Free The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig Page B

going. “It seems a trifle extreme to abduct two girls simply to rifle through one desk. And if so, why not the other girl’s as well?”
    There were dark purple circles beneath Jane’s gray eyes. “You know why.”
    Her silence spoke louder than words. She didn’t need words. They had worked together long enough for that. Lizzy Reid’s desk would be of no interest to someone looking for anything that might incriminate the Pink Carnation. Agnes’s, however, would be.
    If someone wanted a bargaining chip, they could have found no surer one than the Pink Carnation’s youngest sister.
    “It’s one thing to put oneself at risk,” Jane said in a small, tight voice. “But one’s family . . .”
    “You’re starting at shadows,” said Gwen firmly. “It’s nothing of the kind, you’ll see.”
    She could tell Jane wasn’t convinced. She could tell in the way she pressed her lips together, in the way she stared unseeingly at the street ahead. But all she said was, “I hope you’re right.”
    “Aren’t I always?” said Gwen. “I’ll even bear with the company of that Colonel tomorrow to give you peace of mind.”
    “Bear?” Jane raised an expressive brow. “You seemed to be enjoying him, rather.”
    “The man’s a born rogue,” said Gwen repressively. “All stuff and no substance. I know the kind. And so ought you, young lady. A rogue’s a rogue.”
    Jane considered that. “A shrewd one, though. I shouldn’t think that Colonel Reid is anyone’s fool.”
    Gwen remembered the way he had sparred with her, turning her words in on themselves. No, he was no one’s fool, even if he played one for sport. She wasn’t sure that was entirely reassuring.
    “If there’s anything worse than a rogue, it’s a shrewd rogue,” said Gwen with authority. “Give me your common garden rogue any day, all ego and bluster. But it’s just Bristol and back, and then you and I will be back to Paris.”
    “Hmm,” said Jane. “All the same, while you’re in Bristol, I might take another look at Agnes’s room. Just to be sure.”

C hapter 4
    London, 2004
    W e took the train up to London two days later.
    They had been relatively peaceful days. Jeremy must have been regrouping for an alternate line of attack, because we didn’t find him lurking in the shrubbery, hiding behind the shower curtain, or inviting random film crews onto the grounds. Colin managed to get his characters into two high-speed chases and one Russian mafia kidnapping. And I learned many interesting and entirely useless facts about the plumeria.
    Did you know that the flower was named after a seventeenth-century French botanist, Charles Plumier? Neither did I. Given that he had been dead for a good century by the time the jewels of Berar disappeared in the siege of Gawilghur, the bearing of that information on our quest remained dubious. It turned out that there were more than three hundred varieties of the plant, indigenous to all sorts of different places. Wherever it went, though, there appeared to be rather ominous associations: vampires in Malaysia, funerals in Bangladesh.
    Was the Plumeria poem meant as a metaphorical way of telling us that the quest for the doomed jewels brought only death and despair?
    “I don’t think anyone thought it out quite that much,” said my boyfriend, with his head buried inside the pages of the London
Times
. “They might have just liked the sound of the word.”
    I wouldn’t necessarily claim that he was avoiding me, but I had the feeling that Colin was getting a little bit burned-out on fun facts about flowers.
    Well,
one
of us had to do something to find the lost jewels of Berar.
    Not that this had anything to do with my avoiding working on my dissertation. Or the fact that my research had come to an abrupt and uncompromising halt somewhere in the spring of 1805.
    No matter where and how I looked, I couldn’t find any reference to Miss Jane Wooliston or Miss Gwendolyn Meadows in my sources post-1805.