The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Eleven

“Jane! You’ll never believe what I found!”

Racing into Jane’s room without knocking, Amy slammed the door behind her and collapsed panting against the doorframe.

“Two skeletons, three ghosts, and a lunatic in the attic?” Jane suggested absently.

“A wounded man!”

“What?” Jane dropped the heavy tome she had been reading into her lap. “Oh dear, now I’ve lost my page. Amy, a servant with a scratched finger does not count as a wounded man.”

“Very funny. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, and—do you have smelling salts?”

“I do have smelling salts, but why do you need . . . ?” Jane put her book down on the coverlet next to her and fixed confused eyes on her cousin.

“Well, I wanted to wake him up to question him, but I didn’t want to shake him, because heaven only knows what that would do to a man with a head injury—oh, we don’t have time for this, Jane! We have to go back to the west wing!”

“It doesn’t sound as if he’ll be going anywhere,” said Jane mildly, searching in her reticule. She held up a small, green glass vial. “What were you planning to ask him?”

Practically dancing with impatience, Amy yanked her cousin out the door. “Where the Purple Gentian is, of course!”

“What makes you think . . . ?” Jane began, but Amy was muttering to herself about shorter ways to the west wing.

“If we go down the front stairs and to our right . . .” Amy suited action to words, running towards the stairs. Jane caught her hand.

“We’ll be less conspicuous if we walk.”

Amy cast her cousin an agonized glance, but admitted the wisdom of her words. She had been fortunate enough not to see any servants on her hectic flight back from the west wing, but the odds of escaping the staff twice were slim. Wait—she had seen Edouard’s valet, who had been emerging from her brother’s room with a pile of crumpled linen in his arms. Oh well, if he told Edouard, she could always explain that she had been looking at the tapestries when a rat jumped out at her, or something like that.

They descended the stairs at a sedate pace that made Amy dig her fingernails into her palms with impatience. At the base of the stairs, they checked quickly for servants. Although the candles were still lit in the foyer, nobody seemed to be about. To their left lay the rooms of the east wing, to their right, a seeming dead end.

Now that Amy knew what she was looking for, the entrance to the west wing was as clearly marked as though someone had slapped a sign on it. Edouard had hung yet another tapestry, this time one depicting the rape of Lucrece. As the entrance downstairs was more prominent than the one upstairs, Edouard had taken an extra precaution. In front of the tapestry, he had placed a bust of Julius Caesar on a marble pedestal.

Tense with excitement, Amy pointed towards Julius. “There. That’s the entrance.”

Jane picked up a small candelabrum from a marble chest designed to look like a sarcophagus. “Shall we?”

Together, they lifted the heavy tapestry high enough to clear the candles and slipped underneath. They found themselves in an anteroom, a pretty little chamber with gilded walls and dainty chairs that looked as though they would collapse if anyone so much as looked at them. The antechamber led into a music room, complete with a large pianoforte, painted with scenes of pastoral merriment. Jane looked longingly at the yellowed keys, but Amy hurried her onwards into the ballroom. At first, Jane couldn’t see anything at all. Her vision was entirely blocked by piles and piles of brown paper packages.

“There wasn’t anything interesting in them,” Amy whispered as they skirted around the piles. “Just muslin.”

“What an odd place to keep muslin.”

“Maybe they ran out of space in the airing cupboard. My wounded man is just down there, on the sofa underneath Mme de la Vallière.” Amy took the candelabrum from Jane and hurried forward. “I couldn’t get the lids off the crates, but I think—” Amy broke off as she brandished the flames above the sofa to illuminate . . . absolutely nothing.

“Where is he?” In her agitation, Amy forgot to whisper. She waved the candles about, peering under the sofa, running to the next sofa and the next. “I know he was right there! Right under Mme de la Vallière . . . He was fast asleep!”

“Amy . . .”

Amy whirled around to face Jane, flames swirling with her in a diabolical sort of halo. “Please, please don’t tell me I must have imagined him, Jane. I know I saw him!”

“I wasn’t going to,” Jane said gravely. “Bring the candle over here.”

Complying, Amy followed Jane’s gaze. Against the faded white silk of the couch burned a streak of fresh blood.

Jane experimentally reached out a finger. “He can’t have been moved more than a few minutes ago. It’s still wet.”

“But who moved him? And where?” Amy swiveled with the candle as though the malefactors might be hiding in the corners of the room.

“They likely took him out through the French doors into the courtyard,” Jane said thoughtfully.

Amy raced to the nearest door and pulled it open. For something so begrimed with age, it opened without a squeak.

“It’s been newly oiled,” commented Jane under her breath.

Thrusting the candles at Jane, Amy dashed down a shallow flight of three steps and out into the garden while Jane examined the doors. It hadn’t rained recently, so the earth wasn’t damp enough to hold footprints, nor was there mud to track along the stone paths. And there were doors, doors, doors on three sides. Doors into the east wing, the north wing, the west wing. Far too many doors. The man could have been carried through any one of them. Amy prowled the perimeter of the garden, peering through door after door. Unlike the windows and French doors to the west wing, the ones to the east and north were well scrubbed. Amy peered in turn into two drawing rooms, another music room, a breakfast room, and an immense state dining room that took up a large portion of the north wing.

“Amy.” Jane was whispering at her shoulder, the candles in her hand casting odd shadows on the stone of the balustrade. “Come back, I want to show you something.”

“They must have taken him out through one of these rooms.”

Jane considered. “And then downstairs through the servants’ quarters? I think you may have lost your wounded man, Amy.” They were making their way around the garden back to the ballroom doors. Jane paused next to an armless statue of Aphrodite. “None of this explains why he was lying in the ballroom with . . . what kind of wound was it?”

“On his head.” Amy gestured to her own head to demonstrate where. “I couldn’t tell exactly what it was since it was bandaged, but there seemed to be some sort of gash on the left side of his head, or at least that’s where the blood was on the bandage.”

“He could,” Jane commented slowly, “have simply hit his head on something while unloading those packages from the carriage. There might be as simple an explanation as that.”

“Then why all the subterfuge? Why hide him in the ballroom and then whisk him away again?” A breeze whipped Amy’s dark curls into her face and she hastily pushed them out of her way.

“He could have felt better and left.”

“Really, Jane!” The warmth had departed with the sun, and Amy shuddered in the twilight chill, feeling the evening breeze pierce the thin fabric of her frock. “Can you really believe that?”

Jane leaned briefly against Aphrodite, looking perturbed. She finally straightened up and made a face at Amy. “No, I can’t. Come with me and I’ll show you why.”

Amy hurried with her cousin back to the ballroom, where Jane paused just within the entrance.

“Yes?” Amy prompted Jane, who had a regrettable habit of thinking things through before acting on them.

“Look at this.” Jane indicated the door.

“It’s dirty?”

“That’s just it. It’s too dirty. It looks like someone deliberately took garden dirt and smeared it along the glass. See? Here and here? It’s too thick and too uniform to be merely dust and age. It’s as if. . .”

“. . . someone didn’t want anyone seeing in!” Amy finished for her excitedly. Jane quickly moved the candles aside as Amy leaned in to peer at the dirt on the doors, her short curls swinging recklessly close to the flames.

Jane nodded. “That’s just it. But why? What does Edouard have to hide?”

Amy shut the door with a decisive click, and beamed at her cousin. “But, Jane, that’s obvious. Don’t you see? It’s proof that he’s in league with the Purple Gentian!”

The Purple Gentian swung down from his carriage in the courtyard of his own modest bachelor residence—only five bedrooms and a small staff of ten servants, not counting his valet, cook, and coachman—with a heartfelt sigh of relief.

“Zounds, Geoff, it’s good to be back,” he announced to the slender man in waistcoat and shirtsleeves who waited by the door.

“After your dangerous mission into the heart of London society?” his second-oldest friend responded with the quiet humor that had drawn Geoff into Richard and Miles’s circle at Eton.

“Don’t mock,” Richard chided, pulling off his hat and scrubbing one hand through his hair. “I only just made it out of there alive.”

Having displayed their decades of affection by a brisk handshake, Richard surged into the foyer and began dropping his hat, cloak, and gloves on any surfaces that presented themselves. His butler, Stiles, cast his eyes up to the ceiling as he followed in Richard’s wake, gathering up gloves from the floor, cloak from a chair, and hat from the doorknob.

“Will that be all, my lord?” Stiles inquired in the afflicted tones of King Lear.

“Could you see what Cook can rummage up for me? I’m famished.”

“As you wish, my lord,” Stiles intoned, looking, if possible, even more pained than before, and hobbled his way out in the direction of the kitchen.

“He does make a convincing octogenarian,” Richard commented to Geoff as they headed for the dining room in the optimistic anticipation that food would rapidly be forthcoming. “Hell, if I didn’t know better, I would be fooled.”

Geoff darted into the study and emerged shuffling a stack of papers. “You’re not the only one he’s fooled. I gave him last Saturday off, thinking he would wash the gray out of his hair, do the rounds of the taverns, what have you. Instead, he pulled up a chair before the kitchen fire, threw an afghan around his shoulders, and complained about his lumbago.”

The two friends exchanged looks of mingled amusement and distress.

“Well, good butlers are hard to find . . . ,” commented Richard.

“And Stiles will be with you for a great many decades to come,” concluded Geoff.

“That’s the last time we accept an out-of-work actor into the League,” groaned Richard. “I suppose it could have been worse—he could have had delusions of being Julius Caesar and gone about in a toga.”

“He would have fit right in with the members of the Council of Five Hundred,” Geoff commented wryly, referring to the legislative body set up by the revolutionaries in 1795 in an attempt to imitate classical models of government. “About half of them were convinced they were Brutus.”

Richard shook his head sadly. “They read too many classics; such men are dangerous. At any rate, I prefer Stiles’s current delusion. I take it, as matters stand, that he hasn’t lost all track of why he’s really here?”

“If anything, he’s entered into it with even more gusto ever since he decided that he really is an eighty-year-old butler. He plays cards with Fouché’s butler every Wednesday—apparently they exchange remedies for their rheumatism and complain about the poor quality of employers nowadays,” Geoff added with a twinkle in his eye. “And he’s been carrying on a rather bizarre—if informative—flirtation with one of the upstairs maids at the Tuilleries.”

“Bizarre?” Richard sniffed hopefully as he entered the dining room, but comestibles had not preceded them.

Geoff pulled out a chair towards the head of the table and sent the pile of papers he had been holding scooting across the polished wood towards Richard. “He attained her good graces by complimenting her special formula for silver polish. They then proceeded to the intimacies of cleaning crystal.”

“Good God.” Richard began rifling through the stack of correspondence that had accumulated in his absence. “To each his own, I suppose.”

The pile Geoff had brought him contained the usual accumulations—reports from his estate manager, invitations to balls, and perfumed letters from Bonaparte’s promiscuous sister Pauline. Pauline had been trying to entice Richard into her bed since he had returned from Egypt, and the amount of perfume she poured on her letters increased with each failed attempt. Richard could smell the latest all the way from the bottom of the pile.

“How was London?” Geoff asked, signaling to a footman to fetch the claret decanter. “You look like you’re in need of a restorative.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Richard abandoned his letters and flung himself into a chair across the table from Geoff. “Mother must have dragged me to every major gathering in London. If there was an affair of over three hundred people, I was there. I attended enough musicals to render me tone deaf, if not deaf in actuality. I—”

“No more, please,” Geoff shook his head. “I refuse to believe that it could have all been that bad.”

“Oh, really?” Richard raised one brow. He shot his friend a swift, sideways glance. “Mary Alsworthy asked after you.”

“And?” Geoff’s voice was studiedly unconcerned.

“I told her you had taken up with a Frenchwoman of ill repute and were currently expecting your third illegitimate child. By the way, you’re hoping for a girl this time.”

Geoff choked on his claret. “You didn’t. I’m sure I would have heard from my mother by now if you had.”

Richard tipped his chair back with a sigh of pure regret. “No, I didn’t. But I wanted to. It would have been informative to see if she could count high enough to realize three children in less than two years was an impossibility.”

Geoff looked away, displaying a deep interest in the arrangement of silver on the sideboard behind Richard. “There were a number of interesting developments while you were away.”

Richard let the subject drop. With any luck, by the time Geoff returned to England some other poor blighter would have fallen prey to Mary Alsworthy’s overused lures.

Richard leaned across the table, green eyes glittering. “What sort of developments?”

Geoff regaled him with tales of changes in security at the Ministry of Police (“Rather a case of closing the stable door once the horses have fled, don’t you think?” remarked Richard smugly), the frustrated ambitions of Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat (“A weak-willed man, if ever I saw one,” commented Geoff. “He may be of use to us yet.”), and strange goings-on along the coast.

Richard’s ears pricked up. “Do you think he could be shipping munitions in for the invasion of England?” There was no need to ask whom Richard meant by “he.”

“That’s still unclear. We haven’t been able to get anyone close enough to see what’s being transported. Our connection in Calais—”

“The innkeeper at the Sign of the Scratching Cat?”

“The very one. He’s noticed an unusual amount of activity over the past few months. The serving wench at the Drowned Rat in Le Havre has similar reports. She says she saw a group of men transferring a series of large packages from a Channel packet to an unmarked carriage, and taking off down the road towards Paris.”

“Could it be just the usual smuggling activity?” Richard nodded his thanks as the footman set a bowl of potato-and-leek soup down before him, trying to quell the anticipation thrilling through him at Geoff’s news. He felt like a hound eager to bounce off after a fox. Of course, he had better make jolly sure first that it was a fox, and not just a rabbit, or a bunch of waving leaves. Or something like that. Richard rapidly abandoned the metaphor. Ever since war had broken out between England and France, the smugglers of both countries had done a brisk trade, hauling French brandies and silks to England, and returning laden with English goods. There had been one or two occasions in the past where Richard had gone haring off into the night, convinced he was on the trail of French agents carrying valuable intelligence to England, only to wind up with a boat full of disgruntled French smugglers and ten-year-old brandy. Not that Richard minded the brandy, but still. . . .

“There is that,” Geoff conceded. “But Stiles heard from Fouché’s butler that the Ministry of Police has been very quietly detailing men to guard shipments of something coming in from Switzerland. He wasn’t sure what, and he didn’t know when—at least not yet—but he did say that it was top priority, whatever it was.”

“That does sound promising, if somewhat vague. I take it you’ve had someone watching the major roads and waterways?”

“I will ignore the implicit insult,” Geoff said calmly. “Yes, I have. In addition to another three cases of brandy in the cellar, we also have a few leads. Whatever these shipments are, Georges Marston is up to his neck in it.”

Richard’s lip curled in distaste. “Why does that come as no surprise?” he inquired of the portrait on the wall behind Geoff’s head.

The portrait, presumably an ancestor of the former owner of the house, which Richard had purchased furnished, sneered silently. One might assume that the gentleman in the portrait would have turned up his nose at the likes of Marston, even had he been able to speak. While Marston claimed a relation with a distinguished English family through his father, it was an open secret that he had been raised by his French mother in circumstances that could hardly be called respectable. Having wrangled his father’s family into buying him a commission in the English army, he had promptly deserted in the midst of battle and decamped to the French.

“Marston has been frequenting the docks,” Geoff continued. “I’ve had our boys watching him. We’ve noticed a pattern—every few days, someone will come to his lodgings with a note, and then he hares off in a carriage to the waterfront.”

“Then what? Oh, devil take it!” Richard mopped at his lap, where a little puddle of soup was collecting from the spoon that he had suspended halfway to his lips.

“Not the devil, Marston,” Geoff corrected with a twitch of his lips. “I hope those weren’t new trousers?”

Richard scowled.

“At any rate,” Geoff went on, “he always takes an unmarked black coach and four—”

“I thought he only had that flashy curricle of his.” Richard made sure to put his soup spoon down before speaking. “That hideous bright red thing.”

“It wouldn’t be at all bad if it weren’t for the color,” commented Geoff wistfully.

“Marston?” Richard prompted.

“Right.” Geoff shook himself out of his reverie of curricles and phaetons. “The use of the carriage heightened our suspicions. We traced it to a livery stable not far from Marston’s lodgings.”

“The curricle would be too noticeable,” mused Richard. Seeing the gleam of the carriage lover rekindle in Geoff’s eye, Richard hastily asked, “What does he do once at the docks?”

“Cleverly disguised as a sailor, I followed Marston to a rather disreputable tavern called the Staves and Cutlass. They named it that for good reason, I might add,” Geoff commented thoughtfully. “It was quite a good thing that I was wearing a hook.”

“And there I was with the debutantes while you were having all the fun,” mourned Richard.

“Calling it fun might be stretching matters a bit. When I wasn’t otherwise occupied in retaining my skin in one piece, I did notice Marston first engage in conversation with a bunch of ruffians, and then slip into a back room. When he didn’t return, I left the establishment just in time to see Marston and his cronies finish loading the carriage with a number of brown paper packages.”

“What were they?”

Geoff cast Richard a mildly exasperated look. “If we knew that, why would we still be following him? However, I can tell you that at least some of the shipments have made their way to the Hotel de Balcourt.”

“Balcourt?”

“You know, little toady of a man, always hanging about the Tuilleries,” Geoff clarified.

“I know who you mean,” Richard said through a mouthful of soup. Swallowing, he explained, “It’s just a devilish odd coincidence. I shared a boat—and a carriage—with Balcourt’s sister and cousin.”

“I didn’t realize he had a sister.”

“Well, he does.” Richard abruptly pushed away his empty bowl.

“What a great stroke of luck! Could you use the acquaintance with the sister to discover more about Balcourt’s activities?”

“That,” Richard said grimly, “is not an option.”

Geoff eyed him quizzically. “I realize that any sister of Balcourt’s is most likely repugnant at best, but you don’t need to propose to the girl. Just flirt with her a bit. Take her for a drive, call on her at home, use her as an entrée into the house. You’ve done it before.”

“Miss Balcourt is not repugnant.” Richard twisted in his chair, and stared at the door. “What the devil is keeping supper?”

Geoff leaned across the table. “Well, if she’s not repugnant, then what’s the—ah.”

“Ah? Ah? What the deuce do you mean by ‘ah’? Of all the nonsensical . . .”

“You”—Geoff pointed at him with fiendish glee—“are unsettled not because you find her repugnant, but because you find her not repugnant.”

Richard was about to deliver a baleful look in lieu of a response, when he was saved by the arrival of the footman bearing a large platter of something covered with sauce. Richard leaned forward and speared what looked like it might once have been part of a chicken, as the footman whisked off with his soup dish.

“Have some,” Richard suggested to Geoff, ever so subtly diverting the conversation to culinary appreciation.

“Thank you.” Undiverted, Geoff continued, “Tell me about your Miss Balcourt.”

“Leaving aside the fact that she is by no means my Miss Balcourt”—Richard ignored the sardonic stare coming from across the table—“the girl is as complete an opposite to her brother as you can imagine. She was raised in England, somewhere out in the countryside. She’s read Homer in the original Greek—”

“This is serious,” murmured Geoff. “Is she comely?”

“Comely?”

“You know, nice hair, nice eyes, nice . . .” Geoff made a gesture that Richard would have expected more readily from Miles.

“She doesn’t look like her brother, if that’s what you’re asking,” Richard bit out.

Geoff slapped the table. “But if you’re taken with her, that’s wonderful!” His lips twitched. “You can court her and investigate her brother at the same time.”

Richard gave the napkin he had just lifted to his lips an irritable twitch. “No, I cannot. First of all, you know that I will never again allow my personal life to interfere with a mission. And secondly . . . secondly,” he repeated more loudly, as Geoff opened his mouth to protest, “did I forget to mention that she hates me?”

“That’s quick work. How did you get her to hate you in all of one day?”

“It was a day and a half.”

Something between a snort and a snicker escaped Geoff’s lips.

“Easy for you to laugh,” retorted Richard.

“No arguing with that,” chuckled Geoff. “No, really, what did you do?”

Richard planted his elbows on the polished wood of the table. “I told her I worked for Bonaparte.”

“And that was all?”

Richard’s lips quirked. “She’s rather passionate on the subject of the Revolution.”

“Then why is she—”

“I know, I know, I asked her the same thing.”

“And you won’t tell her—”

“No!” Richard pushed back from the table so hard that the legs of his chair nearly splintered.

“You could let me finish a sentence once in a while, you know,” Geoff said mildly.

“Sorry,” Richard muttered.

Geoff took advantage of Richard’s momentary silence to say, “I’m not suggesting you go shouting your identity to every comely young lady who wanders your way. But if this one is special, wouldn’t it be better to take the chance of confiding in her—in a limited way,” he added hastily, “than risk losing her? If she’s so fanatical about the Revolution, it seems rather unlikely that she would betray you.”

Richard was mustering his objections when Geoff silenced him again with the softly spoken words, “Not every woman is as shallow as Deirdre.”

Richard pressed his lips together. “You sound like my mother.”

“Since I like your mother, I’ll take that as a compliment, and not as the insult for which it was intended.” Geoff leaned both elbows on the table. “In some ways, it was a fortunate escape for you.”

“But not for Tony.”

“You can’t go on blaming yourself for Tony’s death. Good gad, the odds of something like that happening were nonexistent! It was an accident, Richard, a foolish, unfortunate accident.”

“It would never have happened if infatuation hadn’t impeded my judgment.”

Richard remembered the nervous anticipation he had felt each time he galloped over to call on Deirdre, the way the heady scent of her perfume made his pulse race and his head spin. Funny, he couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like. He had once written a sonnet to her blue, blue eyes, but he could recall the sonnet, with its limping meter and forced rhymes, far better than he could the eyes themselves. And yet this fuzzy image of a woman, so utterly unmemorable now, had exercised a strong enough effect on him to make him completely forget his obligations. Let this be a lesson to you, he advised himself. Passion was fleeting; dishonor lingered. Sic transit . . . well, everything.

Richard tried to think of a more fitting Latin tag, but couldn’t. Amy would probably . . . Richard quelled that counterproductive thought before it could go any further.

Geoff poured himself a second cup of claret. “Besides, as hideously as the business with Deirdre ended, she wasn’t malicious, just henwitted. It was pure ill luck that her maid happened to be a French operative.”

Richard closed his eyes and pressed the heel of his hand hard against his forehead. “So it wasn’t Deirdre, it was her bloody French maid who was the spy. That didn’t make any difference to Tony.”

“It exonerated her of ill intent.”

“But not me of idiocy.” Richard’s green eyes darkened with remembered pain. “Don’t you see? That makes it that much worse. A chance word to her maid while she was fixing her hair—her damned hair!—and Tony’s life was forfeit. Say I tell Amy . . .”

“So that’s her name.”

“And Amy makes some comment—in strictest secrecy, because, of course, these things are always passed along in strictest secrecy,” Richard spat out, “to her cousin Jane. Jane’s a discreet sort of girl; she might not repeat it. But the house is teeming with servants. Even if they don’t have a bloody lady’s maid in the room with them, there’s bound to be a footman lurking somewhere about. And then there’s Balcourt himself, who may or may not be on Bonaparte’s payroll, but who would do anything to ingratiate himself to him. How long would the League of the Purple Gentian last if my identity were to become known to him? I give it the time it would take for him to call his carriage and waddle his way to the consul’s study.” Richard raised his wineglass in an ironic salute. “Farewell, Purple Gentian.”

“That’s only the very worst case.”

Richard’s lips twisted in a humorless smile. “Isn’t that what we ought to plan for then? I can’t risk it, Geoff. Even if there weren’t other impediments, I couldn’t risk it. Too many people depend on me.”

Geoff looked at him steadily, a friend of too long standing to be daunted by either irony or idealism. “You know what Miles would tell you if he were here. He’d say, ‘You’re being too bloody noble.’ And, in this instance, he’d be right.”

Breaking Geoff’s gaze, Richard lounged back in his chair and changed the subject. “Did anything else thrilling transpire while I was away? Like Delaroche choking on a chicken bone?”

Geoff pushed aside the remains of his own cold chicken. “Delaroche, I regret to inform you, is still alive and kicking. I must say, the man does have an instinct for theater. He strode into the Tuilleries the other day and informed Bonaparte that, as the Purple Gentian hadn’t struck for over a fortnight, it was clear that he, Delaroche, had scared him away.”

“That will never do,” Richard drawled. He rocked back and forth in his chair, a devilish gleam creeping into his emerald eyes. “After all, it would be deuced unkind of us to let the man continue to entertain these delusions, wouldn’t you say?”

Geoff hunched forward, his own eyes taking on an answering sheen. “What do you think one might do to disabuse him of these unhealthy fantasies?”

“Well . . .” Richard toyed with the stem of his wineglass, admiring the way the candlelight struck crimson glints off the dark liquid. “One might raid his secret files . . . but one has done that already, so what’s the fun in that?”

“Or,” Geoff mused, getting into the spirit of the game, “one might leave mocking notes on his pillow, but . . .”

“One has done that already, too,” Richard concluded sadly. “Does Delaroche have any files we haven’t looked at yet?”

Geoff shook his head. “No. I’d say you made a rather thorough job of that. How about rescuing someone from the Temple prison? We haven’t done that in a while, and it’s sure to infuriate Delaroche.”

“The very thing!” Richard rocked upright so fast that he banged into the table, setting dishes and cutlery jumping. “I knew I kept you around for a reason!”

Geoff grimaced. “You flatter me.”

“Think nothing of it,” Richard advised him graciously. “Young Falconstone has been imposing on the hospitality of the Bastille for far too long. We wouldn’t want to overstrain their supplies.”

“The moldy bread and moldier water?”

“Don’t forget the occasional rat as a treat on holidays. I’m sure the French consider it a great delicacy. Like frogs, or cow’s brains.”

Geoff groaned. “No wonder they had a revolution! They were probably all suffering from chronic indigestion.”

“There may be something in that theory.” Richard pushed back from the table and stood. “But let’s save writing your History of the Causes of the French Revolution for another night. We have far more diverting activities ahead of us. . . .”