At least, he hoped not.

Just to be safe—since one really never knew with Amy—Richard took a quick peek under the desk. No, no Amy. Richard reminded himself that he should be experiencing relief, not disappointment.

Making his way to the globe, Richard took up where he had left off the night before. His fingers felt for that telltale crack along the equator, easing towards the tiny bump that must be . . . Ah! Richard smirked as the two halves sprang open. The catch.

Richard’s smirk disappeared as his mouth dropped open in shock. What in the blazes? Plunging his hand into the rounded base, he ran it back and forth and around. He felt along the top of the globe to see if something might be glued to the inside. He stuck his head in so far that his nose bashed into the bottom. Clutching his wounded appendage, Richard staggered back and slammed the empty globe shut.

Someone else had gotten there first.

Chapter Twenty-Five

After the warm coziness of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat, my own little gnome hole seemed even more desolate than usual.

The hall light had gone out again, leaving the blue-walled hallway in gloom, and the blue-carpeted stairs even gloomier. Juggling the caramel macchiato I’d picked up at the Starbucks next to the Bayswater Tube stop and the package under my arm, I picked my way downstairs, making a mental note to call the landlord about replacing the lightbulb before someone (that is, me) broke her neck on the stairs. I managed to insert key into lock on the third try, and blundered into my dark little entryway, fumbling for the light switch.

As furnished flats go, it wasn’t too dreadful. There wasn’t terribly much to it, just a narrow hallway with miniature kitchen appliances crammed against one wall, a tiny bathroom, and one rectangular room that tripled as living room, bedroom, and study. The conscientious owner had tried to brighten it up with cream-colored paint and flowered curtains and large landscapes of the Tuscan countryside. Unfortunately, the latter only emphasized the contrast between the Italian sunshine and the gray excuse for light that filtered through my scrap of window.

Dumping my coffee on the small, round table, and setting the plastic-wrapped package tenderly down on the bed, I toppled into a chair, and tackled my boots. The zipper on the left boot had gone stiff, probably in protest against the eternal rain. Another tug, and the zipper gave with that horrible tearing sound that anyone who has ever snagged a stocking knows all too well.

Ordinarily, I might have been mildly peeved about the untimely demise of my last pair of stockings. But my mind wasn’t on my wardrobe. Fueled by caffeine and caramel, it was replaying last night’s scene in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s kitchen in excruciating detail—the same way it had been doing since three this morning.

I’d tried to lose myself in Amy’s letters, but the papers kept drifting down towards the coverlet as I would stare off into space, coming up with the five-hundredth witty parting line I ought to have fired after Colin Selwick. It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away. Somehow, I figured storming into Colin’s bedroom, shaking him awake, and delivering my brilliant one-liner would only make me look more pathetic.

Besides, he might have gotten the wrong idea. To the male mind, female plus bedroom equals just one thing.

Colin hadn’t been about when I dragged myself blearily out of the guest bedroom at seven that morning, and stumbled kitchenwards. Instead, I’d found Mrs. Selwick-Alderly at the pine table, drinking a cup of tea and reading the Daily Telegraph.

I’d veered between disappointment and relief. Disappointment, because there went any chance of delivering those painstakingly crafted retorts. And relief, because I know what I look like at seven in the morning.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had dropped her newspaper with flattering promptness, smilingly asking me how I’d slept, and pressed tea and toast upon me. I’d accepted the tea, declined the toast, and refrained from any mention of midnight encounters with her nephew. I wondered if she was going to bring up the presence of two chocolate-streaked mugs in the sink, but either she hadn’t noticed, or didn’t think it worth mentioning. Maybe Colin had midnight cocoa tête-à-têtes all the time.

Maybe I was being entirely ridiculous.

I gulped down my tea in record time.

“How are you finding our little archive?” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly asked, giving me a moment to recover from my burnt tongue.

“It’s unbelievable,” I said honestly. “I can’t thank you enough for letting me use it. But . . .”

“Yes?”

“Colin—I mean, your nephew . . .” Damn. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was well aware that Colin was her nephew without my telling her so. I started again. “Why doesn’t he want me to have access to your papers?”

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly looked thoughtfully at the headline of the Telegraph. “Colin takes his position as guardian of the family heritage very seriously. What do you think of our Pink Carnation?”

“I haven’t found him yet. I’m only about halfway through the papers you gave me. The handwriting took some getting used to.”

“Amy’s handwriting is awful, isn’t it? Who do you think the Pink Carnation is?”

“Miles Dorrington seems like the best candidate.” I watched Mrs. Selwick-Alderly closely, hoping for a reaction; something to confirm or contradict my hunch.

I didn’t get one. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly went on calmly spreading marmalade on a piece of toast as she asked, “Why Miles?”

“The Pink Carnation’s first recorded escapade isn’t until late April of 1803. Miles is in constant contact with the Purple Gentian, so he knows everything that’s going on in Paris; he has all the resources of the War Office behind him in London; and”—I brought forth my best piece of evidence so far—“he’s in Paris in late April.”

“How did you discover that, if you’re only half finished?”

“I flipped ahead,” I confessed. “I saw his signature on a letter that was dated Paris, April thirtieth. So I know he’s at the right place at the right time.”

“What about Georges Marston?”

“After his assault on Amy?” I exclaimed incredulously.

“Nobility of deed isn’t always a sign of nobility of character,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said quietly. “Great men have been known to be brutes in private life.”

I made a face, resisting a five-year-old’s impulse to stamp my foot in protest. “Not the Pink Carnation,” I said firmly, trying to ignore the little trickle of unease that slithered down my spine like the snake along the tree of knowledge.

That would explain Colin’s reticence . . . the Pink Carnation, a would-be rapist. I banished the thought as an impossibility. Marston couldn’t be the Pink Carnation. If he were, we’d have heard something about him prior to April 1803; Marston had been in Paris for months, ever since his defection from the English army. Miles. It had to be Miles.

“. . . with you,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said.

“Pardon?”

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly repeated herself. I gaped in incomprehension.

“You can’t mean it.” That had just been an offer to take the manuscript home with me, hadn’t it? I tended to be a bit out of it in the morning, but not entirely delusional. I must have misheard.

“You must finish the story,” she said, folding her paper and putting it aside. “And then we can discuss whether the Pink Carnation lives up to all your expectations.”

“But what if I lost them?” I protested. “I might drop them on the Tube, or they might get damaged by the rain, or . . .”

“That sort of thinking,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said with great satisfaction, “is exactly why I have no hesitation about entrusting them to your care.”

After that, how could I argue? Especially when I wanted to finish reading those papers more than I wanted anything in my life. Retrieving the papers from her guest room, she had first placed them in their special, acid-free box, wrapped the box in a clean linen sheet from the airing cupboard, and folded the entire bundle into no fewer than seven thick plastic bags before placing the bulky package into a Fortnum’s carrier bag. They were on short-term loan—I was to return the pile the following day, presumably before Colin discovered they were missing.

The safety of the papers was one thing, but Colin Selwick’s obsession with secrecy was quite another. I was still smarting over his high-handed directive of the night before. Nothing goes beyond this flat, indeed!

I could understand not wanting his family’s name dragged through the muck of the tabloids—but what sort of scandal was big enough to catch the public’s attention two hundred years later? Maybe his great-great-great-grandfather, the Purple Gentian, had sold out to the French, and had been unmasked by the Pink Carnation, and that’s why Colin Selwick wanted to keep it all under wraps, I hypothesized. Even so, I couldn’t imagine that generating more than scholarly interest, or, at most, a couple of paragraphs towards the middle of the Mirror on a particularly slow news day. It wasn’t exactly stop-the-presses sort of stuff.

Besides, as far as I could tell from the documentation I’d been reading, the Purple Gentian was fanatically devoted to his cause. The worst I’d been able to discover about him was that he had played nasty games with the heart of Miss Amy Balcourt. Poor Amy. Reading that entry of her diary in the wee hours of dawn—just before my eyelids finally gave in to gravity and my body to sleep—I’d wanted to slug Lord Richard for her. And he had sounded so charming. But, then, they all did. Even Grant had been charming in the beginning.