The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (2 page)

In the early nineteenth century, travel between London and Calcu
tta could take anywhere from four to six months, depending on weather.
The Betrayal of the Blood Lily
, in which we first met Colonel Reid, opened in the autumn of 1804. Colonel Reid left Calcutta in October of 1804 and arrived in England in March of 1805. Because of this, he has no knowledge of anything that occurred in India after he left.

That is why, although
Purple Plumeria
takes place several months after
Blood Lily
, the main actors are unaware of some information that the seasoned Pink Carnation reader already possesses.

The seasoned Pink Carnation reader and anyone who managed to get mail onto a faster ship . . .

Sussex, 2004

“I
seriously doubt the lost jewels of Berar are under your bath mat,” I said.

My boyfriend straightened, narrowly missing banging his head on the underside of the sink. He squinted at me, myopia rather than malevolence. “I dropped my contact lens.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say.” I spotted a glint of blue on the tiles near the mat. I don’t know why, but even clear contacts always turn blue when they dry out. “Over there. No. Your other there.”

“Thanks.” Colin groped for the bit of plastic. “I was afraid I’d stepped on it.”

“Ah,” I said, slipping my arms around his waist. “Then you’d be entirely at my mercy.”

He considered that. “Until I put my glasses on.”

I gave him a peck on the back and let go of him. “Spoilsport.”

We were being very touchy-feely these days. At least I was. I’m not usually much of one for PDA, even when the only public was the mold in the grouting, but at my back I could already hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Or, in this case, time’s winged 747. My flight back to the States was booked. It was one of those flexible STA Travel things, but even so. I had a time. I had a flight number. I had a ticket.

I had only two more months with Colin.

Time is a strangely malleable commodity. When I moved to London, last fall, the first two months had lasted for years, and not in a good way. I had come to London on a ten-month grant. Like a good little academic squirrel, I was meant to be gathering the nuts of primary sources, great armloads of them, and then scurrying back to Cambridge—the other Cambridge—to crack and dissect them in the calm of my basement office in the history department. At the time, I had yearned for the comfortable familiarity of the history department, the basement vending machine, the caked-on coffee in the bottom of the department coffee machine that no one ever remembered to clean.

Everything in England was just so . . . English. As an Anglophile, I’d thought I’d known what I was getting into, but years of
Masterpiece Theatre
hadn’t prepared me for the realities of life in London: the miniature bottles of shampoo, the peanut butter that didn’t look like peanut butter, the sun that set at three in winter. Of course, all that would have been bearable, war stories for later, if only the research were going well.

Scrap that: if the research were going anywhere at all.

I was on the trail of the most elusive element of the Napoleonic Wars, those shadowy men and women who had donned aliases rather than uniforms. Spying might have been considered more than a bit ungentlemanly at the time, but there was no denying either its utility or its glamour. With images of the Scarlet Pimpernel dancing in my head, I had envisioned myself making the scholarly coup of the century, unmasking the one spy who had never been unveiled, the spy who sent Napoleon’s Ministry of Police into palpitations and launched a series of florally themed fashion crazes among England’s aristocratic elite: the Pink Carnation.

Yes, admittedly, the name might be a little less than fearsome, but the roster of exploits attributed to the Carnation was impressive indeed. In addition to the usual mocking notes on Napoleon’s pillow (there were times when it seemed that the little dictator’s bedroom must have been busier than Grand Central on a summer Friday), the Carnation had thwarted a plot to kidnap George III, intercepted shipments of Dutch gold, spiked Bonaparte’s plans for a naval invasion, and cured the common cold.

The accounts were all inconclusive and contradictory in the extreme. If you believed the contemporary newsletters, the Carnation was reputed to have been simultaneously in India, Portugal, France, and Shropshire, and possibly somewhere in the Americas, as well. He kept popping up like Elvis, minus the shiny suit. The French Ministry of Police were constantly finding him under their pillows; the British press attributed every French disappointment to his good agency.

In short, it was a mess. After months in the archives, I had been no closer to sorting it out. I was on the verge of sourly ascribing to the popular academic theory that the Pink Carnation had been a deliberate fictional construct, invented by the English government to throw fear into the hearts of their French foes, with the role of the Carnation being played, successively, by a variety of English heroes ranging from Sir Sidney Smith to Lord Nelson’s first cousin twice removed. In other words, the Dread Pirate Roberts, Napoleonic edition.

In one last, desperate attempt, I’d played my final card. I’d sent out letters to the holders of private family archives, hoping against hope that something, some tiny clue to the Carnation’s identity (or identities), might have survived, something that would give me something to put into my dissertation other than the theoretical mumbo jumbo that is the scholar’s best smoke screen for the complete dearth of any actual sources. I’d sent those letters out on the off chance.

Those letters led me to the Pink Carnation. And Colin.

Life works in weird ways, doesn’t it? Romance had been the last thing on my mind in October—I was more concerned with ABD than MRS—but those letters, mailed in desperation, had netted me more than a crack at some private sources. They had plunged me right into the heart not just of historical drama but of a modern one, too. Colin and I had been together, officially, for just a little more than six months now. Just enough time to put down roots, not enough time for declarations. We were betwixt and between and the clock was rapidly running down.

Just because I was going back to the States didn’t mean it was over.

Why did that sound less and less convincing the closer we got to August?

Colin squirted multipurpose solution on his contact, regarded it philosophically, and maneuvered it back into his eye.

“Jeremy rang this morning,” he said thickly. Like mascara application, contact lens insertion requires a partially open mouth.

I could see my own face in the mirror, lips pinched, eyes narrowed. “Oh, did he?”

I mentioned modern drama, didn’t I? That drama had a first name, spelled
J-E-R-E-M-Y
. Jeremy was both Colin’s cousin and his stepfather. If it sounds complicated, it’s because it is. There was some debate as to whether Colin’s father had been cold in his grave yet when Jeremy took up with his cousin’s widow. There had been a suspicious interval of overlap while Colin’s father was in the hospital—or, as they say over here, in hospital—struggling through the final stages of pancreatic cancer, and Colin’s mother had been, shall we say, being comforted by Jeremy, said comforting involving lots of long walks on a beach in the Grenadines.

Don’t think that I was jumping to conclusions or basing my opinion of Jeremy entirely on rumor and hearsay. After some rather intensive observation, I had come to my own conclusions about Jeremy: He was a loathsome cad.

Yes, I know it sounds all Barbara Cartland, but trust me, the phrase had never been more apt. Like a Cartland cad, Jeremy was the sort of man who would gamble away his daughter at cards and never think twice about it. Human beings were just another form of coin to him. I’d seen him play fast and loose with Colin’s family. Colin and his sister were still barely speaking, thanks to one of Jeremy’s lovely machinations. Of one thing I was sure: Jeremy was pure poison.

Colin blinked experimentally and then, once he was sure the contact was firmly in place, raised a brow at me. He was so cute when he tried to be all supercilious. I didn’t say that, of course.

“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.