The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (46 page)

7. Initially, who did you think was actually responsible for the murder of Lucien’s parents? Were you surprised when the real villain was revealed at the end? What were some of the clues that might have pointed to the real villain?

8. Why do you think Colin was initially so distant toward Eloise when he came to visit her? If you were her friend, what advice would you have given her? Were you caught off guard when he proposed to her at the end?

9. Why do you think Miss Gwen suggested that Lucien and Sally enter into a false engagement? Do you think she perceived their budding feelings for each other and was trying to “help things along”?

10. “You’re a one-woman cavalry charge! It doesn’t matter if it’s a windmill at the other end. You’ll tilt at it anyway, because: You. Don’t. Stop. To. Look. Everyone else’s troubles are just so much fodder for your entertainment. Never mind the toes you might tread on in the process.” Do you think Lucien’s accusations are true? Would you like Sally’s character as much if she were less meddlesome and officious? Or do you think that’s part of what makes Sally so endearing and lovable?

11. Just what do you think Sally has against chickens?

12. What do you think Sally gains from her relationship with her pet, Lady Florence? Does the stoat provide some sort of emotional support?

13. What do you think of Sally’s relationship with Lizzy and Agnes? At the beginning of the book, their friendship is undergoing a change as they move from their school days to their new positions in the outside world. Do you think those bonds will stand the test of their changing circumstances?

14. Even though the Pink Carnation is offstage in this book, what do you think she might be up to? Do you think she and Miss Gwen are still working together in some capacity?

15. At the end of the book, Eloise thinks to herself that “the best things sometimes happened by accident.” Do you think this is generally true of life, or do you think things turn out better when they’re planned?

Don’t miss the last novel in the bestsellingPink Carnation series by Lauren Willig
The Lure of
the Moonflower
Available from New American Library in Summer 2015.  

Lisbon, 1807

The mood in the Rossio Square was nasty.

The agent known as the Moonflower blended into the crowd, just one anonymous man among many, just another sullen face beneath the brim of a hat pulled down low against the December rain. The crowd grumbled and shifted as the Portuguese royal standard made its slow descent from the pinnacle of São João Castle, but the six thousand French soldiers massed in the square put an effective stop to louder expressions of discontent. In the windows of the tall houses that framed the square, the Moonflower could see curtains twitch, as hostile eyes looked down on the display put on by the conqueror.

The French claimed to come as liberators, but the liberated didn’t seem any too happy about it.

As the royal standard disappeared from view and the tricolore rose triumphant above the square, the Moonflower heard a woman sob and a man mutter something rather uncomplimentary about his new French overlords.

The Moonflower might have stayed to listen—listening, after all, was his job—but he had another task today.

He was here to meet his new contact.

That was all he had been told: Proceed to Rossio Square and await further instructions. He would know his contact by the code phrase: “The eagle nests only once.”

Who in the hell came up with these lines?

Once, just once, he would appreciate a phrase that didn’t involve dogs barking at midnight or doves flying by day.

The message had given no hint as to the new agent’s identity; it never did. Names were dangerous in their line of work.

The Moonflower had gone by many names in his twenty-seven years.

Jaisal, his mother had called him, when she had called him anything at all. The French had called him Moonflower, just one of their many flower-named spies, a web of agents stretching from Madras to Calcutta, from London to Lyons. He’d counted himself lucky; he might as easily have been the Hydrangea. Moonflower, at least, had a certain ring to it. In Lisbon, he was Alarico, a wastrel who tossed dice by the waterfront; in the Portuguese provinces, he went by Rodrigo, Rodrigo the seller of baubles and trader of horses.

His father’s people knew him as Jack. Jack Reid, black sheep, turncoat, and renegade.

Jack turned up the collar of his jacket, surveying the scene, keeping an eye out for likely faces.

Might it be the dangerous-looking bravo with the knife he was using to pick his teeth?

No. He looked too much like a spy to be a spy. In Jack’s line of work, anonymity was key. Smoldering machismo and resentment tended to attract unwanted attention.

There was a great deal of smoldering in the crowd. Since the French had marched into Lisbon, two weeks since, with a ragtag force that could scarcely have conquered a missionary society, they had proceeded to make themselves unpleasant, requisitioning houses, looting stores, demanding free drinks.

The people of Lisbon simmered and stewed. This lowering of the standard, this public exhibition of dominance, was all that was needed to place torch to tinder. Jack wouldn’t be surprised if there were riots before the day was out.

Riots, yes. Rebellion, no. For rebellion, one needed not just a cause, but a leader, and that was exactly what they didn’t have right now. The Portuguese court had hopped on board the remaining ships of their fleet and scurried off to the Americas, well out of the way of danger, leaving their people to suffer the indignities of invasion.

Not that it was any of his business. Jack didn’t get into the rights and wrongs of it all, not these days. Not anymore. He was a hired gun, and it just so happened that the Brits paid, if not better than the French, at least more reliably.

There was a cluster of French officers in the square, standing behind General Junot. They did go in for flashy uniforms, these imperial officers. Flashy uniforms and even flashier women. The richly dressed women hanging off the arms of the officers were earning dark stares from the members of the crowd, stares and mutterings.

Some were local girls, making up to the conqueror. Others were undoubtedly French imports, like the woman who stood to the far left of the huddled group, her dark hair a mass of bunched curls beneath the brim of a bonnet from which pale purple feathers molted with carefree abandon. Her clothes were all that was currently à la mode in Paris, her pelisse elaborately frogged, the fingers of her gloves crammed with rings.

A well-paid courtesan, at the top of her trade.

But there was something about her that caught Jack’s eye. It wasn’t the flashing rings. He’d seen far grander jewels in his time. No. It was the aura of stillness about her. She stood with an easy elegance of carriage at odds with all her frills and fripperies, and it seemed that the nervous energy of the crowd eddied and ebbed around her without touching her in the slightest.

Her features had the classical elegance that was all the rage. High cheekbones. Porcelain pale skin, tinted delicately pink at the cheeks. Jack had been around enough to know that it wouldn’t take long for the ravages of her trade to begin to show. Those clear eyes would become shadowed; that pale skin would be replaced with white lead and other cosmetics, in a desperate simulacrum of youth, a desperate attempt to catch and hold the affections of first one man and then another, until there was nothing left but the bottle—or the river.

Better, thought Jack grimly, to be a washerwoman or a fishwife, a tavern keeper or a maid. Those occupations might be hell on the hands, but the other was hell on the heart.

Not that it was any of his lookout.

The courtesan’s eyes met Jack’s across the crowd. Met and held. Ridiculous, of course. There was a square full of people between them, and he was just another rough rustic in a shapeless brown jacket.

But he could have sworn, for that moment, she was looking fully at him. Looking and sizing him up.

For what? He was hardly a likely protector for a French courtesan.

Go away, princess,
Jack thought.
There’s nothing here for you.

The French might hold Portugal, but not for long. Rumors were spinning through the crowd. The British navy was sending ships. . . . There were British spies throughout Lisbon. . . . The royal family was returning to raise their army. . . . There were troops massing on the Northern frontier. . . . Rumor upon rumor, but who knew what might have a breath of truth?

It would all go into Jack’s report. Provided he ever found his bloody contact, who appeared to be late. The review was almost over, and still, no one had made contact.

That did not bode well.

The soldiers began to filter out of the square, marching beneath the baroque splendor of the Arco de Bandeira, the cheerful yellow of the facade in stark contrast to the bleak weather and even bleaker mood of the populace.

“Pig!” a woman hissed, and tossed a stone.

“Portugal forever!” rose another voice from the crowd.

The officers milled uneasily, looking to their leader. Junot turned, speaking urgently to the man at his side, one of the members of the Portuguese Regency Council, the nominal government that had replaced the Queen and Regent.

A bottle shattered against the tiles, between the feet of the departing soldiers, spraying glass.

“Death to the French!” shouted one bold soul, and then another took it up, and another.

Projectiles were hailing down from every direction, stones and bottles and whole cobbles pried from the street. Abuse rattled down with the stones. The French troops ducked and milled, looking anxiously to their leader, who appeared to be in the middle of a fight with the Portuguese Regency Council.

And then, the sound that could turn a riot into a massacre. The crack of an old-fashioned musket, shot right into the ranks of French soldiers.

It was, Jack judged, not a healthy time to stay in the square.

Any moment now, the French were going to start firing back, and he didn’t want to be in the middle of it. If his contact hadn’t appeared by now, he wasn’t coming. One thing Jack had learned after years in the game: Saving one’s own skin came first.

He slipped off, through the heaving, shouting crowd. The various approaches to the square were already crammed with people, people surging forward, people fleeing, people fainting, people shouting, mothers grabbing their children out of the way, fishwives scrabbling at the cobbles, old men running for ancient weapons, French émigrés and sympathizers running for their lives as the crowd hurled abuse and missiles at the collaborators. Rioters were fighting hand to hand with French soldiers; Junot’s face was red with anger as he shouted, trying to be heard above the square. A runner was making for the French barracks, undoubtedly to call up reinforcements.

Jack ducked sideways, down the Rua Áurea.

A hand grabbed at his arm. Jack automatically dodged out of the way. This wasn’t his fight. And then a musical voice said, “Wait!”

It was the courtesan, the courtesan he had noticed across the square, her curls flying, her bonnet askew.

“Please,” she said, and she spoke in French, a cultured, aristocratic French that caught the attention of the mob around them, made them stop and stare and growl low in their throats. “I need an escort back to my lodgings.”

He’d say she did. Her voice was already attracting unwanted attention.

But Jack didn’t do rescues of maidens, fair or fallen.
Don’t
get
involved
—that was the only way to survive. Even when they had a figure like a statue of Aphrodite and lips painted a luscious pink.

“Sorry, princess,” he drawled, his own French heavily accented, but serviceable. “I’m no one’s lackey.” He nodded towards the embattled French soldiers. “There’s your escort.”

“They can’t even escort themselves.” Her pose was appropriately beseeching, the epitome of ladylike desperation, but there was, even now, in the midst of all the tumult, that strange calm about her. It was the eyes, Jack realized. Cool. Assessing. She lifted those eyes to his, in a calculated gesture of supplication, her gloved hands against the breast of his rough coat. “Please. You know that the eagle nests only once.”

All around them, the hectic exodus continued. In the distance, Jack could hear the ominous clatter of horses’ hooves against the cobbles, signaling the arrival of the cavalry.

But Jack stood where he was, frozen in the middle of the street, locked in tableau with a French courtesan. And a very pretty tableau it was. Pretty, and completely for show.

Beneath the heavy tracing of kohl that lined her eyes and darkened her lashes, her gray eyes were shrewd and more than a little bit amused.

She raised her brows, waiting for him, giving him the chance to speak first. It was a damnable tactic, and one Jack used himself with some frequency.

He didn’t much appreciate being on the other end of it.

“The eagle,” said Jack, his gaze traveling from the plunging depths of her décolletage to her painted face, “sometimes nests in uncommon strange places.”

The woman didn’t squirm or color. She said calmly, “The more remote the nest, the more secure the eggs.”