The Lure of the Moonflower (15 page)

There was no gravestone with his name on it.

It made all of his grievances feel petty and small. “When I sent those jewels—I never imagined—”

“I know,” said Jane, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “You were only trying to help your sister.” With a visible effort, she added, “It wasn’t really your fault, any more than it’s the fault of a butterfly for flapping its wings.”

Jack clung to what small bit of humor he could find. “A butterfly? Really?”

“Would you prefer something more manly? A buzzard, then.” She rubbed her hand against her temple, leaving a small streak of grime. There was something strangely endearing about that smudge. With her hair in a braid down her back and dirt on her cheek and brow, she looked painfully young. Only her eyes looked old, old and tired, as she said with an obvious effort, “The truth is that it would have happened anyway.”

Jack looked at her doubtfully. “You would have met the Gardener?”

Jane’s eyes met his without faltering. “I would have decided the stakes were too high. By operating under my own name, I put my family, my friends, everyone who associated with me at risk.” There were lines at the sides of her eyes and mouth that Jack hadn’t noticed before, lines engraved there by sleepless nights and hopeless choices. “I had believed that, if I were careful, I could protect them. But I saw agents, good agents, captured. There was a man—an artist—who worked with us who had his fingers broken. It sounds such a small thing, but to him, a man who lived by his brush—”

“You don’t need to explain.” Jack knew. He’d lived it. He could see them still, the bodies of his friends.

“The Gardener precipitated the decision but he didn’t cause it. I could give up the work, or I could go away. Really,” Jane said, with a false brightness that broke Jack’s heart, “my parents did me a favor—”

He couldn’t bear it anymore. He wrapped his arms around her, muffling her words in his chest. “You don’t have to be so damned noble,” he said into her hair. “Scream at me, rail at me, tell me I ruined your life. I’d rather that.”

“But I can’t,” she said, her voice dampened by his coat. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

Jack gave a ragged laugh deep in his throat, a laugh that had more in it of despair than amusement, and pulled her closer, resting his cheek on her hair, breathing in peat and lavender. “You’re too damned fair for your own good.”

“It’s only true.” Wiggling back, she looked up at him, her hair tousled around her dirt-smudged face. Only her eyes were as he had first seen them, clear, uncompromising. “I don’t know what else I could have done, in the end.”

Beneath her disguises lay a core, not of steel, but of pure silver. Jack didn’t know how he hadn’t seen it before. Perhaps because most people were made of baser coin. Himself included.

Jack kept an arm around her, his body providing some small barrier against the elements. He could shield her from the wind, if nothing else. “How did you manage? On your own, I mean.”

“It wasn’t so very different,” said Jane, so carefully that Jack knew it had been very different indeed. “I had connections still. And aliases. The greatest difficulty was the loss of my allowance. Informers tend not to continue informing when one hasn’t the coin to pay them. Not to mention gowns, gloves, and fans. I hadn’t realized quite how much I’d taken for granted until it was no longer there. It was . . . humbling.”

He had twitted her about her expensive Paris gown, her infinite resources. Jack winced at the memory. “What did you do?”

“I found an alternate source of funding,” she said obliquely. Jack hadn’t realized he’d betrayed himself, but he must have made some noise, or given some sign, because Jane added coolly, “Whatever you’re thinking, it was nothing like that.”

Jack could feel color suffuse his cheeks. “I never thought . . .”

But he had. Of course he had. And he felt like a cad for it.

“It was my independence I sacrificed, not my virtue.” There was a rigidity about her posture that suggested just how much the conversation was costing her. “I sacrificed that later, but not for coin.”

“Stop.” Jack turned her face towards his, his palm beneath her chin. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Why not? It’s true.”

“Because I won’t have you making yourself sound cheap. You’re not.” His own vehemence took him by surprise. “If a man took a lover it would be accounted commonplace. Why shouldn’t you? Your virtue lies in your mind, not in what lies between your legs.”

He saw her eyes widen, but she said only, “Plain speaking, Mr. Reid.”

Despite himself, Jack’s lips twisted. “Don’t you think, by now, you ought to call me Jack? You could call me Iain if you like, but I’d never remember to answer to it.” When she didn’t smile in return, he added more seriously, “If either of us cared a fig for the world’s niceties, we wouldn’t be here.”

Jack saw Jane’s throat work, that long, graceful throat. “I thought I did. I thought I could have both. I thought I could be both.”

He could tell her something about that.

“It’s never comfortable belonging to two worlds. You find neither wants you.” Gently, Jack tucked a bit of loose hair behind her ear. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re worth twenty of any of those ladies of supposedly unsullied background. It’s an honor to walk beside your donkey.”

Jane gave a half laugh. “Are you never serious?”

“I’ve never been more serious.” Some remnant of honor prompted him to add, “If you care for the opinion of a mongrel like me.”

Her eyes were silver in the brilliance of the sunset. “I care for
your
opinion.”

“More fool you,” said Jack, but it came out like an endearment.

His hand cupped her face, so different from that of the woman he had first met in Lisbon, so much more beautiful for all her scrapes and smudges.

He could feel the shift of her chin against his palm as she spoke. “For many things,” she said, “but not for this.”

And she rose up on her knees and kissed him, tentatively at first, and then not so tentatively at all.

There was a ringing in Jack’s ears and a roaring in his blood. He should put a stop to it, he knew. This was . . . He was . . . Something about honor? His world narrowed to the woman in front of him, the silk of her hair beneath her fingers, the warm mystery of her lips against his.

Jack gave up any attempt at rational thought. He’d never believed in fighting losing battles.

They were both still kneeling, sinking down together, Jane in his arms, her body pressed against his as the kiss became more intense, deepened. How could he ever have thought her cold? There was nothing cold about her. She was like a living flame in his arms; her lips burned where they touched. They kissed hungrily, greedily, hardly pausing for air, the cold forgotten, the hard ground forgotten, even the donkey forgotten in a sheer physical need more elemental than breathing.

The ringing was louder now, more clamorous. It wasn’t in his head, Jack realized. It was coming from the east, from Alcobaça.

His head spinning, Jack sat down hard on his heels. “Those are bells,” he said dumbly. “Real bells.”

Jane staggered to her feet, yanking her cloak back up around her shoulders. “From Alcobaça?”

She almost managed to make her voice sound even. Almost. Her chest was rising and falling just a little too fast, her lips red and swollen.

And Jack needed to get his brain out of his breeches if they weren’t going to die.

“It’s the nearest foundation with bells that size.” Jack forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. Survival now, kisses later. Not that he had much hope of kisses later. That had been a one-off, an accident. And— Oh, bugger it. “An attack? It might be an attack. Alcobaça is a rich foundation.”

“And Bonaparte’s officers are greedy men. Or if someone discovered the Queen was there—” Jane broke off, a strange expression on her face. “Wait. Do you know what day it is?”

“The day?” Jack wasn’t quite sure what that had to do with anything. They needed to plan their next move. If Junot’s troops were at Alcobaça— “We left Lisbon on the fourteenth.”

“We were eight nights with Lieutenant Moreau . . . and then two since.” Jane pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Of course. It’s the twenty-fourth of December.”

“Of course?” The bells were still ringing, sending out their call of alarm. Jack tried to remember the reports he had rifled, the troop movements Junot had planned. Not that Junot’s plans tended to rise to fruition, particularly not on a specific day. He was missing something, he knew, but his brain was too muddled to see it. Confusion made him short. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“I should say so.” Jane looked at him, a rueful smile spreading across her face. “It’s not an attack. It’s Christmas Eve.”

“T
hey don’t have tablecloths?”

“It’s a pub, Grandma.” My fixed smile was beginning to ache around the edges. Festive. We were supposed to be festive. I just had to keep reminding myself of that as Colin and I made the rounds of our guests.

“A what?” My grandmother eyed the scarred wooden tables with disfavor.

How did one define a pub? They just were. “Sort of like a cross between a bar and a diner. Only with less Formica.”

My grandmother looked even more pained. “Don’t they have any nice restaurants out here, dear?”

“I offered to host the dinner at the Grill at the Savoy,” said Jeremy, managing to look both soulful and sorrowful.

My grandmother and Jeremy were getting along like a house on fire. They disliked all the same things. Including informal rehearsal dinners.

“That would have been much better.” She patted his well-manicured hand with her own heavily beringed one. “Eloise, why aren’t we at the Savoy?”

“Excuse me—Mom wants me,” I lied, and ducked away, my attempts to cunningly ferret something, anything, out of Jeremy blocked by the Grandma effect.

As far as I could tell, Jeremy was behaving exactly as usual, but it was hard to be certain. A force field of smarm surrounded him like the shields of the Death Star (
Spaceballs
edition). I wasn’t sure what would shake that cool exterior, short of squirting his black cashmere sport coat with raspberry jam.

Hey, it had worked for Lone Starr.

By that point, I was getting a little bit punchy. Everything was proceeding exactly as one would expect. People were being awkward, old family grievances were being aired, and the single members of the bridal party were getting soused.

If it weren’t for the empty chair where Mrs. Selwick-Alderly should have been, it would have felt like an entirely normal rehearsal dinner: in other words, full of pitfalls and unresolved family tensions.

We were a small group. Given the huge number of overseas guests, we’d elected to restrict the rehearsal dinner to people actually in the wedding, to keep from having the wedding two times over. Perhaps that was why it felt a bit like five chapters into an Agatha Christie novel, everyone milling around, looking vaguely suspect.

Where was Miss Marple when you needed her? I’d even settle for Hercule Poirot and his leetle gray cells.

Not having a sleuth on hand, I took stock of the assemblage, particularly the dodgier members. Colin’s mother, wearing a dress that was both shorter and cuter than mine, was currently being occupied by my sister, Jillian. They seemed to be getting along rather well. I couldn’t decide whether that was convenient or disturbing. If she had a guilty conscience, Colin’s mother didn’t show it. She was happily knocking back the house bubbly, holding forth to Jillian about an art installation she had just seen that wasn’t nearly as innovative as her dear friend blah blah blah’s blah blah blah.

My eyes snaked over to Colin’s sister, Serena. When I’d first started dating Colin, I’d felt sorry for Serena. She wore her neediness the way her mother wore a little black dress. But my sympathy had waned when Serena had let herself be bribed by Jeremy into voting her share of Selwick Hall against Colin. Behind his back.

I had always suspected that Serena was carrying a torch for her stepfather. She’d claimed to be mourning the breakup of her relationship with smarmy archivist Nigel Dempster, who was now dating Colin’s neighbor, Joan Plowden-Plugge, right next door at Donwell Abbey.

At Donwell Abbey. For a moment, I wondered. . . . Dempster had gone to great lengths to get his hands on the secret history of the Pink Carnation, believing that a blockbuster nonfiction book could be parlayed into fame, fortune, and a BBC miniseries. The Pink Carnation’s trunk had arrived on our doorstep the same day I’d gotten a call demanding a box. And Dempster was, in fact, currently domiciled at Donwell Abbey. Or, if not domiciled, at least staying there pretty frequently.

For fairly obvious reasons, Dempster and Joan hadn’t been invited to the rehearsal dinner, although both were on the guest list for the wedding, mostly because both Colin and I liked Joan’s sister Sally and one couldn’t invite one without the other. Plus, neighbors.

While I might deeply dislike Dempster, it was hard to imagine him carrying off elderly ladies in order to get his book scoop, particularly since he had already been informed, in no uncertain terms, that the family did not intend to cooperate with him and would publish the information themselves sooner than see him profit from it.

Which pretty much washed out Dempster.

Now that I thought about it, it didn’t surprise me that Serena had fallen for Dempster. He was very much of the Jeremy type. Both were older men, vaguely metrosexual, self-assured to the point of arrogance. I was fairly sure that Dempster was merely a Jeremy stand-in. Given that Jeremy was, not to put too fine a point upon it, already married to Serena’s mother.

Peyton Place had nothing on the Selwicks.

Would Serena be party to kidnapping her aunt? I didn’t think so. But if Jeremy were involved . . . all bets were off.

At the moment, Serena was in custody of my best friend, Alex. Thank goodness for Alex, college roommate extraordinaire. There, at least, was one person I could count on unreservedly.

Although I hadn’t quite brought myself to tell her that my husband’s great-aunt had been kidnapped and it might be spies.

Alex’s husband and Colin’s best friend, Nick, had entered an involved discussion of something to do with men kicking projectiles for profit and pleasure, which left Pammy, Nickless, to flirt with the only other single man available, Colin’s other groomsman, Martin. It was clearly rough going. Pammy rolled her eyes at me in a “shoot me now” gesture.

I gave her a little wave and kept on going. My face was still itching from that mud mask. Pammy meant well, but the road to a blotchy complexion was paved with good intentions.

My eyes slid past Pammy to her companion. Martin. Now there was a dark horse. What if . . .

No. Reality caught up with me. Martin was an accountant. He was about as much of a dark horse as Eeyore. In fact, in his gray sport coat, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the depressive donkey. If he was 008, it was the greatest deception since Sir Percy Blakeney decided to don a floral waistcoat.

That left only two more people: my father and the vicar, who were merrily downing white wine spritzers (my father) and gin and tonics (the vicar) and discussing the intricacies of BBC costume dramas, in several of which the vicar had been an extra before going all Vicar of Dibley.

“What they really need to do,” my father was saying, “is remake
Poldark
.”

Looking deeply horrified, the vicar accused him of heresy; the seventies miniseries was the apotheosis of
Poldark
-ness.

“Yes, but the production values . . .”

No, this was not a man who was kidnapping aging secret agents in his spare time. I thought. I hoped.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? You never really knew anything about anyone. I was pretty sure I could vouch for my side of the aisle. Even if my father did occasionally, after a few glasses of cream sherry, claim to have worked for the CIA during his postcollege Fulbright year in Berlin.

But, really, if you’d worked for the CIA, would you say you’d worked for the CIA? I thought not.

Jeremy smarmed back over to me. “Where’s the lucky groom?”

His tone managed to imply that Colin must have made a bunk for the ferry to France. Or at least to the nearest curry house.

“Dealing with some last-minute details for me.” In fact, Colin was phoning all of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s acquaintances in London, trying to determine when and where she’d been seen last. I decided to take the Jeremy by the horns. “Have you seen your grandmother?”

“She’s not here? That’s not like her.” He managed to look genuinely concerned, but this was Jeremy. Even his name wasn’t real.

“Is someone missing?” That was my mother, wearing her harried face.

“Colin’s aunt. Don’t worry,” I said glibly. “There’s probably just trouble on the A39.”

“Er—” Martin piped up, sidling over to us. “The A39 is in Cornwall.”

Okay, maybe not so glibly. I waved a dismissive hand. “All those numbers sound the same to me.”

Colin emerged from the corridor with the phone. “Eloise doesn’t drive,” he explained to Martin, putting an arm around my waist.

I looked up at him quizzically.

He gave his head a little shake.

In other words, no news.

“A fact for which the mailboxes of the world are all grateful,” said Jillian.

You splat one mailbox your first time behind the wheel . . . “If God had intended me to drive, he wouldn’t have invented taxicabs.”

“There aren’t many cabs out here, sweetie,” said my father.

He and my mother exchanged one of those parental looks. They hadn’t exactly come out and said they disapproved, but they had hinted. Broadly. They were worried, they had said, about the pressure living out in the middle of nowhere would place on our relationship. I had pointed out that I had already successfully survived at Selwick Hall, sans driver’s license, for months, but they were still worried.

To be fair, my mother would probably have reacted the same way if I’d said I was moving across Central Park to the West Side.

Although they did have taxis there. Or so I’d been told.

We’d been through this before. “No, but there’s Colin. I don’t even make him wear a little hat. Seriously. It’s fine.”

Another parental look. It wasn’t that they disliked Colin, per se. My mother had reluctantly admitted that he seemed like a Very Nice Boy. But . . .

And there it was. The parental elephant in the room. My parents were convinced that, but for the Colin factor, I wouldn’t have dropped out of grad school. The words “abandoning your career to chase a boy” hadn’t exactly been used, but they had been implied.

I didn’t quite know how to explain to them that I hadn’t abandoned my degree; it had abandoned me.

My dissertation, my advisor had said, had read too much like fiction. He’d given me the option of rewriting from scratch, a project that would have taken at least one year and probably two. I’d already been in grad school for six years. Did I want to make it eight?

I might have slogged through, unenthused, for lack of anything better to do. I’d spent my entire postcollege life training to be a historian. What else was there for me?

It was Colin who had cut the Gordian knot. If it sounds like fiction, he’d suggested, why not write it as fiction?

It was crazy. And yet oddly compelling. I’d disappeared from Robinson Hall (aka the history department building), done the bare minimum to teach the classes I was already teaching, locked myself in my studio apartment, and flung myself into the story of the Pink Carnation. The material, as Colin had pointed out, was already there. The people were already alive to me. I’d lived in their homes, read their letters, walked in their footsteps. All I needed to do was add dialogue.

And caffeine. A lot of caffeine.

So, in a way, it was Colin’s fault. He’d given me an alternative. By the spring I hadn’t been any closer to having official letters after my name, but I did have a manuscript.

I also, miraculously, had an agent. Pammy, who knew everyone and their first cousin, had whisked the manuscript out of my hands and dropped it in the lap—most likely literally, although I hadn’t cared to inquire—of the sort of bigwig agent I would never have dared to approach on my own. After a few quick revisions, the agent was now “shopping” the manuscript, which meant that I checked my phone every five minutes and bit my nails a lot while telling myself I really didn’t expect anything.

If I had hoped the news might reconcile my parents to my career change, my hopes were unfounded. They hadn’t been excited. In fact, they had been extremely skeptical.

I couldn’t entirely blame them. Everyone knew that fiction writing was hardly a stable career. It tended to be associated with garrets, guttering candles, and sneakers with holes in them. I didn’t know that Pammy’s agent friend would be able to sell my book.

But what I did know? I was far happier here, with Colin, than I had ever been teaching Western civ. And if the novel didn’t pan out, well, I’d try something else. Animal husbandry. Or possibly popular narrative nonfiction.

Although I hadn’t admitted it, even to myself, that was a large part of why I’d wanted to have the wedding at Selwick Hall. To show my parents just how well my new life suited me, how comfortable Colin and I were.

Great-aunt-napping hadn’t been part of the plan.

Predictably, my parents were picking up on the tension, but not the source. I caught another Significant Parental Look.

“I think it’s time for us to all sit down,” I said brightly, downing the last of my G-and-T. “Anyone want to help with herding?”

With a certain amount of milling and confusion, everyone found their place cards and shuffled into their allotted seats. Colin and I had opted for traditional pub fare: a choice of bangers and mash or chicken tikka masala.

There were speeches. There were always speeches. Martin read conscientiously off a prepared script with jokes in bullet points. Pammy expostulated about embarrassing events that had occurred in fifth grade and really should have been covered by some sort of statute of limitations. Jillian didn’t say anything; she was saving her fire for her maid-of-honor speech the following day.

We had moved on to the sticky toffee pudding part of the meal without incident when Colin’s mother rose from her seat, clinking her spoon against her glass.

This was not part of the script. I grimaced at Colin. He gave a helpless shrug. Apparently he was as clueless as I was.

“I didn’t want my gift to get lost among the throng,” said Colin’s mother airily, “so I brought it here for you tonight.” To the servers, she said, “Sheila, Peter, if you will?”

Colin and I exchanged a look. This was just like Colin’s mother. It was always all about her.

“As long as it’s not another electric kettle,” Colin murmured. We’d gotten eight already.