The Lure of the Moonflower (31 page)

The vicar winced a little. I had a feeling the sunlight shining right into his eyes wasn’t doing much for his hangover. “As wonderful as that is—and it is wonderful news—we do have a bit more to get through. If you don’t mind, that is?” he said to Pammy, with dangerous politeness. “Pamela?”

“Huh?” Pammy, scrolling through her five hundred other texts, glanced up at the sound of her name. “No, no, of course.”

With grim determination, my mother marched over and confiscated Pammy’s phone.

“Thank you,”
said the vicar, lifting his eyes heavenwards. “Now. Do you, Eloise—”

“I do,” I said quickly. Pammy had three mobiles. I wasn’t taking any chances. Goodness only knew which part of her was going to start vibrating next.

The vicar looked taken aback for a moment, and then decided to go on. “Do you, Colin—”

“I do.”

“Your eagerness is touching,” muttered the vicar. “But I’d prefer if you’d wait for your cue. Now. If I might proceed—”

Pammy’s bouquet began to quiver.

I couldn’t help it; I leaned against Colin, chortling softly into his morning coat. “‘Man and wife—say man and wife.’”

The vicar buried his face behind the Book of Common Prayer. “It’s like trying to conduct the wedding in
The Princess Bride
.”

“But without the speech impediment,” Jillian pointed out helpfully, from where she was trying to keep my mother from strangling Pammy.

“There’s gin in the marquee,” I said to the vicar.

“Good,” he muttered. He raised his voice to a boom of Old Testament proportions. “Now if everyone could silence their phones and return to their places . . .”

As we walked back down the aisle to the triumphal strains of Handel’s Water Music and the vibration of Pammy’s third mobile, my husband murmured, “I never did have a chance to say congratulations. On your book.”

“Well . . . we were rather busy last night.” I glanced up at him. “You don’t mind?” Colin was still hard at work on his own book.

“I’m proud of you,” he said seriously. Before I could get too teary-eyed, he added with mock severity, “And I expect a mention in the acknowledgments.”

I beamed up at my husband, light-headed with joy and lack of sleep. “For you—a paragraph.”

We exited through the French doors, climbing towards the tower, enjoying the few moments of privacy before the bridal party streamed out behind us and our respective families closed around us again. The marquee lay below us, and the mushroom village of tiny tables that had been set out for the cocktail hour. We would take pictures up by the old tower while our guests got started on the serious drinking.

But for the moment, it was just me and Colin.

I bent my head so that he could take the pins from my veil without taking my hair with it. “Have you thought of a title for your book?”

The sun was warm on my bare head, and the grass smelled fresh and sweet. “Well . . . I like
Pride and Prejudice
, but that’s already been taken.”

Colin thought about it for a moment.
“The Convent of Orsino?”

“Also taken.” I could just imagine Miss Gwen rising from the grave, parasol in hand, to defend her territory. Miss Gwen gone zombie was something we could do without. “Something with Pink Carnation in the title?”

The rest of the bridal party were beginning to make their straggling way up the hill. I had a feeling that my choice of a photo spot was not universally popular, especially for the photographer.

A faint smile played around Colin’s lips.
“How the Pink Carnation Stole Me Lucky Charms?”

I had been introducing Colin to the classics of American culture.

“Not funny.” Okay, it was pretty funny. I liked that Colin was making an effort to learn my language. I’d have him making Bueller jokes in no time.
“The Pink Carnation’s Secret History?”

“No,” said Colin, looping an arm around my waist as our respective families joined us at the crest of the hill.
“The Secret History of the Pink Carnation.”

From our vantage point, I could see all of Selwick Hall spread out before me, everything clear and sparkling in the morning sunlight. For a moment, just a moment, I could have sworn I saw the image of a young woman in a long dress in one of the library windows. And then it was gone, just another trick of the light.

“You know,” I said, leaning my head against his shoulder. “You might have something there.”

I could hear the smile in Colin’s voice. “Of course I do,” he said. “I have you.”

I
’ve been living with the Pink Carnation series for a very long time. As my little sister would say, “All the feels, all the feels.” Theoretically, I knew the time had come for the series to end. But when it came to putting words on paper? I put this book off. And I put this book off. And I would have put this book off even longer, but for the fact that my agent, editor, and publisher were all getting justifiably antsy and pointed out that there actually needs to be a manuscript for a book to get published.

So many thanks to my agent, Alexandra Machinist, and my editor, Danielle Perez, for holding my hand when I got angsty, prodding me when I dragged my feet, and for being very, very generous with extensions. Thank you to the best of all possible book doctors, Claudia Brittenham, Brooke Willig, and Sarah MacLean, who talked me through plot crises and helped me over the rough spots. Also, to my husband, who helped me puzzle out the Portuguese, plotted distances on maps, and generally dealt with the practical bits. (And only once suggested just sticking everyone in a TARDIS as a much easier travel alternative to donkey.)

So much love to my family: to my daughter, husband, parents, brother, and sister, who all deal with more than their share of book-induced lunacy. My sister, Brooke, has been my first reader and best critic on every single one of the books. As for my parents . . . there aren’t enough words to say thank you for all the hand-holding, sustenance-bringing, whine-listening, and, more recently, babysitting. (Not to mention all those years of raising me and reading to me and singing endless rounds of “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” and all that sort of thing.) Thank you to my husband for takeout, reassurance, and toddler-wrangling (not necessarily in that order), and to my daughter for being so insanely adorable. Because, really, when a book isn’t behaving, there’s nothing like hearing a toddler’s rendition of
“Frère Jacques”
to put life back into perspective. Thanks to Lutchmie for entertaining said toddler for extra hours during those crucial weeks when
“Frère Jacques”
became incompatible with deadline: this book wouldn’t be here without you.

Over a decade and twelve books, there are so many people who have offered love, support, caffeine, gin, and laughs along the way. This is, necessarily, a very incomplete list, but hugs, hugs, hugs to, among others, Claudia Brittenham, Nancy Flynn, Liz Mellyn, Jenny Davis, Weatherly Ralph, Marie Gryphon, Emily Famutimi, Abby Vietor, Lila de Tantillo, Lara Lorenzana, Chris Ray, Stella Choi-Ray, Will Crawford, Francine Crawford, Justin Zaremby, and Vicki Parsons.

A special shout-out to my writing sisters: Tasha Alexander, Tracy Grant, Deanna Raybourn, Sarah MacLean, Cara Elliot, Alison Pace, Karen White, and Beatriz Williams, for book tour adventures, plot help, gossip, and always reminding me that the point is the stories we’re telling. Thank you for keeping the writing joy alive—and just being such fun.

To all the baristas at my bat cave (i.e., Starbucks) on Fifty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth, a heartfelt thank-you for letting me spend months at a time hogging the seat next to the outlet, starting my drink before I’d even ordered it, not commenting on my haven’t-done-laundry-in-days chic, asking after my book and my toddler, and, generally, being wonderful. Those cheerful good mornings—and caramel macchiatos—made such a difference.

Last but not least, a huge thank-you to my readers. When I wrote that first Pink book twelve years ago, the last thing I ever suspected was that it would lead me not just to an imaginary world, but to a very real community, filled with some of the most talented and generous-spirited people it has been my privilege to know. Together, we’ve built traditions, like the annual Pink Carnation Peep Diorama contest (aka Pinkorama), shared our weekly reads, engaged in adventures in baking (thank you, Christine Moon Angeles!), and so much more. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of my Web site, commented on my author Facebook page, popped by a reading, or taken the time to drop me a note via e-mail. When I was given the choice of dropping the Pink series or doubling my workload in order to see it through, you were the ones who gave me the courage and the energy to see it through. In oh so many ways, this book is for you.

Thank you all!

M
ad monarchs provide excellent fodder for fiction.

Because I already used George III in a previous book, it felt a bit greedy to seize on another afflicted monarch, but Queen Maria I’s condition made a perfect premise for a novel set at the outbreak of the Peninsular War. Like her counterpart, George III, Queen Maria descended into a form of dementia that some speculate may have been caused by porphyria, although other theories have also been mooted. (One of the details that surprised me most in my researches was the amount of inbreeding in the Braganza family tree. Maria herself was married to her uncle; one of her sons was married to his own aunt, Maria’s sister.) Mental instability ran in the family. Maria’s grandfather King Philip V of Spain believed that he was being consumed by fire in retribution for his sins; her uncle Ferdinand VI zigzagged between depression and mania, assaulting his servants and banging his head against the wall. Queen Maria went with the “all of the above” approach: by 1790, her behavior, in the words of her biographer, “swung between extreme lassitude . . . and violent excitement.” George III’s own “mad doctor,” Francis Willis, was called in, but was dismissed after he stipulated that Queen Maria would have to be taken to England for further treatment.

By 1807, Queen Maria lived confined to her pavilion in her palace at Queluz, where shrieks of “
Ai
, Jesus!
Ai
, Jesus!” could be heard echoing through the halls, along with the sound of crashing crockery. I have tried to keep the details of her condition—her violent rages, her fear of her servants—as close to the historical record as possible. You can find more about the life and times of Queen Maria in Jenifer Robert’s biography,
The Madness of Queen Maria: The Remarkable Life of Maria I of Portugal
.

Meanwhile, as Queen Maria raved in her pavilion at Queluz, her son was dealing with pressure from both England and France. In July of 1807, Napoleon ordered the Portuguese Regent, Dom João, to close Portugal’s ports to its old ally and trading partner, England. By August he had upped the ante, warning Dom João that unless he wanted to be deposed, he had better declare war on Great Britain, arrest all British subjects (of which there were many in Portugal, including one of the sons of George III, who had settled there), and hand over his fleet to the French. Caught between a rock and a hard place, aka Britain and France, Dom João dragged his feet, trying to pacify both sides. To the French he offered to arrest British subjects, declare war, and close the ports. To the British ambassador he promised that the war would be in name only, trade could continue with Brazil, the British could lease the isle of Madeira, and no British property in Portugal (of which there was a great deal) would be confiscated. Both sides responded with the diplomatic version of “You’ve got to be kidding.” The British fleet moved to blockade the Portuguese ports. And as for Napoleon . . .

Poor Dom João. On the twentieth of October, Dom João decided that the French were scarier than the British and reluctantly kicked all Britons out of Portugal. It was too late. Even as he offered concessions to Bonaparte, the French army, headed by Jean-Andoche Junot, was already on the move. Napoleon invaded Portugal under the aegis of the Treaty of Fontainebleau (October 27, 1807), a deal with the King of Spain and his minister, Godoy, in which Portugal would be divided into three parts: one for France, one for Spain, and one an independent principality for Godoy. (This, as you can imagine, did not go well in the end for the King of Spain or Godoy. And by “in the end,” I mean a few months later, when the troops supposedly marching through allied territory on their way to Portugal turned around and took Madrid instead.) On November 24, Admiral Sir Sidney Smith (who, as a side note, some claim was the model for Orczy’s Pimpernel) presented Dom João with a copy of
Le Moniteur
, the French newspaper, in which Napoleon had announced, “The House of Braganza has ceased to reign.” The paper was dated October 13, 1807. The British “I told you so” was implied. The issue had been decided before Dom João had said a word.

In a panic, Dom João flung himself on the mercy of the British. Junot was all of five days’ march from Lisbon. A rather straggling march, but Dom João, unlike historians, didn’t know that. Hastily he gathered the court for departure. As the rain pounded down, paintings, objets d’art, furniture, government documents, gold ingots, anything that could be salvaged was piled onto wagons and pulled onto the docks as courtiers desperately tried to secure berths, and royal servants hung about, hoping to be taken along. Space was scant and the confusion was extreme. As the royal storekeeper described it, “Many people were left behind on the quay while their belongings were stowed on board; others embarked, only to find that their luggage could not be loaded.” There was unrest and looting in the town. Dom João took a plain carriage to the docks to avoid being mobbed. The Queen was less subtle. As described in the novel, her cries could be heard all the way down to the docks. Some accounts have it that she shouted, “Not so fast! It will be thought we are running away.” It was that line that gave me the idea of the Queen’s staying behind—although, when I learned the extent of her illness, it became more realistic to render her a pawn than a principal.

It was a last-minute flight. As Junot’s men marched into Lisbon, they could see the sails of the fleet as they bore the Portuguese court away to Brazil. They also discovered a number of carriages and crates left abandoned on the quayside; according to one historian, these included “sixty thousand volumes from the Royal Library of Ajuda and fourteen carriages of church silver and other treasures.” In confusion like that, who would miss one mad monarch?

Little did Dom João know, if he had stood and fought, Napoleonic triumph wasn’t a done deal. As Jack informs Jane in the book, the invasion was a mess. Napoleon looked at a map, found the shortest distance between two points, and told Junot to go that way, rather than take the usual road, ignoring the fact that the usual road was the usual road for a reason (i.e., it was much more passable). The Emperor further gummed the works by ordering Junot “to ignore the temptation to gather supplies, as it would lead to unacceptable delays,” insisting, “Twenty-thousand men . . . can live anywhere, even in a desert.” As historian David Buttery dryly puts it, “Unfortunately for the French, [Napoleon] was about to be proved wrong.” Short on supplies, Junot’s starving and barefoot men found themselves wading through rivers in full spate, falling down gorges, and generally dying like flies. Junot entered Lisbon on November 30, 1807, with only four battalions of infantry. His artillery was still on the road, far behind him. One of his officers, Baron Thiébault, recounted, “As everyone knows, Junot took possession of Lisbon, of the army that was there, and of the entire kingdom, without having at hand a single trooper, a single gun, or a cartridge that would burn. . . .” Exaggeration, certainly, but not by much.

Hungry, ragged, and desperate, looting and pillaging along the way, the French troops did not make themselves popular. Nor, for that matter, did Junot, who was not generally known for his subtlety or tact. The riot in Rossio Square on the thirteenth of December on the occasion of the lowering of the royal standard did, indeed, occur as depicted. The impositions of curfews, decisions to quarter troops in monasteries and nunneries, and an enormous tax levied on the Portuguese people fanned the flames of rebellion.

In reality, it took some time for that rebellion to coalesce into organized resistance. I moved the time line up a bit, inventing a local loyalist group, headed by the Bishop of Porto, intent (in my fictional version) on using the Queen as a rallying point. In real life, the Queen did make it onto that ship to Brazil, and the Portuguese resistance movement, which coalesced under the Bishop of Porto, only really took off six months later, in June of 1808.

If you wish to learn more about the Peninsular War, and this first phase in particular, I recommend David Buttery’s
Wellington Against Junot: The First Invasion of Portugal, 1807–1808
. For the Peninsular War generally, Michael Glover’s
The Peninsular War, 1807–1814
condenses a great deal of information in a highly readable narrative inflected with dry humor.

Many, many English and French passed through Portugal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before, during, and after the Peninsular War. At times it seems like most of them wrote about it. Given the timing of this novel and the changes wrought by the conflict, I relied most heavily on those travel narratives written before the war, since the landscape through which Jack and Jane traveled was still largely untouched by the devastation that would occur a scant year later. That being said, I also consulted the memoirs of those who traveled in and through Portugal during the war (bearing in mind that some of what they saw might have changed). The story of the corpse at the inn came straight from the memoirs of Junot’s wife, Laure. For the details of the march to Lisbon, I relied, among other sources, on the memoirs of Paul-Charles-François Thiébault, who did not mince words when describing the straits in which Junot’s soldiers found themselves. Descriptions of contemporary Lisbon were taken, in part, from William Graham’s memoir,
Travels through Portugal and Spain, During the Peninsular War
.

There are both benefits and drawbacks to travel narratives written by outsiders. On the upside, strangers are likely to notice and report on details that inhabitants take for granted. On the downside, they’re also likely to misinterpret, misunderstand, or misreport many of those details, blowing certain elements out of proportion and ignoring others. It was necessary to read the reports of the French and English in Portugal with more than a grain of salt; the English tended to both exoticize and denigrate Portugal, seeing it on the one hand as foreign and romantic, and on the other as backward, priest-ridden, dangerous, and dirty. For an excellent unpacking of the attitude of the British towards Portugal in the early nineteenth century, I highly recommend Gavin Daly’s
The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814
. Since both Jack and Jane are outsiders, albeit from rather different backgrounds, it was instructive to know not only what Portugal had been, but what the English perceived it to be, which were often two rather different beasts.

It was the 1790 memoirs of James Cavanah Murphy (the same Murphy’s
Travels
Jane references as required reading for the English visitor to Portugal) that inspired the scenes set at Alcobaça Monastery, as well as my depiction of the snobbish abbot. I should like to offer apologies to the actual abbot—one gets the sense that Murphy’s description may have been more than a little biased. Murphy clearly took quite a shine to the prior of Batalha Monastery and something less of a shine to the prior of Alcobaça. The comments about there being more pipes of wine in the cellar than books in the library are taken straight from Murphy, who seemed to be a little bit uneasy about the wealth and grandeur of Alcobaça. (For the record, Murphy—and Jack—were both entirely wrong about that. Alcobaça had an impressive library of medieval manuscripts. At least, that is, until the French came through in 1810. The remains of the collection can be found in the National Library in Lisbon.) But I do owe at least one major plot point to James Murphy. It was his comments about the rarity of strangers being admitted to the hall of novices as well as his description of the mysterious chalice that provided the inspiration for key bits of my story.

Although the monastery of Alcobaça is very much a real place, I took some liberties with its inhabitants and furnishings. Unfortunately, although there were those, like Murphy, who stayed at Alcobaça and wrote of it afterwards, I was unable to find any description of the guest chambers as they would have appeared in the eighteenth century. The reception rooms in the strangers’ wing, yes. The actual bedchambers, no. I also adjusted the layout of the novice’s wing just a bit. Eighteenth-century visitors report traversing a corridor from the chapel to the cells. But I needed Jack and Jane to be able to see the chapel from the inside of a cell, so, for plot reasons, I dispensed with the corridor and had the cells open directly off the chapel. I hope my readers and the shades of past novices will forgive me.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another source to which I owe a great debt: a Web site called myneighborwellington.blogspot.com, which exhaustively and entertainingly chronicles the minutiae of the Peninsular War, largely from the Portuguese perspective. It was from My Neighbor Wellington that I learned of expressions like
saudade
and
amigos de Peniche
, period costume, local living conditions, contemporary recipes, and a thousand other details, most of which I sadly had no opportunity to use, such as folk-song lyrics (which I so very, very much wanted to use—but Jane wouldn’t know them and Jack stubbornly refused to break into song). There isn’t much that isn’t covered on that Web site. To the proprietress, a heartfelt thank-you. The details of daily life on the site brought the early nineteenth century to life for me and, I hope, for the book.

Finally, I couldn’t resist sneaking in a taste of Jane’s and Jack’s future adventures. (Of which there are, of course, many.) The Ottoman sultan Mustafa IV did indeed attempt to have his twenty-three-year-old brother, Mahmud, assassinated in 1808. Accounts vary, as they do, but one version of the story has it that as the assassins approached the harem, a Georgian slave girl named Cevri Kalfa held them off by throwing ashes in their faces. Mahmud then fled to safety, although no one seems to agree on where he hid. I went with the version that had him hiding in a furnace, although other accounts place him on a roof or elsewhere. The rebel leader Alemdar Mustafa Pasha did show up and announce to Mustafa that he was being deposed, although he was not, in fact, fetched by Jack Reid. The bits I left out? Mustafa did succeed in murdering his predecessor, the deposed Sultan Selim III (some of you will remember hearing about him in
The Passion of the Purple Plumeria
), and the story is that the sound of the hullaballoo surrounding Selim’s noisy murder alerted Mahmud and his mother, Naksidil, to his danger.