The Lure of the Moonflower Read Free Page B

sight, something so simple that one wouldn’t expect it to be right. I reached out to press the tacks. . . .
    And my jeans began vibrating.
    No, no curse had been placed on the trunk. After my first nervous jump, I realized that it was Colin’s phone buzzing in my pocket. I wriggled it out of the pocket of my jeans, hoping fervently that it wasn’t the caterers with yet another last-minute polenta-related emergency. If it was, I might just have to go Napoleonic on someone’s nether regions. In translation: I would be politely dismayed in a rather chilly tone.
    What can I say? I study the early nineteenth century, not the Middle Ages. Or rather, I had studied the early nineteenth century.
    The display on the front said, RESTRICTED . Not the caterers, then.
    “Hello?” I said quickly.
    The voice on the other end said something staticky and incomprehensible.
    “Hello?” I said again, the mud cracking around my mouth as I raised my voice. “Hello?”
    Through the buzz, I heard only, “—Selwick.”
    “This is his fiancée,” I said. “May I take a message?”
    Wherever this guy was calling from, it sounded like he was underwater in a Harry Houdini cage. “Tell him . . . bring the box.”
    “Is this Nick?” No connection was that bad by accident. And Colin’s best man was the prank-pulling kind. I knew only about half of what had gone on when they were at Oxford, and that half was more than enough. “Because if it is—”
    A raspy voice interrupted me, sounding like a combination of a chronic cold and nails on sandpaper. “Tonight. Two o’clock. At the old abbey.”
    Donwell Abbey, presumably. The ruins lay in the backyard of the current manor house, next door to Colin’s estate. If a twenty-minute drive over a bumpy road or an even longer walk along the more direct footpath counted as next door.
    Yep, this was right up Nick’s alley. He’d just love to dress himself up as the Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey, complete with hooded robe and phosphorescent paint, and drag Colin out at two in the morning on the night before his wedding. The real question was whether he could refrain from snickering long enough to remember to shout, “Boo!”
    “Not funny.” I rolled my eyes. “If you’re at the services wasting time making prank calls—”
    “It’s not Nick!” The voice on the other end forgot to rasp for a moment. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it definitely wasn’t Nick. Dropping back into film-noir mode, the voice went on. “Tell Selwick to follow instructions—or else. . . .”
    “Or else?” I should have let it go to voice mail. But underneath my annoyance I could feel a little prickle of unease. There was something seriously disturbed about that voice. “Look, I’m going to—”
    “Eloise?” It was a different voice, crackly with static and tension. A voice I knew. “Eloise—”
    “Mrs. Selwick-Alderly?” She’d told me to call her Aunt Arabella, as Colin did, but in the tension of the moment, I forgot. “What on—”
    But she was gone. “Tell him. Bring the box.”
    And the line went dead.

Chapter One
    Lisbon, 1807
    T he mood in Rossio Square was nasty.
    The agent known as the Moonflower blended into the crowd, just one anonymous man among many, just another sullen face beneath the brim of a hat pulled down low against the December rain. The crowd grumbled and shifted as the Portuguese royal standard made its slow descent from the pinnacle of São Jorge Castle, but the six thousand French soldiers massed in the square put an effective stop to louder expressions of discontent. In the windows of the tall houses that framed the square, the Moonflower could see curtains twitch, as hostile eyes looked down on the display put on by the conqueror.
    The French claimed to come as liberators, but the liberated didn’t seem any too happy about it.
    As the royal standard disappeared from view and the tricolor rose triumphant above the square, the Moonflower heard a woman sob,