The Lure of the Moonflower (20 page)

R
emoving his hat, Mr. Samson gave it an irritable shake, sending water skittering down the brim.

Samson was still dressed all in rusty black, from his old-fashioned hat to his many-caped cloak. He moved, however, like a far younger and sprier man than Jane had recalled him being. Or, that was, than he had given the impression of being.

Jane didn’t dare look at Jack. Any movement might dislodge a pebble, or even worse, excite the donkey’s attention. The last thing they needed was a betraying bray. Stillness, she had learned long ago, was her best weapon. Samson might look like he was alone, but if he was, in fact, an emissary of the Gardener, there might be men even now waiting to pounce, concealed among the rocks as Jack and Jane were concealed.

Samson’s nose twitched. Reaching into his pocket, he removed . . .

A handkerchief.

Jane’s throat was dry; it hurt to swallow. She watched as Samson removed the commodious handkerchief from his pocket, dabbing irritably at a patch of mud on his sleeve.

A pretense? Possibly. Her back ached with maintaining her position; her neck was stiff and her nose was beginning to itch.

Having completed his ablutions, Samson reached into his saddlebag and removed a map, turning it this way and that and muttering something to himself. It sounded like, “blasted uncivilized . . .”

Samson consulted his map. He partook of a dry biscuit, complaining to himself about the dryness of it. And then, creaky and cranky, he mounted his horse and trotted down along the road, in the direction of Peniche.

A small shower of pebbles sifted down from the road. The donkey, freeing itself from Jack’s hold, was nosing along the ground, searching for a few strands of dry winter grass.

Slowly, Jack lowered his pistol, his eyes still trained on the road. “He seems to have gone.”

“I don’t like ‘seems.’” Jane straightened, arching her aching back. She had evaded far worse in Paris, in London, and in Venice. She had slipped past assassins, waited out enemies, but she had never felt exposed there as she did here. “I thought Samson was traveling with a muleteer.”

Jack slid his pistol back into his belt. “He seems the sort to dismiss minions.”

Jane rubbed her sore neck with two fingers. “And then travel back in the direction he came?” All of their information about the religion procession moving towards Peniche came from Samson. A trap?

She jumped as Jack’s hands closed around her shoulders, rubbing the sore muscles. “He couldn’t very well move on towards Lisbon. Anyone would be able to tell him that the French are moving north. It would be logical to go back.”

Jack’s hands were warm and sure on the back of her neck. Jane’s head dipped forward, allowing him better access as she tried to hold on to rational thought. “Towards Peniche?”

“Towards Porto,” said Jack easily. “If you were Samson, wouldn’t you go back to the heart of the English community? Or what’s left of it?”

It was too hard to think with Jack’s thumbs digging into her shoulder blades, turning her muscles to mush.

Twisting away, Jane put a safe yard of ground between them. “There’s too much that doesn’t ring true. Why slow just when he reached the end of our tracks? Why stop here? I don’t like coincidence,” she said belligerently.

“Neither do I.” Jane had expected an argument. Jack didn’t give her one. Taking the donkey’s lead, he handed it to her. “Are your blisters up to a brief walk?”

“Brief” was a misnomer. Jack’s route led them north and then west and then south again, doubling back and around. There were no paths here, just trails. Jane clung grimly to the donkey for balance, but she didn’t dare ride. The terrain was too steep; even the donkey was having trouble picking its way. The mist turned to mizzle and the mizzle to rain, sluicing down beneath her collar, soaking through her boy’s clothes.

“This was not what I meant when I said I wanted a bath,” she muttered through clenched teeth. If she didn’t clench them, they would chatter.

Jack’s hand was at her elbow, helping her over the scree. “We’re almost there.”

“Where?” Jane squinted into the twilight, which had fallen barely perceptibly, gloom darkening into more gloom. Her eyes ached from staring at the path at her feet. All of her ached.

“There.” Jack pointed ahead and Jane caught a glimpse of white stucco walls and red-tiled roofs.

She stumbled. “A town?”

“Caldas,” said Jack, as though it should mean something. “Caldas da Rainha.”

“S-s-surely—” It was hard to sound sensible with one’s teeth rattling. “S-s-surely we would be s-s-safer in the rough?”

“And have you take a chill?” The tone was the old mocking one, but there was real concern there. “That’s more of a threat at the moment than Samson.”

Jack moved sure-footed through the deserted marketplace, around a statue of a medieval monarch, past a church along whose pale sides dark stone pillars climbed like moss, until they reached an imposing building of yellow stucco, in the baroque style of the previous century.

Bypassing the main door, he rapped at a smaller portal on the side. “We’ll stay here for the night.”

“What is this place?”

“This,” said Jack smugly, “is a thermal hospital. Or, in layman’s terms, a hot spring. You did say you wanted a bath?”

“I— A hot spring?”

“A rather famous one.” Jack held up both hands, palms out. “Don’t get too excited. The waters smell like the pits of hell. But they’re said to be therapeutic. And they’re hot.”

Hot. Never had a word sounded quite so seductive.

A gatekeeper holding a lantern opened the door. From his blistering tone, Jane gathered that they were not within operating hours for new admissions.

A rapid conversation in Portuguese ensued, of which Jane understood very little. The glint of a coin being passed from Jack’s hand to the other man’s, however, required no translation. Nor did the man stepping back from the door and gesturing them forward before taking a quick look, first this way, then that, and locking it firmly behind them.

Jane Wooliston desperately wanted a bath; the Pink Carnation wasn’t so sure. It felt like a terrible indulgence.

“Do we have time?” Jane said doubtfully. There was, after all, a queen to be saved.

“We have to stop for the night somewhere, don’t we?” When he saw her hesitate, Jack propelled her forward with a hand against her back. “Don’t think about walking out now. I already paid the gatekeeper.”

As they followed the gatekeeper down the corridor, Jane could smell a whiff of rotten eggs. She didn’t care. It was water. And it was hot.

Every inch of Jane was plastered, head to toe, with mud. There was mud under her hat and between her toes. Her clothes itched. Her hair itched. Even her eyes itched. The idea of submerging herself in hot water, even if it did smell like Satan’s own eau de cologne, was utter heaven.

They paused in front of a large wooden door, which appeared considerably older than the facade of the building. The gatekeeper fumbled at his waist for the key, muttering softly to himself.

Jack was right. They were no use to anyone if they fell ill. The Gardener, if he was looking for them, would never think to look for them here. What agents worth their salt stopped at a spa? It was absurd. And therefore safe.

Or as safe as one could be.

Jane tucked a mud-stiffened strand of hair behind her ears. “Well, then. In that case . . .”

Jack’s eyes were amber beneath the brim of his hat. “Happy Christmas, Jane.”

“But I don’t have anything for you.” Jane looked away from the light in his eyes, feeling strangely flustered. “Ordinarily I would have embroidered you a pair of slippers, but . . .”

“It’s not a quid pro quo.” Jack shoved his hands in his pockets, leaning back against the whitewashed wall as the doorkeeper fitted a massive key into the lock. “In any event, don’t thank me; thank Queen Leonor. She was the one who founded the hospital.”

The door creaked open into total darkness. Jane caught another strong whiff of rotten eggs.

She looked at Jack. “You don’t take gratitude well, do you?”

“No better than you take a gift.” Lowering his voice, Jack added, “If it makes you feel better, I’d thought the Queen might have stopped here. This place is a favorite with the royal family.”

Jane kept an eye on the gatekeeper’s back as she murmured, “Was that what you were asking?”

The gatekeeper touched his candle to the single torch that sat in an iron bracket against the wall, illuminating a large, stone-walled room, taken up almost entirely by the rectangular bath in the middle. A narrow wooden walkway banded the pool on all four sides, with a shallow set of stairs leading into the water.

“Part of it. If the Queen came this way, she didn’t stop to take the waters, although he did confirm that a miraculous statue passed by. He was rather grumpy about it, too—apparently when wonder-working statues make their way through, fewer people feel the need to take the waters.”

Jane put a hand to her mouth as she crossed tentatively over the threshold. “I can see why. You weren’t joking about the smell.”

“It’s good for you. Or so they say. I make no warranties.” Jack remained in the doorway, surveying the room with the air of one who had seen it before, which, Jane assumed, he most likely had. “This is one of the older baths.”

The stone ceiling arched up above their heads, punctuated only by two holes, which might have been for light or ventilation or both. In the dark it was hard to tell. Mist rose from the bath, wreathing the windowless stone walls in an air of mystery.

“It feels like something out of—” Jane had nearly said
something out of one of Miss Gwen’s novels
. “Something out of a horrid novel.”

“The specter-ridden castle of Otranto?” Jack offered blandly. “Or perhaps the vaulted dungeons of the Knight of the Silver Tower?”

Jane glanced sharply at him. She didn’t think he knew that was his own stepmother’s novel, but . . . “You’ve read
The Convent of Orsino
?”

“I’ve read a great many things. Amarantha was a ninny, but I liked the battle with the flying monkeys.”

Amarantha had been, although it pained Jane to acknowledge it, very loosely based on her. “Amarantha was placed in difficult circumstances,” she said primly.

“Amarantha didn’t have the nerve to admit she was attracted to the Knight of the Silver Tower, so she just sat there wringing her hands and waiting to be rescued.”

“She had been placed under a spell!” Jane realized she was objecting a little too vehemently. “And maybe she had reservations about the knight’s character.”

“And maybe you’re reading this just a little too closely? Ah,
obrigado
,” Jack said to the gatekeeper, while Jane bit her lip and told herself to stop being an idiot.

Jack couldn’t know that
The Convent of Orsino
was something she took very personally indeed. The novel had made Miss Gwen’s fortune, the fortune that was even now funding Jane’s missions. But it had also held up Jane’s life to her own eyes, albeit in a distorted mirror. A very distorted mirror.

In Miss Gwen’s version, it was the wise chaperone who was needed to free the beautiful but rather wishy-washy Amarantha. Amarantha, who personified virtue and grace and all sorts of other lovely, albeit bland things, fell prey to the fatal attraction of the Knight of the Silver Tower. She remained in his thrall, in his doomed castle, neither yielding to him nor with the strength to pull herself away, until her brave chaperone came to her rescue.

The Gardener’s name, before he persuaded Bonaparte to bestow upon him his dead father’s title, had been the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent.

The Knight of the Silver Tower.

It was, Jane knew, a highly romanticized and fictionalized history. But it stung all the same.

She hadn’t been in his thrall. Not for long, in any event. And she certainly hadn’t needed Miss Gwen to rescue her from her fatal attraction. It had taken only time spent with Nicolas: not stolen moments in a ballroom exchanging quips, but stretches of time working together, sleeping together. The more she had known him, the harder it was to convince herself that she might love him.

Or, for that matter, that he loved her. That he loved the idea of her, Jane had no doubt. The Gardener and the Pink Carnation: what more fitting match? He wanted to display her on his arm, to deck her with jewels. That their principles clashed, that they had found it difficult, if not impossible, to work together, that was something Nicolas dismissed with a wave of his hand.

Probably, thought Jane grimly, because Nicolas had assumed that she would retire from active work and grace the head of his table.

She had left him in Venice with nothing more than a note. Would he go to the trouble of trying to bring her back by force? Or would he assume that their paths would eventually circle back together, as they always seemed to do? That was more in keeping with the man Jane knew.

Unless he had decided to speed the process by sending a lackey along to find her trail.

Jack and the gatekeeper appeared to have arrived at some sort of agreement. More coins passed from Jack’s hands to the gatekeeper’s, along with the large, age-blackened key.

The light of the gatekeeper’s lantern receded down the hallway, leaving Jack and Jane alone in the dimly lit bathing chamber.

Jack lounged against the open door. “According to our genial host, it seems the hospitality of the house might also stretch to bread and cheese and a cup of mulled wine. No Christmas puddings, though, I’m afraid.”

“I should have been very surprised if there had been one.” Jane’s damp shirt prickled against her back. Feeling suddenly awkward, she nodded to the key. “Is that the only key?”

“So he claims.” Jack’s fingers brushed hers as he passed her the heavy key, his eyes meeting hers, the reflected torchlight warming them to the color of sherry. “You won’t be disturbed.”

“What about you?” Next to Jane, the water gleamed an invitation, reflecting the reddish light of the single torch. “You’re not planning to bathe?”

Jack made an ironic bow. “I wouldn’t wish to intrude on your privacy.”