The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Page 28

  “Colonel,” said Miss Wooliston sharply, “I can assure you I do indeed have a younger sister and that sister disappeared with your daughter from Miss Climpson’s seminary. I am as eager as you to reclaim them both.”

  “Then what’s all this about these jewels?” The question came out as a howl of frustration. He was tired, he was sore, and above all, he was hurt, the mindless pain of an animal with a thorn in the pad of his paw, incapable of removing it, driving it in deeper and deeper with every movement.

  “Did you know that your son has been paying his sister’s fees at Miss Climpson’s?”

  The apparent non sequitur made William’s head jerk up. “No. That can’t be right. She was on a scholarship.”

  “They haven’t any scholarships. The fees have all been paid for by a Mr. John Reid. It was he who arranged for your daughter’s place at the school.”

  “Jack paid Lizzy’s school fees?” The entire world had turned on its head.

  Of all his siblings, Jack had always had the softest spot for Lizzy, but this—this was something out of the ordinary, too odd to compass.

  “He might have done it out of kindness,” Gwen said quickly. “You said he cared for her, as much as he cared for anyone.”

  “It also helped,” said Miss Wooliston evenly, “that his employer’s cousin was a member of the faculty.”

  William’s head was swimming. “His employer?” All he could think of was Scindia, and he doubted the Maratha chieftain had much to do with a girls’ school in Bath.

  “The spymaster known as the Gardener. The Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent.” Miss Wooliston was speaking purely to Gwen now. “He was too assiduous in his attempts to aid us. And there was that other incident at the school two years ago. The only way for it all to make sense was for the Gardener to be in some way connected with the school. And so . . .” She spread out her hands.

  William had had enough of gardeners and spymasters. “But what about my Lizzy? Where does she come into all this? What would your spymaster”—he choked on the word—“want with my girl?”

  Miss Wooliston’s well-bred voice replied, measured, inexorable. “Your son sent her a package that arrived not long before her disappearance. Baubles, her teacher called it.”

  She didn’t need to explain further. It was painfully, sickeningly clear. Baubles. From a man who might have made off with the missing jewels of Berar. William felt sick, sick deep in his gut with a horror that made the rest of it, the lies, the revelations, seem as nothing in comparison.

  “No,” he said. Jack wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have put Lizzy in danger like that.

  Or would he?

  “Certain parties,” said Miss Wooliston primly, “believe that your son sent the jewels to your daughter. Hence her precipitate departure from her school and those charming people on the road today.”

  William paced back and forth, his boots leaving no mark on the hard-packed dirt of the lane. “Even if I were to believe that this was all true, even if Jack had those jewels, even if he were—were what you say he is, why would he send them to Lizzy?”

  Gwen shook her head, a blur in the twilight. “It doesn’t matter whether he truly has or not. What matters is that someone believes he has.”

  Someone. A dangerous someone. Someone to whom one girl would be a small price in pursuit of his end.

  All this time, all this time they had been going in circles, attending the opera, laughing, flirting, speculating, all this time his Lizzy had been on the run, burdened by jewels for which more than one man had already shed his blood.

  William turned sharply on his heel, towards Gwen. “All this time,” he said, in a low, harsh voice. “You knew. You knew my Lizzy was in danger.”

  She took a step back, her voice uncharacteristically hesitant. “We didn’t know for certain until yesterday,” she said. “It might have been Agnes they wanted.”

  That only made William angrier. Images flashed through his mind, of their carriage trip to Bristol, his stripping his soul to her in the opera the other night. And all that while . . .

  “Either way, you knew that they hadn’t just run away from school. And yet you let me go on believing—”

  Gwen’s hands balled into fists at her sides. “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”

  How was it not her secret?

  “She’s my child!” The words echoed in the air between them. “How do you know all this? Why do you know all this?” He turned on Miss Wooliston. “Don’t try to tell me it’s just the inquiries of a concerned sister—I wasn’t born yesterday. Concerned sisters don’t come armed.”

  Gwen looked towards Miss Wooliston, who gave a barely perceptible nod. “You might— Well, you might call us agents.” As he stared at her, disbelieving, Gwen raised her head a little higher. “We work for the War Office. Sometimes. We gather information.”

  “I see,” William said, his voice low and flat. And he did. Everything that had passed between them, every confidence, every kiss, had been a lie. A means to an end. “I can see that you’re good at what you do. You always get your information in the end, do you? Even if you have to go to bed with the odd man to get it.”

  Miss Wooliston’s eyebrows shot up.

  Gwen stumbled back, her mouth opening and closing. “I’ve never—”

  William stalked forward. “Didn’t you? What was last night, then?”

  Bright patches of crimson appeared on Gwen’s cheeks. “That wasn’t what last night was about! And if you were any kind of a gentleman, you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  Miss Wooliston’s eyebrows were charting hitherto undiscovered country beneath her hairline.

  “And if you were any kind of lady—” All of William’s rage and hurt came pouring out at the woman in front of him, the woman he had cradled to his breast. He had thought her so gallant and fine. Little did he know it was all an act. “I’m sorry I didn’t have anything better to tell you. You must have been very disappointed. All that effort for nothing.”

  “It wasn’t an effort,” she blurted out.

  “What a relief it is to hear that,” said William acidly. “I’d hate to think I was an unpleasant assignment.”

  “Damn you!” Gwen burst out. “If you can stand there and spout such filth—”

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” he said. “Tell me none of this is true.”

  “I’ll go find someone to open the gates,” said Miss Wooliston tactfully, and dissolved into the dusk.

  Gwen appeared to be going through some sort of massive internal struggle. She started to hold out a hand to him and thought better of it.

  In a low voice, she said, “Don’t you think I wanted to tell you?”

  “You lie for a living,” William said. “You’ve just told me as much. You’ve lied to me since I met you.”

  The words seemed to strike sparks off her. “Not lied, omitted.”

  He looked at her as he might a bug. “Am I meant to believe there’s a difference in that?”

  She balled her hands into fists at her sides. “The end was the same. We were both looking for the girls. What good would it have done to tell you? You’d never have believed me, anyway. You’d have thought I was mad.”

  He hated that there was truth in that, when there was no truth in anything else she had told him.

  Gwen seized her advantage. “If it had gone well,” she said, taking a step towards him. “That would have been all. You would have had your Lizzy back and there would have been no need for you to know—any of the rest.”

  “No, no need,” he said bitterly, feeling like the worst sort of fool. “No need because you never intended to have anything more to do with me, did you? Not once you’d got what you wanted.”

  “William—”

  The sound of his name on her lips stung like salt on a wound. “That’s Colonel Reid to you,” he said brutally. And then, just because he was hurting, because he couldn’t help himself, “Do you know the worst of it? The most damnable bit was that I actually
thought I might be coming to care for you. That just goes to show how good you are—or how gullible I am. Take it as you will.”

  She looked like a man hit with a mortar, in that moment of sheer shock before the pain sets in and the screaming starts.

  Her lips pressed together, her hand was at her throat. “William,” she said, and her voice shook as she took a step forward. The words came out jerkily. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  The same words he had said to her once. Before he knew better. “There’s the man to open the gates,” William said, and turned his back and walked away, leaving Gwen standing there alone in the lane, the horses grazing beside her, her hand at her throat and her heart in her eyes.

  What heart? She had no heart. It was an act, a ploy.

  His sense of ill use drove him, and it overwhelmed the small voice that protested that there might have been some justice in what she had done. He wanted spirits, strong ones. He wanted to get rousingly drunk, as he hadn’t for years, blotting out memory, desire, sense. He wanted to get so drunk he couldn’t remember the look on her face as she said, “I don’t want to lose you.”

  Lose him? More likely use him. All the while he’d been mooning about love in a cottage, she’d been plotting—whatever it was that agents plotted. Nothing to do with him. He’d been nothing but a source of information and a quick roll in the scenery.

  This had been— Well, whatever it had been, it was over. He just had to make it through the night, collect Lizzy and be off, and he’d never have to see her or hear from her again.

  He wouldn’t have to wonder just whom else she might be collecting information from or to what lengths she might go to do it, wonder if she might not be looking at someone else with wide, shocked eyes and protesting that what they had meant more than a tumble on a storage room floor.

  The house to which the path led him turned out to be an Italianate fantasy, a massive pile of marble plunked on the English countryside, built in a low rectangle and bristling with columns, pilasters, and assorted satyrs.

  “It’s a bit of an abomination, I know,” said his host cheerfully, “but we call it home.”

  He was a young man just about the age of William’s oldest, with floppy blond hair, a rather rumpled cravat, and easy and open manners.

  His wife, Lady Henrietta, greeted the ladies in the party with cries of delight and made noises about hot baths and cold suppers.

  Their small and ragged party was welcomed as though fugitive guests on horseback without luggage were a perfectly normal occurrence. And perhaps they were. No one here seemed to operate in the logical workaday realm with which William was familiar.

  There was no need to avoid Gwen; he couldn’t have found her if he’d tried. A liveried servant showed him to a room the size of his bungalow in Madras, with a balcony looking out over acres of formal gardens dotted with follies and statuary. A small brigade of servants poured steaming, scented water into a copper tub, while nameless gnomes left clothing for him on the bed, if not his own size, then a close approximation and finer by far than anything he himself had ever owned.

  In his borrowed finery, he went down to supper, which was served in a long room with crimson walls. Gwen was at the far end of the table, by the left hand of their host. She, too, had found or borrowed a gown. William could only guess that it belonged to their hostess; the white gauze embroidered with flowers wasn’t at all in Gwen’s usual style, too light, too playful, too décolleté—William hastily averted her eyes before he could betray himself—but she had made up for the youthful dress with the severity of her hairstyle.

  It was some small consolation that she looked nearly as unhappy as William felt.

  In her case, it translated into a forbidding aspect and a marked imperiousness of tone. William recognized both of these. This was the woman he had met at Miss Climpson’s a lifetime ago, cold and rude—and miserably unhappy.

  He didn’t want to feel sorry for her. He was supposed to be feeling sorry for himself. He was the one who had been used, wasn’t he?

  But he watched her all the same. He watched her as he made polite conversation with his hostess, as he put food in his mouth with no recollection of what it was that he chewed. It was as though she had retreated into a plaster mold of herself, all the life, all the animation that had so captivated him, buried beneath a cold and brittle shell. That tremendous zest he had seen again and again diverted itself into haughty comments and cutting asides.

  And no one, no one in the room, seemed to find anything out of the ordinary in this.

  They smiled at one another and rolled their eyes as she cracked her wit at them, but not one of them noticed the pain beneath it. They all, William noticed, referred to her casually as Miss Gwen, the honorific serving to set her apart from the rest of the group, a stranger even among her own friends.

  Instead of separating after supper, the entire party retired to a long room replete with trompe l’oeil alcoves and an excess of statuary “to plan their strategy,” as his host enthusiastically put it.

  Everyone seemed to take as entirely natural that his daughter should be under siege by French spies.

  “Good for her,” declared Mr. Dorrington stoutly. “It was most ingenious of her, slipping out from under their noses the way she did.”

  “I don’t understand why she didn’t come to us,” said Lady Henrietta, sounding slightly piqued. She took a sip of wine from her husband’s glass. “We’re much closer to Bath than Selwick Hall.”

  “Yes, but half the time we’re at Selwick Hall,” pointed out her husband. “Um, I say, Hen, wasn’t that mine?”

  Lady Henrietta considered the former and ignored the latter. “More like a third of the time, really.”

  “I only go there for the ginger biscuits,” said her husband cheerfully. Seeing William’s expression, he added, earnestly, “If your daughter had to go anywhere, Selwick Hall is as safe as she could be. They have it battened down like a—”

  “Great battened thing?” suggested his wife.

  “I wouldn’t call it a great battened thing,” said Mr. Dorrington. “More of a slightly nice battened thing, but still rather well battened for all that.”

  William watched them with a certain amount of consternation. He looked, automatically, for Gwen, to see if she could make sense of them, before remembering that she was a deceiver and a despoiler of middle-aged army colonels.

  Lady Henrietta leaned forward, taking pity on his distress. “You really mustn’t worry, Colonel Reid. We’ve had a great deal of experience with this sort of thing.” In ringing tones, she announced, “My brother was the Purple Gentian.”

  It sounded like a form of disease. “I am sorry,” said William apologetically. “I’m afraid I don’t know . . .”

  Lady Henrietta’s face lit up. “Finally!” she said with satisfaction, lifting her eyes heavenwards. “Someone who hasn’t heard of Richard. I shall twit him mercilessly about this. After we rescue the girls, of course,” she added.

  “Do you really think they’ll be needing rescuing?” William asked her husband, who was contentedly munching on a ginger biscuit the size of a small plate.

  “After what happened to you on the road?” Mr. Dorrington said thickly, around a mouthful of biscuit. He swallowed, brushing crumbs from his waistcoat. “Most likely. But it’s nothing we can’t handle. We have had some experience with vicious French spies,” he said modestly. “Right, Hen?”

  “Don’t look at me; I’m just a talented amateur,” she said with a wave of her hand. Her expression sobered as she looked at William. “But we do take getting your daughter back very seriously indeed.”

  William wasn’t sure whether he should feel comforted or very, very afraid.

  Either way, there was something rather exhausting about their youthful exuberance. After that ride, he felt every one of his fifty-four years. It was more than just the physical aches. They were so young, his host and hostess, so careless in their happiness. He didn’t begrudge them that,
quite the contrary, but watching them made him feel shopworn, old and scarred.

  On the far side of the room, Miss Wooliston studied a map or a plan of some kind. Removed from her, from everyone, Gwen sat, her head bent over her notebook. Charting more of the fictional adventures of Sir Magnifico and Plumeria? Perhaps, but her pen wasn’t moving, and her eyes were fixed on the same bit of the page.

  William heaved himself painfully out of his chair. “If it’s all the same,” he said to his host and hostess, “I might go for a bit of a walk before bed.”

  “Just straight out that way,” said Mr. Dorrington, gesturing to a pair of French doors to their left. “You can’t get lost as long as you stick to the paths.”

  There were many things William might have said to that, but none of them particularly cheering, so instead he simply conveyed his thanks and slipped out the French doors into the moonlit gardens.

  Chapter 21

  Their prison was no dungeon of the ordinary sort. If there were stone walls, they saw them not; the bounds of their prison were the green hedges of the garden, the moon and stars their gaolers. The paths wound and twisted, through verdant ornaments carved in ever more fanciful shapes. And yet, and yet, when Plumeria set her hand against the prickly yew hedge, she could have sworn it felt more like the smooth and damp stone of a dungeon wall.

  “I’ faith,” quoth Sir Magnifico. “What strange enchantment is this?’

  “A very strange enchantment,” quoth Plumeria, “if it bids thee set aside thy anger and find thy tongue!”

  —From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady

  v

  The gardens of Darlington Court shimmered in front of Gwen in the moonlight like a treacherous sea, the uncertain light hinting at hidden shoals and depths.

  Gwen descended the weathered stairs from the balcony slowly, the train of her unfamiliar gown dragging on the steps behind her, her hand resting heavily on the broad marble bannister. Somewhere out there, among the fantastical beasts and weeping nymphs, the dry fountains and dancing Nereids, was William.