The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Page 7

  Jane considered that. “A shrewd one, though. I shouldn’t think that Colonel Reid is anyone’s fool.”

  Gwen remembered the way he had sparred with her, turning her words in on themselves. No, he was no one’s fool, even if he played one for sport. She wasn’t sure that was entirely reassuring.

  “If there’s anything worse than a rogue, it’s a shrewd rogue,” said Gwen with authority. “Give me your common garden rogue any day, all ego and bluster. But it’s just Bristol and back, and then you and I will be back to Paris.”

  “Hmm,” said Jane. “All the same, while you’re in Bristol, I might take another look at Agnes’s room. Just to be sure.”

  Chapter 4

  London, 2004

  We took the train up to London two days later.

  They had been relatively peaceful days. Jeremy must have been regrouping for an alternate line of attack, because we didn’t find him lurking in the shrubbery, hiding behind the shower curtain, or inviting random film crews onto the grounds. Colin managed to get his characters into two high-speed chases and one Russian mafia kidnapping. And I learned many interesting and entirely useless facts about the plumeria.

  Did you know that the flower was named after a seventeenth-century French botanist, Charles Plumier? Neither did I. Given that he had been dead for a good century by the time the jewels of Berar disappeared in the siege of Gawilghur, the bearing of that information on our quest remained dubious. It turned out that there were more than three hundred varieties of the plant, indigenous to all sorts of different places. Wherever it went, though, there appeared to be rather ominous associations: vampires in Malaysia, funerals in Bangladesh.

  Was the Plumeria poem meant as a metaphorical way of telling us that the quest for the doomed jewels brought only death and despair?

  “I don’t think anyone thought it out quite that much,” said my boyfriend, with his head buried inside the pages of the London Times. “They might have just liked the sound of the word.”

  I wouldn’t necessarily claim that he was avoiding me, but I had the feeling that Colin was getting a little bit burned-out on fun facts about flowers.

  Well, one of us had to do something to find the lost jewels of Berar.

  Not that this had anything to do with my avoiding working on my dissertation. Or the fact that my research had come to an abrupt and uncompromising halt somewhere in the spring of 1805.

  No matter where and how I looked, I couldn’t find any reference to Miss Jane Wooliston or Miss Gwendolyn Meadows in my sources post-1805. Edouard de Balcourt went on merrily living in the Hotel de Balcourt, toadying up to the Emperor (until the Restoration, at which point he abruptly remembered that his father had been decapitated during the Revolution and he’d never liked that upstart Corsican dictator anyway), but his cousin and her chaperone had left the building. Jane’s coded correspondence with Lady Henrietta Dorrington stopped cold in April 1805. Let me rephrase: All of Jane’s correspondence stopped cold in April 1805.

  Something had happened, something big, and I had no idea what it was. I didn’t even know where to begin to look.

  I’d found only two leads, both of them tenuous. The first was in Jane’s final (coded) letter to Henrietta, in which she made a lighthearted comment about Miss Gwen enjoying a performance by the noted opera singer Aurelia Fiorila in the company of the foreign minister, Talleyrand, on an Oriental topic. Roughly translated, it meant Miss Gwen had eavesdropped on Talleyrand talking to Aurelia Fiorila and it was most likely something to do with the Ottoman Sultan. The timing fit—in the spring of 1805, Napoleon was doing his darnedest to get the Sultan to abandon his old alliance with England and team up with France.

  What Aurelia Fiorila had to do with this, though, I had very little idea. Although I did vaguely recall reading something about Selim III having a thing for opera. Or opera singers.

  I sincerely hoped this didn’t mean the Pink Carnation had upped and swooshed off to the Ottoman court. Istanbul was a very long way from Selwick Hall.

  The second, and more useful, tidbit came from the memoirs of Mme. de Treville, one of the Empress Josephine’s ladies-in-waiting, almost all of whom had written their memoirs after the Restoration, largely because everyone else was and none of them wanted to be left out. Mme. de Remusat and Mme. Junot had nothing to say about the disappearance of Miss Jane Wooliston, but Mme. de Treville remarked that the lovely Mlle. Voolston was gone from court with the gracious permission of the Emperor, who had urged her to admonish her parents to keep a closer rein on their daughters. Mme. de Treville, whose literary style was of the “oh and by the way, I forgot to mention” variety, thought it might have something to do with Mlle. Voolston’s sister eloping with someone unsuitable, but she wasn’t quite sure, and weren’t the fashions this season lovely?

  Well, that was something, at least. Mme. de Treville wasn’t the most reliable of sources, but Napoleon proffering unsolicited parental advice rang true.

  Okay, so they’d gone back to England—if they were telling Napoleon the truth and not using that as an excuse to hide other, more interesting activities (like Istanbul). I’d done some poking around, and Aurelia Fiorila had been performing in Bath in the spring of 1805. Had Miss Gwen been following Fiorila? Was there really something amiss with Jane’s sister? And why, in either case, had they disappeared so entirely off the record after 1805?

  There were other avenues I could pursue. Miss Gwen had made use of a plethora of aliases in the past: Ernestine Grimstone, Mrs. Fustian, Lieutenant Triptrap (like Shakespeare, Miss Gwen enjoyed her breeches roles). I could run all of those through the database in the British Library and see what came up; I’d followed that route before, with a certain measure of success.

  But it would all take time.

  At this point, time was the one thing I didn’t have. And instead of using the limited time I had to good purpose, I had been frittering it away, reading up on the blooming habits of genus Plumeria. One of Colin’s ancestors had obviously been into horticulture; I’d found everything from reprints of Elizabethan herbals to nineteenth-century botanical treatises.

  I poked the paper barrier that separated me from Colin. “The only hopeful bit is that ‘plumeria’ seems to be another name for frangipani.”

  “Why is that hopeful?” came my boyfriend’s muffled voice from between the pages of the Times.

  “Have you read no M. M. Kaye novels?”

  “M. M. who?”

  Apparently, he hadn’t.

  “Frangipani always seems to be blooming profusely around the bungalows of minor British military officers in novels set in colonial India,” I explained importantly. “Indian flower . . . missing Indian jewels . . .”

  Colin’s nose poked up over the top of the newspaper. “Isn’t that a bit tenuous?”

  I settled back against the nubby back of the seat. “Hey, at this point, I’ll take what I can get.”

  Colin set down the paper, looking at me just a little too thoughtfully. “There’s no need to go on with this,” he said quietly. “We’ve known from the start that it’s a hopeless project.”

  I really hoped it was just the hunt for the jewels he was talking about.

  “No,” I said. “I want to. Now that we’ve started, it would be a shame to cop out.”

  Colin raised one brow. “Even if it’s a lost cause?”

  “Especially if it’s a lost cause!” I said, a little too enthusiastically. “Aren’t those always the most glamorous kind? Wouldn’t you rather be a Cavalier than a Roundhead?”

  Colin folded the paper back in on itself. “You’re just saying that because you like the hats.”

  Maybe. “Either way, there’s something noble and grand about lost causes.”

  “Except when they lead to heartbreak and frustration,” Colin pointed out sensibly. “After a while, a lost cause ceases to be romantic and just becomes futile.”

  There was no point in pretending that this was just about the jewels. “Frustration, maybe,�
�� I said awkwardly. “But I hope not heartbreak.”

  “Eloise—”

  “Victoria Station,” squawked the PA system. “London, Victoria Station.”

  “Looks like we’re here,” I said. “Come on.”

  We were both very quiet the rest of the way to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat in South Kensington.

  Colin had to poke me to remind me to get out at South Kensington. Out of sheer force of habit, I’d been ready to stay on until Bayswater. That had been my route to and from Colin’s back in the winter when we’d first started dating and I was spending only the odd weekend out at Selwick Hall: Hove to Victoria Station to the Circle Line to Bayswater, where I had my flat.

  Only, I no longer had a flat, at least not one here in England. There was someone else living there now, in the tiny basement studio down the flight of blue-carpeted stairs where the bulb never seemed to be working properly. Someone else would be picking up their mail on the old radiator in the hall and inserting pound coins into the funny little meter at the back of the closet that made the lights go on. I’d given up the flat when my fellowship ran out at the end of May, moving in with Colin at Selwick Hall instead.

  This was the first time I’d been back to London since then. It hadn’t kicked in until now that it wasn’t just an extended long weekend at Colin’s, that my flat wasn’t still there, waiting for me.

  This, I reminded myself, was why I had made the decision to go back to the States—or part of it, at any rate. I wasn’t ready to depend so fully on Colin, to subsume my life into his. It was bad enough that I was dependent on his ancestors for my academic credentials.

  All the same, I wasn’t ready to declare it all over. I hoped Colin wasn’t either.

  I looked at his profile as we surged through the mob of museum-going tourists, but I couldn’t read what he was thinking. I never could. Not an altogether surprising attribute in the descendant of generations of spies, but frustrating all the same.

  What did I expect? Lifelong guarantees? Those only came in cereal boxes.

  Colin’s aunt’s flat was just around the corner from the tube stop, on Onslow Square. She was waiting for us at the top of the landing, the door slightly ajar. Behind her, someone was singing in Italian of love and loss—at least, I assumed it was of love and loss. My Italian is limited to “Cappuccino? Grazie!”

  “You don’t have a soprano hidden away in there, do you?” said Colin.

  “Radio 3,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, pressing her cheek against mine, then Colin’s. “I’ll shut it off, shall I?”

  “Please,” said Colin. It was one of the surprising things I’d discovered about him. The boy was functionally tone-deaf. Any musical performance bored him stiff.

  “Philistine,” I said. “I like it. We brought you these.”

  I held out the slightly squashed bucket of raspberries that was our offering from the country. I’d like to claim we’d picked them, but we’d bought them from the local farm stand instead.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, taking the container from me with a polite disregard for the effect of raspberry stains on her elegant pale blue pants suit. She glanced over her shoulder. “We can have them with our tea.”

  Her usual poise was frayed around the edges. In the sitting room, the music abruptly cut off. There was the sound of footsteps against carpeting.

  Colin and I exchanged a quick glance.

  “Do you have—,” began Colin, but he broke off as the source of the steps appeared in the hall.

  “Hullo,” said Jeremy. “Hot today, isn’t it?”

  It might be hot, but the atmosphere in the hallway was suddenly distinctly frosty.

  “I’ll just put these in the kitchen,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, and beat a retreat with the raspberries.

  It was summer, so Jeremy wasn’t wearing his signature black cashmere turtleneck. Instead, he was garbed in a caricature of summer wear, an impeccably tailored white linen suit that looked like a novelist’s idea of what gentlemen might wear to go boating. Which, of course, no one would ever actually wear to go boating, since it would get all streaked and muddy within five minutes, but, hey, why let reality interfere? All he needed was a straw boater and an ivory-headed cane.

  “Eloise,” he said, and pressed crocodile kisses to my cheeks, first right, then left.

  Oh, we were on first-name terms now, were we?

  “Jeremy,” I said, and gave him my most polite social smile, the one you give to people about five minutes before you rush off to the ladies’ room to spread vicious calumnies about them behind their backs. “How’s business?”

  He winced slightly at my crassness. Business. So American. “Don’t let’s stand here,” he said, with false bonhomie. “Come. Sit down.”

  He led the way into the sitting room as though it was his by right. Although, I supposed, in a way it was. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was Jeremy’s grandmother. A grandson trumped a great-nephew in the familial pecking order. I was used to thinking of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat as Colin’s London pied-à-terre. I had never stopped to think that there might be someone with a greater right.

  There was no fire lit in the sitting room at this time of year. The windows had been left slightly ajar to catch whatever breeze might be ruffling the leaves of the trees in the square. No air conditioners marred the woodwork of the window frames. Otherwise, the room was much as I remembered it, high ceilinged and airy, glossy coffee table books scattered across the cocktail table. The twin portraits of Amy Balcourt and Lord Richard Selwick smirked down from their places on the wall.

  Mrs. Selwick-Alderly returned, sans raspberries. If she had been anyone else, I would have suspected her of just having a quick nip in the kitchen. I would have. “I just put the kettle on,” she said, seating herself in a straight-backed chair at a right angle to the sofa. “I trust you’re having a pleasant summer?”

  “Yes, it’s been lovely,” I said guardedly.

  “Sussex is beautiful this time of year,” said Jeremy blandly. “I do hope you’re enjoying it.”

  I cast a quick sideways glance at Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. I didn’t know if she knew that I’d given up my basement flat to live with her great-nephew—or what she would think if she did. I knew she liked me, but there was a great difference between liking someone as a historical protégée and liking someone as a potential great-niece.

  If she knew, it didn’t show on her face. There was only polite interest.

  “How much longer are you in England?” she asked.

  I perched uncomfortably on the edge of my seat. “Two months,” I said, before Jeremy could say anything. “I head back to the States in August. I’m teaching a full course load this semester.”

  “Head teaching fellow,” said Colin proudly. The fondness in his voice made my heart swell, like the Grinch’s growing too many sizes all at once.

  “They couldn’t find anyone else to do it,” I said. “It’s the horrible Modern Europe survey course, the one they stick all the non-history majors in and a bunch of cranky medievalists who need to make up their modern credits.”

  “Does that mean you’ve found everything you needed to find in our little archive?” asked Jeremy smoothly.

  What was this “our”? They were Colin’s documents, Colin’s archives. Jeremy might be married to Colin’s mother, but that didn’t make the house his. More than that, I didn’t like this attempt to make me into the outsider—even if I was.

  “It would take a lifetime to go through it all,” I said, addressing myself to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. I had, I realized, gone into schoolgirl mode. My hands were clasped in my lap, my legs were crossed at the ankle, I was sitting on the very edge of my seat, and my voice had gone up half an octave. Five more minutes of this and I would start apologizing for having snuck out of gym class. “But if I don’t start writing it up soon, I’ll never get my degree.”

  “You’ve found everything you need, and now it’s time to go,” said Jeremy understandingly. The impli
cation was unmistakable.

  My hands clenched into fists in my lap. “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.” He wanted to play dirty? Fine. I looked Colin’s cousin straight in the eye. “I’d say there’s still plenty to be found at Selwick Hall. Wouldn’t you?”

  I had the satisfaction of seeing Jeremy’s eyes slide away. Ha. Take that.

  “That’s the kettle,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, with some relief. Her hearing had to be keener than mine; I hadn’t heard anything at all. “Will you help me, Eloise?”

  I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of leaving Colin alone with Jeremy, but I knew a command when I heard one.

  “Certainly!” I said, and wiggled up off my chair. With all the sitting on the train, the skirt of my sundress was irreparably rumpled. I made one abortive effort to smooth it and gave up, too aware of Jeremy’s smirk.

  Mrs. Selwick-Alderly rose with less than her usual ease. She moved stiffly, as though her hip pained her. I wondered, for the first time, if her request for help had less to do with leaving the cousins together to sort things out and more to do with actually needing help. For all her energy, she had to be in her mideighties, at least. She was Colin’s grandfather’s younger sister, and Colin had been a fairly late-life baby. His father had been a good generation older than my parents.

  “Shall I help?’ asked Colin, watching his aunt with concern.

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. “We won’t be long, will we, Eloise?”

  Especially not if one of them started screaming. The second either of them yelled bloody murder, I’d be back down that hall like a shot, tea or no tea.

  “Do you think they’ll be all right in there?” I murmured as we made our way down the hall, past the dining room and the guest bedroom I had stayed in back in October, the night I’d met Colin.

  Just to be clear, I wasn’t staying in it with Colin. That was before he had been brought to an acute awareness of my manifold charms.