The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

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.

Jane rapped on the door as Amy glowered at an infuriating streak of orange in the darkening sky.

“Ready?” she asked.

“An hour ago.”

Jane’s lips quirked as she looked pointedly at the grimy men’s clothes and the streaks of soot adorning Amy’s face. “I guessed as much. I just spoke to Miss Gwen and she says she’ll meet us back here at eleven so we can all leave for the warehouse together.”

“She’s not going to go with us to leave the note?” Amy scraped back her hair with one hand, and felt around on her dressing table for a ribbon with the other.

“No.” Jane took the ribbon from her and began tightly winding the mass of dark curls so they would fit under a knit cap. “She’s saving herself for the real mission. When I went in, she was skewering pillows with her parasol.”

“Some chaperone,” muttered Amy.

“Fortunately for us,” Jane countered wryly, knotting the ribbon. “I’m going to get dressed—are you sure you’re all right?”

“Just fidgety.” Amy demonstrated the proof of her words by resuming her pacing, scattering flecks of dried mud across the carpet. “But I’ll be perfectly happy tomorrow once Lord Richard is gnashing his teeth in frustration because we bested him.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be besting Bonaparte?” Jane inquired delicately.

“Two birds with one stone,” proclaimed Amy with a toss of her head.

Jane shook her head and headed for the door. “I’ll be ready to leave in five minutes,” she reassured her cousin.

Amy glanced at the clock. Nearly half past seven. By eight o’clock . . .

At half past seven, in a small house across the city, Geoff poked his head around the door of Richard’s study.

“Would you like some tea?”

“You can come in, you know,” Richard said crossly, pushing back his chair from the desk. “I’m not going to bite.”

“Do you promise?” Geoff pushed the door the rest of the way open. Richard kicked a chair in his direction. Since the floor of the study was covered by a Persian rug, the chair didn’t go awfully far, but Geoff took the point and the chair. “I thought you were going to skewer Miles with your butter knife tonight at dinner.”

“Well . . . Miles.” Richard shrugged as though that explained it. “Brandy?”

“Thank you.” Geoff accepted a snifter. “Why don’t you just talk to her?”

Richard stiffened, the brandy decanter poised over Geoff’s glass. “To whom?”

Geoff gave him a look. “The Queen of Sheba, who else?” Richard focused on pouring the amber liquid. “Amy, of course.”

“Oh.” Richard corked the brandy decanter and sat back in his chair. “Darts?” he suggested hopefully.

Geoff, however, was not to be deterred. “You are going to do something about her after tonight’s mission, aren’t you? I don’t really care what, but you’ve been increasingly unpleasant to live with.”

“Thanks.”

“Think nothing of it. Well?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Richard grumbled, not meeting Geoff’s eye. That was the problem with friends who had known you since you were just out of the nursery. It was far too easy for them to detect lies—and they had no shame about pointing them out. All right, so Richard had thought about it. Incessantly. He had rehearsed about twenty variants of a speech along the lines of, “Only the need to save England prevented me from revealing to you . . .” No, he had scrapped that one as too pompous. “By the way, thought you might like to know, I’m the Purple Gentian. Will you marry me?” seemed a bit too offhand. And they just got worse from there.

“I was thinking about doing a bit of reconnoitering before tonight’s mission,” Richard announced loudly. True, Geoff was only two feet away, but raising his voice helped to drown out all of that silent skepticism radiating from his friend.

Richard hauled himself out of his chair. He hadn’t really considered reconnoitering before, but now that he’d declared the intent to do so, it did seem rather a good idea. It would give him something to do, keep his mind off Amy, and get him in the right mood for tonight. “I might drop by Delaroche’s lodgings and see if there’s anything about the gold in his secret files there.”

“The ones he keeps under his pillow?” Geoff asked, diverted. “How such an accomplished agent chooses the most idiotic hiding places . . .”

“Shocking, isn’t it?” Richard agreed heartily, seizing the change of subject and making a rapid dash towards the door before Geoff could remember his initial purpose. “The desk drawer in his office and under his pillow. It takes all the challenge out of it. Well, I’m going to go change. I’ll meet you back here by ten or so.”

“Anything else you need me to do?” Geoff asked.

“Just dissuade my mother if she has any ideas of coming along tonight. Other than that, I can’t think of anything that could go wrong,” Richard said breezily, and exited to undertake the calming, and familiar, task of burgling Delaroche’s lodgings. He glanced at the clock: just past seven thirty. He could easily be there within the next half an hour and back by ten.

By eight o’clock, Delaroche’s empty lodgings had become an unexpectedly lively place.

Perched with one leg on the lintel of Delaroche’s windowsill, Richard froze at the sound of a door being eased open. Trying to ignore the discomfort in his leg muscles (after all, it wasn’t the most convenient of poses), Richard watched as the wood swung open in a slow semicircle and a dark-clad frame slid into the small room.

Delaroche? No. The figure, even if somewhat hard to make out in the dark room, was clearly too small to be Delaroche, weedy little man though the Frenchman was. Besides, why would Delaroche be slinking around his own bedroom? The man was odd, and probably mildly mad, but Richard still couldn’t see him prowling around his own darkened room for fun. He preferred to prowl around other people’s darkened rooms for amusement, a pastime Richard had to admit he rather sympathized with.

The small figure stole towards the bed, hips swaying. Hips doing what? Something about the way the prowler was moving nagged at Richard’s memory. Heedless of caution, Richard leaned sharply forward. Intent on tiptoeing, the intruder didn’t notice. The very female intruder. The . . . good God, it was Amy. No wonder that backside looked familiar. He’d certainly spent enough time staring at it over the last few weeks.

The intruder was Amy.

Devil take it, what was Amy doing in Delaroche’s bedchamber?

Amy swerved at the sound of the window sash being raised behind her—and tripped over a leather bed slipper that Delaroche had inconsiderately left lying on the floor beside his bed. She hit the dusty ground with an ooof that obscured the sound of the first footfall, picking herself up off the floor just in time to see a second booted leg join the first. Her gaze traveled up from the scuffed black boots . . . to the hem of a black cape swinging in dark folds against the boot calves. Oh no.

Amy’s hands went cold.

In fact, her entire body must have turned to ice, because she stayed frozen in her half crouch, one hand still touching the dusty floorboards. Her horrified eyes strayed upwards, over a pair of tightly fitted black breeches, black gloved hands loosely resting on the windowsill. . . .

It wasn’t fair. What was he doing here, now, when she was so close to taking her well-deserved revenge? Why couldn’t he have put in an appearance at tea yesterday, or Mme Bonaparte’s salon the day before? Why plague her now? Amy’s whole body began to shake as she took in the lean line of his throat, the familiar angles of his face under the shadowy circle of his hood. She would not fling herself into his arms. It had been a very bad habit, and, besides, he clearly didn’t want her in them anyway. All that was over, over, over. But why did he still have the power to reduce her to an emotional blob of jelly? It was worse than unfair; it was wrong.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, brushing her dusty hands against her knees. With his back to the window, blocking what little moonlight there was, it was all she could do to make out his face, let alone any expression.

“I might ask the same of you,” retorted the Gentian, stepping away from the window in a swirl of black fabric.

Amy automatically took a step back towards the bed, as if putting a few more inches of distance between them would dull the impact of his presence. It didn’t. She still felt his nearness along every inch of skin, raising goose bumps under the coarse linen of her shirt, prickling along the roots of her hair. Amy’s fingers tingled. Hoping it would drive the tingles away, she balled her hands into fists. The tingles spread into her palms.

The Gentian shook his hooded head. In a voice warm with amusement, he said, “You don’t give up easily, do you?”

Amy’s chest constricted with the injustice of it. So it wasn’t enough to repudiate her? He had to laugh at her, too.

“Not on the things that matter,” she bit out.

“I take it you weren’t just out for an evening stroll?”

Amy felt the card containing the Pink Carnation’s note to Delaroche stiff in her pocket. Whatever happened, it was imperative, absolutely imperative, he not discover the existence of the Pink Carnation. Amy clung to that one thought in a mind rapidly turning to mush as Richard took yet another casual step closer. The backs of Amy’s knees banged against Delaroche’s mattress. Thank goodness it was a deep pocket!

“If you’re looking for Delaroche’s secret files”—the Purple Gentian leaned towards Amy—“I’ll give you a little hint. He keeps them under his pillow.”

“Right,” Amy stammered, leaning back so far her head was nearly level with her shoulders. “Thank you.”

“Don’t you want to look at them?”

Whomp! It happened in seconds; the Purple Gentian reached over Amy to the pillow. Amy tried to lean back further, lost her balance, and toppled backwards onto the bed. It was a disaster. Not only was she sprawled flat on her back, with her bottom half off the bed, and her trouser-clad legs flung apart, the Purple Gentian’s hand was trapped under her head.

Amy’s wide eyes flew to Richard’s face. He was still smiling, but it wasn’t a teasing grin; the curve of his lips was . . . predatory. Through the slits of his mask, Amy could see his green eyes narrow on her lips. Amy’s breathing quickened, her lips parting in alarm—it had to be alarm—as the edges of his cape brushed her arms and the familiar scent of his cologne filled her with yearning memories. His hand turned to cup her head, tangling in her hair, massaging her scalp.

“This is not happening,” bleated Amy.

“All right,” murmured the Purple Gentian softly, his face so close she could feel the gentle puff of his breath across her lips. He smelled of brandy and cloves and something else indescribably his. “This is not happening.”