The Lure of the Moonflower by Lauren Willig Page B

argument, to put her on the defensive.
    Loudly, Jane said, “Fetch the mule, Rodrigo. We don’t want to keep our friends waiting.”
    Jack Reid touched his hand to his cap in an ironic salute. “Sir.”
    He sauntered away, leaving Jane feeling as though she had lost the argument, not he.
    Someone had to lead, didn’t they? Jane hunched down beneath her cloak as she rode beside Captain Moreau towards the front of the train, Jack Reid somewhere behind with the mule and the baggage. Or so she hoped. She wouldn’t put it past him to slope off, evading orders as he had so often in the past.
    Did he think she enjoyed making these sorts of decisions? Well, perhaps she did, just a little. At least in the beginning—in the beginning when the work was new and exciting, each challenge a puzzle to be solved. But the more immersed Jane had become in the shadowy world of espionage, the more aware she had become that her actions had consequences. Jane’s second in command, Miss Gwen, tended to swash before she buckled, charging off without thought, sword parasol at the ready. Jane’s cousin Amy, who had founded a spy school in Sussex, optimistically sent her people into Paris, trusting to Jane to keep them alive.
    And Jane had, as best she could.
    But that meant taking charge. It meant making decisions based on the totality of the circumstances, difficult decisions, unpopular decisions. It meant keeping her own counsel, even at times when she longed to pour out all her doubts and worries. In order to maintain her authority, she needed to cloak herself in a mantle of omniscience.
    Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown
, the poet said. He might have substituted “lonely.”
    The rain dribbled steadily down, the horses’ hooves sinking deep in the mire. By the time they made camp, Jane’s boots were caked with mud, her cloak a mass of wet wool.
    Whatever his other faults, Jack Reid knew how to pitch a tent. Jane found hers set at the end of a row, close enough to the circle of safety of the camp, but far enough that one might have a murmured conversation without half of Napoleon’s officer corps hearing it. Bidding Captain Moreau good night, Jane retreated into her tent, draping her sodden cloak carefully on a hook by the inside of the door.
    Jane’s thighs and back ached with the unaccustomed exercise. She knew how to ride, of course. She was generally held to have a fine seat. But an afternoon’s hunting on a well-trained mare was a very different game from a long march on a bony nag who appeared to have one short leg. It was, Jane thought wearily, rather like being placed in a barrel full of blunt edges and rolled rapidly down a hill. She might have suspected Jack Reid of choosing the nag intentionally, as punishment, but for the fact that all of the other officers’ mounts were of similar quality.
    Wincing, Jane peeled off her green jacket. Dampness had made darker patches on the wool. It seemed odd to her that with all his other shifts and deceptions, Jack Reid should balk at wearing this green coat.
    ...You would feel the lie of it. And it would diminish you.
    Fine words from a man who made his life by lying.
    But he was right. That was the awful bit. Jane could see her own face reflected dimly in the mirror that “Rodrigo” had propped on top of her shaving kit. It was a face she barely recognized, her own hair tightly coiled beneath a wig of exuberant dark brown hair; the features rendered unfamiliar by the judicious use of paint. In the dim light, in the wavy glass, she might have been looking at a stranger.
    Lieutenant de Balcourt, Miss Fustian, Gilly Fairley, the Marchesa Malvezzi, Amelie de Printemps . . . She had been so many people over the past few years, and none of them herself.
    Piece by piece, Jane felt herself washing away, like a pebble in a pond, smoothed into featurelessness by the successive waves that crashed over her, until there was nothing left there that was uniquely her own. She wondered