The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (3 page)

I fished out a loofah that had got knocked over into the bath. It still had the Body Shop tag attached and smelled faintly of raspberry body wash. “Seriously, though. How did the rumor get started? There must have been some origin to it all.”

“No smoke without fire?” Colin rinsed his toothbrush and shook it out in the sink. “I don’t know. I remember my father telling me about it when I was little—not in a serious way, mind you. Just as another family story.”

“What did he say?” Colin didn’t talk about his father much. I knew that he had been a great deal older than Colin’s mother and that he had been involved in some branch of the secret services, but that was about it. It was after he died that Colin had thrown over his old career in finance and moved back to Selwick Hall.

Sometimes I wondered what that other, earlier Colin had been like—not that I was going to trade in the one I’d got.

“These were children’s stories,” Colin emphasized. “Once upon a time and all that.”

I nodded vehemently to show I understood. “All warranties and disclaimers acknowledged. Go on.”

Colin stuck his toothbrush in a chipped old mug and leaned back against the sink, resting his elbows against the marble countertop. “It’s complete rubbish,” he said warningly, “but . . .”

“Yes?” The suspense was killing me. So was the edge of the tub, which was distinctly uncomfortable. I shifted forward a bit.

Colin held out a hand to help me up. “According to my father, the story was that the jewels were brought by the Carnation from India to Selwick Hall.”

I felt absurdly disappointed. “But we know that the Carnation wasn’t
in
India.”

My research had turned up the true story of the Carnation’s supposed Indian exploits. Yes, a French plot to rouse the country against the British had been routed, but it had been accomplished by a junior political officer named Alex Reid, not by the Carnation herself. The Carnation had been busy in France at the time, watching Bonaparte crown himself emperor.

“Exactly,” said Colin. “It’s just a story. There was even a bit of doggerel verse—something something Plumeria’s tower.”

I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds like a Whittlesby poem.”

Colin waved that aside. “No,” he said slowly, “it wasn’t. It was just the three lines, and it went something like this:
Hard by Plumeria’s bower / Underneath the brooding tower / The Moon awaits its hard-won hour
.”

“Tower?” My ears pricked up like a spaniel’s. “As in your tower?”

Behind the house loomed the original Norman keep, or the remains thereof, built by Fulke de Selwick to keep those pesky Saxons down. Now semiruined, it was the perfect location for a lost treasure—at least, in theory. In practice, it would be like putting up a neon sign that said, “Get Your Treasures Here!” The place was like a beacon for treasure seekers.

“Is that why you keep it locked?” I asked, tagging along after Colin into the bedroom.

“No. It really is just because of the farm equipment,” he said apologetically. As I had discovered on an earlier, unauthorized foray, the most exciting thing that the tower appeared to be housing was rusty farm equipment. “But we can take a look around if you like.”

“You’ve searched it already, haven’t you?” I said accusingly.

“And my father, and his father before him. Everyone and his mother’s had a go.”

“All his sisters and his cousins whom he reckons by the dozens,” I murmured. “But Jeremy still thinks it’s here.”

Colin spread his hands in silent acknowledgment.

“He’ll go on pestering you until you find it,” I said seriously. “You do realize that.”

“You can’t find what isn’t there to be found,” said Colin.

“Hmm.” I wasn’t ready to admit defeat that easily. “Who was Plumeria?”

Colin’s eyes crinkled. “You know my family tree better than I do.”

“Only the early-nineteenth-century bits of it.” I sank down on the edge of the bed, which made a faint creaking noise in protest. Okay, fine, I had done a bit of poking around into the more recent bits of Colin’s family tree, purely recreationally, but I didn’t want him to know that. It was like admitting you had Googled someone before a first date. “The name does sound oddly familiar, though. . . .”

“Yes?” There was no mistaking the eagerness in Colin’s voice.

Where had I heard that name before? For a moment, I thought I had it, but the wisp of memory drifted away like smoke, nothing to hold on to. Plumeria . . .

“No. It’s gone.” I looked up at Colin, who had busied himself buckling his watch. “Why not ask your aunt Arabella?”

He shook his head. “She won’t give us a straight answer. She doesn’t believe such things are meant to be found.”

“Direct quote?”

“Pretty much.”

“Let’s go anyway.” I liked Colin’s great-aunt, not least because she was the one responsible for setting us up. All right, “set up” might be too strong a term, but she had certainly contrived to throw us in each other’s way. “It’ll be a field trip. Fun!”

Colin came to stand in front of me. “You mean you don’t want to work on your dissertation.”

“Pretty much.” It wasn’t just summer slump. I’d hit a snag in the material and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

Thanks to Colin’s truly excellent archives, I could plot the movements of the Pink Carnation with a fair degree of accuracy between 1803 and 1805. I knew who the Pink Carnation was (Miss Jane Wooliston), where she was living (the Hotel de Balcourt, her cousin’s home in Paris), and exactly what she was doing to thwart Napoleon. Between 1803 and 1805, the Pink Carnation lived in Paris with her chaperone, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows. She kept up a regular coded correspondence with her cousin by marriage, Lady Henrietta Dorrington. And then, in the late spring of 1805 . . .

The paper trail stopped. Cold. No more letters to Lady Henrietta. No more letters to her cousin Amy Selwick. Nothing. Nada.

There were several options, none of them good.

The least awful option was the most obvious: The letters hadn’t survived. As my adviser was fond of saying, just because something wasn’t there didn’t mean it hadn’t existed. It was a miracle that any of these documents survived.

But why meticulously maintain the correspondence up to that point and then burn the rest? It didn’t make sense.

Option two: The Pink Carnation had changed aliases or contacts. If the French had caught on to her coded correspondence with Lady Henrietta, she might have changed her modus operandi, started writing under a different name to a different contact. Clearly, if she had done so, she had not been thinking about the convenience of future historians. On the other hand, at least it meant she was still alive and kicking.

Then there was the final and deadliest option: Something had happened to the Pink Carnation.

It wasn’t impossible. The Carnation was living in constant risk of discovery, her sole protection the French Ministry of Police’s inability to ascribe that kind of cunning to a woman, and a beautiful one at that. All it took was one slip, and it would all be over. The life of a spy wasn’t exactly without danger. The Carnation’s old nemesis, the Black Tulip, had gone up in smoke, quite literally, in the middle of a botched assassination attempt, but a new French spymaster had risen to take the Tulip’s place, a shadowy figure known only as “the Gardener.”

Talk about nerve. It was one thing to pick a flower alias like everyone else, quite another to proclaim yourself master of the whole garden, with the power to cultivate—and to cull.

True, legend ascribed years more of deeds to the Pink Carnation, but by 1805, the Carnation’s reputation had been firmly established. It would have made sense for the English government to continue the use of the alias.

Even in the warmth of the un-air-conditioned room, the thought made me shiver. I’d spent months living in the Pink Carnation’s head. The idea of anything happening to her was anathema to me.

I know, I know. Even if she’d lived to a ripe old age, she’d be long dead now. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. But it mattered to me.

Of all of them, option two was the most likely. It made sense for the Pink Carnation to change up her routine from time to time to keep the Ministry of Police off her tail. Complacency led to discovery. Wasn’t Hotmail constantly reminding me to change my password?

But. That was always the problem, that word “but.” Miss Jane Wooliston and her chaperone, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows—known to the young men of Paris as something that roughly translated to “the Purple Parasol–Wielding Dragon”—were both fixtures on the Paris social scene until spring of 1805. In April 1805, there was a brief mention in the Paris gossip sheets of Miss Wooliston returning to England for a short trip home to deal with what the paper referred to only as a family matter.

After that, nothing. I’d paged through the archives of
Le Moniteur
,
Le Monde Parisien
, and even that notorious scandal rag
Bonjour, Paris!
, sheer up through 1807. True, the microfilm was blurry, but I didn’t think I’d missed anything. There were no further references to Miss Jane Wooliston and Miss Gwendolyn Meadows in Paris after April 1805.

Why had they gone back to England? And what had happened to them there? I was as far from the answer as I was from tracking down the Moon of Berar.

“Anything I can help with?” asked Colin gently.

I bit down on my lower lip. I’d been trying not to yank Colin into my work—I didn’t want him to think I was with him just for his archives. Not that he would think that, hopefully, but love is paranoid. Or at least I was paranoid.

“I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “But I wouldn’t mind a trip to London.”

“Wednesday?” suggested Colin.

I’d have preferred to hop on the next train, but that might have fallen under the heading of running away.

Why had Jane and Miss Gwen left Paris so precipitously? What had driven them back to England? Discovery? Or something else?

“Wednesday,” I agreed, and went off to look up anything I could find about the elusive Plumeria.

Plumeria redoubled her speed as the footfalls of her pursuer pounded ever closer, reverberating through the close confines of the subterranean passage. Her breath rasped in her throat as she spied a faint gleam of light in the distance. At last! But could she reach it before it was too late?

—From
The Convent of Orsino
by A Lady

(and if you were any kind of gentleman, you would stop trying to inquire into her identity!)

T
he spy wore purple.

Only amateurs wore black. Miss Gwendolyn Meadows knew that the true color of a Paris night wasn’t a flat black, but a deep purple, composed of a hundred shades of shadow. Coal smoke masked the moon, diffusing the light of the lampposts, dirtying clothes and shading faces. Tonight she had left off her gown, her gloves, her elaborately curled plumes. She had even, with some reluctance, left behind her trusty parasol and taken up a cane instead. A sword cane, of course. Paris was a dangerous city, even for those engaged in innocent pursuits.

Gwen’s pursuits were anything but innocent.

No one of her acquaintance would recognize her as she was tonight. For tonight’s romp, she had dressed as a dandy in breeches that hugged her legs and an elaborate frock coat of deep purple brocade. The stiffness of the fabric disguised any unseemly curvature of the chest, the tapered silhouette the same as that of any other fop in Paris. Her Hessian boots had been made to her own specifications, supple enough to allow for easy movement, the soles muffled with a thin layer of soft leather.

Her face was masked by a set of elaborately curling sideburns and matching mustache. Not that any of the young bucks who regularly shied away from her in the drawing rooms of the Tuileries would recognize her face. They were usually too busy sidling past in the hopes of saving their shins. Tall for a woman, she was comfortably average height for a man. Long and lean, her body might have been made for breeches roles. In this getup, she looked no different from any of the other gallants who thronged the cafés on the Rue de Richelieu.

There was one major difference. None of them were crouched on the corner of a balcony.

She had followed Bonaparte’s foreign minister from the Théâtre des Arts, marking his limping progress. Talleyrand had gone masked too, but his uneven gait made him easy to follow. They hadn’t far to go. She had tracked him three houses down, to this ramshackle inn. Talleyrand had taken the stairs; Gwen had taken the trellis. Whomever he was meeting, it must be important for Bonaparte’s foreign minister to come himself, and in this much haste.

A light guttered in the room. “Not so bright!”

The voice was the barest whisper, yet still recognizably female. Recognizably female and almost recognizable. Gwen knew that voice from somewhere—she was sure of it. She slouched closer, pressing her ear to the side of the shutters. The overhang of the balcony above shrouded her in shadow, the railing shielding her from the gaze of curious passersby below.

“No one followed me,” said Talleyrand soothingly.

Ha. That’s what he thought. Gwen nobly forbore to preen. There was no point in gloating until she knew what there was to gloat about. He might be meeting a mistress. But if so, why such subterfuge? Talleyrand’s many affairs were fair game; he made no move to hide them.

She would give him one thing: The man recognized his bastards. Not every man could say as much.

“You’re back sooner than I would have thought,” he said. There was an edge of censure in his voice. Gwen heard the shuffle-thump of his passage across the room, the sound of a drink being poured.

“Not from dereliction of duty.” The female’s voice was stronger now, her French lightly accented with a hint of the south. Italian. Not the coarse Corsican of Bonaparte’s cronies, but pure Tuscan, the accent of Dante and the Medicis. And of the opera.

Gwen crept closer. Through the shutters, she saw the lady ease back her hood, revealing a rich mass of auburn hair, elaborately arranged. “I have not forgot our bargain.”

Talleyrand’s voice was dry. “I should be very surprised if you had. Have you secured our prize so swiftly?”

“His Supreme Majesty was not so easily wooed.”

The lady turned, giving Gwen a clear view of her profile, a profile that appeared on countless prints and snuffboxes throughout London, the handsome features of the famed Italian soprano Aurelia Fiorila.

There was just one problem. Fiorila was meant to be in England, recuperating from a nasty bout of something or other.

Yet here she was, as large as life, meeting with Talleyrand in the back room of a none-too-prosperous inn. “The Sultan was much put off by Brune’s clumsy handling.”

Brune. The man had recently returned from a stint as envoy to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. A sultan with a noted taste for opera. And opera singers.

It was an open secret that Bonaparte sought to seduce Selim III away from his alliance with Britain. Bonaparte had bullied the Pope into crowning him emperor not four months past, but the Sultan, entwined in old alliances with England and with Russia, balked at recognizing the imperial title. It was a thorn in Bonaparte’s increasingly rotund flesh. His choice of ambassador, however, had only widened the breach. Brune had been sent back with a flea in his ear.

It shouldn’t have surprised Gwen that Talleyrand had taken matters into his own hands; Talleyrand was a wily old fox. What did surprise her was that Aurelia Fiorila was the means of doing so.

Gwen heard the snap of a snuffbox lid. “Sending Brune,” said Talleyrand, “was not my decision. I trust you were able to sing the Sultan into sweeter temper?”

Fiorila’s voice, the voice that had seduced audience after audience at Covent Garden, was ruefully amused. “Even my voice, sir, has not such power as that.” Talleyrand must have made some move, because she added hastily, “I did gain audience with the Sultan. He told me what he will require to meet your desire. He says he will consider no treaties without a token of France’s good intentions.”

“I should have thought,” said Talleyrand, a courtier to his bones, “that the presence of a beautiful lady would have been token enough.”

Fiorila’s voice was pensive. “The Sultan has beautiful women enough in his harem, sir. He requires no more.”

“Not even one with a voice such as yours?”

Fiorila’s voice sharpened. “I have no desire to sing from a cage. That was never in our bargain.”

That was rather sweetly naïve of her, thought Gwen. She suspected that the terms of Talleyrand’s bargains shifted with his needs. For all his courtly aspect, the man was as slippery as an eel.

“Certainly,” said Talleyrand smoothly. “You know I would never ask that of you.”

Gwen stifled a snort. Talleyrand would ask what he pleased, and they all knew it.

Talleyrand sniffed delicately at a pinch of snuff, coughing neatly into a lace-edged handkerchief of the very finest lawn. “What does the Sultan desire, if not your own fair form?”

Fiorila twisted her hands together. Her face was still youthful, but her hands were beginning to show the signs of age. “He had a more specific token in mind.”

“Which was?” Beneath the charm, Talleyrand was all business.

The singer looked him in the eye. “The Moon of Berar.”

For once, Talleyrand, Talleyrand the unflappable, was genuinely unsettled. “Good God,” he said. “Would the Sultan rather have feathers from the tail of the phoenix, or a ruby made of the final drop of dragon’s blood? They would be as easily obtained. The Moon is a myth.”

“I sang of it in an opera once,” said Fiorila. “Not a very good opera, but the story did catch the imagination. A jewel that makes the wearer impervious to harm, bright enough to blind the most determined assassin, a shield for the body and a mirror for the soul.”

“Stuff and legends,” said Talleyrand. “Not that one might not try to manufacture one . . .”

“But the effects would hardly be what the recipient would expect,” said Fiorila practically. She began to turn up the fabric of her hood. “I have brought you what you required. My part is done. If you would . . .”

Talleyrand moved to block her egress, surprisingly quickly. But then, he had been limping his way in and out of bedchambers for years, thought Gwen cynically.

His voice was gently sorrowing. “Is this the way you requite my generosity, my dear? Feeding me fairy stories? If you think so little of our arrangement—”

“No!” There was no mistaking the alarm in Fiorila’s voice. “I swear, I have relayed it to you as he did to me. The Sultan believes it to be real. He claims it was in the royal treasury of Berar.”

“The Rajah of Berar kept a legendary treasure with the ordinary run of pearls and rubies.” Bonaparte’s foreign minister was politely skeptical.

“According to the Sultan, there was nothing ordinary about any of the treasure of Berar.” Fiorila held out both hands in supplication. “If you bring him the Moon of Berar, he will break with England. But only for that.”

“And how are we to set our hands on it?” There was no mistaking the implication of that “we.” Whatever hold he had on the singer, he wasn’t prepared to relinquish it.

Fiorila’s voice was quiet. “He claims you have it already. He says it fell into the hands of one of your agents at the sack of Berar.”

“One of mine . . .” The tone of Talleyrand’s voice changed.

He knew who it was. Gwen would be willing to wager her favorite parasol on it. She leaned forward to hear better, but she misjudged. The shutters, inexpertly attached at best, rattled against the frame.

“What was that?” demanded Talleyrand.

Gwen didn’t wait for him to find out.

She swung lightly off the edge of the balcony, landing with knee-jarring force in the alleyway below. Something squished under her feet, almost sending her skidding, but she had landed squarely; she had the sense to catch her balance before feinting sideways, around the back of the building.

Talleyrand must have set guards to watch the inn. She could hear their heavy feet, their loud voices. So clumsy! She ducked neatly into a cul-de-sac, pressed against the slimed stones of the wall, waiting as the sound of pursuit pounded past. Her blood raced in her veins, filling her with a high, pure exhilaration. She never felt more alive than when evading pursuit. The dash of danger only made it more interesting.

Botheration. One of them, more cunning than his fellows, was waiting at the entrance to the alley. Moving with painstaking care, Gwen scooped up a loose piece of cobble from the ground. A bit slimy, but it would serve. Choosing her course carefully, she lobbed it to the far left, out of the mouth of the alley. It made a very satisfying clattering sound, well away from her hiding place. As the guard turned to look, she made her move, smashing him hard in the back of his legs with her cane. Leaping over his fallen form, she ran like a rabbit, her heart singing in her breast, the wind whistling in her ears, every sense on fire.

She waited until she was across the bridge before she stopped, just another disheveled dandy among the taverns of St. Michel. She had done it. She had shaken her pursuers. And even if they had seen her, what of it? No one would associate the bravo crouching by the window with the Dragon of the Drawing Room, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, prim of the prim, scourge of importunate swains.

Merciful heavens, she loved her work.

Absurd to think that just two years ago—had it been only two years?—she had been entombed in the English countryside, a reluctant pensioner in her brother’s household, “Aunt Gwen” to her brother’s whining brats, “Oh, Gwendolyn . . .” to her brother’s featherbrain of a wife. Twenty years she had wasted there, growing a little more seamed and a little more sour every day, dependent on the goodwill of her relations for every bite that crossed her lips. In return, she was meant to sit docilely and wind wool, to manage the household for her dolt of a sister-in-law, to pretend gratitude—gratitude!—for the condescension shown her in offering her a home in her own home. The fall from mistress to dependent had been bad enough; the servings of humble pie she had been expected to eat with it were too much.

But what else had there been for her to do? She had no dowry, not anymore. She had no funds of her own. She had been considered handsome once, and not entirely for the size of her vanished dowry. There were some men who appreciated a long, lean form, who preferred black hair to fair, and gray eyes to blue. Her tongue was accounted too sharp by some, but there were men, or at least so she had been told, who prized wit as well as wealth. She might escape through marriage—but to whom? Escape on those terms was no more than another cage. At least under her brother’s roof she preserved the privacy of her own bedchamber, with lock and key when necessary.

Gritting her teeth, she had resigned herself to another twenty years of the same, of watching her idiot nephews marry and procreate, producing offspring as imbecilic as themselves.

It filled her with a savage delight to have escaped that net. When her chance had come, she had seized it with both hands. She had never imagined that her impulsive offer to chaperone a neighbor’s daughter and niece to Paris would provide more than a few months’ reprieve, that it would lead her to emperors and sultans and intrigue beyond imagining. She had gone from counting sheep—her brother was constantly losing track of his herds—to meddling in the affairs of nations.

The League of the Pink Carnation had begun out of pique, an attempt to better the arrogant Englishman who had styled himself the Purple Gentian. But that first mission had led to another, and another after that. In the end, it was the League of the Pink Carnation who had rescued the Purple Gentian from various fates worse than death in the extra-special interrogation chamber of Gaston Delaroche. The Purple Gentian had gone home. The Pink Carnation had stayed on, making Bonaparte fume and his henchmen squirm.

Officially, Gwen’s charge, Jane, was the Pink Carnation. Officially. As far as Gwen was concerned, the whole was a composite performance: Jane’s cunning, Gwen’s daring. They balanced each other, Gwen’s inventiveness supplementing Jane’s cool common sense. It was a pairing that worked ideally.