by Лорен Уиллиг
"Surely there must have been someone who spoke English?"
"Probably off on coffee break," said Colin dryly. "Or just enjoying watching the English bloke make a prat of himself."
"You never know, they might have just been on strike," I provided. "I gather that's pretty much the norm over there."
"All English speakers go slow for a day?"
"It gives whole new meaning to the English-Speaking Union! Maybe that's what happened to the mimes. Being French, they went on strike, and have been doomed to communicate through hand signals ever since, like linguistic gypsies."
Don't ask me where the mimes came from. They just popped out, and once out, refused to go back.
"And the painted faces?"
"An attempt to go incognito, so people won't keep shutting them into boxes. Naturally."
"Naturally," agreed Colin, looking rather bemused. "I don't know why I didn't think of it before."
"It takes a superior intelligence. And years of painstaking observation of the mime in its natural habitat." I hoped Colin wouldn't ask what that was, since I had no idea. Every now and again, my mouth detaches from my brain, and horrible things happen. "How did we get on mimes, again?" I asked hastily.
"It all comes back to the French, somehow or other." Cinching the belt of his raincoat closed—tied, not buckled—he asked, "How is the Pink Carnation?"
"Never been better," I said cheerfully, concealing my disappointment at the signs of his imminent departure. Why wouldn't he leave? He had said he had another event to go to, and I was probably making him late as it was. "She just foiled a rebellion in Ireland."
"I had a feeling she might."
"You mean you knew about it already."
"There is that."
"But I know something you don't know."
"If it has to do with mimes, I don't need to know."
I folded my arms across my chest in exaggerated disgust. "We are just not going there again." Having dismissed the mimes, I lowered my voice dramatically. "What would you say if I told you that, rather than just one Black Tulip, there might have been an entire syndicate of them?"
"How do you mean?" Colin leaned back against the creampainted wall as though he had no intention of going anywhere at all.
"I mean, not one, but a series of subagents, all with very pale skin and black hair. The petals of the Tulip."
"It sounds rather fantastic."
"It is," I agreed. "Only not in the way you mean."
I gave him a quick rundown on my week's archival discoveries, starting with the advent of Miss Emily Gilchrist and finishing up with the marquise's mysterious death in the parlor of Lord Vaughn.
"Aren't you a bit short on petals?" asked Colin. "It takes more than two to cover a flower."
I had to stop and count on my fingers. Surely there had to have been more dark-haired agents than just the marquise and Emily Gilchrist…but if there were, I hadn't found them yet.
"Of course, it's all still conjecture at this point," I said hastily. "But wouldn't it be wonderful?"
For a long moment, Colin didn't say anything at all. He just looked at me, until I could feel my damnably fair skin begin to flush under his scrutiny.
"Wonderful," he agreed, just before the pause reached epic proportions. "I'm sure Jay contributed many brilliant insights."
It took me a moment to remember who Jay was. "Don't remind me. I'm trying to blot that evening out of my memory."
"Aren't you…?"
"Oh, God, no." I hastened to disabuse him of the notion. Forget the fact that I was the one who put the notion into his head in the first place. Right now, all I wanted to do was excise the whole ridiculous Jay episode and go back to where we had been a week or so ago. "I only went out with him to placate Grandma. Since he's in England and I'm in England…it's just easier not to argue with Grandma."
"That is a relief."
"Really?" I went into a full-scale head-tilt, complete with breathy voice and fluttering lashes.
"Yes. He seemed rather a git."
Damn. I couldn't argue with the analysis, but I'd been hoping for something a little more along the lines of "Darling, I wanted you for myself. I couldn't bear to see you so close to the arms of another man."
Ah, well. That's what old movies and cartons of Ben & Jerry's were for, to make up the deficiencies in real life. If this were a black-andwhite movie, I would already be clutched in his manly arms, assuring him that Jay meant nothing to me, nothing at all.
Instead, I got Pammy, wearing enough fur for any three starlets.
"Hi, you two!" she caroled, bumping into me.
I think she meant to knock me into Colin, but her aim was off. Instead, I banged my elbow into the wall with enough force to bring tears to my eyes. Subtlety personified, that's our Pammy.
"Ouch," I said.
"Sorry." Pammy didn't sound the least bit sorry. She turned her hostess smile on Colin, an uncanny mirror of her mother's, only with more of her gums showing. "Are you sure you can't stay for dinner? Really, really sure?"
"I wish I could, but I have to meet someone…" Colin glanced at his watch, a simple silver-framed piece with a leather band. "Five minutes ago."
"I feel bad for having kept you," I said.
"Haven't we already had this discussion?"
"Do you have a date?" Pammy overrode both of us.
"You could say that." I did my best to keep my facial muscles in proper order, rather than drooping like a sad clown. An unmarried, heterosexual male—a tall, cute, unmarried heterosexual male—couldn't possibly be single. I should have expected that he'd be seeing someone, even if it were only an early-days, casual-dating sort of thing. "With my friend Martin."
Right. Martin. Relief flooded in, followed by doubt. Wait—did this mean he wasn't straight, after all?
He was suspiciously well groomed for a straight man. His dark blond hair exuded a clean shampoo smell, and that was definitely aftershave I had scented as I banged into the wall next to him. True, his clothes tended toward the outdoorsy, but that might just be an affectation, like those gay-straight men who affected deep interest in tools and car parts. He had said she could call it a date….
I was officially resigning from the human race. It was all just too much trouble.
"Martin," pressed Pammy. "As in Martin?"
What else could Martin stand for?
"Well, have fun!" I broke in before Pammy could embarrass herself further. Or embarrass me. As I knew from the sixth-grade dances, Pammy is, and has always been, largely embarrassment-proof. Mom's theory is that it comes from having an unsettled home life.
"Thanks. I'm not sure how much fun it will be, though. Martin's girlfriend chucked him last week."
Not gay, then. At least, Martin wasn't. As for Colin, the jury was still out. On just about everything. My personal jury is notoriously indecisive.
"Poor Martin." Pammy allowed a moment for mourning before following up with, "Is he cute?"
"What about your I-banker?" I demanded.
Pammy made a face. "He's being transferred to their Hong Kong office."
"Ah," I said wisely.
"Ah?" inquired Colin.
"Absence makes the heart go wander," I explained.
Colin looked quizzically at Pammy. "His, or yours?"
"Both," replied Pammy emphatically.
Across the coatrack, Colin's and my eyes locked in shared amusement.
I hastily looked away.
"Aren't you late?" I asked, nudging Pammy ahead of me out of the hallway to clear the way. "It seems cruel to keep poor Martin waiting. He'll think you've abandoned him, too."
"Call him and invite him over!" Pammy tossed back over her shoulder as I propelled her into the front hall. "The best way to get over a breakup is to get out there again. Right, Ellie? You can't just let him stay at home and mope. Or he might not have another date for, like, a year."
"At least let the guy have a decent mourning period," I remonstrated. "It takes
a while to get over a breakup."
"Only if you let it take a while. It's all about positive thinking."
"And cosmos?" That had been Pammy's last breakup prescription. Take four cosmos, go out clubbing, and call her in the morning.
"I don't think he's in the mood for new people," said Colin tactfully. "But, thank you."
"Another time, then. We could all do drinks." I could see the Machiavellian wheels in Pammy's head churning up images of potential double dates.
"Won't you be seeing someone else by the time the mourning period is over?"
"I like to keep a backup list," said Pammy blithely. "You never know when they might come in handy."
"Like understudies," I explained to Colin, as the three of us filtered out into the front hall. "She keeps them in the wings in case the principal is unable to go on."
"Or sent to Hong Kong?"
"Happens all the time."
"Isn't it time to call your understudy in from the wings? Now that Jay has been sent back to grandmother?"
I glanced back up over my shoulder at him, turning down the corners of my mouth in feigned regret. "I'm not nearly as well organized as Pammy. My backstage is totally empty."
"That will never do." I couldn't see his face, but I could hear the amusement in his voice. "You need to restock."
"I haven't really had time to set up any auditions." The stage analogy wasn't entirely inapt; my heart was beating as though I were walking a tightrope as I paused next to the front door and turned to face him. "Except the hideous Jay one, and you saw how that one turned out."
"You ought to get back out there."
"Hear, hear!" said Pammy. "I've been telling her that for ages."
"Thanks, Pams."
Colin paused with one hand on the doorknob, and glanced casually down at me. "What are you doing Saturday night?"
I was supposed to be having dinner with Pammy. A swift kick from Pammy informed me that our plans were officially off.
"Nothing."
"Dinner?"
"One of my favorite meals."
"How does eight sound?"
Like a host of celestial angels singing. "Like an excellent time for dinner."
Next to me, I could feel Pammy bristling with repressed commentary.
"Brilliant," said Colin.
That had all happened a little too fast for me.
Did I have a date with Colin? Or was that just an abstract inquiry into the desirability of eight o'clock as a dining hour? It wasn't the sort of thing one could ask without looking really, really stupid.
Besides, Colin was busy thanking Pammy for a lovely evening, and Pammy was smirking in a way usually reserved for successful fairy godmothers. Any moment now she was going to sprout a tutu and start singing "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo."
The niceties disposed of, Colin poked his head around the door one last time. "Till Saturday, then."
"Don't forget your audition materials!" I twinkled.
Fortunately, the door was already swinging shut, placing three inches of good, solid oak between Colin and my silly comments.
I really hoped he hadn't heard that.
I lowered my head to my clenched hands. "Audition materials. Oh, God. I didn't."
Pammy snickered. "It could have been worse. At least you didn't say his audition piece."
"Pammy!"
"Do you think it's a long audition piece?"
I whacked Pammy on the arm. "That's not what I meant. We're just having dinner."
Pammy waggled her eyebrows. "Dinner, eh?"
"Oh, Pams." Overflowing with joy to the world and goodwill toward men, I gave her a quick hug. "Thanks."
"You're welcome." Pammy patted my back complacently. "Now who's making fun of Mustafa and the mountain?"
I didn't even bother to correct her. I was too happy. She could have all the Mustafas she wanted.
"I have a date."
"Uh-huh," said Pammy benignly.
"With Colin."
"That's him."
"I have a date with Colin."
Pammy slipped an arm through mine and began propelling me back toward the living room. "Okay, we got that. But you can't just get complacent. You have to think about the important things. Like, what you're going to wear."
Dinner. Saturday. Eight o'clock. It all sounded pretty incontrovertibly date-ish. Even allowing for transatlantic cultural differences, "Saturday" and "date" tend to be synonymous.
I had a date with Colin! A real date with Colin!
From the kitchen wafted the unmistakable scents of roasting turkey and yams swimming in syrup. Warm, homey smells vested with a wealth of good feelings, like lemon polish and clean linen. A deep feeling of contentment welled within me, the sort you have when you're very little, and the sun is shining, and your parents suggest ice cream without your even having to wheedle for it. All was right with the world. I had a whole new angle for my dissertation, turkey and American accents for Thanksgiving, and a date with a handsome Englishman on Saturday. A man who didn't confuse the Pimpernel with pumpernickel. Life couldn't get much better than this, not for all the Jimmy Choos in China.
With a little smile, I remembered the compositions we had to write each November in Lower School. They invariably began, "I have reason to be thankful because…" At the time, it usually had a lot to do with My Little Pony and naturally curly hair, with the occasional pious reference to loving parents thrown in for ballast.
Thinking of Colin, I sent a heartfelt message of gratitude out to all those turkeys who had perished to make Thanksgiving possible.
"I know!" exclaimed Pammy. "I have the most adorable little yak-skin corset!"
"No yak skin," I said.
Even gratitude only goes so far.
Historical Note
Truth can be very convenient for fiction. The events in Ireland in 1803 make a colorful story without any additional embellishment. After a brief exile in France, Robert Emmet and other veterans of the rising of 1798 returned to Dublin to plot a new insurrection. Stockpiling weapons in various depots around the city, Emmet planned to launch an attack on key centers of power within the city, to be coordinated with risings elsewhere in Ireland, and possibly a French invasion.
At six thirty in the evening on July sixteenth, all those plans quite literally went up in smoke. An explosion at the Patrick Street depot forced the hands of the insurgents. Faced with a choice of acting quickly or abandoning the enterprise, they moved the date of the rising up to July twenty-third, far earlier than intended. As Ruбn O'Donnell sums it up, "The stark choice facing Emmet and the other commanders was to launch a Dublin-centered rebellion without delay or to hold out in the hope that the French would invade Ireland or England as expected in August/September."
Without a full muster of men, without aid from France, the rebellion was practically over before it began. As Emmet's biographer Patrick Geoghegan recounts, "As daylight faded on the evening of 23 July, Emmet waited for the rebels to arrive at the main depot…. He expected two thousand men to appear. Eighty turned up. Worse, before assembling, most of them had been to the Yellow Bottle public house…." The rebel units did manage to hold positions on Thomas Street and James Street for nearly two hours, but the planned attack on Dublin Castle never occurred and the evening ended in rout and riot. Emmet fled to the Wicklow Mountains. Along with twenty other rebel leaders, he was apprehended and executed, dying a martyr for his cause.
The historical record of the rebellion is so rich that it was a wrench not to be able to use everything. One of my favorite tid-bits was the use of hurling societies (not to be confused with curling, which is a different sort of sport entirely) as a screen for military maneuvers, with the hurling stick standing in for a musket or pike. Sadly, I couldn't think of any excuse for proper young ladies like Letty and Jane being allowed anywhere near the Donnybrook hurling club. But even with hurling out of the picture, there were plenty of details that I was able to press into service. The rebel depots, with their warren of
secret rooms and hidden hordes of weapons, were a novelist's dream, and the explosion at Patrick Street simply begged for a role in the story. The rockets, designed as a variant on those used in India, were Emmet's innovation, not mine, and did indeed lead to the fatal explosion at Patrick Street.
There are several discrepancies in the various versions of the explosion at the Patrick Street depot—although nothing to suggest that the incident was anything other than an accident. By all accounts, some of the men had been experimenting with fuses for the rockets, and a moment of carelessness (and possibly inebriation) led to the resulting explosion. Once outside that basic frame, the stories start to vary. Since two of Emmet's men placed the blame on a dyer named George McDaniels, accusing him of working on the rockets while sloshed, I decided to keep him on in the role of scapegoat, placing him on the scene as the drunken watchman.
Historians also squabble over whether Emmet genuinely wished to secure aid from France or whether he preferred, as a powerful symbolic statement, to have Ireland liberated by Irishmen. For the purposes of this book, I went with the former theory, largely because it made tying in the antics of French spies that much easier. Emmet's brother, Thomas Addis, did meet several times with General Berthier, Bonaparte's minister of war, to discuss the loan of French troops, and there is some evidence to suggest that the rebel leaders anticipated a French invasion in late August or early September. For anyone interested in reading more about the rising of 1803, I recommend two excellent biographies of Emmet, both rich in detail but very different in their historiographical slants: Patrick M. Geoghegan's Robert Emmet: A Life, and Ruбn O'Donnell's Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803.
Those familiar with Dublin may notice some changes in the landscape. There would be no chance these days of anyone tripping over a body backstage in the Crow Street Theatre; it has been superseded by a warehouse and offices. The building was already, as a contemporary put it, being "pulled to pieces by installments" as early as the 1820s. For those who are curious, pictures of the theater and the principal performers can be found in T. J. Walsh's Opera in Dublin, 1798–1820: Frederick Jones and the Crow Street Theatre. St. Werburgh's survived far better than the Crow Street Theatre, but at the cost of a few appendages; it lost its steeple in 1810 and its tower in 1836. Patrick Street, home to the ill-fated rebel depot, has undergone even more of a transformation. Lauding the complete overhaul of the area, a 1905 travel guide describes its former state with unveiled distaste as "one of the most squalid, disreputable, and dilapidated in the city. It was intersected by a network of narrow streets and alleys, which were overhung by hundreds of rickety and unsanitary dwellings." It was that world, the vanished nineteenth-century landscape of narrow streets and rickety dwellings, that I strove to re-create, rather than the polished Patrick Street of today.