The Lure of the Moonflower (4 page)

Jane stiffened her spine. “Say what you will. If ever I were needed, it’s here, now. If we can stem Bonaparte’s ambitions in Portugal, we can put paid to his plans for Spain.”

Jack Reid’s amber eyes were focused on her face, intent. “A large task for one woman acting alone.”

“But not for the Pink Carnation.” Jane looked the Moonflower in the eye and said deliberately, “I’ve done more with less.”

It might sound like arrogance, but if they were to work together, she needed him to acknowledge her authority. She was a woman and a young one. In the early days that hadn’t seemed to matter; she had built her league herself, by trial and error, half by accident. It was a game, and she was the one who determined the rules.

But the game had turned darker somewhere along the way. It had gone from a game of wits to a struggle for survival, where there were no points for cleverness, only for results.

The way to succeed was to show no vulnerability.

I should like to lure you off your pedestal.
The voice echoed in her memory, flavored with a lilting French accent, a voice she knew far too well for comfort.

She had ventured off her pedestal once, and found the ground uncommonly hard and rocky.

She would take the high road, thank you very much.

Jack Reid held her gaze. Whatever he saw there, the mockery was gone from his voice as he said abruptly, “Have you ever been to Portugal before, princess?”

“I have not previously had that pleasure, no.”

Jack Reid stepped back a pace, folded his arms across his chest. “And your command of the language . . . ?”

Jane raised her chin a little higher. “I speak French, Italian, and German.”

“But not Portuguese.”

“I purchased a grammar.” Jane was aware of how ridiculous it sounded, how painfully inadequate.

“A grammar.” Jack Reid adopted a lilting falsetto. “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me the way to the nearest Moorish ruin?”

Even as a schoolgirl, she had never sounded quite that daft. “Did you speak Portuguese when you arrived here three years ago, Mr. Reid? You learned. You learned quickly.”

Jack Reid shot her a quick, incredulous look. “Not that quickly. You don’t have time to engage in introductory grammar. You have, what? A week? Two at best? If you’re to find the Queen before someone else does, you’ll need to move fast.”

You
, not
we
, Jane noticed.

“Which is where you come in,” said Jane crisply. “You, Mr. Reid, are to be my mouth and ears. Our first order of operation is to discover whether there were any disruptions to the Queen’s domestic arrangements in the days before the fleet departed.”

“You mean other than invasion by the French?”

Jane ignored the sarcasm. “Yes. Once the word came that Junot was on the march, someone laid his plans. We need to go to the palace at Queluz to interview the Queen’s servants, discover who might have got close enough to move her.”

It shouldn’t be difficult. The palace at Queluz was within easy reach of Lisbon; she’d checked on her map. She would have to rely on Jack Reid for the interviewing, since her Portuguese was still at the rudimentary stage—she had only had a week, after all—but she could observe their faces, their movements, the little tells that often told more than words.

The Queen’s pavilion at Queluz, the palace where she had been immured since her madness became known, was the obvious place to begin.

“No,” said Jack Reid.

“No?” Jane wasn’t used to no.

“You’re wasting your time at Queluz. Don John picked the palace bare. There’s not a tapestry or an armoire left in the building. He took everything but the stones—and that was only because he couldn’t find a way to pack them. You won’t find anything in Queluz.”

He sounded very sure.

“All right, then, Mr. Reid.” Jane hated asking for advice, but he was the expert here, not she. “What do we do?”

“Cut your losses and go home.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He spoke to her patiently, as to a small child. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re really after, but I can tell you one thing: you don’t want to be here. This mission is a fool’s game.” As Jane opened her mouth to protest, he said, “You haven’t met Her Majesty. I have. The woman is delusional. She’s violent. And above all, she’s loud. Once you get your hands on her, you’ll have every French troop in Portugal down on you before the Queen can shout, ‘
Ai, Jesus!
’ Your mission is a fool’s errand.”

“If so,” said Jane smartly, “why has no one yet discovered her?”

Jack Reid shrugged. “At a guess? Opiates.”

“Ah, yes. Opiates.” Among his other dubious activities, Jack Reid had once smuggled opium to a rowdy bunch of bored aristocrats whose Hellfire Club had made a brilliant front for other illegal activities, including a thwarted plot to kidnap the King. “I believe you have some experience of those.”

Jack Reid held out his hands, palms up. “Sorry, princess. I’m out of that line of work. So unless you’ve brought enough laudanum to drug an elephant . . . Queen Maria is about the size of one, and far less amiable.”

She had just enough powder in the compartment in her ring to send a man deep into drugged slumber. “That, Mr. Reid, is a chance I have to take.”

“A chance you choose to take, princess. Not I.” He favored her with a benevolent smile that set Jane’s teeth on edge. “My orders were purely observational. That’s what they’re paying me for, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“Your orders have changed,” said Jane sharply. “When Don John bowed to Bonaparte’s pressure and exiled the English from Lisbon, he exiled our agents as well. You, Mr. Reid, are what is left. For good or for ill.”

“I see.” He rubbed the back of his neck, a studiedly rustic gesture. “Rare commodities command high prices. Do you care to start the bidding?”

She had known he was a soldier of fortune, but it set Jane’s teeth on edge all the same. “You’re already being paid.”

“Not for this.”

Jane raised her chin. “I can offer you the accolades of a grateful nation.”

“One can’t eat accolades, princess. Have I committed a
betise
? My apologies. I ought to have realized that the Pink Carnation is above such base concerns. Myths sup off moonshine and sip drops of dew. There’s no need to bother about such base and vulgar matters as food and lodging. Or expensive gowns.”

The gown was one of the last of her Paris gowns, refurbished by her own hand. The days when she had money to spare for such things were gone.

More sharply than she’d intended, Jane said, “I shouldn’t have thought the man who made off with the jewels of Berar would quibble over the odd tuppence.”

“Ah, we come to the point.” Jack Reid regarded her with mingled resignation and regret. “Shall we abandon this cock-and-bull tale of missing monarchs? If it’s the jewels you’re after, you need only say.” He cocked a brow. “If you want to charm them out of me, you might try a little harder.”

Jane breathed in deeply through her nose. She could hardly tell him that she’d held his jewels in her hand, that she knew exactly where they were kept. It was he, after all, who had precipitated her departure from Paris when he had heedlessly, unforgivably sent the jewels to his sister Lizzy in England, and with them the interest of one of the deadliest spies in Europe. Jane’s own sister Agnes had been drawn into the tangle. The girls had been lucky to escape alive, and no thanks to Jack Reid.

He could keep his jewels. They’d cost Jane more than enough already.

Jane drew herself up, exerting an iron will to keep herself from telling him exactly what she thought. “I have no interest in jewels covered with blood.”

“Strong words,” said Jack Reid softly. He rested a hand on the wall above her head. “But everyone wants something. What do you want, princess?”

“I want Queen Maria safely in Brazil.” Jane could see the flecks of gold in the Moonflower’s amber eyes. She could feel his breath against her cheeks, the warmth of his body through his loose clothes. “I want Bonaparte driven back to France. I want England at peace.”

“How very touching.” Jack Reid pushed away. “There’s a tavern not far from the docks. Several of the Queen’s former servants have been bunking there. They’d been promised passage to the colonies with their masters, but when there was no room on the ships . . .”

“I see.” Jane hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath until she let it out again. She felt as she had the first time she had emerged safely from a midnight raid, breathless and slightly light-headed. “Men like to air their grievances. Particularly after the application of a jug or two of wine. The sooner we go—”

“There is no we. I’ll go. But I go alone.” Jack Reid held up a hand to forestall any protests. “I’m sure you cut a very elegant swath in the salons of Paris, but here? You’re a liability.”

“As you will,” Jane said pleasantly, and had the satisfaction of seeing Jack Reid’s brows draw together in disbelief.

Jane held his gaze, keeping her own expression deliberately bland. Then she drove the knife deeper by saying, “I imagine it will be rather late by the time you conclude your inquiries. You needn’t report immediately. Shall we say . . . noon?”

Jack Reid looked at her from under his hat for a long moment. “I’ll be there at eleven. Beneath the Arco da Bandeira.” He paused for a moment, the door in his hand, before adding helpfully, “You might wear something a little less conspicuous.”

The door clanked shut behind him.

The Pink Carnation regarded the closed door thoughtfully. “Mr. Reid,” she murmured, “you have no idea just how inconspicuous I can be.”

“A
nother for my friend!”

Red wine sloshed over the sides of a carafe as the harassed innkeeper clunked it down. The sticky residue on the planks of the table testified to the speed, if not the accuracy, of his service. Everyone was drinking heavily tonight. Word had gone out that Junot was contemplating a curfew after the events in Rossio Square.

“Better drink while we can,” said Jack’s new best friend, Bernardo, gloomily. The man had once been an undercook in the Queen’s palace of Queluz, left behind, as with so many, when the court sailed for the Americas. “In our homes by seven—bah!”

Bernardo spat eloquently, narrowly avoiding hitting the thinner man next to him, who scooted out of the way, casting the former cook a baleful look. The thin man had been attached in some arcane way to the Queen’s retinue and, from what Jack gathered, deeply resented being relegated to the ranks of the forgotten along with Bernardo, the cook, and Javier, the stable hand. Unfortunately, disappointment didn’t seem to have loosened his tongue. He nursed his drink in silence, regarding the others with a hauteur not dissimilar to the way the woman who called herself the Pink Carnation had looked at Jack.

For a moment, Jack wondered. . . . But no. The woman didn’t speak Portuguese—she’d admitted this much—and this man had ordered his wine in that language.

Although it didn’t take much familiarity with a language to order wine.

Jack shook his suspicions aside and turned back to Bernardo, who, unlike the thin man, was more than happy to air his grievances, especially after a carafe or two of the local vintage, which, from the taste, Jack suspected to be half vinegar and at least a third horse piss, with a slight soupçon of actual wine for piquancy.

Jack had had plenty of chances to sample this particular vintage. Alarico the drunk was well-known at this particular tavern, as he was at most of the taverns along the quayside. People, he had learned, would tell the town drunk what they wouldn’t to their confessor. The confessor might impose penance; the town drunk offered absolution for nothing more than the price of a carafe of wine.

It was an easy enough costume to maintain. A wobble here, a waver there. Ragged clothes splashed with wine. A bit of vomit daubed in the hair if one wanted to be really true to the role. And voilà, instant inebriate.

Jack didn’t need to see himself to know what he looked like. Ragged hat jammed down low over a horsehair wig, ragged jacket liberally streaked with old wine stains, grime beneath his fingers, and half a day’s growth of beard.

Unbidden, Jack thought of his maternal grandfather, the one and only time he had seen him, his blue silk jacket glittering with silver thread, a giant sapphire pinning his silk turban, a knife crusted with jewels at his waist, his mustache elaborately trimmed, radiating wealth and power and scorn.

Jack raised an ironic cup to his grandfather. He’d made clear he thought Jack was the lowest of the low; it was only fair to him to live down to his expectations.

Having made his libation to his illustrious ancestors, he turned his attention back to his work, such as it was.

“When the Queen comes again,” Bernardo was saying, his cup listing dangerously to one side, “when the Queen comes again, those sons of dogs will get what’s coming to them. Oh, yes, when the Queen comes . . .”

When the Queen comes, indeed. Jack stifled a yawn. Blather and blether and wishful thinking. It sounded to Jack like nothing more than his father’s toasts to the King Over the Water, a pointless pledge to a hopeless cause.

Why bother?
he’d asked his father once, in his belligerent youth. He’d been reading Rousseau, and saw no point in exchanging one king for another. Stuart or Hanover, it was all one and the same to Jack.

His father had considered the question.
It’s a manner of remembrance
, he had said at last.
Your grandparents fled their home for their allegiance to the man they believed their true king. We wouldn’t be here but for that. So I toast to the King Over the Water and remember my parents in my heart.

That was like his father; he had a deep streak of sentimentality that expressed itself in old ballads and useless toasts, and never when it mattered.

The wound was an old one, but it still twinged at times. There was something about that lament “When the Queen comes again” that had dredged up those old stories, long-ago days when his father had sat in his chair, Kat and Alex on either knee, Jack at his feet, and spun tales of a land Jack had never seen, a land as green as Madras was red and brown, shrouded in mist, colder than the coldest day Jack had ever known, peopled by men with hair as red as his father’s.

Someday,
his father used to say,
I’ll take you there
. But he hadn’t, had he? And even if he had, Jack would never belong. Nigger brat, the officers in the mess called him. Only when his father couldn’t hear, mind, but they called him that all the same.

When the King comes again . . .

Irritably, Jack set his cup down. Either José was pouring it stronger today, or his interview with That Woman had addled his wits. The King hadn’t come again, not for his grandparents, not for his father, and neither would Queen Maria. The Queen was most likely halfway to Brazil by now, whatever nonsense That Woman had spouted.

He didn’t even know her name.

The Pink Carnation, she had called herself, and it might even be true. There was something uncompromising about her, like a blade made from Seville steel. It wasn’t just that she looked like the image of Virtue on a coin, all clear eyes and classical features, head held high, fearless. It was something more. It was the way she had responded when he asked her what the Pink Carnation had to do with such a small, regional matter as this. Jack had met opportunists in his day. He had known more than his share of scoundrels and tricksters; hell, he was one. This woman meant what she said.

Which made her dangerous. Very dangerous.

During Jack’s brief stint in the Maratha chieftain Scindia’s polyglot army, a former British private—a deserter, a drinker, a wastrel, but a beautiful hand with a musket when he was sober—had told him of the classification of officers.

“There’s killing officers and there’s murdering officers,” he had told Jack laconically. “Your father—now, there’s a killing officer. He might get his men killed, but it won’t be a’purpose. He’s following orders, same as us.”

“And murdering officers?” Jack had asked.

Private Jones had given an exaggerated shudder. “They’s the ones as
believes
,” he had said, and that was all.

The woman who called herself the Pink Carnation believed. She believed enough for both of them. And that was enough to make Jack run straight for Madrid.

So why hadn’t he?

There was the money, Jack reminded himself. The Carnation could taunt him all she liked about the jewels of Berar, but he hadn’t stolen them for himself, hadn’t kept them for himself. The money Wickham paid him, out of whatever shadowy funds, paid for his food, his lodging, and the clothes on his back. Carnation or not, the woman had known the code phrase; there was no getting around it. If Wickham wanted to send him off on a fool’s errand, Jack would tug his cap and say, “Thank you very much, sir.”

But it didn’t mean he had to get himself killed in the process.

Across the room, a group of French dragoons had taken over one of the long tables, shoving the previous inhabitants out of the way. Jack wondered what it was about conquest that did such nasty things to one’s disposition. At home, these might be perfectly reasonable men. They probably cheated their tailors and lied to their wives and such other sins to which gentlemen were prey, but he doubted they would muscle their way into a Paris tavern with quite the same swagger, or shove the peasantry out of the way with such lordly insolence.

So much, Jack thought wryly, for
liberté
,
fraternité
, and
egalité
. Fine words to fly on the side of a flag, but not when one was dealing with a subject population.

The dragoons’ tempers hadn’t been improved by the long and arduous march from France to Lisbon. From the leopard skin on their hats, he could tell these were officers, but their uniforms bore the signs of hard wear, the white breeches mud-stained, the green coats hastily patched, and more than one pair of tall black boots the wrong size for the wearer.

They were young, all of them, from the stripling at the end of the table to the lieutenant with his long locks bragging of his conquests among the women of Almeida. Young and scared and trying to pretend to be neither.

“Your wine is poor as piss!” one of the dragoons shouted, lobbing a charred sardine at José’s retreating back.

“Yes, bring more of it!” added another, contributing his own sardine to the fray. “And meat, man! Meat!”

“There might be more of it if you vultures hadn’t eaten it,” muttered a man at one of the other tables.

In Portuguese, mercifully, or, Jack was sure, there would be a resulting fray that would make the events in Rossio Square look like a tea party.

Bernardo cast a look of pure hatred at the dragoons, his chins dragging down in disgust. “They’ll get theirs when the Queen comes back.”

“It’s a long trip to Brazil.” Jack rocked back against the wall, swinging one foot up onto the table. “We’ll not be seeing our Queen come again for some time.”

Bernardo tapped a finger against the nose. “Not so far as you might think. There’s some as say—” He broke off, an expression of drunken cunning crossing his face as he glanced across the room at the French dragoons.

Jack shook his head. “If words were coins . . . Talk is cheap, my friend.”

“Not always.” Bernardo lowered his third chin into the space where Jack presumed his neck must be. “My wife’s sister was a waiting woman in the Queen’s apartments. . . .”

It was no use to press for information. Even if the poor, sodden fool had any, pressing would only make him turn mum. The best way to get people to talk was to say nothing at all. So Jack didn’t. He merely tipped the carafe over the other man’s glass, filling it once more to the brim.

Bernardo nodded his thanks. “Look to the north, she says. Look to the north.” And then, almost inconsequentially, “The Bishop of Porto is a good man, they say.”

“Yes,” said Jack, trying to hoist Bernardo upright as he started to slide down the bench. “A very good man.”

It was like wrestling with blancmange. Bernardo’s mouth was roughly on a level with the underside of the table. Jack had to lean over to hear what he said.

“. . . in force, they say. With banners of gold . . . of gold . . .” Bernardo’s mouth opened onto a snore.

Releasing the back of his jacket, Jack gave up the battle to keep him upright and let him sink the rest of the way to the floor.

Banners of gold. A picturesque image, to be sure, but nothing more than any exile might whisper around the fire. To be fair, Bernardo and his kin hadn’t been exiled, but their experience was similar. They found themselves strangers in their own homes, yearning after all that was familiar and lost to them.

When the Queen comes again . . .

It was nonsense, all of it, but Jack couldn’t quite get it out of his head. Look to the north. A closed carriage. Two days before anyone realized she was missing.

Bernardo’s sister-in-law had been one of the Queen’s waiting women. If someone had spirited the Queen away, on the very day of departure, they would have needed connivance in the Queen’s household, someone to throw together the necessities for the exiled Queen. Including, Jack thought cynically, enough drugs to keep her from shouting down half of Lisbon.

No. He’d heard the stories of life in the Queen’s household. It was hardly cozy and chummy. The Queen’s mania inclined her to violence; she flung anything that came to hand at her underlings, accusing them of stealing from her, of plotting against her. There was a higher rate of attrition in the Queen’s household than in the East India Company’s army, and given the number of British soldiers Jack had seen fall prey to cholera, syphilis, and bazaar girls, that was saying something indeed. There were days the Queen banned all of her waiting women from her household entirely, admitting only her confessor.

Only her confessor.

Outside the tavern, Jack could hear the rising and falling chant of monks in procession. Through the half-open door, he could see the palanquin they carried, bearing the carved figure of a saint, gaudily painted, draped in silks and velvet. In his character as Alarico, he clumsily crossed himself as the saint’s statue passed, a gesture that would undoubtedly horrify his Calvinist grandparents, the gesture habitual after three years in Portugal. It was hardly anything out of the ordinary. It seemed, sometimes, that every other day was a saint’s day. Robed religious of a dozen orders passed through the streets: mendicant friars, prosperous abbots, white-wimpled nuns.

Jack had grown accustomed to it. He scarcely noticed it. Nor did anyone else.

Reaching down, he took Bernardo by the shoulder and shook. The only response was a gentle snore, followed by a much less gentle snore.

That, thought Jack with some asperity, was the problem of
veritas
by
vino
. With enough application of wine, one passed truth and hit oblivion.

Damn, damn, damn. The hint of a memory teased him. In the week before the court had departed, the Queen had acquired a new confessor. Jack was certain. Almost certain. He hadn’t paid terribly much attention at the time; he’d been more interested in the rumors emerging about the movements of the French troops marching their slow way through the rains towards Lisbon. But anything to do with the Queen was potentially news, so he’d stowed it away without really thinking of it.

Even in her mania—especially in her mania—the Queen was intensely religious. She swore at her son and mistrusted her maids, but any man in a monk’s robe would have her unquestioning obedience.

Particularly if he promised her salvation.

It was beginning to take shape in Jack’s brain, the outlines of a plot both daring and bold and so absolutely simple he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before.