The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (23 page)

“You lie for a living,” William said. “You’ve just told me as much. You’ve lied to me since I met you.”

The words seemed to strike sparks off her. “Not lied, omitted.”

He looked at her as he might a bug. “Am I meant to believe there’s a difference in that?”

She balled her hands into fists at her sides. “The end was the same. We were both looking for the girls. What good would it have done to tell you? You’d never have believed me, anyway. You’d have thought I was mad.”

He hated that there was truth in that, when there was no truth in anything else she had told him.

Gwen seized her advantage. “If it had gone well,” she said, taking a step towards him. “That would have been all. You would have had your Lizzy back and there would have been no need for you to know—any of the rest.”

“No, no need,” he said bitterly, feeling like the worst sort of fool. “No need because you never intended to have anything more to do with me, did you? Not once you’d got what you wanted.”

“William—”

The sound of his name on her lips stung like salt on a wound. “That’s Colonel Reid to you,” he said brutally. And then, just because he was hurting, because he couldn’t help himself, “Do you know the worst of it? The most damnable bit was that I actually thought I might be coming to care for you. That just goes to show how good you are—or how gullible I am. Take it as you will.”

She looked like a man hit with a mortar, in that moment of sheer shock before the pain sets in and the screaming starts.

Her lips pressed together, her hand was at her throat. “William,” she said, and her voice shook as she took a step forward. The words came out jerkily. “I don’t want to lose you.”

The same words he had said to her once. Before he knew better. “There’s the man to open the gates,” William said, and turned his back and walked away, leaving Gwen standing there alone in the lane, the horses grazing beside her, her hand at her throat and her heart in her eyes.

What heart? She had no heart. It was an act, a ploy.

His sense of ill use drove him, and it overwhelmed the small voice that protested that there might have been some justice in what she had done. He wanted spirits, strong ones. He wanted to get rousingly drunk, as he hadn’t for years, blotting out memory, desire, sense. He wanted to get so drunk he couldn’t remember the look on her face as she said, “I don’t want to lose you.”

Lose him? More likely use him. All the while he’d been mooning about love in a cottage, she’d been plotting—whatever it was that agents plotted. Nothing to do with him. He’d been nothing but a source of information and a quick roll in the scenery.

This had been— Well, whatever it had been, it was over. He just had to make it through the night, collect Lizzy and be off, and he’d never have to see her or hear from her again.

He wouldn’t have to wonder just whom else she might be collecting information from or to what lengths she might go to do it, wonder if she might not be looking at someone else with wide, shocked eyes and protesting that what they had meant more than a tumble on a storage room floor.

The house to which the path led him turned out to be an Italianate fantasy, a massive pile of marble plunked on the English countryside, built in a low rectangle and bristling with columns, pilasters, and assorted satyrs.

“It’s a bit of an abomination, I know,” said his host cheerfully, “but we call it home.”

He was a young man just about the age of William’s oldest, with floppy blond hair, a rather rumpled cravat, and easy and open manners.

His wife, Lady Henrietta, greeted the ladies in the party with cries of delight and made noises about hot baths and cold suppers.

Their small and ragged party was welcomed as though fugitive guests on horseback without luggage were a perfectly normal occurrence. And perhaps they were. No one here seemed to operate in the logical workaday realm with which William was familiar.

There was no need to avoid Gwen; he couldn’t have found her if he’d tried. A liveried servant showed him to a room the size of his bungalow in Madras, with a balcony looking out over acres of formal gardens dotted with follies and statuary. A small brigade of servants poured steaming, scented water into a copper tub, while nameless gnomes left clothing for him on the bed, if not his own size, then a close approximation and finer by far than anything he himself had ever owned.

In his borrowed finery, he went down to supper, which was served in a long room with crimson walls. Gwen was at the far end of the table, by the left hand of their host. She, too, had found or borrowed a gown. William could only guess that it belonged to their hostess; the white gauze embroidered with flowers wasn’t at all in Gwen’s usual style, too light, too playful, too décolleté—William hastily averted her eyes before he could betray himself—but she had made up for the youthful dress with the severity of her hairstyle.

It was some small consolation that she looked nearly as unhappy as William felt.

In her case, it translated into a forbidding aspect and a marked imperiousness of tone. William recognized both of these. This was the woman he had met at Miss Climpson’s a lifetime ago, cold and rude—and miserably unhappy.

He didn’t want to feel sorry for her. He was supposed to be feeling sorry for himself. He was the one who had been used, wasn’t he?

But he watched her all the same. He watched her as he made polite conversation with his hostess, as he put food in his mouth with no recollection of what it was that he chewed. It was as though she had retreated into a plaster mold of herself, all the life, all the animation that had so captivated him, buried beneath a cold and brittle shell. That tremendous zest he had seen again and again diverted itself into haughty comments and cutting asides.

And no one, no one in the room, seemed to find anything out of the ordinary in this.

They smiled at one another and rolled their eyes as she cracked her wit at them, but not one of them noticed the pain beneath it. They all, William noticed, referred to her casually as Miss Gwen, the honorific serving to set her apart from the rest of the group, a stranger even among her own friends.

Instead of separating after supper, the entire party retired to a long room replete with trompe l’oeil alcoves and an excess of statuary “to plan their strategy,” as his host enthusiastically put it.

Everyone seemed to take as entirely natural that his daughter should be under siege by French spies.

“Good for her,” declared Mr. Dorrington stoutly. “It was most ingenious of her, slipping out from under their noses the way she did.”

“I don’t understand why she didn’t come to us,” said Lady Henrietta, sounding slightly piqued. She took a sip of wine from her husband’s glass. “We’re much closer to Bath than Selwick Hall.”

“Yes, but half the time we’re
at
Selwick Hall,” pointed out her husband. “Um, I say, Hen, wasn’t that mine?”

Lady Henrietta considered the former and ignored the latter. “More like a third of the time, really.”

“I only go there for the ginger biscuits,” said her husband cheerfully. Seeing William’s expression, he added, earnestly, “If your daughter had to go anywhere, Selwick Hall is as safe as she could be. They have it battened down like a—”

“Great battened thing?” suggested his wife.

“I wouldn’t call it a great battened thing,” said Mr. Dorrington. “More of a slightly nice battened thing, but still rather well battened for all that.”

William watched them with a certain amount of consternation. He looked, automatically, for Gwen, to see if she could make sense of them, before remembering that she was a deceiver and a despoiler of middle-aged army colonels.

Lady Henrietta leaned forward, taking pity on his distress. “You really mustn’t worry, Colonel Reid. We’ve had a great deal of experience with this sort of thing.” In ringing tones, she announced, “My brother was the Purple Gentian.”

It sounded like a form of disease. “I am sorry,” said William apologetically. “I’m afraid I don’t know . . .”

Lady Henrietta’s face lit up. “Finally!” she said with satisfaction, lifting her eyes heavenwards. “Someone who hasn’t heard of Richard. I shall twit him mercilessly about this. After we rescue the girls, of course,” she added.

“Do you really think they’ll be needing rescuing?” William asked her husband, who was contentedly munching on a ginger biscuit the size of a small plate.

“After what happened to you on the road?” Mr. Dorrington said thickly, around a mouthful of biscuit. He swallowed, brushing crumbs from his waistcoat. “Most likely. But it’s nothing we can’t handle. We have had some experience with vicious French spies,” he said modestly. “Right, Hen?”

“Don’t look at me; I’m just a talented amateur,” she said with a wave of her hand. Her expression sobered as she looked at William. “But we do take getting your daughter back very seriously indeed.”

William wasn’t sure whether he should feel comforted or very, very afraid.

Either way, there was something rather exhausting about their youthful exuberance. After that ride, he felt every one of his fifty-four years. It was more than just the physical aches. They were so young, his host and hostess, so careless in their happiness. He didn’t begrudge them that, quite the contrary, but watching them made him feel shopworn, old and scarred.

On the far side of the room, Miss Wooliston studied a map or a plan of some kind. Removed from her, from everyone, Gwen sat, her head bent over her notebook. Charting more of the fictional adventures of Sir Magnifico and Plumeria? Perhaps, but her pen wasn’t moving, and her eyes were fixed on the same bit of the page.

William heaved himself painfully out of his chair. “If it’s all the same,” he said to his host and hostess, “I might go for a bit of a walk before bed.”

“Just straight out that way,” said Mr. Dorrington, gesturing to a pair of French doors to their left. “You can’t get lost as long as you stick to the paths.”

There were many things William might have said to that, but none of them particularly cheering, so instead he simply conveyed his thanks and slipped out the French doors into the moonlit gardens.

Their prison was no dungeon of the ordinary sort. If there were stone walls, they saw them not; the bounds of their prison were the green hedges of the garden, the moon and stars their gaolers. The paths wound and twisted, through verdant ornaments carved in ever more fanciful shapes. And yet, and yet, when Plumeria set her hand against the prickly yew hedge, she could have sworn it felt more like the smooth and damp stone of a dungeon wall.

“I’ faith,” quoth Sir Magnifico. “What strange enchantment is this?’

“A very strange enchantment,” quoth Plumeria, “if it bids thee set aside thy anger and find thy tongue!”

—From
The Convent of Orsino
by A Lady

T
he gardens of Darlington Court shimmered in front of Gwen in the moonlight like a treacherous sea, the uncertain light hinting at hidden shoals and depths.

Gwen descended the weathered stairs from the balcony slowly, the train of her unfamiliar gown dragging on the steps behind her, her hand resting heavily on the broad marble bannister. Somewhere out there, among the fantastical beasts and weeping nymphs, the dry fountains and dancing Nereids, was William.

She had seen him leave, seen him make his way out among the garden paths. Now she paused on the final terrace, surveying the seemingly endless miles of carefully engineered botanical illusion, fighting her own desire to turn back around, to march back into the house, plunk firmly down on her chair, settle a pair of pince-nez on her nose, and stick her nose in the air, secure in the knowledge that a mission was a mission and if William Reid couldn’t understand the importance of what she was doing, what she had done, then he wasn’t worth seeking out and it was his loss anyway.

So there.

She had grown very good at turning up her nose over the years. She snapped and snipped and snarled, keeping the softer emotions at bay, scaring away anyone who might have the temerity to attempt to treat her with affection. But that rogue of a Reid had slipped under her guard, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave without setting things right.

She cared what he thought of her.

It was a horrifying thing, but there it was. His good opinion mattered to her. The scorn on his face down by the gate had abraded her like a cloak of nettles, scouring her raw.

Gwen took a cautious step down, then another, her boots crunching on gravel. The boots didn’t go with the gown, but Henrietta’s slippers were the wrong size for her, too small, so her boots it was, incongruous under the satin and lace, rather like herself, mutton dressed as lamb in a dress more fit for a debutante. She yearned for the armor of a high collar and a well-boned bodice, a fan, even one without an attached stiletto. Anything to form a barrier between herself and the world, and something decidedly more substantial than the flimsy shawl that rode low between her elbows, more ornament than warmth.

A stone lion snarled at her from the one side. On the other, a unicorn lowered its horn to her feet. There were rabbits everywhere, disporting themselves among the carefully clipped yew hedges, frozen forever in marble in the imitation of movement. The gravel beneath her feet glimmered like pearls in the moonlight, marred only by the shadowy shapes of the topiary on either side.

She wove her way past dancing nymphs and leering satyrs. The house, with its lights, its conversation, felt very far away. She had no idea what she would say to William when she found him. She only knew she had come too far to turn back.

She saw him, at last, in a summerhouse posing as a Roman temple, a round structure with a domed top and carefully scaled columns circling all around. It was the sort of summerhouse that demanded a lake, but no one had ever bothered to build one.

There was a small flight of steps leading up, bounded by the bare stalks of rosebushes, pruned down for winter. William stood by the railing, his elbows on the ledge, his shoulders bowed, looking out over the acres of garden.

It was, Gwen realized, a rather pretty inversion, the prince in the tower, the lady clambering up the path below. It was steeper than it looked; the folly stood on its own rise. Stones slid and crunched beneath her half boots.

William turned, sharply. When he saw her, he straightened as if to leave.

“Don’t go,” she said quickly. “I’ll be right up.”

Gwen struggled up the final few steps, her gown tangling around her ankles like vines. The ridiculous gossamer shawl straggled from her elbows, catching on a thorn. In the summer, the temple would be banded by bank upon bank of fragrant roses. Now there were only thorns.

“It’s more of a climb than it looks,” she said tartly, plucking a thorn from her borrowed shawl.

William had stayed—that was true—but only in the most literal sense. His expression was removed, remote. All the liveliness that usually animated it was gone. He looked at her as though she were a not very interesting species of bug on a naturalist’s table.

Fighting against a rising sense of panic, Gwen joined him by the curve of the balustrade, resting her elbows on the pitted stone. Up close, it wasn’t marble, but a coarser substance, worn down by the English weather.

“There ought to be a lake here,” she said. “With swans.”

William didn’t reply. To be fair, it wasn’t necessarily a comment that demanded a response, but she had never before known him to resist the chance to remark on anything, however trivial.

Gwen fidgeted with her borrowed shawl, drawing it closer around her shoulders and letting it drop again. William’s continued silence made her twitchy. It would have been easier if he had stormed off down the hill; then she might have stomped down after him, demanding explanations, berating him for turning his back on a lady, whatever came to mind.

It felt very quiet without William talking. She had never realized before how much she had relied upon him to keep their conversations going, to bounce her witticisms back to her and coax her out of her self-indulgent tempers. He had dealt with her sulks, her storms, her snits, but she hadn’t the slightest notion of how to respond to his silence.

An animal rustled in the underbrush. Somewhere nearby, a bird squawked, an unlovely, unromantic sound. But William might have been carved from marble.

Gwen slammed the balustrade with the flat of her hand. Her palm stung with it, but her temper stung more. “For the love of God,” she cried, “why won’t you speak?”

Very slowly, William turned to face her. “What do you want me to say?”

He didn’t sound angry, just immensely weary. Anger might have been easier to counter. One could return anger shout for shout.

She wanted—

Oh, blast it all. She didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to go back before yesterday. She wanted him to smile at her again. She wanted him to storm at her so that she could storm back.

There were half a dozen things she might have said, but the one that came out was, “I didn’t sleep with you for information.”

William raised his brows. “I suppose it was for my handsome face, then,” he said.

“No,” Gwen shot back. “For your glib tongue, more like.”

It was only once the words were out of her mouth that she realized that there were many ways that could be interpreted, none of them good.

“Not like that. I didn’t mean it like that.” She tried again, lifting her head haughtily. “If I’d wanted information from you, I would have had it.”

Somehow, that didn’t sound much better.

“I’m very good at what I do, you know,” she said shrilly.

William rubbed the side of his hand against his eyes. “Is your name even Gwen Meadows?” he asked wearily. “Or is that just more fustian?”

That inn in Bristol felt a thousand years ago, a tale told by another person, but even that small reference to their shared past felt like encouragement.

“Only the Fustian was fustian,” Gwen said eagerly. She leaned towards him, the words pouring out of her like water from a dam, “I was christened Gwendolyn Meadows; I’ve spent most of my life in Shropshire; I was hired as chaperone for my neighbor’s daughter. Ask me anything you want to know and I’ll tell you. As long as it’s mine to tell.”

William’s voice was carefully neutral. “There’s much that isn’t, I imagine.”

“I’ve kept all kinds of secrets.” Some of them hardly worth keeping, others a matter of life and death. She tried to catch his eye, to make him understand. “A slip of the tongue and a life might be forfeit for it. I’ve learned to keep my own counsel. There’s no other way.”

She remembered Jane, the other night, berating her for treating it all like a game. A game, maybe, but a very dangerous one. She’d grown used to it, the prevarications, the lies. It was all easy to justify when one was in the midst of it.

It was only when one stepped away that one realized the loneliness of it.

She’d thought that shared dangers created shared camaraderie; Jane had shown her the falsehood in that. They were strangers even to each other.

“How long have you been . . . a spy?” William pronounced the word with difficulty.

Gwen seized it as the olive branch it was. “Just over two years now.” It seemed vitally important to make him understand, to make him understand she had a reason for doing as she’d done, that it wasn’t wanton or careless. “I had a chance to go to France as chaperone to a neighbor’s daughter, and it just . . . happened.”

William raised his brows. “I hadn’t realized you could catch spying like the measles.”

That was more like himself again. Gwen took heart. “Not precisely, but the opportunity arose. I would have done anything rather than go back to my brother’s house. In Paris, I was
free
.” At least, she had felt free, in comparison with Shropshire. “No relations carping at me, reminding me that I was dependent on them for every mouthful of bread I ate, just waiting for me to—to commit some indiscretion.”

“If it was that bad,” said William, still in that noncommittal tone, “why not just leave?”

Gwen looked at him, her lips pressing together. It would be easy to make some excuse, to dodge the truth. She’d made a habit of silence, relentlessly protecting her secrets.

But of all the secrets she couldn’t tell, this was the only one that was truly hers to share. She owed William that much. However painful it might be.

“I had no money. And I couldn’t expect anyone to marry me, not after— I made a terrible mistake a very long time ago. I was disinherited for it.” In a rush, before she could think better of it, Gwen said, “I had a child. Out of wedlock. There. Now you can jeer and mock and what you will.”

She felt more naked than she had the other night in that storeroom, with her skirts hiked to her knees and her bodice falling from her shoulders. She was stripped bare, all of her weakness exposed.

She raised her head, gathering the shreds of her pride around her, waiting for the inevitable expression of censure.

There was nothing but sympathy on William’s face. “Would you truly expect me to condemn you for a child out of wedlock? I’ve three of my own such.” He put out a hand, resting it on the balustrade beside her, not touching her, but there. Just there. “What happened?”

Gwen shook her head wordlessly, her neck bent, staring at his hand, the fingers relaxed on the stone, strong and steady. It felt almost indecent to air the story of her youthful idiocy; she had kept it decently shrouded for so long. Her throat closed around the words.

“Do you really want to hear the full tale of my folly?” Gwen was embarrassed to hear how her voice shook. She tried to make a joke of it. “I could say I was young and stupid, but I was old enough to have known better. Four and twenty.”

Just about Jane’s age.

William’s voice was soft and musical. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t care to—but I’d like to hear it if you do.”

Gwen took a deep breath, looking out over the fantastical topiary, the moon-washed paths. “His name was Timothy Fitzgerald.”

The name felt strange on her lips. For years, it had been forbidden in her father’s and then her brother’s house, the silence speaking louder than words. Now, in the vastness of the Darlington gardens, it was reduced to what it was, just a name and not a particularly distinctive one.

Gwen cleared her throat. “He claimed to be the grandson of an Irish earl. Whether he really was or not, I don’t know, but whatever he was, he had a way about him.” She turned her head to look at the man next to her. “You put me in mind of him when I first met you.”

William shifted on his feet, positioning himself more comfortably. “I’m guessing that’s not intended as a compliment.”

“You don’t anymore,” she said gruffly. She dared a quick glance at him. “Not now that I know you better.”

William didn’t say anything, but his hand covered hers and stayed there.

Gwen let the warmth of it seep into her, taking strength from the gesture. “My father told me he’d sooner cut me off without a shilling than see me married to an upstart Irish fortune hunter. I assumed he was bluffing. He had never denied me anything before.”

She had been the spoiled darling of an indulgent parent. Her brother was the butt of their jokes, the object of their wit, but she—she could do no wrong. Until Tim. It had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to wear him down. She had blithely flouted his wishes, meeting with Tim in barns, in inns, in the disused attics of their own house.

“He wasn’t bluffing?” William said gently.

“He was right, on all counts, but I was too stubborn to see it. I told Tim what my father had said. Tim said”—even now, even twenty years on, the memory made her shrivel inside, at her own fatuous credulity—“Tim said he had friends in high places, he just needed some time to muster them on our behalf. He’d be back in two weeks and then we could be married.”

She’d gone around the village with her head high, wearing the secret of their engagement like a gaudy cloak.