The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

by Lauren Willig

  ‘I feel an idiot for not having realised. If I hadn’t been so convinced that he was utterly under Bonaparte’s thumb…’

  ‘It is a wonderful disguise, isn’t it?’ Henrietta belatedly remembered that they were excoriating Richard, not praising him. ‘But he still should have told you.’

  ‘What hurts the most is that he didn’t trust me enough to tell me,’ Amy confided. ‘Just now, when I told him I loved another, he could have made amends by simply saying…’

  ‘“By the way, that other happens to be me? Sorry, forgot to tell you before?”’ Henrietta supplied.

  Amy grinned despite herself. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Oh no. That would have been far too easy. He’s an absolute dear, and a wonderful brother, but he is a boy.’ Henrietta shook her head in irritation. ‘He has delusions of authority. They all do. He thinks he always knows what’s best for everyone and how to organise their lives.’

  ‘That’s exactly the problem!’ Amy waved her hands about excitedly. ‘He needs to be shown that he can’t always organise everything for everyone.’

  Henrietta looked gratified. ‘Oh, absolutely!’

  ‘Something must be done.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Henrietta nodded emphatically. ‘They need to be taken down a peg or two occasionally. For the good of womankind.’

  ‘Amy, are you going to?’ Jane put in.

  ‘Do you have a plan already? Oh, please tell!’ Henrietta swished her long hair out of her face, and leant forward imploringly. ‘I won’t utter a word.’

  ‘We do have a plan,’ Amy uttered thrillingly.

  Henrietta listened, enthralled. ‘Smashing!’ she exclaimed, when Amy and Jane had finished filling in the details. ‘The Pink Carnation! I love it! Especially the name.’ She giggled. ‘How may I help?’

  ‘Shhh!’ Jane hissed abruptly. ‘He’s coming!’

  All three girls instantly sat up straight and folded their hands in their laps.

  Richard glowered suspiciously at his sister as he stepped out onto the balcony. Henrietta smiled at him with an innocence that informed him instantly that his worst fears were correct.

  Richard kissed his sister on the cheek, and bowed over Jane’s hand.

  He didn’t bow over Amy’s hand. He didn’t nod. He simply looked at her. Only there was nothing at all simple about the way he was looking at her.

  His eyes burnt into hers with a mixture of longing and pain that held Amy transfixed. Returning the stare, pain for pain, longing for longing, Amy fought the urge to grab his hand. Even had she not had her pride to consider, a hand would have been redundant. Their eyes locked them closer than any handclasp, closer than speech.

  Richard broke the gaze first.

  With a toneless ‘Good night, Miss Balcourt,’ he turned on his heel and left the balcony. His unyielding back strode out the French doors, through the salon, and disappeared from sight.

  Richard’s sister slid her arm through Amy’s and squeezed. ‘Courage,’ Henrietta cheered her. ‘Remember the good of womankind.’

  ‘Right,’ Amy muttered, eyes still on the door through which Richard had exited a moment before. ‘The good of womankind.’

  She could be heard muttering the phrase through her teeth at intervals for the rest of the evening.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  In a dark house in a dark street in the predawn blackness of the He de la Cité, a single candle burnt. The grudging light of the candle illuminated a chamber as meagre as the single flame itself. A narrow bed, unwelcoming and unslept in, stood against one wall, flanked by a barren nightstand. A pair of ancient leather slippers lay at uneven angles on the scarred wooden floor. In a straight-backed chair by the room’s sole window sat Gaston Delaroche.

  At half past two the signal came, the sound of an owl hooting in the alleyway behind the window. The Assistant Minister of Police raised the sash of the window, and a slight, dark figure joined the shadows under the crooked overhang of the second story of the old house. If words were whispered, the sound was submerged under the million nighttime noises of the crowded street. The abrupt snuffle and hiss of snoring men, the creak of rope beds, and the rustle of feather ticks created a monotonous hum. From the upper reaches of Delaroche’s boarding house came the sharply muffled cry of a small child, and a man’s irritated grumble. The sash of Delaroche’s window slid silently closed. The shadows were once again merely shadows.

  The warped table tottered as Delaroche seated himself again in the rickety chair. The candle flame flickered, threatening to go out. Delaroche appeared not to notice.

  Twice. Lord Richard Selwick had been seen twice in the company of Mlle Amy Balcourt. They had been seen first in the courtyard of the Tuilleries. Later, Selwick had been spied entering the gates of Balcourt’s town house with a larger party, consisting, Delaroche’s spy informed him, of the Englishman’s family.

  What drove a man to see a woman twice in one day?

  Delaroche rapidly dismissed the possibility that the Balcourt girl might be an agent. Her brother was well known as a hanger-on at the First Consul’s court. That in itself was no guarantee of the girl’s innocence. Family ties, ha! Blood might be thicker than water on the floor of the interrogation chamber, but Delaroche had long since concluded that the truism had few other applications. Family ties were an impediment. A prop for the weak, an encumbrance for the strong.

  But Delaroche would have heard long since had a new spy been in operation in Paris. There would have been ripples and reverberations across the dark pools of his subterranean world, whispers and rumours. There had been none. The Balcourt chit was innocent – of spying, at least.

  Which brought Delaroche back to his initial question: Why would the Purple Gentian waste precious hours on a chit of a girl?

  It was at the Balcourt town house that Lord Richard had first been spotted in amorous embrace with an unnamed female two nights previously. Delaroche himself had observed them in flirtation at one of Mme Bonaparte’s salons. A slow, contemptuous smile broke across the face of the Assistant Minister of Police.

  Every man had a weakness, even the oh-so-intrepid Purple Gentian.

  ‘One mistake, Selweeck,’ Delaroche crowed softly in the darkness. ‘All it takes is one fatal mistake.’

  To snare the man, one need only lay hold of the girl.

  Delaroche snuffed the candle.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Unbeknownst to either the Ministry of Police or the Purple Gentian, in a large town house on the other side of the city, the League of the Pink Carnation was planning its first escapade. Considerable thought was expended as to how the illustrious career of the Pink Carnation ought to begin. Miss Gwen, under whose high-necked bodice lurked the sort of bloodthirsty spirit that accounted watching gladiators being gored by lions rather good fun, would be satisfied with nothing less than running through a Frenchman (Miss Gwen graciously left the choice of Frenchman up to committee), and hanging him by his feet from the blade of the guillotine.

  Jane, after a startled look at Miss Gwen, suggested filching some files from Delaroche’s office, a plan which was instantly voted down by both of the others; Amy dismissed it as insufficiently daring, Miss Gwen as boringly bloodless. Amy’s plan A, that they sneak into the Temple prison in cunning disguises and liberate some deserving prisoners, met with equal scorn. As did plan B, plan C, and even plan D, which involved dressing up in the clothes of the previous decade, dusting themselves all over with flour, and flitting about Bonaparte’s bedside as the ghosts of murdered aristocrats. ‘Like Richard III being haunted by his victims!’ explained Amy with relish. Miss Gwen, scenting potential fodder for her horrid novel, was intrigued, but in the end ruled that scaling the windows of the Tuilleries dressed in three-foot-wide panniers and covered in flour would be both difficult and messy.

  Jane’s alarmed face relaxed.

  ‘We don’t have to do anything too spectacular,’ she pointed out hastily, before Amy could outline p
lan E. ‘After all, this is merely a calling card. Something to make the Minister of Police aware that he has a new adversary.’

  ‘A better adversary,’ amended Miss Gwen with a sniff.

  ‘Since our real mission is the retrieval of the Swiss gold,’ Jane continued, ‘shouldn’t we keep this one simple?’

  ‘Oh! I have an idea!’ Amy sat bolt upright on the settee, blue eyes gleaming with mischief. ‘Why don’t we sneak into his bedchamber and leave a note and a pink carnation on his pillow?’

  Miss Gwen’s thin lips, which had begun to move automatically into their sneer position, relaxed into speculation instead.

  ‘I like it!’ seconded Jane, sounding rather insultingly surprised.

  ‘We could write it in rhyme,’ giggled Amy. ‘How about, ‘Seek me where and when you will/ The Pink Carnation will best you still’?’

  ‘It doesn’t scan,’ said Miss Gwen dampeningly.

  ‘Well, I only just made it up off the top of my head.’

  Miss Gwen’s narrowed eyes implied that she thought little of the top of Amy’s head.

  ‘Maybe we should stick to prose,’ Jane suggested tactfully. ‘Something—’

  ‘I know, simple.’ Amy cast Jane a fond look. ‘In that case, why not just leave him a note telling him that he can thank the Pink Carnation for the disappearance of the Swiss gold? We could leave it right before taking the gold.’

  The idea passed the Committee of the Pink Carnation by unanimous vote. It all seemed an excellent idea at the time, with even Miss Gwen deigning a rare nod of approval. Jane, the Carnation with the neatest handwriting, drew up the note to Delaroche. Miss Gwen procured their costumes, a task accomplished with one quick raid on the grooms’ quarters. Discovering the best time to enter Delaroche’s lodgings was left to Amy, who struck up a conversation with Delaroche’s groom as she waited for the Balcourt carriage to be brought around after an evening party at the Tuilleries. If he was nonplussed at being addressed by a lady, the groom failed to show it. He proved surprisingly helpful in apprising her of his master’s schedule, repeating several times that Delaroche had an engagement outside of Paris on the evening of the thirtieth. Amy ought to have been pleased that it had been so easy. But by the time two days had passed, Amy found herself wishing she had been assigned something a little more, well, active. Something that would keep her mind off Lord Richard.

  This latter task wasn’t in the least helped by the fact that Lady Uppington had enthusiastically adopted both Jane and Amy, and persisted, with significant sidelong glances at Amy, in relating many adorable tales of Richard’s youth. Amy tried not to listen too eagerly, but how could she help herself? She could just see a miniature Richard jauntily levelling a sword at a yew bush, and from there it was only a short step to picturing the very devastatingly adult Richard facing off against Marston, and from there… From there, Amy tended to blush a very deep red at memories that had no business coming to mind in the presence of Richard’s mother and sister.

  If she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t just in the presence of Richard’s family members that memories plagued her. They leapt into her head when she was plotting with Miss Gwen, flitted in front of her when she was brushing her hair at her mirror, and positively taunted her as she lay unsleeping in bed. It was utterly infuriating to be sitting at the breakfast table, staring at the remains of a brioche, and to hear the whisper of the Purple Gentian’s voice in her ear and feel the brush of his hand across her cheek. And Amy’s heart leapt painfully into her throat every time she saw a black cloak swishing down the street.

  Why couldn’t he leave her alone? Oh, but there was the rub – Lord Richard, and his alter ego, the Purple Gentian, were leaving her alone. When she and Jane called on Lady Uppington and Henrietta for tea, he kept scrupulously to his study. He stayed towards the other side of the salon at Mme Bonaparte’s receptions. (Amy surrounded herself with very tall officers to physically block off the temptation of glancing in his direction to see if he might possibly be glancing at her.) When she loitered in the corridors of the Tuilleries on her way back from her weekly English lesson with Hortense, he whisked so rapidly around a corner that all she saw was the glint of a familiar golden head. Nor had there been any midnight visitations from the cloaked and masked form of the Purple Gentian.

  But that was all right, wasn’t it? She only had to see him once more, one meeting to crow over her triumph, and then he’d flee back to England in embarrassment, and she would be done with him forever. No more Lord Richard Selwick. No more Purple Gentian.

  Amy scowled at yet another mutilated brioche.

  On the day the Swiss gold was due to arrive, Amy paced back and forth in front of her window, watching as the streaks of sunset wended their painfully slow way across the sky – why wouldn’t the sun just set already? Amy began dressing a good hour before the time they had appointed to leave, drawing out the process as long as she possibly could.

  Binding her breasts proved much more difficult than Amy had imagined. How did all of those Shakespeare heroines who disguised themselves as boys manage it? Amy scowled at the long strip of white linen that had untied itself – again. After another three tries, and several cries of pain, the binding found its way onto the fire. After all, the shirt was loose, and billowy, and maybe if she hunched over a bit, no one would notice.

  Wriggling her nose in distaste, she shrugged into the grimy trousers – their colour was indeterminate, and might have been anything from black to brown originally – and pulled the coarse beige linen shirt over her head. It smelt regrettably of stable-boy.

  Fully garbed, down to a pair of muddy brown boots, Amy found herself once again without anything to do – and with an offensive stench. Next time, she resolved grimly, they would go disguised as something more glamorous. Something less smelly. Maybe they should have pretended to be ladies of the night going to meet a client.

  Jane rapped on the door as Amy glowered at an infuriating streak of orange in the darkening sky.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked.

  ‘An hour ago.’

  Jane’s lips quirked as she looked pointedly at the grimy men’s clothes and the streaks of soot adorning Amy’s face. ‘I guessed as much. I just spoke to Miss Gwen and she says she’ll meet us back here at eleven so we can all leave for the warehouse together.’

  ‘She’s not going to go with us to leave the note?’ Amy scraped back her hair with one hand, and felt around on her dressing table for a ribbon with the other.

  ‘No.’ Jane took the ribbon from her and began tightly winding the mass of dark curls so they would fit under a knit cap. ‘She’s saving herself for the real mission. When I went in, she was skewering pillows with her parasol.’

  ‘Some chaperone,’ muttered Amy.

  ‘Fortunately for us,’ Jane countered wryly, knotting the ribbon. ‘I’m going to get dressed – are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Just fidgety.’ Amy demonstrated the proof of her words by resuming her pacing, scattering flecks of dried mud across the carpet. ‘But I’ll be perfectly happy tomorrow once Lord Richard is gnashing his teeth in frustration because we bested him.’

  ‘Aren’t we supposed to be besting Bonaparte?’ Jane inquired delicately.

  ‘Two birds with one stone,’ proclaimed Amy with a toss of her head.

  Jane shook her head and headed for the door. ‘I’ll be ready to leave in five minutes,’ she reassured her cousin.

  Amy glanced at the clock. Nearly half past seven. By eight o’clock…

  At half past seven, in a small house across the city, Geoff poked his head around the door of Richard’s study.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘You can come in, you know’ Richard said crossly, pushing back his chair from the desk. ‘I’m not going to bite.’

  ‘Do you promise?’ Geoff pushed the door the rest of the way open. Richard kicked a chair in his direction. Since the floor of the study was covered by a Persian rug, the chair didn’t
go awfully far, but Geoff took the point and the chair. ‘I thought you were going to skewer Miles with your butter knife tonight at dinner.’

  ‘Well…Miles.’ Richard shrugged as though that explained it. ‘Brandy?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Geoff accepted a snifter. ‘Why don’t you just talk to her?’

  Richard stiffened, the brandy decanter poised over Geoff’s glass. ‘To whom?’

  Geoff gave him a look. ‘The Queen of Sheba, who else?’ Richard focused on pouring the amber liquid. ‘Amy, of course.’

  ‘Oh.’ Richard corked the brandy decanter and sat back in his chair. ‘Darts?’ he suggested hopefully.

  Geoff, however, was not to be deterred. ‘You are going to do something about her after tonight’s mission, aren’t you? I don’t really care what, but you’ve been increasingly unpleasant to live with.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. Well?’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ Richard grumbled, not meeting Geoff’s eye. That was the problem with friends who had known you since you were just out of the nursery. It was far too easy for them to detect lies – and they had no shame about pointing them out. All right, so Richard had thought about it. Incessantly. He had rehearsed about twenty variants of a speech along the lines of, ‘Only the need to save England prevented me from revealing to you…’ No, he had scrapped that one as too pompous. ‘By the way, thought you might like to know, I’m the Purple Gentian. Will you marry me?’ seemed a bit too offhand. And they just got worse from there.

  ‘I was thinking about doing a bit of reconnoitring before tonight’s mission,’ Richard announced loudly. True, Geoff was only two feet away, but raising his voice helped to drown out all of that silent scepticism radiating from his friend.

  Richard hauled himself out of his chair. He hadn’t really considered reconnoitring before, but now that he’d declared the intent to do so, it did seem rather a good idea. It would give him something to do, keep his mind off Amy, and get him in the right mood for tonight. ‘I might drop by Delaroche’s lodgings and see if there’s anything about the gold in his secret files there.’