Jack wasn’t diverted by abstract musings on the nature of Fortune, which was a pity, because, having begun the conversation, Jane wanted very badly to end it.
He folded his arms across his chest, his stance hard, uncompromising. “Explain.”
The donkey brayed.
“You”—Jack poked a finger at the donkey—“quiet. And you”—he looked at Jane, his face carved from granite—“talk. You’ve judged me already, but I would have thought, under your law, that a condemned man would at least have a right to know the charges leveled against him.”
You’ve judged me already. She had, long ago, long before she’d met him. She’d tried him in absentia and told herself it was justice. But now, now that he was before the bar, all of her grievances felt flimsy and flat, mere paper tigers.
“When you sent the jewels of Berar back to England, you set a train of events in motion. . . .”
Jane could remember that awful night in Paris, the letter from England, delivered by the usual shadowy routes. Her sister and another girl, Lizzy Reid, had gone missing from their Bath boarding school. And Jane had held that crumpled piece of paper and felt a weight like rocks crushing her chest, choking her. She had thought herself very careful in keeping her identity hidden. But no ruse was perfect. There were those who knew. And things slipped out.
If any harm came to her sister, it was on her head.
She had rushed back to England, only to discover that it wasn’t on her head at all—that it was, in fact, Lizzy who had run and Agnes who had followed. And why? Because Lizzy’s brother had had the ill judgment to send the jewels of Berar to a young ladies’ academy.
Looking away, over Jack’s shoulder, Jane said distantly, “The Gardener had promised those jewels to Bonaparte. Bonaparte couldn’t be allowed to have them. I was summoned from Paris.”
It was all true as far as it went. With some rather large omissions. But to tell the whole story—it was to expose a corner of her soul she didn’t want to share. The crushing fear for her sister. The doubt. The questioning.
Not to mention the awkwardness of belatedly explaining her connection to Jack’s family.
“I had not previously made the acquaintance of the Gardener. I knew of him, of course, but our paths hadn’t crossed.” Jane felt Jack stir, and looked him in the eye. “I prevented the Gardener from retrieving the jewels, but at a cost. I learned his identity. And he learned mine.”
“Ah,” said Jack. That was all. But it was enough. He was a fellow agent; he understood.
“Paris was closed to me.” Her league, her web of agents, everything she had built. Jane swallowed hard. “The Gardener professed to have some regard for me, but I didn’t imagine that would save me from the Temple prison should I be so bold as to show my face at the Tuileries.”
At least, not without certain conditions being met. All she had to do was disown her principles and her country.
A small matter, Nicolas had called it, with his facility for seeing things as he wished them to be.
A small matter to him, but not to her.
“Was that why your family disowned you?” Jack’s voice was carefully neutral. “Because of your . . . connection to the Gardener?”
Jane’s head snapped up. “No!”
It would have been laughable if the matter hadn’t been so deadly serious. They had danced around each other for years, she and Nicolas, in a double-edged flirtation that was part attraction and part policy, circling, dipping back. There had been nothing in it that would have been seen amiss in any drawing room in London; any impropriety had been purely in suggestion, all the more seductive for being implied rather than acted.
At least, so matters had stood. Until Venice.
Jack held up both hands. “I’m not condemning you for it. My mother was disowned for nothing more damning than being caught in a kiss. And it ruined her entire life. If you met the Gardener because of the jewels and then—”
“It’s not that,” said Jane hastily. “It’s not that at all.”
A strained silence fell over them. “Perhaps,” said Jack carefully, holding out a hand, “we might continue this conversation more comfortably? It’s dashed awkward having Petunia butting me in the thigh every five seconds.”
“So it’s Petunia now, is it?” said Jane, but she took his hand all the same. It was warm and firm as he helped her down from the donkey, her stiff limbs twinging in protest.
“Would you prefer Columbine?”
“I was thinking . . . Gwendolyn.” Jane wrinkled her nose as Jack spread a blanket on the rough ground, tethering the donkey to an olive tree. The sky was beginning to be streaked with pink. “Shouldn’t we go on?”
“We can spare ten minutes. We’re less than an hour’s walk from Alcobaça.” Jack produced his flask from beneath his jacket and handed it to her. “Pretend it’s tea.”
“Strong tea,” said Jane, but she drank all the same, the liquid sending a shock of warmth through her. It felt like a bizarre parody of a picnic, a man and a woman on a blanket in the countryside, only the countryside was brown and gray, the refreshments were strong spirits, and the man and woman—
Jane felt a pang for the courting couple of her imagination, young and innocent, in a bucolic setting of hedgerows and grazing sheep, no secrets, no scars.
She hadn’t wanted that, she reminded herself. She had left all that without a backward glance. She’d had no patience for rural swains.
But it might be nice, just once, to be able to speak to someone frankly, without reserve.
She hadn’t had that sort of honesty with Nicolas. All of their exchanges had been conducted in layers of euphemism and innuendo. It was a battle of wits, with her heart as the prize. Exhilarating at first, but exhausting, too. If one lay down with lions, one ran the risk of being savaged.
Jane looked up at her companion. Jack Reid wasn’t a lion. A tiger, she’d thought him at first, barely domesticated. But she was beginning to think she had done him an injustice. Beneath his prickly exterior, she suspected he was more like his father than he knew.
She doubted he would take that as a compliment.
“So,” said Jack, and settled back across from her, his booted feet brushing the hem of her skirt. “The Gardener?”
Jane stared at the flask. It was just a simple tube of leather with a tin cap. Nothing fancy. Nicolas had a silver one, engraved with his coat of arms. Not his father’s coat of arms, but the one he had designed for himself, when he was still the Knight of the Silver Tower.
Jane took another swig from the flask. The brandy burned her throat. Her voice was husky as she said, “You have it backwards. The Gardener wasn’t my lover.” She could have left it at that. But some demon of honesty prompted her to add, “Not then.”
Jack’s hands stilled on the ties of his haversack. He looked at her, his expression unreadable.
Jane hurried on. “It’s rather ironic, isn’t it? My parents disowned me because they feared the appearance of impropriety. But I didn’t become truly improper until I was disowned.” She managed a lopsided smile. “It seemed only fitting. Under the circumstances.”
She was waiting for him to say something, Jack knew. But the words stuck in his craw. All he could see was Jane and the Gardener, Jane as he had first seen her, polished and poised, garbed in a gown that cost more than his pay for a year, circling in the other man’s arms in a ballroom lit by braces of candles.
Jack didn’t want to think about it. “You’ve lost me,” he said brusquely. “If it wasn’t on account of the Gardener, why were you struck from the family escutcheon?”
Jane’s back relaxed just a trifle. Had she expected him to condemn her? He, of all people, had no right. “They didn’t approve my going off on my own.”
It sounded so ridiculously prosaic after her earlier admissions. “You’d been working as an agent for how long?”
“For three years,” said Jane calmly. She appeared to have gathered herself together, cloaking herself in that poise that sat on her shoulders like a shawl of finest Kashmir. “But in Paris I lived in the home of my cousin, my mother’s own nephew. He is,” she said dispassionately, “a nasty little toad of a man. But he lent an element of respectability. And I had a chaperone.”
She looked away, her finely boned profile limned by the golden light of the setting sun.
“A nice setup,” said Jack, keeping his voice carefully dry.
A very nice setup, and she’d lost of it because of him. There were a dozen justifications, but the truth of it was that he hadn’t thought before shipping the jewels off to Lizzy. He hadn’t bothered to think about the unintended consequences, any more than he had when he had run away from the printer’s shop at sixteen. It had seemed like a grand gesture at the time, and that had been enough. Enough to turn the Pink Carnation’s life upside down and leave her vulnerable to the predations of men like the Gardener.
“You must miss it,” Jack said awkwardly.
Jane’s eyes met his, and her lips turned up in a rueful smile. “I do. Very much. My parents hadn’t minded in the slightest my living in my cousin’s household, properly chaperoned, but it appeared they minded very much my traveling on my own through Europe, no matter what alias I employed.”
“I can’t pretend to know much of gently bred young ladies”—Jack didn’t miss her wince at the words—“but couldn’t you have traveled with your chaperone? Surely that would have satisfied your parents.”
Jane’s long, elegant fingers picked at a brown stalk of grass. “When we returned to England to pursue the jewels, my chaperone fell in love with . . . with a man who suited her perfectly. How could I deny her a chance at happiness?”
“Very easily,” said Jack bluntly. “Many would.”
Jane only shook her head. “Miss Gwen would have come with me, but I would always have known what I caused her to leave behind.” After a pause, she added, without meeting Jack’s eyes, “She has a daughter now. My goddaughter.”
Jack leaned back on one arm. “You might have stayed behind as well. You might have married.”
“Who?” Jane’s eyes met Jack’s. “What man wants a wife who spends her nights crawling through windows, her days studying maps of Europe?”
The image struck Jack forcibly. And not just because of the tight, dark breeches Jane was wearing in his imagination. His father’s first wife had been an angel. That was what they had been told. Jack had always pictured her eternally sewing a sampler and singing hymns. His own mother had spent half her life in a darkened room, the other half throwing crockery. And Piyali . . . Her province had been the nursery and kitchen.
His father had had his world; the women in his life had had theirs. Marriage, to Jack, was a house, a set of women’s quarters, a geographical tether entirely unsuited to the itinerant existence he lived.
It had never occurred to him that the shoe might have been on the other foot. “You might have given it up.”
“That was what my parents wanted. They told me there had been quite enough of gallivanting around foreign parts. I could come home and wind wool and dance at assemblies—or I could take myself off.”
Jane might have been discussing a night at the opera or the cut of a new gown, but for the fact that there was a small pile of shredded grass in her lap, the only chink in her Olympian calm. The restless movement of her hands told Jack more than another woman’s tears.
She glanced up at Jack, her eyes meeting his. “I don’t believe they thought I would.”
“Then,” said Jack belligerently, “they didn’t know you at all.”
For a moment, something raw and vulnerable looked out of her eyes. And then the mask closed down again. “I died of pneumonia. There’s a little stone to me in the churchyard in Lower Wooley’s Town.” She arched a brow, inviting him to share the humor of a situation Jack didn’t find humorous in the slightest. “I could understand cutting off my allowance, but it was the being declared dead that I found so distressing.”
“I’m sorry.” Jack didn’t know what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”
To be declared dead, officially dead. By one’s own parents. His mind couldn’t quite grasp it. Jack had always suspected his father would have been happier had Jack never been born, but that had never been said, never even been implied.
Come home, his father’s letters had read. Come home when you feel you can come home. Don’t feel you can’t come home.
Jack had torn them into shreds and fed them into the fire.
His old home in Madras was gone. His father had long expressed the intention of retiring, eventually, to England. Jack’s brother Alex was in Hyderabad, his brother George in the retinue of the Begum Sumroo, his sisters in England. But he knew that he could appear, at any time, on any of those doorsteps, and a place would be found at their tables.
There was no gravestone with his name on it.
It made all of his grievances feel petty and small. “When I sent those jewels—I never imagined—”
“I know,” said Jane, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “You were only trying to help your sister.” With a visible effort, she added, “It wasn’t really your fault, any more than it’s the fault of a butterfly for flapping its wings.”
Jack clung to what small bit of humor he could find. “A butterfly? Really?”
“Would you prefer something more manly? A buzzard, then.” She rubbed her hand against her temple, leaving a small streak of grime. There was something strangely endearing about that smudge. With her hair in a braid down her back and dirt on her cheek and brow, she looked painfully young. Only her eyes looked old, old and tired, as she said with an obvious effort, “The truth is that it would have happened anyway.”
Jack looked at her doubtfully. “You would have met the Gardener?”
Jane’s eyes met his without faltering. “I would have decided the stakes were too high. By operating under my own name, I put my family, my friends, everyone who associated with me at risk.” There were lines at the sides of her eyes and mouth that Jack hadn’t noticed before, lines engraved there by sleepless nights and hopeless choices. “I had believed that, if I were careful, I could protect them. But I saw agents, good agents, captured. There was a man—an artist—who worked with us who had his fingers broken. It sounds such a small thing, but to him, a man who lived by his brush—”
“You don’t need to explain.” Jack knew. He’d lived it. He could see them still, the bodies of his friends.
“The Gardener precipitated the decision but he didn’t cause it. I could give up the work, or I could go away. Really,” Jane said, with a false brightness that broke Jack’s heart, “my parents did me a favor—”
He couldn’t bear it anymore. He wrapped his arms around her, muffling her words in his chest. “You don’t have to be so damned noble,” he said into her hair. “Scream at me, rail at me, tell me I ruined your life. I’d rather that.”
“But I can’t,” she said, her voice dampened by his coat. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
Jack gave a ragged laugh deep in his throat, a laugh that had more in it of despair than amusement, and pulled her closer, resting his cheek on her hair, breathing in peat and lavender. “You’re too damned fair for your own good.”
“It’s only true.” Wiggling back, she looked up at him, her hair tousled around her dirt-smudged face. Only her eyes were as he had first seen them, clear, uncompromising. “I don’t know what else I could have done, in the end.”
Beneath her disguises lay a core, not of steel, but of pure silver. Jack didn’t know how he hadn’t seen it before. Perhaps because most people were made of baser coin. Himself included.
Jack kept an arm around her, his body providing some small barrier against the elements. He could shield her from the wind
, if nothing else. “How did you manage? On your own, I mean.”
“It wasn’t so very different,” said Jane, so carefully that Jack knew it had been very different indeed. “I had connections still. And aliases. The greatest difficulty was the loss of my allowance. Informers tend not to continue informing when one hasn’t the coin to pay them. Not to mention gowns, gloves, and fans. I hadn’t realized quite how much I’d taken for granted until it was no longer there. It was . . . humbling.”
He had twitted her about her expensive Paris gown, her infinite resources. Jack winced at the memory. “What did you do?”
“I found an alternate source of funding,” she said obliquely. Jack hadn’t realized he’d betrayed himself, but he must have made some noise, or given some sign, because Jane added coolly, “Whatever you’re thinking, it was nothing like that.”
Jack could feel color suffuse his cheeks. “I never thought . . .”
But he had. Of course he had. And he felt like a cad for it.
“It was my independence I sacrificed, not my virtue.” There was a rigidity about her posture that suggested just how much the conversation was costing her. “I sacrificed that later, but not for coin.”
“Stop.” Jack turned her face towards his, his palm beneath her chin. “Don’t talk like that.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“Because I won’t have you making yourself sound cheap. You’re not.” His own vehemence took him by surprise. “If a man took a lover it would be accounted commonplace. Why shouldn’t you? Your virtue lies in your mind, not in what lies between your legs.”
He saw her eyes widen, but she said only, “Plain speaking, Mr. Reid.”
Despite himself, Jack’s lips twisted. “Don’t you think, by now, you ought to call me Jack? You could call me Iain if you like, but I’d never remember to answer to it.” When she didn’t smile in return, he added more seriously, “If either of us cared a fig for the world’s niceties, we wouldn’t be here.”
Jack saw Jane’s throat work, that long, graceful throat. “I thought I did. I thought I could have both. I thought I could be both.”