The Lure of the Moonflower (14 page)

Even now, the thought of it made his back stiffen and his jaw tense. Nearly ten years and he was still angry, even if sometimes he had a difficult time recalling just what it was he’d been quite so angry about.

Jane’s voice broke into his reverie. “Why did you take those jewels?” Jack turned to find her looking at him with serious gray eyes, her fingers knotted in the donkey’s mane. “Don’t tell me it was for the money.”

“Isn’t that the most obvious reason?” Jack deliberately kept his voice neutral. Thief, she had called him, and there was no debating that it was true. He had stolen those jewels as surely as any cutpurse that ever picked a pocket.

“Mr. Reid,” said Jane with some asperity, “if there is anything I have learned, it is that nothing about you is obvious.”

Jack knew how she felt. He’d been a lot happier when she’d been a society lady in a flounced dress.

And she was that lady still, he reminded himself. Once this mission was over, she would wash her face and put up her hair and be that lady again. They would go off their separate ways, in their own separate worlds.

But for now, they existed outside of time, no one but themselves. And Jack found, as absurd as it was, that he wanted her to think well of him. Even if it was only for now, even if they never saw each other again after Porto. For some absurd reason, her good opinion mattered.

The air was cold and pure, the only sounds the crunch of their progress on the pebbles of the path. Slowly, Jack said, “It’s not untrue. I did want the money.”

Jane’s gray eyes were altogether too keen. “But not for yourself?”

Jack glanced at her from under the brim of his hat. “Has anyone ever told you that omniscience isn’t an attractive habit?”

A shadow crossed Jane’s face. “Yes,” she quietly.

He’d meant it as a joke, not as a jibe. Jack wondered just who had put that bruised look behind her eyes, and found himself inexplicably very much wanting to deliver a fist to that person’s nose.

“I wanted the money for my sister.” The words came out too loud in the still landscape. “My younger sister, Lizzy.”

“Why?”

“She’s—” Jack foundered on the words he’d never tried to frame, not even to himself. “She’s a half-caste, like me. Her mother was my nurse.”

He’d loved Piyali, or thought he had. She was everything his mother wasn’t. She’d been soft and warm and tender where his mother had a hawklike beauty, angular and proud. Piyali had sung him to sleep at night, cuddled him through his nightmares.

But apparently he wasn’t the only one into whose bed Piyali had climbed at night. George had come first, born two years after Jack’s mother had died. And then Lizzy.

As a man, Jack couldn’t begrudge his father his consolation. One couldn’t say he’d taken advantage of Piyali; theirs had been a comfortable domestic relationship, mutually satisfying. But the boy in him still felt betrayed. Piyali had been
his
nurse; she was supposed to love him the most.

But it was impossible to hate either George or Lizzy. George was a sunny-natured boy, one of life’s innocents. Scowl at him and he’d toddle up to you offering a sweet.

And Lizzy—Lizzy was a rogue, like Jack. A rogue with copper curls and, when Jack had last seen her, a deceptively endearing lisp that hid a brain as calculating as the Emperor Aurangzeb’s.

Jack’s older brother, Alex, was infuriatingly earnest. Well-meaning, but maddening all the same. And it had always been open war between Jack and his older sister, Kat. George was too good for his own good. But Lizzy—she was kin. They were two of a kind.

And Lizzy was vulnerable in a way the others weren’t.

Jack cleared his throat. “I wanted Lizzy to have choices. My older sister, Kat—she’s full-blood English, and legitimate. But Lizzy— There are men who prey on unprotected girls.”

He was making a hash of it, the words clumsy on his tongue. How to explain to someone who’d never seen it just what happened to the half-caste daughters of men who didn’t have the power or influence to protect them? Jack had known enough of those men. He’d taken his revenge, in his own way, by bilking them of their coin by overcharging them for the opiates with which they whetted their jaded palates.

But the only sure way to guarantee Lizzy’s safety was money. Money meant choices. It meant power.

Jane frowned down at him. “But surely,” she said, “your father—”

Jack permitted himself a twisted smile. “My father always means well. Provided it doesn’t pose too much inconvenience to himself. He put my sisters on a ship and considered his duty done.”

It was Jack who had arranged a place for Lizzy at a young ladies’ academy in Bath, and paid for it out of his own pocket. Anonymously, of course.

“But the jewels . . .” Jane didn’t look nearly as impressed as Jack had expected. “They aren’t the most comfortable thing to possess. You didn’t worry about putting your sister in danger?”

“You don’t believe all that rot about a curse, do you? There’s more danger in being poor. With a handful of rubies in her pocket, Lizzy can do what she likes. She can marry where she chooses. Or not, if she chooses. But she’ll be her own mistress.” Jack looked fiercely at Jane. “Can you, of all people, deny the power of that?”

“No.” Jane’s face was as still as the frost-blasted landscape. “I had that . . . once. Or thought I had.”

“What happened?”

“How far to Alcobaça?” Jane made as if to spur her mount forward, which didn’t work very well when one was sitting on a donkey. Rather than speeding up, the donkey slowed its pace.

“Not far. We should be there within the hour.” So much for confidences. It wasn’t exactly that he’d expected her to be impressed by his nobility of motive. Except that he had, a little. Jack slapped the donkey on the rump, summoning a jocularity he didn’t feel. “If Buttercup here behaves.”

Jane raised a brow. “Buttercup?”

“You’re the one who wanted to name him.” It felt as though a cloud had fallen over the sun, but for the fact that it had already been cloudy when they started out. A gray morning had given way to a gray afternoon. The difference wasn’t in the sky; it was in Jane.

“Yes,” she said, “but not Buttercup.”

Jack yanked on the lead. “You said you were your own mistress once. What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Clearly it does.” There was nothing so infuriating as haughty silence. Jack couldn’t resist a jibe. “Did your father cut off your allowance?”

“If you must know, yes.” Jack had never heard anything like the controlled rage in her voice. “I was disinherited. Disowned. Cast out. Is that what you wanted to know, Mr. Reid?”

No, he wanted to say. It wasn’t. But the words seemed to have frozen in his mouth.

The Pink Carnation regarded him with an expression of contempt. But that wasn’t what cut to the bone. It was the quiver of her mouth, the glitter of tears in her eyes.

But her voice was utterly controlled as she delivered the coup de grâce. “Thanks to you, Mr. Reid, my family declared me dead.”

“T
hanks to me?”

That, thought Jane, caught between tears and laughter, was the trouble with staging grand scenes on a donkey. One couldn’t ride nobly off into the sunset. High drama turned to low comedy.

“Never mind,” she said.

“Never
mind
?” Jack and the donkey both came to a jolting halt. “You tell me I ruined your life and then you tell me ‘never mind’?”

Stupid, stupid. She’d always prided herself on holding her tongue and keeping her counsel. It was what kept her—and those who depended on her—alive. Jane made a helpless gesture. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“But you did.” Jack wasn’t yielding an inch. He planted one hand on the donkey’s neck, the other on its rump, his nose an inch from Jane’s. “Tell me how I forced your family to disown you. I never set eyes on you until three weeks ago.”

Jane pressed her eyes closed, feeling suddenly very weary. “No, but you sent the jewels of Berar back to England.”

“What has that to do with anything?” Frustration rang through Jack’s voice.

“Fate works in strange ways.” Jane met Jack’s clear amber eyes and felt, for the first time, a twinge of doubt. She took refuge in trivia. “They say Fortune is a wheel, you know. One person goes up; another goes down.”

“Yes.” Jack’s voice was clipped. “I did have a classical education. Such as it was. Is there a point to this exposition?”

“When you sent the jewels to your sister, you provided her the prospect of freedom. And you took mine away.” Jane attempted a smile. “It’s really a classic example of Fortune’s wheel.”

Jack wasn’t diverted by abstract musings on the nature of Fortune, which was a pity, because, having begun the conversation, Jane wanted very badly to end it.

He folded his arms across his chest, his stance hard, uncompromising. “Explain.”

The donkey brayed.

“You”—Jack poked a finger at the donkey—“quiet. And you”—he looked at Jane, his face carved from granite—“talk. You’ve judged me already, but I would have thought, under your law, that a condemned man would at least have a right to know the charges leveled against him.”

You’ve judged me already.
She had, long ago, long before she’d met him. She’d tried him in absentia and told herself it was justice. But now, now that he was before the bar, all of her grievances felt flimsy and flat, mere paper tigers.

“When you sent the jewels of Berar back to England, you set a train of events in motion. . . .”

Jane could remember that awful night in Paris, the letter from England, delivered by the usual shadowy routes. Her sister and another girl, Lizzy Reid, had gone missing from their Bath boarding school. And Jane had held that crumpled piece of paper and felt a weight like rocks crushing her chest, choking her. She had thought herself very careful in keeping her identity hidden. But no ruse was perfect. There were those who knew. And things slipped out.

If any harm came to her sister, it was on her head.

She had rushed back to England, only to discover that it wasn’t on her head at all—that it was, in fact, Lizzy who had run and Agnes who had followed. And why? Because Lizzy’s brother had had the ill judgment to send the jewels of Berar to a young ladies’ academy.

Looking away, over Jack’s shoulder, Jane said distantly, “The Gardener had promised those jewels to Bonaparte. Bonaparte couldn’t be allowed to have them. I was summoned from Paris.”

It was all true as far as it went. With some rather large omissions. But to tell the whole story—it was to expose a corner of her soul she didn’t want to share. The crushing fear for her sister. The doubt. The questioning.

Not to mention the awkwardness of belatedly explaining her connection to Jack’s family.

“I had not previously made the acquaintance of the Gardener. I knew of him, of course, but our paths hadn’t crossed.” Jane felt Jack stir, and looked him in the eye. “I prevented the Gardener from retrieving the jewels, but at a cost. I learned his identity. And he learned mine.”

“Ah,” said Jack. That was all. But it was enough. He was a fellow agent; he understood.

“Paris was closed to me.” Her league, her web of agents, everything she had built. Jane swallowed hard. “The Gardener professed to have some regard for me, but I didn’t imagine that would save me from the Temple prison should I be so bold as to show my face at the Tuileries.”

At least, not without certain conditions being met. All she had to do was disown her principles and her country.

A small matter, Nicolas had called it, with his facility for seeing things as he wished them to be.

A small matter to him, but not to her.

“Was that why your family disowned you?” Jack’s voice was carefully neutral. “Because of your . . . connection to the Gardener?”

Jane’s head snapped up. “No!”

It would have been laughable if the matter hadn’t been so deadly serious. They had danced around each other for years, she and Nicolas, in a double-edged flirtation that was part attraction and part policy, circling, dipping back. There had been nothing in it that would have been seen amiss in any drawing room in London; any impropriety had been purely in suggestion, all the more seductive for being implied rather than acted.

At least, so matters had stood. Until Venice.

Jack held up both hands. “I’m not condemning you for it. My mother was disowned for nothing more damning than being caught in a kiss. And it ruined her entire life. If you met the Gardener because of the jewels and then—”

“It’s not that,” said Jane hastily. “It’s not that at all.”

A strained silence fell over them. “Perhaps,” said Jack carefully, holding out a hand, “we might continue this conversation more comfortably? It’s dashed awkward having Petunia butting me in the thigh every five seconds.”

“So it’s Petunia now, is it?” said Jane, but she took his hand all the same. It was warm and firm as he helped her down from the donkey, her stiff limbs twinging in protest.

“Would you prefer Columbine?”

“I was thinking . . . Gwendolyn.” Jane wrinkled her nose as Jack spread a blanket on the rough ground, tethering the donkey to an olive tree. The sky was beginning to be streaked with pink. “Shouldn’t we go on?”

“We can spare ten minutes. We’re less than an hour’s walk from Alcobaça.” Jack produced his flask from beneath his jacket and handed it to her. “Pretend it’s tea.”

“Strong tea,” said Jane, but she drank all the same, the liquid sending a shock of warmth through her. It felt like a bizarre parody of a picnic, a man and a woman on a blanket in the countryside, only the countryside was brown and gray, the refreshments were strong spirits, and the man and woman—

Jane felt a pang for the courting couple of her imagination, young and innocent, in a bucolic setting of hedgerows and grazing sheep, no secrets, no scars.

She hadn’t wanted that, she reminded herself. She had left all that without a backward glance. She’d had no patience for rural swains.

But it might be nice, just once, to be able to speak to someone frankly, without reserve.

She hadn’t had that sort of honesty with Nicolas. All of their exchanges had been conducted in layers of euphemism and innuendo. It was a battle of wits, with her heart as the prize. Exhilarating at first, but exhausting, too. If one lay down with lions, one ran the risk of being savaged.

Jane looked up at her companion. Jack Reid wasn’t a lion. A tiger, she’d thought him at first, barely domesticated. But she was beginning to think she had done him an injustice. Beneath his prickly exterior, she suspected he was more like his father than he knew.

She doubted he would take that as a compliment.

“So,” said Jack, and settled back across from her, his booted feet brushing the hem of her skirt. “The Gardener?”

Jane stared at the flask. It was just a simple tube of leather with a tin cap. Nothing fancy. Nicolas had a silver one, engraved with his coat of arms. Not his father’s coat of arms, but the one he had designed for himself, when he was still the Knight of the Silver Tower.

Jane took another swig from the flask. The brandy burned her throat. Her voice was husky as she said, “You have it backwards. The Gardener wasn’t my lover.” She could have left it at that. But some demon of honesty prompted her to add, “Not then.”

Jack’s hands stilled on the ties of his haversack. He looked at her, his expression unreadable.

Jane hurried on. “It’s rather ironic, isn’t it? My parents disowned me because they feared the appearance of impropriety. But I didn’t become truly improper until I was disowned.” She managed a lopsided smile. “It seemed only fitting. Under the circumstances.”

She was waiting for him to say something, Jack knew. But the words stuck in his craw. All he could see was Jane and the Gardener, Jane as he had first seen her, polished and poised, garbed in a gown that cost more than his pay for a year, circling in the other man’s arms in a ballroom lit by braces of candles.

Jack didn’t want to think about it. “You’ve lost me,” he said brusquely. “If it wasn’t on account of the Gardener, why were you struck from the family escutcheon?”

Jane’s back relaxed just a trifle. Had she expected him to condemn her? He, of all people, had no right. “They didn’t approve my going off on my own.”

It sounded so ridiculously prosaic after her earlier admissions. “You’d been working as an agent for how long?”

“For three years,” said Jane calmly. She appeared to have gathered herself together, cloaking herself in that poise that sat on her shoulders like a shawl of finest Kashmir. “But in Paris I lived in the home of my cousin, my mother’s own nephew. He is,” she said dispassionately, “a nasty little toad of a man. But he lent an element of respectability. And I had a chaperone.”

She looked away, her finely boned profile limned by the golden light of the setting sun.

“A nice setup,” said Jack, keeping his voice carefully dry.

A very nice setup, and she’d lost of it because of him. There were a dozen justifications, but the truth of it was that he hadn’t thought before shipping the jewels off to Lizzy. He hadn’t bothered to think about the unintended consequences, any more than he had when he had run away from the printer’s shop at sixteen. It had seemed like a grand gesture at the time, and that had been enough. Enough to turn the Pink Carnation’s life upside down and leave her vulnerable to the predations of men like the Gardener.

“You must miss it,” Jack said awkwardly.

Jane’s eyes met his, and her lips turned up in a rueful smile. “I do. Very much. My parents hadn’t minded in the slightest my living in my cousin’s household, properly chaperoned, but it appeared they minded very much my traveling on my own through Europe, no matter what alias I employed.”

“I can’t pretend to know much of gently bred young ladies”—Jack didn’t miss her wince at the words—“but couldn’t you have traveled with your chaperone? Surely that would have satisfied your parents.”

Jane’s long, elegant fingers picked at a brown stalk of grass. “When we returned to England to pursue the jewels, my chaperone fell in love with . . . with a man who suited her perfectly. How could I deny her a chance at happiness?”

“Very easily,” said Jack bluntly. “Many would.”

Jane only shook her head. “Miss Gwen would have come with me, but I would always have known what I caused her to leave behind.” After a pause, she added, without meeting Jack’s eyes, “She has a daughter now. My goddaughter.”

Jack leaned back on one arm. “You might have stayed behind as well. You might have married.”

“Who?” Jane’s eyes met Jack’s. “What man wants a wife who spends her nights crawling through windows, her days studying maps of Europe?”

The image struck Jack forcibly. And not just because of the tight, dark breeches Jane was wearing in his imagination. His father’s first wife had been an angel. That was what they had been told. Jack had always pictured her eternally sewing a sampler and singing hymns. His own mother had spent half her life in a darkened room, the other half throwing crockery. And Piyali . . . Her province had been the nursery and kitchen.

His father had had his world; the women in his life had had theirs. Marriage, to Jack, was a house, a set of women’s quarters, a geographical tether entirely unsuited to the itinerant existence he lived.

It had never occurred to him that the shoe might have been on the other foot. “You might have given it up.”

“That was what my parents wanted. They told me there had been quite enough of gallivanting around foreign parts. I could come home and wind wool and dance at assemblies—or I could take myself off.”

Jane might have been discussing a night at the opera or the cut of a new gown, but for the fact that there was a small pile of shredded grass in her lap, the only chink in her Olympian calm. The restless movement of her hands told Jack more than another woman’s tears.

She glanced up at Jack, her eyes meeting his. “I don’t believe they thought I would.”

“Then,” said Jack belligerently, “they didn’t know you at all.”

For a moment, something raw and vulnerable looked out of her eyes. And then the mask closed down again. “I died of pneumonia. There’s a little stone to me in the churchyard in Lower Wooley’s Town.” She arched a brow, inviting him to share the humor of a situation Jack didn’t find humorous in the slightest. “I could understand cutting off my allowance, but it was the being declared dead that I found so distressing.”

“I’m sorry.” Jack didn’t know what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”

To be declared dead, officially dead. By one’s own parents. His mind couldn’t quite grasp it. Jack had always suspected his father would have been happier had Jack never been born, but that had never been said, never even been implied.

Come home,
his father’s letters had read.
Come home when you feel you can come home. Don’t feel you can’t come home.

Jack had torn them into shreds and fed them into the fire.

His old home in Madras was gone. His father had long expressed the intention of retiring, eventually, to England. Jack’s brother Alex was in Hyderabad, his brother George in the retinue of the Begum Sumroo, his sisters in England. But he knew that he could appear, at any time, on any of those doorsteps, and a place would be found at their tables.