Amy’s large blue eyes snapped open in a way that boded trouble for Richard.

“You know who I am. You called me Amy.”

The Purple Gentian cast a panicked look over his shoulder at the unlatched window. “Let’s ignore that, shall we?”

“Wait!” Amy grabbed his cloak in both hands. “Do I know you from the Tuilleries reception? From England?”

“I don’t have time to argue with you.” The Purple Gentian pulled her to him and pressed a quick, hard kiss on her lips, letting her go so abruptly that she almost overbalanced and tumbled backwards off the window seat into the study. In one polished movement, he swung himself over the windowsill onto the ground below. “Till we meet again, Amy.”

“But when? Where?” Amy regained her balance and leaned out the window after him. “You can’t just—oh, drat.” The Purple Gentian could. He disappeared around the corner of the house with a dramatic swish of his cape.

How could he just run off like that after—ooh! Amy gathered her already ripped skirts together and bunched them up above her knees. Miss Gwen would disapprove, but everything she had done this evening was well beyond the bounds of propriety, so why stop now?

Amy would have liked to have tried to swing off the windowsill like the Gentian, but one quick look down revealed it to be at least a ten-foot drop, all very well when you were the Gentian’s height, but too far a fall to the flagstones for Amy’s comfort. Maybe if she wiggled out one leg at a time, then lowered herself down by her arms?

Oh, for heaven’s sake! By the time she finished figuring out how to climb out of the blasted window, the Purple Gentian could be halfway to England! Amy bravely positioned herself on the edge of the windowsill, allowed herself one last clutch at the sides of the window, closed her eyes, and jumped.

She landed with a jarring thud, stumbled, and sprinted towards the edge of the house. What she would do when she caught up with the Purple Gentian, Amy wasn’t quite sure, but there would be ample time to figure that out after she had grabbed him by the tail of his cloak and dragged him to a stop. As she rounded the corner of the east wing, she thought she caught the faintest sight of a flutter of fabric swishing around the front of the house. Or was it just her blurry vision giving the illusion of movement? If only she had a lantern!

Ignoring the stitch in her side, Amy put on a new burst of speed. She slipped in something foul smelling, and performed an unintentional arabesque before righting herself and staggering onwards. Oh goodness, was this the gutter she was running in? On second thought, Amy decided she’d rather not know. The enveloping darkness that prevented her from seeing more than the dim outline of the stones of the wall and the rough shapes of shrubs and trees might not be an entirely negative thing. Fortunately, Amy’s breath was coming in such short, sharp pants through her parted lips that it was impossible to smell much anyway.

Finally reaching the end of the house—and mentally upbraiding whichever ancestor had decided he really must have a town residence half the length of Versailles—Amy grabbed the wall as she wove around the corner and skidded to a ragged stop just before she would have gone headlong into one of the great iron gates that stood open before the entrance to the cobblestone courtyard.

The gates had been closed after their return from the Tuilleries, Amy was quite sure of it. What were they doing gaping open well past midnight? The gates had to be twelve feet tall, and were, as Amy knew from watching the grooms struggling with them earlier that day, heavy enough to require the efforts of two men to move. Not exactly the sort of door one might accidentally leave ajar. Had Edouard opened them to permit the egress of the Purple Gentian? Then why the dramatic entrance and exit through the study window?

Amy tiptoed cautiously towards the courtyard.

It was quite a different thing approaching the gates on foot, rather than sailing through them ensconced on the raised seat of a carriage. The gate in front of Amy reared forbiddingly into the air. The ornamental fleurs de lys that adorned the upper curve of the gate so charmingly in daylight bristled like the spears of a veritable regiment of sentries.

Flattening herself against the wall, Amy turned to peer through the bars. The elaborate ironwork of the gates, leaves and flowers and curlicues twining so closely together that they almost formed a solid barrier, hid her form from the view of anyone within—or at least she hoped it did. Amy twisted her head at an uncomfortable angle so she could look through the two-inch gap between a flower and a leaf.

A plain dark coach, horses moving restlessly, was preparing to leave the courtyard. Amy couldn’t discern the features of the coachman perched on the box in the front; he wore a shapeless hat, and a long muffler had been wound round his face. On the lip of the coach, speaking softly to her brother, stood none other than Georges Marston. He wore a long black cloak.

Gesturing to Edouard with one black-gloved hand, he swung into the coach. Black gloves, black cloak . . . Amy’s head swirled as she squeezed herself into the gap between the gate and wall. Could there be any doubt?

Her Purple Gentian must be Georges Marston.

Chapter Seventeen

My contact lenses were glued to my eyeballs.

Letting the paper I was holding drop into my lap, I rubbed my eyes. I hadn’t pulled an all-nighter since college, and my eyes had clearly decided I was too old for this sort of thing. Hauling myself higher against the pillows, I glanced at the face of the china clock upon the night table. Two-thirty in the morning. No wonder my contacts were killing me.

The bedside lamp cast intriguing shadows along the flocked wallpaper of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s guest bedroom. Like all guest bedrooms, it had the musty, unused air a room gets when nobody has lived in it for quite some time. Silver-framed photographs of people I didn’t know—but none of Colin—shared dresser space with an old-fashioned dresser set engraved with my hostess’s initials, and a squat statue that looked to my untutored eyes like it might be African. Other exotic knickknacks occupied odd corners of the room, a tufted spear propped up against an armoire, a multilegged goddess sitting companionably next to a Dresden shepherdess on the writing table.

Once again, I tried to focus my bleary eyes on the paper in my lap, but the faded loops of inks slithered away from me. Amy’s handwriting wasn’t nearly as tidy as Jane’s; her diary teemed with crossed-out phrases, blots of inks, and, in moments of agitation, extra loops on her letters. That last entry had been very, very agitated. One “m” alone had obtained three extra humps.

Of course, I’d have been agitated, too, if my favorite masked hero had caught me in a passionate embrace and then hopped blithely out the window. True, I might not have known the last name of a couple of the guys I’d kissed back in college, but at least I’d been able to see their faces. Talk about adding a whole new dimension to the “but does he really like me?” dilemma. Poor Amy.

I was one up on Amy in terms of knowing who the Purple Gentian was, but there had been nary a whiff of a Pink Carnation so far. I mulled over the possibilities. I had to agree with Amy that there was something rather suspect about Georges Marston. Could anyone really be that boorish unless he was trying to hide something? And the whole half-English, half-French thing . . . I paused, liking the notion. I had flung “The Pink Carnation might be French!” at Colin Selwick in a fit of temper, but wouldn’t it be funny if it were true?

I smiled beatifically off into space. I’d just love to see the look on Mr. Colin Selwick’s face as I disclosed to the Institute of Historical Research that not only had the Pink Carnation been half French, but he had held a commission in Napoleon’s army.

Given my own long-lasting attachment to the Pink Carnation, I wasn’t all that sure I wanted him to turn out to be Georges Marston just to spite Colin Selwick. There was something about Marston that put me in mind of those swaggering guys who latch onto you in a club, refusing to believe you’re really there just to dance with your friends. The ones who won’t take no for an answer, and call you nasty names when you wiggle away.

My money was on Augustus Whittlesby. I’d read the effusions he’d sent to Jane, fifteen poems under the collective title, Odes to the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes. They might limp along from one rhyme to the next, but one couldn’t really call them poetry. Not without offering up apologies to Keats and Milton. No man could write verse that bad unless it was on purpose. He had to have a secret identity. And both Pulchritudinous and Princess began with P, like Pink. . . .

I dropped my aching head into my hands with a heartfelt groan. Oh, goodness, I hadn’t just really thought that, had I? “Pink Carnation, Pink Carnation starts with P . . .” sang my unregenerate mind in the tones of Cookie Monster.

I really had been awake too long.

What I needed was a cup of tea. I’d even settle for a plain old glass of water. Something to sip to wake me up so I could go on reading before Colin Selwick managed to convince his aunt never to let me darken their doorstep again.

Placing the unbound pages of Amy’s diary carefully on the bedside table, I shoved aside the covers, and clambered out of the high bed, tugging the long skirts of my borrowed nightgown out of my way.

Easing my way through the crack in the door, I paused, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness of the hallway and trying to get my bearings. As my friend Pammy likes to point out, I have an internal anticompass. Tell me to find my way to a destination, and I will invariably go in the exact opposite direction.