The Lure of the Moonflower Page 3

  “Portugal forever!” rose another voice from the crowd.

  The officers milled uneasily, looking to their leader. Junot turned, speaking urgently to the man at his side, one of the members of the Portuguese Regency Council, the nominal government that had replaced the Queen and Regent.

  A bottle shattered against the tiles, among the feet of the departing soldiers, spraying glass.

  “Death to the French!” shouted one bold soul, and then another took it up, and another.

  Projectiles were hailing down from every direction, stones and bottles and whole cobbles pried from the street. Abuse rattled down with the stones. The French troops ducked and milled, looking anxiously to their leader, who appeared to be in the middle of a fight with the regency council, none of whom could agree with one another, much less anyone else.

  And then, the sound that could turn a riot into a massacre: the crack of an old-fashioned musket, shot right into the ranks of French soldiers.

  It was, Jack judged, not a healthy time to stay in the square.

  Any moment now, the French were going to start firing back, and Jack didn’t want to be in the middle of it. If his contact hadn’t appeared by now, he wasn’t coming. One thing Jack had learned after years in the game: saving one’s own skin came first.

  He slipped off through the heaving, shouting crowd. The various approaches to the square were already crammed with people: people surging forward, people fleeing, people fainting, people shouting, mothers grabbing their children out of the way, fishwives scrabbling at the cobbles, old men running for ancient weapons, French émigrés and sympathizers running for their lives as the crowd hurled abuse and missiles at the collaborators. Rioters were fighting hand-to-hand with French soldiers; Junot’s face was red with anger as he shouted, trying to be heard above the square. A runner was making for the French barracks, undoubtedly to call up reinforcements.

  Jack ducked sideways, down the Rua Áurea.

  A hand grabbed at his arm. Jack automatically dodged out of the way. This wasn’t his fight. And then a musical voice said, “Wait!”

  It was the courtesan—the courtesan he had noticed across the square, her curls flying, her bonnet askew.

  “Please,” she said, and she spoke in French, a cultured, aristocratic French that caught the attention of the mob around them, made them stop and stare and growl low in their throats. “I need an escort back to my lodgings.”

  He’d say she did. Her voice was already attracting unwanted attention.

  But Jack didn’t do rescues of maidens, fair or fallen. Don’t get involved—that was the only way to survive. Even when they had a figure like a statue of Aphrodite and lips painted a luscious pink.

  “Sorry, princess,” he drawled, his own French heavily accented, but serviceable. “I’m no one’s lackey.” He nodded towards the embattled French soldiers. “There’s your escort.”

  “They can’t even escort themselves.” Her pose was appropriately beseeching, the epitome of ladylike desperation, but there was, even now, in the midst of all the tumult, that strange calm about her. It was the eyes, Jack realized. Cool. Assessing. She lifted those eyes to his in a calculated gesture of supplication, her gloved hands against the breast of his rough coat. “Please. You know that the eagle nests only once.”

  All around them, the hectic exodus continued. In the distance Jack could hear the ominous clatter of horses’ hooves against the cobbles, signaling the arrival of the cavalry.

  But Jack stood where he was, frozen in the middle of the street, locked in tableau with a French courtesan. And a very pretty tableau it was. Pretty, and completely for show.

  Beneath the heavy tracing of kohl that lined her eyes and darkened her lashes, her gray eyes were shrewd, and more than a little bit amused.

  She raised her brows, waiting for him, giving him the chance to speak first. It was a damnable tactic, and one Jack used himself with some frequency.

  He didn’t much appreciate being on the other end of it.

  “The eagle,” said Jack, his gaze traveling from the plunging depths of her décolletage to her painted face, “sometimes nests in uncommon strange places.”

  The woman didn’t squirm or color. She said calmly, “The more remote the nest, the more secure the eggs.”

  “Puta!” taunted one of the crowd, jostling towards them.

  The woman raised her voice, putting on a convincing display of arrogance tinged with fear. “I will pay for your escort. My colonel will reward you well for seeing me safely home.”

  “I’ll see her—” shouted one man, and made a graphic hand gesture.

  Loudly, in Portuguese, Jack said, “When coin is lying in the gutter, it would be foolishness not to take it, eh?” Under his breath, in French, he added, “Squeal.”

  Without waiting for a response, he scooped her up, over his shoulder. A ragged cheer rose up from their viewers, combined with some rather graphic suggestions. Jack waved his free hand, and then hastily had to clap it back over her bottom as she squirmed and bucked and squealed, putting on, he had to admit, an excellent show. That is, if she didn’t unbalance them both.

  “Easy there, princess,” called Jack, with a wink for the crowd, and, with a hard hand on her bottom, hoisted her more securely over his shoulder.

  Something banged into his collarbone, making him wince.

  Not all flounces, then. He’d eat his hat if that wasn’t a pistol tucked into her stays.

  Who—or what—in the devil was she?

  “Where to?” he asked beneath his breath, staggering just a little. The woman was slim, but she was nearly as tall as he was, and burdened with a superfluity of flounces and ruffles. The street was slick beneath his feet with mud and offal.

  “Down Rua Áurea and turn left on the Rua Assunção,” she said, as briskly as though she were giving directions to her coachman. And then she began whacking him on the back with her parasol, screaming for help.

  “Right,” Jack said under his breath, and took off. Bloody hell, did she need to hit so hard? “You might be a little less convincing,” he muttered.

  “And ruin the deception?” Amused. The woman sounded amused.

  They were past the mob now, out of the way of the men who had witnessed their little scene. Jack set her down with a thunk, right in a patch of something unmentionable. It did not do wonders for the lilac satin on her slippers.

  “Sorry, princess. I’m not your sedan chair. You can walk the rest of the way.”

  He half expected her to argue, but she cast a look up and down the street and nodded. “Follow me.”

  She knew how to stay in character; Jack had to give her that. She minced along, constantly readjusting her bonnet, fidgeting with the buttons of her pelisse. Jack followed, in the slouch he’d developed in his role as Alarico the drunk, keeping an eye out for pursuers, and trying to figure out what to make of the woman trip-trapping ahead of him, making moues of distaste as she picked her way through the sodden street, her flashing rings practically an invitation to a knife at her throat.

  But there was an alertness to her that suggested her attacker wouldn’t fare well.

  Jack remembered the hard feel of the pistol beneath her stays. That, he realized, explained the fiddling with buttons. And the hat? Jack regarded the woman in front of him with new interest. He’d be willing to wager that there was a stiletto attached to that bunch of feathers on her hat.

  As for those rings, those foolish flashing rings . . . Most would-be assailants would be so dazzled by the gleam of gems on her hands that they wouldn’t notice that those hands were holding a knife until it was too late.

  Grudgingly, Jack had to admit that whoever the woman was, she knew what she was doing.

  Which made her both very intriguing and very, very dangerous.

  The house to which she led him was a private residence. Jack followe
d her through a gate, across a courtyard, and up a flight of stairs to a narrow iron door. His fingers briefly touched the point of the knife he kept in a sheath at his wrist. The woman might have known the code phrase, but that didn’t mean this wasn’t an ambush. No secret organization was inviolable, no code unbreakable. The woman’s French was impeccable, her clothes Paris-made.

  Which could mean anything or nothing.

  How far did her masquerade go? Jack wondered. Was there a colonel who had her in keeping? It had been done before. Sleeping with the enemy was the surest way of securing information. A man might share with a mistress what he wouldn’t with a friend.

  Jack’s imagination painted a picture of the rooms they were about to enter: lush carpets on the floor, a gilded mirror above a dressing table laden with mysterious creams and powders, a hip bath in one corner, silk draperies falling around a wide bed. The perfect nest for a French colonel’s woman.

  Jack didn’t consider himself prudish or squeamish; a job was a job, and they all got it done as best they could. So why the instinctive feeling of distaste that this woman, this particular woman, might sell her body for information?

  From a reticule that looked too small to contain anything of use, the woman took a heavy key and fitted it into the door.

  It opened onto a spartan room, the walls whitewashed, the only furniture a table, a chair, and a divan that looked as though it doubled as a bed. There was no dressing table, no gilded mirror, no bed draped with curtains.

  “Surely,” said Jack mockingly, “the colonel could afford better.”

  The woman closed the door behind them with a snap. “There is no colonel.”

  Now that they were inside, her movements were brisk and businesslike, with no hint of coquetry. She tossed the key on the table and crossed the room, testing the shutters on the window.

  “No?” Jack lounged back against the doorframe, his hands thrust in his pockets. “You surprise me.”

  “I doubt that.” The woman plucked the bonnet off her head, taking the dark curls with it.

  Beneath it, her own hair was a pale brown, brushed to a sheen and braided tightly around and around. Without the coquettish curls, her face had the purity of a profile on a coin, the sort of face to which men ascribed abstract sentiments: Liberty, Honor, Beauty. All she needed was some Grecian draperies and a flag.

  She dropped the bonnet on the table. “You have a reputation for keeping a cool head. Or have we been mistaken in you . . . Mr. Reid?”

  Jack straightened slowly. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me.”

  No names. That was the rule. Never names. Only aliases.

  One by one, the lady plucked the rings off her fingers, setting them each in a bowl on the table. “Your full name is Ian Reid, but no has ever called you that. Your family calls you Jack. You were born in Madras to Colonel William Reid, a Scottish-American officer in the East India Company’s army and his—”

  “Concubine?” drawled Jack.

  “—companion,” the woman corrected primly, “a Rajput lady of high birth.”

  His mother might have been a bazaar girl for all it mattered to the English community in Madras. Her high birth had meant only that she had felt her fall all the more, reduced from a princess among her own people to a cavalry officer’s kept woman.

  Jack didn’t like to talk about his mother. He liked it even less when other people talked about his mother.

  Years of taking hard knocks kept Jack’s face wooden. The only reaction was his very stillness, a stillness he knew betrayed him as much as any response. “Does this fascinating exposition have a point?”

  The cool, controlled voice went inexorably on. “You served for some years in the army of the Maratha chieftain Scindia, before Scindia’s French allies recruited you, and renamed you the Moonflower.” The last ring clattered into the bowl. The woman stretched her bare fingers, like a pianist preparing to play, before glancing over at Jack. “You fell out with the French three years ago. People tend not to like it when you work for someone else while pretending to work for them. They like it even less when you abscond with a raja’s horde of jewels.”

  Jack shrugged. “All’s fair, they say.”

  The woman raised a pale brow. “In love or in war?”

  From his limited experience, Jack didn’t see much difference between the two. Except that those one loved might hurt one the most. “They’re one and the same, princess.” His eyes lingered on her décolletage with deliberate insolence. “I had thought you would know.”

  The woman brushed that aside, continuing with her dossier. “As a result of your little escapade with the jewels, you relocated to Portugal, where you have been positioned ever since.”

  Jack tilted his hat lazily over his eyes. “You are well-informed,” he drawled. “Brava.”

  The woman’s lips turned up in a Sphinx-like smile. “It is what I do.”

  She sounded so pleased with herself that Jack decided that turn and turnabout was only fair play. He’d see how she liked it with the shoe on the other foot.

  “We’ve ascertained that you know all about me.” Jack straightened to his full height, favoring her with a wolfish smile. “Now let’s talk about you.”

  “I don’t—” she began imperiously, but Jack held up a hand.

  Pushing back from the wall, he prowled in a slow circle around her. “You speak French beautifully, but it’s not your native tongue. You wear your French clothes well, but they’re a costume, not a personal choice. Left to yourself, you don’t go in for furbelows.”

  His eyes went to her neck, where she wore a gold locket on a silk ribbon. The rest of her jewelry was showy, and undoubtedly made of paste. The locket was simple, and it was real.

  Jack nodded at her neck. “Except, perhaps, one. That locket.”

  The woman’s hand closed over the bauble, a small but telling gesture. “Very nice, Mr. Reid. You are quite perceptive.”

  Jack smiled lazily. “That’s what they pay me for, princess. Now, do I go on—or are you going to tell me who you are?”

  He half expected her to demur. Any other woman would have. Any other woman would have teased and played.

  Instead, this woman, with her elaborate rings and plain locket, looked him in the eye and said simply, “You may know me as the Carnation. The Pink Carnation.”

  Jack stared at her for a moment, and then he broke out in a laugh. “Pull the other one, sweetheart.”

  Chapter Two

  Laughter wasn’t quite the reaction that Jane Wooliston had expected.

  Napoleon Bonaparte was said to break crockery at the mere mention of the name of the Pink Carnation. Hardened soldiers quailed; courtiers checked beneath their pillows for notes with the telltale pink flower; even Fouché, Napoleon’s Minister of Police, was rumored to look over his shoulder and walk a little faster when there was a hint of floral scent in the air.

  Some of it, Jane knew, was a reflection of her own skill, of knowing when to strike and when to retreat and, most of all, how to remain in the game. There was something to be said for longevity. Other spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, had been unmasked, their leagues unraveled. Still others, Petunias and Orchids and a regular blight of Begonias, had hardly made it across the channel to France before being unceremoniously nabbed and dropped into the darker regions of the Temple prison.

  But the Pink Carnation remained at liberty. And, by remaining so, acquired a reputation that owed a little to the truth and far more to the power of imagination. Any French reversal, from Napoleon’s failure to launch his fleet to the burning of his breakfast croissants, was laid at her door. The Imperial Guard heard her in every shutter that creaked in the night; they looked for her under the bed. Without intending to, Jane had become something greater than herself. She had become a myth, larger than life, cloaked in mystery.

  Ther
e were times when she caught sight of herself in the mirror, of her own familiar face, just a face when it came down to it, eyes and nose and lips and skin pale from the protection of bonnets and hoods, and wondered at the absurdity of it all.

  There were other times, however, when it was rather convenient to be a myth. Particularly when dealing with insubordinate agents. From everything she had read in his file, insubordination was Jack Reid’s middle name.

  Or if it wasn’t, it should be.

  Whatever Jack Reid did, one could be sure it was what he wasn’t meant to be doing. Sent as an apprentice to a printer, he ran away and hired himself out as a mercenary. Offered a permanent position in a prince’s retinue, he accepted a job spying for the French. When the French promoted him to a position of trust, he began feeding information to the English. Jack Reid had a talent for defying expectation, and, not so incidentally, orders.

  He also happened to be very good at what he did. Everyone agreed on that. He had a knack for languages, an instinct for operating unseen. And Jane was in uncertain territory, in a country where she knew only as much of the language as could be crammed into five days of study, about to embark on a mission that would take her deep into a countryside well removed from her usual networks of agents and informers.

  Like it or not, she needed Jack Reid. More than that, she needed his cooperation. She needed him to follow her lead without argument, without question. In their line of work, a moment’s hesitation could mean the difference between life and death.

  It had been a calculated risk, revealing her nom de guerre. The more prudent course would have been to identify herself as the Moonflower’s contact, nothing more. But while a man might quibble at the orders of a fellow agent, especially if said fellow agent were both female and young, no one said no to the Pink Carnation.

  Almost no one.

  Jane didn’t waste her time arguing. That would only make her look weak. So she did what she did best: she waited. She waited until Jack Reid’s laughter subsided from a guffaw into a rich chuckle. She waited until his grin faded into a frown, until his amusement turned to uncertainty.