Lauren Willig - The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

“And you’re so keen to see these papers because?” Colin Selwick inquired delicately.

I made a face at him and said something rude.

He raised a smug eyebrow.

I plunked my mug down on the pine table and leaned forward. “Why did your family hide the identity of the Pink Carnation?”

Colin retracted his eyebrow. He developed a deep interest in poking at the gooey cocoa residue that had collected at the bottom of his mug. “Maybe nobody was interested.”

“Bullshit.”

“Language, language, Miss Kelly.”

“Sorry to singe your tender ears. But, really, why didn’t anyone ever tell?”

Colin leaned back in his chair, lips twisting wryly. “God, you are tenacious.”

“Flattery won’t make me any less so.”

“Flattery?” he queried.

“Pink Carnation?” I prompted.

“Well.” He lowered his voice conspiratorily. “If you really must know . . .”

“Yes!”

“Maybe the Pink Carnation had a loathsome social disease.” He grinned.

“Awful!” I whacked the table in disgust. Cradling my wounded hand, I moaned, “Owwww . . .”

“Serves you right, attacking the poor, innocent table.” Colin picked up his mug and carried it over to the sink.

“You drove me to it,” I flung back at him. “Ouch!”

Colin sighed. “Oh, give me that. No, not that.” I’d extended my half-full mug of cocoa. He took the cocoa out of my hand, placed it on the table, and took hold of my hand instead.

Moving closer, so close that his pajama leg whispered against the skirt of my nightgown, he leaned intently over my hand.

“Where does it hurt?” he asked.

Next to his, my hand looked fragile and transparently pale. A nervous joke about palmistry and fortune-tellers died on my lips as Colin turned my hand palm up, massaging the abused digits. He ran his thumb, large, tanned, calloused, along the fleshy mound at the base of my palm, probing for injury. A shiver that had nothing to do with the draft from the window ran down my spine.

“It’s fine. Really,” I croaked, jerking my hand away.

“Good.” Chair legs scraped against linoleum. “We wouldn’t want you suing us,” Colin added briskly, dumping my mug into the sink with a clatter.

My mouth dropped open. “I wouldn’t—”

Colin started towards the kitchen door. “Of course, you wouldn’t,” he said, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “Look, all of this we’ve discussed—and everything you’ve read—it stays between us.”

I wrenched my chair around to face him. “What do you mean?” I demanded, still reeling from that lawsuit comment.

“The Pink Carnation. Anything you read, or discover, goes no further than this flat. I spoke with Aunt Arabella tonight, and we came to the agreement that you may read anything she sees fit to show you—but only on that condition.”

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!

Georges. Amy rolled the name through her mind and frowned. She tried Anglicizing 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. Spelled Georges it was far too French and slippery. Spelled 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 gray 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 dreamed 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 behavior, 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.