Moving faster, Robert climbed the final few rungs. The ladder let out into a bizarre womblike marble edifice. It took Robert a moment to identify it as the inside of an urn. It seemed a rather Medmenham sort of joke, to house human asps within immense marble jars, just waiting to crawl into some waiting Cleopatra’s breast.

The urn had been cut out on one side, not entirely, just enough of a hole for a man to crawl through. It was as he was contemplating the hole that he heard the voices. Voice, rather. One voice.

It wasn’t the sort of voice one would generally remember. It had a common enough timbre, not too high, not too low, with an over-particularity of pronunciation designed to mask an origin more common than the speaker cared to confess. Robert would have known it anywhere.

Robert crawled very carefully through his hole, the scrape of his robe against the stone sounding, he hoped, like nothing more sinister than the rustle of the wind through the dry winter grass. The massive urn provided the best of all possible screens and there was a wall behind his back, made of rough flint. He was, he realized, in Medmenham’s mausoleum, a vast, open-air edifice scattered with memorial monuments, with urns and arches and ornamental columns, in a macabre pleasure garden for the dead.

The dead weren’t the only ones enjoying it tonight. The wind carried their words as effectively as the acoustics of the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul’s.

“There is the small matter of my payment. . . .” Wrothan’s voice was a touching mix of the obsequious and the importunate.

“Don’t fret yourself.” His companion was unimpressed. Unlike Wrothan’s, his accent was pure, effortless Oxbridge, save for the faint tang of a foreign accent. “You will have your gold. When you fulfill your end of the bargain.”

Robert eased around the side of his urn, but to little effect. An ornamental column blocked his view. All he could make out was the skirt of a monk’s habit, identical to all the others.

Wrothan’s voice took on a wheedling note. “I imagine that the Home Office would pay a pretty penny to know about your activities. They might even pay better than you.”

Fabric rustled and coins clattered together, ringing too true to be anything but gold. “A deposit. There will be nothing more until we see results. And if I find that you have played us false . . .”

“Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Now that he had his blunt, Wrothan was all that was jovial. “Not I.”

His companion was less effusive. “See that you don’t. Or else your goose will be — how do you say? — cooked.” His tone was perfectly matter-of-fact, and all the more chilling for being so.

“General Perron never had any complaints,” countered Wrothan.

In his hollow, Robert’s brows drew together. Perron was Wrothan’s employer? When the Colonel had told him Wrothan was selling secrets to the Mahratta, he had never specified to whom. Perron might be nominally employed by one of the Mahratta leaders, but he took his real orders from France.

“Names, Monsieur le Jasmine, names,” said the Frenchman, in suffering tones. Monsieur le Who? Robert wondered, and cautiously lifted his head away from the stone in an attempt to hear more clearly. “If this is how you carried on in India, I am surprised indeed that Monsieur le Marigold kept you on.”

“The Marigold” — Wrothan seemed to have some small difficulty emitting the word — “had no cause for complaint of me. And nor shall you. If I succeed in this . . .”

“It will be a cause for great rejoicing,” said the Frenchman politely, squelching Wrothan as neatly as a society hostess speeding a parting guest. “Then. Good night, Jasmine.”

He really had said Jasmine, hadn’t he? As in the flower. It took Robert a moment to realize that the Jasmine in question was Wrothan, but he didn’t have time to muse on the Frenchman’s pet name for his favorite traitor. Grass crackled underfoot as the man strode away from Wrothan — straight towards Robert’s urn.

Robert hastily ducked around the other side, grateful for the all-concealing robe that blended so well with both winter-dry grass and granite walls. Hood up, huddled against the base of the urn, he played at being a rock, thankful for the lack of moon that swathed him in darkness. The anonymous monk with the accent disappeared into the urn and down the secret passage.

By the time Robert deemed it safe to look up, both Wrothan and the Frenchman had gone. Only the scent of jasmine lingered in the damp night air.

Robert hunkered back on his haunches, drawing his fingers through his sweat-sodden hair. His head still pounded with the aftereffects of the drug, whatever the drug had been, and he lifted his face gratefully to the night air, letting the damp air buffet his aching head.

Jasmine. What in the blazes were they playing at? Robert wished his mental faculties were in better working order, or that Tommy had been there, too, to hear and judge. The Frenchman had said Jasmine.

Robert wondered, for the first time, if that conspicuous sprig of jasmine Wrothan had affected in India had been more than just a dandy’s foolish nod to fashion. It was a pity, thought Robert grimly, that he had spent so much time concertedly not noticing Wrothan. It made it that much harder remembering his habits. But he did remember joking with Tommy about the migration of the flower, one day on Wrothan’s hat, the next day in his lapel. They had put it down to experiments in fashion. But what if it had been something else? What if it had been a signal, a message? It might have been a call to an assignation, a symbol that he had news to share, any number of things. All of them entirely sinister.

Wrothan wasn’t just raising a little extra blunt selling secrets to the Mahratta. He was playing for higher stakes than that. He was playing with the French.

There had been rumblings about revolutionaries while Robert was in India, whispers of French plots and schemes, but for the most part, those, like Robert, who had been many years away from England had shrugged it off. Everyone knew the Governor-General, Marquess Wellesley, was practically potty on the topic of French threats; he saw Frenchmen under the bed the way small children imagined monsters. There had been a brief stir the year before when Bonaparte had sent a ship of men and arms to India at the request of General Perron, but Wellesley had sent them packing. And Robert had always believed that was that. One failed attempt. They were five months from England by sea. How much interest could they have in the affairs of England and France, or England and France in them? He had assumed that Wrothan’s treachery was a local affair, with purely local consequences.

The damp was seeping through the wool of Robert’s robe, but it wasn’t just his nether regions that were feeling the chill. He might have found Wrothan, but the victory was a Pyrrhic one. There would be no nice, tidy revenge, no easy dispatch of a retired traitor. Instead, he had stumbled upon a hydra, that beast of classical fiction that sported new heads whenever the one was lopped off.

And all the heads were shaped like flowers.

Chapter Twelve

They say that eavesdroppers seldom hear good of themselves. It’s been my experience that eavesdroppers seldom hear anything of themselves at all, since most people aren’t as interested in you as, well, you. This time, however, I was absolutely positive that Joan Plowden-Plugge had been talking about me. Me and Colin, that is. Her voice takes on a special sneer when my name comes up. It’s rather flattering, considering that I’ve met her all of three times.

As I dusted my hands off against my pants, and automatically checked to make sure that the zip was where it ought to be, I wondered exactly what it was that I was expected to take badly when I found out. There was, I admitted to myself, as I pushed open the door of the ladies’ room, the remote possibility that Joan and Sally might have been talking about another couple entirely. But, come on, who would really believe that?

What I needed to do was get them talking. It shouldn’t be too hard to get Joan making barbed little comments. The problem would be making sure they were barbed little comments about whatever it was that Colin did for a living and not about me, my job, my American-ness, or my hair.

I ventured out of the dark cavern of the bathroom hallway (I wonder if there’s a regulation that pub bathrooms must always be in a dark cul-de-sac), feeling like the Duke of Dovedale about to infiltrate a meeting of the Hellfire Club. As I quickly scanned the small group of people scattered around the table in front of the bow window, I was forced to reconsider. Can Hellfire Club really be an appropriate metaphor when there’s a vicar involved?

It made me feel all warm and fuzzy that instead of seating himself, Colin was standing next to the table in that way you do when you’ve only stopped to chat for a moment, declaring to all and sundry his intention to abandon them and cleave unto me — at least for the length of our dinner.

Slipping into the space next to him, I smiled cheerfully all around. “Hi, all! Mmmm, thanks.” I gratefully accepted the drink Colin handed me. The paper napkin wrapped around the glass was already damp with condensation from the melting ice.

“How long are you here?” asked the Vicar, clearly enjoying needling Joan. Joan turned her chair slightly away with the lofty air of one who does not intend to allow herself to be needled.

“Only the week,” I said. “That is, unless I make some sort of major breakthrough in the archives and have to beg Colin to let me stay on.”

“I’m sure you won’t have any trouble convincing him.” The Vicar waggled his eyebrows impishly. He reminded me of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all good-natured mischief. I wasn’t sure that was generally recommended in a vicar, but I certainly enjoyed it.

“Doesn’t Colin have his own work to do?” Joan said acidly, although whether the dig was aimed at me or Colin was hard to tell.

“Nothing that won’t keep,” said Colin neutrally. “Half the time, I don’t even know that Eloise is there. She just slopes off into another century and leaves me to my own devices.”

“You make me sound like Dr. Who!” I protested.

“But prettier.”

“That’s all right then. You know, it’s unfair. You all know what I do, but I don’t know what any of you do — well, except you,” I added to the Vicar.

What was his name? I knew he had been introduced to me by something other than just “Vicar,” but I couldn’t for the life of me remember it. Geoffrey? Godfrey? Sigfried? I was probably safer just sticking to vicar.

“Hazard of my profession,” he said sadly. “It takes all the mystery out of me.”

“Except for the Eucharisticum Mysterium,” Colin pointed out, stretching lazily. “I should think that counts.”

“Yes, but that’s not me, is it?” protested the Vicar. “That’s all God, and you don’t compete for His thunder, not unless you want a plague on your cattle.”

“You don’t have cattle,” Sally said, blowing froth off her beer.

“Chattel, then,” said the vicar. “It’s almost spelled the same.”

“Not unless you’re using an Elizabethan primer,” interjected Colin.

Sally chuckled. “Your chattel, then. I can just see your CD collection coming out in boils. Oooooh. Scary.”

We were straying a bit afield from where I had been trying to go. I made a last-ditch attempt to wrench the conversation back on course. “What about you, Sally?” I asked hastily. “What do you do?”

“Estate agent,” she said, and it took me a moment to remember that in this century, that meant realtor rather than a land manager. She nodded to her sister. “And Joan writes for Manderley.”

Joan was a writer? If anything, I would have had them pegged the opposite way around, with Sally as the artsy one and Joan as the pushy real estate broker. But you never can tell, can you? I know grad students who look dress like lawyers and lawyers who go all bohemian in their spare time.

Then the name of the magazine registered. “You write for Manderley ?”

“Yes.”

Named after the fictional manor house in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the magazine was a cross between a glossy like Country Life and a serious academic journal, devoted to the conservation of England’s major and minor manor houses. Each issue featured articles on subjects ranging from attempts to muster support to save this or that historic site to in-depth looks at restoration projects to more esoteric examinations of material history, such as the spread of chinoiserie textiles in the eighteenth century, with special reference to their sociocultural implications.