The Lure of the Moonflower (6 page)

“Do you plan to disguise yourself as a horse?” asked Jack caustically. “Because that’s what a horse seller tends to have with him. Horses.”

If she had been a man, he would have added certain choice comments about the nether parts of the horse’s anatomy. But something about her straight back and direct gaze made the coarse comments shrivel on his tongue. You could put the lady into a French dragoon’s breeches, but she was still, unmistakably, a lady.

“You could always go back to England and take ship for Porto,” suggested Jack, although without much hope.

“And leave the Queen stranded in the midst of French patrols? No.” The Pink Carnation shook her head briskly, as though they were having a perfectly reasonable discussion and not an opium addict’s addled dream. “But you do have a point. We’ll travel faster by river.”

True as far as it went, but she’d ignored a crucial point. “I hate to disillusion you, princess, but the French came to the same conclusion. The Tejo is crawling with French soldiers.”

The Carnation smiled benevolently upon him. “Then we shall simply be French soldiers.”

Jack spoke without thinking. “No.”

“Why not?” The Pink Carnation began ticking off points on her fingers. “There should be no difficulty in acquiring a spare uniform. I’ve heard you speak the language. Your accent is convincing enough. And I,” she added blandly, “have already established my bona fides.”

She had intended this all along.

Jack’s eyes narrowed on the Carnation’s face as the pieces clicked into place. He was beginning to get a sense of how she operated. Like a stage magician, it was all a matter of misdirection.

Had she known already that the Queen might be in the north? Possibly. The rest was a charade, designed to make Jack feel important, make him feel as though he were part of a decision-making process that had already been decided.

Deliberately, Jack slouched back against the wall, his eyes traveling from her boots to her breeches and then, finally, to her face. “Is that what tonight’s exhibition was in aid of? Establishing your bona fides?”

He saw the Carnation’s back stiffen. “Tonight’s exhibition, as you put it, saved you from a beating, Mr. Reid.”

He would take that as a yes. Jack’s lips twisted in a crooked smile. “Only after you put me in the way of one.”

The Pink Carnation raised her chin, looking like judge and jury all in one. “You put yourself in the way of one, Mr. Reid. Your way of life is hardly conducive to restful pursuits.”

She paraded around a strange city in men’s trousers and she dared to accuse him of reckless behavior?

Jack prowled forward. “Which way of life do you mean, princess? Horse trading? Or espionage? Because if it’s the latter, there’s an adage about pots and kettles that might apply.” He paused directly in front of her, looking into her serene, lying face. “I went into this life because I had no other choice. What’s your excuse?”

The Pink Carnation stood very still, but he could feel the change in her, a tension beneath the surface.

She lifted her face defiantly to his. “Does the idea of wearing a blue-and-white coat bother you so?” she said coolly, and Jack might have believed it, but for the brittleness of her stand, the watchfulness of her eyes. “You’ve turned your coat often enough.”

“Perhaps I have.” Jack waited a moment before adding, “But the coat I wore was always my own. I never pretended to wear any nation’s colors.”

A shadow passed over the Pink Carnation’s clear gray eyes. “It’s only another disguise.”

“No.” Jack’s own vehemence surprised him. But as little as he could explain it, he felt it deep in his bones. Perhaps it came of being a soldier’s brat. He’d grown up among soldiers, men who took pride in their colors. “It’s a symbol—a pledge.”

Somewhere in the distance the bells were tolling, calling the monks to compline. Everyone had beliefs, training, unquestioned assumptions that cut deep, so deep they were scarcely aware of them themselves until challenged.

Jack took a stab in the dark. “Would you genuflect at a Roman mass or take their host? Honestly, now.”

He watched as the Pink Carnation pressed her lips together, duty warring with conscience. With dignity, she said, “If it were necessary.”

Like the seasoned campaigner he was, Jack pressed his advantage. “But you would feel the lie of it. And it would diminish you.”

He ought to have felt triumphant. He had won his point. He could tell from her moment’s hesitation, from the quick flicker of her lashes.

But he didn’t. He felt as he had as a boy, fighting with his sister Kat over a toy horse. He had shoved her. He wasn’t supposed to, but she had angered him and he had. Kat was three years older, and knew just how to get under his skin, to taunt him into bad behavior. So he had elbowed her. And he had been left holding the toy horse, with a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach, wishing it back in Kat’s hands and himself anyone but who he was.

Maybe it was the way the Pink Carnation was looking at him, as though all of humanity were standing on her shoulders. “I do what I have to do, Mr. Reid. As do you.”

“That sounds like a warning.”

The Carnation smiled wryly. “Call it instead a reminder. If your conscience will not sit with a blue coat, would you pose as my batman? You need wear no garment but your own.”

That wasn’t the real problem, and they both knew it. He might be wearing his own coat, but he would be following her orders, playing the game her way. The idea of deliberately placing himself in the middle of the French force felt about as attractive as closing his eyes and plunging his bare fist into a nest of kraits.

He could refuse to go—but this woman represented Wickham, and Wickham was paying the bills.

He could argue; he could insist upon guidelines—no unnecessary risks, no heroics—but what would that be? Nothing but words.

She had him over a barrel and he knew it.

The Pink Carnation was watching him, her expression carefully blank. “Can you be ready by noon tomorrow?”

Noon, afternoon, what difference did it make when one went to the gallows? Jack shrugged into his jacket, pulling his hat down over his horsehair wig.

“It’s your funeral, princess.”

He just hoped it wouldn’t be his own.

J
ane’s plan hit a snag almost at once.

The Pink Carnation wasn’t used to her plans hitting snags. Snags were for other people, people who didn’t do their research. But all the research in the world couldn’t produce a boat where there was none. When they arrived at the docks, they found the wharf a confusion of French soldiers.

“We’re all in the same boat. That is, without a boat,” a friendly captain told Jane cheerfully. He seemed very young to be a captain, very young and very raw. His own troop, making for Villa Franco, was already in formation, ready to march. “Everything’s been taken by reinforcements bound for Abrantes. You may have to wait a bit, I fear.”

“That won’t do.” Jane mimed youthful distress. She didn’t have to work very hard at the distress. Jack Reid slouched behind her in his role as her servant, and, even if he couldn’t currently say,
I told you so
, she knew he was thinking it. “I’m to join General Thomières at the fortress of Peniche. I’m his new aide-de-camp.”

“Thomières?” Captain Moreau looked at her in confusion. “Isn’t he still in Lisbon? Thought I saw him at Madame Pinto’s card party last night.”

“He’s had his orders,” Jane said glibly. And so he had, in the pouch she had lifted off Junot the day before, in Rossio Square. It wasn’t entirely a lie. Thomières had been ordered to Peniche. He just didn’t know it yet. “I’m to go ahead and secure comfortable lodgings for him—he’ll have my head if there’s not a feather bed waiting for him by the time he arrives.”

Captain Moreau grimaced in sympathy. “There’s nothing for it, I’m afraid. Unless you want to wait a week.”

“We’ll have to go by land then.” A rain had begun to fall, not the gentle misty rain of a Shropshire summer, but sharp and stinging. Jane turned up the neck of her cloak. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Wait!” said Moreau, looking genuinely alarmed on her behalf. “You don’t want to travel alone. The roads are teeming with bandits. They aren’t terribly friendly.”

“Bandits tend not to be,” agreed Jane gravely.

“You wouldn’t be friendly either under the circumstances,” muttered Jack Reid behind her.

“What was that?” inquired Moreau.

“Nothing,” said Jane quickly. “Just my servant. He has a horror of highwaymen.”

Captain Moreau glanced dubiously back at the milling men, who appeared to be attempting to move themselves into some sort of formation. Most were without full kit; several had mismatched boots or none at all. Jane had heard that the march into Portugal had wreaked havoc on Junot’s forces, but she had had no idea, until now, just how much. Captain Moreau was considerably short of a company. And also possibly a few beans short of a barrel. He reminded her a great deal of an acquaintance back in England who tended, generally affectionately, to be compared to a root vegetable.

“You’re welcome to march with us,” Moreau offered. “Always room in the mess tent for one more.”

In this case, because about half the company appeared to have been lost somewhere en route.

Jane did a quick calculus. They would travel slowly with Moreau. But she couldn’t travel as a French officer alone with a servant. Moreau was right; the French had done little to endear themselves on their march from Spain. They would be dead within days. But to adopt any other disguise would be to place herself entirely within Jack Reid’s hands.

Reid knew the back roads; he knew the language. Once they veered off the road, away from the familiar, Jane would be at his mercy.

Contact or not, she didn’t trust him enough for that. This was, after all, the man who had betrayed his own people and then, having done so, betrayed the betrayers. He might be in Wickham’s pay at the moment, but who knew what he would do should someone on the other side offer more?

“If you’re quite certain . . .” Jane shifted aside as Jack made an attempt to kick her in the ankle. Fortunately she had been trained by Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, whose parasol was the opposite of the windmills of the gods. It moved exceedingly swiftly, and Jane had long since learned to get out of the way of it.

There was a muffled yelp as Reid’s foot connected with the mule instead.

Jane smiled brilliantly at Moreau. “I would be delighted to accept your kind offer. My servant has my baggage on the mule.”

Moreau looked doubtfully at Reid, who was garbed in a rough brown jacket, yet another dilapidated hat pulled low over his head. Reid had abandoned the horsehair, though. His hair was his own, clubbed back in an old-fashioned queue. “He looks a surly fellow.”

Jane leaned over confidentially. “I had to hire someone local. My old batman fell ill just north of Lisbon.”

Moreau nodded as though that were a story he had heard before. “Just watch that he doesn’t cut your throat in your sleep. Some of these local men . . .”

“He came well recommended,” said Jane quickly. “And he speaks some French. Rodrigo!” she called imperiously. “We travel with Captain Moreau and his dragoons. Fetch my trunks.”

Reid feigned a look of incomprehension.
“O qué?”

“Pardon me,” said Jane. “I must see to my arrangements.”

“Certainly, Lieutenant de Balcourt.” Moreau gave a short bow, one officer to another. “I look forward to the opportunity to improve our acquaintance.”

“‘The opportunity to improve our acquaintance’?” Reid mimicked, as they moved behind a convenient pile of baggage. “What are you doing? We travel faster alone.”

“Yes, but we wouldn’t have the same opportunity to gather intelligence along the way,” said Jane coolly. “We can kill two birds with one stone.”

“This lot,” said Jack Reid, speaking low and quickly, “is a waste of a good stone. That Moreau is about as much use as an arthritic carrier pigeon. If he knows anything the least bit useful, I’ll eat my hat.”

“One can never tell what might be useful,” said Jane priggishly. “They might have information they don’t know they possess.”

Reid gave her a look from under the brim of his hat. “Or is it just that you’re not accustomed to sleeping rough?”

The bolt struck a little too close to home. Her missions, dangerous though they might have been, had all been conducted against the backdrop of drawing rooms and salons.

But she was country-bred, wasn’t she? She had spent her formative years in Shropshire, surrounded by more sheep than people.

Jane drew herself up, feeling the seams of her green jacket scratching her sides. “I’m not afraid of hardship.”

Jack Reid regarded her skeptically. “If you say so—Lieutenant de Balcourt.” He dwelt mockingly on that aristocratic
de
. “You do realize that this means weeks in their company? It’s not a two-day jaunt down the river. What happens if you swill too much port in mess one night and . . . ?”

He made an eloquent gesture that needed no translation.

Jane kept a tight rein on her temper. “I do not, as you so eloquently put it, swill. I assure you I can maintain the deception.” Jane didn’t let her voice slide back into its normal alto, but kept it a light tenor.

Jack Reid watched her, an ironic smile tightening the corners of his lips. “Have you ever marched with an army before?”

She knew remarkably little of armies on the march. Armies in mess, yes. Officers home in Paris, boasting of their escapades, yes. But she had never had any call before to join an army on the march. “I’ve remained in the field for months at a time.”

“As a man? Among the French?”

Jane looked quellingly at him. “It’s always safest to hide in plain sight.” She should know. She had spent years in Paris, right underneath Bonaparte’s nose, dancing at his balls, dining with his stepdaughter, flirting with his marshals. “We can break off at Santarém.”

Jack Reid wasn’t willing to let it go just yet. He turned back, his brows drawing together. “What happens when they decide to demand your bona fides?”

“I shall provide them, of course.” Her papers were tucked away in a pocket of her cloak: Jean de Balcourt, scion of an old but now impoverished family, seeking to regain favor under the new regime. Lieutenant de Balcourt had made the odd appearance before, although never at such length as this. “Did you think I would be so unprepared?”

Jack Reid fixed her with a long, inscrutable look. “You don’t want me to think. You want me to follow.”

A dozen retorts rose and died on Jane’s lips. That was what he wanted: to draw her into argument, to put her on the defensive.

Loudly, Jane said, “Fetch the mule, Rodrigo. We don’t want to keep our friends waiting.”

Jack Reid touched his hand to his cap in an ironic salute. “Sir.”

He sauntered away, leaving Jane feeling as though she had lost the argument, not he.

Someone had to lead, didn’t they? Jane hunched down beneath her cloak as she rode beside Captain Moreau towards the front of the train, Jack Reid somewhere behind with the mule and the baggage. Or so she hoped. She wouldn’t put it past him to slope off, evading orders as he had so often in the past.

Did he think she enjoyed making these sorts of decisions? Well, perhaps she did, just a little. At least in the beginning—in the beginning when the work was new and exciting, each challenge a puzzle to be solved. But the more immersed Jane had become in the shadowy world of espionage, the more aware she had become that her actions had consequences. Jane’s second in command, Miss Gwen, tended to swash before she buckled, charging off without thought, sword parasol at the ready. Jane’s cousin Amy, who had founded a spy school in Sussex, optimistically sent her people into Paris, trusting to Jane to keep them alive.

And Jane had, as best she could.

But that meant taking charge. It meant making decisions based on the totality of the circumstances, difficult decisions, unpopular decisions. It meant keeping her own counsel, even at times when she longed to pour out all her doubts and worries. In order to maintain her authority, she needed to cloak herself in a mantle of omniscience.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown
, the poet said. He might have substituted “lonely.”

The rain dribbled steadily down, the horses’ hooves sinking deep in the mire. By the time they made camp, Jane’s boots were caked with mud, her cloak a mass of wet wool.

Whatever his other faults, Jack Reid knew how to pitch a tent. Jane found hers set at the end of a row, close enough to the circle of safety of the camp, but far enough that one might have a murmured conversation without half of Napoleon’s officer corps hearing it. Bidding Captain Moreau good night, Jane retreated into her tent, draping her sodden cloak carefully on a hook by the inside of the door.

Jane’s thighs and back ached with the unaccustomed exercise. She knew how to ride, of course. She was generally held to have a fine seat. But an afternoon’s hunting on a well-trained mare was a very different game from a long march on a bony nag who appeared to have one short leg. It was, Jane thought wearily, rather like being placed in a barrel full of blunt edges and rolled rapidly down a hill. She might have suspected Jack Reid of choosing the nag intentionally, as punishment, but for the fact that all of the other officers’ mounts were of similar quality.

Wincing, Jane peeled off her green jacket. Dampness had made darker patches on the wool. It seemed odd to her that with all his other shifts and deceptions, Jack Reid should balk at wearing this green coat.

...You would feel the lie of it. And it would diminish you.

Fine words from a man who made his life by lying.

But he was right. That was the awful bit. Jane could see her own face reflected dimly in the mirror that “Rodrigo” had propped on top of her shaving kit. It was a face she barely recognized, her own hair tightly coiled beneath a wig of exuberant dark brown hair; the features rendered unfamiliar by the judicious use of paint. In the dim light, in the wavy glass, she might have been looking at a stranger.

Lieutenant de Balcourt, Miss Fustian, Gilly Fairley, the Marchesa Malvezzi, Amelie de Printemps . . . She had been so many people over the past few years, and none of them herself.

Piece by piece, Jane felt herself washing away, like a pebble in a pond, smoothed into featurelessness by the successive waves that crashed over her, until there was nothing left there that was uniquely her own. She wondered dimly what the girl who had first come to Paris five years before would think of the woman she had become. Would she be proud of her achievements? Or would she long after all that had been lost? So very, very much lost. Lost ideas, lost ideals, lost comrades.

Jane pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. It was important work. She believed that still. She had to believe that. If she didn’t, then it was all for nothing, the estrangement from her family, the danger to her friends.

Jane sank down on the camp stool before the makeshift dressing table, her reflected image dark in the uncertain light. She missed her old friends with an ache like a wound. She missed her life in Paris, where she had carried on a double life, to be sure, but under her own name, in her own clothes, in her own skin, with her chaperone by her side to challenge and anchor her. She missed Miss Gwen. She missed her pithy asides and her utterly unworkable plans.

And then Jack Reid had come into her life.

Not in the flesh, not then. It took, thought Jane wryly, a true talent for chaos to upend someone’s life from a continent away. But that was what Jack Reid had done. When he shipped the jewels of Berar from India to his younger sister in Bath, it had set in train a series of events that had placed Jane squarely in the path of the most dangerous spy in Europe: the French mastermind known as the Gardener.

She couldn’t operate in Paris, not anymore, not now that the Gardener knew who she was. The stakes had been raised with a vengeance. Jane had left behind everything she knew, everyone she loved, going deep undercover with only her wits as company.

And all because Jack Reid had decided it might be amusing to steal a raja’s horde of jewels.

“Daydreaming, Lieutenant?” Jack Reid let the flap of the tent fall back down behind him as he walked in as though he owned it.

“What are you doing here?” Hastily Jane yanked her jacket back around her shoulders. As befitted an officer, the shirt beneath was made of fine linen. Too fine.