Lauren Willig - The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

“Thank you,” said Amy.

“I like this plan much better than tormenting Lord Richard,” contributed Jane, leaning forward on the seat.

“Oh, I still intend to do that, too,” responded Amy stubbornly. “Miss Gwen’s right. He broke the do-unto-others rule, and now he’s going to get his just deserts. It’s too bad I can’t pretend to be two people, just to show him what it feels like.”

“Let’s not go into that again,” Jane put in hastily. “How shall we intercept the gold?”

“We already had a plan.” Amy’s lips twisted in a rueful grimace as she relayed the plan she and the Purple Gentian had contrived together the night before. Miss Gwen listened intently. “If that is the plan the Purple Gentian intends to employ, we must find another one.”

“We don’t have enough people for it,” pointed out Jane, ever practical. “The Purple Gentian has a league; we just have us. Not that we aren’t formidable,” she added hastily, with a glance at Miss Gwen.

“Why shouldn’t we be a league?” demanded Miss Gwen.

“That’s it! Amy—” Jane’s mouth was a round O of amusement. Speechless with mirth, she rocked back against the seat, one hand pressed to her chest, the other held out to her cousin.

“Out with it!” snapped Miss Gwen.

“The Pink Carnation!” gasped Jane.

Miss Gwen looked at her as though she was considering transporting her immediately to Bedlam.

“You must remember, Amy! Before the Purple Gentian appeared, when we were going to be our own league, and call it—”

“The Pink Carnation,” Amy finished, the beginnings of a smile glimmering across her unhappy face. “We liked it better than the Invincible Orchid,” she finished, her voice cracking slightly.

“Shall we?” asked Jane breathlessly, a faint pink flush rising in her pale cheeks. “Shall we become the Pink Carnation?”

“Oh, Jane!” Amy launched herself across the seat to hug her cousin. “I would like nothing better! We’ll make Bonaparte quail at the very sight of a Carnation!”

“I prefer the Invincible Orchid,” announced Miss Gwen.

Neither of her charges listened. They were too busy planning the career of the Pink Carnation.

I only got lost three times on the way to Pammy’s party.

That I didn’t go farther astray was entirely due to the excellence of Pammy’s directions, which were of a see-Jane-run level of simplicity. I’m not exactly a brilliant navigator at the best of times; in my current daze, it was only a wonder I hadn’t accidentally wound up in Scotland. By the time I’d retraced my steps all the way back to Covent Garden from High Holborn (don’t ask how I wound up over there), I was all but ready to hop right back on the Tube and head home. Only a marked disinclination to be alone with my own thoughts drove me to dig out Pammy’s directions from the pocket of my raincoat and try again.

I needed a glass of champagne. Badly.

Spotting me at the door, Pammy waved a tiny pink purse over her head like a lasso and shouted, “Ellie!” Bowling models out of her way, she rushed over, pushing past the bouncer to join me on my little patch of cold sidewalk. We exchanged the sort of effusive greetings usually reserved for released captives rather than friends who just had dinner on Tuesday.

Even through my preoccupied fog, I couldn’t help gaping at Pammy’s latest outfit. She was wearing bright pink snakeskin pants. Species Christianus Lacroixus, that elusive denizen of the fashion jungle. She had paired the flaming fuchsia snakeskin with a bright Pucci top in swirling blue, pink, and orange that clashed dreadfully with the pants, and even more so with the faux red streaks in her short blond hair. It should have looked dreadful. Instead, she looked like she’d just stepped off the cover of Cosmo.

I’d settled on one of my favorite dresses, a little beige suede sheath from BCBG. From the front, it looked perfectly demure, but the back was bare from the waist up, with the exception of one asymmetrical scrap of cloth that tied across the middle of my back, and served more to emphasize the gap than cover it. It was my “I need an ego boost” dress. The creamy color made my hair look more russet than red, and the dramatic back made me feel glamorous, in an old Hollywood sort of way.

Pammy observed my ensemble with a critical eye.

“Oh well, at least you’re not wearing your pearls.”

Pressing a neon green glow stick into my hand (she had a pink one, presumably to go with the pants), she yanked me past the red ropes and into a room already so crowded that people were perching on the edge of the DJ’s booth just to get out of the way. At the far end of the room, a temporary catwalk had been set up. Two women with fashionably bored expressions were posing with shoulders back and hips out, ignoring the inebriated party guest who was trying to claw her way up onto the platform. Since there was clearly no coat check, or, if there ever had been it had long since been overrun by the partygoing hordes, I wriggled out of my raincoat and slung it over my arm.

“Oooh, bubbly!” Pammy exclaimed, as a waiter shimmied by several yards away. “Yoo-hoo!” she caroled. “Over here!”

A glass was shoved into my hand; Pammy introduced me to someone; we shouted pleasantries over the throbbing music and moved on.

I jostled along through the crowd in Pammy’s wake, nodding absently in response to her whispered asides (“That jerk Roderick! Can you believe he . . .”), but I only caught about a third of it. I couldn’t blame it on the music, or the crowds, or the strobe light that seemed personally out to blind me; my mind was elsewhere entirely, back in 1803.

My dashing hero, my paragon of manhood, my lover of moonlit daydreams, was a woman.

The Pink Carnation was a woman.

I’d read the passage in Amy’s diary where she described the inception of the Pink Carnation right before I left for Pammy’s party. I’d been dressed already, perched on the edge of my bed, bag and coat ready next to me, reading just one more page before I really had to go. I’d been longing to find out whether Lord Richard would break down and tell Amy his identity, crossing my fingers and hoping for Amy’s sake that he would.

Maybe that’s why the revelation caught me quite so off guard. I hadn’t been looking for it. It had never occurred to me that the Pink Carnation could be anyone other than a man—most likely Miles Dorrington, but maybe Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, or even Augustus Whittlesby. I had given up expecting to hear anything about it in Amy’s diary, which was crammed full of her personal concerns. If—when—I came upon the Pink Carnation, I’d expected it to be in one of Miles’s letters to Richard: “Hullo, old chap. The War Office is sending me along to take your place. Aside from a silly flower name, should be jolly good fun,” or something along those lines. Never, in a million years, would I have imagined . . . this.

I had sat there numbly, manuscript pages fanning out in my beige suede lap, thinking back over all the clues I’d missed. Amy’s accounts of her childhood exploits, her determination to dethrone Napoleon, her anxiety to join a league. I should have known. I should have expected.

But who would ever have imagined that the Pink Carnation could be a woman?

I grasped at straws. It wasn’t entirely certain that the Pink Carnation was Amy. She’d only just come up with the idea, after all. Maybe she came up with the idea, and then mentioned it to . . . whom? Geoff? Not likely. Geoff was Richard’s friend, not Amy’s. Whittlesby? Amy thought he was a blithering idiot. And why would Amy ever, ever hand her league over to someone else?

There was no logical way around it. The Pink Carnation was a woman.

I had sat on the Tube in a trance. Another passenger, an elderly woman with a woolly hat and bad teeth, had asked me if I was ill. I’d shaken my head, and thanked her politely, the words scarcely registering over the turmoil in my head.

How could I have missed it? As a scholar, how could I have been so careless? That stung, that my preconceptions had so blinded me to the truth of what I was reading. What kind of a historian was I, blundering along blindfolded by my own imagination?

All right, that hurt, but it wasn’t what hurt the most. What hurt the most was the loss of the daydream. I wonder if that was how Amy felt, when she realized her Purple Gentian, her daydream prince, was Lord Richard Selwick, and suddenly everything she had thought to be true needed reevaluating.

My image—my imaginings, as I now, painfully, knew them to be—of the Pink Carnation had been so real, so solid. In my head, he’d been something of a cross between Zorro and Anthony Andrews as the Scarlet Pimpernel. A rakish grin, a cocky tilt of the head, a steady sword arm. I could close my eyes and conjure him up, even now. But none of that had ever existed. Poof! All gone! And in my wonderful Zorro/Anthony Andrews hybrid’s place there stood a bouncy little twenty-year-old English girl in a sprigged muslin dress.

And Colin Selwick had known. My face grew hot as I remembered my spirited defense of the Pink Carnation’s manhood. How he must have been laughing at me!

“At least we agree on that much,” he had said, about the Pink Carnation’s not being a transvestite. That dry note of mockery in his voice—at the time, I’d thought he’d been ironically amused by the idea of our agreeing on anything, but now I knew I’d been the butt of that joke. Of course, the Pink Carnation wasn’t a transvestite. Amy wore dresses and named herself after a pink flower because she was female. Not a cross-dressing male with a carnation fixation, or even a Regency dandy with a penchant for pink. And Colin Selwick had known all along.

Nodding and smiling at yet another of Pammy’s numerous acquaintances, I downed my glass of champagne, and reached for another.

“Pardon?”

One of Pammy’s friends was actually trying to make conversation with me. On my third glass of champagne—or was it my fourth?—it took me a moment to focus. I looked up to see a tallish man with dark, wavy hair like Colin Firth’s. Not at all bad looking in a dark, smoldering Rufus Sewell sort of way.

“Arrr rrrrr rrrr rrrr,” he repeated.

“Oh, absolutely!” I said airily. “Couldn’t agree more!”

Curly-haired Chap gave me an odd look and turned away.

“Um, Eloise?” Pammy hissed in my ear. “He asked what your name was.”

“Well, I thought it was a very valid question!” I hissed back.

That’s the lovely thing about champagne. After a few glasses, one loses all ability to feel like an idiot.

“Oh! Look who’s there!” Pammy was still looking in the direction of Curly-haired Chap, but her attention had shifted to someone just beyond him. Curly-haired Chap was pointedly ignoring both of us. Since Pammy had exclaimed the same thing several times in the past hour, I didn’t pay much attention. “I never thought she’d show. Serena! Yoo-hoo! Serena!”

Curly-haired Chap edged back a bit, and through the gap I saw Chic Girl. Also known as Serena. And behind her was Colin Selwick.

Something cold and wet dripped down onto my sandaled toes. Ooops. I hastily righted my champagne glass before I poured any more libations to my feet.

“Yoo-hoo!” Even over the din, Pammy managed to make herself heard. “Over here!”

With a tentative smile, Serena gave a little wave back, said something to Colin, and began to wend her way through the intervening bodies towards Pammy.

“You know her?” I hissed, as Serena navigated her away around Curly-haired Chap, Colin in tow.

“She’s one of the St. Paul’s crowd,” Pammy whispered back. “A little shy, but a sweetie. Darling!” She launched herself at Serena, kissing her on both cheeks. “And this is my very old friend Eloise. Eloise, I’d like you to meet Serena and her—”

“We’ve already met,” I cut in, with a wave of my champagne glass. “Hello, Serena.” I smiled sweetly at Serena, who did seem rather a sweetie, even if she was wearing another pair of to-die-for boots, this time soft black leather, paired with a very un-Chapin-mother little black dress.

“You.” I pointed the champagne glass at Colin.

I had a feeling I was going to hear about this from Pammy later, but champagne is the better part of valor, and I needed, desperately needed, to talk about the Pink Carnation. The female Pink Carnation.

“I need to speak to you.”

Colin raised an eyebrow. “What about?”

“Yes, what about?” echoed Pammy shamelessly.