The Lure of the Moonflower (11 page)

You can walk down the street unchaperoned.

Jack had never stopped to think of that before, that there might be others who had been more hard done by than he. For a moment, just a moment, he had seen something in the Carnation, something that spoke to him—and then it had been gone again, locked beneath that haughty mask that reminded him, so forcefully, of the Brits back in Madras, the ones who had looked at him with a sneer on their lips, spoken to him with those same plummy voices, expecting obedience and respect from him all because his mother had been of a Rajput family whose lineage was prouder than any of theirs.

Jack had played them for fools, those men. He had bled them dry, selling the opium they craved for their silly rituals while saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir” and laughing behind his hand while he milked them of information and of coin.

They were so sure of themselves, those English aristocrats. So arrogant. As arrogant as the Carnation, who expected him to say “yes, sir” and “no, sir” and follow her lead, even as she led him into a mare’s nest.

Maybe that was why he had done it, why he felt such a need to crack that cool exterior, to make her doubt, question, stop looking at him as though he were beneath contempt.

She hadn’t looked at the Gardener like that. For him, she had been all wide eyes and sudden uncertainty.

Nicolas, she had called him.

Jack had worked for the Gardener for years, and against him for as many again, but he had never known the man’s name.

For that matter, he still didn’t know the Carnation’s.

Well, and what did it matter? Jack trudged up the path, yanking on the lead rope of a very cranky donkey. It was unclear whose temper was worse, Jack’s or the donkey’s.

“If you didn’t move so damn slowly, I wouldn’t have to pull so damn hard,” Jack informed the donkey shortly.

The donkey balked, favoring Jack with a look of scorn remarkably similar to the Carnation’s. That was, if the Carnation were covered with gray fur and had long, slightly floppy ears.

Jack prodded at the recalcitrant animal. “You know, meat is scarce here. There is such a thing as donkey stew.”

The donkey gave a defiant bray and minced three delicate steps. In the wrong direction.

Yes, decided Jack grimly. Definitely kin to the Carnation.

Another massive tug on the rope, and the donkey was once more headed, reluctantly, in the right direction, towards their makeshift camp. Assuming, that was, that the Carnation was still there.

She wasn’t.

The clearing was empty and still, all signs of their presence removed. The Carnation had, Jack noted, not only damped the fire, but done her best to remove all traces of its existence. An experienced tracker would find the marks—she wasn’t so expert as that—but he would have to look for them.

This was not good. This was, in fact, the opposite of good. She might, Jack told himself, as he tried to control his rising alarm, have run back to the Gardener. She might, as he had once supposed, be in his pay.

Or she might have blundered into the night, looking for Jack. And if she had, anything might have become of her. The winter woods were full of dangers, especially during the rainy season. Especially for someone accustomed to city streets, to linkboys and sedan chairs.

He could remember her face as he had walked away, pale with alarm, her voice calling after him.

Temper, my boy, temper
, his father would have said, so disappointed in him yet again. Disappointed and wary. Colonel Reid had never said anything, but Jack had known all the same—known that his father watched him more closely than he did the others, terrified of finding in Jack’s childish tantrums traces of his mother’s terrifying rages.

Jack had been only three when she died, but he could remember the storms breaking above his head: fabric rending, furniture breaking, voice ranting, high and shrill. She had been beyond reason in her rages. Jack remembered his father futilely attempting to soothe her, to cajole her, before he gave up entirely, choosing to spend his time instead in the mess with his friends and a bottle.

Jack remembered those years only dimly: hiding during her rages, attempting to tease her into good humor as she lay in a darkened room, her head turned to the wall. And the good times, the times that she would lift him in her arms and spin him around, would cradle him and sing to him and tell him tales of their ancestors, those proud, proud men who had conquered kingdoms that made the East India Company’s possessions look petty.

He remembered those years dimly, but he remembered the sequel very well. He remembered the way his father watched him every time he raised his childish voice in anger, every time he fought with his brother or snatched a toy from his sister. Jack remembered the fear in his father’s face, the false note in his voice, so different from the way he spoke to Kat and Alex. It was always there, the fear that Jack would be like his mother, governed by emotions beyond his control.

Jack had proved the contrary to himself time and again. He prided himself on keeping his head, on controlling his emotions.

And then there was last night.

Jack looped the donkey’s rope over a shrub, pulling it tight. “Princess?”

“Up here.” There was a rustling overhead, and the Pink Carnation dropped neatly down, landing lightly on her feet.

Jack said a prayer of thanks to every god he could remember. “You were up a bloody tree?”

The Carnation looked up at him from under her lashes. Almost apologetically, she said, “I had thought it best to be prepared in case there was . . . unwanted company.”

“I won’t ask in which category I fall,” said Jack dryly.

The Pink Carnation winced, but didn’t say anything. There was, thought Jack, something different about her this morning. Something tentative and hesitant.

It must, he decided, be the lack of wig. Without the exuberant dark curls, her own hair escaping in pale wisps from her tightly coiled braids, she looked strangely vulnerable, as though she had lost part of her armor.

She was still wearing her mud-spattered white trousers and the frogged green jacket that shouted “enemy.”

Jack seized on that point with relief. “You can’t wear those. You’ll have your throat slit within the week.”

“You instructed me to leave my ball gowns in Lisbon.” The Carnation glanced down at her dirty trousers. “I’m afraid this is all I have.”

“Here.” Jack dug in the saddlebag, thrusting a thick pile of cloth in her general direction. “Take these.”

Warily, the Carnation shook out one piece, then another, revealing a thick brown wool skirt, a tight red bodice, and a long-sleeved white linen chemise. The clothes were all sturdily constructed, but well-worn.

“Did you raid someone’s clothesline?”

“I leave that to your friends in the French camp. I paid for it.” More than it was worth. The region had never been a wealthy one and was poorer still after the depredations of the French troops, who operated under instructions from their Emperor to help themselves as they went.

The Carnation stared down at the brightly colored bodice, her fingers worrying at the stitching on the sides. “I’d thought you’d left me here.” She glanced up, her expression wry. “And I’m not sure I’d blame you if you did.”

He’d felt easier with the haughty aristocrat. “Put those on,” Jack said brusquely. “We need to get moving.”

Without argument, the Carnation took the garments and retreated behind a tree. Jack turned his back, cursing himself and her. This new, humble Carnation made him nervous. He didn’t want to pity her. Or like her.

“You’ll have to travel as my wife,” he said, raising his voice so she could hear him.

The Pink Carnation’s head popped around the tree. “But I don’t speak the language.”

Ah, there was the Carnation he knew.

“You’ll just have to stay silent, then, won’t you?” Jack taunted. “Since you haven’t done me the honor of telling me your name, I’ll just have to come up with my own. We can call you . . . Jacinta.”

The Carnation emerged slowly from behind the tree, shaking out the panels of her skirt. “Flattering, if not entirely auspicious.” She filled out that bodice altogether too well. It fit tightly beneath her breasts, cut in a deep square filled in by only the white linen of the chemise, which, in the local fashion, plunged in a deep vee, no more concealing than a fichu. “In Greek mythology, Hyacinth—”

“I know the myth,” said Jack shortly. “Did you think I was nothing more than a bazaar brat? I spent three years in a boarding school in Calcutta. They crammed the classics down our throats. It was part of the civilizing effort. As you can see, it didn’t take.”

The Carnation’s gray eyes regarded him levelly. “These are not civil times.” More prosaically, she added, “Might it be simpler if we claimed I had been the servant of one of the English factory in Lisbon? If I were a lady’s maid from England, that would explain my inability to speak the language.”

“That might serve.” It would explain not just her lack of Portuguese, but the way she held herself, every inch the aristocrat, even in her shabby clothes. A lady’s maid might well ape her mistress’s airs. It was certainly better than his plan, as much as he hated to admit it.

The Carnation fingered the laces on her bodice. “I have learned that it is generally safer to stay as close to the truth as one can.”

Jack shoved the remains of her uniform into one of the sacks hanging from the donkey’s sides. “As you did before, Lieutenant de Balcourt?”

He expected the Carnation to retort in kind. She didn’t. Instead, after a moment’s internal struggle, she said quietly, “The Vicomte de Balcourt is my cousin. I spent some time living, as a guest, at his house in Paris.”

Jack stood, one hand on the donkey’s flank, completely at a loss.

The Carnation pleated her fingers together. “Last night you accused me of endangering us both. You were right. I—I do not take advice well.”

Jack folded his arms across his chest. “Especially from a traitor?”

The Carnation considered her words carefully. “It was not precisely a point in your favor.”

Despite himself, Jack let out a rusty bark of a laugh. “You couldn’t speak straight if you tried, could you?”

“I’m sorry.” The words shocked Jack into silence. “Is that straight enough for you? You were right. We ought to have traveled your way from the outset.” She paused a moment, her lips pressing tightly together. “Had I known that my actions would lead us into the path of the Gardener, I should have chosen otherwise.”

As an apology, it left something to be desired, but the fact that she was apologizing at all was amazing enough. It didn’t come easily. Jack could see the cost of it in the rigid set of her shoulders, in the lines on either side of her mouth.

But he wasn’t letting her off that easily. “Ah, yes,” he said, steeling himself. “Your friend Nicolas.”

The Carnation took a deep breath that did very interesting things to her bodice. “You asked last night whether I was working with the Gardener.”

Jack hastily relocated his attention to her face. “You can understand why it might be a matter of interest to me,” he said conversationally.

The Carnation’s eyes looked past him, fixed on scenes he couldn’t see. In the tone of someone determined to see a bad job through, she said, “The Gardener and I have been, for the most part, enemies. But we did— We had occasion once to come together on a matter of mutual interest. Five months ago. In Venice.”

Her lips shut fast, as though she were afraid of saying more. Jack frowned at her, trying to read that still face, to divine what lay beneath those hastily truncated words.
In Venice
. That there was more to it than that, he had no doubt.

Just how had the Carnation and the Gardener come together?

You can rent a room or sit at a table at a tavern without everyone assuming that you must be a whore.

The comment he had been about to make died on Jack’s tongue. Instead he said gruffly, “I take it you are no longer . . . mutually interested?”

He could see her weighing her answers, choosing her words. “In Venice,” said the Carnation carefully, “one of the Gardener’s colleagues, a man with whom he was closely connected, was found facedown in a canal, a knife in his back. The Gardener made great lamentation over him.”

She glanced up at Jack, and he could see the reflection of old pain in her eyes, pain and grief, like an echo of an old, sad song.

“But I had seen the Gardener’s hand wield that knife. He was not,” she added primly, “aware that I had witnessed it.”

Jack could picture the scene. A tapestry, richly figured, hanging before the arras in a Venetian palazzo. The Carnation behind. The Gardener, smiling, taking his friend’s hand, and, still smiling, driving the knife into his back.

It might have happened like that. Or it might not. It might have occurred on the street, in a crowded reception, anywhere.

But that it had happened, Jack had no doubt. There were many things one could feign, but not that level of disillusionment. He had felt it himself, the day he had opened the Gardener’s orders and found within the warrant for Perron’s execution.

Testing her, Jack said, “There are times when our work turns deadly.”

“But neither of us has the stomach for assassination.” Her eyes met his. She looked at him without pretense, her pride stripped away. “We did not begin well back in Lisbon. May we start again?”

The scents of dawn were all around them. A cold gray dawn, but dawn all the same. Here, in this abandoned clearing, Lisbon felt worlds away, as did the woman he had first met, the colonel’s lady in her jewels and curls. From a branch a hardy bird chirped, the only sound of life. Otherwise they might have been the first woman and the first man, before fruit and deceit had conspired to alert them to their own nakedness.

And that was what he got for actually listening during those mandatory chapel mornings back in school.

Jack shoved aside thoughts of a naked Carnation holding an apple. What she was saying made good common sense. And had nothing to do with that bodice. They had a mad queen to find and a wily adversary to outsmart. Both of those could be accomplished a great deal more effectively if they joined forces.