The Lure of the Moonflower Page 23

  Her contortions were doing very interesting things to the already tight bodice of the dress. Jack had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Do you need help with that?”

  “These gowns were designed with a maid in mind,” said Jane ruefully, and turned her back to him. The view from that angle was . . . well . . .

  “I don’t think it was a maid they had in mind,” Jack muttered.

  “What?” Jane turned her head slightly, her hair brushing the backs of his fingers.

  “Nothing,” Jack said quickly.

  Jack backed up as the dress slid down over Jane’s shoulders. There was just a fleeting flash of bare back as she yanked the rough cambric shirt over her head, but—

  “I’ll go see to Marigold,” he said, and fled.

  The weather was his ally. The rain was ice-cold, hard where it struck Jack’s face. The winds had risen, making walking difficult and talking harder. There was no energy for anything but pushing against the elements as Jack, Jane, and their donkey struggled through the town and to the west.

  From the other side of the donkey, Jane gasped something that sounded like “bath.”

  “What?” Jack shouted back.

  Jane turned to look at him, the brim of her hat flapping around her face. “I should have had one while I had the chance.”

  Jack tugged his hat further down around his ears. “We’re getting one now,” he shouted back.

  Jane wrinkled her nose at him, but didn’t retort. She was too busy pushing against the wind, bent nearly double in her attempt to forge forward, her boots making squelching sounds as she dragged one, then the other, out of the mud.

  Jack made a quick decision. “We’ll take the main roads. They should be fairly deserted today.”

  Jane clutched the donkey’s side, using it for balance. “Because of the weather?” The words came out as a gasp.

  “Because it’s Christmas morning.”

  She stumbled, catching herself just in time. “I’d forgot.” Jack couldn’t see her face, just her profile beneath the hat. “Everyone will be with their families.”

  A family she didn’t have. Because of him.

  “Those blisters aren’t healed yet,” Jack said gruffly.

  “Won’t it look odd if I’m riding?” It had been one thing when she was posing as a peasant woman; dressed as a boy, she would be expected to bear her share of the load.

  “To whom?” said Jack, and Jane had to admit he had a point. There was no one in either direction. Unless . . . No. That flash of black was a crow’s wing, not someone lurking by the side of the road. She was fairly sure. “There’s no point in your crippling yourself. We’ll make better time if you ride.”

  He was lying, she knew, but it was a kind lie. Jane accepted Jack’s hand as he helped boost her, again, onto the donkey’s back.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  And that was a lie, too. She would rather walk. At least the pain in her heel, the struggle against the elements, provided a distraction. Clinging grimly to the donkey’s back, the rain dripping down her face like tears, there was nothing to do but think.

  Right now, back at home, they were probably walking from the house to the church in the village, Agnes squealing while Ned menaced her with mistletoe, her mother peering myopically back at them and murmuring something about not muddying her slippers, her father too busy reciting the reading to himself to notice.

  There had been the year that Ned had decked the sheep, and her father had been so furious. And the year that Jane’s cousin Amy had accidentally set fire to her frock poking at the Yule log. Miss Gwen in church, glowering through the gospels and singing louder than anyone else during the hymns.

  But that wasn’t now. Jane caught herself up short before she could tumble too far down that particular path. What was the word Jack had taught her the other day? Saudade. A kind of nostalgia. Nostalgia was, by its very nature, about something that no longer was.

  It was a pleasant sort of pain to imagine that everything meandered on exactly as it had been, to jumble together a decade’s worth of memories and paint them into the definitive picture of Life as It Had Been. But it was as much a fiction as any other fairy story. They weren’t all there in Lower Wooley’s Town. Amy was married and living in Sussex; the last Christmas that Jane had spent home in England hadn’t been in Shropshire at all, but in Kent, at the principal seat of Amy’s husband’s parents, the Marquis and Marchioness of Uppington. There had been a spot of bother with spies getting into the mince pies, but Amy had dealt with the matter in her usual, inimitable fashion. In other words, with a great deal of difficulty with a side of French farce.

  Everyone had scattered. Jane’s older sister, Sophia, was long since married, with four children in Gloucestershire. Miss Gwen had her Colonel Reid and little Plumeria. The church in Lower Wooley’s Town had been spared Miss Gwen’s insistent descant for some time now.

  The world moved on. When Jane had left for France all those years ago, the words “home” and “family” had had a very specific meaning; they were constants. But they weren’t, not really. Homes changed; families changed. The house where she had been raised wasn’t her home anymore, and hadn’t been since early 1803. Jane wouldn’t know what to do with herself there, any more than they would know what to do with her.

  Was that better or worse? Jane didn’t know.

  What she did know was that she heard the sound of hoofbeats on the road behind them. Not the plodding footsteps of the mules usually employed to lead travelers down these roads, but a horse, moving rapidly.

  She was off the donkey in an instant and at Jack’s side, aching heels forgotten. “Someone—”

  “On the road behind us.” Jack finished for her. He was already urging the donkey off the road, onto the verge, into a scrum of fallen rock and low shrubs.

  As a hiding place, it was distinctly inadequate, but to try to lead the donkey up the hill would render them even more conspicuous. Jane frowned at the road, saying urgently, “He’ll see our tracks.”

  It wasn’t the sort of thing she had ever had to worry about in Paris; there were too many people muddling about the streets for one set of footprints to stand out.

  Jack hunkered down behind a shrub, one hand on the donkey’s lead. “There’s nothing for it.” He glanced quickly at Jane. “If someone was following us, he’d be stealthier.”

  Jane wasn’t reassured. “Unless his orders were to sweep in and shoot.” To shoot Jack, that was.

  It would be a brutal but effective strategy. Take them by surprise. Shoot Jack. Grab her.

  “If so,” said Jack grimly, extracting a pistol from his belt, “he’s in for a surprise of his own.”

  He cocked his pistol, training it on the stretch of road ahead of them. Jane turned a wary eye to the slope on their other side. It would be a classic distraction: a lone rider on the road, while others slithered down the slope behind them.

  The hoofbeats were louder now. The rider was almost upon them. Jane glanced at Jack’s profile, his face alert, his hands steady on the pistol.

  There was no reason for the Gardener to come after them, she told herself. No real reason. His goal was the Queen.

  The Pink Carnation would be a prize worth bearing back to Bonaparte. Jack had said it, and he was right.

  She and the Gardener had a truce. Noninterference on neutral ground. But Jack’s words gnawed at her all the same, making her jumpy, making her glance over her shoulder. How long would Nicolas maintain their truce if he decided it no longer suited him to keep it?

  The horse’s rapid hoofbeats slowed as the rider approached, falling from a canter to a trot, from a trot to a walk. He was nearly level with them now.

  The horse slowed and stopped, and the rider swung down from the saddle.

  Jane didn’t need to hear Jack’s quick, indrawn breath to know that he ha
d recognized the rider, too. She didn’t dare turn to look at Jack—couldn’t do anything but wait, like a rabbit in the field as the dogs drew near.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Removing his hat, Mr. Samson gave it an irritable shake, sending water skittering down the brim.

  Samson was still dressed all in rusty black, from his old-fashioned hat to his many-caped cloak. He moved, however, like a far younger and sprier man than Jane had recalled him being. Or, that was, than he had given the impression of being.

  Jane didn’t dare look at Jack. Any movement might dislodge a pebble, or even worse, excite the donkey’s attention. The last thing they needed was a betraying bray. Stillness, she had learned long ago, was her best weapon. Samson might look like he was alone, but if he was, in fact, an emissary of the Gardener, there might be men even now waiting to pounce, concealed among the rocks as Jack and Jane were concealed.

  Samson’s nose twitched. Reaching into his pocket, he removed . . .

  A handkerchief.

  Jane’s throat was dry; it hurt to swallow. She watched as Samson removed the commodious handkerchief from his pocket, dabbing irritably at a patch of mud on his sleeve.

  A pretense? Possibly. Her back ached with maintaining her position; her neck was stiff and her nose was beginning to itch.

  Having completed his ablutions, Samson reached into his saddlebag and removed a map, turning it this way and that and muttering something to himself. It sounded like, “blasted uncivilized . . .”

  Samson consulted his map. He partook of a dry biscuit, complaining to himself about the dryness of it. And then, creaky and cranky, he mounted his horse and trotted down along the road, in the direction of Peniche.

  A small shower of pebbles sifted down from the road. The donkey, freeing itself from Jack’s hold, was nosing along the ground, searching for a few strands of dry winter grass.

  Slowly, Jack lowered his pistol, his eyes still trained on the road. “He seems to have gone.”

  “I don’t like ‘seems.’” Jane straightened, arching her aching back. She had evaded far worse in Paris, in London, and in Venice. She had slipped past assassins, waited out enemies, but she had never felt exposed there as she did here. “I thought Samson was traveling with a muleteer.”

  Jack slid his pistol back into his belt. “He seems the sort to dismiss minions.”

  Jane rubbed her sore neck with two fingers. “And then travel back in the direction he came?” All of their information about the religion procession moving towards Peniche came from Samson. A trap?

  She jumped as Jack’s hands closed around her shoulders, rubbing the sore muscles. “He couldn’t very well move on towards Lisbon. Anyone would be able to tell him that the French are moving north. It would be logical to go back.”

  Jack’s hands were warm and sure on the back of her neck. Jane’s head dipped forward, allowing him better access as she tried to hold on to rational thought. “Towards Peniche?”

  “Towards Porto,” said Jack easily. “If you were Samson, wouldn’t you go back to the heart of the English community? Or what’s left of it?”

  It was too hard to think with Jack’s thumbs digging into her shoulder blades, turning her muscles to mush.

  Twisting away, Jane put a safe yard of ground between them. “There’s too much that doesn’t ring true. Why slow just when he reached the end of our tracks? Why stop here? I don’t like coincidence,” she said belligerently.

  “Neither do I.” Jane had expected an argument. Jack didn’t give her one. Taking the donkey’s lead, he handed it to her. “Are your blisters up to a brief walk?”

  “Brief” was a misnomer. Jack’s route led them north and then west and then south again, doubling back and around. There were no paths here, just trails. Jane clung grimly to the donkey for balance, but she didn’t dare ride. The terrain was too steep; even the donkey was having trouble picking its way. The mist turned to mizzle and the mizzle to rain, sluicing down beneath her collar, soaking through her boy’s clothes.

  “This was not what I meant when I said I wanted a bath,” she muttered through clenched teeth. If she didn’t clench them, they would chatter.

  Jack’s hand was at her elbow, helping her over the scree. “We’re almost there.”

  “Where?” Jane squinted into the twilight, which had fallen barely perceptibly, gloom darkening into more gloom. Her eyes ached from staring at the path at her feet. All of her ached.

  “There.” Jack pointed ahead and Jane caught a glimpse of white stucco walls and red-tiled roofs.

  She stumbled. “A town?”

  “Caldas,” said Jack, as though it should mean something. “Caldas da Rainha.”

  “S-s-surely—” It was hard to sound sensible with one’s teeth rattling. “S-s-surely we would be s-s-safer in the rough?”

  “And have you take a chill?” The tone was the old mocking one, but there was real concern there. “That’s more of a threat at the moment than Samson.”

  Jack moved sure-footed through the deserted marketplace, around a statue of a medieval monarch, past a church along whose pale sides dark stone pillars climbed like moss, until they reached an imposing building of yellow stucco, in the baroque style of the previous century.

  Bypassing the main door, he rapped at a smaller portal on the side. “We’ll stay here for the night.”

  “What is this place?”

  “This,” said Jack smugly, “is a thermal hospital. Or, in layman’s terms, a hot spring. You did say you wanted a bath?”

  “I— A hot spring?”

  “A rather famous one.” Jack held up both hands, palms out. “Don’t get too excited. The waters smell like the pits of hell. But they’re said to be therapeutic. And they’re hot.”

  Hot. Never had a word sounded quite so seductive.

  A gatekeeper holding a lantern opened the door. From his blistering tone, Jane gathered that they were not within operating hours for new admissions.

  A rapid conversation in Portuguese ensued, of which Jane understood very little. The glint of a coin being passed from Jack’s hand to the other man’s, however, required no translation. Nor did the man stepping back from the door and gesturing them forward before taking a quick look, first this way, then that, and locking it firmly behind them.

  Jane Wooliston desperately wanted a bath; the Pink Carnation wasn’t so sure. It felt like a terrible indulgence.

  “Do we have time?” Jane said doubtfully. There was, after all, a queen to be saved.

  “We have to stop for the night somewhere, don’t we?” When he saw her hesitate, Jack propelled her forward with a hand against her back. “Don’t think about walking out now. I already paid the gatekeeper.”

  As they followed the gatekeeper down the corridor, Jane could smell a whiff of rotten eggs. She didn’t care. It was water. And it was hot.

  Every inch of Jane was plastered, head to toe, with mud. There was mud under her hat and between her toes. Her clothes itched. Her hair itched. Even her eyes itched. The idea of submerging herself in hot water, even if it did smell like Satan’s own eau de cologne, was utter heaven.

  They paused in front of a large wooden door, which appeared considerably older than the facade of the building. The gatekeeper fumbled at his waist for the key, muttering softly to himself.

  Jack was right. They were no use to anyone if they fell ill. The Gardener, if he was looking for them, would never think to look for them here. What agents worth their salt stopped at a spa? It was absurd. And therefore safe.

  Or as safe as one could be.

  Jane tucked a mud-stiffened strand of hair behind her ears. “Well, then. In that case . . .”

  Jack’s eyes were amber beneath the brim of his hat. “Happy Christmas, Jane.”

  “But I don’t have anything for you.” Jane looked away from the light in his eyes, feeling strang
ely flustered. “Ordinarily I would have embroidered you a pair of slippers, but . . .”

  “It’s not a quid pro quo.” Jack shoved his hands in his pockets, leaning back against the whitewashed wall as the doorkeeper fitted a massive key into the lock. “In any event, don’t thank me; thank Queen Leonor. She was the one who founded the hospital.”

  The door creaked open into total darkness. Jane caught another strong whiff of rotten eggs.

  She looked at Jack. “You don’t take gratitude well, do you?”

  “No better than you take a gift.” Lowering his voice, Jack added, “If it makes you feel better, I’d thought the Queen might have stopped here. This place is a favorite with the royal family.”

  Jane kept an eye on the gatekeeper’s back as she murmured, “Was that what you were asking?”

  The gatekeeper touched his candle to the single torch that sat in an iron bracket against the wall, illuminating a large, stone-walled room, taken up almost entirely by the rectangular bath in the middle. A narrow wooden walkway banded the pool on all four sides, with a shallow set of stairs leading into the water.

  “Part of it. If the Queen came this way, she didn’t stop to take the waters, although he did confirm that a miraculous statue passed by. He was rather grumpy about it, too—apparently when wonder-working statues make their way through, fewer people feel the need to take the waters.”

  Jane put a hand to her mouth as she crossed tentatively over the threshold. “I can see why. You weren’t joking about the smell.”

  “It’s good for you. Or so they say. I make no warranties.” Jack remained in the doorway, surveying the room with the air of one who had seen it before, which, Jane assumed, he most likely had. “This is one of the older baths.”

  The stone ceiling arched up above their heads, punctuated only by two holes, which might have been for light or ventilation or both. In the dark it was hard to tell. Mist rose from the bath, wreathing the windowless stone walls in an air of mystery.

  “It feels like something out of—” Jane had nearly said something out of one of Miss Gwen’s novels. “Something out of a horrid novel.”