The Lure of the Moonflower Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE PINK CARNATION SERIES

  “Not only does Willig deliver captivating characters and a lively plot—she effortlessly channels Austen’s deliciously sharp sense of wit into her own sparkling prose.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Willig is writing the best Regency-era fiction today.”

  —Booklist

  “Willig’s writing is witty and smart, and her addictive series sparkles with lively dialogue, intelligent characters, and great plotting, which is why readers keep coming back for more. Willig represents the Regency romantic mystery at its best.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This tenth bloom to be added to Willig’s popular series is just as fresh and satisfying as any of the other flowers in the best literary bouquet ever created! Fans can rejoice in finding the outstanding features they’ve come to count on: intriguing historical details, double-crossing deceptions, complex characters, and plenty of romance.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Eloise, of course, is amazing, but it’s truly the plot . . . that shines . . . wonderful!”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Humor, love, espionage—yet again there is absolutely nothing that this incredible author leaves out. . . . [These stories] just keep getting better and better every time!”

  —Once Upon a Romance

  “Willig’s sparkling series continues to elevate the Regency romance genre.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Jane Austen for the modern girl . . . sheer fun!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd

  “An engaging historical romance, delightfully funny and sweet. . . . Romance’s rosy glow tints even the spy adventure that unfolds . . . fine historical fiction.”

  —The Newark Star-Ledger

  “Another sultry spy tale. . . . The author’s conflation of historical fact, quirky observations, and nicely rendered romances results in an elegant and grandly entertaining book.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “There are few authors capable of matching Lauren Willig’s ability to merge historical accuracy, heart-pounding romance, and biting wit.”

  —BookPage

  “History textbook meets Bridget Jones.”

  —Marie Claire

  “A fun and zany time warp full of history, digestible violence, and plenty of romance.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Clever [and] playful.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Studded with clever literary and historical nuggets, this charming historical-contemporary romance moves back and forth in time.”

  —USA Today

  “Willig has great fun with the conventions of the genre, throwing obstacles between her lovers at every opportunity . . . a great escape.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A deftly hilarious, sexy novel.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Eloisa James

  “A merry romp with never a dull moment! A fun read.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh

  “This genre-bending read—a dash of chick lit with a historical twist—has it all: romance, mystery, and adventure. Pure fun!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot

  ALSO BY LAUREN WILLIG

  The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

  The Masque of the Black Tulip

  The Deception of the Emerald Ring

  The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

  The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

  The Mischief of the Mistletoe

  The Orchid Affair

  The Garden Intrigue

  The Passion of the Purple Plumeria

  The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © Lauren Willig, 2015

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Random House, 2015

  Excerpt from The Secret History of the Pink Carnation copyright © Lauren Willig, 2005

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  New American Library and the New American Library colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about Penguin Random House, visit penguinrandomhouse.com.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Willig, Lauren.

  The lure of the Moonflower: a Pink Carnation novel/Lauren Willig.

  p. cm.—(Pink Carnation; 12)

  ISBN 978-0-698-18347-6

  1. Women spies—Fiction. 2. Nobility—Portugal—Fiction.

  3. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.I575L87 2015

  813’.6—dc23 2015012935

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my agents, Joe Veltre and Alexandra Machinist; to my editors, Laurie Chittenden, Kara Cesare, Erika Imranyi and Danielle Perez; to my publishers, Brian Tart and Kara Welsh; and to everyone on the team in production, publicity and marketing at Dutton and NAL for seeing the Pink Carnation series through from its inception in 2003 to its final chapter in 2015. So many thanks to you all!

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by Lauren Willig

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Acknowledgments

  Historical Note

  Readers Guide

  An Excerpt from The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Sussex, 2005

  Reader, I married him.

  Or, rather, I was in the process of marrying him, which is a much more complicated af
fair. Jane Eyre didn’t have to plan a wedding involving three transcontinental bridesmaids, two dysfunctional families, and one slightly battered stately home.

  Of course, she did have to deal with that wife in the attic, so there you go.

  There might occasionally be bats in Colin’s belfry, but there were no wives in his attic. I’d checked.

  “Hey! Ellie!” My little sister drifted into the drawing room, where I was busily and profanely engaged in tying bows on the chairs that had been set up for the reception. Silk ribbon, I was learning, might be attractive, but it was also more slippery than a French spy in a Crisco factory. “Delivery for you! Is that supposed to look that way?”

  “It’s a postmodern take on the classic bow,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. “Think . . . Foucault’s bow.”

  Jillian cocked a hip. “Or you could just call it lopsided.”

  “O, ye of little faith.” I abandoned my attempts at Martha Stewartry. The guests wouldn’t care if there were bows or not. They just wanted us to be happy. And an open bar. “You said there was a delivery? Please tell me it’s the port-a-loos.”

  “There’s a perfectly good bathroom down the hall. If you want to, you know, wash off that thing.” Jillian gestured at the tectonic layers of mud that were beginning to crack on my face.

  No, I hadn’t fallen in the garden. I had fallen prey to my oldest friend, Pammy, and her Big Box of Beauty Aids. Which appeared to involve highly priced purple-tinted garden mud.

  “Not for me. For the reception,” I said patiently. Well, sort of patiently. My mud mask was beginning to itch.

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to itch.

  “Not unless it’s one for midgets,” said Jillian.

  “Cutlery? A tent?” I followed Jillian down the hall, ticking off items, and rather wishing we’d thought to invest in item number one: a wedding planner.

  ’Twas the afternoon before my wedding, and all through Selwick Hall nothing was where it was supposed to be, not one thing at all. We had chosen to be married in Colin’s not-so-stately home, on the theory that if you pour enough champagne, no one will notice the cracks in the plaster or the faded bits in the upholstery. We were having the ceremony in the drawing room and the reception on the grounds, which had sounded romantic in theory.

  Like many things that sounded romantic in theory, it was proving more difficult in fact. Right now I was awaiting the delivery of a tent, several cartloads of china, folding chairs, half a dozen port-a-loos, and Colin’s best man, who had inexplicably failed to arrive, although his explanation through the crackling cell phone connection had hinted at obstacles including pile-ups on the A23, an overturned lorry just out of London, and the sheeted dead rising and gibbering in the streets.

  Translation: he’d overslept and was just now leaving.

  My future mother-in-law, on the other hand, had arrived safe and sound, which just went to show that there were times when the universe didn’t have its priorities straight.

  With twenty-four hours left to go, I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t have taken my mother’s advice and just had the wedding in New York.

  But it was Selwick Hall that had kind of, sort of brought us together. Or at least given us the opportunity to find each other, depending on how you preferred to look at it.

  I hadn’t come to England for love. I’d crossed the pond in search of a spy. And if that makes me sound like an extra from a James Bond movie, it couldn’t be further from the truth. The spy I was looking for was long since out of commission. My hunting grounds weren’t grotty clubs or the glass-walled lair of a villain with a taste for seventies-style furnishings, but the archives of the British Library and the Public Records Office in Kew; my weapons, a few heavily underlined secondary sources and ARCHON, which might sound like the sort of acronym chosen by a criminal cartel, but was really the electronic search engine for manuscript sources in the UK. Plug in a name and—voilà!—it would locate that person’s papers. Letters, diaries, random ramblings, you name it.

  There was one slight problem: To find the papers, you needed a name. Spies tend not to use their real names. Unless they’re Bond, James Bond. I’d always wondered why, with such a public profile, no one had succeeded in bumping him off between missions.

  The Pink Carnation hadn’t made the same mistake. The spy who gave the French Ministry of Police headaches, who had caused Bonaparte to gnash his molars into early extraction, didn’t go by his real name. He was everywhere and nowhere, a pastel shadow in the night. Oh, people had speculated about the Carnation’s identity. Some argued that he wasn’t even English, but a Frenchman, cunningly pretending to be an Englishman playing a Frenchman. And if that isn’t enough to make you want to reach for a gin and tonic, I don’t know what is.

  But I had one lead. Sort of. When you’re desperate, “sort of” starts looking pretty good. According to Carnation lore, the Carnation had his start in the League of the Purple Gentian, a spy unmasked fairly early in the game as one Lord Richard Selwick, younger son of the Marquess of Uppington.

  So I’d done what any desperate grad student would do: I’d written to all the remaining descendants of Lord Richard Selwick, asking, pretty please, if anyone might happen to have any family papers lurking about in the attic or under a bed or tucked away among the lining of their sock drawers.

  Did I mention that Colin just happened to be a descendant of that long-ago Lord Richard?

  I found documents. I found love. I found the identity of the Pink Carnation. I didn’t quite find my doctorate, but that was another story. It was all ribbons and roses and happily-ever-afters, or at least it would be as long as the caterers catered, my mother didn’t kill my future mother-in-law before the ceremony, and all the bits and pieces made their way into place by roughly ten a.m. tomorrow.

  I say ten a.m. because we were doing this the traditional way, morning suits and all. Everyone would be blotto by noon and hungover by sunset, but that seemed a small price to pay for the sight of Colin in a morning suit.

  And yes, I may have watched Four Weddings and a Funeral one too many times.

  “Delivery?” I reminded Jillian.

  “It’s a box,” said Jillian informatively. “I signed for it for you.”

  “Did it clink?” I asked plaintively. Booze. Booze would be good. Wedding guests would forgive lopsided bows and a missing best man as long as there was enough booze.

  “See for yourself.” The deliverymen, in the way of deliverymen, had dropped the box smack in the middle of the hall, where it was currently impersonating a large speed bump.

  Just what our wedding was missing: a do-it-yourself obstacle course.

  Although, come to think of it . . .

  I abandoned that tempting thought. Survival of the fittest is a principle best not applied to wedding guests. The person most likely to wipe out on the box was me, after a few gin and tonics too many at our rehearsal dinner.

  I was not looking forward to the rehearsal dinner, that intimate occasion where one’s nearest and dearest can shower blessings on the impending nuptials. The big problem was that Colin’s nearest . . . Let’s just say they weren’t always dearest. There was enough bad blood there to give a vampire indigestion.

  It was tough enough for Colin that his mother had run off with a younger man, a man only a decade older than Colin. Worse that she had done so while his father was dying, slowly and painfully, of cancer. But the real kicker? The younger man was Colin’s own cousin.

  It got even more fun when you factored in Colin’s sister joining with his mother and stepfather in a coup against Colin the previous year, when they’d used the combined voting power of their shares in Selwick Hall to saddle Colin with a film company on the grounds of the Hall.

  Never mind that Colin was the one who actually, you know, lived there.

  For the most part, it had all
been smoothed over. Colin and his sister were speaking again—just. And Colin and his stepfather had reached a tentative peace. As for Colin and his mother . . . that relationship made no more sense to me than it ever had.

  The one saving grace in the mix—other than my groom himself, of course—was Colin’s aunt, Arabella Selwick-Alderly. I wasn’t sure whether it was her natural air of quiet dignity or the fact that she knew where all the bodies were buried, but either way, she was very effective at exerting a calming influence over feuding Selwicks.

  I looked down at the box in the middle of the hall. It wasn’t a box so much as a trunk, the old-fashioned kind with a domed lid and brass bands designed to hold it together through squall, shipwreck, and clumsy customs officials. It looked as though it had been sent direct from Sir Arthur Wellesley, from his headquarters in Lisbon.

  “Maybe it’s a wedding present?” said Jillian dubiously.

  I looked from Jillian to the trunk, a smile breaking across my face. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had already given us a wedding present, and a rather nice one: a Georgian tea set, made of the sort of silver that bent the wrist when you tried to lift it. But there was no one else this could be from.

  Unless the Duke of Wellington really had sent his campaign trunk from beyond the grave.

  Ignoring the flaking mud on my face, I knelt down before the trunk. The box looked like it had been through several wars. The boards were warped with age and the elements; the brass tacks were crooked in parts and missing in others. But it had held together. Rather like the Selwick family.

  It was also quite firmly locked. Again like the Selwick family.

  I sat back on my haunches. “Was there a note? A key?”

  Jillian held up her hands, palms up. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the messenger.”

  “Eloise?” I could hear the slap of my mother’s Ferragamo pumps in the passage from the kitchen to the hall. Enter Mother, stage right, looking harried. “There’s a circus tent going up in your backyard.”