The Masque of the Black Tulip Read online

  ‘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 is 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, titled ‘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 panelling, 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 joint 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 harboured 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 grey 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 dryly.

  I flapped a dismissive hand in his general direction, without interrupting my perusal. I scooted forward 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 organised 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 recognised 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 important, 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, lionised 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 n
ot 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…’

  Chapter Two

  Venetian Breakfast: a midnight excursion of a clandestine kind

  – from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation

  ‘…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 favourite settee.

  Under her elbow, the fabric was beginning to snag and fray; suspicious tea-coloured 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 eye teeth – or their eyes, for that matter, if that wouldn’t have got 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 saviour 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.

  Unfortunately, she was also, as her mother reminded her, a good deal younger than Richard. Seven years younger, to be precise.

  ‘Oh, bleargh,’ said Henrietta, since there was really nothing she could say in response to that, and Henrietta wasn’t the sort who liked being without something to say.

  Lady Uppington looked at her sympathetically. ‘We’ll discuss it when you’re older.’

  ‘Juliet was married when she was thirteen, you know,’ protested Henrietta.

  ‘Yes, and look what happened to her,’ replied Lady Uppington.

  By the time she was fifteen, Henrietta decided she had waited quite long enough. She put her case to the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel in her best imitation of Portia’s courtroom speech. The gentlemen of the League were not moved by her musings on the quality of mercy, nor were they swayed by her arguments that an intrepid young girl could wriggle in where a full-grown man would get stuck in the window frame.

  Sir Percy looked sternly at her through his quizzing glass. ‘We’ll discuss it—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Henrietta said wearily, ‘when I’m older.’

  She didn’t have any more success when Sir Percy retired and Richard began cutting a wide swath through French prisons and English news sheets as the Purple Gentian. Richard, being her older brother, was a great deal less diplomatic than Sir Percy had been. He didn’t even make the obligatory reference to her age.

  ‘Have you run mad?’ he asked, running a black-gloved hand agitatedly through his blond hair. ‘Do you know what Mother would do to me if I so much as let you near a French prison?’

  ‘Ah, but does Mama need to know?’ suggested Henrietta cunningly.

  Richard gave her another ‘Have you gone completely and utterly insane?’ look.

  ‘If Mother is not told, she will find out. And when she finds out,’ he gritted out, ‘she will dismember me.’

  ‘Surely, it’s not as bad as—’

  ‘Into hundreds and hundreds of tiny pieces.’

  Henrietta had persisted for a bit, but since all she could get out of her brother was incoherent mumbles about his head being stuck up on the gates of Uppington Hall, his hindquarters being fed to the dogs, and his heart and liver being served up on a platter in the dining room, she gave up, and went off to do some muttering of her own about overbearing older brothers who thought they knew everything just because they had a five-page spread on their exploits in the Kentish Crier.

  Appealing to her parents proved equally ineffectual. After Richard had been inconsiderate enough to go and get himself captured by the Ministry of Police, Lady Uppington had become positively unreasonable on the subject of spying. Henrietta’s requests were met with ‘No. Absolutely not. Out of the question, young lady,’ and even one memorable ‘There are still nunneries in England.’

  Henrietta wasn’t entirely certain that her mother was right about that – there had been a Reformation, and a fairly thorough one, at that – but she had no desire to test the point. Besides, she had heard all about the Ministry of Police’s torture chamber in lurid detail from her new sister-in-law, Amy, and rather doubted she would enjoy their hospitality any more than Richard had.

  But when one has been angling for something for seven years, it is rather hard to let go of the notion just like that. So when Amy’s cousin, Jane Wooliston, otherwise known as the Pink Carnation, happened to mention that she was having trouble getting reports back to the War Office because her couriers had an irritating habit of being murdered en route, Henrietta was only too happy to offer her assistance.

  It was, Henrietta assured her conscience, a safe enough assignment that even her mother couldn’t possibly find fault with it, or start looking about for England’s last operational nunnery. It wasn’t Henrietta who would be scurrying through the dark alleyways of Paris, or riding hell-for-leather down rutted French roads in a desperate attempt to reach the coast. All she had to do was sit in the morning room at Uppington House, and maintain a perfectly normal-sounding correspondence with Jane about balls, dresses, and other topics guaranteed to bore French agents to tears.

  Normal-sounding was the key. While in London for Amy and Richard’s wedding, Jane had spent a few days at her writing table, scribbling in a little red book. When she had finally emerged, she had presented Henrietta with a complete lexicon of absolutely everyday terms with far-from-everyday meanings.

  Ever since Jane’s return to Paris two weeks ago, the plan had proved tremendously effective. Even the most hardened French operative could find nothing to quicken his suspicion in an exchange about the relative merits of flowers as opposed to bows as trimming for an evening gown, and the eyes of the most determined interceptor of English letters were sure to glaze when confronted with a five-page-long description of yesterday’s Venetian breakfast at Viscountess of Loring’s Paris residence.

  Little did they realize that ‘Venetian breakfast’ was code for a late-night raid on the secret files of the Ministry of Polic
e. Breakfast, after all, was supposed to take place early in the morning, and thus made a perfect analogue for ‘dead of night.’ As for Venetian…well, Delaroche’s filing system was as complex and secretive as the workings of the Venetian Signoria at the height of their Renaissance decadence.

  Which brought Henrietta back to the letter at hand.

  Jane had begun it ‘My very dearest Henrietta,’ a salutation that signified news of the utmost importance. Henrietta sat up straighter on the settee. Jane had been rooting about in someone’s study – the letter didn’t specify whose – and he had been all amiability, which meant that whatever papers Jane had meant to find had been easily found, and Jane had been unmolested in her search.

  ‘I have sent word to our great-uncle Archibald in Aberdeen’ – that was William Wickham at the War Office – ‘in care of Cousin Ned.’ Henrietta reached for the red morocco-covered codebook. ‘Cousin’ she had seen before; it translated quite simply as ‘courier.’ Henrietta reached the proper page in the codebook. ‘See under Ned, Cousin,’ instructed Jane. Mumbling a bit to herself about people with regrettably organised minds, Henrietta flipped forward to the Ns. ‘Ned, Cousin: a professional courier in the service of the League.’

  Henrietta scowled at the little red book. Jane had sent her all the way to the Ns for that?

  ‘Given dear Ned’s propensity for falling in with the wrong sort of company,’ Jane continued, ‘I deeply fear he shall be so busy carousing and roistering about, he shall neglect to fulfil my little commission.’

  Having achieved some notion of the way Jane’s mind worked, Henrietta flipped straight to the Cs, indulging in a small smirk as she beheld, ‘Company, wrong sort of,’ just beneath, ‘Company, best sort of,’ ‘Company, better not sought out,’ and ‘Company, convivial.’ Her smirk faded somewhat at the knowledge that ‘Company, wrong sort of’ signified: ‘a murderous band of French agents, employed for the primary purpose of eliminating English intelligence officers.’ Poor Cousin Ned. Likewise, ‘Carousing,’ a page back, had nothing to do with bacchanalian excesses, but instead meant ‘engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Bonaparte’s minions,’ an activity that sounded highly unpleasant.