The Secret History of the Pink Carnation Read online

  Amy gave a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob.

  ‘How do you intend to wreak your revenge?’ Miss Gwen asked briskly.

  Amy plunged with relief into her favourite distraction. Planning. Planning almost anything was a dependable remedy for weepiness. Planning ways to wreak devastation, vengeance, and mayhem upon the guilty golden head of Lord Richard Selwick was even better. Amy rubbed her eyes clear and set to work.

  The ideal revenge would be to serve back to him the bitter brew of his own devising. Perhaps she could appear at his chambers in disguise, heavily veiled in black, and convince him that she was a secret agent sent by the War Office. Or, even better, she could be a French agent defecting to the English. He wouldn’t see her face, and she would speak in a heavy accent – a Provencal dialect, perhaps, southern and exotic, with echoes of the troubadours and courts of love – so he wouldn’t recognise her voice. And once he was terribly, painfully, in love with her, she could repudiate him on a dark midnight, and leave him standing broken beside his own house. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a deception for a deception. Justice in its purest form.

  The plan was perfect.

  And entirely impracticable. There was nothing to guarantee that she could make him love her. Besides, one yank of her veils, and the whole plan would be undone. Amy sank back into thought.

  What mattered most to him? What would it pain him most to see taken away?

  ‘I’ll beat him to the Swiss gold. I’ll show the Purple Gentian that he isn’t the only one who can thwart Bonaparte.’

  Miss Gwen levelled an appraising gaze at Amy. ‘I thought there might be some mettle in you.’

  Both Jane and Amy stared open-mouthed at Miss Gwen.

  ‘Was that a compliment?’ whispered Amy to Jane.

  ‘It sounded like one,’ Jane agreed, eyes wide.

  ‘Don’t allow it to go to your head,’ Miss Gwen interrupted dryly. ‘I spoke solely of potential. You may yet prove the contrary.’

  ‘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.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  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 blonde 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 favourite 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 emphasise the gap than cover it. It was my ‘I need an ego boost’ dress. The creamy colour 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 party-going 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 carolled. ‘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 lo
nging 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 realised her Purple Gentian, her daydream prince, was Lord Richard Selwick, and suddenly everything she had thought to be true needed re-evaluating.

  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 defence 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 tall-ish man with dark, wavy hair like Colin Firth’s. Not at all bad looking in a dark, smouldering 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 valour, 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.

  I glowered at Pammy. ‘Not here. Come with me. Back in a moment,’ I assured Serena, and towed her boyfriend off across the room. There was a pocket of relative privacy at one corner of the catwalk. The models had long since abandoned their platform, and two drunken guests were gyrating to the music, one of them wearing a green sequinned dress that made her look like a walking Christmas tree.

  Colin submitted to being towed, but freed himself as soon as we’d reached the corner. ‘Bond, James Bond?’ he quipped quizzically.

  ‘She’s a woman!’

  Colin regarded the Christmas-tree woman with a puzzled frown. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’

  I hit him with my glow stick, which had long since ceased to glow. ‘Not her! Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t be dense! You know very well who I mean! The Pink Carnation. Is. A. Woman.’

  That got his attention. ‘Shhhh.’

  I made an exasperated face. ‘Do you really think anyone here would care? They’d probably think I was talking about a new rock group.’

  His face relaxed into amusement. ‘True.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I demanded.

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  ‘That is the most puerile excuse for an answer I’ve ever heard.’

  Colin plunked his empty champagne glass down on the edge of the catwalk. ‘Well, what was I supposed to say?’

  ‘You let me go on about the Pink Carnation, all the while knowing…’ I bit down on my lip, hard.

  Colin stared at me, uncomprehending. ‘All the while knowing what?’

  ‘That the Pink Carnation was female!’


  ‘You’re quite upset about this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Urgh!’ Ten points to Let’s State the Bleeding Obvious Man.

  Looking completely baffled, Colin snagged two more glasses of champagne from a passing tray, and pressed one into my hand, closing my fingers around the stem. ‘Here. Drink. You look like you need it.’

  Despite the fact that it came from Colin Selwick, that was excellent advice. I drank.

  ‘I know you didn’t want me there, but it still wasn’t nice to make fun of me,’ I blurted out.

  ‘When did I make fun of you?’ he asked, with a good imitation of surprise.

  I eyed him suspiciously. ‘Last night.’

  Colin contemplated this. Understanding dawned in his hazel eyes. ‘You mean the nightdress? You must admit, you did look like Jane Eyre.’

  I could only deal with one grievance at a time. ‘Forget about that.’

  ‘How can I?’ Colin’s lips were twitching. ‘It’s not often a Brontë heroine—’

  ‘Stop it!’ I gave a little bounce of irritation. ‘I wasn’t referring to that! I wasn’t talking about your making fun of me for looking like a demented gothic heroine—’

  ‘Not necessarily a demented gothic heroine,’ Colin broke in, grinning.

  ‘Oh, be quiet!’ I howled, undoubtedly changing his mind about the whole demented thing. ‘I’m talking about the Pink Carnation being manly, and it wasn’t nice of you!’

  ‘Come again?’ said Colin.

  I gripped the stem of my champagne glass, took a steadying breath, and started over. ‘I am referring,’ I said with deliberate gravity, ‘to your allowing me to go on about the Pink Carnation being manly, when you knew, all along, that the Pink Carnation was Amy.’

  ‘You think the Pink Carnation is—’ Colin stopped abruptly. ‘Never mind. Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? First of all, I have no recollection of your saying anything about the Pink Carnation being manly.’

  Hadn’t I? I racked my champagne-slogged brain. He’d said something about that researcher thinking the Pink Carnation was a transvestite, and I’d said…what had I said? I couldn’t remember. Damn.