The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read Online Free PDF

them, more cunning than his fellows, was waiting at the entrance to the alley. Moving with painstaking care, Gwen scooped up a loose piece of cobble from the ground. A bit slimy, but it would serve. Choosing her course carefully, she lobbed it to the far left, out of the mouth of the alley. It made a very satisfying clattering sound, well away from her hiding place. As the guard turned to look, she made her move, smashing him hard in the back of his legs with her cane. Leaping over his fallen form, she ran like a rabbit, her heart singing in her breast, the wind whistling in her ears, every sense on fire.
    She waited until she was across the bridge before she stopped, just another disheveled dandy among the taverns of St. Michel. She had done it. She had shaken her pursuers. And even if they had seen her, what of it? No one would associate the bravo crouching by the window with the Dragon of the Drawing Room, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, prim of the prim, scourge of importunate swains.
    Merciful heavens, she loved her work.
    Absurd to think that just two years ago—had it been only two years?—she had been entombed in the English countryside, a reluctant pensioner in her brother’s household, “Aunt Gwen” to her brother’s whining brats, “Oh, Gwendolyn . . .” to her brother’s featherbrain of a wife. Twenty years she had wasted there, growing a little more seamed and a little more sour every day, dependent on the goodwill of her relations for every bite that crossed her lips. In return, she was meant to sit docilely and wind wool, to manage the household for her dolt of a sister-in-law, to pretend gratitude—gratitude!—for the condescension shown her in offering her a home in her own home. The fall from mistress to dependent had been bad enough; the servings of humble pie she had been expected to eat with it were too much.
    But what else had there been for her to do? She had no dowry, not anymore. She had no funds of her own. She had been considered handsome once, and not entirely for the size of her vanished dowry. There were some men who appreciated a long, lean form, who preferred black hair to fair, and gray eyes to blue. Her tongue was accounted too sharp by some, but there were men, or at least so she had been told, who prized wit as well as wealth. She might escape through marriage—but to whom? Escape on those terms was no more than another cage. At least under her brother’s roof she preserved the privacy of her own bedchamber, with lock and key when necessary.
    Gritting her teeth, she had resigned herself to another twenty years of the same, of watching her idiot nephews marry and procreate, producing offspring as imbecilic as themselves.
    It filled her with a savage delight to have escaped that net. When her chance had come, she had seized it with both hands. She had never imagined that her impulsive offer to chaperone a neighbor’s daughter and niece to Paris would provide more than a few months’ reprieve, that it would lead her to emperors and sultans and intrigue beyond imagining. She had gone from counting sheep—her brother was constantly losing track of his herds—to meddling in the affairs of nations.
    The League of the Pink Carnation had begun out of pique, an attempt to better the arrogant Englishman who had styled himself the Purple Gentian. But that first mission had led to another, and another after that. In the end, it was the League of the Pink Carnation who had rescued the Purple Gentian from various fates worse than death in the extra-special interrogation chamber of Gaston Delaroche. The Purple Gentian had gone home. The Pink Carnation had stayed on, making Bonaparte fume and his henchmen squirm.
    Officially, Gwen’s charge, Jane, was the Pink Carnation. Officially. As far as Gwen was concerned, the whole was a composite performance: Jane’s cunning, Gwen’s daring. They balanced each other, Gwen’s inventiveness supplementing Jane’s cool common sense. It was a pairing that