The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig

  “You don’t sound altogether delighted by the prospect.” William tried not to sound too glad of that.

  Gwen shrugged, hitching the sheet higher with a quick, impatient gesture. “It’s important work,” she said defensively. “I am good at it.”

  “Of course you are,” said William. “I’ve seen you at it. But is it what you want?”

  Her face was troubled. “I thought it was.”

  “What’s changed, then?” William tried to sound as though the answer didn’t matter, as though it were purely an abstract inquiry, as if the thought of her going away across the Channel, away from him, wasn’t making his stomach twist.

  Gwen made a dismissive gesture. “It’s foolish.”

  William captured her hand, twining his fingers through hers. “And wasn’t last night proof enough that folly is better than sense? Tell me.”

  Not that he necessarily thought that he would be the cause, but . . .

  Gwen leaned her head back against the carved headboard. “We founded the League together, Jane and I—and her cousin Amy, the one at Selwick Hall. You’ll meet her today,” she added as an aside.

  “Hmm,” said William, trying not to look as disappointed as he felt.

  “I’d thought we were equal partners, but it seems Jane doesn’t feel quite the same way. She’s cut me out, kept information from me. It’s her League; she’s well within her rights.” Gwen’s face was bleak. “But I’d believed she thought better of me than that.”

  William struggled to a sitting position. “Just a moment.” Disappointment warred with confusion. “That child is in charge of your operations?”

  “That child, as you call her, is one of the foremost spymasters in France.”

  “Good God.” So much of what he’d seen the past few weeks began to make sense, the odd deference shown to the girl, Gwen’s concern. She wasn’t that young when one thought of it; at twenty-three, he had been leading men. His Jack was just about the same age as this girl, and he’d already run off with the jewels of Berar. “It’s genius, it is. Who would ever suspect a slip of a girl like that?”

  “That,” said Gwen austerely, “is exactly the point. That is what has kept us safe for the past two years. Bonaparte hasn’t the highest opinion of women. As for a young and pretty one . . .”

  It really was a rather brilliant conceit. “But what about you?” he asked.

  He still couldn’t quite get his head around the idea of Gwen following the Wooliston girl’s orders. Even if he had seen the evidence of it with his own eyes, it was hard for him to imagine his Gwen playing second fiddle to anyone.

  The thought caught William up short. When had she become his Gwen? The surge of possessiveness was as strong as it was unexpected. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and defy anyone who tried to take her from him.

  Fortunately, Gwen was too caught up in her own thoughts to notice his abstraction. “I’d thought I was indispensible to her.”

  William squeezed her hands. “Cut you out, has she?” he said sympathetically.

  “I was never in.” There was a world of pain and confusion beneath Gwen’s jaunty facade. He had seen the look before, in soldiers who woke from a drugged sleep to be told they’d lost a limb. “Apparently, I’m too impulsive.”

  “Charmingly impetuous,” William substituted gallantly, repressing the urge to shake the cool and composed Miss Wooliston.

  Gwen’s lips twisted in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You’re not helping.”

  “You don’t have to go back with her,” William said. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Once out, there was nothing but to say, “You have a home with me. Should your Paris plans fail,” he added quickly.

  “You haven’t a home for yourself,” Gwen protested. “You can’t offer what’s not there.”

  William leaned forward eagerly. “That’s not entirely true. When I haven’t been pursued by ruffians, I’ve spent a bit of time looking into purchasing a cottage somewhere. I’m not entirely without funds, and—” He broke off, realizing just how foolish it must all sound to her. “A cottage must sound deadly dull after the life you’ve been living.”

  “With you in it? Not likely.” Realizing what she had said, she swung her legs over the bed, retreating in a tangle of hair and a flurry of sheets. Leaning over to scoop them off the floor, she tossed William his breeches. “You’d best get back to your own room before anyone comes to wake you. We don’t want to shock the younger generation.”

  William buttoned up his breeches. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. It might do that Miss Wooliston good to realize that her chaperone wasn’t entirely without other options. All of them last night, with the smugness of youth, had treated Gwen as their own personal Methuselah, firmly on the shelf, past the age for human emotions. She might not mind, but he minded on her behalf. “It might do them good. Shake them up a bit.”

  Gwen ignored him. “There are your shoes, under the bed,” she said, kicking them out from under. She peered around the room. “What did you do with your jacket?”

  “You mean what did you do with my jacket?” William cocked a brow at her. Her own garments were scattered with betraying abandon across the floor, his shirt intimately tangled with her chemise. “I seem to remember you removing it somewhat impulsively. . . .”

  “Shirt,” said Gwen, and shoved the aforementioned item at him.

  William shrugged into the shirt, tugging it down over his head. “I wasn’t suggesting that we pose for them in flagrante,” he said innocently. “Just a few rumpled bedclothes, some lingering looks . . .”

  “Out!” Gwen said, and punctuated the directive with a wadded-up cravat.

  William left, grinning.

  He wasn’t grinning an hour later when they all assembled in the front hall. The preparations for their departure were, if not military, at least martial. Six hefty footmen, with the look of former pugilists, had been conscripted to come with them.

  “Just in case,” said Mr. Dorrington airily as they stood in the front of the house, waiting for the horses to be brought around. “Biscuit?”

  No one had wanted to stay for breakfast. An air of urgency had infected them all; even Miss Wooliston was tapping her foot against the stair. Pistols bristled from belts, spare ammunition shoved into deep pockets.

  This, William realized. This was Gwen’s real life. Not their interlude in their borrowed bedchamber, not last night’s confessions in the summerhouse, but this world of shadows and dangers, of footmen turned to guards and society ladies who carried pistols with their parasols.

  William noticed that Gwen had her trusty parasol, the purple frills incongruous against her starkly tailored traveling dress. He had no doubt that the sword had been cleaned and sharpened.

  “How long is it to Selwick Hall?” William asked.

  “Four hours,” said Gwen. She looked at him and then quickly glanced away again. Four hours and then—what?

  “Don’t worry,” said Mr. Dorrington, mercifully immune to undercurrents. “I know a shortcut. It will take at least an hour off our route.”

  Lady Henrietta regarded her husband with deep trepidation. Like the other ladies, she was dressed for hard travel, in a well-cut riding habit and sturdy boots. “This isn’t going to be like that other shortcut, is it?”

  Mr. Dorrington adopted an expression of wounded innoce
nce. “That was a perfectly good shortcut.”

  “Apart from taking three hours longer than the normal route,” pointed out his wife.

  William listened to their cheerful bickering with only half an ear. His attention was on Gwen.

  He was painfully aware that nothing was resolved between them. From the stiff set of her back, the furtive glances she sent him when she thought he wasn’t watching, he knew, without being quite sure why, that she intended to make good her word and go back to France. She wouldn’t look at him so otherwise, like a beggar staring at a bakery window, hunger and denial, all in one.

  Stay, he wanted to say. Stay with me.

  But for what? More nights like last night; there was that, at least. The memory of it brought a smile to his lips. Not merely for the obvious reasons, although those were there, sure enough. No, the sweetest memory was falling asleep with her arm across his chest, her head tucked beneath his chin. He wanted to fall asleep with her at night and wake with her in the morning and bicker with her in between.

  Not much of an argument, was it? There was no poet had ever won his lady with “Come bicker with me and be my love.”

  “Do I have something on my nose?” she said, and he realized he had been staring, letting his horse do the work of following the path.

  They had fallen a bit behind the others, more by accident than by design. Overhead, the sun glimmered through the leaves, creating a dappled pattern on the dusty surface of the road. It was the sort of day the poets had promised, April in England as April was meant to be, with the sun shining down on them and a breeze rustling the young leaves, a breeze that cooled pleasantly without chilling him through. A lark trilled its courting song, the high, clear notes floating on the breeze.

  “Just a bit of dust,” William prevaricated.

  Come away with me, he wanted to say. Away from these ridiculous young creatures who treated her with mingled tolerance and amusement. Not unkindly, no, but it was there all the same. Surely he could do better than that for her. If love was enough to offer.

  He leaned forward, near enough that his leg grazed hers. “Gwen?”

  “Yes?” She left off scrubbing the nonexistent dirt from her nose and looked up at him. Her parasol rode by her hip, like the sword of a medieval knight.

  The words he had meant to say died in his throat.

  Her loyalty, her fierce sense of honor, those were the things he admired about her. How could he ask her to give that up? That might be love too, but it was a craven, selfish kind of love, the sort of love that destroyed the object of its affection.

  “Nothing,” he said, and mustered a smile that was so palpably fake it made his teeth ache. “Nothing.”

  Gwen eyed him narrowly, but she didn’t question him. “We’re not far from Selwick Hall,” she said. “Dorrington’s shortcut appears to have worked. Astonishing as that may be.”

  “I heard that,” called back Mr. Dorrington. He looked like he was about to say more in that vein, but something caught his attention. Slowing his mount, he cocked his head, listening. “Was that a shot?”

  One by one, they stopped and listened. From the distance, William could hear it, the faint crackle of pistol fire.

  Lady Henrietta’s face had gone pale beneath her jaunty hat. “It’s coming from the Hall,” she said.

  “Then we’d better get there, hadn’t we?” Gwen said tartly, and set her heels to the sides of her horse. The others followed suit, cantering down the road, spurred on by the sound of loud voices, the crackle of broken glass.

  The road let out on a slight rise, just above the valley in which the house was set. William drew up his horse sharply, vaguely aware that around him, the others were doing the same.

  “This,” said Miss Wooliston, “was just what I was afraid might happen.” She sounded more annoyed than alarmed.

  Selwick Hall would have been a perfectly pleasant house, built of cream-colored stone, with a central block flanked by two smaller wings. There was a pair of tasteful columns on either side of the front door and classical pediments above the windows.

  Only one thing marred the classical symmetry of the facade: the mob of roughly garbed men who appeared to be doing their best to fire holes into it. There were a good dozen of them, all of them making a great deal of noise and firing their pistols with a remarkable inaccuracy of aim.

  William saw the movement of a curtain and a glint of metal as one of the defenders took a shot through a window, ducking back again against the wall. It was met by an answering burst of fire from the attackers. An arrow whizzed down from an upstairs window, narrowly missing skewering one of the attackers in the nose.

  Selwick Hall was under siege.

  Chapter 23

  The Knight had brought Amarantha to the very highest point of the very highest tower. The mirror lay between them, the sunlight dancing on its gleaming surface, hinting at the mysteries it contained, the mysteries that might crush the one and set the other free—but which?

  The Knight of the Silver Tower raised his visor. “It is of no avail,” quoth he, and his face was terrible in its beauty. “We are two halves of the same whole. You can no more destroy me than I you.”

  Plumeria leapt up the final stair. “Perhaps she may not,” said Plumeria, and brought she forth her sword, “but I have no such qualms.”

  —From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady

  An arrow whizzed past Gwen’s nose.

  “Sorry!” shouted a girl from the window, who could only be William’s daughter. The features were a feminine mold of her father’s, impishness incarnate. “Wind!”

  Next to her, a paler version of Jane appeared in the window, hauling what looked to be a bucket of steaming water.

  “Gardy-loo!” Agnes called out, rather unnecessarily in Gwen’s opinion. She dumped the boiling liquid over the heads of the invaders, one of whom jumped back just in time, as his companion sputtered and ran in circles.

  “Enjoy your bath!” yelled Lizzy, ducking as the maddened attacker, shaking water out of his eyes, stooped and lifted a handful of small stones, flinging them in her general direction. Gwen could hear the crack of glass breaking and an indignant squawk from William’s daughter, which sounded like something about not being the least bit sporting, and if that was the way they were going to behave . . .

  William didn’t wait to hear more.

  He rose in his stirrups, holding his pistol aloft like a sword. The sun lit his bright hair, hiding the lines on his face, the circles beneath his eyes. His horse lifted on its hind legs, man and mount moving in such concert that it dazzled Gwen’s eyes.

  “After me!” he cried. His voice was like a bell, calling men to arms.

  “Huzzah!” shouted Miles Dorrington, waving his hat in the air, and Gwen realized she was shouting too, her throat raw with it as they pounded down the slope, at the startled mob of motley attackers, who turned and gaped and then broke and ran, every man for himself. One had the nerve to take a potshot at Gwen, but William was between them, leveling and firing before Gwen had even seen the danger. The pistol spiraled out of the man’s hand.

  “Nice shot!” shouted Gwen.

  William grinned at her. “I was aiming for his horse.”

  Before Gwen had time to point out that the man didn’t have a horse, William was cantering away again, riding down a fleeing crew of attackers while his daughter sent arrows flying over their heads, most of which landed in the brush far to the side but added to the general air of excitement and confusion.

  The rout was quick and total. The attackers broke and scattered, running for the hills. They didn’t even bother to make an attempt to fight back.

  Gwen thought that very poor form. It was also more than a little bit suspect. Their crew abandoned the fleeing attackers and pounded down towards the house, boisterous and triumphant, wi
th Agnes and Lizzy cheering them on from the windows.

  “The cavalry is here!” shouted Miles, waving his hat to the defenders in the windows.

  Lord Richard’s head popped out of a window. “You’re about half an hour too early,” he said enigmatically, and disappeared again.

  “Of all the ungrateful—,” began Lady Henrietta indignantly, but her husband silenced her by pulling her close and pressing a smacking kiss to her lips.

  From inside, Gwen could hear the sound of bolts being drawn and miscellaneous pieces of furniture being hauled away.

  The great door opened and the defenders poured out: Amy and Richard; their butler, Stiles, who still appeared to be operating under the delusion that he was the scourge of the high seas; and, just behind them, the two schoolgirls.

  William was off his horse in a moment. His expression was rather what Gwen imagined one might see on a medieval visionary having his first divine visitation, dazed and joyful and lit from within.

  He held out his arms. “Lizzy!”

  There was no mistaking the family resemblance. The girl’s hair was a bronzed brown rather than carrot red, her eyes brown rather than blue, but the broad smile was the same. At the sight of her father, the girl’s face lit up.

  “Father!” She dropped her bow and flung herself into her father’s arms. “I thought it was you!”

  The exuberant Lizzy was subsumed in her father’s embrace, her springy hair crushed under his arm, her face buried in his shoulder.

  Despite the imminent risk of paternal asphyxiation, Gwen could hear Lizzy’s muffled voice still going at a cracking pace, saying, “When did you get here? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to England? Did they tell you—” as her father made vague and happy mumbling noises, stroking her bright hair and doing his best to get a word in edgewise.

  It was quite the touching family reunion.

  All around her, happy families reunited, hugging, exclaiming, talking over the events of the day as they all streamed back into the house in joyous, chattering groups. Lord Richard and Miles Dorrington bickered with the comfort of old friendship while their wives enthusiastically rehashed the battle. Colonel Reid and his daughter were lost in each other, although Agnes stayed close by her old school friend, hovering near, occasionally adding something to the conversation.