The Passion of the Purple Plumeria

by Lauren Willig

  Her face was masked by a set of elaborately curling sideburns and matching mustache. Not that any of the young bucks who regularly shied away from her in the drawing rooms of the Tuileries would recognize her face. They were usually too busy sidling past in the hopes of saving their shins. Tall for a woman, she was comfortably average height for a man. Long and lean, her body might have been made for breeches roles. In this getup, she looked no different from any of the other gallants who thronged the cafés on the Rue de Richelieu.

  There was one major difference. None of them were crouched on the corner of a balcony.

  She had followed Bonaparte’s foreign minister from the Théâtre des Arts, marking his limping progress. Talleyrand had gone masked too, but his uneven gait made him easy to follow. They hadn’t far to go. She had tracked him three houses down, to this ramshackle inn. Talleyrand had taken the stairs; Gwen had taken the trellis. Whomever he was meeting, it must be important for Bonaparte’s foreign minister to come himself, and in this much haste.

  A light guttered in the room. “Not so bright!”

  The voice was the barest whisper, yet still recognizably female. Recognizably female and almost recognizable. Gwen knew that voice from somewhere—she was sure of it. She slouched closer, pressing her ear to the side of the shutters. The overhang of the balcony above shrouded her in shadow, the railing shielding her from the gaze of curious passersby below.

  “No one followed me,” said Talleyrand soothingly.

  Ha. That’s what he thought. Gwen nobly forbore to preen. There was no point in gloating until she knew what there was to gloat about. He might be meeting a mistress. But if so, why such subterfuge? Talleyrand’s many affairs were fair game; he made no move to hide them.

  She would give him one thing: The man recognized his bastards. Not every man could say as much.

  “You’re back sooner than I would have thought,” he said. There was an edge of censure in his voice. Gwen heard the shuffle-thump of his passage across the room, the sound of a drink being poured.

  “Not from dereliction of duty.” The female’s voice was stronger now, her French lightly accented with a hint of the south. Italian. Not the coarse Corsican of Bonaparte’s cronies, but pure Tuscan, the accent of Dante and the Medicis. And of the opera.

  Gwen crept closer. Through the shutters, she saw the lady ease back her hood, revealing a rich mass of auburn hair, elaborately arranged. “I have not forgot our bargain.”

  Talleyrand’s voice was dry. “I should be very surprised if you had. Have you secured our prize so swiftly?”

  “His Supreme Majesty was not so easily wooed.”

  The lady turned, giving Gwen a clear view of her profile, a profile that appeared on countless prints and snuffboxes throughout London, the handsome features of the famed Italian soprano Aurelia Fiorila.

  There was just one problem. Fiorila was meant to be in England, recuperating from a nasty bout of something or other.

  Yet here she was, as large as life, meeting with Talleyrand in the back room of a none-too-prosperous inn. “The Sultan was much put off by Brune’s clumsy handling.”

  Brune. The man had recently returned from a stint as envoy to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. A sultan with a noted taste for opera. And opera singers.

  It was an open secret that Bonaparte sought to seduce Selim III away from his alliance with Britain. Bonaparte had bullied the Pope into crowning him emperor not four months past, but the Sultan, entwined in old alliances with England and with Russia, balked at recognizing the imperial title. It was a thorn in Bonaparte’s increasingly rotund flesh. His choice of ambassador, however, had only widened the breach. Brune had been sent back with a flea in his ear.

  It shouldn’t have surprised Gwen that Talleyrand had taken matters into his own hands; Talleyrand was a wily old fox. What did surprise her was that Aurelia Fiorila was the means of doing so.

  Gwen heard the snap of a snuffbox lid. “Sending Brune,” said Talleyrand, “was not my decision. I trust you were able to sing the Sultan into sweeter temper?”

  Fiorila’s voice, the voice that had seduced audience after audience at Covent Garden, was ruefully amused. “Even my voice, sir, has not such power as that.” Talleyrand must have made some move, because she added hastily, “I did gain audience with the Sultan. He told me what he will require to meet your desire. He says he will consider no treaties without a token of France’s good intentions.”

  “I should have thought,” said Talleyrand, a courtier to his bones, “that the presence of a beautiful lady would have been token enough.”

  Fiorila’s voice was pensive. “The Sultan has beautiful women enough in his harem, sir. He requires no more.”

  “Not even one with a voice such as yours?”

  Fiorila’s voice sharpened. “I have no desire to sing from a cage. That was never in our bargain.”

  That was rather sweetly naïve of her, thought Gwen. She suspected that the terms of Talleyrand’s bargains shifted with his needs. For all his courtly aspect, the man was as slippery as an eel.

  “Certainly,” said Talleyrand smoothly. “You know I would never ask that of you.”

  Gwen stifled a snort. Talleyrand would ask what he pleased, and they all knew it.

  Talleyrand sniffed delicately at a pinch of snuff, coughing neatly into a lace-edged handkerchief of the very finest lawn. “What does the Sultan desire, if not your own fair form?”

  Fiorila twisted her hands together. Her face was still youthful, but her hands were beginning to show the signs of age. “He had a more specific token in mind.”

  “Which was?” Beneath the charm, Talleyrand was all business.

  The singer looked him in the eye. “The Moon of Berar.”

  For once, Talleyrand, Talleyrand the unflappable, was genuinely unsettled. “Good God,” he said. “Would the Sultan rather have feathers from the tail of the phoenix, or a ruby made of the final drop of dragon’s blood? They would be as easily obtained. The Moon is a myth.”

  “I sang of it in an opera once,” said Fiorila. “Not a very good opera, but the story did catch the imagination. A jewel that makes the wearer impervious to harm, bright enough to blind the most determined assassin, a shield for the body and a mirror for the soul.”

  “Stuff and legends,” said Talleyrand. “Not that one might not try to manufacture one . . .”

  “But the effects would hardly be what the recipient would expect,” said Fiorila practically. She began to turn up the fabric of her hood. “I have brought you what you required. My part is done. If you would . . .”

  Talleyrand moved to block her egress, surprisingly quickly. But then, he had been limping his way in and out of bedchambers for years, thought Gwen cynically.

  His voice was gently sorrowing. “Is this the way you requite my generosity, my dear? Feeding me fairy stories? If you think so little of our arrangement—”

  “No!” There was no mistaking the alarm in Fiorila’s voice. “I swear, I have relayed it to you as he did to me. The Sultan believes it to be real. He claims it was in the royal treasury of Berar.”

  “The Rajah of Berar kept a legendary treasure with the ordinary run of pearls and rubies.” Bonaparte’s foreign minister was politely skeptical.

  “According to the Sultan, there was nothing ordinary about any of the treasure of Berar.” Fiorila held out both hands in supplication. “If you bring him the Moon of Berar, he will break with England. But only for that.”

  “And how are we to set our hands on it?” There was no mistaking the implication of that “we.” Whatever hold he had on the singer, he wasn’t prepared to relinquish it.

  Fiorila’s voice was quiet. “He claims you have it already. He says it fell into the hands of one of your agents at the sack of Berar.”

  “One of mine . . .” The tone of Talleyrand’s voice changed.

  He knew who it was. Gwen would be willing to wager her favorite parasol on it. She leaned forward to hear better, but she misjudg
ed. The shutters, inexpertly attached at best, rattled against the frame.

  “What was that?” demanded Talleyrand.

  Gwen didn’t wait for him to find out.

  She swung lightly off the edge of the balcony, landing with knee-jarring force in the alleyway below. Something squished under her feet, almost sending her skidding, but she had landed squarely; she had the sense to catch her balance before feinting sideways, around the back of the building.

  Talleyrand must have set guards to watch the inn. She could hear their heavy feet, their loud voices. So clumsy! She ducked neatly into a cul-de-sac, pressed against the slimed stones of the wall, waiting as the sound of pursuit pounded past. Her blood raced in her veins, filling her with a high, pure exhilaration. She never felt more alive than when evading pursuit. The dash of danger only made it more interesting.

  Botheration. One of them, more cunning than his fellows, was waiting at the entrance to the alley. Moving with painstaking care, Gwen scooped up a loose piece of cobble from the ground. A bit slimy, but it would serve. Choosing her course carefully, she lobbed it to the far left, out of the mouth of the alley. It made a very satisfying clattering sound, well away from her hiding place. As the guard turned to look, she made her move, smashing him hard in the back of his legs with her cane. Leaping over his fallen form, she ran like a rabbit, her heart singing in her breast, the wind whistling in her ears, every sense on fire.

  She waited until she was across the bridge before she stopped, just another disheveled dandy among the taverns of St. Michel. She had done it. She had shaken her pursuers. And even if they had seen her, what of it? No one would associate the bravo crouching by the window with the Dragon of the Drawing Room, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, prim of the prim, scourge of importunate swains.

  Merciful heavens, she loved her work.

  Absurd to think that just two years ago—had it been only two years?—she had been entombed in the English countryside, a reluctant pensioner in her brother’s household, “Aunt Gwen” to her brother’s whining brats, “Oh, Gwendolyn . . .” to her brother’s featherbrain of a wife. Twenty years she had wasted there, growing a little more seamed and a little more sour every day, dependent on the goodwill of her relations for every bite that crossed her lips. In return, she was meant to sit docilely and wind wool, to manage the household for her dolt of a sister-in-law, to pretend gratitude—gratitude!—for the condescension shown her in offering her a home in her own home. The fall from mistress to dependent had been bad enough; the servings of humble pie she had been expected to eat with it were too much.

  But what else had there been for her to do? She had no dowry, not anymore. She had no funds of her own. She had been considered handsome once, and not entirely for the size of her vanished dowry. There were some men who appreciated a long, lean form, who preferred black hair to fair, and gray eyes to blue. Her tongue was accounted too sharp by some, but there were men, or at least so she had been told, who prized wit as well as wealth. She might escape through marriage—but to whom? Escape on those terms was no more than another cage. At least under her brother’s roof she preserved the privacy of her own bedchamber, with lock and key when necessary.

  Gritting her teeth, she had resigned herself to another twenty years of the same, of watching her idiot nephews marry and procreate, producing offspring as imbecilic as themselves.

  It filled her with a savage delight to have escaped that net. When her chance had come, she had seized it with both hands. She had never imagined that her impulsive offer to chaperone a neighbor’s daughter and niece to Paris would provide more than a few months’ reprieve, that it would lead her to emperors and sultans and intrigue beyond imagining. She had gone from counting sheep—her brother was constantly losing track of his herds—to meddling in the affairs of nations.

  The League of the Pink Carnation had begun out of pique, an attempt to better the arrogant Englishman who had styled himself the Purple Gentian. But that first mission had led to another, and another after that. In the end, it was the League of the Pink Carnation who had rescued the Purple Gentian from various fates worse than death in the extra-special interrogation chamber of Gaston Delaroche. The Purple Gentian had gone home. The Pink Carnation had stayed on, making Bonaparte fume and his henchmen squirm.

  Officially, Gwen’s charge, Jane, was the Pink Carnation. Officially. As far as Gwen was concerned, the whole was a composite performance: Jane’s cunning, Gwen’s daring. They balanced each other, Gwen’s inventiveness supplementing Jane’s cool common sense. It was a pairing that worked ideally.

  At least, it had been working ideally.

  Over the past few months, Gwen had marked a change in her charge. Ever since Bonaparte’s coronation, the Pink Carnation had embarked upon a policy of “watch and see,” compiling dossiers of information through slow and painstaking effort rather than acts of derring-do. She didn’t seem to be deriving the same relish from their activities that she once had. Admittedly, the game had become more dangerous. Fouché, Bonaparte’s minister of police, had consolidated his hold, wiping out many of the networks of couriers on which they relied. They had also lost their long-term War Office contact, Augustus Whittlesby.

  If Jane were another sort of woman, Gwen might have wondered if Whittlesby’s departure had something to do with her malaise. The poet had made no secret of his admiration for Jane. She had sworn her heart wasn’t touched, but— Jane was twenty-three now, an age when other women would be thinking of home and hearth.

  Other women, Gwen reassured herself, tamping down a frisson of alarm. Not the Pink Carnation. They had work to do still; Jane knew that. She wasn’t the sort to abandon her post for so unremarkable a creature as a man. Heaven only knew, she’d seen enough prime specimens over the years. A waste of good linen, most of them.

  No. It was the lack of a challenge that had been plaguing the Pink Carnation; that was all. Gwen rubbed her gloved hands together. She’d tell Jane about this evening’s gleaning. That should catch the Pink Carnation’s fancy.

  What person was proof to the allure of a missing mythical jewel?

  Gwen let herself in through the servants’ entrance of the Hotel de Balcourt, the home of Jane’s cousin Edouard, a prime example of the failings of the male sex. Balcourt housed them reluctantly, turning a blind eye to their activities, less out of cousinly feeling than out of fear that if he were to turn them in, they would share with the authorities certain rather interesting documents in Jane’s possession regarding Edouard’s cross-Channel trade in muslin and brandy. It was an arrangement that suited them all quite well. They ignored the barrels of brandy in the cellar and Edouard ignored their odd comings and goings.

  In her room, Gwen pressed the button that opened the secret back of her armoire. Here, hidden behind the respectable ranks of day dresses and evening gowns, she kept her real wardrobe: the breeches, the waistcoats, the serving maids’ dresses, the floppy hat of a coastal fisherman, a wide array of wigs, and a small arsenal of firearms. She folded her purple frock coat back among its fellows, right above a footman’s livery and the uniform of a minor officer in the imperial guard. With the ease of long practice, she sponged off her false whiskers, setting them aside to dry.

  There was a light knock on the door. Gwen rapidly shut the secret panel, although there was reasonably only one person who would be knocking on her bedchamber door at this time of night.

  “Yes?” she called.

  The Pink Carnation slipped neatly into the room, shutting the door behind her.

  “Miss Gwen?” Through all they had experienced together, Jane still employed the conventional honorific. Old habits died hard. Partners they might be, but Gwen was still Jane’s chaperone.

  “I’m glad you’re still awake,” said Gwen briskly, shaking her hair free of the tight queue in which she had bound it. “I have news.”

  “So have I,” said Jane. She was in her nightdress, her long light brown hair streaming down her back, like Ophelia about to hand out weed
s. Her face was pale and worried in the uncertain light of the candles. “Agnes has gone missing.”

  Agnes? Gwen’s head was stuffed with sultans and emperors; it took an effort to bring it back to the quiet of the English countryside. Frowning, she managed to dredge up the image of a quiet girl with a long face and light brown hair, a pale copy of Jane. Agnes was the youngest of the Wooliston sisters and, in Miss Gwen’s opinion, too docile to be memorable.

  Jane held up a piece of paper, ill written and marred by blots. “I’ve had a letter from my father.” That in itself was news enough. Bertrand Wooliston could write? Who knew? “Agnes has disappeared from Miss Climpson’s seminary.”

  “Are you sure they haven’t just misplaced her? She’s not very noticeable.” Allowed to join the adults, Agnes had blended into the background at the Christmas festivities at Uppington Hall that past year, noticeable only for taking up an extra seat at the table.

  Jane shook her head. “She’s been missing for well over a week now. They notified my parents first. They haven’t been able to find her.”

  Gwen doubted they had looked very far. Bertrand Wooliston had eyes only for his ewes, and his wife was decidedly myopic.

  She put a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder. “She’s probably just run off with some scrounging half-pay officer,” she said reassuringly.

  Jane gave a choked laugh. “I wish I could believe that were all it might be.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” Gwen picked up Betrand Wooliston’s note from the table. The seal had been lost somewhere along the way. Not surprising. The postal routes between England and France were dodgy at best. Technically, commerce and correspondence between England and France were still strictly forbidden. In practice, a thriving postal service went on across the Channel, often with a side of muslin and brandy. “All young girls are flighty.”