The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read Online Free Page A

England for a short trip home to deal with what the paper referred to only as a family matter.
    After that, nothing. I’d paged through the archives of
Le Moniteur
,
Le Monde Parisien
, and even that notorious scandal rag
Bonjour, Paris!
, sheer up through 1807. True, the microfilm was blurry, but I didn’t think I’d missed anything. There were no further references to Miss Jane Wooliston and Miss Gwendolyn Meadows in Paris after April 1805.
    Why had they gone back to England? And what had happened to them there? I was as far from the answer as I was from tracking down the Moon of Berar.
    “Anything I can help with?” asked Colin gently.
    I bit down on my lower lip. I’d been trying not to yank Colin into my work—I didn’t want him to think I was with him just for his archives. Not that he would think that, hopefully, but love is paranoid. Or at least I was paranoid.
    “I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “But I wouldn’t mind a trip to London.”
    “Wednesday?” suggested Colin.
    I’d have preferred to hop on the next train, but that might have fallen under the heading of running away.
    Why had Jane and Miss Gwen left Paris so precipitously? What had driven them back to England? Discovery? Or something else?
    “Wednesday,” I agreed, and went off to look up anything I could find about the elusive Plumeria.

C hapter 1
    Plumeria redoubled her speed as the footfalls of her pursuer pounded ever closer, reverberating through the close confines of the subterranean passage. Her breath rasped in her throat as she spied a faint gleam of light in the distance. At last! But could she reach it before it was too late?
    —From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady
    (and if you were any kind of gentleman, you would stop trying to inquire into her identity!)
    T he spy wore purple.
    Only amateurs wore black. Miss Gwendolyn Meadows knew that the true color of a Paris night wasn’t a flat black, but a deep purple, composed of a hundred shades of shadow. Coal smoke masked the moon, diffusing the light of the lampposts, dirtying clothes and shading faces. Tonight she had left off her gown, her gloves, her elaborately curled plumes. She had even, with some reluctance, left behind her trusty parasol and taken up a cane instead. A sword cane, of course. Paris was a dangerous city, even for those engaged in innocent pursuits.
    Gwen’s pursuits were anything but innocent.
    No one of her acquaintance would recognize her as she was tonight. For tonight’s romp, she had dressed as a dandy in breeches that hugged her legs and an elaborate frock coat of deep purple brocade. The stiffness of the fabric disguised any unseemly curvature of the chest, the tapered silhouette the same as that of any other fop in Paris. Her Hessian boots had been made to her own specifications, supple enough to allow for easy movement, the soles muffled with a thin layer of soft leather.
    Her face was masked by a set of elaborately curling sideburns and matching mustache. Not that any of the young bucks who regularly shied away from her in the drawing rooms of the Tuileries would recognize her face. They were usually too busy sidling past in the hopes of saving their shins. Tall for a woman, she was comfortably average height for a man. Long and lean, her body might have been made for breeches roles. In this getup, she looked no different from any of the other gallants who thronged the cafés on the Rue de Richelieu.
    There was one major difference. None of them were crouched on the corner of a balcony.
    She had followed Bonaparte’s foreign minister from the Théâtre des Arts, marking his limping progress. Talleyrand had gone masked too, but his uneven gait made him easy to follow. They hadn’t far to go. She had tracked him three houses down, to this ramshackle inn. Talleyrand had taken the stairs; Gwen had taken the trellis. Whomever he was meeting, it must be important for Bonaparte’s foreign minister to come himself, and in this much haste.
    A light