss her. Her son is probably breathing a sigh of relief. Have you considered the option that he might have got rid of her himself?”

There was something strangely disturbing about that prospect. “You have an odd notion of filial obedience, Mr. Reid.”

“Obedience ought to be earned, not given as a right.” There was steel beneath his voice, and a vulnerability that he quickly masked by flinging back at her, “Do your parents know where you are?”

“As much as yours do,” Jane snapped, and then regretted it.

Reid raised his brows, sensing weakness, probing at the wound. “Ah, but I’m not a gently bred young lady.”

He was good. She had to give him that. Very, very good. That was her cue, she knew, to protest, to tell him more than she ought.

But for the fact that she was also good. Very, very good.

“Whatever Don John may feel, or not feel, for his mother as her son, she is also his queen,” said Jane coolly. “There are practical as well as personal considerations at work. The Regent will hardly be pleased if the French employ the Queen to set up a figurehead government in Lisbon.”

Jack Reid watched her with hooded eyes, but he didn’t press the point. “The French already have a figurehead government. It’s called the Regency Council.”

He was lulling her; he would come back to the attack later. It was a technique she’d used herself.

“The Regency Council won’t last a month.” Jane had had a week on the boat from London to come to grips with the situation on the ground in Portugal, spending long nights in her cabin reading through one report after another, tackling unfamiliar names, an unfamiliar language. She spoke with more authority than she felt. “You saw what happened in the square. The Regency Council has no authority and Junot has no patience. He’ll dismiss them on some pretext before the year is out. The people place no reliance in the Regency Council. But they do in their Queen. If their anointed Queen tells them to bow to the French, what are the Portuguese people to do?”

Jack Reid shook his head. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, sweetheart. If Junot had Queen Maria, he’d have paraded her for all to see.”

Jane had reached much the same conclusion. She knew General Junot of old, from Paris. He was a man of strong appetites, without the discipline to rule them. Subtlety wasn’t Junot’s strongpoint. “We don’t know who has her. But we need to find out. And get her back.”

Jack Reid pushed away from the wall, prowling towards her with the graceful, lazy gait of a tiger assessing his prey. “Tell me one thing, princess. Why should the illustrious Pink Carnation waste her time on a small, regional matter such as this? If,” he added, “you are the Pink Carnation.”

Jane ignored the one point and focused on the other. “When Paris ran away with Helen, was that a small, regional matter?”

The room wasn’t large, and it felt still smaller with Jack Reid closing the space between them. “Queen Maria is hardly the sort to launch a thousand ships.”

Jane looked him in the eye, refusing to draw back. “Didn’t she just? If not a flotilla, at least a fleet—a fleet which Bonaparte dearly desires.”

She’d made him think, she could tell. Reid paused, assessing her. “Even if Bonaparte gets his hands on the Queen, he can hardly order the ships back from Brazil.”

Jane spoke with confidence. This much she knew. “It’s not just the ships, not anymore. Bonaparte secured the connivance of the Spanish crown for the invasion of Portugal. He has marched troops across the Spanish border, large numbers of troops. How long before he turns on his allies? How long before he lays claim to Madrid, and from there to the entire peninsula? Bonaparte’s goal is a continent under his sole subjection—and Portugal is his gateway.”

There was a silence and then Jack Reid put his hands together, clapping once, twice. It made a hollow sound in the high-ceilinged room.

“Very nice,” he said mockingly. “All you need is a few draperies blowing in the background and a spear in your hand and you’ll be the very picture of Britannia.”