The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Page 9

  She was still convinced of those things, but with a difference; now she’d earned it, through hard experience and grinding humiliation.

  “You’re still young,” said Colonel Reid, settling himself into the seat behind her.

  “I’d have you know that I count four decades to my credit—and a half!” Take that. One couldn’t quibble with forty-five. “I’m well on the way to my half century.”

  “As I said,” said Colonel Reid, his lips twitching in a most unfair way, “a mere sprig of a girl. Now, I’ve my half century and a few years plus that.”

  “And burnt brown for most of them,” said Gwen acidly.

  “The sun in India will do that to a man,” said the Colonel amiably. “But I don’t see you as the sort to bundle under a bonnet and hide away from the sun.”

  The man was too perceptive by half. A shrewd rogue, Jane had called him, and she was right. Not that it mattered. They would collect the girls and Colonel Reid would be well away out of her life again.

  “The situation has never arisen,” said Gwen crushingly. “The climate of Shropshire is far from tropical.”

  The tutor and his charge took their seats in the stage across from them, the schoolboy showing a lamentable tendency to squirm. The man with many chins considered the schoolboy and then made an ill-advised attempt to squeeze in next to Gwen instead, squashing her against the side of the Colonel.

  “Impossible!” she fumed. “Sir, there is no room for you on this bench.”

  “Na, there’s room right enough,” said the man, the lower sort of clerk by his accent, wiggling his ample backside in the space on the seat that ought by right to have been hers.

  “You might try the other side,” suggested the Colonel politely.

  Squashed up against him, Gwen couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t like the hint of amusement in his voice.

  “And sit next to that young scamp!” The clerk nodded at the schoolboy, who had taken out a small cage with what looked like crickets in it and was engaged in poking at them with a stick. “Can’t believe the sort they let on the stage these days, can you?”

  “No,” said Gwen coldly.

  Behind her, she felt the rumble of the Colonel’s chest as he chuckled.

  Hmph. If he thought it was amusing to have her all but sitting on his lap, so be it. Gwen made her spine as straight as it would go, a rather difficult feat given that she was tucked up against the Colonel’s side.

  “Comfortable, Miss Meadows?” he asked heartily.

  Gwen didn’t dignify that with a response.

  The coach rocked, none too steadily, into motion. Ignoring her companions, Gwen pointedly opened her reticule and took out her notebook and a small black lead pencil. She had got lamentably behind on her writing recently.

  Plumeria had just joined forces with Sir Magnifico to find the missing Amarantha—who, in Gwen’s opinion, could just as well stay lost. She had penned her as a parody of the common Gothic heroine, always cringing and whinging. When it came down to Amarantha and the villain, Gwen’s sympathies, such as they were, were with the villain. He had no idea what he had kidnapped, but the poor man was rapidly finding out.

  Plumeria, on the other hand . . . Now, there was a heroine.

  Forced by dire circumstance into the role of companion and chaperone to the insipid Amarantha, Plumeria was a lady of good family (Gwen had toyed with making her a dethroned princess but decided it was trite; besides, she disapproved of excessive alliteration) with an extensive classical education, as well as knowledge of indigenous plants and swordplay. So far, she had already thwarted a poisoning attempt, bested the villain in a fencing contest, and cracked a riddle couched in the thorniest sort of classical Greek. The only reason the villain had managed to get away with Amarantha—aside from it being a necessary part of the plot—was because the Mother Superior of the cursed Convent of Orsino was secretly Amarantha’s mother’s sister’s former bosom friend turned sworn enemy, who had vowed revenge on Lilibelle and all of her seed. Or her sister’s seed, as the case might be. “Seed” was a very broad term.

  Amarantha should satisfy the critics who wanted to see their heroines young and nubile—Gwen had plans to marry her off eventually to an especially insipid young princeling—but the chaperone was the real heroine of the piece.

  Currently, Plumeria and Sir Magnifico were being set upon by a band of Gypsies unleashed upon them by the Mother Superior. The Gypsies were attacking Plumeria tooth, nail, and with flying monkeys. Fortunately, Plumeria had practiced on flying squirrels, so the monkeys proved little challenge. Back to back, she and Sir Magnifico, wielding his mammoth broadsword, were beating back the Gypsies, when, suddenly, from the caravan leapt—

  “No, no,” said Colonel Reid over her shoulder. “If you deploy them like that, the Gypsies will cut off their left flank.”

  “Colonel Reid!” Gwen slammed her notebook shut.

  “So you’re writing a novel, are you?”

  On her other side, the clerk had descended into slack-lipped snoring. The tutor and his charge were scrabbling on the ground, attempting to find the presumably escaped crickets. Gwen pulled her feet in closer. She’d forgotten how much she hated the stage. “Has anyone ever told you that it’s rude to read over other people’s shoulders?”

  “I can’t help it,” said Colonel Reid. “I’m taller than you are.”

  “That,” said Gwen severely, “is a poor excuse of an excuse.”

  “You know,” he said, ignoring her censure entirely, “that scene wouldn’t be half bad if you’d drop that bit where the wizened old Gypsy crone curses them for all eternity and skip straight to the flying monkeys instead. I liked the flying monkeys.”

  Everyone was a critic. “I’ll have you know that Gypsy curses are very popular this season,” said Gwen loftily.

  “‘May you be doomed to roam the night like a creature of the night’?” The Colonel’s mobile face wrinkled. “It just lacks a certain something. As curses go.”

  Gwen tucked her notebook firmly back into her bag. “Do you have your daughter’s direction in Bristol?” she asked pointedly. This wasn’t, after all, a pleasure jaunt.

  Insufficient malediction indeed!

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve never been, but the girls have described it to me so often I feel as though I’ve been through every room. It’s Kat’s grandmother’s house,” he added, by way of explanation. “My wife’s mother.”

  “Yes, I know. The minister’s wife,” said Gwen, before the curious construction of his phrasing struck her. Kat’s grandmother; not the girls’ grandmother, not Lizzy’s grandmother, just Kat’s.

  The house was in a quiet neighborhood a brisk walk from the posting inn. It wasn’t a fashionable or an overly affluent area, but the houses were tidy and well maintained, with curtains at the windows and boot scrapers by the doors. The house to which the innkeeper at the posting inn had directed them had a corner plot, set back enough to allow room for a patch of yard and a stone path leading up to the door. Gwen saw the curtains twitch and drop again as they walked down the path.

  “It looks just as my Kat described it,” said the Colonel with deep satisfaction. “Lavender bushes and an apple tree in the yard. Many’s the letter I’ve had from her written from that bench, just there. Hello,” he said to the maid who opened the door. “Is Miss Katherine in?”

  “Miss who?” The maid was doing a very creditable village idiot impression.

  “Miss Reid,” interjected Gwen. “We are looking for Miss Reid.”

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said the maid, “but there’s no one of that name here.”

  She started to close the door.

  The Colonel stepped forward, blocking her. “Will you tell Mrs. Davies we’re here, then?”

  “Mrs. Davies?” The maid had to think for a moment. “Oh, you mean the old minister’s wife. She doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “But—” The Colonel’s face was a study in confusion. He looked at th
e lavender, at the apple tree, at the bench in the yard. “That can’t be—”

  The maid, having remembered, went right on remembering. “It’s been—oh, three years now. No, four, since it was the winter my mistress had the pleurisy and the bottom burnt out of the kettle.”

  “Where does she live now?” Gwen asked crisply, before the domestic catalogue could go on. “Mrs. Davies.”

  “I don’t rightly—yes, I do know!” The lappets on the maid’s cap bobbed.

  “Would you care to tell us?” Gwen prompted.

  “If you’d be so good,” the Colonel put in. His ingratiating smile had gone rather frayed around the edges. He fished in his threadbare purse and pressed a coin into the maid’s hand. “With this for your troubles.”

  The coin unleashed a complicated spate of directions. The maid’s directions led them down towards the docks, to a neighborhood that made Gwen take a firmer grip on her trusty parasol. The houses could be called ramshackle at best, paint peeling scabrously off the sides, betraying the crumbling brickwork below. To say that the gutters were inadequate was to do them a disservice; they were barely functional, which didn’t seem to deter the wretch who sat splay legged in one, holding a gin bottle clutched in his or her arms. The gender was indeterminate. The smell of gin was strong. Even that, however, was preferable to the other smells that pervaded the area.

  “This can’t be right,” said the Colonel, looking around him with furrowed brow.

  “We’ve followed the maid’s directions exactly.” Gwen hated to admit it, but her feet were starting to pinch. She wasn’t sure what had possessed her to wear her new boots. Other than the fact that they were dyed a delightful purple that exactly matched her traveling costume. After walking a few yards down this particular road, they were no longer quite so delightfully purple. “It has to be here.”

  “She might have been making it up,” the Colonel argued. “Or got muddled.”

  “She sounded quite certain to me,” said Gwen, treading delicately around a patch of something she’d sooner not examine closely. “Fifth house on the left, she said. There it is.”

  Like all the others on the street, the house was tall and narrow, clinging to its fellows on either side, with a peaked roof and uneven shutters. It looked a bit like an emaciated and inebriated man attempting to maintain his balance.

  The house had been broken up into lodgings by floor. Following the maid’s direction, they went, not to the front steps, but to the side. A very narrow alley led into a dispirited yard. There was a large wash pot on the boil over a makeshift stove. Laundry in various stages of drying hung from ropes strung across the yard.

  “No,” said the Colonel. “This can’t be right.”

  “We’ll never know until we try,” said Gwen, and rapped smartly on the door with the handle of her parasol. There was, unsurprisingly, no knocker.

  “Yes?” The door opened with gratifying promptness, and a woman stepped out into the yard, blinking in the light. Her accent didn’t go at all with the redness of her hands, or the laundry tub propped against one hip. Her dark red hair had been pulled sternly back from her face, knotted at the base of her neck, partly covered with a white kerchief. “If you’ve come about—”

  Catching sight of the Colonel, she broke off midsentence.

  Her eyes weren’t blue like the Colonel’s; they were a dark brown, almost black. But there was no mistaking the family resemblance. She had the same broad cheekbones, the same generous lips, even if hers were tucked into a firm, straight line.

  Since the Colonel appeared incapable of speech, Gwen took it upon herself. “Miss Katherine Reid, I presume?” she said.

  Chapter 6

  The trees crowded close overhead, blotting out the feeble rays of the setting sun. Above their caravan, a raven cawed. It was a forsaken place, more desolate by far than the cursed convent they had fled.

  “My mind mislikes this forest much,” quoth Sir Magnifico.

  Plumeria could not find it in herself to disagree.

  —From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady

  “Kat?”

  William pushed past Miss Meadows, his eyes fixed on his daughter.

  He felt like a man caught in a dream—or a nightmare. It was Kat, but not Kat. Older, thinner, harder than the seventeen-year-old he had put, protesting, on that launch in Calcutta. But it was Kat’s voice, Kat’s voice and her eyes, so like those of her twin brother, Alex. Maria’s eyes.

  For a moment, her eyes lit like they used to when she was a little girl, when he would come home and she would run to him and fling her arms around his neck as he hugged her close, swinging her round and round in circles until she squealed in delight.

  “Father?” she said, and the wariness in her voice broke his heart. His daughter looked at him in confusion. “What are you doing here?”

  Miss Meadows looked around at the spare yard, at the laundry hanging on the line. Her nose wrinkled against the smell of wet washing and boiled cabbage. “We were going to ask the same of you.”

  Kat’s face hardened. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” she said in a tone of dangerous politeness.

  Miss Meadows was unfazed. “I,” she said, “am Miss Gwendolyn Meadows.”

  Kat looked from Miss Meadows to her father. “Are felicitations in order?” said his daughter in a brittle voice.

  She thought he was here because—

  “What? No!” said William. He’d met the woman yesterday! Even he didn’t work that fast.

  “You needn’t sound like that about it,” said Miss Meadows. “Are you going to embrace your daughter, or shall we continue to stand on this somewhat insalubrious doorstep while you make your belated amends to your neglected offspring?”

  Miss Meadows’s ringing tones resonated throughout the little yard.

  By a miracle, Kat actually smiled. She set down the washtub on a wooden block and gestured to the door. “Please do come in. I’m afraid it’s not any more salubrious inside, Miss Meadows.”

  Miss Meadows subjected his daughter to a long, assessing look. “You may call me Miss Gwen.”

  She made it sound like a mark of royal favor.

  William had to duck his head to keep from hitting it on the low doorframe as he went in.

  He followed numbly after the two women into a sitting room that looked as though it were kitchen and dining room and everything else besides. A large hearth, with a bench beside it, provided cooking and sitting area all in one. The rough collection of cooking instruments stood in harsh contrast to the delicate marquetry card table on one side of the room and the blue-and-white porcelain in the corner cabinet.

  William recognized the paired portraits that hung on the roughly whitewashed walls in oval gilded frames: Maria’s grandparents on her mother’s side, prosperous merchants from Cardiff. It was their money that had been set aside, that was supposedly supporting Maria’s mother in her old age.

  What had happened to that money? Why were they living here, like this? If he’d known . . . When he’d written to Maria’s mother, eleven years past, to tell her about his dilemma with the girls, she’d written back that she had a pleasant house in a good part of town, with a bit of a garden where her flowers grew. He’d imagined the girls, sitting winding wool for their grandmother in that bit of a garden, flowers blooming around them, so different from the punishing seasons of India, the heat, the dust, the bugs, the monsoon.

  Instead, he had found his older daughter in a basement, cooking on an open hearth, boiling her laundry on a scrap of dirt where no flowers could ever hope to bloom.

  “Tea?” said Kat, going to the kettle that hung on a hook over the fire. She seemed determined to preserve the amenities, whatever the circumstances.

  Would she have behaved otherwise if he had shown up alone? He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell whether that reserve was directed at his companion or at him.

  “Kat . . . ,” William said, scrounging for his wits. “What are you doing here?”

&
nbsp; Kat’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I live here,” she said.

  “But, surely . . .” William didn’t know what to say. He’d known people in England didn’t live as they did in India, that lodgings and servants were more expensive, but this wasn’t even genteel retrenchment; this was poverty, pure and simple. “What about your grandmother? Is she—”

  “She’s here,” said Kat quickly. “She’s in her room.”

  Her room. There were two doors opening off the far wall, one on either side. Bedrooms, presumably. William’s incredulous eyes took in the peeling paint, the crooked portraits. “What happened to the house with the yard, with the lavender? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Kat’s face set. “There was nothing to tell.” She had always been stubborn, his Kat, as stubborn as a mule. “We get by.”

  From the other room rose a piteous cry. “Maria?”

  William felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. It was his mother-in-law’s voice, but as he had never heard it before, thin and weak and querulous. The Mrs. Davies he had known had been a brisk, bustling little brown berry of a woman, with a sense of humor that offset her husband’s more sanctimonious excesses.

  “Maria? Who’s there?”

  “Excuse me,” said Kat with dignity. “She forgets sometimes. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  William sat heavily on one of the chairs by the card table. The legs wobbled but held. The room swam in front of his eyes. He felt as though he had been punched, hard, in the gut. This was so far from his imaginings of the way his daughters had lived, the way they had allowed him to imagine they lived.

  Miss Meadows raised her brows at him.

  “I had no idea,” he said heavily. “No idea.”

  “That,” said Miss Meadows succinctly, “is very clear. Unless I’m much mistaken, your daughter has been taking in other people’s washing. There were male unmentionables on that line. In a variety of sizes.”

  William barely felt the sting of it. He was too numb from the rest. “To pay for . . . this.” He looked around the damp, barren little room. There were no windows. It would be dark in winter, dark and cold and choked with smoke. “If I’d known . . .”