Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  The archives, he had informed me, around a yawn, were mostly documents establishing provenance of the artwork and all that sort of thing. There were, he allowed, some family papers still floating around. Yes, he thought there might be some from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. He supposed if I really wanted to come see them…The implication, of course, being that any sane person would rather spend a Saturday afternoon watching a cricket match, or watching paint dry, which amounts to much the same thing, as far as I’ve been able to tell. The whole conversation had been pretty much the professional equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting, “Nobody’s home!”

  Between the receptionist and the guy I had spoken to on the phone, I got the impression that the Vaughn Collection wasn’t awfully keen on visitors. Which is a little counterproductive when you’re a museum. I was fervently hoping that the archivist’s assistant’s attitude (I dare you to say that three times fast) was born more of laziness than of the fact that there just plain wasn’t anything there.

  I did have at least one other option. The Vaughns hadn’t donated their family papers to the British Library, or printed up one of those nineteenth-century compilations with all the good bits expurgated. They did still own a rather impressive family seat up in the wilds of Northumberland, currently operating as a leisure center for corporate trainings—the sort of retreats that involve dumping people in a lake and giving them points for how efficiently they get out of it again and other such acts of socially sanctioned torture. The family documents might still be housed up there, but even with the miracles of modern transportation, Northumberland was a ways away. Depending on how things went with Colin…

  Ah, Colin.

  Dodging through the obstacle course of glass display cases, I shook my head at my own foolishness. If I turned into a useless blob of goo every time I thought of him, how was I ever going to maintain a coherent conversation for the duration of dinner?

  Every time I relaxed my concentration, there I was again, off in daydream land, in a glorious summer landscape with a man as perfect and plastic as a Ken doll. I knew I was being absurd. Outside, it was late November, bitter cold November, only three days after Thanksgiving. Yet, in my daydreams, we strolled hand in hand beneath a gentle June sun while the birds chirped away in the trees above. In real life, one of them would probably crap on his head. So much for romance.

  Logically, I knew that the man was just as imaginary as the scene. The Colin I knew—or, rather, the Colin I had met, since I couldn’t really presume to know him at all, despite a rather intense acquaintance to date—was far from perfect. In fact, he was mercurial to the point of being schizophrenic, warm and flirty one minute, cold and distant the next. When I’d first met him, he’d practically bitten my head off for having the nerve to accept his aunt’s invitation to go through the family archives; the next thing I knew, he was refilling my champagne glass and looking at me in a way that made me go all wobbly (although four glasses of champagne will do that to a girl).

  At least he’d had an excellent excuse for his most recent Jekyll and Hyde performance. What I’d thought was a case of Colin simply blowing me off because of, well, me, turned out to be a panicked rush to Italy, where his mother was unconscious in a hospital after a particularly nasty car accident. I hadn’t even realized Colin had a mother.

  Naturally, I knew he must have had one at some point (yes, we all took sixth-grade bio class), but in novels, heroes never seem to have parents, at least not living, breathing ones who get sick or have accidents. Occasionally they have parent issues, but the parents are always conveniently off somewhere to stage left, usually dead. Can you imagine Mr. Rochester trying to explain to his mother how he burned the house down? Or Mr. Darcy promising his mother he won’t marry that hideous Bingley girl? I rest my case.

  Even writing off Colin’s last mood swing, I still hadn’t found out just why he had reacted quite so violently to my excursions into his family’s archives. Most of the hypotheses that occurred to me were far too ridiculous to countenance. Even if Colin’s great-great-grandparents had founded a sort of spy school on the family estate, there was no way that the family could have remained continuously in the spying business since the Napoleonic Wars.

  Could they? My notions of modern espionage had a lot to do with James Bond movies, complete with low-slung cars, talking watches, and women in bikinis with breasts like helium balloons. Colin drove a Range Rover and wore a Timex. As for the helium balloons, let’s just say that if that’s what Colin was looking for, he wouldn’t be going out to dinner with me.

  Occupied by these fruitful speculations, I managed to make my way through the series of linked rooms that led to the back of the house, which petered out into a narrow corridor: Someone had painted the walls a utilitarian white that somehow managed to look more depressing than an outright gray.

  There was a door with a big sign on it that read PRIVATE in all capital letters in four languages (presumably, if you didn’t speak English, German, French, or Japanese, this prohibition didn’t apply to you), with a rope strung across the entrance for emphasis. I cleverly deduced that that was not the door I was looking for.

  An anemic red arrow pointed visitors down a narrow flight of stairs with shiny reflective tape beginning to peel back from the treads. Clutching the warped handrail, I picked my way carefully down and came straight up against—the bathrooms. The little stick figures were unmistakable.

  Next to them, however, a plain white door had been marked with the word REFERENCE. It was just the tiniest bit ajar, presumably for ventilation rather than hospitality. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and made my way in, the heels of my boots slapping hollowly across the linoleum floor.

  In contrast to all the gilt and rosewood upstairs, the reference room wasn’t a very impressive setup. The room was small and square, furnished with two rickety aluminum folding tables, each supplied with four equally rickety folding chairs with hard plastic seats. Padding might have encouraged people to linger. At the far end of the room, a small counter, not unlike those in drugstores, separated the reference room from the archives beyond. Through the gap I caught a tantalizing glimpse of utilitarian metal shelves piled with a variety of acid-free boxes and big black binders.

  At the desk, a man in a hot pink T-shirt guarded the gap. I use the word “guarded” loosely. He was so deeply absorbed in whatever he was reading that I could have vaulted over the desk without his noticing me. The thought was tempting, but that kindergarten training dies hard. I didn’t vault. Instead I coughed. When that didn’t work, I coughed again. Loudly. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to more drastic measures—like sneezing—but the third cough finally broke through his literary absorption. As he hoisted himself up, I took a peek at his reading material. It was a copy of Hello! magazine, open to a fine showing of airbrushed celebrities.

  Somehow, I didn’t think this was the archivist. In fact, I had a pretty shrewd guess as to who he was.

  “I believe we spoke on the phone,” I said.

  Clearly, he also remembered our conversation fondly. His face went from lascivious to hostile in the space of a second. “Oh. You.”

  So much for being a goodwill ambassador for America, or whatever else it is that the Fulbright people expect you to do. Fortunately, my grant was a Clive fellowship, not a Fulbright, so I was off the hook. As far as I could tell, Mr. Clive had harbored no pretensions about his grantees fostering international amity.

  That being the case, I felt no guilt at all about saying crisply, “I’m here to see the papers of Sebastian, Lord Vaughn.”

  The boy gave me a look as though to say, “You would.” Levering himself up with obvious effort, he trudged wearily off into the blazing desert sands, five hundred miles across rugged terrain, to the metal shelves right behind the desk. There, he made a great show of studying the labels on the binders.

  “That’s Vaughn, v-a-u-g-h-n,” I said helpfully. “Sebastian, Lord Vaugh
n.”

  “Which one?” asked Pink Shirt dourly.

  It had never occurred to me that there might be other Sebastian, Lord Vaughns floating around. “There’s more than one?”

  “1768 or 1903?”

  It was a bit like ordering a hamburger. “1768.”

  After a moment, his head popped back around again. “Do you want the 1790 box, the 1800 box, or”—his head ducked back down for a moment—“the everything else box?”

  Next, he was going to ask me if I wanted fries with that. I made my choice, and the 1800 box was duly shoved into my hands. The tape on one end bore a label that descriptively stated, “Seb’n, Ld. Vn., Misc. Docs. 1800–1810.”

  I began to wonder if the archivist actually existed, or if they just pretended they had one for the sake of show. Not only was that one of the less convincing classificatory systems I had ever encountered, there had been no effort made to put the contents of the box in any sort of order; small notebooks, loose papers, and packets of letters were all jumbled, one on top of the other. Given that Vaughn had lived well into the reign of Victoria, my hunch was that the everything else box wasn’t so-called because there wasn’t much there for the next forty years of his life, but simply because no one had gotten around to sorting through it yet.

  Settling myself down at the more stable of the two tables, I reached for the first packet in the 1800 box, gingerly unwinding the string that bound the letters. There’s nothing like peering into someone else’s correspondence. You never know what you might find. Coded messages, plotting skullduggery, passionate letters from a foreign amour, invitations to a late assignation…These turned out to fit none of the categories above. They were all from Vaughn’s mother.

  What was this with everyone having a mother all of a sudden?

  Shoving my hair back behind my ears, I skimmed through the letter on the top of the pile. After one letter, I decided I liked Vaughn’s mother. By the end of three, I really liked Vaughn’s mother, but reading about Vaughn’s spinster cousin Portia who had run off with a footman (“She might at least have picked a handsome one,” opined Lady Vaughn) wasn’t getting me any nearer to ascertaining the identity of the Black Tulip, so I reluctantly put the pile aside for future perusal and dug back into the box.

  I toyed with the notion of Lady Vaughn herself as the Black Tulip, spinning her webs from the safety of Northumberland as she sent out her minions to do her dirty work. Sadly, it didn’t seem the least bit probable. From her letters, Lady Vaughn was far too busy bullying the vicar and terrifying her family to be bothered with international espionage. Another great opportunity wasted.

  I flipped quickly through the usual detritus of a busy life. There were love letters (using that term broadly); invitations to routs and balls and Venetian breakfasts; an extensive correspondence with his bankers (which generally seemed to boil down to “send more money”), and, at the very bottom of the box, tucked away where one might never have noticed it, a nondescript black book.

  It wasn’t a little black book in the modern sense. There was no list of addresses, conveniently labeled, MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF THE BLACK TULIP (LONDON BRANCH). But the reality was nearly as good. I had found Lord Vaughn’s appointment book. All of Lord Vaughn’s movements, recorded in his own hand. His writing was just like his appearance, elegant, but with a sharp edge to it. I paged rapidly through it until I hit 1803, watching the place-names change from the exotic (Messina, Palermo, Lisbon) to the familiar (Hatchards, Angelo’s, Manton’s). Vaughn, I noted, had had a particularly close and personal relationship with his tailor; he saw him nearly once a week.

  I was ruffling lazily through, wondering idly if I could make something out of those tailor appointments (there had, after all, been a round of spies rousted out of a clothiers establishment the year before), when a familiar name struck my eye: Sibley Court.

  Sibley Court…I knew I had encountered that name before. After a moment staring into space, it finally clicked. Sibley Court was the family seat of the Viscounts Pinchingdale.

  I bolted upright in my uncomfortable chair. Viscount Pinchingdale, at least the Viscount Pinchingdale in possession of the title in 1803, had been second in command of the League of the Purple Gentian, from which he moved on to aiding in the endeavors of the Pink Carnation. He was no fan of Lord Vaughn.

  What might the potential Black Tulip be doing at the family seat of a known agent of England?

  Well, that was a silly question. Spying, one presumed.

  I would never know one way or another unless I read on. The entry was terse, but it was enough for a start. Especially once I recognized the names involved, including that, prominently featured, of Miss Jane Wooliston, otherwise known (although not to many) as the Pink Carnation.

  14 Oct., 1803. Sibley Ct., Gloucestershire. Immured in Elizabethan horror in G’shire. Forced to play hunt the slipper with Dorrington and wife. Selwick going on about days of glory in France. Interesting proposition made to me by Miss Wooliston….

  Chapter One

  Sing in me, Muse, of that man of many turnings….

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  October, 1803

  Sibley Court, Gloucestershire

  Sebastian, Lord Vaughn, stood beside a rusting suit of armor, a dusty glass of claret in hand, wondering for the tenth time what evil demon had possessed him to accept an invitation to the house party at Sibley Court. It had to be a demon; Vaughn held no truck with deities.

  The house, which had been closed for well over a decade, was a masterpiece of Elizabethan handicraft—in other words, an offense to anyone with classical sensibilities. Vaughn regarded a series of carved panels with distaste. The repetition of Tudor roses had undoubtedly been intended as a heavy-handed compliment to the monarch. The tapestries were even worse than the paneling, lugubrious depictions of the darker moments of the Old Testament, enlivened only by a rather buxom Eve, who seemed to be juggling her apples rather than eating them.

  Sibley Court had slumbered among its memories and dust motes since the death of the current Viscount Pinchingdale’s father and had only just been hastily opened for the accommodation of the viscount and his new bride. Vaughn had no doubt that the new viscountess would soon have the ancient flagstones gleaming. She was the managing sort. So far, she had already managed her guests through supper, a game of hunt the slipper, and an abortive attempt at blindman’s buff that had come to an abrupt halt when the hoodsman, one Mr. Miles Dorrington, had blundered into a suit of armor under the delusion that it might be his wife, bringing the entire edifice crashing down and nearly decapitating the dowager Lady Pinchingdale in the process.

  Undaunted by her brush with death, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale and her newest relation by marriage, Mrs. Alsworthy, appeared bent on engaging in Britain’s Silliest Matron contest. So far, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale was ahead four swoons to three. The only one of the lot who seemed to have two brain cells to rub together was the long-suffering Mr. Alsworthy. He had proved his intelligence by promptly disappearing just after their arrival.

  Between the dowager and his fellow guests, Vaughn was considering a spot of decapitation himself. Starting with his own head. It was beginning to ache damnably from the combination of inferior claret and worse conversation.

  Nursery parties—for that was what the gathering at Sibley Court felt like—weren’t usually in Vaughn’s line. He ran with an older, faster set, men who knew the way of the world and women who knew the way of those men. They played deep, they spoke in triple entendres, and they left their bedroom doors open. In contrast, the crowd at Sibley Court was sickeningly unsophisticated. Part of that insipid breed spawned by the new century, Pinchingdale’s set uttered words like “King” and “country,” and had the poor taste to mean them. No one dueled anymore; they were all too busy gadding about France disguised as flowers. Or named after them, which was nearly as bad. Lord Richard Selwick, currently occupied in propping up the enormous Elizabethan mantelpiece, had only recently been unma
sked as the notorious Purple Gentian, a flower as obscure as it was unpronounceable. The youth of England were fast running out of botanical monikers. What would they do next, venture into vegetables? No doubt he would soon be forced to listen to dazzling accounts of the adventures of the Orange Aubergine. It all showed a marked lack of good ton. Vaughn might be less than a decade older than his host, but among this company he felt as ancient as the tapestries lining the walls.

  The blame for his presence fell squarely on the woman standing next to him, looking deceptively demure in a high-necked gown of pale blue muslin embroidered with small pink flowers about the neck and hem. With her smooth brown hair threaded with matching ribbons and her gloved hands folded neatly around a glass of ratafia, Miss Jane Wooliston looked more like a prosperous squire’s daughter than that many-petaled flower of mystery, the Pink Carnation. It was her summons that had sent Vaughn jolting through the back roads of Gloucestershire clear off the edge of the earth to this godforsaken relic of Bonnie Olde Englande. And he wasn’t even sharing her bed.

  At the moment, Jane was occupied in examining a dark-haired girl who posed becomingly in front of the light of a twisted branch of candles. Like Jane, the girl was tall, tall enough to carry off the long-lined classical fashions swept across the Channel by the revolution, with the sort of finely boned features that showed to good effect in the uncertain light of the faltering candles. But there the resemblance ended. There was nothing the least bit demure about the girl across the room. The light struck blue glints in the smoothly arranged mass of her black hair and reduced the fine fabric of her muslin gown to little more than a wisp.

  “She is lovely,” remarked Jane, in a considering sort of tone.