Or she could just bang her head against the counter and wish she had never got out of bed that morning.

Laura glanced guiltily over her shoulder, but the only other person in the shop was the poet, who was, mercifully, too absorbed in poetic reflection to pay any attention to her faux pas.

“Never mind,” she muttered, and affected a cough to cover her confusion. She would have to be wary of slips like that. After sixteen years, she had become far more English than she had realized. So much for doing so well. Pride goeth, and all those other gloomy adages. She would have to be more careful in the future. “Er, do you have any picture books with Latin translations for children?”

Why hadn’t she just asked that in the first place? That was what she got for trying to show off.

“I can see about finding something like that for you,” the bookseller offered dubiously, “But it might take some time. We did have a copy of Aesop’s Fables in a Latin translation. I could have that for you next week.”

“Do you think it would be appropriate for a child of nine?”

“It very well could be,” agreed the shopkeeper. His slow nod of approval made Laura feel marginally less like an idiot. Whatever message the Carnation next wanted to convey would be found on page nine of Aesop’s Fables, corresponding to the code word “silver.”

“That would be very good of you,” said Laura, just as the door opened again with a tinkle of chimes and a blast of cold air.

Three women breezed into the store. Two were obviously ladies of fashion; the third, older by several years, was dressed with puritanical severity except for the truly alarming purple plumes that sprouted from her bonnet like a molting tropical bird. Laura sincerely doubted that any bird, even in the tropics, had ever dared to show itself among the avian haut monde in plumage of that shade.

Laura saw Gabrielle taking in the details of the ladies’ costumes with hungry eyes. With a twinge, Laura remembered what it was to be nine and plain, with that horrible awareness that one didn’t, somehow, look quite right. The child’s clothes were sturdy and well made, but they could not, under any circumstances, be termed anything other than provincial. Laura’s problem hadn’t been quite the same—she had, if anything, always been dressed in far too mature a style for her age—but she could well remember that anxious desire to look just like everyone else, and the squirming humiliation of knowing she didn’t.

She would have to speak to Jaouen about a new dress for his daughter. If books wouldn’t win Gabrielle over, perhaps pretty clothing might. And it would give her an excellent excuse to seek out her employer.

The poet’s sleeves expanded to hitherto unimaginable width as he flung his arms high in the air. Gabrielle hastily retreated back against a stack of books.

“My muse!” he cried, gesturing grandly at one of the ladies, who was magnificently turned out in a tight-sleeved, high-waisted sky blue pelisse finished in fur trim. She wore a bonnet with a silk-lined brim that shadowed her face, although not enough to curtain her from the eyes of her admirer. “Well met by midday, fair Miss Wooliston!”

Laura had to juggle to keep her grip on her book. Fortunately, no one was looking at her. All attention was on the lady in sky blue, the poet’s muse.

Or, as Laura knew her, the Pink Carnation.

Laura felt a tug on her arm. “What’s a muse?” demanded Pierre-André, in a whisper like a foghorn.

“Ah, the muse!” mused the poet, striking a pose like Jove about to throw thunderbolt. “The muse, my dear poppet, is a thing of glory, a flame of fire, a blazing comet of divine inspiration! In short—she!” He wafted his sleeve in the direction of the Pink Carnation.

The pretty lady didn’t appear to be on fire, but Pierre-André prudently backed up against Laura’s side in case she should blaze into divine inspiration and catch them all up in the conflagration.

Undaunted, the poet was courting artistic immolation. “I have just, this very morning, finished my latest ode to your sublime, um—”

“Sublimity?” suggested the Pink Carnation.

Gabrielle’s eyes were like saucers and Pierre-André was tugging at Laura’s arm again, hissing, “What’s sublimmy? And can I have a shirt like that? Can I? Can I?”

Turning back to the shopkeeper, Laura said hastily, “The Greek myths in the front. We would also like a copy of that. If you are a good boy,” she added to Pierre-André, “I’ll read you about Hercules and the snakes later. You’ll like the snakes.”

With a nod, the shopkeeper set off to the front to fetch the book.

Behind her, the poet was in full spate, fluttering his sleeves at Miss Wooliston in a bizarre sort of mating ritual. “Sublimity is too limiting a term to encompass the range of my regard for so rarefied a creature as thou. Which is why, instead of one word, I offer you five cantos.”

From somewhere in the vicinity of his left sleeve, the poet made good his word by producing a very thick roll of paper, beautifully tied with a pink silk ribbon.

“The pink,” he added helpfully, “represents love hopeful. I discuss that at some length in the fourth canto.”

Miss Wooliston eyed the thick roll of paper with comic apprehension. “You flatter me. Again.”

Her friend, a fair-haired woman whose claims to beauty were marred by the length of her nose, came to her rescue, “When will you immortalize me, Monsieur Whittlesby?”

The poet swept an elaborate bow that set all his ruffles fluttering. “You, Madame Bonaparte, have no need of my humble pen to make you immortal.”

Bonaparte. He had said Bonaparte, hadn’t he? If there had been anything in Laura’s mouth, she would have choked on it.

This Mme. Bonaparte was too young to be the First Consul’s wife, so it was presumably his stepdaughter, Hortense, made doubly a Bonaparte through her marriage to the First Consul’s younger brother.

That was a lot of Bonaparte in a very small space.

Mme. Bonaparte’s lips lifted in a rueful smile. “No. My stepfather’s cannon have done so already.”

“And a copy of Caesar’s Wars,” Laura said brusquely as the shopkeeper set down Hercules on top of the botanical treatise.

What was the Pink Carnation playing at? She had known Laura intended to come to the bookshop today; in fact, it was she who had advised her to do so. Why come bearing a Bonaparte? Laura didn’t like surprises, especially not in Bonaparte form.

“Gallic or Civil?” asked the shopkeeper laconically.

“Civil—no, Gallic,” Laura corrected herself.

What was the Pink Carnation doing going about with a Bonaparte on her arm?

Laura supposed it must be an equivalent of the old adage about keeping one’s enemies closer. When it came down to it, it wasn’t all that different from her notion of bringing the children along to provide an air of innocence. No one would ever suspect Miss Wooliston of delivering or receiving treasonous material with a daughter of the First Consul in tow.

Laura might have been teaching for what felt like an eon, but when it came to espionage, she still had a great deal to learn.

“No cannonade more powerful than the grapeshot of your eyes!” declaimed the poet. “No fusillade could match the artillery of your wit, no cavalry charge the pounding of the hearts which beat only for you!”

“We really must get you near a proper battlefield, Monsieur Whittlesby,” said Bonaparte’s stepdaughter with amusement. “Or at least buy you a book on tactics to bolster your metaphors.”

“Ought you to be encouraging him?” Holding out a hand to the poet, Miss Wooliston said, “Give me that ode of yours, Mr. Whittlesby, and from now on apply your pen to worthier subjects.”

Whittlesby gazed up at her soulfully. “What topic could be worthier than love?”

“Digestion,” snapped the older woman without a moment’s reflection.

“Digestion?” Whittlesby clutched his poem protectively to his chest and looked askance at the woman in the purple plumes. “My words are meant to be savored with the eye, not the tongue, Mademoiselle Gwendolyn.”

“I don’t believe she was planning to eat them, Monsieur Whittlesby,” said Hortense Bonaparte reassuringly, patting the poet’s sleeve. “Nobody’s teeth are that good.”

Mademoiselle Gwendolyn, or, in plain English, Miss Gwen, bared a set of teeth that gave the lie to Hortense Bonaparte’s supposition. “You can mock all you like, but that doesn’t change facts. Just look at the chronicles of history here in this shop! The Roman Empire was lost by rich sauces, not by love.”

There was an idea, thought Laura. If all else failed, they could simply feed Bonaparte into submission, one cream puff at a time.

Considering that she had proved her point, the Pink Carnation’s chaperone directed a look of withering scorn at the poet. “Attend to your diet before you talk to me of poetry.”

Whittlesby made a valiant effort to rally. “But poetry is food for the soul!”

“Hmph. If that’s true, your poetry wants fiber. Your adjectives are flabby and your nouns lack substance.”

Radiating offense, the poet made a show of extending the roll of paper past Miss Gwen, into the waiting hand of Miss Wooliston. “I shall let my muse be the judge of that,” he said sniffily. “Good day.”

“Good day, bad poetry!” Miss Gwen called triumphantly after him. The door closed with a decidedly unpoetic bang.

Hortense Bonaparte stifled a smile behind one gloved hand. “Must you torment him so, Mademoiselle Meadows?”

Miss Gwen was unrepentant. “Anyone who writes drivel such as that deserves to have the stuffing knocked out of him. An eye for an eye, I say.”

“Or an insult for an ode?” Miss Wooliston unrolled roughly two inches of her ode. “Oh, dear. He’s gone and compared me to a graceful gazelle gliding gallantly o’er a glassy glade again.” Shaking her head, she rolled it tightly back up. “If he must show his admiration, it’s a pity he can’t just do it with flowers.”

“Roses,” suggested Hortense Bonaparte, whose mother had made an art of cultivating them.

Miss Wooliston tilted her head, as though considering. “I have always been rather partial to carnations.”

“Cheap, showy things,” Miss Gwen said with a sniff. “Rather like that Whittlesby’s poetry.”

“At least he hasn’t published any of his odes to you in the newspapers yet,” contributed Hortense Bonaparte, cheerfully oblivious to botanical subtext. She slid her arm companionably through the Pink Carnation’s. “One dreadful little man did that to me while I was still at Madame Cam-pan’s school. The other girls called me la Belle Hortense for weeks. It was very trying.” Glancing over a display of books as she spoke, she lifted a large volume bound in red morocco from the table, angling it towards Miss Wooliston. “Have you read this yet? I heard it was rather good.”

The Pink Carnation shook her head, making a show of looking around the shop. “I was hoping to find a copy of The Children of the Abbey.”

“Do you mean to tell me there is a horrid novel you haven’t read?” Mme. Bonaparte feigned shock. “I thought you had them all.”

It struck Laura that the Pink Carnation was on remarkably good terms with the First Consul’s stepdaughter. Well, what had she expected? That the Pink Carnation would conduct her career by skulking in dark alleys in malodorous disguises? It was much more efficient to do one’s reconnaissance in a drawing room, properly garbed.

Miss Wooliston accepted the teasing in good grace. “I seem to have missed this one, and I am most distraught about it. Who knows what might be hidden behind those abbey walls? I simply must find out.”

An abbey or an Abbaye?

Taking Miss Wooliston’s statement at face value, Mme. Bonaparte laughed good-naturedly. “I shouldn’t imagine you’ll find anything out of the ordinary. Aren’t those novels all the same?”

Miss Gwen let out a loud and offended harrumph that set her plumes a-wagging. “Only to the uninformed. How many have you read recently, missy?”

Mme. Bonaparte held out her hands in a gesture of defeat. “I was once very fond of La Nouvelle Héloïse.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Miss Gwen. “That drivel! That Rousseau wouldn’t know a proper plot if it bit him.”

Mme. Bonaparte bowed her head in contrition. “I shall eagerly await the publication of your romance, Mademoiselle Meadows.”

“In the meantime,” said Miss Wooliston, neatly bringing the conversation back around. “I must have my Children of the Abbey. I find I am become quite urgent in my curiosity.”