The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (29 page)

I’m not sure who started laughing first, but we all were, at ourselves, at the night, at everything.

“Not exactly Sherlock Holmes, are we?” I leaned against Colin for balance. Every part of me was stiff after two hours of book hauling. “We fail at detection.”

“We get points for perseverance,” said Jeremy, wincing as he started to lever himself to his feet.

“And teamwork,” said Colin, and held out a hand to his stepfather.

For a moment, Jeremy hesitated, and I wondered if he feared that Colin was going to dump him back on the ground. But their tentative entente held. Jeremy took Colin’s hand and let him help him off the floor.

While Jeremy was dusting off his trousers, I went for the book. It was huge, large enough that I staggered as I lifted it off the stand, staggered and sneezed. The cover was grimed with a century of dust. Obviously, it hadn’t been high on anyone’s reading list for quite some time. The leather cover left streaks of dirt on my fingers.

Balancing it against the edge of the table, I flipped it open as Colin and Jeremy clustered around, Jeremy keeping his expensive trousers well out of the way. It opened to the frontispiece, a much larger and grander frontispiece than in the cheap multivolume edition Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had loaned me.

On one side, Plumeria and Sir Magnifico sat on their horses by the edge of a grove of trees, Sir Magnifico sporting a rather magnificent plumed cap. On the far side, the Knight of the Silver Tower bore a fainting Amarantha away in his arms, the mirror dangling from one of her limp hands. In the middle, the drunken revelers cavorted, dancing and swirling. Above it all loomed the ominous shape of the Dark Tower.

Underneath, in a sprawling, childish hand, someone had written:
Plumeria Reid. MY book. 1815.

“This is it,” I said hoarsely. “We’ve found the Tower. Plumeria’s Tower.”

Jeremy was hovering just over my shoulder, popping up and down like a jack-in-the-box, eager to play but not wanting to get too close to the grime. “Is there”—he gestured at the book—“something in the lining? A hollow space in the middle?” He turned to Colin. “There’s certainly room enough.”

I flipped through, transferring the dust of one hundred and eighty-nine years from the pages to my fingers. The entire volume appeared to be intact. There were no secret compartments, and certainly not enough room in the lining to hide even a modest haul of gems.

“Nada,” I said, closing the heavy book and setting it down with a slap. Dust billowed up from the cover. “Except—oh.”

That cover. That absurd, ornate cover.

“Do you have a handkerchief?” I said to Colin.

He looked at me as though I were crazy. “Why would I have a handkerchief?”

“I do,” said Jeremy, bringing one out with a flourish. It was a lovely piece of nearly transparent linen, lovingly embroidered with his initials.

“Thank you.” I took it and began scrubbing away at the first of the brass carbuncles. “We need something stronger. Water. Solvent . . .”

“No,” said Colin, leaning over my shoulder. “You’ve got it.”

The old brown paint was flaking off. Or maybe it had originally been gilt rather than brown; with the grime of ages on it, it was hard to tell. Whatever was beneath the ugly paint wasn’t brass or any other base metal.

“Is that—,” said Jeremy.

I handed him back his handkerchief. “I believe that is a ruby,” I said, feeling slightly light-headed and more than a little slaphappy. “You’re welcome to have a go at the rest, but I’m guessing you’ll find more of the same.”

“So it was here,” said Colin bemusedly, “all along.”

“Hard by Plumeria’s Tower!” I said.

Colin turned to me, his eyes brilliant with excitement. “We did it. We found it.”

We. And again we. I nodded vigorously, blinking against sudden, silly tears. “We did.”

Colin’s arms closed around. I gave a little shriek as he lifted me off the floor, the world rocking around me, my arms locked around his neck.

“We did it,” he repeated, and kissed me hard, on the mouth.

I wished I could have shared his triumphal joy, but somehow, the fact that we’d succeeded only made it more real that I was going to be leaving. The quest was over and so was my time with Colin. I looped my arms around his neck and kissed him back, harder, trying to kiss away all the fear and doubt and worry.

Jeremy lifted the empty grilled cheese plate. “I’ll just go put this in the kitchen,” he said loudly. He couldn’t resist adding, “If you trust me not to steal the silver.”

“There isn’t any,” said Colin, keeping one arm looped tightly around my waist. “But you’ll find the washing-up liquid next to the sink.”

Jeremy gave him a look that told him just what he thought of that idea. He did, however, close the door when he went out. And he didn’t take the rubies of Berar with him.

“He’s not going to do the dishes, is he?” I said, rubbing my cheek against Colin’s shirt. If I could have burrowed in and stayed there, I would have.

“No,” said Colin. And then, the words muffled by my hair, “I don’t want you to leave.”

It was the first time either of us had referred directly to my leaving since I’d told him my decision two months ago. It was certainly the first time he had been quite so direct about his preferences.

My throat closed up on me. “I don’t want me to leave either. But I’m stuck.”

“I know,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me, my cheek against his chest, his chin resting on the top of my head. It was very quiet in the library, quiet and dim, with the shadows of the trees moving softly through the window.

He wouldn’t have been Colin if he had pleaded with me to stay. I wouldn’t have respected him if he had. It was one of the things I loved about him, that he never discounted the importance of my obligations, never told me that I should drop it all and stay with him. He was too deeply honorable for that.

If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have loved him so.

If I had had any doubts before, I knew it now. This wasn’t infatuation or lust (not that I was discounting that factor) or archive envy. I’d lived with Colin long enough now to know the real thing when I saw it. He was true gold through and through. And I loved him.

I loved him and I had never told him so. There had always been something else in the way—pride, fear, whatever it is that drives us to hide our emotions from those we love. I’d been burned, badly, in relationships before. It was safer, all around, to cling to what a friend of mine liked to call plausible deniability, to play it cool and pretend I could take it or leave it.

Safer, but so wrong.

We had only a month left together. I owed it to Colin, to us, to stop being such a coward. We’d accomplished our quest; now it was time for one final hurdle.

I extracted myself from my cozy nook against his chest. “Colin—,” I began.

But he beat me to it. “Before you go,” he said quickly, his eyes intent on my face. “There’s something I need you to know.”

I drew in an unsteady breath. “You have a mad cousin in the attic?”

“No,” Colin said immediately. “In the kitchen. But that’s not it. What I’m trying to tell you is—I’ll miss you when you go. A lot.” It was very quiet in the library, all the books still on their shelves. Colin gave up the struggle and looked me straight in the eye. “I love you. For what it’s worth.”

More than a Rajah’s jewels—that was for sure. But the glib words wouldn’t come to my lips.

“I love you too,” I croaked. “So much.”

Fortunately, Colin didn’t seem to mind that I sounded like an asthmatic frog. When we could speak again, he said, “I just wanted you to know that your going away doesn’t change that. My feelings will remain the same.”

There was something charmingly old-fashioned about the way he said it. Rather Mr. Darcy-ish.

“Sir,” I said primly, “are you trying to inform me that your intentions are honorable?”

“Not entirely . . . ,” Colin said, with a familiar glint in his eye. His expression sobered. “But if you mean do I intend to let you go? Not for all the oceans in the world.”

I lifted my hand to his chest. “What’s a little bit of long distance?” I said recklessly. I nodded to the lost rubies of Berar, adorning a third-rate novel by a first-rate adventuress. “We’ve managed to find something that most people thought didn’t exist.”

Colin framed my face in his hands. “Yes,” he said, and he wasn’t looking at the rubies. “Yes, we have.”

A
s always, I have shamelessly twisted real events and people to my own purposes. By early 1805, Napoleon was, indeed, anxious to form an alliance with the Ottoman Sultan, Selim III. Franco-Russian diplomatic relations had sputtered to a halt and Russia had entered into an alliance with Britain against France. A Franco-Ottoman entente might have balanced the scales, but Bonaparte’s ambassador in Constantinople, Brune, made himself less than popular. He was recalled in the autumn of 1804; Brune’s successor, Sebastiani, was appointed in April 1805. Into that diplomatic gap, I’ve slipped my imaginary opera singer, Aurelia Fiorila, who returns to Paris with a demand for a mythical jewel.

Selim III did have a taste for Western opera, importing the first opera troupe to perform in Constantinople. However, as far as I know, neither Napoleon nor his foreign minister ever took advantage of that operatic inclination to slip in a secret negotiator. Aurelia Fiorila, her child, and her mission to Constantinople are entirely my own invention. (Although one wouldn’t put any of it past the notoriously wily Talleyrand.)

Likewise, the legend of the lost jewels of Berar is taken from the historical record, but the specific nature of the jewels and their fate are entirely my own invention. Before the siege of Gawilghur in 1803, rumors spread that a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and jewels was being kept within the fortress. A small fortune in silver bowls and copper coins was discovered after the siege, but the jewels were never found. Jac Weller, author of
Wellington in India
, posits, “If the treasure ever had been kept in Gawilghur, and there seems to be little reason to doubt that some at least had been there, the Mahrattas got it out in time. . . . It is also possible that the treasure was hidden and recovered later.” In that case, why might the jewels not be recovered and removed by a double agent who knew where they were hidden? I was unable to find any specific descriptions of the jewels, so I invented the apocryphal Moon of Berar, both to provide a sufficient prize for an anxious Sultan and also as a nod to Wilkie Collins’s
The Moonstone
, which takes as its base a looted Indian jewel.

Similarly, several of my main characters are partly purloined from the past. My hero, Colonel William Reid, is loosely based on Colonel James Kirkpatrick of the Madras Cavalry, commonly known as “the Handsome Colonel.” According to William Dalrymple, “the name was apparently a reference not only to his good looks . . . but also to his rackety love life” and a career “more distinguished for its amorous conquests than its military ones.” Colonel Kirkpatrick’s parents fled Scotland for South Carolina after the failed 1715 uprising. My hero is a generation younger, so his parents fled Scotland after the ’45. Like my Colonel Reid, Colonel Kirkpatrick set off for India, where, in between his military duties, he fathered a brood of both legitimate and illegitimate offspring.

The main difference there? All of Colonel Kirkpatrick’s offspring were of European descent, a fact with far-reaching legal implications in India at the time. Under the governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis in the late eighteenth century, a series of laws designed to keep those of mixed birth out of governmental or military positions were passed. In 1791, anyone without two European parents was banned from civil, military, or naval service in the East India Company. By 1795, children of mixed parentage were barred from serving even as drummers, pipers, or farriers. Those wealthy enough to do so sent their children back to England, where there were no such legal barriers to advancement. Those without such resources apprenticed their sons to tradesmen or sent them out as mercenaries to local rulers. Colonel Reid’s legitimate son, Alex, is employed in the East India Company’s diplomatic service, but, due to Cornwallis’s laws, his two illegitimate sons are barred Company employment.

My inspiration for Jack Reid was James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, a real man caught in a predicament identical to Jack’s. Like Jack, Skinner was born to a British army officer and a Rajput lady of high birth, who committed suicide when Skinner was a child. Barred by his birth from following his father into the East India Company’s army, Skinner was apprenticed to a printer but ran away, signing on as a mercenary with the army of Scindia, a prominent Maratha chieftain with French sympathies. Eager to have Skinner’s talents for the British side, Lord Lake engineered a loophole, commissioning Skinner to raise a troop of irregular cavalry. Skinner’s solution is notable as the exception rather than the rule; most half-castes didn’t have any way around the legal strictures keeping them from gainful employment in the East India Company’s army or diplomatic service. Cornwallis’s laws created a powerful impetus for divided loyalties.

Interestingly, while being a half-caste had serious social and legal consequences in India in the early nineteenth century, the same did not necessarily hold true in England. As the child of an Indian mother, Lizzy Reid would be likely to face social censure among the British community in India, but not in England, where—at least at this early date—her Indian heritage would more likely be seen as intriguing and exotic. I based Lizzy Reid on Colonel Kirkpatrick’s granddaughter, Kitty Kirkpatrick, the offspring of the marriage of Colonel Kirkpatrick’s son and a Hyderabadi lady of quality, Khair-un-Nissa. After her father’s death in 1805, Kitty was raised at her grandfather’s home in England. The famous writer Thomas Carlyle described Kitty Kirkpatrick as “a strangely complexioned young lady with soft brown eyes and floods of bronze red hair . . . pretty looking, smiling, and amiable,” with “a slight merry curl of the upper lip.” Kitty was a great hit in London society. I am happy to say that Kitty achieved her own love match, marrying a captain of the Seventh Hussars.

Whether Lizzy will do the same is a question for another novel. . . .

Speaking of novels, I couldn’t end this note without a brief word about the antecedents of Miss Gwen’s horrid novel.
The Convent of Orsino
is a knockoff of Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
, “Monk” Lewis’s
The Monk
, Ann Radcliffe’s
Mysteries of Udolpho
, and the many other works of Gothic fiction so popular at the time. The genre was very effectively spoofed by Jane Austen in her own
Northanger Abbey
.

I have no doubt that Catherine Morland would have been a great fan of
The Convent of Orsino
.