The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (10 page)

‘I hate him, I hate him, I hate him,’ Amy muttered as she drifted into sleep.

Within moments, Amy found herself on a balcony outside a ballroom. Through the open French doors came the sound of laughter and music. The candlelight traced intriguing patterns at Amy’s feet, but they failed to hold Amy’s attention.

She was looking over a garden – a large, elaborate, formal garden, with bowers of roses, a false classical temple on a distant hill, and a large, surprisingly unruly hedge-maze smack in the middle of the patterned paths and beds of flowers. And that’s when she saw him. Practically a shadow himself in a dark, hooded cloak, he slipped out of the maze and swung over the edge of her balcony. Amy reached out an eager hand to help haul him over.

‘I knew you’d come!’ Through the kid of his glove, she could feel the signet ring on his hand, a signet ring that bore a small, purple flower.

‘How could I stay away?’ he murmured.

Amy clung to his hand. ‘I so badly want to help you! It’s all I’ve ever wanted! Won’t you tell me who you are?’

The Purple Gentian ran one gloved finger down her cheek in a way that made Amy shiver with delight. ‘Why don’t I show you?’

Usually, at this point in the dream – because Amy had dreamt this same dream, not once, but several dozen times, down to the very
colours of the flowers in the garden – Amy woke up, anxious, bereft, and more eager than ever to track the real Gentian down to his lair.

But tonight she watched with quivering anticipation as the Gentian painstakingly undid the knot holding his cloak at his throat, as he slowly pushed back the enveloping hood to reveal a head that glinted gold in the candlelight and a pair of shrewd and mocking green eyes.

‘I’ll wager you didn’t expect to see me,’ drawled Lord Richard Selwick.

Amy woke with a gasp of horror.

‘Drat him!’ You would think the nasty cad could at least leave her to dream in peace! Amy punched the pillow, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Lord Richard invaded her slumbers once more, but this time Amy didn’t mind. She dreamt with great satisfaction of pushing Lord Richard off the side of the boat, and then sticking out her tongue at him as he thrashed in the cold waters of the Channel.

On the other side of the cabin, Richard’s slumbers were equally uneasy – even though he had no idea that Amy was mentally chucking him into the Channel. He had lain awake for some time, alternately fuming over his own behaviour and that of Amy. He had dismissed a ridiculous voice in his head (which sounded unsettlingly like Henrietta’s) that rather caustically informed him that if he wanted Amy’s attention behaving like a seven-year-old was not the best way to go about it. ‘She started it,’ Richard grumbled, and then felt even worse, because, devil take it, he had sunk to the level of arguing with people who weren’t even there. If he continued like this, he’d be more fit for Bedlam than espionage.

Richard fell asleep while mentally drafting an instructional pamphlet for the War Office entitled
Some Thoughts on the Necessity
of the Avoidance of the Opposite Sex While Engaged in Espionage:
A Practical Guide.
The title itself took him some effort to get just right. By the time he finished composing Item One (‘Under no circumstances allow yourself to be drawn into conversation, no matter how well read the young lady in question, or how fine her
eyes’), Richard slid seamlessly into a familiar nightmare.

He was just outside Paris, making his way through the Bois de Vincennes to the rendezvous with Andrew, Tony, and the Marquis de Sommelier. Percy was to meet them at Calais with his yacht and the Comte and Comtesse de St Antoine. Another successful week’s work for the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Richard wasn’t feeling particularly buoyed with success; he was still brooding over that last call on Deirdre. She had been arranging flowers from Baron Jerard when he had arrived. Baron Jerard! What sort of rival was that! Forty if he was a day! Richard would be willing to wager the man couldn’t sit the back of a horse for the duration of a hunt, much less pull off dashing rescues with half the military might of revolutionary France in pursuit. It had been the way Deirdre said his name when Richard asked about the flowers that had set Richard off. ‘Baron Jerard called,’ she’d said, and there was just a hint of something secret, something almost smug, only his Deirdre, his perfect, beautiful Deirdre would never possibly be smug. That’s when Richard rashly spilt
his
secret.

But when he’d told her…well, what he wasn’t supposed to tell her, she’d just kept on arranging Jerard’s pestilential flowers, and trilled, ‘La, you are droll, my lord!’

‘What will it take to convince you, the head of a Frenchman on a platter?’ Richard had cried in anguish, and stormed from the parlour.

Geoff poked Richard in the ribs. ‘Richard, something’s not right.’

Blinking, Richard realised they were already at the small shack they used for their rendezvous. And Geoff was right – something was quite, quite wrong. There should have been a scrap of scarlet cloth in one of the rough rectangles that passed for windows. The door of the shack hung ominously ajar.

The two old friends exchanged a long look, and crept silently along the side of the shack. ‘Ready?’ Richard breathed. Geoff nodded, and they exploded into the hovel. Only to find one man lying twisted on the floor, his clothes dark and wet with his own blood.

Tony.

And then Geoff uttered the words that Richard couldn’t erase from his brain, not with a hundred bottles of port. ‘Someone must have tipped them off.’

‘Damn her!’ Richard cursed, as he thrashed in his sleep. ‘Damn her!’

Chapter Eight

V
oices in the foyer jolted me out of Amy’s world.

Expecting to hear only waves lapping against the keel of a boat, the sound of laughter in the next room knocked me unwillingly back into the twenty-first century. I blinked to rid myself of the last phantom images of tarry decks and canvas sails. It took me a moment to remember where I was; my head felt as muzzy as though I’d just taken a double dose of cold medicine. A quick glance around informed me that I was still sprawled out on the Persian rug in Mrs Selwick-Alderly’s drawing room and the fire next to me had burnt down to mere embers from lack of tending. I had no idea what time it was, or how long I’d been reading, but one leg seemed to have gone numb, and there was a vague ache in my shoulders.

I was experimentally stretching out one stiff leg – just to make sure it still worked – when he appeared in the doorway.

It was the Golden Man. He of the photograph on Mrs Selwick-Alderly’s mantel. For a moment, in my befuddled state, caught between past and present, I half fancied that he’d just strolled out of the photograph. All right, I know it sounds silly, but I actually took a quick look to make sure the man in the picture was still where he ought to be, frozen in perpetual laughter next to his horse. He was. And on a second glance at the man in the doorway, I picked up the differences I had missed the first time around. The man in the photograph hadn’t been wearing grey slacks and a blazer, and his blond hair had been bright with sun, not dark with wet.

He also hadn’t been wearing an unspeakably chic woman on his arm.

She was about my height, but there the resemblance ended. Her long, glossy dark brown hair floated around her face as though it was auditioning for a Pantene commercial. Her brown suede boots were as immaculate as if she had just walked out of the Harrods shoe department, and her smart little brown wool dress screamed Notting Hill boutique. They made an attractive pair, like something out of
Town and Country:
Mr and Mrs Fabulously Fabulous Show Off their Gracious Home.

It was enough to make one feel like a miserable mugwump.

I was so deep in mugwump land that it took me a moment to realise that not only was the smiling, golden man of the photograph not smiling, his expression was positively explosive. And it was aimed at me.

‘Hi!’ I struggled to my feet, a few yellowed pages tumbling from my lap as I levered myself up with one hand, the other hand clutching the bundle of letters. ‘I’m Elo—’

Golden Man stalked across the drawing room, snatched up the papers I’d left on the floor, flung them into the open chest, and slammed the lid shut.

‘Who gave you leave to take those papers?’

I was so shocked by the transformation of the friendly man of the photograph that my brain and my mouth stopped working in partnership.

‘Who gave me…?’ I glanced down dumbly at the papers in my hand. ‘Oh, these! Mrs Selwick-Alderly said—’

Golden Man bellowed, ‘Aunt Arabella!’

‘Mrs Selwick-Alderly said I could—’

‘Serena, would you go fetch Aunt Arabella?’

Chic Girl bit her lip. ‘I’ll just go see if she’s ready to leave, shall I?’ she murmured, and hurried off down the hallway.

Golden Man plunked himself down on the chest, as though defying me to snatch it out from under him, and glowered at me.

I stared at him in dismayed confusion, automatically clutching Amy’s letters closer to my coffee-blotched sweater. Could he be under some sort of misapprehension about my intentions towards his family papers? Maybe he thought I was an appraiser from Britain’s equivalent of the IRS, come to charge his aunt great gobs of money for possessing a national treasure, or a rogue librarian, come to steal the papers for my library. After all, if there was art theft, maybe there was document theft, too, and he thought I was a dastardly document thief. I didn’t think I looked particularly dastardly, just dishevelled – it’s hard to look dastardly when one has wide blue eyes, and one of those easy-to-blush complexions – but maybe document thieves came in all shapes and sizes.

‘Mrs Selwick-Alderly said I could look at these papers for my dissertation research,’ I tried to reassure him.

He continued to eye me as though I were a Victorian scullery maid caught parading around in the mistress’s best diamond tiara.

‘I’m getting a PhD,’ I added. ‘From Harvard.’

Why had I felt the need to say that? I sounded like one of those intolerable academic types who wore leather patches on their tweed jackets, affected horn-rimmed spectacles, and pronounced ‘Hahvahd’ without any Rs.

Golden Man clearly thought so, too. ‘I don’t care if you’re David bloody Starkey,’ he snapped. ‘Those papers aren’t open to the public.’

Forget golden. He was being rapidly demoted to bronze. Tarnished bronze, at that.

‘I’m not the public,’ I pointed out as Chic Girl slipped unobtrusively back through the open doorway. ‘Your aunt invited me here, and offered me the use of these papers.’

‘Damn!’ he cursed explosively.

‘Really, Colin,’ she of the enviable boots broke in, ‘I don’t think—’

‘
Colin
?’ I took a step forward, eyes narrowing as a nasty suspicion began to form. ‘Not Mr Colin Selwick of Selwick Hall?’

Suddenly, it all made sense.

I dropped the disputed bundle of papers on an overstuffed chair. ‘Not Mr Colin Selwick who likes to send nasty letters to American scholars?’

‘I wouldn’t say—’ he began, looking harried, but I didn’t let him get any further. After all, if I was going to be flung out of the house like a disobedient Victorian scullery maid, I might as well go out with style.

‘‘Badgering private persons with impertinent requests for personal papers may be appropriate on your side of the Atlantic’?’ I quoted triumphantly.

Chic Girl looked horrified. ‘Colin, you didn’t!’

I began to think I could forgive her the boots. ‘Oh, yes, he did.’

‘I was having a bad day,’ Colin Selwick muttered, shifting uncomfortably on the wooden chest. I hoped he was sitting on a splinter. Make that several splinters. ‘Look, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the—’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ I said sweetly. ‘You were quite,
quite
clear, Mr Selwick. Oh, wait, wasn’t there also something about academics who have nothing better to do than waste taxpayer money on dilatory pursuits that are about as much good to the public as a mouldy ham sandwich?’

‘I never—’

‘I just added the mouldy ham sandwich bit,’ I clarified for Chic Girl’s benefit, ‘since I’m afraid I don’t remember just which thrilling analogy Mr Selwick employed to describe my utter uselessness to human existence.’

‘Do you always memorise your correspondence?’ he demanded in exasperation, pushing off from the trunk.

‘Only when it’s as memorable as this one was. You have quite a knack with the poison pen.’

‘And
you
have quite an overwrought imagination.’ With two long strides, he bridged the swath of carpet separating us.

‘Are you saying I’m making this up?’ I yelped.

Colin Selwick shrugged. ‘I’m saying you’re exaggerating wildly.’

‘Right. I’m sure your behaving like a boorish lout just now was all a product of my hyperactive imagination, too.’ I had to tilt my head back to glower at him.

From my vantage point just beneath his chin, I could see the muscles of his throat constrict. Swallowing some choice Anglo-Saxon words, no doubt.

‘Look,’ he said in strangled tones, ‘how would you feel if you saw a perfect stranger pawing through your private possessions?’

‘This isn’t exactly your underwear drawer. And as far as I can tell, these papers aren’t even yours.’

Mr Colin Selwick didn’t like that. Underneath his sportsman’s tan, his face was turning a mottled red. ‘They belong to my family.’

A slow smile spread across my face. ‘You don’t have any authority over these documents, do you?’

‘Those. Papers. Are. Private.’

I’d never actually seen anyone speak through gritted teeth before. No wonder English dentistry was in such a dreadful state.

‘Why?’ I demanded recklessly. ‘What is it that you don’t want me seeing? What are you so afraid of?’

‘Colin…’ Chic Girl tugged anxiously at his arm. We both ignored her.

‘Did the Purple Gentian sell out to the French? Have a thing for women’s underwear? Or maybe it’s the Pink Carnation you don’t want me finding out about? Ha!’ An involuntary twitch – perhaps a repressed attempt to strangle me? – gave me the clue I was looking for.

I shoved my hair back behind my ears and leant forward for the kill, never taking my eyes from his. ‘I’ve got it! The Pink Carnation was…
French
!’

At that inconvenient moment, Mrs Selwick-Alderly hurried in, dressed for going out in black and pearls. We all froze like naughty schoolchildren caught brawling in the playground.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, dears! Colin, I see you’ve met Eloise?’

That was one way of putting it.

Colin mumbled something in the general direction of the carpet.

Draping a cashmere stole around her shoulders, Mrs Selwick-Alderly added, ‘Eloise is working on a fascinating project about the Pink Carnation. You must tell Colin about it sometime, Eloise. The Pink Carnation has always been something of a passion of his.’

‘So I gathered.’ My tone was as dry as well-aged sherry.

Colin sent me a sharp look.

I permitted myself a slight, sardonic smirk.

Colin returned the smirk with interest. ‘Too bad she has to be going.’

Going. My smirk disintegrated faster than the embers of the fading fire. He who smirks last… There was no denying that Colin Selwick had won that round. Of course, I should have realised that if Mrs Selwick-Alderly was going out, I would have to go home, home to my lonely basement flat, and my frozen Sainsbury’s dinner, and the All-England televised darts championship. And if Colin Selwick had his way, I would never be invited back.

What time was it?
Late
, said the midnight-dark sky beyond the cream-coloured drapes. At a guess, it was dinnertime at least, probably later. I cast an agonised glance at the half-read papers on the chair – not only was I no closer to the identity of the Pink Carnation, but I was dying to know if Lord Richard ever did kiss Miss Amy Balcourt. Did he tiptoe over to her side of the boat in the dead of night, stand on his tiptoes…and smooch Miss Gwen by accident? It was like being torn away midway through an episode of
The Bachelor.

But Mrs Selwick-Alderly, stole around her shoulders, was clearly ready to leave.

‘I’m so sorry.’ I turned penitently to Mrs Selwick-Alderly. ‘I probably should have left ages ago, but I was so wrapped up in Amy’s letters that I lost all track of time. I can’t thank you enough for your kindness and hospitality.’

‘We wouldn’t want you to be late for an engagement,’ Colin Selwick broke in impatiently.

‘That would only be a problem if I were going somewhere.’

‘In that case…’ Mrs Selwick-Alderly began.

‘Well, we are,’ Colin said rudely. ‘Goodbye.’

‘In that case,’ Mrs Selwick-Alderly repeated, with a look of gentle reproach for her erring nephew. ‘There’s no reason you can’t stay.’

It was like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one. ‘Do you really mean it? Are you sure it wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience?’

‘No reason?
’

‘It’s not an inconvenience at all. Serena, would you show Eloise to the spare room before we go? There should be some old nightgowns in the wardrobe.’

Colin made a low, grumbling noise. ‘Aunt Arabella, are you sure this is wise?’

She met his agitated gaze serenely. ‘You know the contents of that chest.’

‘But the Pink—’

Her head swayed infinitesimally in negation. ‘The one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other, you know,’ and in her voice was both reassurance and warning.

She slipped quickly back into the prosaic. ‘Now, Eloise, the bathroom is the third door to the right, and you’ll find the kitchen straight back and to the left. Please don’t hesitate to help yourself to anything in the cupboards. And don’t worry about the washing up; Consuela will be here in the morning to take care of that. Is there anything I’ve forgotten?’

Colin mumbled something. It sounded like, ‘Common sense.’

Mrs Selwick-Alderly ignored him. So did I.

‘I’ll take very good care of the papers,’ I promised, eyes shifting to the treasure chest in the corner. All those lovely letters to read…

‘Be sure that you do,’ Colin Selwick said shortly. ‘Aunt Arabella?’

He did a very good job of stalking from the room, back straight, head high. But he spoilt it with a backwards glance over his shoulder. His face was rigid with frustrated anger, and I could tell that he
wanted nothing more than to sling me over his shoulder and fling me out the nearest doorway. Or window. He didn’t look like he was in the mood to be picky about the means of egress.

I wish I could say that I met his gaze with level dignity. I didn’t.

I grinned – an honest-to-goodness, gum-baring, playground grin.