The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Three

“How do you possibly expect to find the Purple Gentian?” Jane hurried after Amy into the airy white-and-blue-papered room they had shared since they were old enough to abandon the nursery. “The French have been trying for years!”

Their bedroom was beginning to look like a modiste’s shop struck by a hurricane. A garter dangled off the clock on the mantelpiece, Amy’s bed was snowed under by a pile of frothy petticoats, and, somehow, with one wild fling, Amy had even managed to land a bonnet on the canopy of Jane’s bed. Jane could just make out the tips of pink ribbons dangling over the edge of the canopy.

Amy had gotten it into her head that if she packed at once she might be able to leave the next day. It was, reflected Jane, a typically Amy reaction. If Amy had been around for the creation of the world, Jane had no doubt that she would have chivvied the Lord into creating the earth in two days rather than seven.

Several pairs of stockings came whizzing Jane’s way. “Remember that inn the papers said the Scarlet Pimpernel always stopped at? The one in Dover?”

“The Fisherman’s Rest,” Jane supplied.

“Well the Shropshire Intelligencer said that they thought the Purple Gentian might be continuing the tradition. So . . . what if we were to stop at the Fisherman’s Rest before we sail? With a little careful eavesdropping, who knows?”

“The Shropshire Intelligencer,” Jane reminded her, “also carried a piece about the birth of a two-headed goat in Nottingham. And last month’s edition claimed that His Majesty had gone mad again and appointed Queen Charlotte Regent.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll grant you that it’s not the most reliable publication—”

“Not the most reliable?”

“Did you see today’s headline, Jane? In the Spectator, mind you, not the Intelligencer.” Snatching up the much-thumbed sheet of paper, Amy read rapturously, “ENGLAND’S FAVORITE FLOWER FILCHES FRENCH FILES IN DARING RAID.”

Amy was cut off by the scrape of the door inching open. It couldn’t move more than an inch or two, because Amy’s trunk, which she had dragged out from under the bed, was blocking it. “Begging your pardon, Miss Jane, Miss Amy”—Mary, the upstairs maid, poked her head in and bobbed a curtsy—“but the mistress said I was to see if you would be needing any help dressing for dinner.”

Amy’s face contorted with horror like Mrs. Siddons performing Lady Macbeth’s mad scene. “Oh, no! It’s Thursday!”

“Yes, miss, and tomorrow’s Friday,” Mary supplied helpfully.

“Oh, drat, drat, drat, drat,” Amy was muttering to herself, so it was left to Jane to smile graciously and say, “We won’t be requiring your assistance, Mary. You may tell Mama that Miss Amy and I will be down shortly.”

“Yes, miss.” The maid curtsied again, closing the door carefully behind her.

“Drat, drat, drat,” said Amy.

“You might wear your peach muslin,” suggested Jane.

“Tell them I have the headache—no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.”

“At least half a dozen people saw you running across the lawn in perfect health not half an hour ago.”

“We’ll tell them it was a sudden case?” Jane shook her head at Amy and handed her the peach gown. Amy docilely turned her back to Jane to be unbuttoned. “I haven’t the patience for Derek tonight! Not tonight of all nights! I have to plan!” Her voice was slightly muffled as Jane pulled the clean frock over her head. “Why did it have to be a Thursday?”

Jane gave Amy a sympathetic pat on the back as she began buttoning her into the peach dress.

They would be twelve for dinner tonight, as they were every Thursday. Every Thursday night, with the same inevitable regularity as the shearing of the sheep, an outmoded carriage with a blurred crest on the side rattled down the drive. Every Thursday, out piled their nearest neighbors: Mr. Henry Meadows, his wife, his spinster sister, and his son, Derek.

Amy flung herself into the low chair before the dressing table and began to brush her short curls with a violence that made them crackle and frizz around her face. “I really don’t think I can take it much longer, Jane. Derek is more than anyone should be expected to bear!”

“There are easier ways to escape Derek than to go chasing the Purple Gentian.” Jane reached around Amy to pluck a locket on a blue ribbon off the dressing table.

“How can you even combine their names in the same sentence?” Amy protested with a grimace. Resting her chin on clasped hands, she grinned up at Jane in the mirror. “Admit it. You want to go chasing the Purple Gentian just as much as I do. Don’t try to pretend you’re not excited.”

“I suppose someone needs to go with you and keep you out of scrapes.” There was no mistaking the glint in Jane’s gray eyes.

Amy leaped up from her stool and flung her arms around her cousin. “Finally!” she crowed. “After all these years!”

“And all our planning.” Jane hugged Amy back exultantly. She added, “I do draw the line at soot on my teeth and Papa’s old periwig.”

“Agreed. I’m sure I can think of something much, much cleverer than that. . . .”

Jane pulled back with a sudden frown. “What do we do if Papa says no?”

“Oh, Jane! How could he possibly refuse?”

“Absolutely out of the question,” said Uncle Bertrand.

Amy bristled in indignation. “But . . .”

Uncle Bertrand forestalled her with a wave of his fork, sending a trail of gravy snaking across the dining room. “I’ll not see a niece of mine among those murderous French. Black sheep, the lot of them! Eh, vicar?” Uncle Bertrand drove an elbow into the vicar’s black frock coat, causing the vicar to reel into the footman and the footman to spill half the carafe of claret onto the Aubusson rug.

Amy put down her heavily engraved silver fork. “May I remind you, Uncle Bertrand, that I myself am half French?”

Uncle Bertrand had little sense of tone or nuance. “Never mind that, lass,” he replied jovially. “Your pa was a good chap for all that he was a Frenchman. We don’t hold it against you. Eh, Derek?”

Derek smirked across the table at Amy. In his Nile green frock coat, he looked like a particularly foppish frog, thought Amy disgustedly.

“If you feel the need to move about more, Amy, dear, you’re always welcome to call on us!” chirped Derek’s mother from Uncle Bertrand’s right. Her double chins bounced with enthusiasm. “I’m sure Derek can find the time to take you for a lovely turn in the rose gardens—properly chaperoned, of course!”

She waved a plump hand at the obvious proper chaperone, Mr. Meadows’s maiden sister, commonly known as Miss Gwen. Miss Gwen responded in her usual fashion: she glowered. Amy supposed that if she had to live with Mrs. Meadows and Derek, she would glower, too.

“Oh, my love is like a red, red rose. . . ,” Derek began, making sheep’s eyes at Amy.

He was drowned out by his father. “None of your rose gardens! They’ll go riding,” barked Mr. Meadows, from the opposite end of the table, next to Aunt Prudence. “Survey the land. Kill two birds with one stone. Derek, you’ll call for the girl tomorrow. Need you to take a look at the fences near Scraggle Corner.”

“I’m sure she’d much rather see my roses, wouldn’t you, dear?” Mrs. Meadows sent what was meant to be a meaningful glance at her husband. “They’re so much more . . . romantic.”

Turning to her left, Amy caught Jane’s eye and grimaced.

She sent a look of appeal to Aunt Prudence at the foot of the table, but there was no help forthcoming from that corner. Aunt Prudence’s one passion in life was covering all surfaces in Wooliston Manor with miles of needlepoint, and she was blind to all else.

Amy launched into plan B. She squared her shoulders and looked directly at her uncle. “Uncle Bertrand, I am going to France. If I cannot leave with your assent, I shall leave without it.” She braced herself for argument.

“Feisty one, ain’t she!” Mr. Meadows declared approvingly. “Would’ve thought the French line would weaken the blood,” he continued, eyeing Amy as though she were a ewe at market.

“The dam’s line bred true! You can see it in my girls, too, eh, Marcus? Good Hereford stock.” It was highly unclear whether Uncle Bertrand was referring to his niece, his sheep, his daughters, or all three.

“Bought a ram from Hereford once . . .”

“Ha! That’s nothing to the ewe I purchased from old Ticklepenny. Annabelle, he called her. There was a look in her eye . . .” Uncle Bertrand waxed lyrical in the candlelight.

The conversation seemed on the verge of degenerating into a nostalgic catalog of sheep they had known and loved. Amy was mentally packing for a midnight flight to the mail coach to Dover (plan C), when Jane’s gentle voice cut through the listing of ovine pedigrees.

“Such a pity about the tapestries,” was all she said. Her voice was pitched low, but somehow it carried over both the shouting men.

Amy glanced sharply at Jane, and was rewarded by a swift kick to the ankle. Had that been a “say something now!” kick, or a “be quiet and sit still” kick? Amy kicked back in inquiry. Jane put her foot down hard over Amy’s. Amy decided that could be interpreted as either “be quiet and sit still” or “please stop kicking me now!”

Aunt Prudence had snapped out of her reverie with what was nearly an audible click. “Tapestries?” she inquired eagerly.

“Why, yes, Mama,” Jane replied demurely. “I had hoped that while Amy and I were in France we might be granted access to the tapestries at the Tuilleries.”

Jane’s quiet words sent the table into a state of electric expectancy. Forks hovered over plates in midair; wineglasses tilted halfway to open mouths; little Ned paused in the act of slipping a pea down the back of Agnes’s dress. Even Miss Gwen stopped glaring long enough to eye Jane with what looked more like speculation than rancor.

“Not the Gobelins series of Daphne and Apollo!” cried Aunt Prudence.

“But, of course, Aunt Prudence,” Amy plunged in. Amy just barely restrained herself from turning and flinging her arms around her cousin. Aunt Prudence had spent long hours lamenting that she had never taken the time before the war to copy the pattern of the tapestries that hung in the Tuilleries Palace. “Jane and I had hoped to sketch them for you, hadn’t we, Jane?”

“We had,” Jane affirmed, her graceful neck dipping in assent. “Yet if Papa feels that France remains unsafe, we shall bow to his greater wisdom.”

At the other end of the table, Aunt Prudence was wavering. Literally. Torn between her trust in her husband and her burning desire for needlepoint patterns, she swayed a bit in her chair, the feather in her small silk turban quivering with her agitation. “It surely can’t be as unsafe as that, can it, Bertrand?” She leaned across the table to peer at her husband through eyes gone near-sighted from long hours over her embroidery frame. “After all, if dear Edouard is willing to take responsibility for the girls . . .”

“Edouard will take very good care of us, I’m sure, Aunt Prudence! If you’ll just read his letter, you’ll see—ouch!” Jane had kicked her again.

“You know I don’t hold with gadding about with foreigners,” Uncle Bertrand was saying with a forbidding shake of his wineglass. “Why your sister ever . . .”

“Yes, yes, dear, I know, but that’s all past, and Edouard is our nephew.”

Amy clenched her hands in her lap. It took all of her willpower not to speak; she could feel her chest heave with the effort of containing the angry words. Noticing, Jane gave her a small, warning shake of the head. Noticing something else entirely, Derek leered at Amy’s décolletage. Amy glared at Derek. Derek failed to notice. His eyes, after all, were not on Amy’s face.

“. . . just for a few weeks.” As Aunt Prudence’s words drifted past her, Amy realized she had missed a couple of rounds of the conversation. “It’s not that terribly far, and we can fetch them back if there’s any trouble.”

Uncle Bertrand, Amy noticed, with the dawning of delight, was visibly weakening. He was regarding Aunt Prudence across the table in a rather bemused way. In a younger man, Amy would have called the look besotted. As for Aunt Prudence, if she had been a younger woman, Amy would have termed her expression positively coquettish! Her head was tilted at its most becoming angle, and she was smiling fondly at Uncle Bertrand. Amy’s twelve-year-old cousin Ned looked horrified.

So did Derek. His head swiveled anxiously back and forth from one to the other. “You can’t mean to let them go!” he yelped, adding belatedly, “sir,” as Uncle Bertrand dragged his eyes away from Aunt Prudence.

Mrs. Meadows’s lips narrowed into a tight line. To Aunt Prudence, she said, “You won’t be able to send the girls off for months, anyway, I suppose. You’ll have to hire a proper chaperone, and that can take quite some time. Good duennas are so hard to find these days.”

“I’m sure Edouard has a chaperone waiting for us in Paris,” Amy said hastily. “If we left immediately—”

“But who is to travel with you?” Mrs. Meadows drew herself up and cast a censorious eye across the table at Amy. “You and Jane cannot think of traveling alone! Two delicate young ladies at the mercy of ruffians and highwaymen!”

“You could send a manservant with us, couldn’t you, Uncle Bertrand?” Amy asked her uncle. “To fight off all the highwaymen?”

Derek slumped down in his chair, an unattractive pout blowing out his thick lips.

Mrs. Meadows redoubled her efforts. “Think of your reputations!” she howled.

“I suppose I shall have to advertise,” sighed Aunt Prudence.

“You shall have to,” Mrs. Meadows declared officiously. “There’s really no other alternative.”

Amy wondered if she would be able to make the midnight mail coach if she crept out of her room by eleven.

“I shall chaperone them.”

Ten heads (Ned was still involved in coaxing the remains of his vegetables down Agnes’s back) turned to stare at Miss Gwen in astonishment. Ten mouths opened at once.

“When can we leave? I can be finished packing by tomorrow morning!” Amy shouted gleefully above the din.

In the hullabaloo, nobody even noticed when Agnes clapped a hand to the back of her neck, shrieked, shook Ned by the collar until he turned a rich shade of purple, and fled from the room scattering small green blobs.

Still calmly cutting her meat, Miss Gwen stared down the various speakers one by one. “You may be assured, Prudence, I shall keep a close eye on Jane and Amy. As for you, Miss Amy, you may be packed, but I am not.”

Miss Gwen speared a pea with military precision.

“We leave in two weeks.”