The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (16 page)

Fiorila had a child. Not surprising. The woman was roughly Gwen’s age, a year or two younger perhaps. If the child were eight or nine, that would put Fiorila in her midthirties when the child had been born. Audiences would have come to see her anyway, but the powerful men who protected her, who championed her against rival singers, might not have been so eager had there been a child in tow.

Yes, a child, tucked away somewhere, being educated at a young ladies’ academy, wasn’t at all a surprise.

It made some things Gwen had overheard in that conversation in Paris quite, quite clear. Talleyrand—or more accurately, one of his minions—must have discovered the child and taken her into custody in exchange for Fiorila’s compliance. Talleyrand had needed an opera singer to sway the Sultan. Fiorila had provided him the perfect pawn.

Gwen had a fairly good idea what the quid pro quo would be: Fiorila got her daughter back when Talleyrand got the jewels.

No one was more dangerous than a woman whose child was in danger.

Carefully putting back the letter and the watercolor just where she’d found them, Gwen resumed her search. Most of the surfaces in the main part of the room were laid out with various costumes, the role of Semira obviously occasioning a good many changes from one diaphanous robe into another, many of them sewn with fake jewels that glittered in the light.

Fake? Or simply designed to look so?

It would be a rather cunning way to smuggle out the jewels of Berar. Who would look too closely at an actress’s costume? She could return to France with a king’s ransom hidden on her body, in plain sight.

Gwen poked at a ruby. No. That was quite definitely paste. She could tell from the way it crumbled.

Maybe no one would notice?

She was just about to replace the gown in the wardrobe when she heard voices outside, voices and footsteps, coming towards the door. There would be no way out that way. Gwen glanced at the wardrobes. She refused to be that kind of cliché. Not to mention that hiding in an actress’s wardrobe bore with it a very high chance of discovery.

There was only one way out.

Dropping the gown, she clambered onto the settee. It was a bit of a reach, but with a desperate leap she managed to lock her arms around one of the wooden slats in the unfinished ceiling, using the momentum to swing her legs up, locking her ankles around the beam. She wished she were wearing her breeches; her purple evening gown had been designed to hide the wear and tear of espionage, but the skirts still got in the way.

With a desperate wrench, she managed to swing herself around, on top of the beam. She was inching down the beam on her hands and knees when the door to the dressing room opened. Gwen froze, inches away from safety. One more foot and she would be over what looked like an empty storage room next door.

“—can’t think how it got there,” the dresser was saying.

“No matter.” Even off the stage, Fiorila’s voice was musical and pitched to carry. “You have it now.”

She sounded tired, tired and ineffably weary. It was not the voice of a woman who had just received multiple encores.

“How did this get here?” The dresser was shaking out the gown Gwen had dropped. “I could have sworn . . .”

Fiorila swung around sharply. “Has someone been in here?”

“I was looking for the crown,” began the dresser, flustered. “I did not see . . .”

Fiorila sat down heavily at her dressing table. Gwen saw her hand go to the pocket of her dressing gown, assuring herself that her letter was still there. Her hand fell away again. Gwen could see her face, darkly, in the mirror, her auburn hair piled on top of her head in an elaborate cascade of curls, her white robe, crusted with make-believe diamonds, falling off her shoulders. Next to all that glitter, her face was pale and strained.

“I do not like this,” said the dresser darkly.

“I know, Justine.” Fiorila pressed the heels of her hands to her temples as though her head hurt. Given the volume of the chorus, it probably did. There were a few rather overenthusiastic baritones out there. “I don’t like it either, but there’s nothing else to be done.”

“What about the father of the child?” From the tone of her voice, the dresser had been with Fiorila for some time, long enough, at least, to know her secrets. “Surely, he would—”

Fiorila cut her off. “I cannot ask him for aid.” Her voice softening, she said, “He is only recently married. I hear it is a love match, at that. He has been too good a friend these many years for me to play him such a trick as that.”

“But if he knew—”

“He will not know.” Fiorila’s voice was final. “I’ll get us out of this coil myself. I have before.”

Gwen felt a reluctant sense of kinship with her, with the straight set of her spine, the determination in her voice. They were both women who knew what it was to stand alone.

A woman would risk much for her child.

“Not like this,” said the dresser darkly. “Not with—”

“Hush,” said Fiorila. “And bring me the gold-spangled gown for Act II.”

“Foreign places, intrigues . . . I liked it better when we were in London,” grumbled the dresser.

“I, too,” said Fiorila. She was stripping the paint from her face with a damp sponge. She dabbed a tiny brush into a pot of rouge, prepared to start again. “We’re so close, Justine, so close. It will all be over soon, I promise.”

“But at what cost?” The dresser took the brush from her mistress’s hand and began applying the rouge for her.

Fiorila’s voice was wry and more than a little bit sad. “There is always a cost, Justine. It is simply a matter of the price. Yes?” Her voice rose in response to a knock on the door.

It opened to reveal one of the chorus girls bearing a large bouquet. “A gentleman sent this for you,” she said, and giggled.

Gwen took advantage of their distraction to scuttle away, as quickly as she dared, along the beam, past the partition that separated the rooms. Outside, a boy was calling principals for the second act. Gwen lowered herself as carefully as she could, dropping lightly to her feet in the storeroom. Quickly, she brushed her dress clear of the dirt and grime from the beam. The dark purple satin absorbed the stains admirably. According to the watch she wore pinned to her breast, she had been gone just over ten minutes. It felt like longer.

It was surprisingly easy to thread her way back through the side of the stage to the boxes. Everyone was bustling about their own business, carrying props, shifting sets, gossiping about so-and-so’s gaffe in the opening ballet. No one noticed a woman in purple making her way quietly through the corridors. There were the usual loiterers in the corridor, ladies engaging in flirtations, dandies making wagers.

Gwen sailed haughtily past them, back in her role of disapproving chaperone, her feathers firmly in place.

Below, the second act had begun. The audience, waiting for the signature arias of the third act, were doing as they usually did and paying very little attention. There was a lively game of cards going on in one box, loud laughter and boisterous voices from another. The orchestra scraped vainly on.

There were voices coming from her own box, but pitched less loudly. Gwen paused, one hand on the curtain, struck by the unpleasant tableau of Jane tête-à-tête with the Chevalier. On her other side, Jane’s father was fast asleep, head resting on the balustrade and periwig tilted over one eye. Mrs. Wooliston nodded over her embroidery frame.

The Colonel was nowhere to be seen.

Where was the blasted man? Gwen felt a surge of entirely unjustified indignation. He should have known better than to leave Jane alone with that cad—even if Jane weren’t technically alone. But any fool could see that her parents were hardly the most diligent of duennas. One might as well leave a pair of sheep as chaperone.

Her temper wasn’t the least bit improved by the Chevalier’s tone, low and intimate, as he said, his lips dangerously close to Jane’s ear, “I should like to lure you off your pedestal.”

Jane leaned back in her chair, regarding him coolly. But was that a glint of amusement Gwen saw beneath her vaunted calm? “You are certainly at leave to try, sir, but I warn you, I enjoy the view too much to be easily swayed.”

“What are challenges for, but to be conquered?”

Jane settled her skirts demurely around her ankles. “Sometimes, the best lessons are learned in defeat.”

The Chevalier leaned forward. As if sharing a secret, a delicious, scandalous secret, he murmured, “But success is so much more pleasant.”

Jane cocked a brow, a queen who deigned to be entertained. “You are very sure of yourself, sir.”

“Am I?” The Chevalier sat back in his chair. Gwen could happily have slapped the smug look from his face. “A man must be adamant if he seeks to move marble.”

“You mix your metaphors—or at least your masonry.”

He pressed a hand to his heart. “So long as I build a small home in your heart.”

“I doubt you should be content with anything less than a palace.”

“You wrong me, Mademoiselle.” The Chevalier’s voice was warm. To Gwen’s horror, he took possession of Jane’s hand. Even worse, Jane made no move to stop him. “I should dwell in a willow cabin so long as it were at your gate.”

No.
No, no, no. Gwen stood frozen at the back of the box, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes. This wasn’t her Jane. Yes, certainly, she had seen Jane flirt before. In fact, she had done everything she could to aid her in it. Her chaperonage waxed and waned depending on its utility to the mission. She had, without qualm, left Jane alone in gardens and on balconies for as much as half an hour at a time, ready to burst in if needed, but just as happy to leave Jane to work her magic on the ignorant mark of the moment.

The idea that Jane might actually fall in love wasn’t to be thought of.

Not now, in any event. Eventually. Somewhere down the road. Then she would see Jane happily wed to some worthy soul who held her in the proper sort of esteem. She might even condescend to stay on to bully their children. But not now, not this. She wasn’t ready for it all to be over yet, for Jane to throw it all away for such a petty specimen of a man, all superficial charm and glib compliments.

She had been just Jane’s age, exactly Jane’s age, when she had done just that.

“There you are.”

It was the Colonel, all cheerful bonhomie, as though there weren’t a dark farce taking place in front of them. Jane gently drew back her hand, but too late; she had let it lie there too long, long enough for liking.

The Colonel regarded Jane and the Chevalier. “They make a handsome pair,” he said.

A handsome pair? They weren’t any kind of pair.

Gwen turned on the Colonel. “Where have you been?” she snapped. “What were you thinking, leaving them alone?”

“Looking for you,” he said. “And they’re hardly alone. Her parents—”

“Haven’t the sense God gave a sheep!” Gwen burst out.

The Colonel possessed himself of her arm, making the sort of soothing noises one might to a fractious child. “Why are you taking on so? What harm can the young ones come to in an open box? Surely, even the greatest sticklers couldn’t find fault with that.”

The fact that he was right only made Gwen angrier. She yanked her arm away. “You oughtn’t have left them! Just because you leave your own children to roam the earth without supervision doesn’t mean that some of us don’t take our responsibilities seriously.”

The Colonel dropped his hand as though he had been stung. His face went white, whiter than it had in the alley, with his blood draining out along the seams of his coat.

“What did you say?” he said, his voice low and dangerous.

She had never seen him like this before, never imagined that he could look this way. If a human could breathe fire, there would have been flames shooting from his nostrils. Every inch of his body quivered with tension. His blue eyes were as cold as the Thames in winter, hard and frozen.

She wasn’t going to back down. She was Miss Gwendolyn Meadows and she bowed to no one.

She raised her head, matching him stare for stare.

Or tried to. Something in his gaze shamed her. Her eyes shifted sideways. “I said that some of us take our responsibilities seriously.”

It came out wrong, somehow, low and sulky.

“Right,” said the Colonel. His nostrils flared. His hands clenched in fists at his sides. But he held his temper. She could practically see the effort, the tight leash on which he held himself.

“You’d best see to them, then, hadn’t you?” he said, and turned and walked away.

Gwen watched him march away, his back straight, his hands balled at his sides, the silver in his hair shining in the candlelight, and felt shame such as she had never known descend on her like a fog, miserable and choking.

She felt like an earthworm.

It was a concept so foreign as to be almost unimaginable, but she had been . . . wrong. She wasn’t used to being in the wrong. It was a distinctly uncomfortable feeling.

In the box, Jane and the Chevalier were still engaged in close conversation. Gwen glanced at them and then back at the Colonel.

Dropping the curtain, Gwen set off after the Colonel, the slap of her slippers against the marble floor echoing in her ears.

“Wherefore do you follow me?” protested Plumeria. “Go back to the feast. The danger there is far less than the perils that face us below the earth, where this cursed crew hold their deadly revels.”

“Think you I would allow you to face this danger alone?” quoth Sir Magnifico, and drew her forth into his embrace. “I go with you, or we go not at all.”

Plumeria lifted her torch high. “Come, then. For the hour grows late. And the hour of reckoning draws nigh.”

Down, down, down they went, through a maze of stairs, deep into the heart of the Tower. Only the torches flickering along the walls illuminated their way, for there was no light of moon or star to penetrate this cursed place. As they descended, the sound of a rhythmic drumming grew ever louder. . . .

—From
The Convent of Orsino
by A Lady

“C
olonel Reid!”

William kept walking. Over the chatter of the theatregoers, over the flat sound of his own footfalls, he could hear a clear soprano voice singing of the soldier tired of war’s alarms.

War’s alarms hadn’t broken him. War, he understood. It was peace that was confounding him, a thousand times more complex than anything he had been forced to confront in any of his varied commands. He had fought through deserts, jungles, and the narrow and twisting streets of hostile cities. He hadn’t always won the day; he had experienced his share of retreats, of rearguard actions, of desperate last-minute maneuvers.

But never before had he felt so entirely defeated as this.

The footsteps behind him quickened. “Colonel Reid!
William
.” The sound of his name on her lips brought back a powerful memory of Bristol, of Gwen Meadows bullying and cosseting him back to health. She hadn’t called him that since they’d left Bristol. “Wait.”

Slowly, William turned.

“It’s about time!” Gwen skidded to a stop on the slick marble floor. Her color was high, her breathing rapid. She paused just long enough to catch her breath before saying, in the hectoring tone of one who knew the value of a strong offense, “There’s no need to go off in a huff.”

William faced her without expression. “Don’t you have a duty to discharge? I wouldn’t want you to be remiss.”

Just because you leave your own children to roam the earth without supervision
 . . .

He inclined his torso in a bow. It wasn’t a polished bow, like the Chevalier’s. It was stiff and formal and it hurt like the very devil. His wound might have scabbed over, but it still burned.

“Don’t let me keep you,” he said.

Gwen folded her arms across her chest. “I didn’t mean it. Not that way.”

Some of us take our responsibilities seriously. . . .

“You needn’t sugarcoat it,” he said, feeling, for the first time, every one of his fifty-four years and then some. Where had they gone, those sunny, laughing years? How had they come to this? “It is what it is.”

Kat with her reddened hands and defiant eyes. And Lizzy. Where was Lizzy? Every one of those words scored his conscience like a cat-o’-nine-tails on raw flesh.

“Oh, all right, I— You touched me on the raw,” Gwen said gruffly. She fiddled with her fan, making a fold of painted silk appear and disappear. “I oughtn’t to have said it. I was out of line.”

His lack of response seemed to madden her. In and out the fold of silk went, in and out.

“I was angry at myself, not you. Well, at myself and at that coxcomb of a Chevalier. I should have gone after him, not you.”

William nodded at her fan. “If you keep doing that you’ll break it.”

“It’s sturdier than you think.” Gwen snapped the fan together. She looked up at him, a deep furrow between her eyes. “It was ill done of me. Unsporting. Say something!”

Somewhere, William managed to find words. “You were protecting your charge,” he said flatly. “That was all.”

“No,” said Gwen. “It’s not all. Stop standing there looking like a corpse! I’m telling you I was wrong. And I don’t say that often.”

He didn’t imagine that she did.

She paced a few steps, her purple skirts whirling around her legs. “You were right. Her parents were with her.” She couldn’t restrain herself from muttering, “Even if they are without a stick of sense between them.”

There was more than an apology at issue here. The formidable woman he had seen facing off armed men with a glint in her eye was rattled, and William would wager it had something to do with two handsome young people in an opera box.

It wasn’t easy to lose a child, even if a surrogate one. Perhaps particularly if a surrogate one. No matter where they went, or whom they married, he had a claim on all his children, the most basic claim, the claim of blood. What call on a child’s heart did a chaperone have once the chaperonage was done?

Looking at Gwen with compassion and a new understanding, William said, “You love her, don’t you? Miss Wooliston.”

Gwen stiffened. “I am very fond of Jane,” she said guardedly. “Proud, even. I owe her a duty. Her parents entrusted me with her care.”

He’d never known a woman who knew so many ways to hedge around the concept of affection.

“All that, too,” he said.

Gwen glowered at him. “Love,” she said succinctly, cutting off every word with a snap, “is a word too often used and too little meant. What does it matter to say you love someone if the word inspires no action?”

It reminded William of something he had heard once in a play.
“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without deeds do not to heaven go.”

Gwen tapped her fan against her palm. “Don’t try to distract me with doggerel verse. The Lord knows, poetry has done enough harm in its time, all sweet professions that last only until the ink has dried.”

“Not all sweet professions are lies,” protested William, “verse or no. Sure and it’s no crime to put one’s love into words.”

“It is when those words are nothing more than empty air.” Gwen regarded him militantly. “One can love volubly and publicly, with all the trappings of sentiment, and still fail someone entirely when it comes to the point.”

Love his girls? Of course he did. He would have said so to anyone who asked. Volubly and publicly. But in the end, all his fine sentiments had led him here.

“Yes,” William said slowly. “Sure and that’s a fair assessment of my own situation, whichever way you turn it.”

Gwen’s head snapped up, purple feathers bobbing. “That’s not what I—”

“Meant, I know.” William’s lips twisted wryly. “But you were right, all the same. I’m a poor excuse for a father. I’ve let my children go to wrack and ruin and I didn’t even know it was happening. I’d brag of them to anyone who would listen. I waxed sentimental over their miniatures in the mess. But I hadn’t the devil of an idea that they were out running about England entirely without resources or supervision.”

He remembered his idealized image of them, all pastels and frills, like someone off a piece of French porcelain, Kat in a muslin gown, sitting beneath the spreading branches of an oak tree, watching Lizzy, sprawled on a blanket on the grass, eating cherries and laughing, their rosy-cheeked grandmother calling them in for dinner.

His throat felt tight. The images were choking him. “I thought Kat was sitting prettily in a garden under a tree. A tree . . .”

“Stop that!” Gwen said harshly. Her fan swung down from its string as she grabbed his arm, her fingers biting into his sleeve. “I won’t have it. You were thousands of miles away. How were you to know?”

“I ought to have made it my business to know.”

“How often did you write them?”

William bristled. “As often as there was a ship to carry the letter.”

They had both written back, regularly. He might have been suspicious otherwise. He hadn’t realized it was all lies.

Gwen looked at him from under beetled brows. “Was there any way to have kept them with you?” She leveled her fan at him, poking him in the ribs, well below his bandages. “Don’t fib! I’ll know if you’re lying. Did you send them away for your own convenience?”

William shook off her hand, stepping back. “Don’t be absurd!” His voice echoed uncomfortably loudly off the marble and gilding. He swallowed hard, modulating his tone. “I hated to send them away. They were . . .”

Little Lizzy, all childlike exuberance, yanking him by the hand, creating elaborate and imaginative excuses as to why eating all the jam out of the pot was really a favor to him; Kat, the oldest, protective of her status as the lady of the house, bullying him with all the confidence of seventeen.

“They were the best part of me.”

“Well, then.” That was all she said, but William felt as though he had somehow gone through a tribunal and been exonerated. She fixed him with a look of staggering smugness. “Hadn’t you better stop flagellating yourself and get on with it?”

The smugness of her expression startled him into a laugh, hoarse and raw, but a laugh all the same.

He took her hand in his, looking down at the gloved fingers. “You are a remarkable woman, Gwen Meadows.”

Gwen emitted a delicate sniff. “There’s hardly much in the way of competition here. I shine by comparison. Besides, I can’t have you wasting time in moping. I didn’t patch you up just to have you go jump off a balcony.”

“For all of that,” William said gently, squeezing her hand before letting it go, “I thank you.”

Gwen shrugged, not quite meeting his eyes. “As you say, it is what it is. One does what one must.”

She did like to hide affection behind the guise of duty. He remembered her hands, gentle, washing the grime of the sickroom off his face in the inn room, the infinite patience with which she had spooned soup between his slack lips. There was a tender heart beneath that prickly shell, however hard she tried to hide it. On an impulse, William slid a finger beneath her chin, lifting her face towards his. “You seem to be making a practice of patching me up.”

Her eyes were gray, a gray so deep that they looked almost purple against the frame of her headdress. He wondered if the swains of her youth had compared them to violets, or her skin to cream. It wasn’t cream now, but ivory, strong and vibrant. With her hair pulled back away from her face under her absurd purple turban, he could see the strength in her face, the clean, bold bones, but the weaknesses, too, the faint purple shadows beneath her eyes, the sensitive dent below her lips.

She stuck her chin into the air. “You’ll just have to stop blundering into trouble, then, won’t you?”

She did a good job of looking stern, but her lips hadn’t been made for sternness; they were full and generous, less a rosebud and more a Cupid’s bow. She might pull back her hair and button her bodice up to the chin, but she couldn’t hide those lips.

“I think I already have,” he said honestly.

“There you are!” The sound of Miss Wooliston’s voice broke the spell.

They jerked away from each other like marionettes at the hands of an inexpert puppeteer.

Miss Wooliston looked from one to the other with an expression of mild inquiry. “We were wondering where you’d got to.”

It wouldn’t have been quite so bad but for the carefully suppressed amusement in her tone. The Chevalier, standing just beside Miss Wooliston, winked at him. William pretended not to notice.

Bad enough to be behaving like a moonstruck calf, and worse still to be caught at it by the younger generation.

“The caterwauling on the stage was too much for me,” said Gwen, stepping quickly away. Her skirts brushed William’s legs as she walked past him. “It sounded like a bunch of cats being swung by their tails.”

“That is most unkind, and untrue, as well.” Miss Wooliston linked arms with her chaperone. “I thought it was an excellent production.” She frowned. “Except for the third violin, which was sorely out of tune.”

“I didn’t think Fiorila was in her usual voice,” offered the Chevalier.

Gwen eyed the Chevalier narrowly. “Know her, then, do you?”

She managed to imply that he was a rake, a rogue, a seducer, and a despoiler of opera singers. It was beautifully done.

“Not personally, no,” said the Chevalier, unruffled. “But I have had the pleasure of hearing her sing many times in London.”

“There’s no music like the sound of the wind through the wool,” contributed Mr. Wooliston poetically. He jammed his periwig back on his head. “I don’t hold with this foreign entertainment.”

Gwen looked at him with imperfectly concealed scorn. “
Artaxerxes
is an English opera, sirrah.”

“No. Can’t be.” Wooliston shook his head, the tail of his periwig swaying mournfully. “What kind of name is Xerxes? No, the man’s not an Englishman.”

“Would you prefer that the opera be called
George
?” demanded Gwen.

“I prefer Harry, myself,” contributed William blandly.

“I believe, sir,” said the Chevalier smoothly, “that Xerxes was a Persian potentate.”

“They make such lovely carpets,” said Mrs. Wooliston.

“I rather think Xerxes was too busy conquering the world to weave,” said Miss Wooliston peaceably.

“Only webs of intrigue,” said the Chevalier, and bowed over Miss Wooliston’s hand. “Many thanks for a most lovely—and edifying—evening.”

Throughout the extended and elaborate leave-taking, Gwen was quiet. Too quiet.

William joggled her arm lightly with his elbow. “All right, there?”

Ignoring William, Gwen turned to her charge and said, “Go on without me. I’ve remembered something I have to see to.”

A look passed between her and Miss Wooliston. “We’ll send the carriage back for you,” Miss Wooliston said, and, without seeming to do so, neatly turned her parents towards the exit.