The Lure of the Moonflower (21 page)

The bath was large enough for the entire Regency Council, three French hens, and a partridge in a pear tree. The room was dark, further obscured by the steam rising off the water. Once under the water, there would be nothing to be seen, just her bare shoulders emerging from the pool, and she showed more than that to the world every time she donned an evening dress.

“After weeks of sharing close accommodations,” said Jane, not quite knowing what she was doing, “I hardly think that’s a consideration.”

“Yes,” said Jack, “but there was the donkey to ensure your virtue.”

They looked at each other and Jane knew they were remembering the same thing: the night in that hut, the straw crackling beneath her cloak, their faces a whisper away. Jane could feel the tingle starting in her fingers, moving up her arms.

“There’s no need to be so noble,” Jane said. “You must be sore, too.”

“What gives you that idea?”

Jane raised a brow. “The fact that you’re walking like a bowlegged old man?”

“The bath is your Christmas present.”

“And I choose to share it.” Turning, Jane retreated to a dark corner of the room, her frozen fingers fumbling on the unfamiliar lacings of her breeches. Just for good measure, she added, “You smell like donkey.”

“
I
smell like donkey?” But she could hear the sound of mud-soaked cloth dropped with a splat. Jane paused with her fingers on the ties of her shirt. She could go into the water with it on. Invalids bathed in shifts, after all.

But did it matter? The dark created its own shield. And, when it came down to it, she had already been stripped bare in all the ways that mattered. She had never told anyone before of her affair with the Gardener; Miss Gwen might have suspected, but she had never dared ask. And yet . . . and yet she had told Jack Reid. Told him and then kissed him.

Mere nudity was nothing next to that.

Jane’s fingers lingered on the neck of her shirt. With one swift, decisive movement she peeled it up over her head. Naked, she turned and strode gracefully towards the steps that led down into the pool.

J
ack did his best not to look as Jane descended into the pool.

He couldn’t help it. No matter how he tried to keep his eyes locked straight ahead, they insisted on straying to the side, catching glimpses of Jane moving deliberately forward, Jane stepping down into the pool, Jane with water lapping at her calves like a latter-day Aphrodite. The steam from the pool wreathed her body, hiding and revealing, making her descent more tantalizing than any courtesan’s practiced dance.

Jack sank a little deeper in the water, grateful for the darkness, grateful for the murkiness of the water.

He didn’t think Jane had been making that sort of offer when she invited him to share her bath. At least, he amended, it was safer to assume she hadn’t been making that sort of offer. Now he had only to convince his body of that.

Disdaining the wooden planks set out for the invalids, Jack had seated himself firmly on the pool floor. It wasn’t deep, after all. He plunked his arms down on the wooden walkway banding the bath. Relaxing. They were meant to be relaxing. If he told himself that often enough, he might even believe it.

The water slapped against the side, the sound awakening all sorts of lascivious echoes in Jack’s imagination, as Jane settled herself carefully into the water.

From the corner of his eye, he could see her as she lifted her arms to pull the last of the pins from her hair, shaking the thick mass free with an unconscious gesture that made Jack swallow with a throat gone very dry.

“I’ll . . . just see if our host has left the wine,” he said, and, rather than pass Jane on his way to the stairs, he hoisted himself up over the side of the pool by the strength of his arms.

He wasn’t sure whether he hoped she was looking or hoped she wasn’t. Flashing one’s backside in the air wasn’t generally the accepted way of attracting a lady, unless one were a monkey. Jack had spent time with monkeys. He didn’t want to ape them.

Wrapping his shirt around his waist as a makeshift loincloth, he scuttled crablike to the door, where a jug of steaming wine and a plate of
biscoitos
were waiting.

Jack poured the mulled wine into two goblets. Crouching by the side of the pool, he handed one down to Jane. “Refreshment.”

“Thank you.” She leaned her head back against the side of the pool to look up at him, and Jack’s breath caught at the sight of her, her hair dark with wet around her pale face, snaking down around her unbound shoulders. The way she was looking up at him brought her breasts up out of the water, so he could just almost see . . .

“You’re welcome,” Jack said brusquely, and thrust a
biscoito
into her other hand. “Have a biscuit.”

Discarding his shirt, Jack dropped back into the pool. At the other end. It seemed safer that way. But the pool that had seemed so large in concept was a great deal smaller with Jane in it, a goblet in one hand, a biscuit in the other.

Turning her head, Jane said, “Thank you for my Christmas present. It’s much better than yet another pair of embroidered slippers.”

But for him, she might have been spending Christmas with her family, not in a sulfur-smelling tub with a mad Frenchman in pursuit.

Jack took a long swig from his goblet. The wine had been heavily sugared; the taste of cloves cloyed against the back of his throat. “It isn’t the Christmas you would have had at home.”

For a moment, all was still except for the gentle lap of water in the pool, the drip of condensation along the walls. Then Jane said quietly, “What was that word you told me about? The one for nostalgia?”

“Saudade?”
The muscles in Jack’s arms were tightly corded as he propped them against the side of the pool.

“Saudade,”
Jane repeated, tasting the word on her tongue. “Longing for people and places past. But that’s the point. They’re past. They don’t exist anymore. Not really.” She turned, and Jack could feel the faint ripple of water bridging the space between them. “It’s the exile’s dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.”

“Would you return? If you could?” Jack’s voice felt hoarse and rusty. Sulfur and cloves, he told himself, sulfur and cloves.

Jane tilted her head back against the side of the pool. Distantly, she said, “Miss Gw— My former chaperone concocted a plan to bring me back from the dead, should this war ever end. I would be introduced as a distant cousin and presented into society.”

Jack’s reaction was immediate and negative. “People wouldn’t recognize you from your old life?”

Jane sank a little deeper in the water, her long hair trailing in ropes around her. “I was raised in the country. There is no one in London who would know me—other than those who already know.”

He should be glad for her, Jack knew. But he wasn’t. He hated the idea. He hated the idea of Jane disappearing back into her old world, lost under gloves and bonnets and airs and graces, nodding and smiling to the overbred who didn’t realize that she was more than a graceful figure in a fashionable gown.

Would any of them know how she could switch roles at a moment’s notice? Decipher a complicated code on sight? Face down a French spy without turning a hair?

No. And if that was the way Jane wanted it, Jack told himself, that was the way Jane wanted it. It wasn’t his choice to make. Hell, he’d done enough damage in her life already, before he’d even known her name.

Carefully, Jack said, “So you could go back.”

“No.”

“What?” Jack forgot that he was supposed to be averting his eyes and turned and stared. “I thought you just said . . .”

Jane sat up straight, shoving her wet hair back over her shoulders. “I might be able to go back, but that doesn’t mean I could.”

Jack did his best to make sense of that, although it was very hard to make sense of anything with a half-naked Jane in front of him. “I’m missing something,” he said at last.

“It doesn’t matter if no one recognized me.
I
would know.” Jane leaned forward, a sheen of water glistening on her bare shoulders and chest. “My deceptions here—they’re for a purpose. They have an end. I play a role for a few weeks, or even a few months, but at the end of it—I’m still myself. Can you imagine living a lie for the rest of your life, pretending to be someone you’re not? Watching yourself disappear, piece by piece?”

Her lips were moving, but it took a moment for the words to resolve themselves into meaning.

Pushing the words out of his dry throat, Jack said, “I am familiar with the concept.”

Jane gave one brisk nod, a gesture so entirely Jane, and so utterly at odds with her garb or lack thereof. “Could you imagine going on being Alarico or Rodrigo?”

“Or Johnny Fluellen?” Jane was right, of course. He had at one point toyed with the idea of remaining in Portugal, marrying, bearing children, sinking into the landscape. But he couldn’t. He would be lying to his neighbors, his wife, his own children. He couldn’t do that. “No.”

The word sank into the silence between them.

Jack could hear a faint creak as Jane leaned back against one of the wooden planks. “You understand, then.”

Heaven help him, he did. When he had met Jane, he had assumed that she had everything he lacked: a cause, a country, a family. That when the mission was over, she would return . . . somewhere.

He had never imagined that she might be as lost as he.

“If you won’t go back to England,” said Jack quietly, “then where?”

“I don’t know.” There was something almost hypnotic about the movement of the water, the rising of the steam, the patterns traced by the torchlight. “Have you ever thought of returning to India?”

The red light on the surface of the water twisted and changed, became a spill of blood twining down the folds of a sari of crimson silk, a red uniform jacket, a series of pennants waving in the breeze. A series of memories, and none of them good.

“At that rate,” said Jack flatly, “I’d rather remain Alarico. There’s nothing in India for me.”

“The Gardener no longer has the power there he did.” Jane turned on her side to look at him, her hair falling over one shoulder. “You could go back to being a soldier.”

“I never wanted to be a soldier.” The words came out before he could think better of them. Jack shrugged. “That was my father’s province. And my little brother, George. He always liked playing at soldiers.”

“What about you?”

Jack’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “I looked down on it. Anyone could hack with a sword. I was going to be a philosopher king and right the world’s wrongs. Or at least govern a small district.”

He remembered how smug he had been, how sure. He had hated that boarding school in Calcutta, but there had been a purpose to it. He was going to rise in the ranks of the East India Company’s administration and show everyone: Alex, Kat, his father. . . . They would see.

Only they hadn’t seen. He had.

“But—I thought . . . The laws . . .”

“Didn’t come into effect until I was already old enough to have expected otherwise.” Jack could taste the old bitterness at the back of his throat.

He had been ten when Cornwallis had put out the first of the series of regulations that stripped him of any future in his own country; he hadn’t learned of it until he was thirteen. His father had kept it from him, although whether from hope that it would change, or fear that Jack would fly into a rage like his mother, Jack was never quite sure.

It was one of the boys at school who had told him, taunting him. And Jack had gone to his father—only to discover that what he had been studying for, working for, those past three years didn’t exist. Not anymore.

Jack stretched out his legs in the water, concentrating on the stretch of his muscles, the rough bottom of the pool against his skin. “I think my father hoped it was all nothing, that the laws wouldn’t be enforced, or that someone would find a gap in them. Unfortunately, Cornwallis was too good a legislator for that.”

It had cost his father, he knew. In a very real sense. That school in Calcutta hadn’t been cheap, and his father had never been particularly plump in the pocket. That he had kept Jack in it for years longer than he had to . . . well, it was either a kindness or a very real aversion to any kind of unpleasantness. Or a little bit of both.

“What did you do?” Jack was dimly aware that Jane had moved closer, that she was only the breadth of a board away.

“My father took me out of school in Calcutta and apprenticed me to a printer.” Jack could still remember the humiliation of it. He shrugged, feeling the water ripple around him. “As much as it pains me to say it, I believe my father meant well. It was the best he could do for me under the circumstances. He thought I’d be happy among books and tracts. Better that than some other trade. And a trade was all that was open to me.”

“But you weren’t happy.”

“I was furious.” Jack could smell it still, the ink and glue. He’d slept in a room with a press, on a pallet on the floor. He’d hugged his grievances to himself; his father might be an officer, but his mother had been a princess. He had convinced himself that he was owed better, that he would have better. “I ran away to find my mother’s people. I thought—I hoped . . .”

In retrospect, it felt so hopelessly naive.

Jack looked up at Jane, his lips twisting in a humorless smile. “I spun a fairy tale for myself. I had a dream that my mother’s father would welcome me with open arms and proclaim me his heir. Oh, there were all sorts of versions of the tale. In one version I would burst onto the scene just as he was being menaced by a man-eating tiger and save him single-handedly, with nothing but a small dagger.”

He looked at Jane, inviting her to share the humor of it, but she wasn’t laughing. Her gray eyes were clouded with sympathy. “Oh, Jack,” she said.

“You haven’t even heard the best of them. My favorite was the one in which he announced that he had had men scouring Madras, searching for me, that he had been looking for me since I was a baby. And lo, all the kingdom was filled with rejoicing.”

Jane winced at the sarcasm in his voice. “What really happened?”

“What you would expect. He threw me out on my—” Jack caught himself with a cough. “Let’s just say he threw me out. Or rather, he had me thrown. He wasn’t going to sully his jeweled fingers doing it personally. He had retainers for tossing out the rubbish.”

Jane’s fingers brushed his arm, just a light touch, no more substantial than the water around them. “Jack. I’m so sorry.”

Jack smiled a crooked smile. “Don’t look so grim. It was to be expected. He’d disowned my mother. As far as he was concerned, I didn’t exist. It was rather embarrassing for him to be reminded that I did.”

Jane’s hand rested lightly on his arm. “Pride makes people do foolish things.”

Jack looked at her, at her shadowed gray eyes, and thought of that tombstone in a little graveyard in England.

His hand closed over hers. “Shall we raise a toast to the dispossessed? We’ve been disinherited and survived.”

Jane glanced down at their joined hands. All Jack could see was the water-dark fall of her hair as she said, “What about your father? Surely he would be glad to have you back.”

“The prodigal son returneth?” There was nothing like a mention of one’s father to kill the mood. Particularly in his case. Jack removed his hand, leaning back against the wall. “My father’s married again. He’s started another family. He’s good at that.” One family disappoint you? Have another one! Jack knew he wasn’t fair, but he wasn’t interested in being fair. “I doubt he’ll be breaking out the fatted calf.”

Jane pressed her lips together, looking far more perturbed than the situation warranted. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

Jack rolled his head sideways. “You don’t know my father.”

Jane moved back a little. She cocked her head, looking across at him. “I do, actually.”

“What?” Slowly levering himself up, Jack squinted at Jane in the darkness.

She sat pale and still as a statue at the center of a fountain, carved of marble and moonlight. “When I said my chaperone fell in love? Jack—that man was your father.”