At the end of the cell, a path sloped sharply upwards, leading to the source of the fresh air. Robert took it. His legs weren’t quite so steady as he might have liked and his tongue still felt fuzzy, but his mind appeared to be clearing. It would be like Wrothan to slip away once the festivities were safely under way. Wrothan had little interest in orgies on their own account; his sole ambition was the power he could glean through them. That debilitating smoke that sapped the energy from muscle and mind alike wouldn’t be to his liking at all. But what better time to slip away and conduct a little business? Given the activities in which he had left the others, Robert doubted either he or Wrothan would be missed for some time.
Just thinking about it made Robert’s stomach turn again. He could feel the press of the dancing girls like sores in his flesh. He could still taste them on his lips, feel the slide of their tongues painting lines of shame across his skin. Robert scrubbed a hand against his jaw, as if the mere friction could rub off the taint. It felt like a profanation to have gone from Charlotte to . . . this.
And, yet, he almost had. Five more minutes and he would have had them both on the floor, rutting by instinct, as mindless as an animal. Just like his father.
Good God. That was an even more sick-making thought, to ponder the possibility of his father having sown the same field, so to speak, a generation ago, wearing the same brown robes, mindlessly coupling on the same gritty floor in the same vaulted room. The coarse wool of the monk’s habit scratched at his bare skin like a hair shirt.
How proud his father would be, after all this time, to know that the apple hadn’t fallen that far from the tree after all.
His path came to an abrupt end. Robert found himself facing a sheer chalk wall, but above him, all the way up, he could see the sky, black, practically moonless, and devilish cold, but open sky for all that. He had never been so happy to see it. In front of him, metal bars jutted out from the wall at even intervals, forming a ladder. Hoisting his skirt out of the way, Robert began to climb, resolved of one thing.
He didn’t want Medmenham anywhere near Charlotte. Or Staines or Frobisher or Innes or any of the lot of them. Including himself. He could feel the filthy reek of that subterranean room grinding into his flesh, marking him as surely as a brand.
As he climbed, he could smell jasmine again, the scent of betrayal, as thin as a reed, a phantom, a token, taunting him with all his failures, all the people he had loved and betrayed.
Was it merely his guilty conscience producing the elusive hint of jasmine? Or was it something else? As he left the incense of the lower chambers behind, Robert could still smell jasmine, stronger now in the winter night. No matter what occult powers Medmenham might claim, even he couldn’t make jasmine bloom in the English countryside in January. But there were such things as colognes, trapping the essence of the flower in alcohol. Very few men favored feminine scents like jasmine. But Robert knew of one.
Moving faster, Robert climbed the final few rungs. The ladder let out into a bizarre womblike marble edifice. It took Robert a moment to identify it as the inside of an urn. It seemed a rather Medmenham sort of joke, to house human asps within immense marble jars, just waiting to crawl into some waiting Cleopatra’s breast.
The urn had been cut out on one side, not entirely, just enough of a hole for a man to crawl through. It was as he was contemplating the hole that he heard the voices. Voice, rather. One voice.
It wasn’t the sort of voice one would generally remember. It had a common enough timbre, not too high, not too low, with an over-particularity of pronunciation designed to mask an origin more common than the speaker cared to confess. Robert would have known it anywhere.
Robert crawled very carefully through his hole, the scrape of his robe against the stone sounding, he hoped, like nothing more sinister than the rustle of the wind through the dry winter grass. The massive urn provided the best of all possible screens and there was a wall behind his back, made of rough flint. He was, he realized, in Medmenham’s mausoleum, a vast, open-air edifice scattered with memorial monuments, with urns and arches and ornamental columns, in a macabre pleasure garden for the dead.
The dead weren’t the only ones enjoying it tonight. The wind carried their words as effectively as the acoustics of the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul’s.
“There is the small matter of my payment. . . .” Wrothan’s voice was a touching mix of the obsequious and the importunate.
“Don’t fret yourself.” His companion was unimpressed. Unlike Wrothan’s, his accent was pure, effortless Oxbridge, save for the faint tang of a foreign accent. “You will have your gold. When you fulfill your end of the bargain.”
Robert eased around the side of his urn, but to little effect. An ornamental column blocked his view. All he could make out was the skirt of a monk’s habit, identical to all the others.
Wrothan’s voice took on a wheedling note. “I imagine that the Home Office would pay a pretty penny to know about your activities. They might even pay better than you.”
Fabric rustled and coins clattered together, ringing too true to be anything but gold. “A deposit. There will be nothing more until we see results. And if I find that you have played us false . . .”
“Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Now that he had his blunt, Wrothan was all that was jovial. “Not I.”
His companion was less effusive. “See that you don’t. Or else your goose will be—how do you say?—cooked.” His tone was perfectly matter-of-fact, and all the more chilling for being so.
“General Perron never had any complaints,” countered Wrothan.
In his hollow, Robert’s brows drew together. Perron was Wrothan’s employer? When the Colonel had told him Wrothan was selling secrets to the Mahratta, he had never specified to whom. Perron might be nominally employed by one of the Mahratta leaders, but he took his real orders from France.
“Names, Monsieur le Jasmine, names,” said the Frenchman, in suffering tones. Monsieur le Who? Robert wondered, and cautiously lifted his head away from the stone in an attempt to hear more clearly. “If this is how you carried on in India, I am surprised indeed that Monsieur le Marigold kept you on.”
“The Marigold”—Wrothan seemed to have some small difficulty emitting the word—“had no cause for complaint of me. And nor shall you. If I succeed in this . . .”
“It will be a cause for great rejoicing,” said the Frenchman politely, squelching Wrothan as neatly as a society hostess speeding a parting guest. “Then. Good night, Jasmine.”
He really had said Jasmine, hadn’t he? As in the flower. It took Robert a moment to realize that the Jasmine in question was Wrothan, but he didn’t have time to muse on the Frenchman’s pet name for his favorite traitor. Grass crackled underfoot as the man strode away from Wrothan—straight towards Robert’s urn.
Robert hastily ducked around the other side, grateful for the all-concealing robe that blended so well with both winter-dry grass and granite walls. Hood up, huddled against the base of the urn, he played at being a rock, thankful for the lack of moon that swathed him in darkness. The anonymous monk with the accent disappeared into the urn and down the secret passage.
By the time Robert deemed it safe to look up, both Wrothan and the Frenchman had gone. Only the scent of jasmine lingered in the damp night air.
Robert hunkered back on his haunches, drawing his fingers through his sweat-sodden hair. His head still pounded with the aftereffects of the drug, whatever the drug had been, and he lifted his face gratefully to the night air, letting the damp air buffet his aching head.
Jasmine. What in the blazes were they playing at? Robert wished his mental faculties were in better working order, or that Tommy had been there, too, to hear and judge. The Frenchman had said Jasmine.
Robert wondered, for the first time, if that conspicuous sprig of jasmine Wrothan had affected in India had been more than just a dandy’s foolish nod to fashion. It was a pity, thought Robert grimly, that he had spent so m
uch time concertedly not noticing Wrothan. It made it that much harder remembering his habits. But he did remember joking with Tommy about the migration of the flower, one day on Wrothan’s hat, the next day in his lapel. They had put it down to experiments in fashion. But what if it had been something else? What if it had been a signal, a message? It might have been a call to an assignation, a symbol that he had news to share, any number of things. All of them entirely sinister.
Wrothan wasn’t just raising a little extra blunt selling secrets to the Mahratta. He was playing for higher stakes than that. He was playing with the French.
There had been rumblings about revolutionaries while Robert was in India, whispers of French plots and schemes, but for the most part, those, like Robert, who had been many years away from England had shrugged it off. Everyone knew the Governor-General, Marquess Wellesley, was practically potty on the topic of French threats; he saw Frenchmen under the bed the way small children imagined monsters. There had been a brief stir the year before when Bonaparte had sent a ship of men and arms to India at the request of General Perron, but Wellesley had sent them packing. And Robert had always believed that was that. One failed attempt. They were five months from England by sea. How much interest could they have in the affairs of England and France, or England and France in them? He had assumed that Wrothan’s treachery was a local affair, with purely local consequences.
The damp was seeping through the wool of Robert’s robe, but it wasn’t just his nether regions that were feeling the chill. He might have found Wrothan, but the victory was a Pyrrhic one. There would be no nice, tidy revenge, no easy dispatch of a retired traitor. Instead, he had stumbled upon a hydra, that beast of classical fiction that sported new heads whenever the one was lopped off.
And all the heads were shaped like flowers.
Chapter Twelve
They say that eavesdroppers seldom hear good of themselves. It’s been my experience that eavesdroppers seldom hear anything of themselves at all, since most people aren’t as interested in you as, well, you. This time, however, I was absolutely positive that Joan Plowden-Plugge had been talking about me. Me and Colin, that is. Her voice takes on a special sneer when my name comes up. It’s rather flattering, considering that I’ve met her all of three times.
As I dusted my hands off against my pants, and automatically checked to make sure that the zip was where it ought to be, I wondered exactly what it was that I was expected to take badly when I found out. There was, I admitted to myself, as I pushed open the door of the ladies’ room, the remote possibility that Joan and Sally might have been talking about another couple entirely. But, come on, who would really believe that?
What I needed to do was get them talking. It shouldn’t be too hard to get Joan making barbed little comments. The problem would be making sure they were barbed little comments about whatever it was that Colin did for a living and not about me, my job, my American-ness, or my hair.
I ventured out of the dark cavern of the bathroom hallway (I wonder if there’s a regulation that pub bathrooms must always be in a dark cul-de-sac), feeling like the Duke of Dovedale about to infiltrate a meeting of the Hellfire Club. As I quickly scanned the small group of people scattered around the table in front of the bow window, I was forced to reconsider. Can Hellfire Club really be an appropriate metaphor when there’s a vicar involved?
It made me feel all warm and fuzzy that instead of seating himself, Colin was standing next to the table in that way you do when you’ve only stopped to chat for a moment, declaring to all and sundry his intention to abandon them and cleave unto me—at least for the length of our dinner.
Slipping into the space next to him, I smiled cheerfully all around. “Hi, all! Mmmm, thanks.” I gratefully accepted the drink Colin handed me. The paper napkin wrapped around the glass was already damp with condensation from the melting ice.
“How long are you here?” asked the Vicar, clearly enjoying needling Joan. Joan turned her chair slightly away with the lofty air of one who does not intend to allow herself to be needled.
“Only the week,” I said. “That is, unless I make some sort of major breakthrough in the archives and have to beg Colin to let me stay on.”
“I’m sure you won’t have any trouble convincing him.” The Vicar waggled his eyebrows impishly. He reminded me of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all good-natured mischief. I wasn’t sure that was generally recommended in a vicar, but I certainly enjoyed it.
“Doesn’t Colin have his own work to do?” Joan said acidly, although whether the dig was aimed at me or Colin was hard to tell.
“Nothing that won’t keep,” said Colin neutrally. “Half the time, I don’t even know that Eloise is there. She just slopes off into another century and leaves me to my own devices.”
“You make me sound like Dr. Who!” I protested.
“But prettier.”
“That’s all right then. You know, it’s unfair. You all know what I do, but I don’t know what any of you do—well, except you,” I added to the Vicar.
What was his name? I knew he had been introduced to me by something other than just “Vicar,” but I couldn’t for the life of me remember it. Geoffrey? Godfrey? Sigfried? I was probably safer just sticking to vicar.
“Hazard of my profession,” he said sadly. “It takes all the mystery out of me.”
“Except for the Eucharisticum Mysterium,” Colin pointed out, stretching lazily. “I should think that counts.”
“Yes, but that’s not me, is it?” protested the Vicar. “That’s all God, and you don’t compete for His thunder, not unless you want a plague on your cattle.”
“You don’t have cattle,” Sally said, blowing froth off her beer.
“Chattel, then,” said the vicar. “It’s almost spelled the same.”
“Not unless you’re using an Elizabethan primer,” interjected Colin.
Sally chuckled. “Your chattel, then. I can just see your CD collection coming out in boils. Oooooh. Scary.”
We were straying a bit afield from where I had been trying to go. I made a last-ditch attempt to wrench the conversation back on course. “What about you, Sally?” I asked hastily. “What do you do?”
“Estate agent,” she said, and it took me a moment to remember that in this century, that meant realtor rather than a land manager. She nodded to her sister. “And Joan writes for Manderley.”
Joan was a writer? If anything, I would have had them pegged the opposite way around, with Sally as the artsy one and Joan as the pushy real estate broker. But you never can tell, can you? I know grad students who look dress like lawyers and lawyers who go all bohemian in their spare time.
Then the name of the magazine registered. “You write for Manderley ?”
“Yes.”
Named after the fictional manor house in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the magazine was a cross between a glossy like Country Life and a serious academic journal, devoted to the conservation of England’s major and minor manor houses. Each issue featured articles on subjects ranging from attempts to muster support to save this or that historic site to in-depth looks at restoration projects to more esoteric examinations of material history, such as the spread of chinoiserie textiles in the eighteenth century, with special reference to their sociocultural implications.
As you can tell, I’d done more than my share of guilty newsstand browsing. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could quite justify buying, but some of the articles were just enough over the edge into my field to almost qualify as research.
“I love that magazine!”
Joan crossed one long leg over the other. If she had had a cigarette, she would have blown smoke rings. “Many people do.”
She sounded as though she couldn’t quite see the point of it herself. I wondered if it was an act. She was the one who worked for the magazine, after all. Although I hated having to admit there might be something interesting or likable about her.
Well, maybe not likable.
Taking advantage of the lull, Colin seized his moment to whisk us away. “Brilliant stumbling into you,” he said, steering me back from the table, “but we’re famished. No lunch,” he explained mendaciously.
I suppose from a boy perspective, cheese and crackers in the car doesn’t really count as real food.
“Hmph,” said the Vicar. “We know when we’re not wanted.”
With a backwards wave, I submitted to being led off to a small round table all the way in the far corner of the room, as tucked away as we could be. The table was blackened with age, nicked by generations of knives, forks, and goodness only knew what else.
The waitress flicked a couple of cardboard beer mats down in front of us, dropped two plastic menus, and departed.
So far, I was getting an F for my attempts at espionage. Mata Hari need have no fear of losing her place in the spy pantheon.
“You know,” I said, setting my vodka tonic down on the beer mat and leaning my elbows on the table, “we talked about everyone else, but never what you do.”
“You’re in a wet patch,” pointed out Colin, his menu covering his face right up to the eyes.
For a moment, I thought that might be an outré way of saying, “don’t tread here; you’re on marshy conversational ground,” or something like that. But it only took the feel of damp seeping through the wool of my sweater to make me realize that, no, he was referring to a literal wet spot.
“Damn!” I snatched my elbows off the table and tried to twist it to peer at the damp patch—which, if you’ve ever tried it, is an exercise in futility, and doesn’t make you any less damp.
Colin ran a finger over the shiny spot on the table. “Only water,” he decreed, gallantly scrubbing dry the rest of the table top with his own napkin. “Now, what do you want to eat?”
I’m ashamed to admit that what with one thing and another (fisherman’s pie and chicken tikka masala), we never made it back to the topic of Colin’s occupation. It wasn’t just that I’m easily distractible—although I am—or that my previous attempts had been about as successful as trying to batter down a door with a feather duster. There were so many other things to talk about, from silly one-liners to world affairs to books we’d both read or hadn’t read but thought the other person should read. We were on to coffee before I could remember lifting a fork to eat my fisherman’s pie.
Pink Carnation 05 - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine Page 17