The Lure of the Moonflower Read online

  With a nod of satisfaction, he folded the sheets, tucked them carefully into a leather wallet, and slipped the wallet beneath his jacket.

  Was it her imagination, or did his eyes flick towards the row of cells?

  Imagination, Jane told herself. Imagination and the glint of the lantern light. Hopefully.

  She stayed where she was, pressed against Jack, feeling his breath warm against the back of her neck as de la Mare took an unconscionably long time examining the paintings in the chapel. It felt like an age that he stood in front of the Titian, examining the brushwork—at least, Jane decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it was the brushwork—before he took himself and his lantern back through the door, plunging the room once more into darkness.

  They were both too well trained to move immediately. It could be a trap. There was nothing to do but wait, feeling Jack’s chest rise and fall behind her, his leg mirroring the curve of hers, his thigh hard against her own. Nothing to do but wait as the silence stretched on between them, broken only by the high, clear voice of a nightingale singing its own tale of love and loss.

  The minutes stretched on, agonizing, endless.

  “He’s gone.” Jack’s voice sounded rusty and hoarse. He shifted awkwardly, but it was enough to send Jane scrambling off his lap. “What in the devil was that in aid of?”

  “Not the devil.” Her legs were cramped and she appeared to be tangled in her own skirts. “Calling him went out of fashion a century ago after all of those amateur diabolists got flung into one of Louis the Fourteenth’s dungeons.”

  Jane put a hand down to lever herself up. It landed on something warm and hard that tensed when she touched it.

  Jane snatched her hand away from Jack’s thigh. “You haven’t a flint, have you? It’s rather dark.”

  Jack’s voice sounded rather strangled. “No.” He helped her up by the simple expedient of wrapping both hands around her waist and lifting. “What have diabolists to do with anything?”

  “They haven’t.” Jane felt unaccountably muddled. She blamed it on the darkness. She wasn’t used to such complete darkness. In Paris there was always the low glow of the streetlamps, the haze of coal smoke turning the sky purple and orange. “You’re quite sure you haven’t a flint?”

  “That,” said Jack through gritted teeth, “was not a flint.”

  If she couldn’t see, it meant that Jack couldn’t see either, which meant he couldn’t see the color staining her cheeks.

  “De la Mare was after the cup,” Jane said rapidly. “Weren’t you listening at dinner? He was waxing lyrical about a mystical chalice in the monastery’s collection. Apparently it has words from the kabbalah graven around the base.”

  Jack was feeling his way along the wall; Jane could see him only as a slightly darker shadow. “It all sounded like so much gibberish to me. Nothing but a passel of— Ow.”

  “What was that?”

  “My foot. At least, it used to be.” Jane followed the sound of hopping. “Mind the wall. It kicks back.”

  “You walked into the wall?” For a man who had navigated treacherous ravines on a moonlit night, Jack was being unusually clumsy.

  “It’s dark!” As if realizing how foolish he sounded, Jack lowered his voice. “Sorry. It’s been a long night. I don’t like de la Mare showing up like that. It’s too pat to be coincidence.”

  Ordinarily Jane might have agreed, but she had a different theory. “I don’t think we have anything to fear from Monsieur de la Mare. His eye is on the philosopher’s stone, not a lost queen. He’s an alchemist.”

  “In this day and age?” Jack successfully located the door, wrenching it open. Torchlight, blessed torchlight, filtered dimly up from the lower reaches of the stairs.

  “Sir Isaac Newton believed, and not so long ago.” Everything seemed subtly distorted and out of proportion. Jane blinked, trying to help her eyes readjust themselves. “You must have seen stranger things in your travels.”

  Jack preceded her down the stairs, keeping a practiced eye out for would-be assailants. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’?”

  Jane wrinkled her nose at his back. “I’m not sure I would go that far. But just because I don’t believe doesn’t mean de la Mare doesn’t. The power of belief can be as real as the thing itself.”

  “Or,” suggested Jack, looking back over his shoulder, “it can provide a very good excuse for odd behavior.”

  He held out a hand to help her down the final step. Jane’s ungloved fingers tingled where they touched his.

  She hastily walked ahead, towards the guest wing. “Possibly. But if it is as you say, why is de la Mare still here if the Queen is gone?”

  Jack caught up with her as one wing joined the next. “To set a snare for the Pink Carnation?”

  “Subtle,” said Jane with approbation. “But possibly a little too subtle.”

  Jack raised a brow. “Is it?”

  He didn’t invoke the Gardener’s name. He didn’t need to. They both knew what he meant.

  Nicolas never chose the direct route when a twisty one would serve.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said at last. “The scene in the cell might have been staged; de la Mare might have been set in place to drive us there. But it all seems terribly chancy. And to what end? If they were trying to herd us someplace, wouldn’t there have been a note?”

  “Badly coded?” Jack acknowledged her point, holding open the door of the bedroom. “‘Your Majesty, your devoted subjects await only your presence’?”

  “Something of that sort.” A servant had lit a branch of candles on the writing table, and another on the table by the bed. Light shimmered across the silk brocade of the coverlet, glimmering an invitation. “I feel as though there’s something we’re missing, but I’m too tired to think what.”

  Jack flung himself down in the chair by the writing table, stretching his legs out in front of him. “In between telling me more than I ever wanted to know about the manufacturing of glass, Samson said that the wonder-working saint was making for Peniche. In some haste.”

  Jack tried and failed to smother a yawn, his head dropping back against the carved wooden back of the chair.

  He looked so weary, thought Jane with a pang of tenderness. They were both tired, but it was Jack who had borne the brunt, who had taken the late watches, who had walked while she had ridden.

  She wanted, so very badly, to cradle his head against her shoulder, to stroke his hair until the lines of worry and fatigue disappeared from around his eyes, to lean her cheek against the top of his head and close her eyes, and not think of anything at all.

  Jack stirred in his chair, suppressing another yawn.

  Come to bed, Jane almost said, but the words might be taken the wrong way.

  “You are sure he said Peniche?” she said instead, perching primly on the end of the bed.

  Jack opened his weary eyes, looking at her with bleary resignation. “He was very specific about all of his trials and tribulations. In excruciating detail.”

  Jane traced a pattern in the brocade with one finger. “General Thomières was assigned to garrison Peniche—but his orders were delayed.” She should know. She had been the one who had removed them. She had had a particular interest in the disposition of that fortress. “There was previously a Portuguese garrison in place.”

  “Loyal to the Queen?” Jack had sunk so low in his chair he was practically perpendicular.

  “Presumably.” There was a pattern there, if only she could see it, something dancing just out of reach. “Our marines have taken the island of Berlengas, just off the coast of Peniche. That’s where I was to deliver the Queen, once I located her.”

  Jack cracked open an eye. “Hence the loss of Thomières’s orders? Nicely done.”

  Jane shook her head. “A delay of a few days, no more. He
might have reached Peniche by now.”

  “But it’s a close-run thing.” Jack levered himself upright in the chair. “If time was of the essence . . . Do you think Wickham dispatched another agent?”

  “It’s not impossible.” Wickham hadn’t been entirely keen about contracting the mission to the Pink Carnation. And Jane couldn’t blame him. She knew she wasn’t best qualified. But there had been other considerations and other debts to be paid. And she hadn’t realized then, in the relative comfort of Wickham’s office in the Alien Office, just how ill qualified she was. “None of us is indispensable. Or it might not have been Wickham at all. There’s also Admiral Sir Sidney Smith. He was the one who lost the Queen. He’s better known for acts of daring than calm good judgment.”

  “You think he might have attempted to redeem his honor by coming back for her?”

  “Abandoning the rest of the fleet to his second in command? Possibly.”

  Jane had never had much respect for Sir Sidney, who had made much of his romantic escape from the Temple prison several years back. As far as Jane was concerned, it wasn’t the escape that counted; it was the fact that he had been caught in the first place. But that was Sir Sidney. Flashy. Showy. Careless of his life and those of others in the pursuit of yet another flattering engraving in the illustrated papers.

  Yes, she could imagine Sir Sidney landing at Peniche, sending someone to summon the Queen, and walking right into the teeth of an incoming French garrison.

  If the Queen was in Peniche. If this wasn’t all an elaborate trap.

  “What do you say, princess?” Jack’s jaws cracked on a yawn. “Do we take the bait and make for Peniche?”

  “I think,” said Jane carefully, “that right now you make for bed.”

  “I’ve slept in worse than this chair.”

  “In a French dungeon?” The chair was angular and unyielding, and Jack was already beginning a slow slide towards the floor. “Come to bed. I promise not to seduce you.”

  A slow grin spread across Jack’s sleepy face. “If you put it that way . . . what’s the point?”

  Jane yanked down the covers. “For heaven’s sake. You’re too tired to commit any improprieties.”

  “Is that a challenge?” said Jack, but he ruined it with yet another massive yawn. He plopped down on top of the coverlet, his head hitting the pillow with an audible thump. “A pillow. How decadent.”

  Jane leaned over his prone figure. “You might be even more decadent and try sleeping under the covers instead of over them.”

  “And run the risk of getting used to it?” He turned his head on the pillow, looking at Jane with a seriousness that was more disconcerting than any of his banter. “The covers are yours. Enjoy.”

  Was he trying to preserve her modesty? Given what he knew of her past, that was as noble as it was foolish.

  Or, she realized, with a feeling like lead in her stomach, he might be trying to preserve his own.

  Jane’s cheeks flamed with sudden color. “Take your cloak, at least,” she said abruptly, shaking it out over him.

  It was silly to feel rejected. Jack had more sense than she. They were colleagues, partners. Anything else would only muddy the waters. And the waters, thought Jane with wry humor, were more than muddy enough already.

  It was more comforting to think that than that he didn’t desire her.

  The problem had always been quite the opposite. She had never doubted she was beautiful, as society measured beauty. She had been told so again and again, in poetry and prose. She knew how to fend off advances, but when it came to encouraging them, she was remarkably inexperienced.

  They had been on the road too long; that was all. She was tired and lonely—and if Jack had wanted to kiss her, he would have. She had certainly provided opportunity enough.

  There was only one conclusion. He didn’t want to. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  There were times when it was deeply unpleasant having a logical mind. One by one, Jane snuffed the candles until all the light that was left in the room was the subdued glow of the fire in the brazier.

  As she navigated her way around the edge of the bed in the darkness, she heard Jack’s voice rise sleepily from the depths. “There’s a saying in Portuguese. Amigos de Peniche.”

  Jane peeled back the coverlet. It felt like heaven sliding into a real bed, on a real mattress, beneath a real blanket. The weight of Jack’s body tipped her towards him, her blanket and his cloak a barrier between them.

  “What does it mean?”

  She could feel Jack’s exhalation of breath as he shifted, turning on his side, away from her. “False friends.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Wakey, wakey, princess.”

  Jane blinked blearily up at him. “Is it morning?”

  “Almost.”

  “Almost” by a rather broad margin. The sky was just beginning to turn from black to gray. The nightingale still sang the last ragged notes of his song.

  Jack hadn’t slept well. He found that particularly irritating, given that he prided himself on sleeping anywhere. But anywhere didn’t usually include next to Jane, on a mattress that sagged. A blanket between them wasn’t nearly barrier enough, not when Jack dozed, only to dream of lavender, and woke to the reality of Jane against him.

  Jane had slept the sleep of the exhausted, her head pillowed on Jack’s shoulder, her hair tickling his chin. One hand stretched out across Jack’s chest. He had never seen her like that before, all her watchfulness dissolved in sleep, relaxed, trusting.

  How can there be love where there is no trust?

  It was exhaustion, Jack told himself bluntly. That was all. She was tired past endurance. And this was a real bed, not the makeshift pallet of the previous night.

  But Jack had turned all the same, making a cradle for her of his arms. Rest, true rest, was rare in their line of work. It was seldom one could sleep deeply, secure in the knowledge that someone else was on watch. Especially someone like Jane, who took everything on herself.

  She could be high-handed. Could be? Ha. She was. Autocratic, dictatorial, domineering. But never beyond reason. That, Jack realized, was what made all the difference. She might be accustomed to acting unilaterally, but she wasn’t beyond explaining her reasoning, or, when it came to it, admitting when she might be in the wrong.

  She would never fly into rages like his mother, never retreat someplace he couldn’t reach her.

  Where in the devil had that come from? Jack tried to push the thought aside, but once there, it didn’t quite want to go away. Jack could remember slinking up to his mother, never sure if she was going to greet him with a kiss or a cuff. Or, on that final day, with a knife in her breast.

  Did she die because I was bad? Jack had asked his nurse, thinking of the broken clasp on a necklace, of singing too loudly when he had been told to be quiet, of half a dozen other minor infractions.

  But she had only held him closer, humming to him.

  His father, when cornered, had sighed, and said only, She wasn’t a happy woman, your mother.

  But all Jack had taken from that was that he might have made her happy—they both might have made her happy—and they had failed. Love was terrifying. It brought with it the uncertainty of trying to please another person, trying to understand another person, the mechanisms of whose mind were, by their very nature, opaque.

  In the end, it just wasn’t worth it.

  But when he looked down at Jane’s pale profile, serene in sleep, Jack felt some of that old fear leaching away. It was impossible to imagine Jane behaving in any way that wasn’t fundamentally fair.

  Stabbing oneself in front of one’s three-year-old son wasn’t fair.

  She wasn’t a happy woman. For the first time, Jack thought he understood some of what his father had meant. There were some so locked in their own minds that they couldn’t get out.


  And that hadn’t been his fault, or his father’s, or anybody else’s. It just was.

  Jane had stirred in her sleep, burying her head deeper into his chest, and Jack had felt an almost painful feeling of tenderness. In sleep, it seemed rather incredible that a collection of bones and flesh could contain all the things that made her Jane, the sharp mind, the wary humor, those flashes of vulnerability that made her achingly, endearingly human.

  What was he going to do next, write sonnets? Jack hastily turned his back, yanking open the curtain. “Time to be back on the road. Our friends of last night are most likely what they seem, but if they’re not—why make it easy for them?”

  Jane regarded him blearily. She looked damnably appealing, warm and flushed from the layers of blankets, a crease on her cheek from the pillow, her hair escaping in wisps from last night’s coiffeur. “We’re leaving? Now?”

  Jack couldn’t blame her for sounding doubtful. The sky was charcoal gray and distinctly uninviting.

  The bed, on the other hand . . .

  “As soon as you can dress.” Jack tossed a pair of breeches, a shirt, and a jacket on the coverlet. “I liberated these from the poor box. Don’t worry—I left a donation in return.”

  “I wasn’t. Worrying.” Jane rubbed her fingers against her eyes, a gesture Jack found strangely endearing, so different from her usual polished poise. “I take it this means a change of role?”

  “Anyone looking for us will be looking for a woman and a man,” said Jack defensively, “not a man and a boy.”

  “I wasn’t arguing.” Jane wiggled off the side of the bed, her white satin gown tugging up to reveal a flash of ankle and calf. Jack turned aside as she stepped into the breeches, pulling them up beneath her skirt. “How far to Peniche?”

  “Under good conditions? A day.”

  The wind rattled the casement window, followed by the ominous clatter of hard-driving rain. “In other words,” said Jane, twisting to try to reach the buttons on the back of the dress’s bodice, “two days.”