The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Two

The Purple Gentian was not having a good day. Lord Richard Selwick, second son of the Marquess of Uppington, prime object of matchmaking mamas, and chief foiler of Napoleonic ambitions, stood in the front hall of his parents’ London home and scuffed his boots like a sulky schoolboy.

“That will be enough of that.” His mother shook her head at him in fond exasperation, setting the egret feathers precariously perched on her coiffure wafting in the still air of the front hall. “It’s an evening at Almack’s, not a firing squad.”

“But, Mother . . .” Richard caught the whine in his own voice and winced. Bloody hell. What was it about being home that instantly drove him back to the manners and maturity of a twelve-year-old?

Richard took a deep breath and made sure his voice came out in its proper register. “Look, Mother, I’m quite busy right now. I’m only in London for another two weeks, and there are a number of things . . .”

His mother made a noise that in anyone of lower rank than a countess would have been given the unmannerly name of snort. As a cowed member of the ton had once commented, “Nobody harrumphs quite like the Marchioness of Uppington.”

“Tush!” His mother waved his words away with a sweep of her feathery fan. “Just because you’re a secret agent doesn’t mean that you can put off settling down forever. Really, Richard.” She took a furtive look around the hall to make sure no servants were in evidence, as, after all, it wouldn’t do to have her son’s secret identity getting out, and servants did gossip so. Having ascertained that none were about, she warmed to her theme. “You’re nearly thirty already! Just because you’re the Purple Gentian—ridiculous name!—doesn’t mean that you don’t have responsibilities!”

“I’d say saving Europe from a tyrant is a jolly good responsibility,” Richard muttered under his breath. Unfortunately, the marble foyer had excellent acoustics.

“I meant responsibilities to your family. What if the Uppington title were to die out entirely because you couldn’t be bothered to spend one little evening at Almack’s and meet a nice girl? Hmmm?” She cocked her head to one side, narrowing her green eyes at him, green eyes which were, Richard thought sourly, altogether too shrewd for either his good or hers. His mother, as he knew from unfortunate past experience, had the rhetorical slip-periness of Cicero, the vocal endurance of an opera singer, and the sheer bloody-minded tenacity of Napoleon Bonaparte. Sometimes Richard had the sinking suspicion that he had a far better chance of preventing Bonaparte from conquering Europe than he had of thwarting his mother’s plans to see him married off within the next Season.

Nonetheless, Richard battled on valiantly. “Mother, Charles has produced a child for every year he’s been married. I sincerely doubt that the title is in any danger.”

His mother frowned. “Accidents do happen. But that’s not even to be thought of.” Reconsidering her tactics, Lady Uppington began to pace along the expanse of the foyer, bronze silk skirts swishing in time to her steps. “What I meant to point out was that sooner or later you’re going to have to give up playing at espionage.”

Richard’s jaw dropped. Playing at espionage? He shot his mother a look of equal parts outrage and incredulity. Just who had provided Nelson the intelligence that destroyed Napoleon’s fleet at Aboukir? And who had prevented four determined French assassins from murdering the king in his gardens at Kew? Lord Richard Selwick, alias the Purple Gentian, that was who! Had he not been constrained by the immense respect and filial affection he bore his mother, Richard would have produced a harrumph that would put the marchioness’s to shame.

But as all this never made its way from Richard’s mind to his mouth, his mother blithely carried on with her lecture. “All this gadding about on the Continent—you’ve been at it for almost a decade, Richard. Even Percy retired after he met his Marguerite.”

“Percy retired because the French discovered he was the Scarlet Pimpernel,” Richard grumbled unthinkingly. Hit by a sudden, horrible surmise, he jerked his head up. “Mother, you wouldn’t . . .”

Lady Uppington paused in her perambulations. “No, I wouldn’t,” she said regretfully. For a moment, she gazed dreamily off at an arrangement of flowers in one of the alcoves in the wall. “Such a pity. It would be so effective.”

Shaking her head as if to whisk away the temptation of the thought, she resumed her brisk progress around the room. “Darling, you know I could never sabotage you. And you know both your father and I are terribly proud of you. Don’t think we don’t appreciate that you trusted us enough to confide in us. Look at poor Lady Falconstone—she only found out her son was an agent for the War Office after he was captured by that French spy and they started sending her all of those nasty ransom notes in French. And he never even had a special name or made it into the illustrated papers.” The marchioness indulged in a maternal smirk. “We just want to see you happy,” she finished earnestly.

Sensing another maternal oration coming on, one of those I-bore-you-and-thus-know-what’s-best-for-you lectures, Richard made a pointed move towards the door. “If that’s all for the moment, Mother, I really must be off. The War Office . . .”

The marchioness gave another of her infamous harrumphs. “Have a good time at White’s, darling,” she said pointedly.

Richard paused halfway out the door and flashed her an incredulous look. “How do you always know?”

Lady Uppington looked smug. “Because I’m your mother. Now, shoo! Get along with you!”

As the door closed behind him, Richard heard his mother call out gleefully, “Almack’s at nine! Don’t forget to wear knee breeches!”

The banging of the door drowned out Richard’s heartfelt groan. Knee breeches. Bloody hell. It had been so long since he had last been dragged by the ear through the dreaded doors of Almack’s Assembly Rooms that he had completely forgotten about the knee breeches. Richard looked understandably glum as he headed down Upper Brook Street toward St. James Street. The prospect was enough to send anyone into a precipitate decline that would make the consumptive Keats and drugged Coleridge look like strapping specimens of British manhood. How did his mother contrive to rope him into these things? If the Foreign Office had thought to let his mother loose on France . . . she’d probably have the entire country married off within a month.

“Afternoon, Selwick!”

Richard absently nodded to an acquaintance in a passing curricle. As it was just after five, the hour for flirting while on horseback, a steady stream of fashionable people in carriages or on horseback passed Richard as they made their way to Hyde Park. Richard smiled and nodded by rote, but his mind was already slipping away, across the Channel, to his work in France.

When he was very little, Richard had resolved to be a hero. It might have had something to do with his mother reading him the more stirring bits of Henry V at far too young an age. Richard charged about the nursery, dueling with invisible Frenchmen. Or maybe it came from afternoons playing King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table in the gardens with his father. For years Richard was convinced that the Holy Grail lay hidden under the floor of the ornamental Greek temple his mother used for tea parties. When Richard appeared with a shovel and a pickax while the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale was partaking of an al fresco tea, his mother was not amused. She declared an end to the grail-searching sessions at once.

Sent to Eton to learn the classics, Richard raced through the adventures of Odysseus and Aeneas, earning an utterly undeserved reputation as a scholar. Richard burned for the day when he could set out on his own adventures.

There was only one problem. There seemed to be very little call for heroes nowadays. He had, he realized, the ill fortune to be living in a time of singular peace and civility. Other employment would have to be found.

With that in mind, Richard looked first to estate management. He did have his own little estate, but the steward was a genial man of middle years, universally liked and unusually competent. There was little for Richard to do but ride about making polite conversation with his tenants and kissing the occasional baby. There was certainly something satisfying about it, but Richard knew that playing the role of gentleman farmer would leave him bored and restless.

So Richard did what any other young man in his position would do. He set out to become a rake. By the time he was sixteen, the second son of the Marquess of Uppington was a familiar figure in the fashionable gaming dens and bawdy houses of London. He played faro for high stakes, drove his horses too fast, and changed his mistresses as frequently as he did his linen. But he was still bored.

And then, just when Richard had resigned himself to a life of empty debauchery, good fortune smiled upon him in the form of the French Revolution. For hundreds of years, the Uppington estates had adjoined those of the Blakeneys. Richard had spent countless afternoons hunting with Sir Percy, raiding his kitchens for tarts, and kicking about the Blakeney library, reading Percy’s extensive collection of classical works, all of which contained bookplates with the Blakeney coat of arms, which happened to contain a small scarlet flower. When the Scarlet Pimpernel began making headlines, it didn’t take much for Richard to put two and two together and come up with the fact that his next-door neighbor was the greatest hero to appear in England since Henry V.

Richard had begged and pleaded until Percy agreed to take him along on a mission. That one mission went well, and became two, and then three missions, until Richard, with his gift for the heroic, became absolutely indispensable to the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. So indispensable that Percy and the others had forgiven him when . . . No. Richard squashed the thought before it could grow into memory, stomping up the steps to his club with unnecessary vigor.

Richard felt himself relaxing as he entered the masculine stronghold of White’s. The smells of tobacco and spirits hung heavy in the air, and from a chamber to his right, he could hear the heavy thud of darts being flung against a target—and missing, if the curses coming from that room were any indication. Meandering through the first floor, he spotted several hands of cards in progress, but none that he cared to join. One of his sister’s many suitors made enthusiastic welcoming motions at Richard from the small table where he was ensconced with two friends over a bottle of port. Unfortunately, his welcome was a little too enthusiastic. He toppled himself right over the side of his chair, taking the table, port decanter, and three glasses with him. “Well, that’s one person we won’t be seeing at Almack’s tonight,” murmured Richard to himself, as he nodded in passing at the flailing boy and his port-sodden companions.

Richard found his quarry in the library.

“Selwick!” The Honorable Miles Dorrington flung aside the news sheet he had been reading, leaped up from his chair and pounded his friend on the back. He then hastily reseated himself, looking slightly abashed at his unseemly display of affection.

In a fit of temper, Richard’s sister Henrietta had once referred irritably to Miles as “that overeager sheepdog,” and there was something to be said for the description. With his sandy blond hair flopping into his face, and his brown eyes alight with good fellowship, Miles did bear a striking resemblance to the more amiable varieties of man’s best friend. He was, in fact, Richard’s best friend. They had been fast friends since their first days at Eton.

“When did you get back to London?” Miles asked.

Richard dropped into the seat next to him, sinking contentedly into the worn leather chair. He stretched his long legs comfortably out in front of him. “Late last night. I left Paris Thursday, stopped for a couple of nights at Uppington Hall, and got into town about midnight.” He grinned at his friend. “I’m in hiding.”

Miles instantly stiffened. Anxiously, he looked left, then right, before leaning forward and hissing, “From whom? Did they follow you here?”

Richard shouted with laughter. “Good God, nothing like that, man! No, I’m a fugitive from my mother.”

Miles relaxed. “You might have said so,” he commented crossly. “As you can imagine, we’re all a bit on edge.”

“Sorry, old chap.” Richard smiled his thanks as a glass of his favorite brand of scotch materialized in his hands. Ah, it was good to be back at his club!

Miles accepted a whisky, and leaned back in his chair. “What is it this time? Is she throwing another distant cousin at you?”

“Worse,” Richard said. He took a long swig of scotch. “Almack’s.”

Miles grimaced in sympathy. “Not the knee breeches.”

“Knee breeches and all.”

There was a moment of companionable silence as the men, both fashionably turned out in tight tan trousers, contemplated the horror of knee breeches. Miles finished his whisky and set it down on a low table beside his chair. Taking a more thorough look around the room, he asked Richard quietly, “How is Paris?”

Not only Richard’s oldest and closest friend, Miles also served as his contact at the War Office. When Richard had switched from rescuing aristocrats to gathering secrets, the Minister of War had wisely pointed out that the best possible way to communicate with Richard was through young Miles Dorrington. After all, the two men moved in the same set, shared the same friends, and could frequently be seen reminiscing over the tables at White’s. Nobody would see anything suspicious about finding two old friends in hushed conversation. As an excuse for his frequent calls at Uppington House, Miles had put it about that he was thinking of courting Richard’s sister. Henrietta had entered into the deception with, to Richard’s big-brotherly mind, a little too much relish.

Richard took his own survey of the room, noting the back of a white head poking out over a chairback. He lifted an eyebrow quizzically at Miles.

Miles shrugged. “It’s only old Falconstone. Deaf as a post and fast asleep to boot.”

“And his son is one of ours. Right. Paris has been . . . busy.”

Miles tugged at his cravat. “Busy how?”

“Stop that, or you’ll have your valet baying for your blood.”

Miles looked sheepish and tried to rearrange the folds of his cravat, which had gone from being a perfect waterfall to simply falling all over.

“Lots of comings and goings from the Tuilleries—more than usual,” Richard continued. “I’ve sent a full report to the office. Along with some information helpfully compiled by our mutual friend Monsieur Delaroche at the Ministry of Police.” His lips curved in a grin of sheer glee.

“Good man! I knew you could do it! A list of all their agents in London—and right out from under Delaroche’s nose, no less! You do have the devil’s own luck.” Richard’s back was too far away to reach, so Miles slapped the arm of his chair appreciatively instead. “And your connections to the First Consul?”

“Better than ever,” Richard said. “He’s moved the collection of Egyptian artifacts into the palace.”

Egyptian artifacts might seem a topic beyond the scope of the War Office. But not when their top agent played the role of Bonaparte’s pet scholar.

When Richard created the Purple Gentian, the talent for ancient languages that had stunned his schoolmasters at Eton had come to his aid once again. While Sir Percy had pretended to be a fop, Richard bored the French into complacency with long lectures about antiquity. When Frenchmen demanded to know what he was doing in France, and Englishmen reproached him for fraternizing with the enemy, Richard opened his eyes wide and proclaimed, “But a scholar is a citizen of the world!” Then he quoted Greek at them. They usually didn’t ask again. Even Gaston Delaroche, the Assistant Minister of Police, who had sworn in blood to be avenged on the Purple Gentian and had the tenacity of . . . well, of Richard’s mother, had stopped snooping around Richard after being subjected to two particularly knotty passages from the Odyssey.

Bonaparte’s decision to invade Egypt had been a disaster for France but a triumph for Richard. He already had a reputation as a scholar and an antiquarian; who better to join the group of academics Bonaparte was bringing with him to Egypt? Under cover of antiquarian fervor, Richard had gathered more information about French activities than Egyptian antiquities. With Richard’s reports, the English had been able to destroy the French fleet and strand Bonaparte in Egypt for months.

Over those long months in Egypt, Richard became fast friends with Bonaparte’s stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais, a sunny, good-natured boy with a genius for friendship. When Eugene introduced Richard to Bonaparte, presenting him as a scholar of antiquities, Bonaparte had immediately engaged Richard in a long debate over Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. Impressed by Richard’s cool argument and immense store of quotations, he had extended an open invitation to drop by his tent and dispute the ancient past. Within a month, he had appointed Richard his director of Egyptian antiquities. Among the sands of the French camp in Egypt, it was a rather empty title. But on their return to Paris, Richard found himself with two rooms full of artifacts and an entrée into the palace. What spy could ask for more? And now his artifacts had been moved into the palace, Bonaparte’s lair. . . .

Miles looked as though he had been handed a pile of Christmas presents in July. “And your office with it?”

“And my office with it.”

“Damn it, Richard, this is brilliant! Brilliant!” Miles so forgot himself as to raise his voice above a whisper. Quite far above a whisper.

At the far end of the room, old Falconstone stirred. “Whaaat? Eh, what?”

“I quite agree,” Richard said loudly. “Wordsworth’s poetry is quite brilliant, but I shall always prefer Catullus.”

Miles cast him a dubious glance. “Wordsworth and Catullus?” he whispered.

“Look, you were the one who shouted,” cast back Richard. “I had to come up with something.”

“If it gets around that I’ve been reading Wordsworth, I’ll be booted out of my clubs. My mistress will disown me. My reputation will be ruined,” Miles hissed in exaggerated distress.

Meanwhile, Falconstone had staggered to his feet, and did a bizarre little dance as he tried to catch his balance with his cane. Spotting Richard across the room, his face darkened to match his burgundy waistcoat.

“Blasted cheek showing your face here! After you been consorting with them Frenchies, eh, what?” Falconstone roared with the complete lack of shame of the extremely deaf and the complete lack of grammar of the extremely inbred. “Blasted cheek, I say!” He tried to poke at Richard with his cane, but the effort proved too much for him, and he would have gone tumbling had Richard not steadied him.

Glowering, Falconstone yanked his arm away and stalked off, mumbling.

Miles had jumped to his feet when Falconstone had charged Richard. He looked at his friend with concern. “Do you get much of that?”

“Only from Falconstone. I really do have to get around to freeing his son from the Temple prison one of these days.” Richard resumed his seat and drained the remainder of his scotch in a single swallow. “Don’t be such an old woman, Miles. It doesn’t bother me. Look, I prefer Falconstone’s rantings to all those debutantes twittering about the Purple Gentian. Can you imagine what I’d have to put up with if the truth got out?”

Miles cocked his head thoughtfully, sending a lock of floppy blond hair tumbling in front of his eyes. “Hmm, adoring debutantes . . .”

“Think how jealous your mistress would be,” Richard said dryly.

Miles flinched. His current mistress was an opera singer as well known for the range of her throwing arm as that of her voice. He had already courted concussion by flirting openly with a ballet dancer and had no desire to repeat the experience. “All right, all right, point taken,” he said. “Oh, damnation! I promised her I would have supper with her before the opera. She’ll probably break half the dishes in the house if I’m late.”

“Most of them over your head,” commented Richard helpfully. “Since I prefer you with your head all in one piece, you’d better relay my assignment quickly.”

“How right you are!” Miles replied fervently. He struggled to collect himself and regain the gravity incumbent upon a representative of the War Office. “All right. Your assignment. We’re pretty sure that Bonaparte is using the peace to plot an invasion of England.”

Richard nodded grimly. “I thought as much.”

“Your job is to uncover as much as you can about his preparations. We want dates, locations, and numbers, as quickly as you can get them. We’ll have a string of couriers posted from Paris to Calais to relay the information as you find it. This is it, Richard!” Miles’s eyes glowed with sporting fervor, like a hound on the trail of a fox. “The assignment. We’re relying on you to keep old Boney out of England.”

A familiar tingle of anticipation rushed through Richard. How had Percy been able to give this up? The rush, the excitement, the challenge! Heady stuff, to know the safety of England depended upon him. Of course, Richard didn’t delude himself that he was the country’s sole hope. He knew the War Office had a good dozen spies scattered around the French capital, all striving to uncover the same things. But he also knew, without false modesty, that he was their best.

“The usual code, I suppose?” They had developed the code their first year at Eton as part of an elaborate plan to outwit their bullying proctor.

Miles nodded. “You’ll leave for Paris in two weeks?”

Richard rubbed his forehead. “Yes. I have some personal business to take care of—and I’ve promised my mother to squire Hen around to scare the fortune hunters away. Bonaparte should be away at Malmaison for most of next week, anyway, and I’ve left Geoff to keep an eye on things while I’m gone.”

“Good man, Geoff.” Miles rose and stretched. “Now if he were here, the three of us could have a bang-up night of carousing just like old times. I guess it’ll have to wait till we’ve foiled old Boney once and for all. Cry God for England, Harry, and St. George, and all that.” Miles was frantically trying to rearrange his cravat and smooth down his hair. “Damn. No time to stop off at home and get my valet to tidy me up. Oh well. Give Hen a kiss for me.”

Richard shot him a sharp look.

“On the cheek, man, on the cheek. God knows I’d never try anything improper with your sister. Not that she isn’t a beautiful girl and all that, it’s just, well, she’s your sister.”

Richard clapped his friend on the shoulder in approval. “Well said! That’s exactly the way I want you to think of her.”

Miles muttered something about being grateful that his sisters were a good deal older. “You turn into a complete bore when you’re chaperoning Hen, you know,” he grumbled.

Richard raised one eyebrow at Miles, a skill that had taken several months of practice in front of his mirror when he was twelve, but had been well worth the investment. “At least I didn’t let my sister dress me up in her petticoat when I was five.”

Miles’s jaw dropped. “Who told you about that?” he demanded indignantly.

Richard grinned. “I have my sources,” he said airily.

Miles, not a top agent of the War Office for nothing, considered for a moment and his eyes narrowed. “You can tell your source that she’s going to have to find someone else to fetch her lemonade at the Alsworthys’ ball tomorrow night unless she apologizes. You can also tell her that I’ll accept either a verbal or a written apology as long as it’s suitably abject. And that means very, very abject,” he added darkly. Miles snatched his hat and gloves up from a side table. “Oh, stop grinning already! It wasn’t that amusing.”

Richard rubbed his chin as though in deep thought. “Tell me, Miles, was it a lacy petticoat?”

With a wordless grunt of annoyance, Miles turned on his heel and stomped out of the room.

Picking up the news sheet Miles had left behind, Richard settled back down into the comfortable leather chair.

Two weeks, he thought. In two weeks he would be back in France, risking discovery and death.

Richard couldn’t wait.