The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

by Lauren Willig

  I popped out of my chair. ‘But my dissertation!’

  ‘Will no doubt contain all sorts of brilliant insights about the Purple Gentian and the Scarlet Pimpernel,’ he said smoothly. ‘You can use anything you read here for those purposes. Not the Pink Carnation.’

  ‘You’re absurd!’

  His eyes swept leisurely up and down my linen-clad form. And he grinned. The bastard had the nerve to grin.

  ‘At least I’m not impersonating Jane Eyre. Good night, Eloise.’

  ‘Well, you’re no Mr Rochester!’ I snapped.

  A door clicked shut somewhere along the hallway, informing me that even my feeble sally had been too late.

  Urgh!

  I sank back down into my chair, fuming. That nasty, vile… I must really have been reading too many nineteenth-century letters if my first impulse was to call him a cad. Rogue and bounder might also apply. Whatever term one used – and I could also think of several modern ones that would do nicely – the result was the same. That walking ball of slime had lulled me into a false sense of security by plying me with apologies and hot chocolate, intending all the while to spring his little nondisclosure provision on me.

  Did he think I was going to go all gooey and giggly over him just because he fed me some instant hot chocolate and spoke to me like a human being for half an hour?

  Well, I wasn’t falling for it. And I wasn’t giving in that easily. So his Aunt Arabella liked me, did she? We’d see what she had to say about the whole nothing-you-read-can-go-beyond-this-flat ultimatum.

  In the meantime, I had reading to do. Lots and lots of reading, and only a few hours left before morning necessitated my departure.

  Stomping purposefully down the hall to my temporary room, I flung myself onto the bed, and resolutely took up Amy’s diary where I had left off. I didn’t care if my contacts started dancing a tango; nothing was going to deter me from finding out as much as I possibly could, and to hell with Colin Selwick!

  Chapter Eighteen

  Georges. Amy rolled the name through her mind and frowned. She tried Anglicising it. George. George! George… No matter how she pronounced it or punctuated it, George just didn’t sound like the sort of name the Purple Gentian ought to have. Spelt Georges it was far too French and slippery. Spelt George, the name called up images of corpulent old King George puttering about in the gardens of Kew. Not exactly an enticing prospect.

  But after last night, how could she have any doubt as to the Gentian’s identity? The evidence was overwhelming. If Marston’s conversation with her brother hadn’t been enough to prove his identity, seeing him climbing into his carriage, wearing a long black cloak of the same sort that Amy had been in such intimate contact with – her stomach did flip-flops at the recollection – had to be conclusive. Two men in black cloaks roaming about her brother’s house in the dead of night strained the imagination. And that Marston would be leaving from the front of the house just after the Purple Gentian sped off in that direction was enough of a coincidence to beggar belief.

  Amy squirmed fretfully against the grey velvet squabs as her brother’s coach pulled out of the courtyard, the same courtyard into which she had spied so anxiously last night. In the midday sun, with light glancing off the windows of the house and glinting along the shiny black finish of the gates, it hardly seemed like the same place. In fact, had Amy not woken on her chaise longue to find a pair of hideously besmeared slippers kicked half into the fireplace grate (she vaguely remembered attempting to burn them, and being thwarted by the fact that the coals had already been banked), she would have been inclined to assume that she had dreamt the whole thing.

  Finding her way back into the house last night had been an experience that Amy would as soon forget. Attempting to climb over the gates had not been one of her more inspired plans. Discovering that Edouard had returned to his study and latched the window – after Amy spent an uncomfortable fifteen minutes grappling with the wall before successfully hoisting herself up onto the sill – had been the sort of setback that would have reduced a woman of lesser spirit to tears. Finally, when she had sunk to the prospect of waking the household and was trying to concoct a convincing tale to explain why she was outside at well past midnight in a torn gown and filthy slippers, she had come upon an unlatched window in the dining room, and swarmed up over the sill with a strength born of desperation.

  At least the treacherous journey into the house had kept Amy’s mind occupied. Back in her room, she lit a candle by the bed, and changed out of her soiled clothes in the quivering point of light. She stuck her shoes in the grate, pulled on a clean white linen night rail, brushed her hair fifty times, turned down the covers, blew out the candle, and couldn’t sleep.

  She couldn’t sleep on her side, and she couldn’t sleep on her back, and she couldn’t sleep rolled into a ball with her arms around her knees.

  ‘Oh my goodness, I kissed the Purple Gentian,’ Amy whispered to the darkened room. She slid down along the pillow with a silly smile on her face. It really had been an incredibly nice kiss.

  But she still had no proof of who he actually was. Or how to find him.

  Who was he? Why had he kissed her? Did he want to see her again? Argh!

  Two o’clock saw Amy flat on her stomach with her head at the footboard and her feet kicking the pillow, replaying her conversation with the Purple Gentian in a slightly improved version.

  At three o’clock Amy had rolled the covers into a little ball at the foot of the bed, and was wondering whether the Purple Gentian had just kissed her to get her to stop pestering him.

  By four o’clock Amy had been reduced to pulling little tufts of fuzz off of the coverlet and chanting, ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’

  It had taken the combined efforts of Jane and Miss Gwen to drag Amy out of bed in time for her first English lesson with Hortense Bonaparte. Really, that jug of water had been completely unnecessary, Amy decided crossly.

  Amy yawned broadly as the carriage drew up before the Tuilleries, decanting her and Edouard into the courtyard. A bored-looking sentry waved them into the palace. Amy made faces at Edouard’s anxious reminders to be on her best behaviour, promised to meet him back at the entryway in two hours, and breathed a sigh of relief as he scuttled off down a corridor on his own errands. Amy wasn’t supposed to meet Hortense – she consulted the little enamel watch hanging from a gold chain around her neck – for another twenty minutes, which, now that she had divested herself of her brother, left her time to explore.

  The Tuilleries by day was quite a different prospect from the Tuilleries by night. Last night, the rooms through which they had passed had been decked with orange blossoms and cunning arrangements of roses whose scent had clashed with the heavy perfumes worn by the guests. Not even the odd, crumpled petal remained; all had been swept away by efficient servants, leaving in their wake the less pleasant reek of ammonia and lye.

  Last night grenadiers standing stiffly at attention (at least Bonaparte made no attempt to hide the source of his power!) had lined the staircase like human signposts. At the top of the landing they had followed the sound of martial music through a series of antechambers lit with candle sconces draped in gauze. By the time they were three rooms away, the hubbub of the Yellow Salon had been an unmistakable guide.

  It wasn’t as though the palace was deserted. As Amy wandered down the corridors looking for suspicious activities, she passed servants lugging pails of water, soldiers leaving their shifts, and a pale young man in an ill-fitting frock coat with ink-stained fingers, who Amy surmised was most likely someone’s secretary.

  Amy was contemplating following the secretary (after all, he might be on his way to a highly secret meeting), when her attention was arrested by a familiar puce frock coat in the next room. It was undeniably her brother – no one else would wear gold lace in that quantity at collar and cuffs – but his voice held a very uncharacteristic air of authority as he held forth in a rapid whisper.

  Amy strained for a
glimpse of his companion. Her pulse raced at the prospect of encountering the Purple Gentian again, and she leant further forward around the doorframe. Why did Edouard have to wear coats with such ridiculously padded shoulders? All she could make out was a hand and a bit of black sleeve; Amy doubted even the most dedicated spy would be able to identify someone from a hand glimpsed from several yards away. Even that unhelpful appendage was soon blocked by a waterfall of gold lace, as Edouard pressed something into the stranger’s hand. Edouard’s garish cuffs hindered Amy’s view, but it looked like paper. A note of some kind?

  Amy edged forward, right into the doorknob.

  She bit down on her inadvertent gasp of pain and annoyance, but the soft exhalation of air was enough to alert Edouard’s companion, who grabbed at Edouard’s arm, said something in a rapid whisper, and propelled him through the door on the opposite side of the room. Edouard scurried out without so much as glancing back.

  But his companion did.

  As Edouard’s companion swerved to yank the door shut behind him, his face came briefly into view before the oaken barrier slammed into place. Amy only saw his face for a moment, but that moment was enough. It was a face she recognised, but not the face of Georges Marston. It was a narrow, dark face, undistinguished in every way – except for the long, newly healed scab that slashed across his left temple.

  ‘Drat!’

  Amy raced across the room and peered through the door, but it was no use; her brother and his companion had already disappeared from sight.

  How ever was she going to explain to Jane that she had lost her wounded man for a second time?

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was in considerably reduced spirits that Amy returned to her exploration of the Tuilleries. At first, she peered beneath tables and behind chairs in search of a familiar flash of puce and gold, but Edouard and his companion had disappeared with a speed of which Amy would never have believed her brother capable. He had whisked his padded shoulders and lacy ruffles out of her path faster than the Purple Gentian leaping through a study window.

  Ought she, Amy wondered, to broach the topic with Edouard on the way home? Should she simply tell him she knew him to be in league with the Purple Gentian and demand to be allowed to participate? It would certainly save her much time spent skulking about, and give Edouard an opportunity to drop his foppish front in his own home. On the other hand, Edouard might tell her, as he frequently had when they were small children, to mind her own business. In fact, it seemed more than likely that was just what Edouard would do. He had never been amenable to sharing.

  All things considered, Amy concluded, she was probably best off maintaining an air of ignorance – and spying on her brother whenever the opportunity arose. She would have to consult with Jane…

  ‘DISGRACE!’ someone bellowed.

  Amy stopped abruptly, shocked out of her reverie. Good heavens, that wasn’t directed at her, was it? She took a quick look around. No. She was alone in yet another of the little antechambers that separated the grander areas of the palace. The noise had emerged from the door towards which she had been thoughtlessly wandering, a door that stood slightly ajar, as though someone had just entered.

  ‘YOU ARE A DISGRACE!’ the bellower repeated, with, if possible, an increase in volume.

  Amy was considering edging her way back out of the anteroom, when another much softer voice interposed, ‘But, Napoleon, I—’

  Amy’s breath caught in her throat. While not exactly a meeting with Fouché, the conversation held promise for the eavesdropper. Perhaps a scandal that she could convey back to the English news sheets? Lifting her muslin skirts in both hands, she tiptoed her way into the space between the door and the wall.

  ‘Leclerc only dead for a year!’

  Leclerc… The name might mean little in terms of international espionage, but Amy pressed her ear against the hinges of the door hard enough to leave a permanent dent. The last time she had spotted Pauline Bonaparte Leclerc, the shameless woman had had her tongue in Lord Richard Selwick’s ear. Her interest, Amy assured herself, was purely professional, not personal. Lord Richard’s amours meant nothing to her, nothing at all. It was just that…that…any scandal that might be damaging to the Bonaparte clan could be helpful to her cause, she rationalised triumphantly.

  Through the gap in the door, Amy could hear the clomping of boots on the parquet floor as Bonaparte raged about the room. ‘You’re out of mourning already!’

  ‘But, Napoleon, I did cut off all my hair and place it in his coffin.’

  ‘Hair, ha!’ The smack of a palm hitting wood. ‘Hair grows back! It already has! And you! Chasing anything in trousers!’

  Amy waited eagerly for a reference to Lord Richard and that scandalous scene in the salon.

  ‘My Assistant Minister of Police complained that you pinched him in an inappropriate place! Again!’

  ‘Oh, but, Napoleon, it wasn’t an inappropriate place,’ Pauline reassured him eagerly. ‘It was in my sitting room.’

  Amy eyed the wood of the door with incredulous disgust. Either Pauline Leclerc was one of the most truly addlepated people she had ever encountered (and there was stiff competition for that title, with Derek on that list, not to mention her cousin Agnes), or she was wickedly clever. Amy preferred the first option.

  Bonaparte spoke in the simple monosyllables of someone who had also chosen the first option. ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘I had to have someone check for spies,’ Pauline answered innocently.

  Crash! Bonaparte had hurled something against the wall. Amy squinted against the hinges. Ah, an inkwell, judging from the large black splotch adorning the wallpaper.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Napoleon,’ Pauline wheedled. ‘It’s just that I am so bored…’

  ‘Bored? Bored? Find a hobby! Go shopping!’

  ‘You can’t begrudge me my innocent little amusements…’

  ‘Your innocent amusements are an international scandal! What do I have to do? Send you to a nunnery?’

  An excellent solution! Amy would have seconded the idea had she been a legitimate part of the conversation, rather than an eavesdropper.

  ‘How can you’ – sniff – ‘be so unkind? All I want’ – sniff – ‘is a little happiness.’

  ‘All I want is my family not to embarrass me!’

  ‘This is Josephine’s doing, isn’t it? She’s poisoned your mind against me!’

  Amy had been decidedly right in liking the First Consul’s wife. Josephine was clearly a woman of good taste and sound judgment – except in marrying Bonaparte.

  To his credit, the First Consul rose to his wife’s defence, or rather, roared in his wife’s defence, ‘Hold your tongue!’

  ‘If that’s what you want, I’ll just leave. You’ll never have to see me again.’ The sound of chair legs scraping against wood was followed by Pauline sobbing her way out of the room. Amy cringed back against the wall, fearing both disclosure and the impact of the door, but Pauline slipped easily through the gap – nobody in the throes of distress should be that graceful, thought Amy critically – bawling into her handkerchief all the while.

  ‘Pauline! Don’t cry, damn you! Pauline!’ Bonaparte charged out of the room after his sister.

  The door slammed open. Fortunately, Bonaparte’s shouts drowned out Amy’s involuntary oomph as the heavy wood whacked all of the air out of her lungs.

  When the little black spots in front of Amy’s eyes had faded away – except for the legitimate little spots of dust motes dancing in a beam of sunshine – she slipped cautiously out from behind the door. ‘I feel like a dress that was put in a clothespress,’ she muttered to herself.

  Once Amy had flexed her shoulders and shaken out her arms, and felt more like herself and rather less like a piece of recently ironed fabric, she tiptoed around to peek into the room that Bonaparte and his sister had so recently vacated. After all, there was only so much one could see through the inch-wide gap between the door and the
wall.

  Amy’s eye took in, one by one, a wall with a large ink splotch, an iron staircase that looked a bit like an ink splotch itself against the pale wall, and a carpet marred by yet more ink splotches. By far the most interesting feature of the room was a desk, piled with stacks of papers, and surrounded by enough broken quills to re-feather a plump goose.

  Bonaparte had left his study empty.

  Amy allowed herself only a moment to gloat over her good fortune. With a quick glance either way to make sure no one else was about, she plunged into Bonaparte’s study.

  Amy picked her way across the broken quills and balled-up bits of paper on the floor. She really mustn’t disturb anything; she must do nothing to arouse suspicion. And if he returned, she could legitimately claim to be lost and looking for Hortense. Who would ever suspect a bit of a girl in a yellow muslin dress? Amy practiced looking innocent and mildly daft as she made for the desk. Widen the eyes, drop the lower lip…and, if worse came to worst, cry. From that last interview Amy had gleaned a crucial piece of intelligence; Bonaparte was a soft touch for crying women.

  Ah, the desk! Amy briefly clasped her hands together to still their shaking, and then stooped over in earnest. In the centre of the desk lay a piece of paper closely covered with writing, as well as an unintended design of ink dots splattered by the abandoned quill that lay next to it. Clearly, Bonaparte must have been working on this when his sister disturbed him.

  Eagerly, Amy snatched it up and began to read. ‘Article 818. The husband may, without the concurrence of his wife, claim a distribution of objects movable or immovable fallen to her and which come into community…’

  Oh, for goodness’ sake, what was this drivel? Not only did Amy disagree heartily with the sentiment – she defied any future husband to try to claim a distribution of her objects movable or otherwise without her concurrence – but it was utterly useless to her investigation. Unless Bonaparte’s secret plan for conquering England was to contract a marriage between the two countries and then claim that as husband, France was entitled to all of England’s objects, movable and immovable.