The Passion of the Purple Plumeria

by Lauren Willig

  Gwen nodded. “Undoubtedly.” Prima donnas might command rich protectors; the members of the chorus were forced to find alternative ways to supplement their incomes. “As are the other two. They wouldn’t thank you for interfering.”

  William wasn’t convinced. “She looks drugged.”

  “They’re all drugged, every man jack of them.” That was all she needed, for William to go charging in, half-healed wound and all. They would tear him to shreds and leave his body among the ruins.

  The thought roused Gwen to real alarm. This might be playacting, but she had no doubt that the men below would turn violent if someone tried to balk them of their promised pleasures. They were panting like dogs down there.

  “Does she really look unwilling? Besides, if we were to go charging down there, how would we fight them all off? I don’t have my parasol with me.” Only her fan, but he didn’t need to know about the dagger in the ivory casing. “It’s twenty to two, and those two unarmed.”

  William looked at her fiercely. “I shouldn’t have thought that would stop you.”

  “It wouldn’t,” said Gwen, stung, “if I thought they needed rescuing.”

  As if in illustration of her point, the woman on the bier curled her legs beneath her and rose to her knees, stretching sinuously. Every man in the place—including, Gwen noticed, her companion—held his breath as she took hold of the fabric at the neck of her modest gown and, with one fluid motion, ripped it straight down the front, from breast to knee.

  She wore nothing underneath.

  “Point taken,” said William, staring like the rest of them.

  The woman on the bier was extremely well endowed. Gwen resisted the urge to glance down at her own neatly covered and far less protuberant chest. With every eye in the place on her, the girl shrugged out of the remains of her gown, shaking her long hair down around her shoulders, the twining brown curls highlighting rather than hiding her most obvious attributes.

  “Showy.” Gwen sniffed.

  “Mmm,” said William.

  Gwen glowered at him. “You’re not here to admire the view.”

  William lifted innocent blue eyes to hers. “If it’s there . . . sure and I wouldn’t want to let it go to waste.”

  “Hmph,” said Gwen. It was all staging, anyway. She could look equally sultry lying on a bier. Not that she wanted to lie on a bier for the delectation of a gang of hardened roués. But it was the principle of the thing.

  The celebrant went through a mockery of a blessing. Dipping his fingers in the wine, he anointed first the woman’s closed eyelids, then her lips, tracing the shape of her lips with his finger. She sucked his finger into her mouth with every sign of pleasure.

  Next to her, Gwen could hear William swallow. Hard.

  Men.

  Raising the skull in his hands, the celebrant upended it over the lounging figure of the woman. Red liquid trickled down around her breasts, down her belly, along her thighs, staining the crumpled material of her gown on the litter beneath her.

  From a distance, it looked like blood.

  “Wine,” murmured Gwen. When she used the scene in her novel, she decided, it would be blood. Much more dramatic.

  “Do you think the skull is plaster?” whispered William.

  “One can only hope.”

  The wine traced elaborate trails along the woman’s naked body, the reddish lines glowing in the torchlight against her pale skin like ancient runes. Or, thought Gwen sourly, like a treasure map leading to X marking the spot, with very little doubt what that spot might be.

  The celebrant spread his arms wide. The broad black folds of his cape fell back to reveal a line of rich, crimson silk.

  “Come!” he commanded. “Drink!”

  His congregation didn’t need to be asked twice.

  From the front of the room, a man stumbled forward, clumsy in his eagerness. The others were chanting something, low, rhythmic. It took Gwen a moment to realize that it was nothing more than “drink, drink, drink.” In that tone, in that place, the words had a far more menacing sound. And above it all, the drugged smoke swirled.

  For a moment, she thought he meant to bite the woman’s neck. He hovered like one of the dark predators of fiction, his black cape flowing behind him.

  Instead, he swooped down, his tongue licking up a long swath of wine, from her neck to her breastbone. Gwen knew it was all nonsense, but she couldn’t look away, as the man followed the crazy, zigzagging trail of wine, over and around the woman’s breasts, circling around her nipple as she writhed with every appearance of enjoyment.

  The room was eerily silent. Gwen licked her dry lips. It was decidedly airless in the subterranean chamber. The neckline that had been modest and appropriate upstairs felt quite uncomfortably close down here; the lace frill around her neck was choking her.

  As the first man continued his amorous ministrations, another man fell to his knees before the bier, taking possession of a foot, licking at a trail of wine that had dripped all the way down to her toes. He followed it up the inside of her calf, past her knee. The woman let her legs fall wide as he made his way up, farther and farther still.

  Gwen had thought herself unshockable, after all these years, but there were some circumstances that took one by surprise.

  The celebrant clapped his hands, twice, and the litter bearers stepped forward, flinging off their scraps of gauze. Reaching into the ranks of hooded men, they chose their lovers seemingly at random, pulling men to them in a heady, confused dance. The skull cup must have been refilled with wine; Gwen could see it making the rounds, being passed from hand to hand. One of the hooded men lifted it, laughingly trickling it over one of the dancing girls, who tipped back her head to drink, then, moving the cup aside, transferred her mouth to another object.

  There was no chanting anymore, just the unmistakable sounds of murmurs, laughter, and heavy breathing.

  Gwen was having trouble breathing at all. She forced the air through her throat. It came out as a sort of wheeze.

  Good heavens, was that woman really—yes, yes, she was.

  “So. This is what an orgy looks like.” Wiping the sweat off his brow, William cleared his throat. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”

  Warm? She was boiling. Her dress felt painfully tight, the fabric of her bodice rasping against her nipples. The fichu at her neck was smothering her; she wanted to rip it free, to yank the turban off her hair and shake it free, to reach out . . .

  Well.

  “Suetonius suddenly makes so much more sense,” she said shakily.

  It made it easier to think about Roman emperors, something far removed, dull and dry and long past, as if the writhing, twining bodies in front of them were something out of the illustrations in one of those forbidden books on the top shelf of the library.

  “They’re certainly”—William tugged at his collar, loosening his cravat—“inventive.”

  His throat looked very brown against the white of his shirt. There was a little hollow right in the middle, where the pulse was pounding. She could see the sweat beading there, just as it was beading down her own throat and between her breasts. It would be so easy to lean forward, to lick away that drop of saltwater as the man below had tasted the wine, to pull open jacket, waistcoat, shirt, and follow the paths of the scars she had seen there before, curving and winding, down, down, down.

  “Indeed,” Gwen said hoarsely. “Although I imagine it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before.”

  William looked at her. “No,” he said, and there was a curious intensity in his gaze, in the light in his eyes as he looked at her, the way his eyes traveled over her. “It’s as old as time, it is.”

  Good heavens, was there no air in here?

  Gwen tore her gaze away from William’s, drawing in deep breaths of the dense, drugged air, trying to make sense of her muddled thinking. Gwen dug her nails into her palms, forcing herself to concentrate, to think. The man who had ambushed them—that was what they were after. He was down th
ere somewhere. But where? Below, hoods had been thrown back, and more than hoods, but it was impossible to identify a face.

  There were, however, two men who weren’t participating, either as actors or as voyeurs. They had removed themselves to the side, to the relative privacy of a niche between two pillars. One was still hooded, in the same anonymous black cape and hood as all the others. The other was the celebrant.

  Gwen poked William in the arm, leaning just close enough to whisper, “Look over there. Those two. They’re not participating.”

  She could feel the warmth of his body beside her, the heat coming off his skin in waves. Blinking, with an obvious effort, he directed his gaze where she pointed.

  “So they are.” He nodded towards the crumbling staircase to their left. “There might be a way down. Are you game?”

  She would sooner bite off her own hand than admit otherwise. “Of course.”

  After all, if they caught her, it wasn’t as though she was the sort of woman from whom they would strip every last scrap of clothing and whom they would tie to a bier and . . .

  “Gwen?”

  She could feel her face going a deep, betraying red. “Be careful on those stairs,” she said curtly. “They don’t look stable.”

  “A pity we don’t have the cloaks,” he murmured as they picked their way carefully down, keeping to the shadows. “We could slip right in.”

  In more ways than one. “See something you like down there?” muttered Gwen.

  William’s blue gaze lit on her.

  “No,” was all he said, but she found herself shivering at what he left unsaid, her skin all goose bumps. She had drawn off her long gloves, and her arms felt naked and bare.

  “Keep to the shadows,” she shot back, “or it’s all over for us.”

  “Hush,” he said, and reached for her hand. To her surprise, she let him take it. His thumb pressed intimately into her palm, silencing her. “I’ve done reconnaissance before. Stay close.”

  She would have told him what she thought of his giving her orders, but he was right. This once. She followed softly behind him, picking her way carefully down the crumbling stair, which must once have been a path from the galleries to the side of the bath. It led out into the shadowed arcade.

  On the ground, the smoke was chokingly strong. The shimmering of the torchlight through the smoke made Gwen’s eyes ache, turning the smoke into a living, shifting, treacherous thing. It formed shapes, like clouds, dragons and dancing girls and menacing satyrs, and through it all, intensified by the smog, she could hear the pants and grunts, the cries of pleasure, as the orgy throbbed around them.

  William tugged on her hand, pulling her into a narrow aperture. Yanking his cravat from his throat, he tied it around his own nose and mouth, creating a screen. His eyes, tearing from the smoke, narrowed at her over the cloth. It took her a moment to realize what he meant. Then, fumbling, she tugged the fichu from the neck of her gown.

  Without it, the gown felt dangerously décolleté, the satin of her gown slippery against her damp skin.

  With fingers that wouldn’t quite obey, she tried to fold the fabric into a triangle, to tie it at the back of her head as her companion had done, but her hairpins kept getting in the way. William took the cloth from her, draping it carefully over her nose and mouth.

  She could feel his knuckles brushing against the nape of her neck as he tied the lacy fabric into a clumsy but effective knot. His touch tingled. She looked up at him and found his eyes on hers. It must have been the smoke that made breathing so difficult, the smoke and the lace-trimmed muslin brushing her lips.

  His fingers stroked her neck in a caress before his hand dropped to his side.

  Gwen bit down hard on her lip, using the pain to recall herself to their purpose. Her eyes stung and her head spun, but she forced herself to attention, turning on her heel, using the rough wall to guide her through the smoke, towards the alcove where the two men were still in conference. She could see the crimson lining of the celebrant’s cape through the smoke.

  There must have been a form of colonnade at some time, a place for people to lounge and eat by the side of the bath in the privacy of their own niches. A corridor ran behind, a service corridor, at a guess. There were openings in the walls, by which food might once have been passed. Gwen shamelessly put her ear to the opening. A few feet down, she could see William doing the same.

  “This is the last of the old lot.” It was the celebrant speaking. She could see only the back of his head, his hair close cropped in the fashionable style. “We were supposed to have a shipment a month ago.”

  The man next to him still wore his hood, the fabric draping down on either side of his face, muffling his words. “I’ve arranged for an alternate means of supply.”

  “We’ve never had delays before.”

  The hooded head turned. “There have been . . . unforeseen circumstances.”

  The celebrant leaned his back against the wall of the niche, his relaxed pose at odds with the tinge of excitement in his voice. “So it’s true. The Moonflower has defected.”

  “No names,” said the other man shortly. “That was part of the bargain. Wasn’t it . . . Sir Francis? Or would you rather seek your supplies elsewhere?”

  Sir Francis inclined his head, acknowledging the point. “A nom de guerre is hardly the same as one’s proper name. But let us not quibble about details. Far be it from me to violate the terms of our agreement.” His lips curved, the motion exaggerated by the red paint he wore. “I take it our mutual friend is no longer a friend?”

  “My associate”—the hooded man stressed the distinction—“will no longer be associating with us. But you needn’t worry. There are other channels. Your people shan’t be balked of their entertainments.”

  Sir Francis raised a brow. “I understand that the Moonflower bilked you of more than my pretty poppies when he decided to change allegiances. The price of his redemption, was it?”

  “Allow me to worry about my own affairs.” The other man’s voice was too faint to hear properly. Something in the inflection put her in mind of the Chevalier—but his voice was muffled by that blasted hood, by the hood and the acoustics of the alcove. Gwen strained to hear more but found her cheek scraping against rough stone. “You have your toys. Enjoy them.”

  “One can never have too many toys.” Sir Francis was clearly enjoying himself. “Especially those that glitter. Such attractive things, mythical jewels . . . if one can hold on to them.”

  Pressed against the stone, Gwen froze, desperately scrabbling to remember what she had just heard, to piece it all together.

  The Moonflower. Redemption. Mythical jewels. They were talking of the jewels of Berar; she had no doubt of it. Somehow, this hooded man in front of her was linked to the jewels of Berar, stolen by an agent called the Moonflower.

  The hooded man spoke quietly, but even through the stone, Gwen could hear the note of menace in his voice. “You dabble in matters that do not concern you.”

  “Poisonous waters, I know,” said Sir Francis languidly. “Don’t worry. I have no desire to wake with a dagger in my back, however prettily jeweled. I simply wished to ascertain the—how shall I say this?—stability of your organization. My people are used to their diversions. They should grow restless if they went too long without.”

  The hooded man had moved. Gwen couldn’t see him through her narrow window, but she could hear the swish of his robe against stone. “Your supplies will arrive as promised.”

  “I thank you,” said Sir Francis blandly. “That was all I needed to know.”

  The hooded man was moving, leaving. Gwen couldn’t see him through the smoke. She dodged to the next aperture, the window onto the next niche, but all she could see was the swirling smoke, the glare of the torches lighting the slow-moving forms of the writhing, rutting naked bodies in the pit.

  William tugged at her hand. Stumbling a bit, Gwen followed him through a break in the masonry. There was a passageway leading up.r />
  He put his lips close to her ear, over the edge of her kerchief. “Let’s go—before they find us.”

  Gwen tugged away, back towards the bath. Somewhere in there, the hooded man was on the prowl, the man who might lead her to the jewels of Berar. The man who might be Jane’s Chevalier. Or might not. Damn that hood! “But—”

  William held fast. “We’ll not hear anything else, not tonight.”

  She looked at him, and the truth of what he was saying sunk in. There was no way of following the hooded man through that mob below; they’d stand out too sorely. And even if they did follow him, what then? It was the Moonflower she had to look for, an agent named the Moonflower.

  Her brain was too muddled to make sense of it all. Later. Later in the clear air, when the drums stopped throbbing and her skin stopped tingling; then she would parse it all out, with clear, uncluttered logic. But for now . . .

  “This way,” she said, pulling him towards the passageway.

  Hand in hand, they lurched their way up the slope, alternately pulling each other, half walking, half running. Gwen couldn’t have said with any certainty what they were running from, but an urgency had infected them both, as frantic as the beat of the drums and the pants and cries of the revelers below. The path twisted, bumping them up against a ladder that led to a trapdoor.

  William gave Gwen a boost up, his hands lingering just a bit too long on her bottom as she scrambled up, pushing the light wood trapdoor aside, breathing deep of the stale air, which felt, smoke-free, as clear and clean as that to be had on any mountaintop. William clambered up behind her, dropping the trapdoor back into place.

  They were in a cluttered, dusty room, lit by the moonlight coming through the windows. A storage room, under the theatre.

  They stood, their hands on their knees, panting with their exertions, looking at each other, chests moving in and out, dusty, sweaty, disheveled. Gwen could feel her bodice gaping open, the cool air on her damp breasts.

  All of a sudden, William started laughing, a great bark of laughter, and Gwen was laughing too, only half-sure why, from the exhilaration of it all, from the adventure, from being safe here in this little room with the orgy going on below.