The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig
“You know he rang,” he said drily. “You were on the other extension.”
“I hung up,” I protested. “As soon as I heard who it was.”
Okay, maybe there might have been a few seconds of lag time. No one’s halo is quite that shiny.
“You could have stayed on the line,” Colin said gently. His eyes met mine in the bathroom mirror. “I wouldn’t have minded.”
I shrugged, poking at a patch of peeling paper on the wall. “I didn’t want to pry.”
It wasn’t true, of course. I was dying to pry. But now that I knew that I was leaving, I was feeling particularly scrupulous about our respective realms, what was his and what was mine. I might be living in his world, but my stay was only temporary.
I could feel Colin looking at me, but all he said was, “When it comes to Jeremy, I’d rather have witnesses.”
Fair enough. I pushed my hair back behind my ears and perched on the edge of the bathtub. “So what did he want?”
Colin squirted toothpaste onto a blue plastic toothbrush. “He says he called to apologize.”
“Huh,” I said. The only place I could see Jeremy voluntarily burying the hatchet would be in Colin’s skull. He’d probably keep the scalp, too, and call it installation art. Jeremy is something to do with art sales. That’s his career; his vocation is bedeviling Colin. “What did he really want?”
Colin’s lips quirked. “You don’t pull your punches.”
“That’s why you like me,” I said cheerfully.
Toothbrush suspended in space, Colin looked back over his shoulder at me. “It’s not the only reason.”
It hurt to look at him looking at me like that. It hurt when I knew that the clock was ticking, marking the moments until I climbed on that plane, back to the other Cambridge, the American one.
It would have been easier if I could have blamed someone else for it, but the decision to go back had been mine. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Now . . . Well, there was no changing my mind, was there? The teaching contract for next year was already signed, sealed, and delivered, or the e-mail equivalent thereof. What didn’t break us up would make us stronger. Or something like that.
I lifted the shampoo bottle in mock toast. “Cheers.”
Through a mouthful of foam, Colin said, “You also make a decent toasted cheese.”
I set down the shampoo and scrubbed my hand off on the knee of my jeans. “Only decent? Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
Colin rinsed and spat. “Superlatively brilliant toasted cheese?”
“Too little, too late.” I tossed him a hand towel. “Jeremy?”
“Wants to come over for lunch. To make his amends.”
I leaned back, bracing my hands against the enamel sides of the bath. “You’d think if he really wanted to make amends, he could at least take us out.”
“But then,” said Colin, “he wouldn’t have an excuse to come to the house.”
We exchanged a look in the mirror. We both knew why Jeremy wanted to come to Selwick Hall.
He was looking for the lost jewels of Berar.
Berar was in India. Selwick Hall was in Sussex. Slight anomaly there, no? The jewels had disappeared during Wellington’s wars in India, back in the early nineteenth century. It was the usual sort of hoard: ropes of pearls, piles of rubies, emeralds bigger than pigeons’ eggs (having never seen a pigeon’s egg, that descriptor wasn’t quite as useful for me as it could be), and, the pièce de résistance, the one jewel to rule them all, a legendary something or other called the Moon of Berar. I say “something or other” because the contemporary commentators differed as to what exactly made up the Moon. Opals? Sapphires? Diamonds from the mines of Golconda? No one knew for sure. What they did agree on was that the jewel was credited with all manner of mystical powers, ranging from omniscience to invulnerability to minty-fresh breath.
Okay, maybe not the minty-fresh breath, but everything else and then some.
But here was the kicker: Somehow, somewhere, the legend had started that the jewels were hidden in Selwick Hall.
It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? A treasure in Indian jewels hidden in an English gentleman’s residence. We’re not even talking a grand estate, just a pleasant, reasonably unpretentious gentleman’s house of the sort that spring up like mushrooms in Jane Austen novels, closer to the Bennet house than to Pemberley. Ridiculous, yes, but Jeremy believed it—believed it enough to rifle through my notes in search of clues. Jeremy believed, and Colin . . . Well, let’s just say he didn’t entirely disbelieve it.
It had become something of a running joke between us over the past two weeks. Stay too long in the bathroom? “What were you doing in there, looking for the lost jewels of Berar?” Lose an earring? “Perhaps it’s gone to find its friends.” You get the idea.
We hadn’t, however, actually done anything constructive about looking for them. With the threat of a full teaching load staring me in the face, I’d been knuckling down on my dissertation. I had enough experience of ungrateful undergrads (genus Harvardensius undergradius annoyingus) to know that I would be spending the fall term fully employed fielding e-mails proffering inventive excuses for missed classes and late papers. Colin, meanwhile, was hard at work on the novel he was convinced would make him the next Ian Fleming. In the evenings, once our respective papers had been put away, neither of us was particularly inclined to hunt around the house with flashlights like a pair of attenuated Nancy Drews. With only two months left, we had far better things to do.
Like quiz night at the local pub. If only either of us knew anything about science, we would have been undefeated. As it was, the vicar trumped us every time.
One of these days . . .
Only we didn’t have that many days left. I hated thinking that way. I couldn’t stop thinking that way. I needed an off switch for my internal monologue.
“It makes no sense,” said Colin for the fiftieth time. “What would a rajah’s ransom in jewels be doing in a house in Sussex?”
“Things turn up in strange places all the time,” I said. For example, library books, which possess a disconcerting ability to move from place to place, seemingly of their own volition.
“We’re not talking about a stray pair of socks,” said Colin.
“That would be great. Can’t you just see it? ‘King’s Ransom in Jewels Found in Sussex Sock Drawer.’” Why not? Colin had an odd habit of sticking odds and ends in his sock drawer, from cuff links to credit card receipts. I’d learned, when in doubt, to check the sock drawer. Occasionally, there was even a pair of socks. “Hey, everything else seems to be in there.”
Colin didn’t seem to share my amusement.
I fished out a loofah that had got knocked over into the bath. It still had the Body Shop tag attached and smelled faintly of raspberry body wash. “Seriously, though. How did the rumor get started? There must have been some origin to it all.”
“No smoke without fire?” Colin rinsed his toothbrush and shook it out in the sink. “I don’t know. I remember my father telling me about it when I was little—not in a serious way, mind you. Just as another family story.”
“What did he say?” Colin didn’t talk about his father much. I knew that he had been a great deal older than Colin’s mother and that he had been involved in some branch of the secret services, but that was about it. It was after he died that Colin had thrown over his old career in finance and moved back to Selwick Hall.
Sometimes I wondered what that other, earlier Colin had been like—not that I was going to trade in the one I’d got.
“These were children’s stories,” Colin emphasized. “Once upon a time and all that.”
I nodded vehemently to show I understood. “All warranties and disclaimers acknowledged. Go on.”
Colin stuck his toothbrush in a chipped old mug and leaned back against the sink, resting his elbows against the marble countertop. “It’s complete rubbish,” he said warningly, “but . . .”
“Yes?” The suspense
Colin held out a hand to help me up. “According to my father, the story was that the jewels were brought by the Carnation from India to Selwick Hall.”
I felt absurdly disappointed. “But we know that the Carnation wasn’t in India.”
My research had turned up the true story of the Carnation’s supposed Indian exploits. Yes, a French plot to rouse the country against the British had been routed, but it had been accomplished by a junior political officer named Alex Reid, not by the Carnation herself. The Carnation had been busy in France at the time, watching Bonaparte crown himself emperor.
“Exactly,” said Colin. “It’s just a story. There was even a bit of doggerel verse—something something Plumeria’s tower.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds like a Whittlesby poem.”
Colin waved that aside. “No,” he said slowly, “it wasn’t. It was just the three lines, and it went something like this: Hard by Plumeria’s bower / Underneath the brooding tower / The Moon awaits its hard-won hour.”
“Tower?” My ears pricked up like a spaniel’s. “As in your tower?”
Behind the house loomed the original Norman keep, or the remains thereof, built by Fulke de Selwick to keep those pesky Saxons down. Now semiruined, it was the perfect location for a lost treasure—at least, in theory. In practice, it would be like putting up a neon sign that said, “Get Your Treasures Here!” The place was like a beacon for treasure seekers.
“Is that why you keep it locked?” I asked, tagging along after Colin into the bedroom.
“No. It really is just because of the farm equipment,” he said apologetically. As I had discovered on an earlier, unauthorized foray, the most exciting thing that the tower appeared to be housing was rusty farm equipment. “But we can take a look around if you like.”
“You’ve searched it already, haven’t you?” I said accusingly.
“And my father, and his father before him. Everyone and his mother’s had a go.”
“All his sisters and his cousins whom he reckons by the dozens,” I murmured. “But Jeremy still thinks it’s here.”
Colin spread his hands in silent acknowledgment.
“He’ll go on pestering you until you find it,” I said seriously. “You do realize that.”
“You can’t find what isn’t there to be found,” said Colin.
“Hmm.” I wasn’t ready to admit defeat that easily. “Who was Plumeria?”
Colin’s eyes crinkled. “You know my family tree better than I do.”
“Only the early-nineteenth-century bits of it.” I sank down on the edge of the bed, which made a faint creaking noise in protest. Okay, fine, I had done a bit of poking around into the more recent bits of Colin’s family tree, purely recreationally, but I didn’t want him to know that. It was like admitting you had Googled someone before a first date. “The name does sound oddly familiar, though. . . .”
“Yes?” There was no mistaking the eagerness in Colin’s voice.
Where had I heard that name before? For a moment, I thought I had it, but the wisp of memory drifted away like smoke, nothing to hold on to. Plumeria . . .
“No. It’s gone.” I looked up at Colin, who had busied himself buckling his watch. “Why not ask your aunt Arabella?”
He shook his head. “She won’t give us a straight answer. She doesn’t believe such things are meant to be found.”
“Direct quote?”
“Pretty much.”
“Let’s go anyway.” I liked Colin’s great-aunt, not least because she was the one responsible for setting us up. All right, “set up” might be too strong a term, but she had certainly contrived to throw us in each other’s way. “It’ll be a field trip. Fun!”
Colin came to stand in front of me. “You mean you don’t want to work on your dissertation.”
“Pretty much.” It wasn’t just summer slump. I’d hit a snag in the material and I didn’t know how to deal with it.
Thanks to Colin’s truly excellent archives, I could plot the movements of the Pink Carnation with a fair degree of accuracy between 1803 and 1805. I knew who the Pink Carnation was (Miss Jane Wooliston), where she was living (the Hotel de Balcourt, her cousin’s home in Paris), and exactly what she was doing to thwart Napoleon. Between 1803 and 1805, the Pink Carnation lived in Paris with her chaperone, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows. She kept up a regular coded correspondence with her cousin by marriage, Lady Henrietta Dorrington. And then, in the late spring of 1805 . . .
The paper trail stopped. Cold. No more letters to Lady Henrietta. No more letters to her cousin Amy Selwick. Nothing. Nada.
There were several options, none of them good.
The least awful option was the most obvious: The letters hadn’t survived. As my adviser was fond of saying, just because something wasn’t there didn’t mean it hadn’t existed. It was a miracle that any of these documents survived.
But why meticulously maintain the correspondence up to that point and then burn the rest? It didn’t make sense.
Option two: The Pink Carnation had changed aliases or contacts. If the French had caught on to her coded correspondence with Lady Henrietta, she might have changed her modus operandi, started writing under a different name to a different contact. Clearly, if she had done so, she had not been thinking about the convenience of future historians. On the other hand, at least it meant she was still alive and kicking.
Then there was the final and deadliest option: Something had happened to the Pink Carnation.
It wasn’t impossible. The Carnation was living in constant risk of discovery, her sole protection the French Ministry of Police’s inability to ascribe that kind of cunning to a woman, and a beautiful one at that. All it took was one slip, and it would all be over. The life of a spy wasn’t exactly without danger. The Carnation’s old nemesis, the Black Tulip, had gone up in smoke, quite literally, in the middle of a botched assassination attempt, but a new French spymaster had risen to take the Tulip’s place, a shadowy figure known only as “the Gardener.”
Talk about nerve. It was one thing to pick a flower alias like everyone else, quite another to proclaim yourself master of the whole garden, with the power to cultivate—and to cull.
True, legend ascribed years more of deeds to the Pink Carnation, but by 1805, the Carnation’s reputation had been firmly established. It would have made sense for the English government to continue the use of the alias.
Even in the warmth of the un-air-conditioned room, the thought made me shiver. I’d spent months living in the Pink Carnation’s head. The idea of anything happening to her was anathema to me.
I know, I know. Even if she’d lived to a ripe old age, she’d be long dead now. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. But it mattered to me.
Of all of them, option two was the most likely. It made sense for the Pink Carnation to change up her routine from time to time to keep the Ministry of Police off her tail. Complacency led to discovery. Wasn’t Hotmail constantly reminding me to change my password?
But. That was always the problem, that word “but.” Miss Jane Wooliston and her chaperone, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows—known to the young men of Paris as something that roughly translated to “the Purple Parasol–Wielding Dragon”—were both fixtures on the Paris social scene until spring of 1805. In April 1805, there was a brief mention in the Paris gossip sheets of Miss Wooliston returning to England for a short trip home to deal with what the paper referred to only as a family matter.
After that, nothing. I’d paged through the archives of Le Moniteur, Le Monde Parisien, and even that notorious scandal rag Bonjour, Paris!, sheer up through 1807. True, the microfilm was blurry, but I didn’t think I’d missed anything. There were no further references to Miss Jane Wooliston and Miss Gwendolyn Meadows in Paris after April 1805.
Why had they gone back to England? And what had happened to them there? I was as far from the ans
“Anything I can help with?” asked Colin gently.
I bit down on my lower lip. I’d been trying not to yank Colin into my work—I didn’t want him to think I was with him just for his archives. Not that he would think that, hopefully, but love is paranoid. Or at least I was paranoid.
“I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “But I wouldn’t mind a trip to London.”
“Wednesday?” suggested Colin.
I’d have preferred to hop on the next train, but that might have fallen under the heading of running away.
Why had Jane and Miss Gwen left Paris so precipitously? What had driven them back to England? Discovery? Or something else?
“Wednesday,” I agreed, and went off to look up anything I could find about the elusive Plumeria.
Chapter 1
Plumeria redoubled her speed as the footfalls of her pursuer pounded ever closer, reverberating through the close confines of the subterranean passage. Her breath rasped in her throat as she spied a faint gleam of light in the distance. At last! But could she reach it before it was too late?
—From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady
(and if you were any kind of gentleman, you would stop trying to inquire into her identity!)
The spy wore purple.
Only amateurs wore black. Miss Gwendolyn Meadows knew that the true color of a Paris night wasn’t a flat black, but a deep purple, composed of a hundred shades of shadow. Coal smoke masked the moon, diffusing the light of the lampposts, dirtying clothes and shading faces. Tonight she had left off her gown, her gloves, her elaborately curled plumes. She had even, with some reluctance, left behind her trusty parasol and taken up a cane instead. A sword cane, of course. Paris was a dangerous city, even for those engaged in innocent pursuits.
Gwen’s pursuits were anything but innocent.
No one of her acquaintance would recognize her as she was tonight. For tonight’s romp, she had dressed as a dandy in breeches that hugged her legs and an elaborate frock coat of deep purple brocade. The stiffness of the fabric disguised any unseemly curvature of the chest, the tapered silhouette the same as that of any other fop in Paris. Her Hessian boots had been made to her own specifications, supple enough to allow for easy movement, the soles muffled with a thin layer of soft leather.