The Lure of the Moonflower (10 page)

The Pink Carnation’s lips quirked. “It seemed easier than carrying the trunk.”

Was she trying to be funny?

“I hope you can carry it, that’s all,” muttered Jack.

He shouldered his own haversack. Unlike the Carnation, he didn’t travel with full kit. He was always ready to move on a moment’s notice. He didn’t need rosewood writing desks and mirrored shaving stands. Kneeling, Jack yanked up one of the tent pegs.

“What are you doing?” asked the Pink Carnation.

“Crawling,” said Jack. He peeled back a small section of canvas. “After you.”

With one doubtful look, the Pink Carnation crawled. Her white breeches were soon brown with mud. So much the better, thought Jack, forcing himself to be hard. Those white trousers were worse than a beacon.

“No lantern?”

“Not unless you want to be seen.”

There wasn’t much by way of a moon; the clouds had taken care of that. They pressed forward in grim silence, away from the road, over rocks slippery with rain, up treacherous paths slick with mud and pitted with pebbles. The Carnation staggered and slipped but kept doggedly on, her head lowered, hatless. The rain had slowed, but Jack had led them, deliberately, through a heavily forested region, and the leaves let loose their moisture on the Carnation’s bare head, making her hair drip damply around her face, running into her eyes. She had left her uniform hat behind. Sensible if one expected to be seen, not so clever when it came to keeping the rain off.

Jack might have given her his own hat; he raised a hand to his head, and then stopped, as those three little words came back to taunt him.

Don’t hurt him
.

The path was little more than a goat track, better suited to hooves than boots, particularly if one wasn’t accustomed to the terrain. The Pink Carnation stumbled again, catching herself against the jagged branch of a tree. She didn’t cry out, but the corners of her lips compressed with pain and her white face went even whiter.

Turning back, Jack relieved the Carnation of her pack.

“You don’t . . . need . . .”

“I don’t need you breaking your fool neck,” said Jack shortly, hefting the haversack onto his shoulder. The Carnation had clearly packed a few bricks, just in case they needed to build their own shelter. Three-story, with a drawing room and space for a music room. “Wickham doesn’t pay extra for dead agents. We’ll camp at the next clearing.”

“Shouldn’t we . . . go . . . farther?” The Carnation was shivering so hard she could hardly speak.

“Only idiots would be out tonight.” What that made him, Jack wasn’t sure.

An abandoned goatherd’s hut would have been rather nice about now, but one wasn’t going to oblige him by materializing. Instead Jack found a relatively level space between the trees, the ground thickly thatched with pine needles.

“Home, sweet home,” he said. “Put up your feet and make yourself comfortable.”

He’d expected complaints, protests, demands for an inn with an en suite chamber pot. The Pink Carnation provided none of those. She turned, surveying her surroundings with a slightly bewildered expression.

“I suppose it’s too dangerous to have a fire,” she said.

He shouldn’t feel sorry for her. It was ridiculous. They wouldn’t be in this mess, insufficiently provisioned, wet, hunted, if she hadn’t insisted on going her own way in the first place, whether it had been by ignorance or design.

But he did. Her face looked so white and pinched in the meager light, her body racked by chills she did her best to hide.

“More dangerous to die of exposure,” Jack said gruffly, squatting on the ground as he cleared a makeshift fire pit. “And, no, no one will see it from here.”

He hoped.

He had led them deep into the countryside, well away from the main road. They were, Jack surmised, more likely to encounter curious locals than French soldiers.

The Pink Carnation squatted down beside him, shoving her cold hands into her sleeves. “Which way are we going?”

“North,” Jack lied. Not that she had any way of communicating with the Gardener from here, unless she had a carrier pigeon tucked into that bulging bag of hers, but best to be safe.

If she smelled a rat, she didn’t say. Instead she scooted a bit closer to the tiny blaze, hunching down into her cloak.

Jack pulled a flask from beneath his jacket. “Brandy?”

The Carnation looked at him in surprise. “Do you— That is, I didn’t know. Are Hindus allowed to drink?”

Deliberately, Jack took a long draft. “It’s Musselmen who can’t drink.” He capped the flask and shoved it back in his pocket. “And I’m not.”

“A Musselman?”

“Anything.” The word came out raw and ugly. Jack had thought himself inured against it, but it still hurt, every time. His father had had him baptized, supposedly, but that was the extent of his theological contribution, theoretically out of respect for Jack’s mother, but really, Jack suspected, because it would link Jack too closely to him, this child he had never wanted born of a woman he had never wanted. As for his mother’s people, Jack was an outcast, unclean. “I’m neither fish nor fowl, princess. Trust me at your peril.”

There was a charged silence. The Pink Carnation raised her hands to her brow and lifted the hair right off her head. The entire dark, sodden mass came off, revealing her own hair, pale and dry beneath, tightly braided.

Another deception.

Jack felt a fool. Here he’d been feeling sorry for her, hatless, when she’d been wearing a hat of hair, dry and snug underneath. He ought to have remembered; he’d seen her in her own hair once before, that day in Lisbon, fine and straight, nothing like the dark curls she had affected as Lieutenant de Balcourt. But she had remained so thoroughly in character throughout their march, never once removing the wig, he had forgotten that the dark curls weren’t her own.

It didn’t do to take anything at face value with the woman who called herself the Carnation.

She gave her head a little shake as though testing the feel of it. Primly, she said, “We shape ourselves, not the circumstances of our birth. We choose our own course—for good or for ill.”

Yes, but she hadn’t started life in a leaky ship. Jack rocked back, bracing himself on one hand. “Has your road always run straight, princess? Or have you perchance taken the odd trek down the garden path?”

“If you want to know how I know the Gardener, you could just say so,” the Carnation said mildly.

And there he’d thought he was being so subtle. To the devil with it all. Bluntly, Jack said, “Are you working with him?”

The Pink Carnation stared at him across the flames. Quietly, she said, “My loyalties have never been questioned. Can you say the same of yours?”

Maybe it was the contempt in her voice. Maybe it was the way she was looking at him, as though he were a cockroach beneath her heels. Maybe it was two weeks of playing Rodrigo to her lieutenant, fetching her shaving water and saying “yes, sir, no, sir,” when all he wanted was to bend her over that camp bed and—

Whatever it was, something snapped.

“Go on,” Jack drawled in his most offensive voice. “Tell me what you think of me. Tell me that I’m a turncoat. Tell me that I’m a man without honor. Be honest now. Don’t hold back.”

She had courage; he’d give her that. There she was, alone with him in the wilderness, lost, vulnerable, and utterly unapologetic.

She looked him squarely in the eye. “I’ve said nothing more than is true.”

“But there’s truth and there’s truth. Isn’t there,
Jean
?” Jack had the satisfaction of seeing her flinch just a bit. “You have your truth. I have mine.”

The Carnation was not impressed. “What is true is that you lied. People trusted you—and you lied to them.”

“And you don’t lie?” Jack looked pointedly at her green uniform jacket. “Everything about you is a lie.”

If she sat any straighter, he could use her as a hat rack. “There are . . . compromises we make in the interest of justice. But I have never, ever betrayed my comrades.”

The first time he had slipped information to the British, three of his friends had died in battle. He hadn’t expected that. When great nations warred, small men suffered. Died. It had seemed so abstract, that information. Such-and-such company to move at such-and-such a time. Words on a slip of paper. Nothing more.

He had forgotten that the point of information was to be used.

And, having committed to his course, he was obliged to do it again. And again. Justice, the Carnation said. Oh, he had believed, initially, in the justice of his actions.

But that didn’t change the outcome.

The woman sitting across from him, so smug and sure, had no idea. “Do you want me to grovel and cringe? Yes, I betrayed the men who employed me. But I had my reasons for doing so.”

Reasons
.
The corpses of his friends stared sightlessly up at him, mocking him.

“By reasons,” said the Carnation coolly, “I assume you mean coin.”

Yes
, Jack was tempted to say.
Riches beyond imagining. Dancing girls. Priceless gems
. But that would be a lie, even more of a lie than the green uniform jacket she wore. He had never cared for any of that. He had never desired riches, for all that he had stumbled upon them. Stealing the jewels of Berar had been another way of taking revenge, of thumbing his nose at the man who had stolen his ideals and left him a man with neither a country nor a cause.

“Wouldn’t that be nice and simple? No.” Jack smiled crookedly. “If you want to know why I did what I did, ask your friend. The Gardener.”

“I
can’t,” said Jane, with some asperity. “He’s not here. And he’s not my friend.”

Her enemy, her lover, but never her friend. Friendship required a measure of trust, and that was one thing, even at the height of infatuation, she had never been able to give to Nicolas de la Tour d’Argent.

Sometimes it seemed to her that everything that had gone wrong, everything that had led her to this moment, here, cold, miserable, unsure, could be dated back to that day in the spring of 1805 when she had first held out her hand to the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent.

If only she could turn back the clock . . .

But there was no way to do that, and even if she could, what would she do? Stop Jack Reid from sending the jewels of Berar back to England? Jane indulged in a moment’s wishful thinking. If Jack Reid had never sent the jewels . . . then her sister Agnes would never have disappeared from her boarding school. Jane and Miss Gwen would never have been summoned from Paris to find her. They would never have met Nicolas de la Tour d’Argent.

And everything could be as it was.

She was being selfish, she knew. If that were so, the Gardener would still be operating untrammeled in England. If she was barred from Paris now, so the Gardener was barred from London. She had accomplished that much, at least. And if Jack had never sent those ill-starred jewels, Miss Gwen would never have met Colonel Reid, would never have had her daughter, Jane’s goddaughter, Plumeria. Could she cast that small life into darkness, render it as nothing, merely because she was so petty as to long for the calm certainties of her old existence?

Jane hated herself for begrudging Miss Gwen her happiness. She wanted Miss Gwen to be happy—of course she did. And she owed Miss Gwen so very much.

At times like this, Jane wished she owed Miss Gwen a little less.

“Whatever I may think of the Gardener, for good or for ill, he’s hardly Satan, to be blamed for every sin.” Jane shifted on the rough ground. It had stopped raining, but she could feel the damp seeping through her breeches. She would have given anything to be anywhere but here. “You made your own choices.”

And so had she. As much as she would like to blame Jack Reid for all her current misery.

But she, unlike Jack Reid, knew how to take responsibility for her own actions.

Jack Reid leaned his weight against one arm, his pose lazy, relaxed, but there was something beneath it that made the hairs on Jane’s neck prickle. “I’d like to set you an exercise, princess. Imagine, if you will, that you live in a country—your own country, mind!—where you have no rights at all. The law forbids your entering the army, the government, any profession that might suit your interests or talents. And why? All because you were born to the wrong mother. Well? Can you picture that?”

“Picture it?” A slightly hysterical laugh rose in Jane’s throat. “I’ve lived it. I’ve lived it these past five years.”

The confusion on Reid’s face would have been amusing if she weren’t so entirely beyond amusement, cold and wet and terrified. She’d had two years now—two years of hiding so far from anyone she knew or loved that she’d nearly forgotten herself, two years of bottling her emotions, whistling through her fears.

Jane’s hands shook with cold and nervous energy. “What do you think it is to be a woman? If I had been born a man, I might have served my country in the normal way. I might have stood for Parliament or commanded a company. Do you think yourself hard done by, Mr. Reid? You can walk down the street unchaperoned. You can rent a room or sit at a table in a tavern without everyone assuming that you must be a whore.”

The ugly word hung in the air between them. On the fire a twig cracked, sending sparks flying into the air.

There was a dark color beneath Jack Reid’s tanned skin. “I didn’t assume—”

“Didn’t you?”

Their eyes locked, held. Jane could feel her hands clench into fists in her lap, the nails biting into her palm, but she kept her spine straight, her head held high. Her reputation was all that was left to her. Once that was lost, she would be fair game. It was unfair, but it was the way the world worked. She had learned that the hard way.

“With every word, with every gesture, you have made clear your opinion of me. And my morals. And why? Because I am a woman alone, doing a man’s work. Picture
that
, Mr. Reid. And be grateful for the freedoms you have that I never shall.”

Jack Reid’s face might have been carved from seasoned wood. Then slowly, deliberately, he doffed his hat to her. “You’re fighting for the wrong side, princess. You ought to have joined the revolution.”

Someday
. Nicolas’s voice, urbane and amused, his breath warm against her ear.
Someday you’ll realize you’re fighting for the wrong side. And when that day comes, I’ll be there waiting.

Don’t keep me waiting too long, Jeanne.

“I’m no radical,” said Jane flatly. She turned the collar of her cloak up, a small barrier against the world. “And even if I were, the revolution is dead. Bonaparte may claim to be the voice of the revolution, but the only force that drives him is his own ambition.”

Jack Reid stared into the fire, his expression abstracted. “I believed in it all once, you know. The revolution, the shining city on a hill, rights for all.” He glanced sideways at Jane, his eyes unreadable in the firelight. “When I was sixteen, I ran away and joined Scindia’s army. I was recruited by a man named Pierre Perron. You’ve heard of him, I take it?”

“He was one of Scindia’s generals,” said Jane warily. “A committed revolutionary.”

“A true one. His goal was that the tricolor fly over all of India, in a world where all men were equal. More equal if they were French, but no one’s perfect. He meant well. And he was good to me. He took me on as if I were his own. He made me free of his library. He showed me the image of a world made new.” Memory softened Jack’s features, brought a warmth to his voice that Jane had never imagined he could possess. “He called me son.”

It was too much. She didn’t want to know this, any of it. There had to be some trick, some ploy. Men like the Moonflower didn’t confide without purpose, no matter how cold the wind or dark the night.

“You had a father,” said Jane.

The warmth fled Jack’s face. “Was that in my dossier? Or are you merely presuming based on the commonplaces of natural science? So I did. For what it was worth.”

Jane remembered Colonel Reid as she had last seen him, his two-year-old daughter balanced high on his shoulders, her small fingers tugging at his silvering red hair as the colonel bounced her up and down. The Laughing Colonel, they called him—except when he had cause to mention his second son.

Jane frowned at the Moonflower. “Why are you telling me this?”

Whatever camaraderie there had been between them, it was gone now. “Because,” said Jack Reid lazily, “Perron was the one who recruited me on the Gardener’s behalf.”

“Oh?” Jane affected lack of interest, but the hairs on the back of her neck prickled. If Jack Reid was working with the Gardener still, if this was a complicated plot, now was the perfect time for him to reveal his perfidy—now, when she was isolated, alone, and entirely dependent.

She had, she realized, walked herself right into a potential trap by fleeing with him into the night. In the French camp, on a major road, she might have blended in, found her way back to Lisbon and safety.

But the French camp and the road were miles behind them.

“The work, Perron told me, might be irregular, but it would be for a just cause. Our cause. And it all went well enough for the first year. I remained nominally within Perron’s command, but in reality I worked for the Gardener.”

Jane moved subtly closer to the fire. A burning brand wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would serve in case of need. “Until you saw a shiny case of jewels?”

Jack’s eyes met hers, cool and hard. “Until he asked me to murder my mentor.”

Jane blinked. “Murder?”

“Perron,” said Jack Reid very softly, “had outlived his usefulness. He was too bold in his beliefs, too blunt. He had antagonized the rest of Scindia’s forces. There was dissension in the ranks and talk of a potential coup. Battles were lost. Ideals were all very well, but Bonaparte needed results, not rhetoric. He needed Scindia’s armies pitted against the British. So the Gardener sent me another assignment. I was to assassinate Perron.”

“But . . .” Jane delved into her memory. “Perron lives. He retired to France.”

“Yes.” Jack Reid kicked a fallen twig back into the fire with the heel of his boot. “Perron lives.”

None of this sorted with what she knew about Jack Reid, or what she thought she knew about him. “You refused?”

Jack Reid smiled without humor. “And risk having my own neck on the block? What do you take me for?” He leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head. “I had an unavoidable assignment elsewhere. By the time I returned, Perron had fled Scindia’s camp. He had received . . . anonymous information.”

There had been something rather unusual about Perron’s escape. Jane had marked it as odd even then, but there had been too many other matters demanding her attention.

“Perron fled to the English camp. . . . He was given safe passage to the coast.” Jane looked down at Jack Reid as the pieces clicked together. “You saved him.”

“‘Saved’ is such a strong term.” Jack tipped his hat down over his eyes. “Perron was old enough to take care of himself.”

If he had professed noble motives, painted a halo for himself, Jane would have been suspicious. But this . . . this had too much of the ring of truth. It would be just like Nicolas to order the dispatch of a colleague who had proved himself a liability. Jane had seen as much herself, with her own eyes.

Perron had lived. And Jack Reid had begun selling secrets to the English.

Jane looked narrowly at him, trying to find his face beneath his hat. “Information for safe passage. Was that the bargain?”

Jack Reid shrugged. “The English paid more. I’m a mercenary, out for what I can get, remember?”

He was sprawled nearly flat on his back, his head propped against his haversack, his hat tipped over his eyes, one foot propped on the opposite knee, the picture of devil may care. But he did care. He cared badly. Jane could hear it in his voice, could read it in his deliberate slouch, in his studied unconcern. Everything Jane knew about him, everything she had thought she had known—it was turned upside down, on its head. A troubled soul, Colonel Reid had called his second son. Insubordinate, those who worked with him had said. Brilliant but unpredictable.

All true, but from it, Jane had inferred something more. A man without principle, without belief, without honor, his loyalty only to himself. Because what sort of man could turn his back on his father and make common cause with his father’s enemies?

He called me son.

Jane stared at the recumbent figure in mounting frustration. “Why?” she demanded. “Why tell me this now?”

“Doesn’t every campfire need a story? Remind me next time to tell you the one about the tiger that got away.”

“That isn’t funny.” She prided herself so on her judgment, on her ability to read the hearts and minds of men. And she had been wrong. Utterly, dangerously wrong. And why? Because Jack Reid made a career out of being provoking. Because she blamed him, still, for his carelessness in sending the jewels of Berar to England. Jane snatched the hat off his head. “Do you realize that your stubbornness may have walked us into a trap?”

Jack sat up straight so suddenly that Jane rocked back on her heels with a thump. “
My
stubbornness?” There was a dangerous glint in his amber eyes. The tiger hadn’t got away. It was here at the campfire next to her. “May I remind you, Your Royal Highness, that you were the one who insisted on traveling with Captain Moreau? Against, I might add, repeated advice to the contrary.”

Advice that she had ignored, on principle, because he was Jack Reid, and therefore automatically suspect.

Jane wanted to cry with frustration. “If you had given me any reason to trust you—”

“What?” Jack’s voice was rich with sarcasm. “You would have placed my judgment before your own? The Pink Carnation who does no wrong?”

He was on his feet now, looking down at her. Jane had never felt smaller in her life, her legs drawn against her chest, plastered with mud, Jack Reid standing over her, legs apart, arms crossed, regarding her with an expression of utter contempt.

“Don’t blame me for your own mistakes, princess,” he said, and turned on his heel, stalking past the small circle of the fire.

“Wait.” Jane scrambled to her feet, her boots slipping and sliding against the damp pine needles. She had no map, no compass. Only Jack Reid. “Where are you going?”

“To cover our tracks,” said Jack, without breaking stride.

And he was gone before Jane could follow, leaving her, foolish and alone, by the dying remains of the fire.

•   •   •

Jack spent the rest of the night laying false trails.

If the Gardener inquired after them, he would discover that a French lieutenant and his batman had been seen at a tavern on the road, making rapidly for Lisbon. Should that not suit the Gardener’s temper, inquiries in the other direction would ascertain that, in fact, a woman and a man traveling together—the woman with pale brown hair, claiming to be a French noblewoman, the man dressed in local costume—had bespoke a carriage and were headed for the Spanish border.

Trails, trails, trails, and more trails, as tangled as Jack’s thoughts, as the sky paled to the chill dawn of December, as gray as the Carnation’s face as he had left her behind in the camp.

That had been ill-done, Jack knew. A cad’s trick, his father would have said reprovingly, ever the ladies’ man, solicitude bred into the bone. And this time his father would have been right.

Jack’s conscience gave an unaccustomed twinge. He had been sixteen when he ran away from home, old enough to be on his own. But he could still remember that first night sleeping rough, the desperation and terror of it. He’d stayed awake the whole night, hearing brigands in every footfall, holding with both hands to the bundle of his belongings. And that had been in a city he knew, where he spoke the language, could chart his own course.