The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

by Lauren Willig

  The box toppled over onto the parquet floor with a tremendous crash. Lid intact.

  Hands on her hips, Amy glowered at the crate. She would have to find a poker.

  That was when Amy heard the sound. It was half a breath, half a groan. Like the sigh of a spirit in torment. A frisson of terror quivered through Amy. Oh, for heaven’s sake! She didn’t believe in ghosts. Muttering to herself in annoyance, Amy tottered towards the edge of the ballroom. It was more likely wind she had heard. A house of this age nearly always had draughts. Or rats. Ugh. Amy didn’t like to think of herself as squeamish, but she could definitely do without rats. Pulling her skirts close to her ankles, she peered along the floorboards on either side of the room.

  Someone had left a boot dangling off the edge of a sofa. With a leg still inside it.

  On a sofa by the wall, under a portrait of Mme de la Valliere, lay a sleeping man with a bloody bandage wrapped around his brow.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Jane! You’ll never believe what I found!’

  Racing into Jane’s room without knocking, Amy slammed the door behind her and collapsed panting against the doorframe.

  ‘Two skeletons, three ghosts, and a lunatic in the attic?’ Jane suggested absently.

  ‘A wounded man!’

  ‘What?’ Jane dropped the heavy tome she had been reading into her lap. ‘Oh dear, now I’ve lost my page. Amy, a servant with a scratched finger does not count as a wounded man.’

  ‘Very funny. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, and – do you have smelling salts?’

  ‘I do have smelling salts, but why do you need…?’ Jane put her book down on the coverlet next to her and fixed confused eyes on her cousin.

  ‘Well, I wanted to wake him up to question him, but I didn’t want to shake him, because heaven only knows what that would do to a man with a head injury – oh, we don’t have time for this, Jane! We have to go back to the west wing!’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if he’ll be going anywhere,’ said Jane mildly, searching in her reticule. She held up a small, green glass vial. ‘What were you planning to ask him?’

  Practically dancing with impatience, Amy yanked her cousin out the door. ‘Where the Purple Gentian is, of course!’

  ‘What makes you think…?’ Jane began, but Amy was muttering to herself about shorter ways to the west wing.

  ‘If we go down the front stairs and to our right…’ Amy suited action to words, running towards the stairs. Jane caught her hand.

  ‘We’ll be less conspicuous if we walk.’

  Amy cast her cousin an agonised glance, but admitted the wisdom of her words. She had been fortunate enough not to see any servants on her hectic flight back from the west wing, but the odds of escaping the staff twice were slim. Wait – she had seen Edouard’s valet, who had been emerging from her brother’s room with a pile of crumpled linen in his arms. Oh well, if he told Edouard, she could always explain that she had been looking at the tapestries when a rat jumped out at her, or something like that. They descended the stairs at a sedate pace that made Amy dig her fingernails into her palms with impatience. At the base of the stairs, they checked quickly for servants. Although the candles were still lit in the foyer, nobody seemed to be about. To their left lay the rooms of the east wing, to their right, a seeming dead end. Now that Amy knew what she was looking for, the entrance to the west wing was as clearly marked as though someone had slapped a sign on it. Edouard had hung yet another tapestry, this time one depicting the rape of Lucrece. As the entrance downstairs was more prominent than the one upstairs, Edouard had taken an extra precaution. In front of the tapestry, he had placed a bust of Julius Caesar on a marble pedestal.

  Tense with excitement, Amy pointed towards Julius. ‘There. That’s the entrance.’

  Jane picked up a small candelabrum from a marble chest designed to look like a sarcophagus. ‘Shall we?’

  Together, they lifted the heavy tapestry high enough to clear the candles and slipped underneath. They found themselves in an anteroom, a pretty little chamber with gilded walls and dainty chairs that looked as though they would collapse if anyone so much as looked at them. The antechamber led into a music room, complete with a large pianoforte, painted with scenes of pastoral merriment. Jane looked longingly at the yellowed keys, but Amy hurried her onwards into the ballroom. At first, Jane couldn’t see anything at all. Her vision was entirely blocked by piles and piles of brown paper packages.

  ‘There wasn’t anything interesting in them,’ Amy whispered as they skirted around the piles. ‘Just muslin.’

  ‘What an odd place to keep muslin.’

  ‘Maybe they ran out of space in the airing cupboard. My wounded man is just down there, on the sofa underneath Mme de la Vallière.’ Amy took the candelabrum from Jane and hurried forward. ‘I couldn’t get the lids off the crates, but I think—’ Amy broke off as she brandished the flames above the sofa to illuminate…absolutely nothing.

  ‘Where is he?’ In her agitation. Amy forgot to whisper. She waved the candles about, peering under the sofa, running to the next sofa and the next. ‘I know he was right there! Right under Mme de la Vallière… He was fast asleep!’

  ‘Amy…’

  Amy whirled around to face Jane, flames swirling with her in a diabolical sort of halo. ‘Please, please don’t tell me I must have imagined him, Jane. I know I saw him!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ Jane said gravely. ‘Bring the candle over here.’

  Complying, Amy followed Jane’s gaze. Against the faded white silk of the couch burnt a streak of fresh blood.

  Jane experimentally reached out a finger. ‘He can’t have been moved more than a few minutes ago. It’s still wet.’

  ‘But who moved him? And where?’ Amy swivelled with the candle as though the malefactors might be hiding in the corners of the room.

  ‘They likely took him out through the French doors into the courtyard,’ Jane said thoughtfully.

  Amy raced to the nearest door and pulled it open. For something so begrimed with age, it opened without a squeak.

  ‘It’s been newly oiled,’ commented Jane under her breath.

  Thrusting the candles at Jane, Amy dashed down a shallow flight of three steps and out into the garden while Jane examined the doors. It hadn’t rained recently, so the earth wasn’t damp enough to hold footprints, nor was there mud to track along the stone paths. And there were doors, doors, doors on three sides. Doors into the east wing, the north wing, the west wing. Far too many doors. The man could have been carried through any one of them. Amy prowled the perimeter of the garden, peering through door after door. Unlike the windows and French doors to the west wing, the ones to the east and north were well scrubbed. Amy peered in turn into two drawing rooms, another music room, a breakfast room, and an immense state dining room that took up a large portion of the north wing.

  ‘Amy.’ Jane was whispering at her shoulder, the candles in her hand casting odd shadows on the stone of the balustrade. ‘Come back, I want to show you something.’

  ‘They must have taken him out through one of these rooms.’

  Jane considered. ‘And then downstairs through the servants’ quarters? I think you may have lost your wounded man, Amy.’ They were making their way around the garden back to the ballroom doors. Jane paused next to an armless statue of Aphrodite. ‘None of this explains why he was lying in the ballroom with…what kind of wound was it?’

  ‘On his head.’ Amy gestured to her own head to demonstrate where. ‘I couldn’t tell exactly what it was since it was bandaged, but there seemed to be some sort of gash on the left side of his head, or at least that’s where the blood was on the bandage.’

  ‘He could,’ Jane commented slowly, ‘have simply hit his head on something while unloading those packages from the carriage. There might be as simple an explanation as that.’

  ‘Then why all the subterfuge? Why hide him in the ballroom and then whisk him away again?’ A breeze whipped Amy�
��s dark curls into her face and she hastily pushed them out of her way.

  ‘He could have felt better and left.’

  ‘Really, Jane!’ The warmth had departed with the sun, and Amy shuddered in the twilight chill, feeling the evening breeze pierce the thin fabric of her frock. ‘Can you really believe that?’

  Jane leant briefly against Aphrodite, looking perturbed. She finally straightened up and made a face at Amy. ‘No, I can’t. Come with me and I’ll show you why.’

  Amy hurried with her cousin back to the ballroom, where Jane paused just within the entrance.

  ‘Yes?’ Amy prompted Jane, who had a regrettable habit of thinking things through before acting on them.

  ‘Look at this.’ Jane indicated the door.

  ‘It’s dirty?’

  ‘That’s just it. It’s too dirty. It looks like someone deliberately took garden dirt and smeared it along the glass. See? Here and here? It’s too thick and too uniform to be merely dust and age. It’s as if…’

  ‘…someone didn’t want anyone seeing in!’ Amy finished for her excitedly. Jane quickly moved the candles aside as Amy leant in to peer at the dirt on the doors, her short curls swinging recklessly close to the flames.

  Jane nodded. ‘That’s just it. But why? What does Edouard have to hide?’

  Amy shut the door with a decisive click, and beamed at her cousin. ‘But, Jane, that’s obvious. Don’t you see? It’s proof that he’s in league with the Purple Gentian!’

  The Purple Gentian swung down from his carriage in the courtyard of his own modest bachelor residence – only five bedrooms and a small staff of ten servants, not counting his valet, cook, and coachman – with a heartfelt sigh of relief.

  ‘Zounds, Geoff, it’s good to be back,’ he announced to the slender man in waistcoat and shirtsleeves who waited by the door.

  ‘After your dangerous mission into the heart of London society?’ his second-oldest friend responded with the quiet humour that had drawn Geoff into Richard and Miles’s circle at Eton.

  ‘Don’t mock,’ Richard chided, pulling off his hat and scrubbing one hand through his hair. ‘I only just made it out of there alive.’

  Having displayed their decades of affection by a brisk handshake, Richard surged into the foyer and began dropping his hat, cloak, and gloves on any surfaces that presented themselves. His butler, Stiles, cast his eyes up to the ceiling as he followed in Richard’s wake, gathering up gloves from the floor, cloak from a chair, and hat from the doorknob.

  ‘Will that be all, my lord?’ Stiles inquired in the afflicted tones of King Lear.

  ‘Could you see what Cook can rummage up for me? I’m famished.’

  ‘As you wish, my lord,’ Stiles intoned, looking, if possible, even more pained than before, and hobbled his way out in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘He does make a convincing octogenarian,’ Richard commented to Geoff as they headed for the dining room in the optimistic anticipation that food would rapidly be forthcoming. ‘Hell, if I didn’t know better, I would be fooled.’

  Geoff darted into the study and emerged shuffling a stack of papers. ‘You’re not the only one he’s fooled. I gave him last Saturday off, thinking he would wash the grey out of his hair, do the rounds of the taverns, what have you. Instead, he pulled up a chair before the kitchen fire, threw an afghan around his shoulders, and complained about his lumbago.’

  The two friends exchanged looks of mingled amusement and distress.

  ‘Well, good butlers are hard to find…’ commented Richard.

  ‘And Stiles will be with you for a great many decades to come,’ concluded Geoff.

  ‘That’s the last time we accept an out-of-work actor into the League,’ groaned Richard. ‘I suppose it could have been worse – he could have had delusions of being Julius Caesar and gone about in a toga.’

  ‘He would have fit right in with the members of the Council of Five Hundred,’ Geoff commented wryly, referring to the legislative body set up by the revolutionaries in 1795 in an attempt to imitate classical models of government. ‘About half of them were convinced they were Brutus.’

  Richard shook his head sadly. ‘They read too many classics; such men are dangerous. At any rate, I prefer Stiles’s current delusion. I take it, as matters stand, that he hasn’t lost all track of why he’s really here.’

  ‘If anything, he’s entered into it with even more gusto ever since he decided that he really is an eighty-year-old butler. He plays cards with Fouché’s butler every Wednesday – apparently they exchange remedies for their rheumatism and complain about the poor quality of employers nowadays,’ Geoff added with a twinkle in his eye. ‘And he’s been carrying on a rather bizarre – if informative – flirtation with one of the upstairs maids at the Tuilleries.’

  ‘Bizarre?’ Richard sniffed hopefully as he entered the dining room, but comestibles had not preceded them.

  Geoff pulled out a chair towards the head of the table and sent the pile of papers he had been holding scooting across the polished wood towards Richard. ‘He attained her good graces by complimenting her special formula for silver polish. They then proceeded to the intimacies of cleaning crystal.’

  ‘Good God.’ Richard began rifling through the stack of correspondence that had accumulated in his absence. ‘To each his own, I suppose.’

  The pile Geoff had brought him contained the usual accumulations – reports from his estate manager, invitations to balls, and perfumed letters from Bonaparte’s promiscuous sister Pauline. Pauline had been trying to entice Richard into her bed since he had returned from Egypt, and the amount of perfume she poured on her letters increased with each failed attempt. Richard could smell the latest all the way from the bottom of the pile.

  ‘How was London?’ Geoff asked, signalling to a footman to fetch the claret decanter. ‘You look like you’re in need of a restorative.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Richard abandoned his letters and flung himself into a chair across the table from Geoff. ‘Mother must have dragged me to every major gathering in London. If there was an affair of over three hundred people, I was there. I attended enough musicals to render me tone deaf, if not deaf in actuality. I—’

  ‘No more, please,’ Geoff shook his head. ‘I refuse to believe that it could have all been that bad.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Richard raised one brow. He shot his friend a swift, sideways glance. ‘Mary Alsworthy asked after you.’

  ‘And?’ Geoff’s voice was studiedly unconcerned.

  ‘I told her you had taken up with a Frenchwoman of ill repute and were currently expecting your third illegitimate child. By the way, you’re hoping for a girl this time.’

  Geoff choked on his claret. ‘You didn’t. I’m sure I would have heard from my mother by now if you had.’

  Richard tipped his chair back with a sigh of pure regret. ‘No, I didn’t. But I wanted to. It would have been informative to see if she could count high enough to realise three children in less than two years was an impossibility.’

  Geoff looked away, displaying a deep interest in the arrangement of silver on the sideboard behind Richard. ‘There were a number of interesting developments while you were away.’

  Richard let the subject drop. With any luck, by the time Geoff returned to England some other poor blighter would have fallen prey to Mary Alsworthy’s overused lures.

  Richard leant across the table, green eyes glittering. ‘What sort of developments?’

  Geoff regaled him with tales of changes in security at the Ministry of Police (‘Rather a case of closing the stable door once the horses have fled, don’t you think?’ remarked Richard smugly), the frustrated ambitions of Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat (‘A weak-willed man, if ever I saw one,’ commented Geoff. ‘He may be of use to us yet.’), and strange goings-on along the coast.

  Richard’s ears pricked up. ‘Do you think he could be shipping munitions in for the invasion of England?’ There was no need to ask whom Richard
meant by ‘he.’

  ‘That’s still unclear. We haven’t been able to get anyone close enough to see what’s being transported. Our connection in Calais—’

  ‘The innkeeper at the Sign of the Scratching Cat?’

  ‘The very one. He’s noticed an unusual amount of activity over the past few months. The serving wench at the Drowned Rat in Le Havre has similar reports. She says she saw a group of men transferring a series of large packages from a Channel packet to an unmarked carriage, and taking off down the road towards Paris.’

  ‘Could it be just the usual smuggling activity?’ Richard nodded his thanks as the footman set a bowl of potato-and-leek soup down before him, trying to quell the anticipation thrilling through him at Geoff’s news. He felt like a hound eager to bounce off after a fox. Of course, he had better make jolly sure first that it was a fox, and not just a rabbit, or a bunch of waving leaves. Or something like that. Richard rapidly abandoned the metaphor. Ever since war had broken out between England and France, the smugglers of both countries had done a brisk trade, hauling French brandies and silks to England, and returning laden with English goods. There had been one or two occasions in the past where Richard had gone haring off into the night, convinced he was on the trail of French agents carrying valuable intelligence to England, only to wind up with a boat full of disgruntled French smugglers and ten-year-old brandy. Not that Richard minded the brandy, but still…

  ‘There is that,’ Geoff conceded. ‘But Stiles heard from Fouché’s butler that the Ministry of Police has been very quietly detailing men to guard shipments of something coming in from Switzerland. He wasn’t sure what, and he didn’t know when – at least not yet – but he did say that it was top priority, whatever it was.’