The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Seventeen

My contact lenses were glued to my eyeballs.

Letting the paper I was holding drop into my lap, I rubbed my eyes. I hadn’t pulled an all-nighter since college, and my eyes had clearly decided I was too old for this sort of thing. Hauling myself higher against the pillows, I glanced at the face of the china clock upon the night table. Two-thirty in the morning. No wonder my contacts were killing me.

The bedside lamp cast intriguing shadows along the flocked wallpaper of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s guest bedroom. Like all guest bedrooms, it had the musty, unused air a room gets when nobody has lived in it for quite some time. Silver-framed photographs of people I didn’t know—but none of Colin—shared dresser space with an old-fashioned dresser set engraved with my hostess’s initials, and a squat statue that looked to my untutored eyes like it might be African. Other exotic knickknacks occupied odd corners of the room, a tufted spear propped up against an armoire, a multilegged goddess sitting companionably next to a Dresden shepherdess on the writing table.

Once again, I tried to focus my bleary eyes on the paper in my lap, but the faded loops of inks slithered away from me. Amy’s handwriting wasn’t nearly as tidy as Jane’s; her diary teemed with crossed-out phrases, blots of inks, and, in moments of agitation, extra loops on her letters. That last entry had been very, very agitated. One “m” alone had obtained three extra humps.

Of course, I’d have been agitated, too, if my favorite masked hero had caught me in a passionate embrace and then hopped blithely out the window. True, I might not have known the last name of a couple of the guys I’d kissed back in college, but at least I’d been able to see their faces. Talk about adding a whole new dimension to the “but does he really like me?” dilemma. Poor Amy.

I was one up on Amy in terms of knowing who the Purple Gentian was, but there had been nary a whiff of a Pink Carnation so far. I mulled over the possibilities. I had to agree with Amy that there was something rather suspect about Georges Marston. Could anyone really be that boorish unless he was trying to hide something? And the whole half-English, half-French thing . . . I paused, liking the notion. I had flung “The Pink Carnation might be French!” at Colin Selwick in a fit of temper, but wouldn’t it be funny if it were true?

I smiled beatifically off into space. I’d just love to see the look on Mr. Colin Selwick’s face as I disclosed to the Institute of Historical Research that not only had the Pink Carnation been half French, but he had held a commission in Napoleon’s army.

Given my own long-lasting attachment to the Pink Carnation, I wasn’t all that sure I wanted him to turn out to be Georges Marston just to spite Colin Selwick. There was something about Marston that put me in mind of those swaggering guys who latch onto you in a club, refusing to believe you’re really there just to dance with your friends. The ones who won’t take no for an answer, and call you nasty names when you wiggle away.

My money was on Augustus Whittlesby. I’d read the effusions he’d sent to Jane, fifteen poems under the collective title, Odes to the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes. They might limp along from one rhyme to the next, but one couldn’t really call them poetry. Not without offering up apologies to Keats and Milton. No man could write verse that bad unless it was on purpose. He had to have a secret identity. And both Pulchritudinous and Princess began with P, like Pink. . . .

I dropped my aching head into my hands with a heartfelt groan. Oh, goodness, I hadn’t just really thought that, had I? “Pink Carnation, Pink Carnation starts with P . . .” sang my unregenerate mind in the tones of Cookie Monster.

I really had been awake too long.

What I needed was a cup of tea. I’d even settle for a plain old glass of water. Something to sip to wake me up so I could go on reading before Colin Selwick managed to convince his aunt never to let me darken their doorstep again.

Placing the unbound pages of Amy’s diary carefully on the bedside table, I shoved aside the covers, and clambered out of the high bed, tugging the long skirts of my borrowed nightgown out of my way.

Easing my way through the crack in the door, I paused, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness of the hallway and trying to get my bearings. As my friend Pammy likes to point out, I have an internal anticompass. Tell me to find my way to a destination, and I will invariably go in the exact opposite direction.

The steady tick-tock of a grandfather clock formed a backbeat to the other nighttime noises: the hum of the pipes, the creak of floorboards, the rustle of the wind through the bare branches of the trees in the square. I shimmied along the wall, hoping I was heading in the right direction for the kitchen. Ouch. I had discovered a doorframe with my elbow. Rubbing my injured extremity, I peered around the door. Silver gleamed in the faint light from the streetlamp outside. It was the dining room, a long table of polished wood in the center of the room, a silver-laden sideboard under the half-draped windows.

Where there was a dining room, shouldn’t there be a kitchen? I’d try the next door down, I decided, turning back around, and if that didn’t work. . . .

Ooof!

I whammed into something warm and unyielding. A large pair of hands clamped down on my elbows. Automatically, I tried to wiggle free.

“What in the hell—?” it rasped.

Colin Selwick. Who else would be profane to a guest in the wee hours of the morning? I pushed against him with both hands, coming into contact with pure muscle beneath a thin layer of fabric. The big lummox didn’t so much as budge.

“Let go!” I whispered indignantly. “It’s me. Eloise.”

His viselike grip on my elbows loosened, but he didn’t let go. I could feel the warmth of his hands seeping through the thin linen of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s nightgown.

“What in the hell are you doing creeping around the house at this hour of the night?”

“Stealing the silver, what else?” I snapped.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” He released me and took a step back; I could barely make out the location of his face in the darkness of the hallway, much less see his expression. “Let’s try this again, shall we?”

“I was looking for the kitchen,” I amended hastily. “I wanted a glass of water.”

“You’re going the wrong way.”

“Typical,” I muttered.

“Come along before you wake Aunt Arabella,” he ordered, and took off in the opposite direction. He didn’t wait to see if I would follow.

He moved through the pitch-black hallway with the sureness of a man in his own home, weaving dexterously around such impediments as a small table (which I identified the hard way), a chair (ditto), and someone’s discarded umbrella. For all I knew, it was his home. After all, what did I know of the Selwicks? Limping along behind the broad shadow of Colin Selwick’s back, I had to remind myself that I’d only known them for one day; Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, kind as she had been to me, was still a stranger. Even if I was wearing her nightgown. Stumbling on the hem, I gathered up my linen skirts and followed Colin Selwick around a bend in the hallway, through a swinging door, and into the kitchen.

I covered my eyes with my hand as Colin flicked the switch, flooding the square room with light from the overhead fixture. He stood there, one hand still on the switch, just looking at me.

I countered his inspection with one of my own. With the light on, he was considerably less intimidating than he had been as a shadow in the dark hallway. There’s something inherently unthreatening about plaid pajama bottoms and a ratty old T-shirt.

Even so, I missed the protective armor of my three-inch heels. With my bare feet poking out from under the flounce of my nightgown, I felt little, off-balance. I had to tilt my head back to meet Colin Selwick’s speculative gaze. I didn’t like it.

“Do you have something to say?” I prompted. “Or do you just enjoy propping up the wall?”

Colin considered me for a moment longer. “Aunt Arabella likes you.”

He sounded unflatteringly perplexed.

“There is a small but vocal minority of people who do.”

Colin had the good grace to look abashed. “Look, I didn’t mean to—”

“Treat me like I have a loathsome social disease?”

His lips quirked with something that might have been amusement. “Do you?”

“None that I’d admit to in mixed company.” After all, an unhealthy obsession with Cadbury Fruit & Nut bars isn’t the sort of weakness a girl confides in just anybody.

He smiled—a real smile. Damn. It was easier to deal with him when he was being thoroughly vile. “Look, I’m sorry for being so rude earlier today. Your presence came as something of a shock and I reacted badly.”

“Oh.” Geared for battle, his apology took me utterly by surprise. I gaped.

“Aunt Arabella spoke very highly of you,” he added, heaping coals of fire on my head. “She was impressed by your work on the Purple Gentian.”

“Why all this sudden amiability?” I asked suspiciously, crossing my arms across my chest.

“Are you always this blunt?”

“I’m too tired to be tactful,” I said honestly.

“Fair enough.” Stretching, Colin detached himself from the wall. “Can I make you some hot chocolate as a token of peace? I was just about to have some myself,” he added.

Suiting action to words, he loped over to the counter beside the sink and checked the level of water in a battered brown plastic electric kettle. Satisfied, he plugged it into the wall, flipping the red switch on the side.

I followed him over to the counter, the linen folds of the nightgown trailing after me across the linoleum. “As long as you promise not to slip any arsenic in it.”

Colin rooted around in a cupboard above the sink for the cocoa tin and held it out to me to sniff. “See? Arsenic free.”

I leaned back against the counter, my elbows behind me on the marble work surface. “I don’t think arsenic is supposed to have a smell, is it?”

“Damn, foiled again.” Colin spooned Cadbury’s instant hot chocolate into two mugs, one decorated with large purple flowers, and the other with a quotation that I thought might be Jane Austen, but the author’s name was hidden around the other side of the mug. “Look, if it makes you feel better, I promise to do a very bad job hiding your body.”

“In that case, carry on,” I yawned.

The red switch on the side of the electric kettle flipped to off as the water bubbled to a boil. Marveling at the unreality of it all, I watched as Colin efficiently unplugged the cord and poured steaming water into the two mugs. Here I was, in someone else’s midnight kitchen, while the man who had told me to keep my grubby little hands off his family papers made me hot chocolate. I had to be hallucinating. Or asleep. Any moment now, Colin was going to morph into a dancing aardvark, and I’d find myself naked in the middle of a chemistry exam.

Colin held out one steaming mug. “Flowers suit you?”

In the interest of our truce, I refrained from making snide remarks about carnations.

“Do you live here?” I asked, carefully positioning my fingers at the very bottom of the handle so that they wouldn’t touch his.

He shook his head, carrying his own mug over to the kitchen table. “I stay with Aunt Arabella when I’m in town.”

“Is your girlfriend also staying over?” I asked.

I caught a flash of something in his eyes—probably distaste at my prying into his personal life—but he said neutrally, “Serena has her own flat.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why he was staying with an aged aunt instead of his beauteous lady love, but I bit it back. It really wasn’t any of my business. For all I knew, they’d had a huge spat over dinner and he’d been banned from his girlfriend’s bed. Maybe he was a cover hog, and she’d exiled him. Maybe she snored. I rather liked that theory. The glamorous Serena snuffling and snorting, while Colin, driven half mad with the noise, fled in his plaid pajamas to Onslow Square.

My amusement faded as another, more realistic option occurred to me. His return to his aunt’s house might have more to do with concern that a certain unwanted houseguest didn’t try to make off with the family silver in the middle of the night.

“Sorry?” I’d been so wrapped up in my speculations that I’d missed whatever the object of them was saying.

“Why don’t you sit down,” he repeated patiently. He nudged a chair towards me with one large, bare foot. “I won’t bite.”

“One would never have known it from that letter of yours.” I maneuvered myself and my flounces into the straight-backed chair, setting my still-steaming cocoa on the table in front of me. “I half expected to be set upon by mastiffs if I dared to set foot upon the hallowed grounds of Selwick Hall.”

Amusement danced in Colin Selwick’s hazel eyes. “I only promised I wouldn’t bite. That’s what we keep the dogs for,” he added with mock solemnity.

“Why were you so nasty?”

Colin shrugged, some of the amusement fading. For a second, I was almost sorry I’d forced the topic. “We’ve had some difficulty with academics in the past, wanting to see the family papers. Some of them were less than polite.”

Personally, I thought that if he had behaved to them as he had to me, they had every reason to rave like demented harpies.

“We had one woman sniffing around two years ago, trying to prove that the Pink Carnation was a transvestite. She said that’s why he picked such a poofy name.”

“He was not!” I said indignantly. Not that I have anything against that splendid segment of the species with their highly developed fashion sense, but my—um, I mean, the Pink Carnation was all man. He was Zorro, Lancelot, and Robin Hood all rolled into one. And, yes, I know Robin Hood wore tights, but they were manly tights.

“At least we agree on that much,” Colin said dryly.

“And why should it matter?” I took a gulp of my cocoa, scalding half the skin off my tongue in the process, but I was off on one of my favorite rants and not to be deterred. “How does that make any difference to the thousands of British soldiers he saved and the hundreds of French spies he uncovered? What does it matter who the Pink Carnation was, when what he did—oops!” I had gestured a little too grandly with my flowery mug, generating a waterfall of hot cocoa down my hand.

“And you’re so keen to see these papers because?” Colin Selwick inquired delicately.

I made a face at him and said something rude.

He raised a smug eyebrow.

I plunked my mug down on the pine table and leaned forward. “Why did your family hide the identity of the Pink Carnation?”

Colin retracted his eyebrow. He developed a deep interest in poking at the gooey cocoa residue that had collected at the bottom of his mug. “Maybe nobody was interested.”

“Bullshit.”

“Language, language, Miss Kelly.”

“Sorry to singe your tender ears. But, really, why didn’t anyone ever tell?”

Colin leaned back in his chair, lips twisting wryly. “God, you are tenacious.”

“Flattery won’t make me any less so.”

“Flattery?” he queried.

“Pink Carnation?” I prompted.

“Well.” He lowered his voice conspiratorily. “If you really must know . . .”

“Yes!”

“Maybe the Pink Carnation had a loathsome social disease.” He grinned.

“Awful!” I whacked the table in disgust. Cradling my wounded hand, I moaned, “Owwww . . .”

“Serves you right, attacking the poor, innocent table.” Colin picked up his mug and carried it over to the sink.

“You drove me to it,” I flung back at him. “Ouch!”

Colin sighed. “Oh, give me that. No, not that.” I’d extended my half-full mug of cocoa. He took the cocoa out of my hand, placed it on the table, and took hold of my hand instead.

Moving closer, so close that his pajama leg whispered against the skirt of my nightgown, he leaned intently over my hand.

“Where does it hurt?” he asked.

Next to his, my hand looked fragile and transparently pale. A nervous joke about palmistry and fortune-tellers died on my lips as Colin turned my hand palm up, massaging the abused digits. He ran his thumb, large, tanned, calloused, along the fleshy mound at the base of my palm, probing for injury. A shiver that had nothing to do with the draft from the window ran down my spine.

“It’s fine. Really,” I croaked, jerking my hand away.

“Good.” Chair legs scraped against linoleum. “We wouldn’t want you suing us,” Colin added briskly, dumping my mug into the sink with a clatter.

My mouth dropped open. “I wouldn’t—”

Colin started towards the kitchen door. “Of course, you wouldn’t,” he said, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “Look, all of this we’ve discussed—and everything you’ve read—it stays between us.”

I wrenched my chair around to face him. “What do you mean?” I demanded, still reeling from that lawsuit comment.

“The Pink Carnation. Anything you read, or discover, goes no further than this flat. I spoke with Aunt Arabella tonight, and we came to the agreement that you may read anything she sees fit to show you—but only on that condition.”

I popped out of my chair. “But my dissertation!”

“Will no doubt contain all sorts of brilliant insights about the Purple Gentian and the Scarlet Pimpernel,” he said smoothly. “You can use anything you read here for those purposes. Not the Pink Carnation.”

“You’re absurd!”

His eyes swept leisurely up and down my linen-clad form. And he grinned. The bastard had the nerve to grin.

“At least I’m not impersonating Jane Eyre. Good night, Eloise.”

“Well, you’re no Mr. Rochester!” I snapped.

A door clicked shut somewhere along the hallway, informing me that even my feeble sally had been too late.

Urgh!

I sank back down into my chair, fuming. That nasty, vile . . . I must really have been reading too many nineteenth-century letters if my first impulse was to call him a cad. Rogue and bounder might also apply. Whatever term one used—and I could also think of several modern ones that would do nicely—the result was the same. That walking ball of slime had lulled me into a false sense of security by plying me with apologies and hot chocolate, intending all the while to spring his little nondisclosure provision on me.

Did he think I was going to go all gooey and giggly over him just because he fed me some instant hot chocolate and spoke to me like a human being for half an hour?

Well, I wasn’t falling for it. And I wasn’t giving in that easily. So his Aunt Arabella liked me, did she? We’d see what she had to say about the whole nothing-you-read-can-go-beyond-this-flat ultimatum.

In the meantime, I had reading to do. Lots and lots of reading, and only a few hours left before morning necessitated my departure.

Stomping purposefully down the hall to my temporary room, I flung myself onto the bed, and resolutely took up Amy’s diary where I had left off. I didn’t care if my contacts started dancing a tango; nothing was going to deter me from finding out as much as I possibly could, and to hell with Colin Selwick!