The Passion of the Purple Plumeria

by Lauren Willig

  Jane looked at her askance. “Were you?”

  “Flighty” wasn’t the word she would have used. Headstrong, yes. Defiant and proud and infinitely foolish.

  There were times when Jane reminded her uncannily of herself at a similar age. Oh, not in comportment. She had never had Jane’s Olympian calm; she had always preferred to express herself directly. But Jane’s self-containment was its own form of stubbornness. In that, they were alike.

  “Your sister is probably halfway to Gretna Green by now,” said Gwen heartily. “Let’s just hope she picked a handsome one.”

  Jane shook her head. With her hair down, she looked very young and very vulnerable, hardly the mistress of the spy operation that had terrorized Bonaparte for the past two years. “She’s not alone. Another girl has gone missing too.”

  “Even better,” said Gwen. “They’ve run off together. They’ve probably gone to London to see Kemble perform, or some such fool thing.”

  Jane laced her fingers together. Aristocratic, Gwen’s father would have called her hands, with his merchant’s instinct for divining the details of his betters. “If that were the case,” she said quietly, “they would have been back by now.”

  Gwen looked at the controlled face of her charge. “Are you suggesting foul play?”

  “You think I’m overwrought.”

  Gwen gave a harsh bark of laughter. “You don’t know what overwrought is.” Her sister-in-law did a fine line in overwrought. A delay in dinner could bring out a performance worthy of Mrs. Siddons. “But foul play? It hardly seems likely. The girl is sixteen—”

  “Seventeen,” corrected Jane.

  “A distinction without a difference. She’s practically a babe in arms. How many enemies can she have?”

  “She might not,” said Jane. “But I have.”

  The words polluted the air between them, stinking like the Seine. Gwen looked at Jane’s pale, anxious face. She wanted to argue her into comfort, to smash her theory into harmless little bits. But she couldn’t.

  “It’s unlikely,” she offered instead, knowing just how weak it sounded.

  Jane’s face was set in a way none of her suitors would have recognized. “But not impossible,” she said.

  No, not impossible. No matter how careful they were, leaks occurred. Too many people knew Jane’s double identity: former agents, former contacts, her loathsome toad of a cousin. And those were only the ones they knew about. Various French agents had sworn to unmask the Pink Carnation or die trying.

  The Black Tulip actually had died in the attempt—or so they had been led to believe. The Tulip had an inconvenient habit of resurrection. If the Tulip, or someone like him, had Agnes . . . Not that she believed that Agnes had been kidnapped. The very idea was ridiculous.

  But it wasn’t impossible.

  Jane read her conclusion in her face. “You see? We have to find her.”

  Gwen rubbed at her cheek where her false whiskers had irritated her skin. “Not so fast, young lady. Have you considered you might be walking into a trap? If someone has discovered your identity—not that I’m saying that they have—but if they have . . .” The Black Tulip hadn’t been known for mercy.

  “How could I leave Agnes to suffer on my behalf?” Jane’s indignation made Gwen feel small, small and selfish. “If I put her into danger, it’s my duty to get her out again.”

  Gwen’s eyes met Jane’s. “Have you considered that if you leave, you might not be able to come back?”

  Travel across the Channel was still technically forbidden. If it were known that they traveled back and forth to England, it would arouse suspicion. For brief and necessary clandestine visits, Jane usually pretended an illness, “taking to her bed” at the Hotel de Balcourt, with Gwen at her side to nurse her. It only added to her mystique of fragile delicacy. In public, they went disguised, under other personae: the forbidding Ernestine Grimwold and her dithery niece Miss Gilly Fairly, or the widowed Mrs. Fustian and her daughter. They were themselves only within the safety of the family circle, and that sparingly.

  “Miss Fustian,” suggested Jane with unaccustomed hesitation, “might seek employment in Miss Climpson’s school.”

  Gwen shook her head. “No. You look too much like Agnes. The students will suss it out in ten minutes, maybe less. Unless . . .”

  She had an idea, an idea insane enough that it just might work. Part of her, the craven, selfish part, wanted to shake it away, to pretend helplessness. After all, wouldn’t it make more sense to stay in Paris and delegate the task to one of their agents in England? The former Purple Gentian would leap at the assignment. If he were out of commission, there were half a dozen others who would take on the task with a great deal of enthusiasm and varying levels of skill.

  And Jane would never forgive herself.

  Reluctantly, Gwen said, “There might be a way.”

  Jane regarded her warily. “Does this have to do with wearing your false whiskers?”

  “No,” said Gwen. “We disguise ourselves by having no disguises at all. We go as ourselves.”

  Jane gave her a frustrated look. “I know you don’t approve of the venture, but there’s no need to speak nonsense.”

  “It’s not nonsense. It’s our best chance,” said Gwen rapidly. “We evade suspicion by being entirely aboveboard. What is there to hide, after all?”

  Jane cocked an eyebrow. It was an effective trick, one the chit had picked up from her early mentor, the Purple Gentian. Gwen had practiced it herself, but it required one attribute she had never mastered: the gift of sustained silence.

  “No, not like that.” Gwen waved Jane’s silent protest aside. “You apply to the Emperor for permission to travel. You tell him your sister has eloped and your family needs you. He, of all people, should understand the concerns of wayward sisters. Look at his! A scandal, all of them.”

  Jane sat down on the edge of Gwen’s bed, a slender figure in a white nightdress. “You might be right,” she said slowly.

  Gwen harrumphed. “Of course I’m right. Aren’t I always?”

  What was she doing? The last thing in the world that she wanted was to go back to England. Here in Paris, she had presence, she had standing, she had fear, if not respect. Back in England, she was just Miss Meadows, spinster. The very idea made her stomach cramp.

  She looked down at Jane’s bowed head, the color of old whiskey in the candlelight, and felt something like pity twist in her gut, pity and a bit of envy. Her family had never given her cause to love them as Jane loved hers. They had abandoned her when she had most needed them and ground salt in her wounds when she was most vulnerable.

  All for the best, of course. It had toughened her up, made her what she was. But there was no need for Jane to be toughened so. The girl had enough on her head already.

  No need to repine, Gwen promised herself. It needn’t take more than a week or so. They would find Agnes, give her a good ticking off, and come right back to their life in France.

  “Get your things together,” Gwen said regally. “We’re going to England.”

  Chapter 2

  The building sat on a low rise, shaded by a stand of trees. In spring, it might have been a happy place, but not now. A bolt of lightning forked through the sky as Sir Magnifico clattered into the courtyard, his senses rent with misgiving. Where were the joyful carols of the cloistered ladies? The voices of the virgins were hushed and anxious, as muted as the rain that dripped down the cold, gray stone.

  Was it an ancient curse that lay over the building? Or some more recent evil?

  —From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady

  England wasn’t at all what Colonel William Reid had expected it to be.

  Back in the mess in Madras, his fellow officers were always nattering on about the lush green of the fields, the cerulean blue of the sky, the delicate touch of a spring breeze, as soft and sweet as a lover’s kiss. They hadn’t mentioned the driving rain that got beneath a man’s collar, or the mu
d of the roads that sucked at cart wheels and caked the bottom of a man’s boots. If the wind was the touch of a lover, this was less a kiss and more a hearty slap across the face.

  Shivering in his newly purchased, many-caped coat, William felt like a piece of wet washing, damp down to the skin, and then some besides. Winter, yes. He’d expected winter to be cold. But this was spring, for the love of all that was holy. Birds should be on the wing and buds on the thorn, or wherever it was that buds went.

  So much for April in England, of which the poets sang so sweetly and so falsely. William would have traded it in a moment for May in Madras. Faith, he’d even take July in Jaipur, sweating in his regimentals in the blazing sun, hotter than hell and ready to wilt.

  Not that he had that choice. It was England for him now, will he nill he, a classic case of blithely making one’s bed, only to discover, when the time came to lie on it, that it was full of lumps. He was good at that.

  And didn’t I warn you? He could hear his mother’s outraged Highland brogue in his head, exaggerated by time and distance.

  His mother would be turning in her tartan grave if she knew that he’d chosen to take up residence in England in his old age. They’d been committed adherents to the King over the Water, his parents; fled from Inverness in ’45 in the wake of the disaster at Culloden. Committed from a distance, that was. In the safety of the Carolinas, their commitment had extended mostly to derisory epithets about the English and toasting the Pretender’s health, such as it was. They’d had some lovely glasses made up, crystal, with thistles, and some Jacobite motto or other scrolled about the bowl. Latin, it was, but what the words had been, he couldn’t say.

  Memory blurred. Or perhaps it was the drizzle driving into his eyes, that maddening, peculiarly English form of precipitation, not quite mist, not quite rain, but something in between, all but impossible to keep off. Give him a proper thunderstorm any day, like the sort they’d had in his youth in the Carolinas, winds howling, thunder crashing, not like this, insidious, invidious, and damnably damp.

  For choice, he would have stayed in India. He’d had nearly forty good years there, posted all around the country, from Calcutta to Bombay. He’d served in the East India Company’s army. Not as lucrative, perhaps, as the royal army, apt to be sneered at by snobs, but he couldn’t see himself taking the King’s shilling, not then, not now. Old prejudices died hard. It had been a polyglot group with whom he’d fought in the Madras cavalry, most of them wanderers like himself, all out to make their fortune in the fabled land of jewels and spices.

  He missed India, missed it with a visceral longing he’d never felt for Charleston. He had come of age in India; he had learned his trade there, made his friends, fallen in love. It was in India he’d married and buried his Maria; in India he’d raised his children, three boys and two girls, only two of them what you might call legitimate. What did it matter? Legitimate, illegitimate, British, half-caste, what have you, they were all his children and he loved them all alike: conscientious Alex, prickly Jack, sunny-natured George, stubborn Kat, and his youngest, his sweet Lizzy. If the circumstances of his family life were sometimes a little . . . irregular, well, it was India, and such things were common there.

  Common, yes, but not always easy. He’d learned that the hard way. Of his three sons, two were barred employment in the very regiment to which he’d given so many years’ service, simply by virtue of having a native woman for a mother. William had got George settled, finding him a place in the retinue of a local ruler, the Begum Sumroo. As for Jack . . . It didn’t matter that Jack’s mother had been a lady of quality in her own land; he’d been barred all the same, barred as though his mother were the lowest bazaar strumpet.

  The boy had taken it hard. Jack had ridden away, offering his sword to whomever would employ him against the men who had denied him his place. They hadn’t spoken since. Jack’s absence was a wound in William’s heart that wouldn’t heal.

  The worst of it, though, had been sending his daughters away. It had been nearly a decade ago now, Kat seventeen, Lizzy an imp of seven, all curls and dimples. For their education, he’d bluffed, but the truth was it wasn’t safe for them, not for Lizzy, who was a half-caste, child of a native mother. There were some young bucks who thought a half-caste girl fair game. He’d seen it happen, to his horror, to the daughter of a friend, raped and tossed aside. She’d died of the pox—and the shame, some said. Her father had aged ten years in as many months. And William had packed his girls onto a ship bound for England, bundling them off in the face of all their protests.

  Just a few years, he’d told his girls as he handed them onto the launch in Calcutta harbor, Kat glowering, Lizzy clinging to his neck. Then he would come to England and join them and what grand times they would have then! But then had come Tippoo Sultan’s rising in the south and unrest in the north and what with one thing and another a few years had stretched to another and another, until here he was, ten years later, standing on the stoop of a young ladies’ seminary in Bath, a bouquet of wilted flowers in one hand, prepared to surprise a daughter he wasn’t sure he would recognize. When he’d last seen her, she’d had two missing teeth and a scrape on her left knee. He could picture that scab as he could picture his own hand, every moment of their parting branded on his memory.

  Would she be happy to see him, his Lizzy? He hoped so. He felt like a nervous suitor, about to call on a young lady for the first time. William straightened his collar and cleared his throat.

  “It’s Miss Elizabeth Reid I’m here to see,” he said to the woman standing at the door, a young woman with soft dark hair, in a modest gray dress that matched the weather. She was a small woman, with the mushroom-like complexion of someone who had never encountered a tropical sun. She had identified herself as the French mistress, Mlle. de Fayette.

  She also looked distinctly wary. William supposed he couldn’t blame her, faced with a strange man holding a bouquet of battered flowers, standing at the doorstep. One couldn’t be too careful with a house full of impressionable young ladies.

  “I have the fear—,” she began, taking a step back. “That is, I am most desolate, but—”

  “It’s her father, I am,” William said quickly. He swept a quick half bow, smiling to show her that he wasn’t a rake, rogue, or seducer, but just a parent come to call. “Colonel William Reid. Lizzy might have mentioned me?” He tipped the French mistress a wink. “Not that a mere father is much in the mind of a young girl.”

  If anything, Mlle. de Fayette looked even more distressed.

  Was he losing his touch in his old age?

  “Colonel Reid,” she said, rolling out the syllables of the title in the Continental fashion. She twisted her hands together, pale against the dark material of her dress. “I am of the most sorry. Miss Reid, she is—it is of the most unfortunate!”

  “What’s she done now?” William asked resignedly. “In disgrace, is she?”

  That sounded like his Lizzy. He could hear the lamentations of his housekeeper back in Madras, ten years past, in different accents, but the same general tone. Lizzy had a way of wreaking havoc, but with a smile so sweet it was hard to take against her.

  “Miss Reid, she—” Mlle. de Fayette bit her lip, hard enough to leave a mark. “We would have sent the letter, but we did not know where—”

  The hairs on William’s neck prickled. This wasn’t just a case of Lizzy eating the jam out of the biscuits or trying to climb the trellis on a dare.

  “A letter?” he said, as casually as he could. “And what would that be about, then? She’s not got herself sent down, has she?”

  “No, no.
That is—” The woman in the doorway made a notable effort to compose herself. She pressed a hand to her lips.

  “There, there. I’m sure it’s not so bad as all that,” said William reassuringly. “Whatever she’s done, I’ll see it put right. Now, what’s the minx done now?”

  “Minx indeed!”

  William’s head snapped up as a voice rang imperiously through the hall.

  A woman strode forward, wafting Mlle. de Fayette out of the way. The glass prisms on the wall sconces quivered with the force of her movement. Next to the diminutive French mistress, the newcomer looked like an Amazon, although a great part of her height were the tall plumes that curled from her elaborate purple turban.

  She moved with rangy grace, her skirts moving briskly against her long legs. Paris tailoring, unless William missed his guess, the material fine and cut narrow. An expensive rig for the proprietress of a young ladies’ academy.

  “Are you the parent of Miss Reid?” she asked in ringing tones.

  It felt like an accusation.

  William retaliated with the full arsenal of his charm. “I have that honor,” he said easily. “But I fear I haven’t yet the pleasure of your acquaintance, Madame—”

  The woman sniffed. It was a most effective sniff, conveying the full range of her displeasure. “Don’t call it a pleasure until you’ve had a chance to judge.” Using the point of her parasol, she neatly prodded the younger woman out of the way. “In or out? Make up your mind. You’re letting in the most appalling draft.”

  William chose in. The door snapped shut behind him. Mlle. de Fayette stepped prudently out of the way.

  William smiled determinedly at the woman in purple, whose commanding air seemed to imply that she must be the preceptress of this academy. Either that or the ruler of a small but warlike kingdom. William had met rajahs with less of an air of command.