Lauren Willig - The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

“Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Delaroche turned abruptly on one heel. “I said watch him! Go, damn you!”

Without another word, the boy fled the room.

Delaroche’s nose quivered like a dog scenting blood. The Purple Gentian was growing careless. One could tell by the foolish mistake he had made of trying to disguise his meetings with agents as affairs of the heart.

Lord Richard Selwick had powerful friends in the government, friends no less formidable than the stepchildren of the First Consul. It was said that the First Consul himself was unaccountably fond of the man. But how fond would the First Consul remain of his director of Egyptian antiquities once his less-scholarly activities came to light?

Delaroche’s lips curved into the shape of a scimitar. “One more mistake, Selwick. All it will take is one more mistake.”

“Good morning, slugabed!” Jane’s voice came from somewhere close at hand. Amy rolled over, the covers still bunched up around her shoulders, as Jane continued, with the unconscious condemnation of the naturally early riser, “It’s past eleven already. You’ve lost half the day.”

“No great loss,” muttered Amy. Despite the comfort of the familiar dialogue, a sense of malaise weighed heavily over her. Her eyes felt scratchy under their lids and the back of her throat ached as though with the onset of the grippe. Memories of the night before began to return slowly, in patches. Marston on the ground. All the stars shining at her. The Purple Gentian telling her . . . oh. Amy squeezed her eyes even more tightly shut. As if shutting her eyes could block out the memory of the Gentian saying, “We can’t see each other anymore.”

“I brought you chocolate,” Jane’s familiar voice wheedled. “And I have something to tell you.”

Amy slowly pushed the covers back from her chin, and blinked blearily at Jane. In her Grecian-style gown, her hair in a knot at the back of her head, a pile of papers in one hand, and a fluted chocolate pot in the other, Jane looked a bit like a minor classical deity. Amy envied her cousin’s serenity.

“I thought that would roust you out,” Jane said with some satisfaction. But her tone changed as she took in Amy’s reddened eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously.

The sight of her cousin exuding love, concern, and hot chocolate—since Jane, focused entirely on Amy, hadn’t noticed the way the chocolate pot in her hand was tilting, or the trickle of chocolate freckling the pale blue counterpane—made tears prick in Amy’s eyes.

Pulling her pillow over her head, Amy grumbled, “Not if you wake me at this hour of the morning.”

“I’m not sure this even counts as morning anymore.” Jane put down her papers, tugged the pillow away, and handed a reasonably dry-eyed Amy a porcelain cup of lukewarm chocolate.

“What happened last night?” Jane asked, settling herself down on the bed in the hollow next to Amy’s hip. Her skirts blended with the sheets, white on white. “I stopped by after I heard your door click closed, but you were lying so still I couldn’t bear to disturb you. Did you speak to your Purple Gentian?”

“I think we may have to restore the monarchy without the Purple Gentian,” Amy said, her eyes on her cup of chocolate. She looked up at Jane with a false, strained smile. “That will give us much more freedom of movement, don’t you think?”

Jane watched the contortions of Amy’s lips with alarm. “What’s wrong, Amy?”

“Nothing’s wrong. The Purple Gentian and I just realized we had different . . .” Different depths of emotion? Different ideas of the value of a kiss? Amy pressed her lips together tightly. “Objectives,” she finished brightly. “He wants to stop the invasion of England, and I want to restore the crown. That’s all.”

“The two aren’t necessarily incompatible.”

The Purple Gentian seemed to think so. He found her a distracting infatuation, incompatible with stopping the invasion of England. Incompatible with him.

The rich chocolate tasted like acid in Amy’s mouth.

“Who needs the Purple Gentian?” declared Amy, hauling herself up on her elbows. “Just because he’s”—handsome, charming, witty, tender, her traitor mind supplied—“had more experience doesn’t mean he’s indispensable. We’ll do just as well on our own.”

An ache of emptiness overtook Amy on that last word. Maybe she could pretend she had never found him, never believed she loved him, had lost nothing but daydreams.

“Something happened last night with the Purple Gentian. Was he uncouth?” Jane asked darkly. “Did he hurt you?”

“No! Nothing like that. He just—”

“Just what?” prompted Jane, a deadly hint of steel in her gray eyes.

“It’s complicated.”

Jane refilled Amy’s cup of chocolate and handed it back to her. “It can’t be that complicated.”

So Amy explained. She told her about the meeting in the study, the fracas in the gardens—Amy rapidly hurried through that bit, as Jane’s face darkened in a way that foretold lectures to come—and the dreadful walk home. The events on the boat, aside from a chaste kiss or two, Amy omitted. And she left out any mention of stars, especially in the form of a necklace.

Jane listened thoughtfully. “I’m not sure this means what you think it means.”

Amy plucked listlessly at an embroidered lily on the edge of her eiderdown. “I’ll never see him again, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Amy, you can’t just—”

“Romance would get in the way of my mission, anyway. It already has.”

“Birds of a feather,” muttered Jane. “That sounds a great deal like—”

“When you woke me up, you said you had something to tell me?” Amy cut in.

Jane retrieved her tidy stack of papers. “It will keep till later. We’re to go to the Tuilleries at four, and I have some little odds and ends I want to tie up before then.”

Amy buried her head again in her pillow. “I’d forgotten. Lord Richard’s antiquities.”

Her spirits were still low hours later as Miss Gwen shepherded them into the Tuilleries to keep their appointment with Lord Richard. Amy derived less than the usual enjoyment from watching Miss Gwen make loud demands in English and poke the baffled guards with her parasol. An entourage of three footmen, all clutching their sides in pain, eventually escorted them to Lord Richard’s office.

The room was smaller than Amy had anticipated. Or maybe it merely seemed small due to the clutter of objects that filled the room. Long tables ran down both sides and the center of the room, their surfaces covered by vases, pottery, fragments of jewelry. Crates, lined up one after another, formed a solid block beneath the tables and rose in tottery piles at the corners of the room. At the very end of the room sat Lord Richard, nearly hidden behind a stack of immense, leather-bound ledgers. He was, Amy saw as they moved further into the room, squinting at a shard of pottery, the quill in his other hand poised over a page already half filled with tidy script.

And he wasn’t fully clothed.

Amy didn’t mean to stare, but Lord Richard’s jacket was slung over the back of his chair, his waistcoat hung open, and the linen of his shirt was so very fine. The healthy sheen of skin showed through the white fabric. Amy watched, fascinated, as the sleeve bunched and pulled against the sleek muscles of his arm as he reached over to dip his quill in the inkwell. Her eyes traveled up the length of his arm, to the loosened knot of his cravat, the pulse moving in the hollow of his bare throat.

“Hrrrrmph!” Miss Gwen cleared her throat forcefully enough to create a hurricane three counties away.

“I do beg your pardon.” Lord Richard grabbed for his jacket. “I hadn’t expected you for another quarter hour yet. Welcome.” He ushered them into the room, turning his devastating smile in special welcome upon Amy.

“When were you in Egypt?” asked Miss Gwen in her peremptory way, saving Amy from having to say anything at all.

“I went over in ninety-eight with Bonaparte’s expedition and returned later that year,” Lord Richard said, not meeting Amy’s eye.

Blast! Trust Miss Gwen to bring up an awkward topic, when the point of the visit was to charm Amy into liking him as himself. A few more mentions of the Egyptian expedition, and she’d be scowling at him again as though he had singlehandedly guillotined half the French aristocracy. But could he really blame Miss Gwen for bringing up Egypt when he’d invited them to view Egyptian antiquities? Hmm. Richard considered that conundrum. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any nice, safe Roman or Greek antiquities lying about, and he couldn’t very well ask them to leave for a few hours so that he could procure some.

“You were in Egypt when Nelson destroyed the French fleet?”

“Yes.”

Miss Gwen’s steely eyes were rather too probing for Richard’s peace of mind. He hastily picked up a necklace from one of the long tables lining the sides of the room. “This is a necklace made of faience, which is—”

“Where were you?”

The necklace dangled in the air in front of Amy, shades of dusty red and blue, as Lord Richard turned to cock a confused eyebrow at Miss Gwen. “Where was I when?”

“Never mind.” Miss Gwen waved an imperious hand. “It doesn’t signify.”

Jane stepped in to rescue him. “What’s this, my lord?” she asked, indicating a piece of stone, engraved with what looked to be little squiggles and pictures, which stood propped against the wall.

“We think that might be a funeral stela,” explained Lord Richard, running a finger fondly along the carvings. “See the pictures on top? That’s the pharaoh in the middle, giving offerings to a god—that’s the chap with horns, on his right. His queen, with the tall hat, stands on his left.”

“Who was she?” asked Amy, moving to stand next to him, drawn in despite herself.

“We don’t know,” Lord Richard admitted, grinning boyishly down at her. “Would you like to hazard a guess? Perhaps a princess from a faraway land, brought overseas from her home.”

“Shipwrecked on the coast of Egypt,” suggested Amy, “like the heroine of a Shakespeare play. Forced to disguise herself as a boy, until her innate nobility shines through her humble robes. She catches the eye of the pharaoh. . . .”

“And they live happily ever after,” finished Lord Richard.

“I wonder what really happened to her,” Amy said, eyes scanning the unreadable symbols in front of her. It reminded her of the first time she had looked at the Greek letters on the page of one of Papa’s books, how it seemed impossible that the strangely configured strokes of ink could resolve themselves into the love of Ariadne and the treachery of Theseus. Amazing how many stories dwelled on men repudiating the women who loved them. Theseus and Ariadne, Jason and Medea, Aeneas and Dido. Too bad she hadn’t learned her lesson well enough from her storybooks.

“You don’t think she lived happily ever after?” Lord Richard asked softly, his fingers brushing past Amy’s as she traced the contours of a small bird.

“That’s an ending for books, not for people.”

“What are books about, if not people?”

Richard yielded to the temptation to lean just a little bit closer to Amy. The lavender scent of her hair filled his nostrils. His gaze roamed over the dark curls of her hair, the gentle curve of her cheek, the kissable little dent at the base of her throat.

Amy backed away from the force of Lord Richard’s gaze. “Why don’t you ask Miss Gwen,” she suggested. “She can tell you all about the characters in her horrid novel, I’m sure.”

Lord Richard didn’t so much as glance at Miss Gwen. His green gaze narrowed even more intently on Amy. What was it about his voice, his presence, his talk of happy endings that was making her so nervous? Amy felt a slight flush rising in her cheeks at the sight of Lord Richard’s tapering fingers stroking the stone tablet, caressing the contours of the carvings. She focused her eyes on Lord Richard’s face. She could see the little crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the gold tips of his lashes, the slight dusting of pale hairs across the bridge of his nose.

“Uppington,” announced Miss Gwen out of nowhere. Lord Richard started and banged his head against the stela. Amy let out the breath she’d been holding in a giggle.

“The Selwick Marquesses of Uppington of Uppington Hall. In Kent, unless I mistake myself,” Miss Gwen continued.

Rubbing the bump on his head—Richard wondered if he’d find hieroglyphs embedded on his skull from the force of that blow—he smiled ruefully at Miss Gwen. “You know your Debrett’s well.”