The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

Chapter Eighteen

Medmenham’s letter crinkled reassuringly in Robert’s waistcoat pocket as he trudged down the stairs of Loring House.

“Did the old snuffbox dodge work?” A dark shape detached itself from the corner of the house, falling in step beside him. They were already late for an appointment at an exclusive gentlemen’s club on St. James Street.

“Beautifully. I owe you one.” Robert made the mistake of looking back. Through one of the long windows, he could still see Charlotte, in silhouette, standing where he had left her.

Grabbing his arm, his companion tugged him to one side, narrowly saving him from collision with a decidedly unfriendly lamppost.

“By my count, you owe me about two hundred. Including that one. But what are a few favors between friends?” said Tommy airily. “Did you get Medmenham’s note?”

Robert patted his waistcoat pocket. “Safely tucked away.”

“And the lady?”

Robert kicked at a bit of loose paving, sending pebbles scattering down the street. “Still thinks I’m lower than dirt.”

Tommy was unsympathetic. “You did rather do that to yourself, you know.”

“For good reasons!”

Tommy stuck his hands in his pockets and tilted his head back to stare at the sky. “You just keep telling that to yourself.”

“They seemed like good reasons at the time,” Robert mumbled. Even to his own ears, he didn’t sound anywhere near convincing.

How had be managed to make such a monumental muddle of things? Fresh from the Hellfire Caves, the stench of brimstone still scouring his nostrils, it had all seemed so simple. In a fine glow of self-abnegation, he resolved to take the noble and lonely path, sacrificing his own happiness to keep his princess safe in her tower. For “noble,” substitute . . . “misguided,” Robert decided, ignoring the various riper adjectives Tommy had suggested, among the milder of which were “pig-headed,” “addlepated,” and “just plain stupid.”

“Seems my friend,” said Tommy wisely, “is a very dangerous creature. Like a tiger, only with even more spots. Great big spotty spots.”

Robert reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by throttling his closest friend, even if he was asking for it. “There’s no need to belabor the point.”

“Or the spots? All right, all right. I’ll leave you to make yourself miserable in your own way.”

“What happened to pots and kettles?” demanded Robert, stung beyond endurance. “How many times have you proposed to Penelope Deveraux in the past week?”

Some of the mirth faded from his friend’s face. Tommy managed to shrug without taking his hands out of his pocket. “Ten at last count. I try to get in at least one proposal before lunch and another after supper. But she won’t have me. She says she won’t drag me down with her.”

“Then why do you keep trying?”

“Why in the hell did you leave that damned snuffbox?”

Robert wasn’t sure he would call it quite the same thing, but Tommy had made his point.

“Fair enough,” he said brusquely. “We’re both besotted fools.”

“The difference,” said Tommy, delicately scratching the side of his nose, “is that you still have a chance.”

He might have had a chance once, but he had trodden it beneath his horse’s hooves on that hasty midnight ride from Girdings, trampling it away in the slush and the mud. However good his intentions might have been, there was no going back, no wiping the slate clean, any more than one could turn slush back into snow.

Irritation made him sharp. “Because ‘I never want to speak to you again’ so often means ‘I love you.’ No, Tommy. It’s just not on.”

“There is a very simple solution,” Tommy pointed out. “Tell her the truth.”

“Before or after our next drunken orgy?” asked Robert sarcastically.

“Just because you go doesn’t mean you participate.”

“Brilliant,” said Robert, ducking out of the way of a very rapidly moving sedan chair. “I’ll just tell her I was surrounded by drugged smoke but I didn’t inhale.”

“Well, when you put it that way . . .”

Robert rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, knowing that he was being deliberately difficult and wondering if maybe, just maybe, Tommy might have a fragment of a point. His grand and noble gesture had been a colossal failure. What would Charlotte say if he plunked himself down in her parlor and said — what in the hell would he say? “Everything I told you the other day was a lie?” “Sorry to break your heart, but I was only trying to protect you?”

He had meant to protect her. Protect her and keep her safe for the sort of man she ought to marry. Someone whose education had come out of more than the odd book scrounged from other peoples’ libraries. Someone who didn’t wake in the night with sheets soaked with the sweat of memories of horses writhing and men screaming and flies lighting on the open eyes of the dead and dying and black powder smoke drifting over it all as though driven by the devil’s own bellows. Someone who would protect her and cherish her and never be anything other than she expected him to be.

After a month moving through Charlotte’s world, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been the naïve one. In the hard scrabble of his youth, he had always imagined his peers — the ones whose fathers hadn’t burned through their inheritances, who hadn’t been disowned by their families, who didn’t eke out a life lurching from town to town a week ahead of their creditors — leading lives of awe-inspiring gentility, with tutors to tend their minds and servants their bodies. Their food would be taken off china plates, from platters proffered by silent servants, not slopped into tin. Conversation would be conducted at a level scarcely louder than the genteel click of silver against porcelain. No shouting, no banging, no waving drumsticks to emphasize a point, no loud demonstrations of bodily functions. That was the sort of man Charlotte ought to marry, polished to a fine sheen of civilization.

Such creatures didn’t seem to exist. Over the past month he had met bruising sportsmen who smelled of the stable even in evening clothes, professional toadies who simpered even in their sleep, and dedicated roués whose encyclopedic knowledge of sin would put a St. Giles slum-lord to shame. These men, these polished, powdered, pampered men, with their Etonian inflections and towering confections of neckwear, might have cleaner linen than the louts he had known growing up, but underneath they were as coarse, as self-serving, and a good deal less honest.

Who was he protecting by staying away? Charlotte? Or himself?

At the far end of the street, Robert could see the twin Tudor towers of the palace of St. James, location of that uncomfortable scene in the Queen’s Drawing Room. Even if Charlotte forgave him for that, what if he hurt her again? He had seen his father do it again and again, trampling over the feelings of those nearest to him, not out of malice, but just by being what he was. There was no assurance that he would be able to make her happy, in this world that was so much more hers than his.

Seeing her in the Palace wearing her diamonds and feathers with the unselfconsciousness of long custom, he had felt for the first time the true depth of the chasm that separated them. He hadn’t risen to a ducal coronet; it had tumbled down to him. He had seen feathers before, on chickens. Diamonds didn’t come into it. When his childhood companions spoke of court, they meant the sort ruled by magistrates, not monarchs. Right now, he was nearly as much a novelty as a unicorn, the rightful heir returned home, cloaked in exotic grandeur from his time in India. But it was all an illusion. In time, she would come to be ashamed of him, and regret the impulse that had made her paint him in brighter colors than he deserved.

Which would be worse? he wondered. Never having her at all, or having to witness the slow death of love by disillusionment?

There was a cheerful prospect.

Robert scowled at the shadows on the pavement. Tommy, wisely, stayed quiet. There were some moods on which a man’s closest friends knew better than to intrude.

Talk to her, Tommy had said. What if he did? What if he told her the whole of it, warts and all? Robert felt the familiar twist in his stomach at the memory of that interlude in the underground chamber. Well, maybe not quite the whole of it. But close. Enough to allow her to decide for herself. Back at Girdings, he might have worried that childhood infatuation would unfairly prejudice her opinion of him — but he had certainly put paid to that, hadn’t he? He grimaced at the recollection of Charlotte challenging the existence of his snuffbox. She wasn’t anyone’s fool.

Not even his.

As they strode down St. James Street, he heard his own voice asking, roughly, “What if she doesn’t believe me?”

“Then you’ve lost nothing.” Tommy paused to consider. “Except possibly a snuffbox or two. But you’re a duke now. You can afford those.”

Robert shook his head. “And what if she does? What then?” “Then,” said Tommy, speaking very slowly, as though to a not-very-bright child, “you live happily ever after.”

“What if there isn’t such a thing as happily ever after?”

“Then I can’t really help you, can I?” said Tommy.

Robert paused in front of a wide-fronted stone house, one of the famous gentlemen’s clubs scattered along the street. Had he been the sort of duke he was meant to be, he might have been a member. Instead, he came as guest. He wasn’t even sure it was the right bloody building. They didn’t exactly signpost these things for nonmembers.

Hoping to hell he was in the right place, Robert began climbing the shallow stone steps.

“Nothing can be done until the day after tomorrow, anyway,” said Robert, as much to himself as Tommy. “We have to catch Wrothan first.”

“Even better,” said Tommy cheerfully. “Think of it this way. You’ll be coming to her a hero, having bagged a vicious traitor and a French spy.”

“Mmmph,” said Robert as noncommittally as he could, struggling to mask the unwarranted surge of hope that Tommy’s casual suggestion brought with it.

It was a possibility, at least, the prospect of scouring away all the embarrassments of his past with one pure blaze of heroism. Once redeemed . . . well, he would deal with that when he got there. First, there was a spy to catch. And he hadn’t the least idea of how to go about it.

“Our contact said he would meet us here at seven.” Robert raised a hand to rap at the door and hastily withdrew it as the door opened of its own accord. Knocking, apparently, was yet another faux pas.

“Who is this contact of yours?” whispered Tommy as they handed their hats and gloves to a waiting manservant.

“War Office,” Robert whispered back, before raising his voice to give their names to the waiting manservant. It was hard to tell whether or not they were expected; the man’s expression remained as impassive as wax. If he poked the man’s cheek, the impression of his finger would probably remain.

“Hmm,” said Tommy, looking around as though expecting the head of the War Office to burst through the door.

It had been a struggle to admit that he required reinforcements. But if the Colonel had drummed anything into him over the years, it was that fighting a battle one couldn’t win wasn’t gallant; it was irresponsible.

So he had swallowed his pride and found his way to a ramshackle building on Crown Street, where his years of loyal service to the crown had meant nothing, but his ducal title got him through the door. He was passed along to someone not so junior as to offend Robert’s rank, but not so senior as to interfere with real work. In the end, he had been given a name, a contact, someone who (the slightly bored bureaucrat said, glancing at his watch) might help him. To Robert’s surprise, it was a name he knew.

The man with their hats melted away, replaced by another black-coated functionary, who guided Robert and Tommy through a series of rooms papered in deep greens and rich reds, redolent of tobacco and freshly ironed newspapers. Up two flights of stairs, at the very back of the house, they were admitted to a square room with only one window. The walls were papered in the same hunter green as the rooms downstairs, hung with paintings of slightly lumpy horses. The heavy drapes had been drawn across the one window, muffling the room from the outside world. After bowing them in, their guide closed the thick oak door securely behind them, leaving them to the man who waited for them, sprawled in a squat leather chair before the fire.

“Dovedale!” Robert’s contact bounded out of his chair in a very un-agent-like way. “Bloody good of you to come. Sit down, sit down.”

Waving them into chairs, he promptly set about splashing brandy into three glasses. A table had been discreetly furnished with an array of decanters and a platter of refreshments.

“Ginger biscuit?” offered their host, brandishing a biscuit. “As you can see, we have everything we need. You don’t need to worry about being disturbed. No one will come unless we call.”

Robert gingerly accepted a biscuit. “Thank you for agreeing to help us.”

“I couldn’t be more delighted. London has been damnably dull since the Black Tulip was put out of commission.”

“The Black Who?” asked Tommy, punching the leather of his chair into a more comfortable shape.

“By Gad, how long did you say you’d been away?” Their host paused with the biscuit in midair to gape at them.

“Twelve years for me,” said Robert dryly.

“Well, that it explains it, then.” Their host flung himself back in his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. Taking a big bite of his ginger biscuit, he followed it with a long swig of brandy, swilling the two together with obvious satisfaction. Thus refreshed, he said, rather indistinctly, “There’s been a vogue this past decade for flower names for spies, English and French. You must have just missed it when you left, Dovedale. We’ve had the Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation. They’ve countered with the Black Tulip — nasty one, that — and a rather halfhearted series of Daisies, none of that stuck.”

“You can add a Jasmine to that list,” put in Robert, as the missing puzzle piece clicked into place. “A Jasmine that might prove rather sticky.”

“So that’s it!” exclaimed Tommy. “Wrothan and his infernal sprig of jasmine. It wasn’t just for show.”

Seeing their host’s confused expression, Robert explained, “It all began in India, with a man named Arthur Wrothan.”

“Your Jasmine,” Tommy chimed in, “who was selling secrets to the Mahratta and, it seems, to the French.”

“Wrothan,” continued Robert, “attached himself to Freddy Staines in India. It was what he did. He collected young officers with more money than sense and promised them access to all manners of Eastern pleasures.”

“Eastern pleasures?” Their host perked up.

“Usually women with a fringe of opiates,” Robert said bluntly. “Wrothan appears to have found a similar outlet for his talents here, in Sir Francis Medmenham’s Hellfire Club. He appears to be using Medmenham’s meetings as a cover for rendezvous with his liaison from France.”

“I see.” Their host frowned into his brandy. “Medmenham and Staines have been friends since the nursery. Staines would have provided your Mr. Wrothan with the introduction to Medmenham. Mr. Wrothan sounds like he would fit right into Medmenham’s infernal activities. But how does the Frenchman come in?”

“That’s what we wanted to find out,” admitted Tommy. “Wrothan must have met him in India. Or Wrothan’s French contacts in India arranged for an introduction once he returned to England.”

“Medmenham’s club must have seemed like manna from heaven to him,” put in Robert. “Think about it. You have the brothers and sons of members of the cabinet, a groom of the bedchamber to the King, and assorted peers, all out of their minds on opiates.”

“Good God,” breathed their host. “It’s the answer to an agent’s prayer. Do you think Medmenham’s in on it?”

“It’s hard to tell,” admitted Robert. “In those robes, it’s deuced hard to tell who’s who. The Frenchman might have snuck in without being passed through Medmenham. He might also be known to Medmenham without Medmenham being aware of his other activities.”

“There are certainly more than enough Royalist émigrés moving about society, any of whom might secretly be working for the other side,” said their host frankly, helping himself to another biscuit. “But if Medmenham doesn’t know about your Mr. Wrothan’s extra activities, what does he get out of all those? Aside from the women and opiates, of course.”

Robert thought about it. “Power. Influence.” He remembered the rapt look on Medmenham’s face as he called forth his papier-mâché deity. It might have been merely the opiates at work, but he rather thought it went deeper than that. He could hear Medmenham’s voice at Girdings, speaking of more things than heaven and earth. “Much as he mocks it all, I wouldn’t wonder if Medmenham half believes his own mumbo jumbo. Ridiculous as it sounds.”

“Huh.” Their host kicked back in his chair, balancing his brandy balloon on his stomach. “We have enough demons in London without his raising more. Your esteemed relation, for example.” He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as he said it, as though expecting her to pop out at him. “The Dowager Duchess.”

“Who is, mercifully, at Girdings,” said Robert. “And will hopefully stay there until this business is done.”

“Amen,” agreed their host, and got down to business. “When is Medmenham’s next meeting?”

“Tomorrow.” Robert felt duty bound to add, “The Frenchman might not appear again. It is something of a long shot.”

“My favorite kind!” Their host raised his hand to toast and realized he was holding a biscuit instead of his glass. Philosophically, he finished it off in two large bites, adding somewhat indistinctly, “Where’s the place?”

“Upon the heath,” said Robert.

“Really?” said their host eagerly.

“No. Not really,” Robert admitted. “We’re meeting tomorrow night at Drury Lane at six o’clock and then departing the theatre at a prearranged time to be led to the ceremonial meeting place, wherever that may be.”

“Midnight?” said their host, reaching for another biscuit.

“Nine o’clock.”

Their host coughed up brandy. “What self-respecting satanical society meets at nine o’clock?”

“One with an early bedtime?” suggested Tommy.

Robert considered the liquid in his glass. The wallpaper gave it an oddly greenish tinge, like something seen through water. “Or one with other activities planned afterwards.”

Their host raised his glass to Robert. “I like the way you think. Tomorrow night it is. To the Hellfire Club!”