The warped table tottered as Delaroche seated himself again in the rickety chair. The candle flame flickered, threatening to go out. Delaroche appeared not to notice.

Twice. Lord Richard Selwick had been seen twice in the company of Mlle Amy Balcourt. They had been seen first in the courtyard of the Tuilleries. Later, Selwick had been spied entering the gates of Balcourt’s town house with a larger party, consisting, Delaroche’s spy informed him, of the Englishman’s family.

What drove a man to see a woman twice in one day?

Delaroche rapidly dismissed the possibility that the Balcourt girl might be an agent. Her brother was well known as a hanger-on at the First Consul’s court. That in itself was no guarantee of the girl’s innocence. Family ties, ha! Blood might be thicker than water on the floor of the interrogation chamber, but Delaroche had long since concluded that the truism had few other applications. Family ties were an impediment. A prop for the weak, an encumbrance for the strong.

But Delaroche would have heard long since had a new spy been in operation in Paris. There would have been ripples and reverberations across the dark pools of his subterranean world, whispers and rumors. There had been none. The Balcourt chit was innocent—of spying, at least.

Which brought Delaroche back to his initial question: Why would the Purple Gentian waste precious hours on a chit of a girl?

It was at the Balcourt town house that Lord Richard had first been spotted in amorous embrace with an unnamed female two nights previously. Delaroche himself had observed them in flirtation at one of Mme Bonaparte’s salons. A slow, contemptuous smile broke across the face of the Assistant Minister of Police.

Every man had a weakness, even the oh-so-intrepid Purple Gentian.

“One mistake, Selweeck,” Delaroche crowed softly in the darkness. “All it takes is one fatal mistake.”

To snare the man, one need only lay hold of the girl.

Delaroche snuffed the candle.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Unbeknownst to either the Ministry of Police or the Purple Gentian, in a large town house on the other side of the city, the League of the Pink Carnation was planning its first escapade.

Considerable thought was expended as to how the illustrious career of the Pink Carnation ought to begin. Miss Gwen, under whose high-necked bodice lurked the sort of bloodthirsty spirit that accounted watching gladiators being gored by lions rather good fun, would be satisfied with nothing less than running through a Frenchman (Miss Gwen graciously left the choice of Frenchman up to committee), and hanging him by his feet from the blade of the guillotine.

Jane, after a startled look at Miss Gwen, suggested filching some files from Delaroche’s office, a plan which was instantly voted down by both of the others; Amy dismissed it as insufficiently daring, Miss Gwen as boringly bloodless. Amy’s plan A, that they sneak into the Temple prison in cunning disguises and liberate some deserving prisoners, met with equal scorn. As did plan B, plan C, and even plan D, which involved dressing up in the clothes of the previous decade, dusting themselves all over with flour, and flitting about Bonaparte’s bedside as the ghosts of murdered aristocrats. “Like Richard III being haunted by his victims!” explained Amy with relish. Miss Gwen, scenting potential fodder for her horrid novel, was intrigued, but in the end ruled that scaling the windows of the Tuilleries dressed in three-foot-wide panniers and covered in flour would be both difficult and messy.

Jane’s alarmed face relaxed.

“We don’t have to do anything too spectacular,” she pointed out hastily, before Amy could outline plan E. “After all, this is merely a calling card. Something to make the Minister of Police aware that he has a new adversary.”

“A better adversary,” amended Miss Gwen with a sniff.

“Since our real mission is the retrieval of the Swiss gold,” Jane continued, “shouldn’t we keep this one simple?”

“Oh! I have an idea!” Amy sat bolt upright on the settee, blue eyes gleaming with mischief. “Why don’t we sneak into his bedchamber and leave a note and a pink carnation on his pillow?”

Miss Gwen’s thin lips, which had begun to move automatically into their sneer position, relaxed into speculation instead.

“I like it!” seconded Jane, sounding rather insultingly surprised.

“We could write it in rhyme,” giggled Amy. “How about, ‘Seek me where and when you will/ The Pink Carnation will best you still’?”

“It doesn’t scan,” said Miss Gwen dampeningly.

“Well, I only just made it up off the top of my head.”

Miss Gwen’s narrowed eyes implied that she thought little of the top of Amy’s head.

“Maybe we should stick to prose,” Jane suggested tactfully. “Something—”

“I know, simple.” Amy cast Jane a fond look. “In that case, why not just leave him a note telling him that he can thank the Pink Carnation for the disappearance of the Swiss gold? We could leave it right before taking the gold.”

The idea passed the Committee of the Pink Carnation by unanimous vote. It all seemed an excellent idea at the time, with even Miss Gwen deigning a rare nod of approval. Jane, the Carnation with the neatest handwriting, drew up the note to Delaroche. Miss Gwen procured their costumes, a task accomplished with one quick raid on the grooms’ quarters. Discovering the best time to enter Delaroche’s lodgings was left to Amy, who struck up a conversation with Delaroche’s groom as she waited for the Balcourt carriage to be brought around after an evening party at the Tuilleries. If he was nonplussed at being addressed by a lady, the groom failed to show it. He proved surprisingly helpful in apprising her of his master’s schedule, repeating several times that Delaroche had an engagement outside of Paris on the evening of the thirtieth. Amy ought to have been pleased that it had been so easy. But by the time two days had passed, Amy found herself wishing she had been assigned something a little more, well, active. Something that would keep her mind off Lord Richard.

This latter task wasn’t in the least helped by the fact that Lady Uppington had enthusiastically adopted both Jane and Amy, and persisted, with significant sidelong glances at Amy, in relating many adorable tales of Richard’s youth. Amy tried not to listen too eagerly, but how could she help herself? She could just see a miniature Richard jauntily leveling a sword at a yew bush, and from there it was only a short step to picturing the very devastatingly adult Richard facing off against Marston, and from there . . . From there, Amy tended to blush a very deep red at memories that had no business coming to mind in the presence of Richard’s mother and sister.

If she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t just in the presence of Richard’s family members that memories plagued her. They leaped into her head when she was plotting with Miss Gwen, flitted in front of her when she was brushing her hair at her mirror, and positively taunted her as she lay unsleeping in bed. It was utterly infuriating to be sitting at the breakfast table, staring at the remains of a brioche, and to hear the whisper of the Purple Gentian’s voice in her ear and feel the brush of his hand across her cheek. And Amy’s heart leaped painfully into her throat every time she saw a black cloak swishing down the street.

Why couldn’t he leave her alone? Oh, but there was the rub—Lord Richard, and his alter ego, the Purple Gentian, were leaving her alone. When she and Jane called on Lady Uppington and Henrietta for tea, he kept scrupulously to his study. He stayed towards the other side of the salon at Mme Bonaparte’s receptions. (Amy surrounded herself with very tall officers to physically block off the temptation of glancing in his direction to see if he might possibly be glancing at her.) When she loitered in the corridors of the Tuilleries on her way back from her weekly English lesson with Hortense, he whisked so rapidly around a corner that all she saw was the glint of a familiar golden head. Nor had there been any midnight visitations from the cloaked and masked form of the Purple Gentian.

But that was all right, wasn’t it? She only had to see him once more, one meeting to crow over her triumph, and then he’d flee back to England in embarrassment, and she would be done with him forever. No more Lord Richard Selwick. No more Purple Gentian.

Amy scowled at yet another mutilated brioche.

On the day the Swiss gold was due to arrive, Amy paced back and forth in front of her window, watching as the streaks of sunset wended their painfully slow way across the sky—why wouldn’t the sun just set already? Amy began dressing a good hour before the time they had appointed to leave, drawing out the process as long as she possibly could.

Binding her breasts proved much more difficult than Amy had imagined. How did all of those Shakespeare heroines who disguised themselves as boys manage it? Amy scowled at the long strip of white linen that had untied itself—again. After another three tries, and several cries of pain, the binding found its way onto the fire. After all, the shirt was loose, and billowy, and maybe if she hunched over a bit, no one would notice.

Wriggling her nose in distaste, she shrugged into the grimy trousers—their color was indeterminate, and might have been anything from black to brown originally—and pulled the coarse beige linen shirt over her head. It smelled regrettably of stableboy.

Fully garbed, down to a pair of muddy brown boots, Amy found herself once again without anything to do—and with an offensive stench. Next time, she resolved grimly, they would go disguised as something more glamorous. Something less smelly. Maybe they should have pretended to be ladies of the night going to meet a client.