I had sat there numbly, manuscript pages fanning out in my beige suede lap, thinking back over all the clues I’d missed. Amy’s accounts of her childhood exploits, her determination to dethrone Napoleon, her anxiety to join a league. I should have known. I should have expected.

But who would ever have imagined that the Pink Carnation could be a woman?

I grasped at straws. It wasn’t entirely certain that the Pink Carnation was Amy. She’d only just come up with the idea, after all. Maybe she came up with the idea, and then mentioned it to . . . whom? Geoff? Not likely. Geoff was Richard’s friend, not Amy’s. Whittlesby? Amy thought he was a blithering idiot. And why would Amy ever, ever hand her league over to someone else?

There was no logical way around it. The Pink Carnation was a woman.

I had sat on the Tube in a trance. Another passenger, an elderly woman with a woolly hat and bad teeth, had asked me if I was ill. I’d shaken my head, and thanked her politely, the words scarcely registering over the turmoil in my head.

How could I have missed it? As a scholar, how could I have been so careless? That stung, that my preconceptions had so blinded me to the truth of what I was reading. What kind of a historian was I, blundering along blindfolded by my own imagination?

All right, that hurt, but it wasn’t what hurt the most. What hurt the most was the loss of the daydream. I wonder if that was how Amy felt, when she realized her Purple Gentian, her daydream prince, was Lord Richard Selwick, and suddenly everything she had thought to be true needed reevaluating.

My image—my imaginings, as I now, painfully, knew them to be—of the Pink Carnation had been so real, so solid. In my head, he’d been something of a cross between Zorro and Anthony Andrews as the Scarlet Pimpernel. A rakish grin, a cocky tilt of the head, a steady sword arm. I could close my eyes and conjure him up, even now. But none of that had ever existed. Poof! All gone! And in my wonderful Zorro/Anthony Andrews hybrid’s place there stood a bouncy little twenty-year-old English girl in a sprigged muslin dress.

And Colin Selwick had known. My face grew hot as I remembered my spirited defense of the Pink Carnation’s manhood. How he must have been laughing at me!

“At least we agree on that much,” he had said, about the Pink Carnation’s not being a transvestite. That dry note of mockery in his voice—at the time, I’d thought he’d been ironically amused by the idea of our agreeing on anything, but now I knew I’d been the butt of that joke. Of course, the Pink Carnation wasn’t a transvestite. Amy wore dresses and named herself after a pink flower because she was female. Not a cross-dressing male with a carnation fixation, or even a Regency dandy with a penchant for pink. And Colin Selwick had known all along.

Nodding and smiling at yet another of Pammy’s numerous acquaintances, I downed my glass of champagne, and reached for another.

“Pardon?”

One of Pammy’s friends was actually trying to make conversation with me. On my third glass of champagne—or was it my fourth?—it took me a moment to focus. I looked up to see a tallish man with dark, wavy hair like Colin Firth’s. Not at all bad looking in a dark, smoldering Rufus Sewell sort of way.

“Arrr rrrrr rrrr rrrr,” he repeated.

“Oh, absolutely!” I said airily. “Couldn’t agree more!”

Curly-haired Chap gave me an odd look and turned away.

“Um, Eloise?” Pammy hissed in my ear. “He asked what your name was.”

“Well, I thought it was a very valid question!” I hissed back.

That’s the lovely thing about champagne. After a few glasses, one loses all ability to feel like an idiot.

“Oh! Look who’s there!” Pammy was still looking in the direction of Curly-haired Chap, but her attention had shifted to someone just beyond him. Curly-haired Chap was pointedly ignoring both of us. Since Pammy had exclaimed the same thing several times in the past hour, I didn’t pay much attention. “I never thought she’d show. Serena! Yoo-hoo! Serena!”

Curly-haired Chap edged back a bit, and through the gap I saw Chic Girl. Also known as Serena. And behind her was Colin Selwick.

Something cold and wet dripped down onto my sandaled toes. Ooops. I hastily righted my champagne glass before I poured any more libations to my feet.

“Yoo-hoo!” Even over the din, Pammy managed to make herself heard. “Over here!”

With a tentative smile, Serena gave a little wave back, said something to Colin, and began to wend her way through the intervening bodies towards Pammy.

“You know her?” I hissed, as Serena navigated her away around Curly-haired Chap, Colin in tow.

“She’s one of the St. Paul’s crowd,” Pammy whispered back. “A little shy, but a sweetie. Darling!” She launched herself at Serena, kissing her on both cheeks. “And this is my very old friend Eloise. Eloise, I’d like you to meet Serena and her—”

“We’ve already met,” I cut in, with a wave of my champagne glass. “Hello, Serena.” I smiled sweetly at Serena, who did seem rather a sweetie, even if she was wearing another pair of to-die-for boots, this time soft black leather, paired with a very un-Chapin-mother little black dress.

“You.” I pointed the champagne glass at Colin.

I had a feeling I was going to hear about this from Pammy later, but champagne is the better part of valor, and I needed, desperately needed, to talk about the Pink Carnation. The female Pink Carnation.

“I need to speak to you.”

Colin raised an eyebrow. “What about?”

“Yes, what about?” echoed Pammy shamelessly.

I glowered at Pammy. “Not here. Come with me. Back in a moment,” I assured Serena, and towed her boyfriend off across the room. There was a pocket of relative privacy at one corner of the catwalk. The models had long since abandoned their platform, and two drunken guests were gyrating to the music, one of them wearing a green sequinned dress that made her look like a walking Christmas tree.

Colin submitted to being towed, but freed himself as soon as we’d reached the corner. “Bond, James Bond?” he quipped quizzically.

“She’s a woman!”

Colin regarded the Christmas-tree woman with a puzzled frown. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

I hit him with my glow stick, which had long since ceased to glow. “Not her! Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t be dense! You know very well who I mean! The Pink Carnation. Is. A. Woman.”

That got his attention. “Shhhh.”

I made an exasperated face. “Do you really think anyone here would care? They’d probably think I was talking about a new rock group.”

His face relaxed into amusement. “True.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.

“You didn’t ask.”

“That is the most puerile excuse for an answer I’ve ever heard.”

Colin plunked his empty champagne glass down on the edge of the catwalk. “Well, what was I supposed to say?”

“You let me go on about the Pink Carnation, all the while knowing . . .” I bit down on my lip, hard.

Colin stared at me, uncomprehending. “All the while knowing what?”

“That the Pink Carnation was female!”

“You’re quite upset about this, aren’t you?”

“Urgh!” Ten points to Let’s State the Bleeding Obvious Man.

Looking completely baffled, Colin snagged two more glasses of champagne from a passing tray, and pressed one into my hand, closing my fingers around the stem. “Here. Drink. You look like you need it.”

Despite the fact that it came from Colin Selwick, that was excellent advice. I drank.

“I know you didn’t want me there, but it still wasn’t nice to make fun of me,” I blurted out.

“When did I make fun of you?” he asked, with a good imitation of surprise.

I eyed him suspiciously. “Last night.”

Colin contemplated this. Understanding dawned in his hazel eyes. “You mean the nightdress? You must admit, you did look like Jane Eyre.”

I could only deal with one grievance at a time. “Forget about that.”

“How can I?” Colin’s lips were twitching. “It’s not often a Brontë heroine—”

“Stop it!” I gave a little bounce of irritation. “I wasn’t referring to that! I wasn’t talking about your making fun of me for looking like a demented gothic heroine—”

“Not necessarily a demented gothic heroine,” Colin broke in, grinning.

“Oh, be quiet!” I howled, undoubtedly changing his mind about the whole demented thing. “I’m talking about the Pink Carnation being manly, and it wasn’t nice of you!”

“Come again?” said Colin.

I gripped the stem of my champagne glass, took a steadying breath, and started over. “I am referring,” I said with deliberate gravity, “to your allowing me to go on about the Pink Carnation being manly, when you knew, all along, that the Pink Carnation was Amy.”

“You think the Pink Carnation is—” Colin stopped abruptly. “Never mind. Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? First of all, I have no recollection of your saying anything about the Pink Carnation being manly.”

Hadn’t I? I racked my champagne-slogged brain. He’d said something about that researcher thinking the Pink Carnation was a transvestite, and I’d said . . . what had I said? I couldn’t remember. Damn.

“Oh,” I said in a small voice. Maybe champagne didn’t completely dull one’s ability to feel like an idiot.

“Second,” he began, “I never—” but I was spared the second blow to my ego. Someone tugged at Colin’s elbow, causing him to break off midsentence. We both looked over sharply. It was Serena.

“Colin?” she said in a piteous little croak, “I don’t feel very well.”