The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Eighteen

Georges. Amy rolled the name through her mind and frowned. She tried Anglicizing it. George. George! George . . . No matter how she pronounced it or punctuated it, George just didn’t sound like the sort of name the Purple Gentian ought to have. Spelled Georges it was far too French and slippery. Spelled George, the name called up images of corpulent old King George puttering about in the gardens of Kew. Not exactly an enticing prospect.

But after last night, how could she have any doubt as to the Gentian’s identity? The evidence was overwhelming. If Marston’s conversation with her brother hadn’t been enough to prove his identity, seeing him climbing into his carriage, wearing a long black cloak of the same sort that Amy had been in such intimate contact with—her stomach did flip-flops at the recollection—had to be conclusive. Two men in black cloaks roaming about her brother’s house in the dead of night strained the imagination. And that Marston would be leaving from the front of the house just after the Purple Gentian sped off in that direction was enough of a coincidence to beggar belief.

Amy squirmed fretfully against the gray velvet squabs as her brother’s coach pulled out of the courtyard, the same courtyard into which she had spied so anxiously last night. In the midday sun, with light glancing off the windows of the house and glinting along the shiny black finish of the gates, it hardly seemed like the same place. In fact, had Amy not woken on her chaise longue to find a pair of hideously besmeared slippers kicked half into the fireplace grate (she vaguely remembered attempting to burn them, and being thwarted by the fact that the coals had already been banked), she would have been inclined to assume that she had dreamed the whole thing.

Finding her way back into the house last night had been an experience that Amy would as soon forget. Attempting to climb over the gates had not been one of her more inspired plans. Discovering that Edouard had returned to his study and latched the window—after Amy spent an uncomfortable fifteen minutes grappling with the wall before successfully hoisting herself up onto the sill—had been the sort of setback that would have reduced a woman of lesser spirit to tears. Finally, when she had sunk to the prospect of waking the household and was trying to concoct a convincing tale to explain why she was outside at well past midnight in a torn gown and filthy slippers, she had come upon an unlatched window in the dining room, and swarmed up over the sill with a strength born of desperation.

At least the treacherous journey into the house had kept Amy’s mind occupied. Back in her room, she lit a candle by the bed, and changed out of her soiled clothes in the quivering point of light. She stuck her shoes in the grate, pulled on a clean white linen night rail, brushed her hair fifty times, turned down the covers, blew out the candle, and couldn’t sleep.

She couldn’t sleep on her side, and she couldn’t sleep on her back, and she couldn’t sleep rolled into a ball with her arms around her knees.

“Oh my goodness, I kissed the Purple Gentian,” Amy whispered to the darkened room. She slid down along the pillow with a silly smile on her face. It really had been an incredibly nice kiss.

But she still had no proof of who he actually was. Or how to find him.

Who was he? Why had he kissed her? Did he want to see her again? Argh!

Two o’clock saw Amy flat on her stomach with her head at the footboard and her feet kicking the pillow, replaying her conversation with the Purple Gentian in a slightly improved version.

At three o’clock Amy had rolled the covers into a little ball at the foot of the bed, and was wondering whether the Purple Gentian had just kissed her to get her to stop pestering him.

By four o’clock Amy had been reduced to pulling little tufts of fuzz off of the coverlet and chanting, “He loves me, he loves me not.”

It had taken the combined efforts of Jane and Miss Gwen to drag Amy out of bed in time for her first English lesson with Hortense Bonaparte. Really, that jug of water had been completely unnecessary, Amy decided crossly.

Amy yawned broadly as the carriage drew up before the Tuilleries, decanting her and Edouard into the courtyard. A bored-looking sentry waved them into the palace. Amy made faces at Edouard’s anxious reminders to be on her best behavior, promised to meet him back at the entryway in two hours, and breathed a sigh of relief as he scuttled off down a corridor on his own errands. Amy wasn’t supposed to meet Hortense—she consulted the little enamel watch hanging from a gold chain around her neck—for another twenty minutes, which, now that she had divested herself of her brother, left her time to explore.

The Tuilleries by day was quite a different prospect from the Tuilleries by night. Last night, the rooms through which they had passed had been decked with orange blossoms and cunning arrangements of roses whose scent had clashed with the heavy perfumes worn by the guests. Not even the odd, crumpled petal remained; all had been swept away by efficient servants, leaving in their wake the less pleasant reek of ammonia and lye.

Last night grenadiers standing stiffly at attention (at least Bonaparte made no attempt to hide the source of his power!) had lined the staircase like human signposts. At the top of the landing they had followed the sound of martial music through a series of antechambers lit with candle sconces draped in gauze. By the time they were three rooms away, the hubbub of the Yellow Salon had been an unmistakable guide.

It wasn’t as though the palace was deserted. As Amy wandered down the corridors looking for suspicious activities, she passed servants lugging pails of water, soldiers leaving their shifts, and a pale young man in an ill-fitting frock coat with ink-stained fingers, who Amy surmised was most likely someone’s secretary.

Amy was contemplating following the secretary (after all, he might be on his way to a highly secret meeting), when her attention was arrested by a familiar puce frock coat in the next room. It was undeniably her brother—no one else would wear gold lace in that quantity at collar and cuffs—but his voice held a very uncharacteristic air of authority as he held forth in a rapid whisper.

Amy strained for a glimpse of his companion. Her pulse raced at the prospect of encountering the Purple Gentian again, and she leaned further forward around the doorframe. Why did Edouard have to wear coats with such ridiculously padded shoulders? All she could make out was a hand and a bit of black sleeve; Amy doubted even the most dedicated spy would be able to identify someone from a hand glimpsed from several yards away. Even that unhelpful appendage was soon blocked by a waterfall of gold lace, as Edouard pressed something into the stranger’s hand. Edouard’s garish cuffs hindered Amy’s view, but it looked like paper. A note of some kind?

Amy edged forward, right into the doorknob.

She bit down on her inadvertent gasp of pain and annoyance, but the soft exhalation of air was enough to alert Edouard’s companion, who grabbed at Edouard’s arm, said something in a rapid whisper, and propelled him through the door on the opposite side of the room. Edouard scurried out without so much as glancing back.

But his companion did.

As Edouard’s companion swerved to yank the door shut behind him, his face came briefly into view before the oaken barrier slammed into place. Amy only saw his face for a moment, but that moment was enough. It was a face she recognized, but not the face of Georges Marston. It was a narrow, dark face, undistinguished in every way—except for the long, newly healed scab that slashed across his left temple.

“Drat!”

Amy raced across the room and peered through the door, but it was no use; her brother and his companion had already disappeared from sight.

How ever was she going to explain to Jane that she had lost her wounded man for a second time?