The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read online

  Jane raised a brow. “For deeds of great valor?”

  “No,” said the Chevalier sadly, but there was a glint in his eyes. “For cupidity beyond imagining. It was, I fear, the ill-famed Fourth Crusade, and this most unprincipled knight returned from the sack of Byzantium with so much purloined silver plate that his peers enviously dubbed him the Knight of the Silver Tower. I assure you, it was no honor, but those of his line have stubbornly held to it ever since.”

  “Most families have equally ignominious origins when one comes down to it,” said Jane.

  The Chevalier’s smile was only for Jane. “Does yours?”

  “We’re quite dull, really. A great-grandparent too many greats back to remember took a fancy to a particular patch of soil in Shropshire and we’ve been there ever since.”

  “Bucolic, perhaps,” said the Chevalier gallantly, “but never dull.”

  That was quite enough of that. Gwen glowered at the upstart Frenchman taking up valuable space and even more valuable time. “How do you come to be in our front hall?”

  Jane cast her a quelling glance. “The Chevalier has been kindly assisting us in our inquiries.”

  “Oh, have you, then?”

  The Chevalier affected a half bow. “There are places that a man might go that I fear are barred to you ladies. As I have told Miss Wooliston, my curricle and escort are at her disposal.”

  “How very . . . helpful of you. To what do we owe this solicitude? You’re not related to the Reid girl, are you?” She was reasonably sure the Colonel would have mentioned a Frenchman running amuck on his family tree. On the other hand, given his amorphous gaggle of offspring, one couldn’t be sure. She doubted he was a Reid pretending to be a Frenchman, but one never knew. “You don’t happen to be named Jack, do you?”

  “Er, no.” The Chevalier was all that was apologetic. “Forgive me for that oversight. My elder brother was a Jean-Marie, but we have no Jacques of which I know. My family calls me Nicolas. Or occasionally that limb of Satan. The two appear to be largely interchangeable.”

  He was making eyes at Jane again. Gwen rapped her parasol on the ground, calling them both to attention. “What’s your interest in the girls, then?”

  “The Chevalier’s cousin is a teacher at the school,” said Jane calmly. “You met her last week. Mademoiselle de Fayette. The girls were on her hall.”

  “She takes this matter very much to heart,” said the Chevalier with seeming sincerity. The emphasis on “seeming.” Earnestness did not become him. That face of his was made for mischief and deviltry, from his too-exuberantly curling locks to his laughing eyes.

  “Hmph,” said Gwen. “So you’ve taken it upon yourself to clear her good name, have you?”

  “Something of that nature.” The Chevalier indulged in one of those indeterminate Gallic gestures somewhere between a wave and a shrug. “Delphine is the only family I have. I take my responsibility to her quite seriously indeed.”

  Gwen vaguely remembered the French mistress, small and sweet faced, meek in the gray gown of a schoolmistress. She certainly bore no resemblance to the imp of a dandy in their front hall, rigged out in the height of fashion down to the cameo fobs on his watch chain.

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Your cousin, you say?”

  “Yes.” He winked at Jane before turning back to her chaperone, as innocent as a choirboy. “My mother was the Comtesse de Brillac.”

  “An old and honorable line,” Jane said diplomatically.

  The Chevalier shrugged. “Once. Perhaps. Of all my family, Delphine and I were the only ones to escape the bite of the guillotine.”

  There was one problem with his story. “Why are you then not the Comte de Brillac rather than the knight of the so lengthy silver tower?” asked Gwen accusingly.

  The merriment fled from the Chevalier’s face. He looked, for a moment, considerably older than his presumed age, harsh lines marring the skin around his mouth. “I would not take his title.”

  The words echoed harshly through the hall, at odds with the delicacy of the too-fussy mirror that hung on the wall, the mincing tile squares on the floor.

  The Chevalier shook himself back to the present. He raised his eyebrows at Jane with a wry expression, the charm firmly back in place. “How could I take his title, knowing the end he met? I had a brother, too, my older brother, Jean-Marie. That title would one day have been his. I will not profit from his death.”

  “Your feelings do you credit,” said Jane gently.

  Gwen refrained from a snort.

  What was Jane thinking, letting this French coxcomb accompany her on her inquiries? The man himself might be nothing to do with the school, but his cousin—his presumed cousin, Gwen corrected herself darkly—was the mistress in charge of Agnes’s hall. She would have been a prime suspect even without the accent.

  The Chevalier spread his hands. “A wound is a wound only so long as it remains open. That life was a lifetime ago—and I find nothing to complain of in my existence here. It is Delphine who has suffered most, and if I can make her easier in any way, I shall.”

  “Charming,” said Gwen combatively. “Nicely said. Why, then, is she teaching at that ridiculous school?”

  The Chevalier’s coat alone cost more than a teacher’s salary for a year. It certainly cost more than Gwen had to her name. For a moment, she thought of the Colonel’s coat, the cheap fabric stiff with blood. She had wrung it out over the basin in that little inn room, doing her best to rehabilitate it. He had donned the stained and crumpled garment without a murmur.

  But this wasn’t about the Colonel; it was about the Chevalier. There was something about the situation that didn’t add up, and Gwen was determined to winkle it out.

  The Chevalier spread out his hands, not one whit abashed. “You mean when I have every worldly good, all of which I am prepared to shower upon her?”

  “If you wish to put it that way, yes.” It was exactly what she’d meant, yet somehow he’d managed to turn it to his credit.

  “She refuses to accept my aid.” The Chevalier turned mournful eyes on Jane. “She escaped only with the clothes on her back, through the good offices of your—how was it again?—your Purple Gentian.”

  There was a charged silence in the hall.

  “I believe I have heard the name,” said Jane demurely. “His exploits were much in the papers in my youth.”

  “Nonsense, all of it,” said Gwen brusquely. “Spies flying through windows, leaving notes on pillows—pure palaver.”

  The Chevalier turned his attention back to her. “You, then, are not an admirer of these men?”

  “I might be if I believed the half of it,” grumbled Gwen. “Pure puffery, puffery and nonsense.”

  The Chevalier gave her a crooked smile. “Yet that nonsense, as you call it, saved the life of my cousin. I find I cannot bring myself to dismiss these men so entirely as you do, however absurd their noms de guerre.” He held out a hand to Jane. “I fear I overstay my welcome. I will call for you tomorrow?”

  To Gwen’s annoyance, Jane allowed the bounder to possess himself of her hand, to bow over it, dusting a kiss over the back of it. It wasn’t the sort of kiss of which a chaperone might justly complain. He didn’t hold her hand too long or essay a rogue’s trick like turning her hand to press a kiss into the palm.

  But there was something undeniably intimate about it nonetheless. It might have been the way his eyes held Jane’s as he raised his head, or the way Jane looked back at him, as though she were equal parts apprehension and fascination.

  Gwen had seen Jane flirt with many admirers, but she had never seen her look like that.

  “Yes, tomorrow.” Jane walked with her admirer to the door, Gwen trailing along behind, fuming helplessly. “We shall see you at the opera?”

  The Chevalier retrieved his hat and gloves from the butler, pressing the entire mess of belongings to his heart as he said, “I shall count the minutes.”

  He clapped the hat upon his head an
d departed.

  “I hope all that counting doesn’t overtax his mathematical skills,” muttered Gwen. Through the window, she could see the Chevalier climbing into a flashy high-perch phaeton, painted an impractical pale blue.

  “Welcome back,” said Jane drily. “I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

  Gwen followed her into the morning room, which, like all the other rooms in the Woolistons’ rented house, had been relentlessly decorated by someone who had lurched at good taste and missed by the length of several yards of bric-a-brac. Portraits of someone’s idealized ancestors leered at them from above the fireplace, interspersed with Watteau shepherdesses, Fragonard fetes, and miscellaneous simpering putti.

  “I see you’ve been busy in my absence,” said Gwen pugnaciously, flinging her reticule down on the settee. “Entertaining dubious gentlemen callers.”

  “Would you like some tea?” suggested Jane, entirely unperturbed. “Some cakes perhaps?”

  Gwen wasn’t going to let herself be distracted by cakes, not even the little iced ones that the Woolistons’ cook made so well.

  “Your Chevalier was lying,” she said, thumping down on the settee next to her reticule. The impractical edifice buckled but held.

  “Yes, I know,” said Jane calmly. She seated herself on a silk-upholstered chair by the fire. “I’m not so green as that. I did have him investigated.”

  “And?”

  “His father is the Comte de Brillac; his mother, father, and sister all died in the Terror.”

  “But?” Gwen prompted. Jane had an aggravating habit of dragging out her revelations. It drove Gwen absolutely mad, which was probably why Jane did it.

  “The tender filial picture he presented might not have been entirely the case. Brillac publicly disowned him at birth, refusing to acknowledge him as his son. The Comtesse de Brillac tried several times to flee her husband but was every time brought back.”

  “So Brillac was a brute and your Chevalier was a by-blow.”

  “Or his father believed him so. According to my sources, the Comte’s favorite epithet for his second born was ‘you bastard son of an Englishman.’ It is unclear,” added Jane delicately, “whether the national identification was meant descriptively or pejoratively.”

  “Yes, but what is the man about now?” Gwen brushed aside the question of the Chevalier’s parentage. That sort of tittle-tattle was all very well for the readers of scandal sheets, but they had more pressing business in hand. “You say he has been assisting you?”

  “Oh, yes, most assiduously,” said Jane blandly.

  Gwen gave her a look. “That man is after something.”

  “And it’s probably not my person,” said Jane cheerfully. “That’s why I accepted his offer. I’d rather have him under my eye.”

  Was that the only reason?

  She had seen Jane flirt for England many times. She did it very well, with wide, admiring eyes, a coy glance here, a demure smile there. It bore very little resemblance to what she had seen with the Chevalier in that hallway.

  But no matter how Gwen tried, she couldn’t find the words to ask her. They had no vocabulary for navigating the shoals of sentiment. After two years of their common enterprise, they were expert at dissecting facts. Feelings they gave a wide berth, unless they were other people’s feelings and might somehow have a bearing on the great game of nations that they played. Sentiment, personal sentiment, had no place in their work. It was nothing more than a snare and a distraction.

  Gwen only hoped that Jane would remember that.

  Since she could say none of that, she said, gruffly, “What have you discovered thus far?”

  Jane folded her hands neatly in her lap. To all outward appearances, she was the very image of a well-bred young lady, a picture in white muslin in a prettily appointed morning room. It was only her voice that was at odds with her appearance, brisk and businesslike, her voice and the calculating glint in her eye. Gwen found herself reassured. This was the Jane she knew, detached and analytical.

  “The school is hopeless,” she said. “There are half a dozen ways in and out, including a convenient trellis that could easily be scaled by a determined man or a fleeing girl.”

  “Harder to carry someone out that way,” Gwen pointed out. “A kidnapper might get in, but he’d have a hard time getting out again.”

  “True,” said Jane. “Especially with two.”

  She had that look in her eye. There was something she wasn’t telling. “You know something,” said Gwen sternly. “Out with it.”

  “There is,” said Jane, “a small hut on the grounds, not far from the main house. It was previously the abode of the gardener, before the last gardener was let go. I found this beneath the dresser.”

  She drew something out of her pocket and laid it on the table. It was a trumpery thing, a bracelet of gilt and pale pink enamel, with tiny seed pearls embedded in a pattern in the plaques. Gwen recognized it instantly.

  “That is part of the set you gave Agnes for Christmas.”

  “Yes, and look.” Jane turned the bracelet over. “The clasp isn’t broken.”

  Gwen took the bracelet from her, examining it. The silver gilt was worn off in places, but it was the wear that would come with regular use, not anything that betokened foul play. “Which means it is unlikely that it was torn from her wrist. Were there any other signs of a struggle in the cottage?”

  “No,” said Jane. “Of course, it’s been three weeks, so someone might have tidied the place since. But there were ashes in the fireplace. They did not look over a year old.”

  Gwen looked hard at Jane, trying to winkle out what she was surmising. “You think the girls stayed there. Of their own volition.”

  Jane nodded. “Possibly. Or someone made every attempt to make it look as though they did. There was also,” she added, as though it were a matter of minor import, “a schedule for the London stage on the table.”

  Two young ladies, fleeing their select seminary for adventures in town, leaving their timetable behind . . .

  “No,” said Gwen. “It’s too easy.”

  “That was my thought too.” Jane rose, her skirt drifting gently around her as she wandered towards the mantelpiece, ticking off theories on her fingers. “One possibility: The girls were lured out into the garden, abducted, and held overnight in the gardener’s cottage. The kidnapper left the stage schedule as a false trail.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Gwen. “Why would the kidnapper keep them on the school grounds overnight? There would be too much chance of being discovered. Someone might have heard them struggling—and, again, you say there was no sign of a struggle—or seen the smoke from that fire. No. I don’t believe it. Next?”

  “Possibility the second.” Jane took a deep breath. “The girls planted their own false trail, deliberately leaving the bracelet to let us know they had been there.”

  Gwen pulled at a loose thread on the silk upholstery. That made somewhat more sense. The girls, unused to being on their own, would have wanted someplace familiar to shelter. “Yes, but it still doesn’t tell us where they went. Or why they went,” she added as an afterthought.

  Jane leaned an elbow against the mantelpiece, regarding her chaperone seriously. “Do you incline towards the kidnapping theory?”

  “I don’t believe they were taken from the school, but there is some sort of foul play afoot.” Gwen left off tugging at the upholstery. “Colonel Reid and I were attacked in Bristol.”

  “I gathered as much from your note,” said Jane.

  Gwen shrugged. “I deemed it better to be oblique. They might merely have been footpads, but one complained to his fellows that he hadn’t been warned that we would be armed.”

  “Which suggests a planned attack,” said Jane. “On you or on the Colonel?”

  “I don’t know. All three rushed the Colonel, although that might have been an attempt to immobilize him and make off with me.”

  Jane was quiet, thinking. She looked like a statue
, entirely still, her muslin dress falling in the required classical folds by her feet. The only jarring note was the locket she wore on a ribbon around her neck. On the other side lay her signet, the sign of the Pink Carnation.

  “They might just have been footpads,” said Gwen.

  Jane smiled wryly, her expression too old, too world-weary for someone so young. “I thought you didn’t believe in coincidence.” She stepped lightly away from the mantel, her usual mask back in place. “Speaking of coincidence, I have secured us the tickets to the opera that you required. Aurelia Fiorila sings the part of Semira in Artaxerxes.” She raised a brow. “I hear it is much anticipated.”

  Gwen rose too, lifting her reticule by the strings. Her dirty dress made her skin itch. She was yearning for a bath and some clean linen, but she had to ask, “Will the Chevalier be attending this much-anticipated event as well?”

  “He will be most honored and delighted to escort us.”

  Gwen looked back over her shoulder at her charge. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, missy?” she demanded. “Love—”

  “Has no place in grand schemes, I know,” said Jane patiently. “Who said anything about love? You yourself once told me to keep one’s enemies close enough to poke with a parasol.”

  “Yes,” said Gwen crossly. “Arm’s length.”

  “Shall I ring for water for a bath for you?” said Jane, crossing the foyer ahead of her.

  Gwen scowled at the back of her charge’s head, which was, as always, impeccably coiffed, no hair out of place. Her dress was spotless, her back straight, everything was entirely in order, and, yet, Gwen had a slight sense of impending doom.

  “I have a slight sense of impending doom,” she declared. The words resonated rather nicely in the marble hallway.

  Jane turned, one brow lifted. “A slight sense of impending doom? Isn’t that rather like saying that one has a mild case of bubonic plague?”

  “That,” said Gwen, stalking towards the stairs and the promised bath, “isn’t the least bit funny.”

  “Plague seldom is,” Jane agreed.