Amy scowled at her. “What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t take heaven’s name in vain, missy. You might want to go there someday.” Miss Gwen smirked. Amy simmered. When Miss Gwen felt Amy had simmered for a suitable length of time, she spoke. “It’s quite simple. You wouldn’t hate him so much unless you loved him. Hmm. I like that. Maybe I’ll use it in my book.”

“At least someone benefits from this farce,” bit out Amy.

“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady. I’m on your side in this. You needn’t goggle your eyes at me. The young man played with your affections in a most inappropriate way and deserves whatever punishment you choose to mete out.” Miss Gwen considered for a moment before adding, “Excluding physical mutilation. One must acknowledge the bounds of decency.”

Amy gave a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob.

“How do you intend to wreak your revenge?” Miss Gwen asked briskly.

Amy plunged with relief into her favorite distraction. Planning. Planning almost anything was a dependable remedy for weepiness. Planning ways to wreak devastation, vengeance, and mayhem upon the guilty golden head of Lord Richard Selwick was even better. Amy rubbed her eyes clear and set to work.

The ideal revenge would be to serve back to him the bitter brew of his own devising. Perhaps she could appear at his chambers in disguise, heavily veiled in black, and convince him that she was a secret agent sent by the War Office. Or, even better, she could be a French agent defecting to the English. He wouldn’t see her face, and she would speak in a heavy accent—a Provençal dialect, perhaps, southern and exotic, with echoes of the troubadours and courts of love—so he wouldn’t recognize her voice. And once he was terribly, painfully, in love with her, she could repudiate him on a dark midnight, and leave him standing broken beside his own house. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a deception for a deception. Justice in its purest form.

The plan was perfect.

And entirely impracticable. There was nothing to guarantee that she could make him love her. Besides, one yank of her veils, and the whole plan would be undone. Amy sank back into thought.

What mattered most to him? What would it pain him most to see taken away?

“I’ll beat him to the Swiss gold. I’ll show the Purple Gentian that he isn’t the only one who can thwart Bonaparte.”

Miss Gwen leveled an appraising gaze at Amy. “I thought there might be some mettle in you.”

Both Jane and Amy stared openmouthed at Miss Gwen.

“Was that a compliment?” whispered Amy to Jane.

“It sounded like one,” Jane agreed, eyes wide.

“Don’t allow it to go to your head,” Miss Gwen interrupted dryly. “I spoke solely of potential. You may yet prove the contrary.”

“Thank you,” said Amy.

“I like this plan much better than tormenting Lord Richard,” contributed Jane, leaning forward on the seat.

“Oh, I still intend to do that, too,” responded Amy stubbornly. “Miss Gwen’s right. He broke the do-unto-others rule, and now he’s going to get his just deserts. It’s too bad I can’t pretend to be two people, just to show him what it feels like.”

“Let’s not go into that again,” Jane put in hastily. “How shall we intercept the gold?”

“We already had a plan.” Amy’s lips twisted in a rueful grimace as she relayed the plan she and the Purple Gentian had contrived together the night before. Miss Gwen listened intently. “If that is the plan the Purple Gentian intends to employ, we must find another one.”

“We don’t have enough people for it,” pointed out Jane, ever practical. “The Purple Gentian has a league; we just have us. Not that we aren’t formidable,” she added hastily, with a glance at Miss Gwen.

“Why shouldn’t we be a league?” demanded Miss Gwen.

“That’s it! Amy—” Jane’s mouth was a round O of amusement. Speechless with mirth, she rocked back against the seat, one hand pressed to her chest, the other held out to her cousin.

“Out with it!” snapped Miss Gwen.

“The Pink Carnation!” gasped Jane.

Miss Gwen looked at her as though she was considering transporting her immediately to Bedlam.

“You must remember, Amy! Before the Purple Gentian appeared, when we were going to be our own league, and call it—”

“The Pink Carnation,” Amy finished, the beginnings of a smile glimmering across her unhappy face. “We liked it better than the Invincible Orchid,” she finished, her voice cracking slightly.

“Shall we?” asked Jane breathlessly, a faint pink flush rising in her pale cheeks. “Shall we become the Pink Carnation?”

“Oh, Jane!” Amy launched herself across the seat to hug her cousin. “I would like nothing better! We’ll make Bonaparte quail at the very sight of a Carnation!”

“I prefer the Invincible Orchid,” announced Miss Gwen.

Neither of her charges listened. They were too busy planning the career of the Pink Carnation.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I only got lost three times on the way to Pammy’s party.

That I didn’t go farther astray was entirely due to the excellence of Pammy’s directions, which were of a see-Jane-run level of simplicity. I’m not exactly a brilliant navigator at the best of times; in my current daze, it was only a wonder I hadn’t accidentally wound up in Scotland. By the time I’d retraced my steps all the way back to Covent Garden from High Holborn (don’t ask how I wound up over there), I was all but ready to hop right back on the Tube and head home. Only a marked disinclination to be alone with my own thoughts drove me to dig out Pammy’s directions from the pocket of my raincoat and try again.

I needed a glass of champagne. Badly.

Spotting me at the door, Pammy waved a tiny pink purse over her head like a lasso and shouted, “Ellie!” Bowling models out of her way, she rushed over, pushing past the bouncer to join me on my little patch of cold sidewalk. We exchanged the sort of effusive greetings usually reserved for released captives rather than friends who just had dinner on Tuesday.

Even through my preoccupied fog, I couldn’t help gaping at Pammy’s latest outfit. She was wearing bright pink snakeskin pants. Species Christianus Lacroixus, that elusive denizen of the fashion jungle. She had paired the flaming fuchsia snakeskin with a bright Pucci top in swirling blue, pink, and orange that clashed dreadfully with the pants, and even more so with the faux red streaks in her short blond hair. It should have looked dreadful. Instead, she looked like she’d just stepped off the cover of Cosmo.

I’d settled on one of my favorite dresses, a little beige suede sheath from BCBG. From the front, it looked perfectly demure, but the back was bare from the waist up, with the exception of one asymmetrical scrap of cloth that tied across the middle of my back, and served more to emphasize the gap than cover it. It was my “I need an ego boost” dress. The creamy color made my hair look more russet than red, and the dramatic back made me feel glamorous, in an old Hollywood sort of way.

Pammy observed my ensemble with a critical eye.

“Oh well, at least you’re not wearing your pearls.”

Pressing a neon green glow stick into my hand (she had a pink one, presumably to go with the pants), she yanked me past the red ropes and into a room already so crowded that people were perching on the edge of the DJ’s booth just to get out of the way. At the far end of the room, a temporary catwalk had been set up. Two women with fashionably bored expressions were posing with shoulders back and hips out, ignoring the inebriated party guest who was trying to claw her way up onto the platform. Since there was clearly no coat check, or, if there ever had been it had long since been overrun by the partygoing hordes, I wriggled out of my raincoat and slung it over my arm.

“Oooh, bubbly!” Pammy exclaimed, as a waiter shimmied by several yards away. “Yoo-hoo!” she caroled. “Over here!”

A glass was shoved into my hand; Pammy introduced me to someone; we shouted pleasantries over the throbbing music and moved on.

I jostled along through the crowd in Pammy’s wake, nodding absently in response to her whispered asides (“That jerk Roderick! Can you believe he . . .”), but I only caught about a third of it. I couldn’t blame it on the music, or the crowds, or the strobe light that seemed personally out to blind me; my mind was elsewhere entirely, back in 1803.

My dashing hero, my paragon of manhood, my lover of moonlit daydreams, was a woman.

The Pink Carnation was a woman.

I’d read the passage in Amy’s diary where she described the inception of the Pink Carnation right before I left for Pammy’s party. I’d been dressed already, perched on the edge of my bed, bag and coat ready next to me, reading just one more page before I really had to go. I’d been longing to find out whether Lord Richard would break down and tell Amy his identity, crossing my fingers and hoping for Amy’s sake that he would.

Maybe that’s why the revelation caught me quite so off guard. I hadn’t been looking for it. It had never occurred to me that the Pink Carnation could be anyone other than a man—most likely Miles Dorrington, but maybe Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, or even Augustus Whittlesby. I had given up expecting to hear anything about it in Amy’s diary, which was crammed full of her personal concerns. If—when—I came upon the Pink Carnation, I’d expected it to be in one of Miles’s letters to Richard: “Hullo, old chap. The War Office is sending me along to take your place. Aside from a silly flower name, should be jolly good fun,” or something along those lines. Never, in a million years, would I have imagined . . . this.