The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Page 35

  We had all been behaving like complete idiots. Unless, of course, Fuzzy was at the center of a gang of international jewel thieves, but somehow I doubted that. Remembering my own suspicions of Jeremy, I felt more than a little bit ashamed. The truth was that Colin spent too much time living in his spy thriller and I in the past. When you put those two together, you wound up with a serious case of overactive imagination.

  True, I didn’t think I was ever going to actually actively like Jeremy, but there was a bit of a gap between finding someone annoyingly smarmy and suspecting him of hiring a hit man.

  I didn’t even know how one would go about hiring a hit man.

  Hopefully, Jeremy didn’t either. Colin thought he did, but that was only because he read too many thrillers.

  Deciding to give the men a little more time, just in case they were having some sort of deep familial epiphany, I took down the can of coffee from the cupboard and spooned a generous helping into the machine, sniffing the familiar and comforting scent of the coffee grounds. While the coffee perked, I buttered bread for the promised grilled cheese. Now that the danger was over, I was suddenly ridiculously, ravenously hungry.

  I’d give that to blind terror—it certainly burned calories, even if in the end the whole thing had turned out to be more Abbott and Costello than The Convent of Orsino.

  I dropped the first sandwich into the pan, where it landed with a satisfying sizzle. I still had one more book left to read of that blasted—er, lovely—novel, and I strongly suspected I was wasting my time. The whole thing about the jewel being in the mirror was all very interesting, but I couldn’t see where that led us. Unlike Jeremy, I was fairly sure that was a metaphor. But a metaphor for what?

  Perhaps there were no jewels; perhaps the whole thing was a metaphor for knowing oneself, or something equally smug and unsatisfying.

  No. I flipped a sandwich with a spatter of grease. I’d read those letters, and if Henrietta Dorrington was to be believed, the jewels not only existed; they had come here, to—and possibly through—Selwick Hall.

  Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had said something about there being a presentation copy of The Convent of Orsino here at Selwick Hall, a big, fancy one.

  It had belonged to Colonel Reid’s youngest daughter, she had said, who had married Richard’s son. I jumped back as the sandwich pan spat hot grease at me. Quickly, I turned off the gas, moving the pan to a cool burner as I stood there with the spatula in one hand, staring blindly into space. That made no sense. I’d seen the Selwick family tree. I didn’t remember all the myriad branches, but I did know that Richard and Amy didn’t start producing little spies in training until early 1806.

  Lizzy Reid had been seventeen in 1805. Unless she was the ultimate Regency cougar, she would have been far too old for Richard and Amy’s son.

  Miss Gwen was in her forties when she married Colonel Reid, a little old for childbearing, but certainly not impossibly so. I stood there, staring at the cooling sandwiches, as the truth dawned. When Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said Colonel Reid’s youngest daughter, she meant Miss Gwen’s daughter.

  Assuming she was conceived fairly rapidly, this nameless girl child would have been born just about the same time as Richard and Amy’s eldest. Given all the ties between the families, there were good odds they’d been raised together, or close to it. A girl with Colonel Reid’s charm and Miss Gwen’s bullish determination? That poor little Selwick boy never had a chance.

  A distressing corollary occurred to me. This meant, among other things, that Colin was descended from Miss Gwen.

  I decided I didn’t want to think about that bit.

  Piling the sandwiches haphazardly on a plate, I started down the hall, absentmindedly taking a bite out of the topmost sandwich. I’d forgotten to halve them, but the men would just have to deal. I was too busy playing with a new and fascinating idea. If Miss Gwen were going to leave a clue to the location of the missing jewels, where better than in the volume she left to her daughter?

  Odds were that if there were any jewels, the daughter had long since converted them to cash and used them to re-lead the roof of Selwick Hall (I made a note to self to check the early Victorian Selwick account books to see if there were any large and unaccounted expenditures soon after the Reid-Selwick nuptials), but at least we’d have the satisfaction of knowing that it wasn’t all a myth, that the jewels had, in fact, passed through Selwick Hall.

  Colin and Jeremy were both in the salon where I’d left them, Colin on the floor with the dog, Jeremy sitting on one of the settees. They weren’t exactly hugging, but at least they didn’t look quite so ready to pulverize each other.

  “Guys?” I said.

  “You brought sandwiches!” said Jeremy in the tones of someone who is determined to play nice. “Thank you.”

  I’d forgotten I was holding them. “Right. You’re welcome. But there’s something I think you’d better come see.”

  Colin got hastily to his feet. “Another intruder?”

  “No, nothing like that.” I set the sandwiches down before I accidentally gesticulated with them. “But I think I have an idea of where we might look for the jewels. . . .”

  Two hours later, we had eaten the sandwiches. We had drunk the coffee. And we had handed Fuzzy over to a grateful and slightly hysterical owner. What we hadn’t done? Found the presentation copy of The Convent of Orsino.

  “It’s not here,” said Jeremy, sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of tattered early Ian Flemings that we had removed to get to the books behind.

  Colin’s ancestors, like all avid readers, were book double stackers. Jeremy had removed his blazer, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He looked closer to human than I had ever seen him.

  “I hate to agree,” said Colin, his voice echoing down from his perch on the top of the library ladder, “but I think he’s right.”

  “Your aunt Arabella said it was here,” I said stubbornly.

  “She’s not entirely omniscient,” said Colin, clambering down the ladder. “Every now and then—”

  He stopped short at the base of the ladder.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “No,” said Colin. “I’m a cretin.”

  From the expression on his face, I assumed he meant someone of limited mental capacity rather than someone who hailed from the isle of Crete.

  Colin shook his head, looking like a man who had been dealt a blow with a ruffled parasol. “We’ve been looking right past it for the past two hours.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jeremy from the floor.

  “It’s the purloined letter,” said Colin. “We didn’t notice it because it was right in front of us. There.”

  On a table in the corner, on stands, stood a miscellany of books.

  It would be a misnomer to say that they were on display. It was more that someone had at one point bunged them down there and no one had bothered to dust them since. There was a large, leather-bound copy of Robinson Crusoe, a late Victorian travel memoir by someone I’d never heard of—and The Convent of Orsino, fully a foot and a half tall and staring us straight in the face. The cover was a miracle of poor taste, covered with brass carbuncles that were clearly meant to be some sort of decorative feature.

  I’m not sure who started laughing first, but we all were, at ourselves, at the night, at everything.

  “Not exactly Sherlock Holmes, are we?” I leaned against Colin for balance. Every part of me was stiff after two hours of book hauling. “We fail at detection.”

  “We get points for perseverance,” said Jeremy, wincing as he started to lever himself to his feet.

  “And teamwork,” said Colin, and held out a hand to his stepfather.

  For a moment, Jeremy hesitated, and I wondered if he feared that Colin was going to dump him back on the ground. But their tentative entente held. Jeremy took Colin’s hand and let him help him off the floor.

  While Jeremy was dusting off his trousers, I went for the book. It was huge, large enough th
at I staggered as I lifted it off the stand, staggered and sneezed. The cover was grimed with a century of dust. Obviously, it hadn’t been high on anyone’s reading list for quite some time. The leather cover left streaks of dirt on my fingers.

  Balancing it against the edge of the table, I flipped it open as Colin and Jeremy clustered around, Jeremy keeping his expensive trousers well out of the way. It opened to the frontispiece, a much larger and grander frontispiece than in the cheap multivolume edition Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had loaned me.

  On one side, Plumeria and Sir Magnifico sat on their horses by the edge of a grove of trees, Sir Magnifico sporting a rather magnificent plumed cap. On the far side, the Knight of the Silver Tower bore a fainting Amarantha away in his arms, the mirror dangling from one of her limp hands. In the middle, the drunken revelers cavorted, dancing and swirling. Above it all loomed the ominous shape of the Dark Tower.

  Underneath, in a sprawling, childish hand, someone had written: Plumeria Reid. MY book. 1815.

  “This is it,” I said hoarsely. “We’ve found the Tower. Plumeria’s Tower.”

  Jeremy was hovering just over my shoulder, popping up and down like a jack-in-the-box, eager to play but not wanting to get too close to the grime. “Is there”—he gestured at the book—“something in the lining? A hollow space in the middle?” He turned to Colin. “There’s certainly room enough.”

  I flipped through, transferring the dust of one hundred and eighty-nine years from the pages to my fingers. The entire volume appeared to be intact. There were no secret compartments, and certainly not enough room in the lining to hide even a modest haul of gems.

  “Nada,” I said, closing the heavy book and setting it down with a slap. Dust billowed up from the cover. “Except—oh.”

  That cover. That absurd, ornate cover.

  “Do you have a handkerchief?” I said to Colin.

  He looked at me as though I were crazy. “Why would I have a handkerchief?”

  “I do,” said Jeremy, bringing one out with a flourish. It was a lovely piece of nearly transparent linen, lovingly embroidered with his initials.

  “Thank you.” I took it and began scrubbing away at the first of the brass carbuncles. “We need something stronger. Water. Solvent . . .”

  “No,” said Colin, leaning over my shoulder. “You’ve got it.”

  The old brown paint was flaking off. Or maybe it had originally been gilt rather than brown; with the grime of ages on it, it was hard to tell. Whatever was beneath the ugly paint wasn’t brass or any other base metal.

  “Is that—,” said Jeremy.

  I handed him back his handkerchief. “I believe that is a ruby,” I said, feeling slightly light-headed and more than a little slaphappy. “You’re welcome to have a go at the rest, but I’m guessing you’ll find more of the same.”

  “So it was here,” said Colin bemusedly, “all along.”

  “Hard by Plumeria’s Tower!” I said.

  Colin turned to me, his eyes brilliant with excitement. “We did it. We found it.”

  We. And again we. I nodded vigorously, blinking against sudden, silly tears. “We did.”

  Colin’s arms closed around. I gave a little shriek as he lifted me off the floor, the world rocking around me, my arms locked around his neck.

  “We did it,” he repeated, and kissed me hard, on the mouth.

  I wished I could have shared his triumphal joy, but somehow, the fact that we’d succeeded only made it more real that I was going to be leaving. The quest was over and so was my time with Colin. I looped my arms around his neck and kissed him back, harder, trying to kiss away all the fear and doubt and worry.

  Jeremy lifted the empty grilled cheese plate. “I’ll just go put this in the kitchen,” he said loudly. He couldn’t resist adding, “If you trust me not to steal the silver.”

  “There isn’t any,” said Colin, keeping one arm looped tightly around my waist. “But you’ll find the washing-up liquid next to the sink.”

  Jeremy gave him a look that told him just what he thought of that idea. He did, however, close the door when he went out. And he didn’t take the rubies of Berar with him.

  “He’s not going to do the dishes, is he?” I said, rubbing my cheek against Colin’s shirt. If I could have burrowed in and stayed there, I would have.

  “No,” said Colin. And then, the words muffled by my hair, “I don’t want you to leave.”

  It was the first time either of us had referred directly to my leaving since I’d told him my decision two months ago. It was certainly the first time he had been quite so direct about his preferences.

  My throat closed up on me. “I don’t want me to leave either. But I’m stuck.”

  “I know,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me, my cheek against his chest, his chin resting on the top of my head. It was very quiet in the library, quiet and dim, with the shadows of the trees moving softly through the window.

  He wouldn’t have been Colin if he had pleaded with me to stay. I wouldn’t have respected him if he had. It was one of the things I loved about him, that he never discounted the importance of my obligations, never told me that I should drop it all and stay with him. He was too deeply honorable for that.

  If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have loved him so.

  If I had had any doubts before, I knew it now. This wasn’t infatuation or lust (not that I was discounting that factor) or archive envy. I’d lived with Colin long enough now to know the real thing when I saw it. He was true gold through and through. And I loved him.

  I loved him and I had never told him so. There had always been something else in the way—pride, fear, whatever it is that drives us to hide our emotions from those we love. I’d been burned, badly, in relationships before. It was safer, all around, to cling to what a friend of mine liked to call plausible deniability, to play it cool and pretend I could take it or leave it.

  Safer, but so wrong.

  We had only a month left together. I owed it to Colin, to us, to stop being such a coward. We’d accomplished our quest; now it was time for one final hurdle.

  I extracted myself from my cozy nook against his chest. “Colin—,” I began.

  But he beat me to it. “Before you go,” he said quickly, his eyes intent on my face. “There’s something I need you to know.”

  I drew in an unsteady breath. “You have a mad cousin in the attic?”

  “No,” Colin said immediately. “In the kitchen. But that’s not it. What I’m trying to tell you is—I’ll miss you when you go. A lot.” It was very quiet in the library, all the books still on their shelves. Colin gave up the struggle and looked me straight in the eye. “I love you. For what it’s worth.”

  More than a Rajah’s jewels—that was for sure. But the glib words wouldn’t come to my lips.

  “I love you too,” I croaked. “So much.”

  Fortunately, Colin didn’t seem to mind that I sounded like an asthmatic frog. When we could speak again, he said, “I just wanted you to know that your going away doesn’t change that. My feelings will remain the same.”

  There was something charmingly old-fashioned about the way he said it. Rather Mr. Darcy-ish.

  “Sir,” I said primly, “are you trying to inform me that your intentions are honorable?”

  “Not entirely . . . ,” Colin said, with a familiar glint in his eye. His expression sobered. “But if you mean do I intend to let you go? Not for all the oceans in the world.”

  I lifted my hand to his chest. “What’s a little bit of long distance?” I said recklessly. I nodded to the lost rubies of Berar, adorning a third-rate novel by a first-rate adventuress. “We’ve managed to find something that most people thought didn’t exist.”

  Colin framed my face in his hands. “Yes,” he said, and he wasn’t looking at the rubies. “Yes, we have.”

  Historical Note

  As always, I have shamelessly twisted real events and people to my own purposes. By early 1805, Napoleon was, indeed, anxi
ous to form an alliance with the Ottoman Sultan, Selim III. Franco-Russian diplomatic relations had sputtered to a halt and Russia had entered into an alliance with Britain against France. A Franco-Ottoman entente might have balanced the scales, but Bonaparte’s ambassador in Constantinople, Brune, made himself less than popular. He was recalled in the autumn of 1804; Brune’s successor, Sebastiani, was appointed in April 1805. Into that diplomatic gap, I’ve slipped my imaginary opera singer, Aurelia Fiorila, who returns to Paris with a demand for a mythical jewel.

  Selim III did have a taste for Western opera, importing the first opera troupe to perform in Constantinople. However, as far as I know, neither Napoleon nor his foreign minister ever took advantage of that operatic inclination to slip in a secret negotiator. Aurelia Fiorila, her child, and her mission to Constantinople are entirely my own invention. (Although one wouldn’t put any of it past the notoriously wily Talleyrand.)

  Likewise, the legend of the lost jewels of Berar is taken from the historical record, but the specific nature of the jewels and their fate are entirely my own invention. Before the siege of Gawilghur in 1803, rumors spread that a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and jewels was being kept within the fortress. A small fortune in silver bowls and copper coins was discovered after the siege, but the jewels were never found. Jac Weller, author of Wellington in India, posits, “If the treasure ever had been kept in Gawilghur, and there seems to be little reason to doubt that some at least had been there, the Mahrattas got it out in time. . . . It is also possible that the treasure was hidden and recovered later.” In that case, why might the jewels not be recovered and removed by a double agent who knew where they were hidden? I was unable to find any specific descriptions of the jewels, so I invented the apocryphal Moon of Berar, both to provide a sufficient prize for an anxious Sultan and also as a nod to Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, which takes as its base a looted Indian jewel.

  Similarly, several of my main characters are partly purloined from the past. My hero, Colonel William Reid, is loosely based on Colonel James Kirkpatrick of the Madras Cavalry, commonly known as “the Handsome Colonel.” According to William Dalrymple, “the name was apparently a reference not only to his good looks . . . but also to his rackety love life” and a career “more distinguished for its amorous conquests than its military ones.” Colonel Kirkpatrick’s parents fled Scotland for South Carolina after the failed 1715 uprising. My hero is a generation younger, so his parents fled Scotland after the ’45. Like my Colonel Reid, Colonel Kirkpatrick set off for India, where, in between his military duties, he fathered a brood of both legitimate and illegitimate offspring.