The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read online

  Jeremy, who looked like he had been about to make some kind of crack, closed his mouth.

  Colin looked thoughtful. “And what is this jewel?”

  “Unspecified.” A collective sigh went around the table. “I’m not at the end yet, though. Hey! It’s five volumes long. I’ve had one day.” With a minimum of sleep the night before, what with staying up half the night to preread everything I’d given to Jeremy. “And believe me when I tell you that it reads as if Danielle Steel had a love child with Vincent Price.”

  Both men shuddered.

  “It’s rather fascinating, really,” I said. “At least from a lit-crit point of view. The real heroine isn’t the ingénue; it’s Plumeria, who’s her preceptress—that’s the word they use. Plumeria and the girl’s father, Sir Magnifico, battle all sorts of obstacles to get to the Silver Tower, where the girl is being held, only to discover that the girl has fallen in love with her captor, just as Magnifico has formed an attachment for Plumeria. It’s all parallels and mirrors. In some ways, it’s a little bit like Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The characters are constantly being tested and forced to question their true natures.”

  “Fascinating,” said Jeremy flatly.

  “Whatever this magical jewel is that Amarantha carries, she keeps it in a magic mirror, which only she has the power to unlock.” Elbows on the table, chin on my hands, I was in full-blown grad student mode. “I think the mirror is meant to be a metaphor for her virtue or something like that. If the Knight of the Silver Tower smashes it, he gets the jewel and lives, but some unspecified doom will come upon her. If she keeps it intact, he’s doomed to spend eternity with his goblin crew. It’s her salvation or his.”

  To my surprise, it was Jeremy who quoted the obvious lines. “‘The mirror crack’d from side to side / “The curse is come upon me,” cried the Lady of Shalott.’”

  “It does make you wonder if Tennyson read The Convent of Orsino,” I said. “They’re both set in a pseudo-medieval fantasyland, although Tennyson’s is explicitly Arthurian and Miss Gwen’s is set in some unspecified place on the Continent that might be either France or Italy or a mishmash of both.”

  “What happens?” said Colin. He couldn’t resist one-upping his cousin. “Singing her song she dies?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t made it to the end yet.”

  A depressed silence fell.

  It was Jeremy who perked up first. He lifted his head, a gleam of cupidity lighting his eyes. “You say the jewel is hidden in a mirror. . . .”

  “It’s a metaphor,” I said quickly. “Like that china vase in the Pope poem.”

  Colin was more to the point. “I’m not smashing all the mirrors in the house.”

  “Not all the mirrors,” said Jeremy persuasively, and I got a glimpse of the face he must show to his clients. “But if there were one from the right time period . . .”

  “No,” said Colin.

  Jeremy took a delicate sip of his wine. “Afraid of the seven years’ bad luck, cousin?”

  Colin crackled his knuckles. “Maybe I don’t believe in wantonly destroying something that has managed to survive this long.”

  Okay. We weren’t talking about mirrors anymore.

  “Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s worth deifying,” said Jeremy snarkily. “You heard my grandmother. You can’t turn the old place into a shrine.”

  Nothing could have been more calculated to infuriate Colin. “No,” he said. “You’d just sell off anything worth a quid and play squire with the rest.”

  “You’ve always wanted to keep me out.” The gloves were off now and there was no stopping it. “You and your father, treating me like trash.”

  “He was right, wasn’t he? You couldn’t even wait until he was dead before—” Colin broke off, his lips pressing tightly together.

  “Right,” said Jeremy, kicking back in his chair. “That was all my doing. You never bothered to ask your mother for her side of it, did you? Your father never appreciated—”

  Colin didn’t let him finish. “And you did?”

  “Yes.” The intensity with which Jeremy said it made me sit up and take notice. “Caroline was wasted on your father.”

  I’d always assumed, as Colin had said, that Jeremy had gone after Colin’s mother to get at Colin’s father, just another play in a long-standing feud. But something about the look on Jeremy’s face, the absolute conviction of his voice, made me wonder if Jeremy’s feelings might not have been at least a little more genuine than we gave him credit for.

  Not that he wasn’t still slime, but he seemed to be slime who genuinely loved his wife.

  Colin had turned an odd shade of gray. “I don’t want you in my house,” he said.

  Jeremy smiled nastily. “That’s just the thing, isn’t it? It’s not your house. It’s our house—yours, mine, and Serena’s. Just one big, happy family.”

  “We were until you came along,” said Colin in a low voice, although, from everything I’d heard, that was pretty palpably untrue.

  “Stop!” I banged my glass down between them.

  Unfortunately, it was plastic, so it didn’t make quite the ding it might have, but it was still enough to get their attention.

  “This is exactly what Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was talking about,” I said furiously. “You’re never going to get anywhere unless you stop rehashing the same old grievances. Both of you.”

  I knew that I wasn’t being tactful, but I didn’t care. “You know what? You’re stuck with each other. Deal with it.”

  Not exactly after-school-special stuff, but at least it knocked them out of their endless argument loop. For the moment.

  Colin turned to Jeremy. There were two deep lines between his brows. With an effort, he asked, “Is she really sick?”

  “I don’t know.” You could tell that Jeremy hated admitting ignorance just as much as Colin hated asking. He lifted his glass in an ironic excuse, his face twisting. “If she’d tell anyone, it would be you. She always did like you better.”

  Colin’s brows pulled together. “You must be joking. You’re her grandson.”

  Jeremy’s smile was bitter. “But I wasn’t a Selwick. Not a real one. Not by her lights.”

  It was like opening a pretty Victorian picture book to find that the center had been eaten out by mold. It all seemed so quaint and charming, Selwick Hall, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, all their family stories and traditions, but there was a deep well of poison in the middle. I wasn’t quite sure how it had started—Mrs. Selwick-Alderly blamed it all, beginning and end, on Colin’s mother—but somewhere things had gone terribly wrong.

  I pushed back my menu. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not really all that hungry. Anyone else up for grilled cheese back at the house?”

  “I’ll settle our tab,” Jeremy said quickly and pushed away from the table.

  Colin watched him from under furrowed brows. “He’s always been a bastard,” he muttered, but it didn’t come out quite as confidently as usual.

  What a mess.

  Wiggling out of my chair, I draped my arms around Colin’s shoulders and dropped a kiss on the top of his head. “I adore your aunt,” I said, “but, boy, did she do a real job on that guy.”

  “Mmph,” said Colin.

  They were both quiet as we drove back to the house, Colin and I in the front, Jeremy in the back. To call it a truce would be overstating matters. It was more that each side had fired the last of his shots and was trying to decide where and how to regroup.

  I just didn’t want to be in the middle when it happened.

  I wondered if finding the jewels would make things better or worse. On the one hand, there would be the shared thrill of accomplishment, of achieving something that no one in their family, for generations back, had managed. On the other, one bone, two dogs. I could just see them snipping and sniping. Either way you looked at it, it was a no-win.

  “Didn’t we leave the light on?” I asked as the Land Rover pulled i
nto the gravel sweep in front of the house.

  Usually we left the front porch light burning when we went out. It got pretty dark out there at night in the country, and my shoes weren’t always well suited to picking my way from the car in the dark.

  “It might have gone out,” said Colin, pulling up in his usual spot and turning off the ignition. “Or we forgot.”

  He held out a hand to help me down from the car. I took it, giving it a squeeze before letting go again.

  The only light came from inside the car, casting a dim circle on the gravel. In the dark verges beyond, I could hear the rustling of small animals scrabbling in the bushes and the mournful cry of a bird of prey.

  Colin slammed the car door behind me, plunging us into darkness.

  “Christ, it’s dark,” said Jeremy. “Do you have a torch?”

  “It’s all right,” I said, groping my way to the front door with the ease of practice. “I’ll just get the door and turn on the—ah!”

  “Eloise?” I heard Colin say at the same time as Jeremy’s quick, excited, “What is it?”

  “I’m okay!” I said hastily, catching myself on the doorjamb just as Colin, behind me, caught me by the shoulders. There was empty space where the door should have been. “It’s just—the door’s open.”

  “Open?” said Colin.

  Moving me aside, he stepped forward and flicked the switch. The hall light flickered reluctantly on. Faux candles stuck into a central chandelier illuminated a scene of destruction. The vase that usually sat on the hall table lay in pieces on the floor. The hall rug, a threadbare Persian, was bunched up, half in a puddle of water. Fallen flowers from the vase strewed the floor, like a bizarre funeral arrangement.

  Behind me, I could hear Jeremy’s quick, sharp breath.

  Colin stood, one hand on the light switch, staring at the ruin of his beloved front hall.

  “Guys?” I said, taking a cautious step forward, around the shards of what once had been a pretty, if not particularly valuable piece of chinoiserie. “I don’t like this.”

  Colin looked at Jeremy. “Neither do I.”

  Chapter 20

  “Did you know the truth of this tower? Of the ancient secret it keeps?”

  In the dungeons where they lay, Plumeria twisted her hands and essayed an answer. “There might have been a whisper of it, in my books of ancient lore—but of the whole truth of it I knew not, not whole and entire, not until he bared his fangs and carried Amarantha from us.”

  “You knew,” quoth Sir Magnifico, “and yet you did not tell me.”

  —From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady

  “My—what?”

  “Your son,” said Miss Wooliston. “Jack, I believe you call him.”

  “I know who he is,” William said.

  Miss Wooliston patted her horse’s neck. “According to my sources, your son has operated for several years under the alias of Moonflower, gathering information for the French government.” She looked at him shrewdly. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  By the change of subject, yes. By the content of her words, no. “Why would I be? He always did support their cause.”

  Gwen made a noise of surprise.

  William turned on her. “Sure and why wouldn’t he? It was the English who wouldn’t let him into their army or their diplomatic service. He had an Indian mother, you see. Those laws are an abomination, setting father against son, brother against brother—”

  He broke off, shaking his head to clear it. This was all very interesting, but it was getting him no closer to the answer to his questions.

  Conversationally, he said, “I’ve no particular allegiance for the English myself, when it comes to it, but that’s all beside the point. What I don’t understand is what my Jack has to do with your billiard balls.”

  “Everything,” said Miss Wooliston. “Have you heard of the jewels of Berar?”

  “Heard of them? I’ve seen them.” The Rajah liked to deck himself out to impress visiting dignitaries. William had been invited to his durbar a time or two, in his official capacities. An officer in the East India Company’s army played many roles, only some of them military. “Some of them, in any event. He had a prodigious number of them. But what—”

  “Your son,” said Miss Wooliston delicately, “in the course of his duties, managed to make off with the jewels of Berar. There are various parties who want those jewels very much indeed.”

  “Jack wouldn’t—,” William began automatically and stopped.

  He hadn’t seen his son, not to speak to, since Jack had stormed out five years before, vowing revenge on his father’s people. William had tried to argue that they weren’t his people, not really, that a Scoto-American was a far cry from an Englishman, but he had taken the East India Company’s coin and eaten their salt and that was enough for Jack.

  It was no use to say Jack wouldn’t. He would.

  “He was in that area, it was true. I kept tabs on him, you see, even when he wasn’t writing. I still have friends scattered about, and they would write me, letting me know how he was, if he seemed well, nothing much, just enough to put a father’s mind at rest. He’d been close to Scindia, high in his counsel, but he was seconded to the service of the Rajah of Berar, just before—”

  “Just before the siege?” Miss Wooliston supplied.

  William glanced at Gwen, who stood silent and pale beside the great gates. “I’d never understood why. Why Scindia sent him off to do a journeyman’s job in Berar when he might have kept him by his side. I’d thought they might have had a falling out, that Jack had pulled one of his tricks on him. He isn’t always the most diplomatic person, Jack.”

  “No,” said Miss Wooliston gently. “I would guess that it wasn’t Scindia’s choice at all.” She pronounced the foreign name without hesitation, mimicking his pronunciation. “Scindia had French aid. It seems likely his French backers requested that the Moonflower—Jack—be sent to Berar for just that purpose. There was just one slight hitch to their plan. Your Jack switched sides.”

  The news hit him like an electric bolt. “No,” he said. “That I won’t believe.”

  On a branch overhead, a bird cawed, launching itself in a flurry of black feathers from branch to post. The muted colors of an English twilight surrounded him, the trees, the gates, the women standing beside him blurred and dim in the half-light, so alien, so unfamiliar, compared to the vivid, sun-drenched country he had for so long called home.

  “No,” he said again. “Jack’s anger ran deep. He wouldn’t have helped those who had shunned him.”

  Or would he? The tree branches shivered in the breeze, the night drew around him like a web, in the half-light, where nothing was what it seemed. Gwen, in her purple traveling dress, blended into the shadows, a blur against a blur. He could feel everything slipping away from him, everything he thought he had known.

  Miss Wooliston stood her ground. “It’s true, whether you believe it or not. He’s been a double agent for some time. I gather that his former masters only found out about it last winter. The news only just made its way back here.” Her voice was somber as she said, “They’ve sworn out a price on his head.”

  A price. He remembered his little boy, gap-toothed and laughing, sun-browned and healthy, squabbling with his older sister in the zenana quarters of their bungalow in Madras. Kat running to him: Father, Jack—

  Why did he have to go courting trouble, always? David’s lament for Absalom ran through his mind: My son, my son.

  “Enough!” Gwen stepped out of the shadows, ranging herself beside him. “Can’t you see he’s heard enough for now? We can continue this in the house.”

  What else had she known that she hadn’t been telling him?

  This woman with whom he had, he thought, achieved such an intimacy over the past few weeks, the woman who had patched him up, body and soul—but to what end? Not for pure affection, as he’d thought. Not even for lust. For what?

  He tried to look into her face, but the l
ight played tricks on him, blurring her features like smoke.

  “No,” he said slowly. “We’ll continue this now. I want to know what else you haven’t told me. I’ll have the rest of it. Now. Before we go anywhere else.”

  Gwen rubbed her hands along her arms as though she’d grown cold.

  Miss Wooliston was all business. “The French want the jewels back. They believe your son sent them here to England.”

  William remembered that visit to Kat. “The boxes,” he said at last. “The boxes he sent to Kat. They weren’t looking for opium. They were looking for jewels.”

  “We believe that Mr. Reid sent those boxes to his older sister as a decoy,” said Miss Wooliston. William didn’t miss the quick, surprised look Gwen sent her. “He also had boxes delivered to several other addresses, many of them empty or abandoned.”

  “He did?’ Gwen broke in. “You never told me that.”

  William felt a petty satisfaction in that—that she had been kept in the dark as he had. It was short-lived, however. No matter what else she might not have known, she had known enough.

  Miss Wooliston regarded her warily. “I have not managed to secure the contents, but I believe that those, too, were intended as a distraction.”

  William took a deep breath. “All right. I can see where this is leading. So what you’re saying is that Jack handed off those jewels to someone. That’s why those men came after us in the alley—and again just now. I can’t blame them. I’ve just come from India. Who better for him to give them to than me?”

  It was as he was saying it that the full corollary of his own words struck him, with a deep and burning pain.

  He turned to Gwen, forcing himself to say the words. “Is there even an Agnes Wooliston? Or was that why you attached yourself to me all along? To find the jewels?”

  “I—I didn’t attach myself to you!” sputtered Gwen. “If anything, it was the other way around!”