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.
Jack tossed his hat onto her cot, where it spattered rainwater on her blanket. “We made less than five miles today. At this rate we’ll make Porto by spring.”
“Don’t be absurd. I’m sure we’ll pick up speed tomorrow.” Jane snatched the hat off the bed and thrust it back at him. “Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be?”
“The mule is settled and Moreau’s servant is short a week’s pay. Dice,” Jack explained helpfully, as he plucked Jane’s cloak from its peg and began rolling it into a makeshift pallet.
“How nice for you,” said Jane, with heavy sarcasm. Heaven help her, she was beginning to sound like him. She set her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?”
“Insurance.” Jack removed a pair of pistols and placed them by the side of the pallet. “Not to mention that it’s drier inside than out.”
He plunked himself down on Jane’s cloak, smiling seraphically up at her.
Jane blinked down at him. She hadn’t thought about where he would sleep. She had assumed, if she had thought of it, that the officers’ servants would have their own accommodations.
The tent felt very small with Jack Reid in it.
Jane narrowed her eyes at him. “You can’t bunk with one of the other batmen?”
“And leave you unprotected?”
There, at least, she was on firm ground. Jane reached beneath her pillow. “I have my own pistols.”
“Try not to point them at me,” said Jack, and settled back, using his camp bag as a pillow. “Would you mind blowing out the lantern when you’re done prinking? I don’t like sleeping with a candle lit.”
Neither did Jane, but that was beside the point. “What about ‘go’ and ‘away’ don’t you understand . . . Rodrigo?”
Jack propped himself up on one elbow. The lamplight picked out the strands of copper in his dark hair, dancing along the lines of his muscles beneath the folds of his shirt.
“Are you going missish on me, princess?” There was a dangerous glitter in his amber eyes. “Because if you are, tell me now and we can abandon this whole bloody charade.”
The profanity, Jane had no doubt, was deliberate and designed to shock. “If this is an attempt to provoke me, I can assure you, it will be quite unavailing.”
“‘Quite unavailing’?” Jack collapsed back on his camp bag, rolling his eyes up at the roof of the tent. “Forget what I said about not pointing those things at me. Put me out of my misery and shoot me now.”
Jane resisted the urge to direct a short, sharp kick to the side of the Moonflower’s head. “No one asked you to join me.”
“Didn’t you?” retorted Jack mockingly. “I don’t remember being given much choice in the matter. Master.”
“In my tent,” Jane amended, glaring at him.
It was too cold to strip down entirely, but she’d intended at least to remove her boots before seeking her bed. Jane regarded the recumbent figure on the floor—on her cloak—with tight lips. Missish, he had called her.
If she could endure his presence in her tent, he could bear with her wet feet.
Jack rolled onto his side, looking up at her with an expression of feigned innocence. “Need help with that?”
“I can manage,” said Jane, with as much dignity as she could muster while hanging half upside down. These boots had been designed with a valet in mind. Either that or the leather had shrunk in the rain.
The first boot came off with a pop, nearly conking her erstwhile batman in the head.
Jack dodged out of the way. “Apparently not,” he said, and before Jane could stop him he had gripped the other boot by the heel. “Relax, princess. Consider this a basic instinct for self-preservation.”
“I thought you had rather a well-developed instinct for that,” said Jane tartly. Empires could rise and fall, but the Moonflower always seemed to land on his feet. Generally on the other side.
“If I did, would I be here with you?”
The boot came off easily in his hands, leaving Jane’s leg bare but for her silk stockings, rather the worse for wear. Jack Reid’s fingers ran along her calf, his thumb digging into the tight muscles, massaging them.
Jane froze.
So did Jack Reid. He snatched his hand away as though burned.
Jane drew her leg back, tucking it behind the other. She could feel the tingles all the way up her shin. “Thank you. For your help with the boot.”
Jack Reid rocked back on his heels. “This is only the beginning, you know.” He looked up at her, his eyes dark in the uncertain light. “I’m your manservant. I live in your tent. I see to your, ahem, needs. You’re going to be seeing a lot of me, princess.”
Jane pressed her eyes briefly shut. Of course. Another ploy, another stratagem. She ought to have known.
“We’re not going back to Lisbon,” said Jane flatly.
“Suit yourself.” Jack shrugged, burrowing down into Jane’s cloak and tipping his hat down over his nose. From beneath the brim, she heard him murmur, “It’s going to be a long march.”
• • •
By the end of the first week, Jane didn’t suspect she had made the wrong choice; she knew it.
It wasn’t just the continued presence of Jack Reid in her tent. Captain Moreau’s company moved at a rate that made walking seem like a highly viable alternative. The locals regarded them with outright hostility. In his role as Rodrigo, Jack Reid did his best to inquire, subtly, after previous travelers on the road, but his questions were met with blank stares, unflattering commentary, and the odd gobbet of spittle.
“Can you blame them?” said Jack shortly, wiping his face on the back of his sleeve. They had stopped to make camp just south of a village so small that it wasn’t even a dot on Jane’s map. Jack turned his back, using the heel of his boot to dig one of the tent staves in deeper. “This village has now been ravaged by French troops twice over: once on the march to Lisbon and now on the march back to the border.”
“But Rodrigo isn’t French.”
“Men who choose to work for the enemy are never popular.” There was something about the way Jack said it that made Jane wonder whether he was speaking of more than Portugal. But his stance and his expression forbade her to ask more.
They might share a tent, but that didn’t make them friends or even comrades. If anything, Jane felt she knew less of her companion than she had when they left Lisbon. He performed the tasks of Rodrigo quietly and efficiently, something she wouldn’t in the least have expected.
After that first rather odd night, he hadn’t fallen out of his role. Nor had he touched her again.
For which she was grateful, of course. They didn’t need complications.
But somehow Jack Reid’s compliance made her warier than any amount of argument. That it was compliance and not cooperation, Jane had no doubt. Cooperation implied a degree of agreement, of complicity. The Moonflower was going through the motions of a plan of which he wanted no part, there in body, but withdrawn in spirit.
He was, Jane was quite sure, biding his time. But for what?
“Only three days until Santarém,” said Jane, watching her companion closely, “and then we can break off.”
Jack didn’t respond. His eyes were on the makeshift alley created by the crooked row of tents. “We’ve got visitors.”
Captain Moreau was skipping down the alley, in company with another man dressed not in regimentals, but in an elegant traveling cloak and well-polished boots.
He must, thought Jane absently, as she scraped her own boot on the board at the side of the tent, have been traveling by carriage; otherwise he could never have maintained that pristine shine.
And then he turned, and all thoughts of boots went out of her head.
No. Her mind was playing tricks on her. It was the mist, dancing in front of her eyes. Or her own guilty conscience, plaguing her with ghosts.
But it wasn’t a ghost. She knew that walk, that elegant, graceful gait. She knew the way he furled his cloak, the way he tipped his head in speaking, as though the listener were voicing the most fascinating utterances, even if it was nothing more interesting than “good morning.”
Jane made a choked noise deep in her throat. “He mustn’t—” she began. And then, rapidly, “Tell Moreau I’ve a stomach complaint. I—”
But it was too late. Moreau had already seen her. He raised a hand, calling out, “Balcourt! Meet our honored guest—the Comte de Brillac. Monsieur le Comte, may I present my traveling companion, Lieutenant de Balcourt?”
Jane tried to take consolation in her wig and her whiskers. But even horsehair could do only so much. This man knew her in all her guises, or rather, in all her disguises, just as Jane knew him. They had sparred together so many times, each testing the other, enjoying the game despite the deadly seriousness of its outcome.
Jane saw the man’s hazel eyes widen in recognition. No disguises there, unless one counted the name, the title he had once sworn to her he intended never to assume.
Surprise was rapidly replaced by amusement as he made a polite half bow. “Lieutenant? I hadn’t thought to see you turned soldier . . . Jean.”
Jane bowed in return, duelists signaling before the commencement of hostilities. “I hadn’t thought to see you turned Comte, Chevalier.”
The man she had once known as the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent gave a very Gallic shrug. “When one’s Emperor requires . . .”
“How very wearing for you,” said Jane dryly. For Moreau’s benefit, she added, “My felicitations, all the same.”
The Chevalier—no, Jane reminded herself, the Comte now—pressed his hands to his heart. “I shall treasure the sentiment.”
Doing it too brown, Nicolas, Jane wanted to say, but couldn’t. That was the danger of living in layers: one could never say exactly what one wanted when one wanted.
She nodded instead, politely, correctly, and saw in the Comte’s dancing hazel eyes that he knew just how much it had cost her.
Why? Why here? Why now?
But there was nothing to be gained in breaking her role now. Jane held to her composure as Moreau looked from one to the other, like a puppy who had found a new friend. “You know each other?”
Jack Reid was also watching. His eyes were guarded and wary, his hat pulled down low as a shield. He slumped down on a bit of sacking outside the tent and began, idly, to polish a pair of Jane’s boots.
“We move in similar circles,” said the Comte de Brillac. He handed his gloves and hat to his servant without ever taking his eyes from Jane’s. Jane didn’t recognize the servant. He must, she thought, be new.
That meant one fewer person in the camp to know Jane. She could be grateful for that, at least.
Small blessings, she mocked herself. Her former chaperone, Miss Gwen, didn’t believe in small blessings. Miss Gwen didn’t believe in small anything. She could practically hear Miss Gwen’s voice saying with a sniff, Small blessing or large mishap? Dress it up any way you like; it’s still no good.
Miss Gwen, thought Jane wryly, would undoubtedly have taken her parasol to the side of the Comte’s head, kicked Moreau in the shins, and even now be riding ventre à terre—most likely straight into a gorge.
Jane looked levelly at the Comte. “You have traveled very far from Paris . . . Monsieur le Comte.”
The Comte’s hazel eyes danced with mischief. “Even Paris occasionally grows dull—when one’s friends are absent.”
Jack Reid was watching too closely for comfort. Desperately trying to stem the tide, Jane said, “I have heard that one who is sick of Paris is sick of life.”
“And perhaps I am.” The Comte struck a pose, his hand on his heart. “Not sick, but heartsick.”
“Are you quite sure?” inquired Jane repressively. “It might be no more than an attack of indigestion.”
Captain Moreau ignored her. “Are you fleeing an affair of the heart?” he inquired eagerly.
Moreau’s travel bag included La Nouvelle Héloïse, Julie, and a stack of other novels of the multiple-hanky variety. Jane knew because she had searched it.
The Comte de Brillac smiled brilliantly at the captain. “Isn’t one always? Such inconvenient organs, hearts, so terribly susceptible to Cupid’s dart.”
In this case, Jane wasn’t entirely sure that Cupid was the relevant culprit. An affair it might have been, but not of the heart.
“. . . agony!” Captain Moreau was saying earnestly. “I carried her glove in my pocket for months. At least, I think it was her glove. It might have been her friend’s. But it was the thought that counted, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, yes, mon ami.” The Comte de Brillac patted his shoulder, as one might a puppy. “You must tell me at length. Later.” Turning to Jane, he said casually, “I trust, Lieutenant de Balcourt, we shall find the opportunity to . . . renew our acquaintance?”
So he didn’t mean to unmask her. At least, not yet.
“We certainly have much to discuss,” Jane said warily, and Nicolas grinned at her, that open, mischievous grin that had once had the power to disarm her, to fool her into believing that there might be something more between them than policy.
“I shall look forward to it,” he said, and moved on, chatting easily with Captain Moreau, as if their discovery of each other here, in this out-of-the-way place, didn’t signal impending disaster for one or both.
But it had been like that, from the beginning. Nicolas had always refused to behave as an enemy ought. That had been part of his charm: his ability to appreciate the absurd, his refusal to acknowledge the barriers that ought to separate them.
But one could live on a diet of meringues and champagne for only so long.
Jack Reid unfolded himself slowly from the ground outside the tent. Unlike the Comte, his breeches were liberally spattered with mud; his jacket showed signs of patching. In all the time she had known him, Nicolas had never undertaken a disguise that would render him anything but entirely soigné. Even in the black hood and robe worn by the members of the Hellfire Club, in a drug-fueled orgy, his locks had been arranged just so.
Jack didn’t waste time on niceties. “What was that?”
“Don’t you mean who was that?” Jane was glad of her false whiskers. They might not protect her from Nicolas, but they might at least hide her blushes. She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Call him an old adversary.”
And so much more than that. Friend, enemy.
Lover.
“Have you ever heard,” said Jane, “of a spy called the Gardener?”
Chapter Six
I had always wondered whether Colin was a spy.
Not seriously. Well, mostly not seriously. I stood there holding his phone in my hand, that horrible, rasping voice echoing in my ears.
Tell him. Bring the box.
I set off up the stairs at a run, aiming for Colin’s study. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had sounded . . . not afraid, precisely. But strained. Very strained.
Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was the most unflappable person I knew. Stiff upper lip didn’t even begin to approach it.
I could hear typing from behind the half-closed door of Colin’s study. Flinging it open, I said, “Colin?”
My little sister looked up from behind Colin’s monitor, her fingers continuing to move even as she spoke to me. “Outside. He went to check on—something.�
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Something. Lovely. “Do you have any idea where?”
“You know you’re flaking mud, right?”
I flapped an impatient hand in Jillian’s general direction. “That’s what vacuums are for.”
“Don’t you mean Hoovers?” Jillian had been a little too amused by my attempts to adopt the local lingo.
“Whatever.” Right now I had other things on my mind than my sister’s My Fair Lady impression.
Colin’s study had a view back over the grounds. Through the window I had caught sight of a familiar dark blond head making for the abandoned tower on the hill that I had once assumed held family secrets, but that actually held a miscellany of rusting farm equipment and, now, two dozen round tables with folding metal legs. Also some of the wedding presents we couldn’t quite figure out what to do with, including the cuckoo clock that sang, for some arcane reason, “Frère Jacques,” while a little monk popped in and out of the doorway.
Jillian popped up from behind the computer screen. “If you’re looking for Colin, you could always ring on your mobile.”
“Not helpful,” I said, and set off down the stairs, making for the garden.
Zigzagging my way past people trying to intercept me felt a bit like being back in the field-hockey unit in gym class, only minus the mouth guard.
“Later!” I called, and, “In a minute!” and, “Is that coffee?”
No, no, mustn’t be distracted by coffee, even if Colin’s friend Martin, the backup best man (should Nick fail to show up), was carrying a whopping great Costa cup filled with beautiful, life-giving nectar.
Pausing had been a mistake. A man with a clipboard came up to me. “Where do you want the—”
“In a minute,” I said, and then spotted my mother. I pointed at her. “Ask her. She’ll know.”
Resisting the urge to grab Martin’s coffee, I hustled towards the tower, which, unlike objects in the rearview mirror, was always farther away than it appeared.
Colin was just emerging as I huffed and puffed my way up the hill. “Did you know you have mud on your—”
“Yes,” I said shortly. “It’s cosmetic.”
The Lure of the Moonflower Page 8