The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (21 page)

The carriage speeded up, the horses giving it all they could. The riders followed suit, and the man in the lead drew something from his belt, something dark and metallic that created a little puff of smoke.

A bullet whizzed past the window, past William’s shocked eyes.

“They’re shooting at us!” he exclaimed.

“Yes, and we’re going to shoot right back.” Gwen didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. If anything, she seemed happier than he’d seen her since the previous night. Her color was high and her eyes sparkled with excitement. “Hold my legs,” she commanded.

“What?” Admittedly, her legs had featured rather prominently in his reverie a moment ago, but not in quite this way.

Gwen gave him a frustrated look. “Do you want me to fall out the window? Hold my legs.”

And with that, she squirmed out of the window, not just head and shoulders, but all the way to the waist. William hastily clamped his arms down across her legs. The position provided him an excellent view of her rear end, draped in thin purple muslin, which waggled distractingly before William’s eyes.

A muffled voice came from the other side of the window. “Hold
tight
!”

William held tight. The carriage hit a bump. There was a ladylike but vehement curse from outside and some scrabbling about the window frame. Another shot thudded into the back of the chaise.

“All right out there?” William yelled.

“As well”—more scrabbling noises, a thud, and a click—“as can be expected.”

There was the report of a shot and the echoing sound of a faraway cry. William slid hastily to the side as Gwen scrambled in backwards through the window, landing with a thump in his lap.

William risked a look through the back window. One of their pursuers was clutching his arm, his horse veering erratically.

“Were you aiming for the man or the horse?”

“The man, of course.” Gwen gave him a superior look. “I wouldn’t shoot the horse. That would be unjust. It’s not the horse’s fault he’s being forced to chase us.”

“Right,” said William. “Of course.” He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of that.

“They’re still gaining on us,” said Miss Wooliston.

“Highwaymen?” guessed William. He hadn’t realized they traveled in packs.

“Someone doesn’t want us getting to Selwick Hall,” said Gwen grimly. She looked over him at Miss Wooliston, her gray eyes glittering. “I’ll just open the special trunk, shall I?”

Wiggling her way off William’s lap, she jammed herself back through the window. “Legs!” came an imperious voice from outside.

William’s arms automatically clamped down on the backs of Gwen’s knees. “The—”

“The special trunk,” said Miss Wooliston serenely. She was calmly loading another pistol.

They seemed just a little too well prepared. “What in the blazes is going on?” William demanded. “Why would someone want to stop us going to—wherever this place is?”

Before Miss Wooliston could answer, a hail of hard projectiles pounded down the back of the carriage, bouncing off the back of the coach, ricocheting off one another. There were billiard balls, dozens of billiard balls, streaming down from the now open trunk onto the road.

Gwen wiggled her way back into the window, plopping down onto William’s thigh. The exertion had loosened her coiffure, which straggled down on the right side of her face. She shoved her hair back behind her ears, saying breathlessly, “That should hold them. For the moment.”

Behind them, horses shied and riders cursed. A shot went wide, nearly hitting one of the other riders.

Miss Wooliston turned to William. “Can you ride?”

Was she really asking him that? “I was a cavalry officer,” said William. “Over thirty years in the cavalry.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then.” Miss Wooliston turned back to her chaperone. “I say we take two of the horses, send the chaise off as decoy, and ride to Bunny-on-the-Wold. We can stay the night at Darlington.”

They were speaking a foreign language. “Bunny on the what?”

“It’s a small town in Hampshire,” said Gwen helpfully. Which, to William’s mind, explained nothing. “If Dorrington is in residence, we can pick up reinforcements there.” She turned back to William. “Are you ready to ride?”

“What I’d like is for someone to tell me what the devil this is all about!”

“Later.” A bullet ricocheted off the side of the carriage. “Blast! I knew we should have packed more billiard balls!”

William looked back through the window. “It’s only the one man.”

“The others will be up and following him soon enough,” said Gwen with authority. The coach swerved dangerously as they went around a corner. “I’ll see him off and then we’ll take to the horses before the others get close enough to follow.”

This road was less traveled, rutted and bumpy. However much he liked her legs, William wasn’t fond of the idea of her doing her window trick again.

“Let me,” said William quickly. He didn’t stop to wonder what he was doing. Snatching up one of the pistols, he used the butt to break the glass on the back window, leveled, and shot. He’d been aiming for the man’s shoulder, but the erratic nature of both platform and target meant that he hit the man’s leg instead, causing the horseman to veer wildly.

“Nicely done,” said Gwen.

“Thank you,” said William, and decided to pretend that he’d meant it. Deadpan, he said, “I wouldn’t hit the horse.”

The two of them grinned at each other like fools.

Miss Wooliston leaned forward. “Just around the next corner,” she told the coachman. “That copse over here.”

The man responded with an alacrity that made William wonder exactly how many times they’d performed this maneuver before. The coachman unharnessed the two leaders. They weren’t saddled for riding, but that didn’t deter either of the ladies. The coachman gave Gwen a leg up onto the horse’s bare back. She bunched her skirts up to the knees, revealing a pair of rather fetching silk stockings embroidered with small purple flowers.

She held out a hand to William. “Well?” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” said William. He snapped his gaze away from her legs. “Nothing at all.”

He swung up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, and they were off, riding hell-for-leather down a road that was little more than a track, while in the other direction, the chaise rattled away, pulled by two horses now rather than four, a decoy for their pursuers.

Which put William in mind of the one crucial detail he was missing.

“Why doesn’t someone want us to reach—wherever it is?” William bellowed in Gwen’s ear, above the rush of the wind, the pounding of the hooves, and the crackles of fallen twigs. But she just shook her head and urged the mount on faster, following Miss Wooliston’s horse.

“—not clear of them yet,” he heard her say, the words carried away by the wind.

Behind them, pounding down the road, came one of the riders who had escaped the billiard ball ambush. His horse hadn’t been winded by pulling a chaise. He was fresh and gaining. William hadn’t a pistol of his own. He hadn’t thought to come armed.

“May I?” he said, and drew the pistol from Gwen’s belt, gripping the horse’s back with his legs, wishing he’d spent more time on a horse these past few years and less on a parade ground.

Turning, he aimed and fired, ducking to avoid decapitation by an overhanging branch. The shot went wide, but the report startled the other man’s horse. It reared, sending the bandit flying into the brush. Through the dust of their own passage, William could vaguely see a fleeing horse and squirming shrubbery.

As for their own mount, Gwen was pushing him hard, her skirts hiked to the knees as she leaned forwards over the horse’s neck.

“You’ll lather him if you keep going like this,” William shouted in Gwen’s ear. “It’s too much carrying two. And we’ve still a ways to go.”

Without argument Gwen reined the horse from an all-out gallop to a trot. He felt her chest rise and fall as she breathed in deeply, nearly as winded as the horse. Her hair was spilling down around her shoulders, her cheeks windburned. She squirmed around to look at him, keeping one hand on the reins, the other braced on the horse’s neck.

“You’re a good man in a fight, William Reid,” she said. “When you’re not getting yourself stabbed.”

“You’re not still holding that against me, are you?” he said jokingly, high on the euphoria of battle, the same euphoria that she was feeling. “But there’s just one thing you’ve forgot to mention.
Why
are we in a fight? Who’s following you?”

Gwen’s lips pressed together. “People,” she said.

“I didn’t think they were squirrels,” said William, but he was speaking to the back of her head.

His amusement faded as their horse plodded on, down untraveled byways. What had begun as a simple trip to Sussex to collect his daughter had turned to a very different kettle of fish indeed.

Like a kettle of fish, it stank to high heaven.

Whatever had occurred on the road today, the two women had been expecting it—there was no denying that, or explaining it away. Constantly looking out the window, checking the road—and who in the blazes traveled with a trunk full of billiard balls?

Who was following them? Why? And why did a respectable lady and her ward travel armed to the teeth? He didn’t know England or English mores, but he strongly suspected that this was something out of the ordinary.

“Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?” he asked, but Gwen pretended not to hear, and William, recognizing a losing battle when he saw it, settled back on the rump of the horse and tried not to sneeze on Gwen’s hair, which, freed from its usual confinement, was doing its best to colonize William’s nose.

It was twilight by the time they reached the gates of a great estate, the sun setting in shades of violet and orange. Down a long and winding drive, William could make out the roofs of an estate large enough to house a rajah’s retinue, built of a pale stone that gleamed golden in the light of the setting sun. The ornate metal gates were decorated with an entwined
D
and
L
.

“No gatekeeper,” grumbled Gwen. “We’ll have to get down and shift them ourselves.”

“Where are we?” William asked, swinging down from the horse. That was the least of his questions, but it would do for a start. One of the first rules of campaign: always know the field.

“Darlington Court,” said Gwen.

“It’s the country seat of the Viscounts Loring,” provided Miss Wooliston helpfully. She was leading her own tired horse. “The son of the current viscount is my cousin’s husband’s sister’s husband.”

William didn’t even bother to start to untangle that.

“All right,” said William. “We’re here. There’s no one coming after us with pistols, knives, or small artillery. Would one of you tell me what in the devil is going on?”

“We’re stopping for the night,” said Gwen loftily. “And there’s no need to swear. Help me down?”

As far as William was concerned, there was every need to swear. He reached up to help Gwen from the horse, lifting her by the waist and swinging her down. Once her feet touched the ground, he gave her a little shake.

“Why do you carry a sword in your parasol?” he demanded. “Why were you looking out the window the whole bloody way from Bath? Why are we set upon by brigands every time you leave the house?”

Gwen folded her arms across her chest. “How do you know they weren’t setting upon you?”

“Because I wasn’t the one who came prepared with billiard balls!” Raking a hand through his hair, William got control of his temper and his voice. In a gentler tone, he said, “Are you in some sort of trouble? Just be honest with me, and I’ll help you however I can.”

Gwen pressed her lips together, shaking her head. “It’s too complicated for that.”

William wasn’t budging until he got an explanation. “Try me.”

Miss Wooliston stepped forward. “Let me.”

Gwen made an automatic gesture of negation. “But—”

“No, I think it’s time,” Miss Wooliston said. Turning to William, she said, in a conversational tone, “Did you know that your son was a French spy?”

Sussex, 2004

“H
ave you heard of someone called the Moonflower?” asked Jeremy.

We had gone to the pub for dinner, none of us having felt particularly inspired in the culinary department.

The Heavy Hart was our favorite pub. It was also the only pub, at least in the immediate vicinity. If you drove for a while south and east of Selwick Hall, you came upon the decaying Victorian tackiness of Brighton; several miles west, in the other direction, there was a chichi, upmarket, revitalized village center, with an organic grocer’s and one of those make-your-own-pottery places. Colin felt a local’s scorn for the resulting gastropub with its London chef, so to the Heavy Hart, with its bangers and mash, we went.

The fact that Jeremy would have preferred the gastropub might also have had something to do with it.

It was a misleadingly cozy scene, the dark wood paneling scarred by generations of tipsy darts players, the battered oak tables sticky with the residue of spilled beer, scattered with round mats celebrating the virtues of various malt concoctions. A television mounted over the bar broadcast yet another game of football (the British kind), which only a handful of diehards appeared to be watching. A poster tacked to the wall above our table featured the blurry muzzle of a dog and, above it, uneven lettering saying, “Have you seen Fuzzy? If so call . . .”

Fortunately, none of the usual gang seemed to be in the pub tonight. Joan Plowden-Plugge, my local nemesis, had stopped attending as soon as she started dating a pretentious museum curator with delusions of stealing my dissertation thesis. They went to the gastropub, which was another reason we didn’t. That would be all we needed, to have them after the jewels, too.

On the other hand, they and Jeremy might mutually destruct, which would make the world a better place for everyone.

To be fair, Jeremy had been pretty well behaved so far. We were already on day two of his sojourn at Selwick Hall. As far as I could tell, he had stayed in the spot in the library where I had placed him, reading only the papers that were set before him, although that might have had something to do with my plumping myself two chairs down with the collected oeuvres of Miss Gwen.

He didn’t make his bed and he had left his towels on the floor of the bathroom, but I couldn’t really hold that against him, at least not as an act of malice. One had the feeling that in Jeremy’s world, little elves took care of that sort of thing. In this case, the little elf was me. It had seemed easier than leaving the towels in a damp heap on the floor.

“Does this Moonflower wear long skirts and smell of patchouli?” Colin asked.

“Not that kind of Moonflower,” I said.

I’d come across the Moonflower before, when I was looking into the Pink Carnation’s activities in India. Upshot: The Pink Carnation didn’t have any activities in India. Which made sense given that the nearest port in India was five months from England, on a good day. What I had discovered was a net of French spies, loosely under the guide of a master spy named the Gardener—loosely because of the distance between India and the Continent. On the ground, these agents had a fair amount of autonomy. There had been a Marigold, who had been trying to stir up an anti-English rebellion among the local rulers.

Then there was the Moonflower. . . .

I said slowly, “He’s the one who was supposed to have something to do with the jewels of Berar.” Then, just in case it wasn’t a good idea to sound too informed, I added, “Unless it was the Marigold.”

Jeremy was drinking white wine. He’d made a point of it. He was also wearing an Italian blazer that looked rather ridiculous next to Colin’s rumpled polo shirt. I suspected Colin of having smeared extra mud on his shoes, just because.

“Wait, I remember now.” I repositioned a beer mat in the little puddle of condensation that had formed under my G&T. “I thought the deal was that the Moonflower claimed the jewels of Berar had disappeared, that they were only being held out as a lure but didn’t actually exist.”

That much was actually true. From what I’d been able to discover, last time around, the Marigold had been promising various jewels to local rulers, only to be told by his counterpart, the Moonflower, that both he and they had been hoaxed, that the jewels had been lost, genuinely lost, when Berar fell.

“That’s not what the files you gave me say.” Jeremy took a swig of his wine. The man looked like he needed it. “How many letters did that woman write?”

“Lots,” I said. “Hey, it was before TV.”

Jeremy gave me a look but held his peace. “According to that Lady Henrietta—”

“Your ancestress,” I pointed out.

Neither of the males at the table appeared pleased by that observation.

“The Moonflower sent the jewels to his sister”—Jeremy consulted his notes—“Libby.”

“Lizzy,” I corrected him automatically and then remembered that it was the sort of thing I wasn’t supposed to know. “Er, Libby wasn’t the sort of nickname they used at the time. It would have to be Lizzy.”

No need for him to know that I had stayed up half the night reading through those letters before he could. I viewed it as a sort of safety check. If he recounted them correctly, he was to be trusted, at least on a limited basis; if not, we would know he was trying to scam us.

Not that Colin would believe that Jeremy was operating in good faith even if he came with a certificate signed by Mother Teresa, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and assorted local saints.

“In the event,” said Jeremy, leaning back in his chair with a studied movement reminiscent of Alistair Cooke announcing
Masterpiece Theatre
, “according to Lady Henrietta, this Lizzy fled to safety at Selwick Hall. Presumably taking the jewels with her.”

He looked more than a little bit smug.

Colin balked. “Even if the jewels did come to Selwick Hall, we don’t know that they stayed there. It has been—”

He looked to me for help.

“One hundred and ninety-nine years.” April of 1805 to July of 2004. I abandoned exact math for convenient generalization. “And a bit.”

“Two hundred years,” Colin translated. “They could be anywhere by now.”

“Speaking of that,” said Jeremy, his tone silkier than his socks, “weren’t you meant to be searching the tower?”

Colin had. He had come back covered with miscellaneous animal droppings and a nasty scratch on one arm from something unidentified but rusty.

“Nothing in the tower,” said Colin tersely.

“Are you sure?” Jeremy was vibrating with suspicion beneath his Italian wool. “The rhyme did say—”

“I know what the rhyme said,” said Colin, setting his pint firmly down on the table. “There’s nothing there but stone, mold, and old plows.”

“Tetanus on the hoof,” I said, but they both ignored me. They were too intent on staring each other down.

They didn’t look alike. Jeremy took after his grandfather’s side. I had seen the pictures of Robert Alderly, handsome and dissolute, in a Duke of Windsor sort of way, with carefully slicked-back hair and clothes that spoke of the close attention of a valet. Like his grandfather’s, Jeremy’s skin had been carefully protected from sun and wind, his hair coaxed and nurtured with a variety of designer products, most of which I had wound up having to clear off the side of the bathtub that morning. Colin took after the Selwick side, outdoorsmen, midblond hair streaked with sun, skin darkened to a nondesigner tan. I’d seen pictures of Colin’s father, an older, grayer version of Colin.

You would never have guessed that Colin and Jeremy were related. The one thing they had in common was their mutual dislike, and that came through loud and clear, imprinted on both their features.

“There’s nothing there,” repeated Colin.

Jeremy’s face hardened. “How do I know you’d tell me if there was?”

“Because your grandmother would kick his ass.”

Wait, had I said that out loud? Well, at least it had broken the tension. Both of the men were staring at me as though I had grown an extra head.

It seemed like the time for a show of girlfriendly solidarity. “Also, Colin doesn’t lie.”

“Thanks, Eloise,” said Colin drily.

It was not exactly a wholehearted endorsement, but then, neither was mine. Yes, Colin was fundamentally a good and honest guy. I would trust him in a room full of scantily clad women, knowing that he’d never so much as think of cheating on me. When it came to Jeremy, however . . . even Colin’s probity had its limits.

Before Jeremy could jump in again, Colin turned to me, asking, “How was
Nightmare Abbey
?”

Hmm. If I hadn’t seen him come in from the tower, cranky as only the unsuccessful and scratched can be, I might have suspected him of hiding something myself. That change of subject was just a little too pat.

“You mean
The Convent of Orsino
,” I corrected him. I sensed many Gothic novel jokes in my future, which seemed a little unfair, considering I was taking one for the team, here. “It’s—um—”

“An action-packed thrill ride?” suggested Colin.

“Pretty much, yes.” In prose so purple you could use it to paint your house. “So far, they’ve been cursed by Gypsies, passed out in an enchanted grove, narrowly escaped an orgy—”

“Escaped an orgy?” Colin said incredulously.

I could tell from the looks on both male faces that this concept did not compute. “Avoided an orgy, then. Hey, I didn’t write it. I’m just summarizing. Look, can we get away from the orgy?”

A laminated menu hit the floor. The server hastily gathered it up and dropped the menus on the table in front of us.

“I’ll just leave those with you, shall I?” she gabbled, and fled back to the bar, where I saw her whispering something into the ear of the bartender, who wiped his hands on his apron and raised a brow in our general direction.

I rounded on my boyfriend. “Why didn’t you tell me she was standing behind me?”

Colin was laughing soundlessly into his pint.

“We’re never going to be able to come here again, you know,” I said darkly.

“I don’t know,” said Colin. “We might get some interesting invitations.”

Or rather, Colin would get some interesting invitations. I wouldn’t be here. It was a distinctly sobering thought.

“And by interesting, I think you mean alarming,” I said firmly. “I’ve seen the local talent. And by talent, I mean livestock.”

“We’re not Dibley,” said Colin, referring to the television show.

“No,” I agreed. “You don’t have Dawn French.”

As I was saying it, I realized that Jeremy was watching us or, more precisely, watching Colin, a little confused and a little bit wary. For a moment, we’d fallen back into our usual patterns (read, absurd back-and-forth over nothing). We’d forgotten that Jeremy was there. Colin looked more relaxed than I’d seen him since yesterday morning. And it suddenly hit me that I’d never seen him like this around Jeremy. The minute Jeremy entered the room, Colin started radiating tension, like the nuclear reactor in a Bond film, the sort that came complete with handy self-destruct button.

From the look on Jeremy’s face, the same thing had occurred to him. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he even looked a little bit wistful.

Which, of course, was utterly absurd. Would Darth Vader be wistful? Hard to tell with that helmet.

Colin followed my gaze and his smile faded, whatever crack he’d been about to make dying on his lips. Instead he said, “Anything else about the book we should know?”

“You mean, other than the orgies?” Colin didn’t crack a smile. Apparently, we were back to business. I tucked my hair behind my ears. “Basically, once you get past all the heavy Gothic hoodoo, it turns into your classic vampire novel.”

“I thought vampires began with Bram Stoker,” said Jeremy, sounding just like his disagreeably smug self. Good. I didn’t want to have to feel sorry for him. “Wasn’t he later?”

“He was, but he didn’t invent the vampire myth; he only built on it. There was a huge vampire scare in Austria in the mid–eighteenth century, and English poets and writers picked up on it at the beginning of the nineteenth. Even Byron wrote a vampire poem.”

I could state all this with authority. I’d done some quick source checking once I’d hit the vampires in the plot and had the same reaction as Jeremy. It wasn’t entirely idle curiosity. If the work was a late-nineteenth-century piece and not actually by Miss Gwen, then it would be entirely useless to us.

“Miss Gwen was on the early side with the vampire craze, but she didn’t invent it,” I said. “There are some interesting twists, though. Her vampire isn’t an old guy with a Transylvanian accent. He’s young and vaguely French.”

“
Vaguely
French?” said Colin.

“Nationalities are never specified as such. The entire book is all set in some mythical kingdom far, far away, in a sort of pseudo–Middle Ages. Anyway”—I stared down the peanut gallery—“the vampire, who is young and vaguely charming, is condemned to preside over an endless party of ghouls in his dark tower until he can find the one maiden who holds the precious jewel that will set him free. Yes,
jewel
.”

Jeremy, who looked like he had been about to make some kind of crack, closed his mouth.

Colin looked thoughtful. “And what is this jewel?”

“Unspecified.” A collective sigh went around the table. “I’m not at the end yet, though. Hey! It’s five volumes long. I’ve had one day.” With a minimum of sleep the night before, what with staying up half the night to preread everything I’d given to Jeremy. “And believe me when I tell you that it reads as if Danielle Steel had a love child with Vincent Price.”

Both men shuddered.

“It’s rather fascinating, really,” I said. “At least from a lit-crit point of view. The real heroine isn’t the ingénue; it’s Plumeria, who’s her preceptress—that’s the word they use. Plumeria and the girl’s father, Sir Magnifico, battle all sorts of obstacles to get to the Silver Tower, where the girl is being held, only to discover that the girl has fallen in love with her captor, just as Magnifico has formed an attachment for Plumeria. It’s all parallels and mirrors. In some ways, it’s a little bit like Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
. The characters are constantly being tested and forced to question their true natures.”