The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (7 page)

“They couldn’t find anyone else to do it,” I said. “It’s the horrible Modern Europe survey course, the one they stick all the non-history majors in and a bunch of cranky medievalists who need to make up their modern credits.”

“Does that mean you’ve found everything you needed to find in our little archive?” asked Jeremy smoothly.

What was this “our”? They were Colin’s documents, Colin’s archives. Jeremy might be married to Colin’s mother, but that didn’t make the house his. More than that, I didn’t like this attempt to make me into the outsider—even if I was.

“It would take a lifetime to go through it all,” I said, addressing myself to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. I had, I realized, gone into schoolgirl mode. My hands were clasped in my lap, my legs were crossed at the ankle, I was sitting on the very edge of my seat, and my voice had gone up half an octave. Five more minutes of this and I would start apologizing for having snuck out of gym class. “But if I don’t start writing it up soon, I’ll never get my degree.”

“You’ve found everything you need, and now it’s time to go,” said Jeremy understandingly. The implication was unmistakable.

My hands clenched into fists in my lap. “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.” He wanted to play dirty? Fine. I looked Colin’s cousin straight in the eye. “I’d say there’s still plenty to be found at Selwick Hall. Wouldn’t you?”

I had the satisfaction of seeing Jeremy’s eyes slide away. Ha. Take that.

“That’s the kettle,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, with some relief. Her hearing had to be keener than mine; I hadn’t heard anything at all. “Will you help me, Eloise?”

I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of leaving Colin alone with Jeremy, but I knew a command when I heard one.

“Certainly!” I said, and wiggled up off my chair. With all the sitting on the train, the skirt of my sundress was irreparably rumpled. I made one abortive effort to smooth it and gave up, too aware of Jeremy’s smirk.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly rose with less than her usual ease. She moved stiffly, as though her hip pained her. I wondered, for the first time, if her request for help had less to do with leaving the cousins together to sort things out and more to do with actually needing help. For all her energy, she had to be in her mideighties, at least. She was Colin’s grandfather’s younger sister, and Colin had been a fairly late-life baby. His father had been a good generation older than my parents.

“Shall I help?’ asked Colin, watching his aunt with concern.

“No, no,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. “We won’t be long, will we, Eloise?”

Especially not if one of them started screaming. The second either of them yelled bloody murder, I’d be back down that hall like a shot, tea or no tea.

“Do you think they’ll be all right in there?” I murmured as we made our way down the hall, past the dining room and the guest bedroom I had stayed in back in October, the night I’d met Colin.

Just to be clear, I wasn’t staying in it with Colin. That was before he had been brought to an acute awareness of my manifold charms.

“I don’t think either is going to go after the other with the letter opener.” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly preceded me into the kitchen. “At least, I hope not.”

The door swung shut behind me, noiseless on its well-oiled hinges. We were too far down the hall to hear anything that went on in the sitting room. By the same token, they were too far away to hear us.

I took advantage of that to ask, “Why do they hate each other so much?”

What I really wanted to know, of course, was why Jeremy hated Colin. As far as I could tell, the feud might be two-sided now, but only because Jeremy had started it.

But I couldn’t very well say that to Jeremy’s grandmother.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly slowed in the act of setting cups and saucers out on a tray, the same lacquered tray she had used the first time I had been to tea in her flat. But all she said was, “Would you mind pouring the water? There should be leaves in the pot.”

There were, a generous scoop of them, some variety of orange pekoe, at a guess. A gypsy fortune-teller might have used them to divine the future. I squinted down at them, but they told me nothing, so I poured the boiling water over them instead, trapping the aromatic steam with the china lid.

I looked over my shoulder at Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, who was setting biscuits out on a tray: ginger biscuits and Colin’s favorites, the dark-chocolate-covered McVities. I wondered if the others, the ginger biscuits, were for Jeremy.

“It hasn’t been easy for Jeremy,” she said, so abruptly that I nearly dropped the lid of the teapot. “Growing up in the shadow of Selwick Hall.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything at all. I just stood there, holding the teapot like an idiot.

“It’s my fault, really.” She turned and took the teapot from me, setting it on the tray with a muted clink. “Filling him full of stories about his ancestors. He would have done better without them. He might have been . . . more free.”

“He seems to be pretty successful,” I said. It was the most neutral thing I could think of to say. None of the other possibilities were complimentary.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was lost in her own thoughts. “His father died so young. He was army,” she added, belatedly remembering my presence. “Jamie—he was Jamie then; he only changed his name to Jeremy later, when he started dabbling in the art world—was shuttled around from place to place and person to person. It was no life for a child.”

I wasn’t sure that excused the adult, but I held my tongue.

“He always wanted what Colin had,” she said, and set the sugar bowl down on the tray.

“Selwick Hall?”

“No,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly with a wry half-smile. “Well, yes, but not just the Hall. The poor boy wanted to belong. He wants so very badly to belong.”

“He’s making Colin’s life miserable,” I blurted out. “Did you know about—”

“Yes. I know.” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s lips thinned into a determined line. “And I intend to put a stop to it. Would you be so good as to take the tray?”

She had never let me carry the tray before. I hoped she was okay. I was also confused. I hefted the tray.

“How?” I asked.

But she didn’t answer. Fairy godmothers never do.

I trailed after her to the sitting room, awkwardly clutching the heavy tray. I’d overfilled the teapot; the spout showed a dangerous inclination to leak on the biscuits.

Personally, I didn’t see how anyone was going to stop Jeremy, short of a restraining order. Or a mallet.

I favored the mallet.

I set the tray down with a thump on a cleared patch on the table. After months of lifting nothing heavier than a folio volume, my arm muscles were protesting the weight of the tray. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly sat down serenely in her usual chair.

“I know why you’re both here,” she said, conversationally. “Biscuit?”

Colin took a biscuit. It was one of the ones that had got tea sogged. I made an apologetic face.

“To see you, of course,” said Jeremy smoothly.

His grandmother gave him a look I wouldn’t exactly call doting. “You’re treasure hunting, both of you.” She made them sound like little boys in a sandbox. “And you want me to help you.”

“I wouldn’t call it treasure hunting—,” Jeremy began.

“Eloise wanted—,” trotted out my loyal boyfriend.

“Don’t look at me!” I hastily put in.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly overrode us all without raising her voice. It was an impressive trick, that. “Did you really think I would help one of you against the other?” she said.

From their faces, it was very clear that each had.

“I am your grandson—,” began Jeremy, just as Colin started with, “Selwick Hall—”

“I don’t know where the jewels are,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said, effectively squelching them both. I cowered quietly by the teapot. “I don’t even know if they exist. But I will tell you what I know—on one condition.”

The room was so quiet, you could have heard a biscuit drop on the carpet.

The biscuit was mine, and it was one of the ginger ones. I hastily scooped it up again.

“What’s the condition?” asked Colin. He had a smudge of chocolate on his upper lip, which made him look endearingly like Charlie Chaplin, if Charlie Chaplin were large, blond, and distinctly wary.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly looked from her grandson to her great-nephew before dropping her bombshell.

“That you work together.”

“Come!” cried Plumeria. “We must away! There is some old treachery within these walls—far darker and deeper than even the vaults beneath the Convent itself, a secret so dark and deep that the very walls must quake to hear of it.”

“But my daughter,” protested Magnifico. “What of she? I cannot leave without—”

“Sir,” quoth wise Plumeria. “If your child you would save, you must first save yourself. But haste! A carriage waits, even as we speak! I shall tell you more, ere this!”

—From
The Convent of Orsin
by A Lady

G
wen arrived early at the White Hart the following morning.

She preferred to be first. It gave one such a sense of moral superiority, not to mention forcing the other party into unnecessary and demeaning apologies.

It was always good to set the proper tone from the beginning.

It was busy at the White Hart, ostlers running to and fro, men shouting for their parcels, farmwives bustling in with baskets of produce. A small cluster of people by the door of the inn looked as though they might also be waiting for the stage, a schoolboy and his tutor, from the look of it, and a rather greasy man with more chins than the good Lord usually thought to provide.

There was a commotion at the entrance to the inn as a man stormed out, demanding that his carriage be made ready
at once
, at once, did they hear?

Gwen would have been surprised if they hadn’t heard him in Bristol.

“Yes, Lord Henry, at once, Lord Henry,” murmured the landlord, with more forelock tugging than was strictly necessary.

Gwen didn’t know the man, but she knew the type: the cloak with too many capes, the hat with the too-curly brim, the jangle of far too many watch fobs. He wore a very flashy ring with a large red stone on one hand. In short, overbred and underoccupied. Gwen gave him a wide berth as she strolled across the courtyard, using her trusty parasol to ward off an inquisitive fowl who had the audacity to peck at her petticoat.

If Colonel Reid were right, Agnes and her friend would most likely have caught the coach for Bristol in this very yard. Yes, decided Gwen, it would be easy enough for a pair of girls disguised as lads to lose themselves in a place such as this, among the bustle and din. All they would need would be a story about traveling home from school or on their way to school and no one would give them a second glance. There were several such in the inn yard at the moment, including two gawky lads of roughly thirteen who were taking turns eating an apple and ogling a poster on the wall, featuring a woman wearing a variety of veils in what Gwen could only assume was meant to be the Oriental fashion—Oriental, that is, as imagined by the proprietors of the Theatre Royal.

The woman’s hair was a very vivid and familiar auburn.

Gwen shooed the boys off with her parasol, clearing them out of the way so that she could see. The poster had been slapped haphazardly over another, creating an odd effect of shadow images, half-seen through the cheap layers of paper and paste, so that the veiled lady appeared to be shadowed by a dark creature standing just behind. Despite the relative warmth of the morning, Gwen felt a cold sense of foreboding as she read the bold print below the picture.

“Artaxerxes!”
the poster proclaimed. A new production at the Theatre Royal in Sawclose. The title role was to be played by Nicolas Peretti. As for the role of Semira . . .

The role of Semira was to be played by Aurelia Fiorila.

That same Aurelia Fiorila whose famed voice Gwen had last heard not raised in song, but lowered in supplication as she pleaded with Bonaparte’s foreign minister.

It wasn’t entirely surprising to find her back in England. As far as most were concerned, she had never left it. Fiorila had, officially, been sick with the influenza and then “resting” for the past several months. This particular performance might have been prepared months or even years before. Bath was busy right before the start of the Season; it was a logical place for a singer to gravitate. Many did.

But not Fiorila. Her contract was with the Opera House in the Haymarket. She had sung for the Prince of Wales in Brighton at a command performance, but never before in Bath.

Gwen didn’t believe in coincidences, not as a rule. What was there in Bath—in Bath, of all places!—to draw Talleyrand’s agent? Somehow, she doubted Fiorila was here to take the waters.

“Miss Meadows?”

“Hmm?” She was so engrossed in the playbill that she only vaguely registered someone saying her name.

“Miss Meadows?”

She started, bumping into the man standing behind her. “Colonel Reid!” She covered her confusion with a stern, “You’re late.”

“I’m just on time,” the Colonel countered with easy good humor. “You’re early.”

Since it was true, there was very little Gwen could say to that, so she contented herself with a quelling, “Hmph. Let us hope the coach will be equally timely.”

She subjected the Colonel to a sweeping scrutiny. He bore little resemblance to the rumpled, travel-stained man of yesterday. His breeches and jacket, while still too comfortably cut for fashion, were impeccably clean, his exuberant red hair brushed to sleekness. The sun glinted silver off the white streaks in his hair, but his smile was brighter by far.

“I’ve cleaned beneath my nails, too,” he said teasingly. “And brought a clean pocket handkerchief.”

Gwen gave him a look. “I am not your governess, Colonel Reid.”

She had never been a governess. She had contemplated it once, briefly, in the miserable period after her father’s death, but the idea of being dependent on a strange family, neither guest nor servant, was even more unpalatable than being dependent on the family she knew. Better to be Aunt Gwen, with a room on the floor with the rest of the family, than Miss Meadows, relegated to the attics and sent a tray in her room for supper.

Colonel Reid gave a shout of laughter. “I should think not,” he said. “You’d have been in the nursery while I was in the schoolroom. I’ve a decade on you, I’m sure.”

Gwen frowned. “I’m older than you think.”

She’d spent so much time working on appearing older than she was, making herself properly fearsome to the young. Age was the only leverage the penniless spinster had. Age and illness, but she refused to be one of those carping maiden aunts, taking to her bed of pain with hartshorn in order to gain the simulation of affection. She had chosen to be fearsome instead.

The Colonel, however, did not seem properly intimidated.

The Colonel’s lips quirked in a smile. “In spirit, perhaps, Miss Meadows—that I’ll grant you—but not in years.” He nodded to the poster in front of them. “Are you a devotee of the opera, Miss Meadows?”

“Of the—oh.” Blast the man, he had thoroughly discommoded her, treating her like a sprig of a green girl. She shrugged a shoulder, glad that she was wearing her best traveling dress, tailored in Paris, and designed to put upstart Anglo-Indian army officers in their place. “I take an interest.” Especially when the star soprano happened to be employed by Bonaparte’s slippery foreign minister. “It depends on the production.”

“I’ve always been one for Mozart myself,” said Colonel Reid. “There’s a nice bounce to his music, and it always all comes out right in the end.”

“Hardly realistic,” Gwen shot back.

“Neither is singing out one’s woes at the top of one’s lungs,” countered Colonel Reid. He grinned. “When was the last time you’ve done that? With an orchestra to follow one about, no less.”

“Most of the orchestras I’ve encountered,” said Gwen, “are remarkably stationary.”

The lines at the corners of Colonel Reid’s eyes crinkled. “Do you ever allow anyone else the last word, Miss Meadows?”

“Not if they haven’t wit enough to seize it,” said Gwen.

“That,” said Colonel Reid, “sounds remarkably like a challenge.”

Oh, he wanted a challenge, did he? Gwen was about to put him quite soundly in his place—she wasn’t quite sure how, but she was certain she could have come up with something—when the same arrogant young lordling she had seen before shoved past them, making for a curricle that was just being drawn up in the courtyard.

“What took you so bloody long?”

“Apologies, my lord. The horses were spavined, the tack was frayed, and the replacements delayed—”

“I don’t care if they were stayed, flayed, and spayed,” said the young man arrogantly, climbing up onto the high perch. He reached out impatiently for the reins. “Well, give me that!”

The landlord handed over the reins, murmuring apologies.

“For your troubles,” said the lordling, and tossed a coin in the air. It glinted dully, copper rather than gold, before landing in the churned mud. The landlord jumped out of the way as the curricle shot forward, the horses’ hooves kicking up clods of dirt as they went. The horses, fresh and restive, pulled at the bit, yanking the carriage sideways, straight at Gwen.

Before she could even get a grip on her trusty parasol, she found herself flung back against the wall, the Colonel pressed against her, shielding her with his body.

Flecks of mud spattered the wall next to them. There was the sound of men cursing and horses whinnying and geese squawking.

“Are you all right?” the Colonel asked, looking down at her with concern.

“I would be”—they were pressed together, front to front, the buttons of the Colonel’s coat biting into her chest, his hands braced against the wall on either side of her arms—“if I could breathe.”

He looked at her quizzically. They were close enough that she could make out the faint hint of a scar beside his lip, close enough to kiss.

Where had that ridiculous thought come from?

Gwen mustered the breath to say, “Your buttons, Colonel. I am sure they are most attractive, but they are also rather poking.”

“What? Oh! My apologies!” The Colonel gallantly removed himself from her person, looking her over with a concerned eye. “You are unharmed? That idiot in the curricle . . .”

“Perfectly,” said Gwen crisply. She bent to retrieve her parasol, noting, as she stood, that there was a gash across the poster of Fiorila. The carriage lamp must have ripped right across.

She had been standing directly in front of that poster, her nose on a level with Fiorila’s bisected bust.

The Colonel had noticed as well. “Young buck,” he said with heat, frowning after the rapidly disappearing curricle. “He’ll get himself or someone else killed if he goes on like that.”

“More likely someone else,” remarked Gwen with some asperity. She could still feel the impression of Colonel Reid’s buttons pressing against her chest. If he hadn’t thrown her to the side . . . She’d give him one thing, no matter his ridiculous banter—his reflexes were good. She shook out her skirt with more force than necessary. “That type has more lives than a cat.”

“And the morals of one, too,” agreed Colonel Reid. “We get a fair number of that kind in India, sent off by their families or out for adventure. They cause more trouble than they’re worth.”

There was a note of authority in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Despite herself, Gwen found herself taking notice of her companion. “How long were you in India, Colonel Reid?”

“Most of my life,” he said, his bright blue eyes looking out across the courtyard at lands far, far away. “I came there as a lad of sixteen and never thought to go anywhere else. It’s a grand place, Miss Meadows, a grand place.”

He held out his arm to her and she took it, picking her way across the courtyard with him towards the newly arrived stage. “And yet you chose to come back here.”

“It’s not back for me,” he said. “I was born in the Carolinas. In America,” he clarified, and seemed amused by the expression of horror on his companion’s face. “It’s not so wild as that, Miss Meadows. I spent my youth in Charleston, which is as fine a city as you’ll find.”

Gwen deeply doubted that. It was in the Americas, after all. Any colony that wantonly rebelled against its rightfully ordained monarch didn’t know what was good for it. “Why leave it, then?”

“Why does any youth do what he does? A longing for adventure, a thirst for new worlds—and, of course, the desire to thumb one’s nose at one’s parents.” He gallantly gave her a boost up into the carriage, his hand sturdy on the small of her back. “Not that you’d know anything about that, Miss Meadows, a paragon of virtue such as you are.”

For some reason, this irked her. “I was young once too,” she said sharply.

So painfully, painfully young. She had been such a fool back then, so convinced of her own innate wisdom and superiority.

She was still convinced of those things, but with a difference; now she’d earned it, through hard experience and grinding humiliation.

“You’re still young,” said Colonel Reid, settling himself into the seat behind her.

“I’d have you know that I count four decades to my credit—and a half!” Take that. One couldn’t quibble with forty-five. “I’m well on the way to my half century.”

“As I said,” said Colonel Reid, his lips twitching in a most unfair way, “a mere sprig of a girl. Now, I’ve my half century and a few years plus that.”

“And burnt brown for most of them,” said Gwen acidly.

“The sun in India will do that to a man,” said the Colonel amiably. “But I don’t see you as the sort to bundle under a bonnet and hide away from the sun.”

The man was too perceptive by half. A shrewd rogue, Jane had called him, and she was right. Not that it mattered. They would collect the girls and Colonel Reid would be well away out of her life again.

“The situation has never arisen,” said Gwen crushingly. “The climate of Shropshire is far from tropical.”

The tutor and his charge took their seats in the stage across from them, the schoolboy showing a lamentable tendency to squirm. The man with many chins considered the schoolboy and then made an ill-advised attempt to squeeze in next to Gwen instead, squashing her against the side of the Colonel.

“Impossible!” she fumed. “Sir, there is no room for you on this bench.”

“Na, there’s room right enough,” said the man, the lower sort of clerk by his accent, wiggling his ample backside in the space on the seat that ought by right to have been hers.