Lauren Willig - Masque of the Black Tulip

Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf.

In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy.

My face fell.

"It's not original."

"No, you poor innocent," said Colin. "The entire house was gutted not long before the turn of the century. The last century," he added pointedly.

"Gutted?" I bleated.

Oh, fine, I know it's silly, but I had harbored romantic images of walking where the Purple Gentian had walked, sitting at the desk where he had penned those hasty notes upon which the fate of the kingdom rested, viewing the kitchen where his meals had been prepared… I made a disgusted face at myself. At this rate, I was only one step away from going through the Purple Gentian's garbage, hugging his discarded port bottles to my palpitating bosom.

"Gutted," repeated Colin firmly.

"The floor plan?" I asked pathetically.

"Entirely altered."

"Damn."

The laugh lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.

"I mean," I prevaricated, "what a shame for posterity."

Colin raised an eyebrow. "It's considered one of the great examples of the arts and crafts movement. Most of the wallpaper and drapes were designed by William Morris, and the old nursery has fireplace tiles by Burne-Jones."

"The Pre-Raphaelites are distinctly overrated," I said bitterly.

Colin strolled over to the window, hands behind his back. "The gardens haven't been changed. You can always go for a stroll around the grounds if the Victorians begin to overwhelm you."

"That won't be necessary," I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. "All I need are your archives."

"Right," said Colin briskly, turning away from the window. "Let's get you set, then, shall we?"

"Do you have a muniments room?" I asked, tagging along after him.

"Nothing so grand." Colin strode straight towards one of the bookcases, causing me a momentary flutter of alarm. The books on the shelf certainly looked elderly — at least, if the dust on the spines was anything to go by — but they were all books. Printed matter. When Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had said there were records at Selwick Hall, she hadn't specified what kind of records. For all I knew, she might well have meant one of those dreadful Victorian vanity publications compiled from "missing" records, entitled, "Some Documents Formerly in the Possession of the Selwick Family But Tragically Dropped Down a Privy Last Year." They never cited their sources, and they tended to excerpt only those bits they found interesting, cutting out anything that might not redound to the greater credit of the ancestry.

But Colin bypassed the rows of leather-bound books. Instead, he hunkered down in front of the elaborately carved mahogany wainscoting that ran, knee-high, around the length of the room, in a movement as smooth as it was unexpected.

"Hunh?" I nearly tripped over him, stopping so short that one of my knees banged into his shoulder blades. Grabbing the edge of a bookshelf to steady myself, I stared down in bewilderment as Colin bent over the wooden paneling, his head blocking my view of whatever it was he was doing. All I could see was sun-streaked hair, darker at the roots as the effects of summer faded, and an expanse of bent back, broad and muscled beneath an oxford-cloth shirt. A whiff of shampoo, recently applied, wafted up against the stuffy smells of closed rooms, old books, and decaying leather.

I couldn't see what he was doing, but he must have turned some sort of latch, because the wainscoting opened out, the join cleverly disguised by the pattern of the wood. Now that I knew what to look for, there was nothing mysterious about it at all. Glancing around the room, I could see that the wainscoting was flush with the edge of the shelves above, leaving a space about two feet deep unaccounted for.

"These are all cupboards," Colin explained briefly, swinging easily to his feet beside me.

"Of course," I said, as if I had known all along, and never harbored alarming images of being forced to read late-Victorian transcriptions.

One thing was sure: I need have no worries about having to entertain myself with back issues of Punch. There were piles of heavy folios bound in marbled endpapers, a scattering of flat cardboard envelopes looped shut with thin spools of twine, and whole regiments of the pale gray acid-free boxes used to hold loose documents.

"How could you have kept this to yourself all these years?" I exclaimed, falling to my knees in front of the cupboard.

"Very easily," said Colin drily.

I flapped a dismissive hand in his general direction, without interrupting my perusal. I scooted forwards to see better, tilting my head sideways to try to read the typed labels someone had glued to the spines a long time ago, if their yellowed state and the shape of the letters were anything to go by. The documents seemed to be roughly organized by person and date. The ancient labels said things like LORD RICHARD SELWICK (1776 — 1841), CORRESPONDENCE, MISCELLANEOUS, 1801 — 1802. Or SELWICK HALL, HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS, 1800 — 1806. Bypassing the household accounts, I kept looking. I reached for a folio at random, drawing it carefully out from its place next to a little pocket-sized book bound in worn red leather.

"I'll leave you to it, shall I?" said Colin.

"Mmm-hmm."

The folio was a type I recognized from the British Library, older documents pasted onto the leaves of a large blank book, with annotations around the edges in a much later hand. On the first page, an Edwardian hand had written in slanting script, "Correspondence of Lady Henrietta Selwick, 1801-1803."

"Dinner in an hour?"

"Mmm-hmm."

I flipped deliberately towards the back, scanning salutations and dates. I was looking for references to two things: the Pink Carnation, or the school for spies founded by the Purple Gentian and his wife, after necessity forced them to abandon active duty. Neither the Pink Carnation nor the spy school had been in operation much before May of 1803. Wedging the volume back into place, I jiggled the next one out from underneath, hoping that they had been stacked in some sort of chronological order.

"Arsenic with a side of cyanide?"

"Mmm-hmm."

They had. The next folio down comprised Lady Henrietta's correspondence from March of 1803 to the following November. Perfect. On the edge of my consciousness, I heard the library door close. Scooting backwards, I sat down heavily on the floor next to the open cupboard, the folio splayed open in my lap. Nestled in the middle of Henrietta's correspondence was a letter in a different hand. Where Henrietta's script was round, with loopy letters and the occasional flourish, this writing was regular enough to be a computer simulation of script. Without the aid of technological enhancement, the writing spoke of an orderly hand, and an even more orderly mind. More importantly, I knew that handwriting. I had seen it in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly's collection, between Amy Balcourt's sloppy scrawl and Lord Richard's emphatic hand. I didn't even have to flip to the signature on the following page to know who had penned it, but I did, anyway. "Your affectionate cousin, Jane."

There are any number of Janes in history, most of them as gentle and unassuming as their name. Lady Jane Grey, the ill-fated seven-day queen of England. Jane Austen, the sweet-faced authoress, lionized by English majors and the BBC costume-drama-watching set.

And then there was Miss Jane Wooliston, better known as the Pink Carnation.

I clutched the binding of the folio as though it might scuttle away if I loosened my grip, refraining from making squealing noises of delight. Colin probably already thought I was a madwoman, without my providing him any additional proof. But I was squealing inside. As far as the rest of the historical community was concerned (I indulged in a bit of personal gloating), the only surviving references to the Pink Carnation were mentions in newspapers of the period, not exactly the most reliable report. Indeed, there were even scholars who opined that the Pink Carnation did not in fact exist, that the escapades attributed to the mythical flower figure over a ten-year period — stealing a shipment of gold from under Bonaparte's nose, burning down a French boot factory,spiriting away a convoy of munitions in Portugal during the Peninsular War, to name just a few — had been the work of a number of unrelated actors. The Pink Carnation, they insisted, was something like Robin Hood, a useful myth, perpetuated to keep people's morale up during the grim days of the Napoleonic Wars, when England stood staunchly alone as the rest of Europe tumbled under Napoleon's sway.

Weren't they in for a surprise!

I knew who the Pink Carnation was, thanks to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. But I needed more. I needed to be able to link Jane Wooliston to the events attributed to the Pink Carnation by the news sheets, to provide concrete proof that the Pink Carnation had not only existed, but had been continuously in operation throughout that period.

The letter in my lap was an excellent start. A reference to the Pink Carnation would have been good. A letter from the Pink Carnation herself was even better.

Greedily, I skimmed the first few lines.

"Dearest Cousin, Paris has been a whirl of gaiety since last I wrote, with scarcely a moment to rest between engagements…"

"…Yesterday, I attended a Venetian breakfast at the home of a gentleman very closely connected to the Consul. He was all that was amiable."

In the morning room at Uppington House, Lady Henrietta Selwick checked the level of liquid in her teacup, positioned a little red book on the cushion next to her, and curled up against the arm of her favorite settee.

Under her elbow, the fabric was beginning to snag and fray; suspicious tea-colored splotches marred the white-and-yellow-striped silk, and worn patches farther down the settee testified to the fact that the two slippered feet that currently occupied them had been there before. The morning room was usually the province of the lady of the house, but Lady Uppington, who lacked the capacity for sitting in one place longer than it took to deliver a pithy epigram, had long since ceded the sunny room to Henrietta, who used it as her receiving room, her library (the real library having the unfortunate defect of being too dark to actually read in), and her study. Haloed in the late morning sunlight, it was a pleasant, peaceful room, a room for innocent daydreams and restrained tea parties.

At the moment, it was a hub for international espionage.

On the little yellow-and-white settee rested secrets for which Bonaparte's most talented agents would have given their eyeteeth — or their eyes, for that matter, if that wouldn't have gotten in the way of actually reading the contents of the little red book.

Henrietta spread Jane's latest letter out on her muslin-clad lap. Even if a French operative did happen to be peering through the window, Henrietta knew just what he would see: a serene young lady (Henrietta hastily pushed a stray wisp of hair back into the Grecian-style bun on the top of her head) daydreaming over her correspondence and her diary. It was enough to put a spy to sleep, which was precisely why Henrietta had suggested the plan to Jane in the first place.

For seven long years, Henrietta had been angling to be included in the war effort. It didn't seem quite fair that her brother got to be written up in the illustrated newsletters as "that glamorous figure of shadow, that thorn in the side of France, that silent savior men know only as the Purple Gentian," while Henrietta was stuck being the glamorous shadow's pesky younger sister. As she had pointed out to her mother the year she turned thirteen — the year that Richard joined the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel — she was as smart as Richard, she was as creative as Richard, and she was certainly a great deal stealthier than Richard.