The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

by Lauren Willig

  For a moment I considered pushing the little red end-call button. But Pammy is a force of nature not to be denied. She’d only keep calling back till I gave in. I hit receive.

  ‘Hi, Pammy.’

  ‘What are you wearing tonight?’ she demanded without preamble.

  Oh, God, tonight. I’d completely forgotten. Damn. I knew I should never have picked up the phone.

  Pammy, as she airily informed people at cocktail parties, did PR, which, as far as I could tell, involved throwing very expensive parties on other people’s tabs. Tonight’s extravaganza celebrated the launch of the Covent Garden store of a hot new designer, hot and new meaning that the clothes were all either tattered in mysterious places, or made from exotic materials like genuine imported Tibetan yak skin (dry clean only). Pammy, who tended to know about these things, swore he was the next Marc Jacobs. It would be, like all of Pammy’s parties, hot and crowded and filled with impossibly glamorous people with hip bones so sharp they could qualify as concealed weapons.

  ‘Pammy, no; I can’t,’ I moaned.

  ‘Don’t even think of backing out,’ she ordered. ‘If you don’t show tonight, I will personally march over to Bayswater and drag you out.’

  She would, too. This was, after all, the same girl who had marched Andy Hochstetter over to me at a Goddard Gaities dance in sixth grade, and threatened to strangle him with his own tie if he wouldn’t dance.

  ‘I’m really tired…’ I hedged.

  Pammy snorted. ‘So take a nap! It’s not like you have to go anywhere.’

  Pammy had never grasped the concept that grad school actually required work.

  ‘I have a ton of manuscripts to read…’

  ‘These people have been dead for five hundred years, Ellie. What does an extra day matter?’

  Pammy had also never grasped the concept of time periods. I had given up trying to explain to Pammy that 1803 was only two hundred years ago, and, no, the Pink Carnation didn’t wear armour like the people in A Knight’s Tale.

  ‘It’s not like it’s going to make any difference to them if – what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  Since that last was followed by a screech of tires, it clearly wasn’t intended for me.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I shouted above the din of cursing motorists.

  ‘Idiot drivers,’ muttered Pammy, who’d nearly mown down three pedestrians driving me home from her flat two nights before. Her tone switched to wheedle mode. ‘Come on, Ellie, if you don’t go, you’re just going to sit alone in your flat feeling sorry for yourself. Wouldn’t you rather be out, doing something? It will be fun.’

  ‘Fun,’ I echoed flatly. Stick-thin models parading around in clothes that looked like something out of a surrealist painter’s disturbed dreams while the self-proclaimed glamorous screeched at each other over lukewarm glasses of champagne. Hmm, champagne. Pammy did generally order excellent alcohol.

  Pammy scented weakness. ‘Good! It’s just a few blocks off the Covent Garden Tube stop…’ Without pausing for breath she rattled off the address. ‘Did you get that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ellie!’

  I fetched pen and paper. One could sooner argue with a hurricane. ‘Repeat,’ I directed.

  By the time she was done, I’d covered two sides of a piece of notepaper. Knowing my propensity for getting lost, Pammy gave me what she calls Ellie directions: complicated lists of every single landmark in a ten-block radius of where I was supposed to be going. ‘If you see a Starbucks, you’ve gone too far,’ she finished. ‘And I’ll have my mobile on. I probably won’t be able to hear it,’ she added pragmatically, ‘but call if you get lost, and I’ll try to come out and find you.’

  ‘No Starbucks…’ I repeated, scribbling away. ‘Will anyone I know be there?’

  Pammy rattled off a list of names, some of which I recognised from her previous parties, including her current crush, an investment banking type notable only for his surprisingly bright ties.

  ‘And I’ve invited a few St Paul’s people,’ she finished, referring to the London private school she’d transferred to after leaving Chapin, ‘but I don’t think you’ve met any of them. Now,’ she said briskly, having got the preliminaries out of the way, ‘what are you going to wear? ‘

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ I admitted; Pammy’s parties were always impossible to dress for.

  Phone pressed to my ear, I wandered over to the wardrobe, and regarded my limited London wardrobe. The sight that greeted me was uninspiring. Tweed, tweed, everywhere, as far as the eye could see. All right, so I’d taken the whole dressing-like-an-academic thing a little too much to heart.

  ‘I can loan you something,’ Pammy offered a little too promptly. ‘There’s the cutest little outfit I bought just the other day…’

  ‘What about my little black dress?’ I countered, pushing past rows of herringbone and plaid.

  ‘Ugh,’ Pammy said eloquently. ‘It makes you look like a Chapin mother.’

  Now that wasn’t fair. True, it was a classic little black sheath dress, but it was made of a soft, clinging fabric that draped in a way utterly inappropriate for a parent–teacher meeting. I’d bought it miraculously on sale at Bergdorf’s the previous winter, and it had become my cocktail fallback dress. Definitely not a Pammy sort of outfit, though.

  As for what was a Pammy sort of outfit…‘Listen, I’m going down into the Tube now, so we might be cut off. But how about this. All you need are two scarves. Just tie one around your chest as a top, and the other—’

  Mercifully, the Tube yanked Pammy out of range before she could finish the thought. Even Scheherazade was allotted a few more layers than that.

  Slamming the wardrobe doors shut, I retreated to the bed. I’d deal with the outfit issue later. With any luck, Pammy wouldn’t change her mind and decide to show up at eight o’clock with an outfit that she just knew would look fabulous on me. The last time she had attempted to dress me for a party, it had involved a red leather bustier. Enough said.

  Plumping up my pillows, I fell gratefully back onto the bed, and regarded the plastic bundle from a prone position. Nap? Or manuscript? My body was definitely urging nap…but I found myself reaching for the manuscript anyway.

  Just one or two pages of Amy’s diary, I promised my tired body. Just enough to find out what happened when she went to view Lord Richard’s antiquities.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Dawn had barely broken over the spires of Notre Dame. In the twisted streets of the city, fires remained unlit and responsible citizens slumbered soundly in their beds. But in the Ministry of Police, Gaston Delaroche was already at his desk.

  Outside his office, four people stood waiting. One wore the clothes, and bore the reek, of an onion seller. He juggled three onions as he waited. Another was dressed for travel in spurs, cape, and hat. He feigned interest in the pattern of tiles on the floor, ducking the occasional flying onion. The third was female, a burly woman in brown wool with her hair piled atop her head, examining her nails in the flicker of the torches on the wall. The final member of the quartet was the sort of street urchin one might encounter on any street on any day in any major city, a skinny thing held together by dirt and rags. He stood picking at the specks on his arms.

  The silent denizens of the hallway possessed two things in common. The first was a certain blandness of expression. Despite their varied costumes, anyone walking down the hall would be hard-pressed, upon being asked, to remark upon the particulars of any one of them.

  The second common element was Delaroche.

  Each waited for admission to the inner sanctum, as they had waited each morning since he had summoned them. As they would continue to wait each morning until he gave them leave to go.

  They were his…ah, but spy was such a nasty word. They were his intelligence gatherers, his eyes, his ears, his pursuers of the elusive and the dangerous. Each had come to him through paths so shadowed that not even his extensive files bore the record
of their existence. Each owed him a bond of obligation as deep as life or death.

  By courtesy, the lady, however dubious her claim to that title, was summoned first, by a red-eyed sentry who opened the door at Delaroche’s command, and closed it again behind. It amused her to vary her accent as she spoke: one moment the purring tones of a polished courtesan, the next the shrill shriek of a fishmonger’s wife. In this patchwork way, she reported that Augustus Whittlesby had spent the past day prostrate at the feet of a minor statue of Pan, and the past evening pursuing his muse in the arms of one of the girls of Mme Pinpin’s house of pleasure.

  ‘Not enough. Not enough,’ muttered Delaroche, and waved her away.

  The onion seller entered next. He informed the assistant to the Minister of Police that Sir Percy Blakeney had passed the previous day reading in his library, playing piquet with his wife, and entertaining his brother and sister-in-law. No unknowns had entered the house nor had Sir Percy gone out.

  Third came the traveller, spurs clicking with authority against the tiled floor. His voice, when he spoke, failed to match his stride. Hesitant and apologetic, he confessed to losing Georges Marston at Mme Rochefort’s party, and only finding him again lying senseless in a cul de sac in the Latin Quarter.

  ‘Fool!’ Delaroche hissed, slamming his palm upon his desk. ‘Careless fool!’

  The traveller slunk out of the office, spurs grating against stone as he dragged his feet. The others drew back from him as if from one with the plague. One never knew how the taint of displeasure might spread.

  Last entered the street urchin, slipping through the door with the beggar’s ragged grace. In the harsh light of the candles on Delaroche’s desk – both illumination and weapon – the urchin’s begrimed face hovered uncertainly between youth and age.

  In a light voice that could have been a boy’s treble or a man’s tenor, he reported that Lord Richard Selwick seemingly had done nothing but engage in amorous endeavours. Two nights previous, Selwick had undertaken an assignation with a young woman in the Balcourt household.

  ‘And last night?’ Delaroche’s eyes narrowed.

  Last night, explained the urchin, Selwick had engaged in a brawl with Georges Marston over some wench in the Luxembourg Gardens – the urchin’s smudged face cheered somewhat at the mention of bloodshed – but once Marston had been knocked cold, not much of a fight at all, Selwick had gone off with the girl, engaging in activities better conducted behind closed shutters.

  ‘So Marston was felled by Selwick.’ Two suspects disqualified by a chit of a girl! Marston’s crumpled body in the park had seemed so promising, but to hear that his state was brought on by nothing more significant than a fracas over a female… Delaroche’s nostrils flared with ire. That left him, once again, with Sir Percy and Whittlesby. Delaroche’s mind sped feverishly back over the testimony of his agents. There must be something there. Some clue.

  The urchin’s lips twisted in the flickering candlelight into a fey smile. ‘Lord Richard Selwick,’ he added softly, ‘was hooded and masked.’

  Delaroche had been on the verge of dismissing his last and youngest agent; the boy’s words stayed his hand.

  ‘Masked.’

  ‘Lord Richard returned to his lodgings prior to both assignations. He emerged wearing a black cape, a black hood, and a black mask. A cape, hood, and mask such as are worn by the Purple Gentian.’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ Delaroche muttered to himself. ‘Anyone might wear a black cloak. Even the mask might be explained. We need more. We need…’ Delaroche fixed his ferocious gaze on his agent. ‘Two women, you say? One each night?’

  ‘Yes.’ The agent had learnt that it was best to answer simply.

  ‘Ah.’ Delaroche leant back in his chair with a nasty smile, a smile akin to that bestowed by the spider upon the fly. ‘Therein lies the answer to our riddle.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘But isn’t it obvious?’ Delaroche barked with humourless laughter. ‘Come! Even you must see the fatal flaw in his alibi! Selwick is…English!’

  ‘English.’ Understanding began to dawn in the agent’s eyes.

  Delaroche rubbed his palms together in an orgy of self-congratulation. ‘If Selwick were French, the tale would be believable. We could dismiss him now. But he is English! And everyone knows that the English are a cold, passionless people, incapable of grand stirrings of the blood. For an Englishman to have seduced two women in as many nights is inconceivable.’

  Rising from his chair, slowly, deliberately, Delaroche strolled to the window. ‘You,’ he said in a voice so pleasant that the boy-man, who had faced the point of a knife more than once without a wince, trembled with fear. ‘You are to watch Lord Richard Selwick day and night. Keep a detail of soldiers within call. Do not let him leave your sight.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Delaroche turned abruptly on one heel. ‘I said watch him! Go, damn you!’

  Without another word, the boy fled the room.

  Delaroche’s nose quivered like a dog scenting blood. The Purple Gentian was growing careless. One could tell by the foolish mistake he had made of trying to disguise his meetings with agents as affairs of the heart.

  Lord Richard Selwick had powerful friends in the government, friends no less formidable than the stepchildren of the First Consul. It was said that the First Consul himself was unaccountably fond of the man. But how fond would the First Consul remain of his director of Egyptian antiquities once his less scholarly activities came to light?

  Delaroche’s lips curved into the shape of a scimitar. ‘One more mistake, Selwick. All it will take is one more mistake.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘Good morning, slugabed!’ Jane’s voice came from somewhere close at hand. Amy rolled over, the covers still bunched up around her shoulders, as Jane continued, with the unconscious condemnation of the naturally early riser, ‘It’s past eleven already. You’ve lost half the day.’

  ‘No great loss,’ muttered Amy. Despite the comfort of the familiar dialogue, a sense of malaise weighed heavily over her. Her eyes felt scratchy under their lids and the back of her throat ached as though with the onset of the grippe. Memories of the night before began to return slowly, in patches. Marston on the ground. All the stars shining at her. The Purple Gentian telling her…oh. Amy squeezed her eyes even more tightly shut. As if shutting her eyes could block out the memory of the Gentian saying, ‘We can’t see each other anymore.’

  ‘I brought you chocolate,’ Jane’s familiar voice wheedled. ‘And I have something to tell you.’

  Amy slowly pushed the covers back from her chin, and blinked blearily at Jane. In her Grecian-style gown, her hair in a knot at the back of her head, a pile of papers in one hand, and a fluted chocolate pot in the other, Jane looked a bit like a minor classical deity. Amy envied her cousin’s serenity.

  ‘I thought that would roust you out,’ Jane said with some satisfaction. But her tone changed as she took in Amy’s reddened eyes. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked anxiously.

  The sight of her cousin exuding love, concern, and hot chocolate – since Jane, focused entirely on Amy, hadn’t noticed the way the chocolate pot in her hand was tilting, or the trickle of chocolate freckling the pale blue counterpane – made tears prick in Amy’s eyes.

  Pulling her pillow over her head, Amy grumbled, ‘Not if you wake me at this hour of the morning.’

  ‘I’m not sure this even counts as morning anymore.’ Jane put down her papers, tugged the pillow away, and handed a reasonably dry-eyed Amy a porcelain cup of lukewarm chocolate.

  ‘What happened last night?’ Jane asked, settling herself down on the bed in the hollow next to Amy’s hip. Her skirts blended with the sheets, white on white. ‘I stopped by after I heard your door click closed, but you were lying so still I couldn’t bear to disturb you. Did you speak to your Purple Gentian?’

  ‘I think we may have to restore the monarchy without the Purple Gentian,’ Amy s
aid, her eyes on her cup of chocolate. She looked up at Jane with a false, strained smile. ‘That will give us much more freedom of movement, don’t you think?’

  Jane watched the contortions of Amy’s lips with alarm. ‘What’s wrong, Amy?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. The Purple Gentian and I just realised we had different…’ Different depths of emotion? Different ideas of the value of a kiss? Amy pressed her lips together tightly. ‘Objectives,’ she finished brightly. ‘He wants to stop the invasion of England, and I want to restore the crown. That’s all.’

  ‘The two aren’t necessarily incompatible.’

  The Purple Gentian seemed to think so. He found her a distracting infatuation, incompatible with stopping the invasion of England. Incompatible with him.

  The rich chocolate tasted like acid in Amy’s mouth. ‘Who needs the Purple Gentian?’ declared Amy, hauling herself up on her elbows. ‘Just because he’s’ – handsome, charming, witty, tender, her traitor mind supplied – ‘had more experience doesn’t mean he’s indispensable. We’ll do just as well on our own.’

  An ache of emptiness overtook Amy on that last word. Maybe she could pretend she had never found him, never believed she loved him, had lost nothing but daydreams.

  ‘Something happened last night with the Purple Gentian. Was he uncouth?’ Jane asked darkly. ‘Did he hurt you?’

  ‘No! Nothing like that. He just—’

  ‘Just what?’ prompted Jane, a deadly hint of steel in her grey eyes.

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  Jane refilled Amy’s cup of chocolate and handed it back to her. ‘It can’t be that complicated.’