The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (6 page)

The Colonel was too happy to be wise. “Hardly that far, Miss Meadows,” he said gallantly.

Gwen looked at him loftily. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Colonel Reid.”

“Not even to Bristol?”

Was he flirting with her? If so, it was time to put a quick stop to that. “You can try your charm on the stage master,” retorted Gwen, “but I suspect he’d prefer hard coin to empty words.”

“Sure and that’s preferable to hard words and empty coin,” the Colonel concurred blandly.

“It’s a soft wit that turns hard coin to hard words,” said Gwen scornfully.

Colonel Reid waggled his brows. “But a sure wit that turns empty words to hard coin.”

Jane and Mlle. de Fayette turned one way and then another, like spectators at a tennis match.

“In that case,” said Gwen triumphantly, “you can book our passage for tomorrow, and there are my empty words for your hard coin.”

“As they say, touché.” Colonel Reid assayed a bow. “Madame, I bow to your powers of persuasion. One passage to Bristol, at your disposal.”

“And back,” Gwen reminded him.

Colonel Reid caught her eye and grinned. His eyes were blue, pale in his sun-browned face. The lines around them crinkled when he smiled. “And back,” he agreed. “It will be my honor and my privilege.”

Gwen let out a crack of laughter. “That’s doing it a bit too brown, Colonel Reid. It will be your honor, certainly, but many would question the privilege.”

“Then,” he said, with a courtly tilt of his head, “they are both foolish
and
rude.”

Jane cleared her throat slightly. Nobody paid her any mind.

“I look forward to our journey tomorrow,” said Colonel Reid cheerfully. “And to retrieving my wayward Lizzy.”

“And my wayward Agnes,” Gwen reminded him.

Jane cleared her throat again, more loudly.

“We’ll herd them safely home,” agreed Colonel Reid.

“
If
I might be so bold?”

The Pink Carnation’s voice came dangerously close to a shout.

“Forgive me for interrupting.” Jane waited until she had their full attention before saying, mildly, “It might be simpler to send a message to Mrs. Davies to make certain the girls are with her. If a note were sent by the mail tonight, you might have a reply by noon tomorrow.”

“No,” said Gwen decidedly. There was no way she was backing down from this trip now, and the more she thought about it, the more she was certain that the Colonel was right. Where else could the girls have been for two whole weeks without exciting comment? No, they must be with this grandmother in Bristol. “Messages go astray. Let’s put an end to this now. Colonel Reid and I will go in the morning and bring the girls back—if they’re there,” she added, just to put the Colonel in his place.

“Oh, they will be,” said the Colonel cheerfully. “They will be. I can’t imagine where else they could be.”

 • • • 

“You seem rather keen to go to Bristol,” commented Jane as they made their way back to the Woolistons’ hired house in Laura Place.

She didn’t say “with the Colonel,” and for that, Gwen was grateful. Jane did show odd inclinations towards matchmaking from time to time.

The rain had stopped and the women had furled their umbrellas. Gwen used hers to poke at a wayward cobble. “I’m keen to get those troublesome chits back. The sooner they’re home, the sooner we can get back to doing what we need to do.”

“Assuming they’re in Bristol,” said Jane.

“Why would we assume otherwise? There were no signs of a struggle.” Gwen began ticking points off on her gloved fingers. “The schoolmistress said that they were annoyed at the departure of their friend. This Lizzy girl sounds like the sort who would egg Agnes on to run off. And it’s ridiculously easy to sneak out of that so-called young ladies’ academy. I saw three ways within five minutes.”

“I know,” said Jane, tucking her chin into her collar. “I know.” Then, “Mademoiselle de Fayette seemed quite nervous, didn’t she?”

“You would be too, if you had to tell a parent his child had gone missing,” retorted Gwen. The change in the Colonel, once he had solved the mystery of his missing child, had been remarkable. He had looked like a sinner who had been assured the hope of salvation.

“I suppose,” said Jane.

Gwen looked at her charge with mingled affection and frustration. There were times when Jane’s reserve sorely tried her patience. Not that she’d ever pretended to have much of that particular commodity. “What is it, then? Out with it!”

“It’s not anything I can put my finger on,” said Jane hopelessly. “Just a feeling. I know, I know. I sound like the heroine from one of your novels.”

“Not my novel,” said Gwen, offended. She had begun working on her novel several years before, and the project was dearer to her than she liked to admit. “My heroine would never indulge in such foolishness.”

“I know,” said Jane with a slight smile. “She would go charging forward, parasol at the ready.”

Once, they had both gone charging forward. This new reluctance on Jane’s part . . . Gwen didn’t like it.

Gwen rapidly changed the subject. “I’m surprised you were able to find anything on Miss Reid’s desk. It looked as though Bonaparte had dropped a shell on it.”

“Yes, it was rather mussed, wasn’t it?” said Jane. “Whereas Agnes’s was . . . almost a little too tidy.”

Gwen looked at her shrewdly. “What are you saying?”

Jane picked her way carefully across the rain-slick cobbles. “If you were to search someone’s desk, you wouldn’t leave it looking as though a shell had exploded. You would put everything back in what you believed to be its place. Wouldn’t you?”

Gwen didn’t like where this was going. “It seems a trifle extreme to abduct two girls simply to rifle through one desk. And if so, why not the other girl’s as well?”

There were dark purple circles beneath Jane’s gray eyes. “You know why.”

Her silence spoke louder than words. She didn’t need words. They had worked together long enough for that. Lizzy Reid’s desk would be of no interest to someone looking for anything that might incriminate the Pink Carnation. Agnes’s, however, would be.

If someone wanted a bargaining chip, they could have found no surer one than the Pink Carnation’s youngest sister.

“It’s one thing to put oneself at risk,” Jane said in a small, tight voice. “But one’s family . . .”

“You’re starting at shadows,” said Gwen firmly. “It’s nothing of the kind, you’ll see.”

She could tell Jane wasn’t convinced. She could tell in the way she pressed her lips together, in the way she stared unseeingly at the street ahead. But all she said was, “I hope you’re right.”

“Aren’t I always?” said Gwen. “I’ll even bear with the company of that Colonel tomorrow to give you peace of mind.”

“Bear?” Jane raised an expressive brow. “You seemed to be enjoying him, rather.”

“The man’s a born rogue,” said Gwen repressively. “All stuff and no substance. I know the kind. And so ought you, young lady. A rogue’s a rogue.”

Jane considered that. “A shrewd one, though. I shouldn’t think that Colonel Reid is anyone’s fool.”

Gwen remembered the way he had sparred with her, turning her words in on themselves. No, he was no one’s fool, even if he played one for sport. She wasn’t sure that was entirely reassuring.

“If there’s anything worse than a rogue, it’s a shrewd rogue,” said Gwen with authority. “Give me your common garden rogue any day, all ego and bluster. But it’s just Bristol and back, and then you and I will be back to Paris.”

“Hmm,” said Jane. “All the same, while you’re in Bristol, I might take another look at Agnes’s room. Just to be sure.”

London, 2004

W
e took the train up to London two days later.

They had been relatively peaceful days. Jeremy must have been regrouping for an alternate line of attack, because we didn’t find him lurking in the shrubbery, hiding behind the shower curtain, or inviting random film crews onto the grounds. Colin managed to get his characters into two high-speed chases and one Russian mafia kidnapping. And I learned many interesting and entirely useless facts about the plumeria.

Did you know that the flower was named after a seventeenth-century French botanist, Charles Plumier? Neither did I. Given that he had been dead for a good century by the time the jewels of Berar disappeared in the siege of Gawilghur, the bearing of that information on our quest remained dubious. It turned out that there were more than three hundred varieties of the plant, indigenous to all sorts of different places. Wherever it went, though, there appeared to be rather ominous associations: vampires in Malaysia, funerals in Bangladesh.

Was the Plumeria poem meant as a metaphorical way of telling us that the quest for the doomed jewels brought only death and despair?

“I don’t think anyone thought it out quite that much,” said my boyfriend, with his head buried inside the pages of the London
Times
. “They might have just liked the sound of the word.”

I wouldn’t necessarily claim that he was avoiding me, but I had the feeling that Colin was getting a little bit burned-out on fun facts about flowers.

Well,
one
of us had to do something to find the lost jewels of Berar.

Not that this had anything to do with my avoiding working on my dissertation. Or the fact that my research had come to an abrupt and uncompromising halt somewhere in the spring of 1805.

No matter where and how I looked, I couldn’t find any reference to Miss Jane Wooliston or Miss Gwendolyn Meadows in my sources post-1805. Edouard de Balcourt went on merrily living in the Hotel de Balcourt, toadying up to the Emperor (until the Restoration, at which point he abruptly remembered that his father had been decapitated during the Revolution and he’d never liked that upstart Corsican dictator anyway), but his cousin and her chaperone had left the building. Jane’s coded correspondence with Lady Henrietta Dorrington stopped cold in April 1805. Let me rephrase: All of Jane’s correspondence stopped cold in April 1805.

Something had happened, something big, and I had no idea what it was. I didn’t even know where to begin to look.

I’d found only two leads, both of them tenuous. The first was in Jane’s final (coded) letter to Henrietta, in which she made a lighthearted comment about Miss Gwen enjoying a performance by the noted opera singer Aurelia Fiorila in the company of the foreign minister, Talleyrand, on an Oriental topic. Roughly translated, it meant Miss Gwen had eavesdropped on Talleyrand talking to Aurelia Fiorila and it was most likely something to do with the Ottoman Sultan. The timing fit—in the spring of 1805, Napoleon was doing his darnedest to get the Sultan to abandon his old alliance with England and team up with France.

What Aurelia Fiorila had to do with this, though, I had very little idea. Although I did vaguely recall reading something about Selim III having a thing for opera. Or opera singers.

I sincerely hoped this didn’t mean the Pink Carnation had upped and swooshed off to the Ottoman court. Istanbul was a very long way from Selwick Hall.

The second, and more useful, tidbit came from the memoirs of Mme. de Treville, one of the Empress Josephine’s ladies-in-waiting, almost all of whom had written their memoirs after the Restoration, largely because everyone else was and none of them wanted to be left out. Mme. de Remusat and Mme. Junot had nothing to say about the disappearance of Miss Jane Wooliston, but Mme. de Treville remarked that the lovely Mlle. Voolston was gone from court with the gracious permission of the Emperor, who had urged her to admonish her parents to keep a closer rein on their daughters. Mme. de Treville, whose literary style was of the “oh and by the way, I forgot to mention” variety, thought it might have something to do with Mlle. Voolston’s sister eloping with someone unsuitable, but she wasn’t quite sure, and weren’t the fashions this season lovely?

Well, that was something, at least. Mme. de Treville wasn’t the most reliable of sources, but Napoleon proffering unsolicited parental advice rang true.

Okay, so they’d gone back to England—
if
they were telling Napoleon the truth and not using that as an excuse to hide other, more interesting activities (like Istanbul). I’d done some poking around, and Aurelia Fiorila had been performing in Bath in the spring of 1805. Had Miss Gwen been following Fiorila? Was there really something amiss with Jane’s sister? And why, in either case, had they disappeared so entirely off the record after 1805?

There were other avenues I could pursue. Miss Gwen had made use of a plethora of aliases in the past: Ernestine Grimstone, Mrs. Fustian, Lieutenant Triptrap (like Shakespeare, Miss Gwen enjoyed her breeches roles). I could run all of those through the database in the British Library and see what came up; I’d followed that route before, with a certain measure of success.

But it would all take time.

At this point, time was the one thing I didn’t have. And instead of using the limited time I had to good purpose, I had been frittering it away, reading up on the blooming habits of genus
Plumeria
. One of Colin’s ancestors had obviously been into horticulture; I’d found everything from reprints of Elizabethan herbals to nineteenth-century botanical treatises.

I poked the paper barrier that separated me from Colin. “The only hopeful bit is that ‘plumeria’ seems to be another name for frangipani.”

“Why is that hopeful?” came my boyfriend’s muffled voice from between the pages of the
Times
.

“Have you read no M. M. Kaye novels?”

“M. M. who?”

Apparently, he hadn’t.

“Frangipani always seems to be blooming profusely around the bungalows of minor British military officers in novels set in colonial India,” I explained importantly. “Indian flower . . . missing Indian jewels . . .”

Colin’s nose poked up over the top of the newspaper. “Isn’t that a bit tenuous?”

I settled back against the nubby back of the seat. “Hey, at this point, I’ll take what I can get.”

Colin set down the paper, looking at me just a little too thoughtfully. “There’s no need to go on with this,” he said quietly. “We’ve known from the start that it’s a hopeless project.”

I really hoped it was just the hunt for the jewels he was talking about.

“No,” I said. “I want to. Now that we’ve started, it would be a shame to cop out.”

Colin raised one brow. “Even if it’s a lost cause?”

“Especially if it’s a lost cause!” I said, a little too enthusiastically. “Aren’t those always the most glamorous kind? Wouldn’t you rather be a Cavalier than a Roundhead?”

Colin folded the paper back in on itself. “You’re just saying that because you like the hats.”

Maybe. “Either way, there’s something noble and grand about lost causes.”

“Except when they lead to heartbreak and frustration,” Colin pointed out sensibly. “After a while, a lost cause ceases to be romantic and just becomes futile.”

There was no point in pretending that this was just about the jewels. “Frustration, maybe,” I said awkwardly. “But I hope not heartbreak.”

“Eloise—”

“Victoria Station,”
squawked the PA system.
“London, Victoria Station.”

“Looks like we’re here,” I said. “Come on.”

We were both very quiet the rest of the way to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat in South Kensington.

Colin had to poke me to remind me to get out at South Kensington. Out of sheer force of habit, I’d been ready to stay on until Bayswater. That had been my route to and from Colin’s back in the winter when we’d first started dating and I was spending only the odd weekend out at Selwick Hall: Hove to Victoria Station to the Circle Line to Bayswater, where I had my flat.

Only, I no longer had a flat, at least not one here in England. There was someone else living there now, in the tiny basement studio down the flight of blue-carpeted stairs where the bulb never seemed to be working properly. Someone else would be picking up their mail on the old radiator in the hall and inserting pound coins into the funny little meter at the back of the closet that made the lights go on. I’d given up the flat when my fellowship ran out at the end of May, moving in with Colin at Selwick Hall instead.

This was the first time I’d been back to London since then. It hadn’t kicked in until now that it wasn’t just an extended long weekend at Colin’s, that my flat wasn’t still there, waiting for me.

This, I reminded myself, was why I had made the decision to go back to the States—or part of it, at any rate. I wasn’t ready to depend so fully on Colin, to subsume my life into his. It was bad enough that I was dependent on his ancestors for my academic credentials.

All the same, I wasn’t ready to declare it all over. I hoped Colin wasn’t either.

I looked at his profile as we surged through the mob of museum-going tourists, but I couldn’t read what he was thinking. I never could. Not an altogether surprising attribute in the descendant of generations of spies, but frustrating all the same.

What did I expect? Lifelong guarantees? Those only came in cereal boxes.

Colin’s aunt’s flat was just around the corner from the tube stop, on Onslow Square. She was waiting for us at the top of the landing, the door slightly ajar. Behind her, someone was singing in Italian of love and loss—at least, I assumed it was of love and loss. My Italian is limited to “Cappuccino? Grazie!”

“You don’t have a soprano hidden away in there, do you?” said Colin.

“Radio 3,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, pressing her cheek against mine, then Colin’s. “I’ll shut it off, shall I?”

“Please,” said Colin. It was one of the surprising things I’d discovered about him. The boy was functionally tone-deaf. Any musical performance bored him stiff.

“Philistine,” I said. “
I
like it. We brought you these.”

I held out the slightly squashed bucket of raspberries that was our offering from the country. I’d like to claim we’d picked them, but we’d bought them from the local farm stand instead.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, taking the container from me with a polite disregard for the effect of raspberry stains on her elegant pale blue pants suit. She glanced over her shoulder. “We can have them with our tea.”

Her usual poise was frayed around the edges. In the sitting room, the music abruptly cut off. There was the sound of footsteps against carpeting.

Colin and I exchanged a quick glance.

“Do you have—,” began Colin, but he broke off as the source of the steps appeared in the hall.

“Hullo,” said Jeremy. “Hot today, isn’t it?”

It might be hot, but the atmosphere in the hallway was suddenly distinctly frosty.

“I’ll just put these in the kitchen,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, and beat a retreat with the raspberries.

It was summer, so Jeremy wasn’t wearing his signature black cashmere turtleneck. Instead, he was garbed in a caricature of summer wear, an impeccably tailored white linen suit that looked like a novelist’s idea of what gentlemen might wear to go boating. Which, of course, no one would ever actually wear to go boating, since it would get all streaked and muddy within five minutes, but, hey, why let reality interfere? All he needed was a straw boater and an ivory-headed cane.

“Eloise,” he said, and pressed crocodile kisses to my cheeks, first right, then left.

Oh, we were on first-name terms now, were we?

“Jeremy,” I said, and gave him my most polite social smile, the one you give to people about five minutes before you rush off to the ladies’ room to spread vicious calumnies about them behind their backs. “How’s business?”

He winced slightly at my crassness. Business. So American. “Don’t let’s stand here,” he said, with false bonhomie. “Come. Sit down.”

He led the way into the sitting room as though it was his by right. Although, I supposed, in a way it was. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was Jeremy’s grandmother. A grandson trumped a great-nephew in the familial pecking order. I was used to thinking of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat as Colin’s London pied-à-terre. I had never stopped to think that there might be someone with a greater right.

There was no fire lit in the sitting room at this time of year. The windows had been left slightly ajar to catch whatever breeze might be ruffling the leaves of the trees in the square. No air conditioners marred the woodwork of the window frames. Otherwise, the room was much as I remembered it, high ceilinged and airy, glossy coffee table books scattered across the cocktail table. The twin portraits of Amy Balcourt and Lord Richard Selwick smirked down from their places on the wall.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly returned, sans raspberries. If she had been anyone else, I would have suspected her of just having a quick nip in the kitchen. I would have. “I just put the kettle on,” she said, seating herself in a straight-backed chair at a right angle to the sofa. “I trust you’re having a pleasant summer?”

“Yes, it’s been lovely,” I said guardedly.

“Sussex
is
beautiful this time of year,” said Jeremy blandly. “I do hope you’re enjoying it.”

I cast a quick sideways glance at Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. I didn’t know if she knew that I’d given up my basement flat to live with her great-nephew—or what she would think if she did. I knew she liked me, but there was a great difference between liking someone as a historical protégée and liking someone as a potential great-niece.

If she knew, it didn’t show on her face. There was only polite interest.

“How much longer are you in England?” she asked.

I perched uncomfortably on the edge of my seat. “Two months,” I said, before Jeremy could say anything. “I head back to the States in August. I’m teaching a full course load this semester.”

“Head teaching fellow,” said Colin proudly. The fondness in his voice made my heart swell, like the Grinch’s growing too many sizes all at once.