Pink Carnation 05 - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

by Willig, Lauren

  “The very one,” said Colin, swinging around the side of the building.

  Twisting in my seat to stare through the back window, I squinted at the sign hanging from a long pole stuck in the ground in proper ye olde pub fashion. It featured a decidedly potbellied deer. Picture Homer Simpson as Bambi’s fat old uncle (the one who likes to drink and smoke and refuses to go running with the rest of the herd) and you get the idea. The name of the pub was the Heavy Hart.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, pointing at the sign through the car window. “That can’t be the real name.”

  “I think the real name was the Hart and Hare.” Colin brought the Range Rover to an expert halt in the anachronistic but very convenient car park that had been laid to one side of the building. “Something nondescript, at any rate.”

  “I like it,” I said. “Nice little in-joke there. So is this your local watering hole?”

  Aside from the name and the beer signs in the window, it was the very image of an Old World pub, a two-story building of white stucco with a roof that slanted down over chimneys on both sides. White lettering on the bottom of the sign proudly declared, EST. 1682. A chalkboard stuck beneath the inn sign advertised that Tuesday was Quiz Night. Despite living in London for three months, I’d never actually been to a pub quiz. Perhaps Colin would be up for going on Tuesday.

  This, I thought smugly as I climbed out of the Range Rover, was the stuff of which real relationships were made. We wouldn’t be one of those couples who had to spend all their time in each other’s pockets. No, we could spend the day happily immersed in our own pursuits and then rejoice at coming together again for a pub quiz or a romantic tête-à-tête over bangers and mash. Because nothing says romance quite like a large pile of sausages.

  Trip-trapping merrily along in the three-inch stacked loafers that were the closest thing I owned to sensible shoes, I followed Colin in through the suitably battered door of the pub, into a long room with all the dark wood and exposed beams my little heart could desire. And came to an abrupt halt as vague shapes formed into people, and recognizable people, at that.

  What I hadn’t stopped to consider was that if this was the local watering hole, there would probably be locals in it.

  “Sorry,” Colin muttered out of the side of his mouth, pasting on a big, friendly smile. “I didn’t know they’d be here.”

  “S’okay,” I whispered back, pasting on a fake smile of my own.

  I had met a smattering of the locals at a cocktail party my last time there, back in the days when I was still a tagalong American researcher rather than rehearsing for the role of mistress of the house. For the most part, I had found them incredibly friendly and welcoming.

  For the most part.

  The exception to that was sitting at a round wooden table set into the curve of the bow window. She had angled her chair out, to provide the best possible view of a pair of unfairly long legs tucked into a pair of trim tan slacks designed to put one in mind of riding gear without actually being riding gear. She had had a haircut since I’d last seen her; her straight blond hair was now jaw-length, with a curve at the end. In fact, she had my haircut.

  From the nonplussed expression on her face, I could tell that Joan Plowden-Plugge was about as happy to see me as I was to see her.

  If you’re wondering how I managed to alienate someone on such short notice, allow me to assure you, quite sincerely, that it wasn’t so much me as it was me-with-Colin. Quite simply, Joan would have hated any reasonably nubile female who appeared in public with the man for whom she harbored a decade-long crush that made Petrarch’s thing for Laura look like chump change. As you can imagine, I felt much the same way about her. It didn’t help that she was fashion-model thin and Revlon-commercial blond to boot.

  To add to the fun, the first—and only other—time I had been at Selwick Hall, before we were dating, Colin had employed me as a sort of human shield to keep Joan at bay. Manlike, he hadn’t bothered to warn me beforehand, perhaps because he feared I’d refuse to cooperate and throw him right into the lion’s jaws. This had not endeared me to Joan.

  We stared at each other for a long moment in complete mutual loathing before the silence was broken by the man beside her scraping back his chair.

  “Selwick!” exclaimed the Vicar with the sort of forced cheerfulness you use when social bombs are going off around you. “When did you get back?”

  “Just this afternoon,” said Colin. It had really been more like late morning, but who was being picky?

  “Well, we’re glad to have you back,” said Joan’s sister Sally, doing her part to counteract the chilling effect of the human icicle sitting next to her.

  Sally was what my Dresden doll-size grandmother would call a “big girl,” tall, big-boned, with a broad forehead, broad cheekbones, and an even broader smile, framed by a profusion of exuberant brown hair. Sally was about twice Joan’s width and, to my mind, twice as attractive.

  Of course, that might also be because Sally was smiling a genuine smile of welcome while Joan was wearing the sort of expression Cruella de Vil might have bestowed upon a wayward dalmatian. If I were a dog, I would have put my tail between my legs and whimpered.

  But I was stronger than that; I was bigger than that. And I had the man. Ha. Take that, Cruella.

  I returned her glare with a benign smile.

  From the corner of my eye I saw the Vicar wink at me. From what I could recall, he didn’t have much patience for Joan, either.

  “You remember Eloise.” Colin slung a casual arm around my shoulders, adding, just as casually, “My girlfriend.”

  Joan’s nose twitched as though she had suddenly smelled something very unpleasant. Sally bounced out of her chair and gave me a warm hug.

  “Lovely to see you again,” she said, all but smothering me in her hair. It was part genuine nice person-ness, and part, I suspected, an attempt to give her sister time to compose herself. You may not always adore your siblings, but they are yours.

  “Lovely to see you, too,” I sneezed, fighting my way through the mass of Pre-Raphaelite curls.

  “I can’t say how utterly delighted I am to see you back so soon,” said the Vicar, kissing me on both cheeks in the Continental style. Since I didn’t see the second one coming, he got my nose instead of my other cheek, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Ditto,” I said, rubbing my nose.

  “Don’t you find it terribly dull after London?” asked Joan, the only one who hadn’t bothered to rise, in tones so terrifyingly posh that they couldn’t possibly be real. Especially since Sally didn’t sound like anything of the kind.

  “Not at all,” I said cheerfully. “There’s plenty to occupy me at Selwick Hall.”

  “I should think so,” said Sally, with a mischievous glance at Colin.

  “It’s my ancestors who are the attraction,” he said, in mock woe. “Not me.”

  I shot him a glance to make sure that there wasn’t a grain of truth beneath the mockery. It wasn’t that long ago that his little sister had emerged from a disastrous relationship with a man who had used her solely to gain access to the family archives. It was part of why Colin had been so beastly when we’d first met; he had seen me as yet another vulture trying to batten off the family history.

  It all seemed to be okay, but I leaned into him a bit just the same, trusting the pressure of body to body to do more than a hundred reassuring words.

  Joan’s face closed like a fist. “Anyone for a drink?” she asked in tones you could have used to cut glass.

  “Guinness for me,” said Sally, and I saw her sister wince. “Eloise?”

  I looked to Colin.

  “Sit down, Joan,” he said easily. “I’m buying.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said quickly.

  “Gin and it?” he said, nodding to the Vicar.

  The Vicar cast his eyes towards heaven. “If only all my parishioners were like you. Who needs a flower rota?”

  “Drinks r
ota, instead?” I suggested.

  “That’s heresy around here,” Colin said. “We hold our flower arrangements sacred.”

  “But we also like our gin.” The Vicar made little shooing motions at Colin. “Go on, go on. Fetch.”

  “You mean you like gin,” I heard Joan saying as I meandered with Colin over to the bar.

  “Oh, we’re not going to start all that about gin being the drink of unwed mothers again, are we?” griped the Vicar. “Think of it as a good, imperial drink, the stuff the Raj was built on. That should tickle your fancy.”

  From the tone of her response, it was clear that Joan was less than tickled.

  I poked Colin in the arm. That’s one of the best bits of being in a relationship: all the legitimate little touches that let you know that you belong to someone and someone belongs to you. You can’t poke just anyone, after all.

  I stood on the toes of my boots to whisper in his ear, “Do you think he’s flirting with her?”

  Colin made a distinctly skeptical face at me. “Eloise, half the parish has a pool going on whether he’s gay.”

  Considering I had wondered the same myself, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. “But if he’s not . . .”

  Colin was already giving drink orders to the bartender, with whom, like everyone else, he appeared on extremely familiar terms. It seemed that this pub was the local equivalent of Cheers. “Vodka tonic for you?” he said to me.

  “You remembered!” I exclaimed with pleasure. There had been a dreadful Thanksgiving party during which we stood at a bar pretending not to know each other. Well, maybe not so dreadful after all, since he had asked me out at the end of it. It had taken quite some time for me to figure out that I was being asked out, but fortunately my friend Pammy was there to interpret for me and prevent my botching it all too badly.

  Colin’s ears turned slightly pink. “It’s not exactly the theory of relativity,” he mumbled.

  “Still.” Rising on my tiptoes, I brushed a quick kiss against his cheek. “Thank you.”

  Colin smiled down at me in a way that warmed me straight down to my toes. “You’re welcome.”

  I would be lying if I said I didn’t hope Joan was watching. The kiss on the cheek was, to use a very homely metaphor, a bit like a dog peeing on its territory to ward of other dogs.

  Speaking of peeing . . . there was a convenient little hallway just off the end of the bar, with the traditional male and female signs prominently displayed. I took a step back from the bar, hitching my bag higher up on my shoulder in the universal gesture of “I’m just going to the bathroom.” It’s like opening your mouth when you’re putting on mascara. Everyone does it without realizing it.

  “If you’ll excuse me for just a moment . . . ,” I said, nodding towards the bathrooms. “I’ll be right back.”

  The bathroom was much cleaner than those I’d been to in city bars, presumably because the clientele knew exactly to whom to complain if it wasn’t. There were four stalls all in a row, and the row of sinks and mirror across from them. Going for the stall on the far end, I was just zipping up my pants when I heard a flurry of feet barging through the bathroom door.

  “—bring her here,” Joan Plowden-Plugge’s voice shrilled through the air like an electric drill.

  There was a rustle of hair and a sighing noise that sounded like, “Oh, Joan.”

  I slunk back against the wall of my own stall, desperately hoping that neither of them would notice an extra pair of feet in the last loo. Fortunately, they were too preoccupied with their own conversation to notice me—or if they did see my feet, they didn’t recognize them.

  I could hear Joan’s voice, smug, even through the stall door. “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes when she finds out what he does.”

  “I don’t think you could fit into her shoes,” commented Sally casually, and I could hear the bolt of her bathroom stall sliding home.

  Joan’s stall door banged shut with considerably more force.

  As I heard the rustle of a skirt being raised, I realized that this was the ideal time for me to make good my escape, while they were both incapable of exiting to investigate. But I stayed, like a rabbit in a hedgerow, frozen by my own curiosity. And probably just as likely to get mown over by a Range Rover. I didn’t think Joan was the sort to brake for fluffy bunnies.

  Joan’s cut-glass tones sliced straight through three stalls. “That’s not what I meant. I just think it’s disgraceful, a grown man who had a perfectly respectable career—” A forceful stream of pee drowned out the rest of her words.

  “That’s you,” said Sally. “Not everyone would feel the same way.”

  Joan clearly had little patience for relativism.

  “I wouldn’t want my boyfriend”—the gurgle of the toilet flushing all but extinguished the rest of the sentence, right up until—“spies.”

  Wait. She hadn’t really said “spies,” had she?

  Maybe she had said “sties.” As in pigs. I couldn’t see Joan Plowden-Plugge having any truck with livestock that couldn’t be ridden.

  I tamped down on a betraying giggle at the thought of Joan Plowden-Plugge riding pig-back in her immaculate Country Life riding gear.

  It did make sense, though, that she would look down on farming. For all her lady of the manor pretensions, everything I had seen of Joan Plowden-Plugge implied that it was the money rather than the land that counted with her. Oh, she wanted the land, too, but only if it came with designer gardens and the latest in fashionable topiary. Someone who did something in the City, eventually ending up on the honors list for dodgy financial favors done to his local MP, would be much more in her style than the gentleman farmer who actually farmed. I was reminded a bit of Hyacinth Bucket from the old comedy Keeping Up Appearances , forever pushing her husband, Richard, to be more posh, even though Hyacinth’s view of posh was decidedly naff. Did anyone even use the word “naff” anymore?

  As I pulled myself back from that fascinating byway, the other toilet finished hiccuping. “—rather interesting, really,” Sally was saying.

  Presumably not sties, then. I doubted even kindhearted Sally could find much to ooh and aah over in a sty. But spies? No. Too silly. I just had spies on the brain, courtesy of my dissertation research. It was one thing to have gentlemen spies running around in the nineteenth century, quite another in the twenty-first.

  “If you like that sort of thing,” said Joan pettishly. I heard a rustling sound, like a purse being excavated none too gently.

  “I like that shade,” said Sally, in a conciliatory tone.

  Oh Lord, they were putting on makeup? I began to wish I had run for it while I still could. Of course, then I would have missed all that about Colin. It had been about Colin, hadn’t it? And me.

  It seemed like forever that they tarried in personal grooming, Sally drawing a brush through her hair, Joan frowning critically at her own reflection in the mirror, twitching a hair in place here, adding a dab of lipstick there. But then they were gone, and I sagged against the pink and white papered wall, my trousers going lose at the waist as I let out all the breath I’d been holding in a long sigh of pure relief at not having been caught.

  As I let myself out of the stall, I grimaced at the thought of what Colin must be thinking. I just hoped he didn’t mention to the others that I’d been in the loo. Well, only one way to forestall that. Washing my hands in the sink, I dried them briskly on a paper towel and headed purposefully for the door.

  It was time that the Plowden-Plugges and I were better acquainted.

  Chapter Six

  In her usual spot, on a small gilt chair by the wall, Charlotte could have pinpointed to the second the moment the Duke of Dovedale nodded farewell to Sir Francis Medmenham and set off across the ballroom—directly for her corner.

  Charlotte immediately sat up straighter, a move that did not escape the attention of her best friend.

  “Hail, the conquering duke approacheth!” exclaimed Henrietta, who didn’t need wine to ma
ke her dangerous.

  “Shhhhh!” hissed Charlotte, making an ineffectual batting motion. “He might hear you.”

  “I,” said Henrietta, enjoying herself altogether too much, “am not the one your duke is here to see. Or hear.”

  Charlotte decided it would be a waste of time and breath to reiterate that she did not, in fact, have a duke. Besides, her—er, the Duke, was already upon them, looking painfully dashing in the light of the mirror-backed sconces.

  He was wearing the same sort of evening kit as everyone else, with a garnet-toned waistcoat adding color to an otherwise starkly black and white ensemble, but on him, it looked different. It wasn’t just that his cravat was simply tied rather than being teased and creased into whatever the latest fantasy of fashion demanded. It wasn’t just that his breeches stretched against genuine muscles rather than padding when he walked. Charlotte knew she wasn’t supposed to notice such things, but after years of Penelope, one did, and a very nice view it was.

  There was something alive and vital about him that made the glittering stretch of the gallery seem small and fusty. He needed a horse beneath him, a spear in his hand, an expanse of muddy battlefield, with trumpeters following along behind to sound out a triumphant peal as he passed.

  “Charlotte?” whispered Henrietta. “Are you all there?”

  “No,” admitted Charlotte. “Do you think it’s quite normal that whenever I see Robert, I hear trumpets?”

  “I’ve heard of violins, but . . . trumpets?”

  “I know,” sighed Charlotte. “It’s all the fault of Agincourt.”

  There was no time for Henrietta to demand that she explain herself; Robert was already upon them, and the trumpets flared to a final, triumphal fanfare in her head.

  It was rather odd to reflect that she had known him even before she had known Henrietta, whom she always thought of, in all capital letters, as her best and oldest friend.

  Henrietta, however, seemed determined to make Charlotte rethink that designation.

  “Hello!” Henrietta popped out of her chair, ignoring protocol with the blithe unconcern of one to the marquisate born. “You must be Charlotte’s duke.”