The Secret History of the Pink Carnation pc-1 Read online

  “So we are on our own,” said Lady Uppington. “As we expected.”

  The marquess took her hand and squeezed it. “As we expected, my dear.” He cast a keen look at Geoff. “I suppose this Delaroche chap won’t be susceptible to bribery.”

  “Not a chance of it, sir.”

  “I feared as much. There’s nothing worse than an incorruptible madman.”

  Jane’s lashes lifted over clear gray eyes. “There might be another solution, sir. Amy, do you remember the soot on our teeth?” she asked in the infuriatingly enigmatic way she had whenever she had a truly inspired idea.

  Amy nodded hesitantly, trying to figure out what Jane could mean by it. “Yes, of course. When we used to . . . Oh! Servants! That’s it!”

  “Could you enlighten the rest of us?” asked Miles.

  “Do you want to use servants to storm the ministry and rescue Richard?” Henrietta looked up interestedly from her cup of tea. “That would be splendid.”

  “No.” Amy shook her head so rapidly she knocked off her cap. “We could be servants. Surely someone must clean the Ministry? And who would ever look at a charwoman with a bucket? Jane, you’re brilliant!”

  “An excellent idea!” seconded Lady Uppington. “You’re quite right. Nobody ever looks closely at staff. Geoff, dear, you can forge us some sort of pass, can’t you?”

  “I do have a copy of Delaroche’s seal,” Geoff admitted, “but, surely, you can’t be thinking of going yourself?”

  The room broke into an alarming hullabaloo as Lord Uppington, Geoff, and Miles tried to remonstrate with Lady Uppington and Amy—as Amy quickly made quite clear that the only way to prevent her going was to lock her in a tower without doors or windows, of which there were few in the vicinity. Miles kept insisting that as Richard’s best friend, he really ought to go; the marquess thumped for his paternal privileges; and Geoff’s usually quiet voice rose to unusual levels as he reminded them all that only he actually knew where Richard was being kept.

  “You would all make appalling women.” Lady Uppington cut forcibly through the babble. “And if Amy and I are caught—yes, I do admit the possibility!—they are far more likely to deal leniently with us than with you.”

  “Besides,” pointed out Jane coolly, “someone still needs to intercept the Swiss gold.”

  “Oh hell,” Miles groaned. “The Swiss gold.”

  “The Pink Carnation will steal the gold just as we planned,” Jane said firmly. “With the Purple Gentian incarcerated, there’s all the more need for the Pink Carnation. But if Amy is rescuing Lord Richard, we need a replacement for her.”

  Miles nodded, hair flopping up and down over his brow. “Count me in.”

  “And me!” chimed in Henrietta.

  “You,” said Lady Uppington tersely, “are staying home. One child in the hands of the French is more than enough for any mother to have to bear. It’s settled, then,” she said, before Henrietta could launch into full-scale protest. “Amy and I will rescue Richard; Geoff, I believe you should come along with us as guide; Miles, Jane, and Uppington will intercept the Swiss gold. Shall we?”

  The entire party surged to their feet, shoving teacups back on the tray, and quibbling over details. Amy declared her intent to get clothes from the servants’ quarters; Jane directed a footman to take a note to Miss Gwen to alert her to join them at Lord Richard’s house; and Henrietta’s voice rose in agitated protest.

  “But, Mama . . .”

  “No buts, Henrietta!”

  Henrietta pressed her lips together in extreme irritation. “I’m not going to waste time by teasing to come along. But you’ve all forgotten something. How are we going to get Richard out of Paris?”

  Miles dropped his teacup. The point was so simple, and so essential, that Amy couldn’t believe that none of them had thought of it. From the looks of stupefaction on the faces of Richard’s family and friends, none of them had considered it either. Perhaps, thought Amy rapidly, they could secrete Richard in the Hotel de Balcourt till the hullabaloo quieted down and the French agents had some other poor hero to persecute.

  Jane suddenly smiled. “Oh, I think we have an answer to that. There is a certain gentleman of our acquaintance who possesses both a carriage and a boat, which I believe he will be more than happy to place at our disposal.”

  “Marston!” exclaimed Amy.

  “The very one,” agreed Jane. “If someone would be so kind as to remind him of some papers of his I hold, I have no doubt he’ll be agreeable.”

  “Give me his direction, and I’ll see to him.” Lord Uppington strode across the room to Jane.

  Jane nodded her thanks. “It might be wise to take the precaution of replacing Marston’s coachman and sending some of our own men ahead to Calais to secure the boat. I wouldn’t trust Mr. Marston’s word.”

  Miles, for once all seriousness, yanked the bellpull. “Richard’s coachman can take care of the carriage, and Stiles and five of the footmen can ride ahead for the boat. I’ll speak to them directly.”

  “Can we go now?” prompted Amy anxiously, halfway out the door.

  Following her, Lady Uppington stuck her head around the door of the drawing room one last time.

  “Have the carriage brought to the Hotel de Balcourt,” instructed Lady Uppington. “If these French have any sense, they’ll be watching this house. I don’t think they have much in the way of sense, but we can’t rely on that. We’ll meet you there by one. If we’re not there . . .”

  Amy hurried ahead of Lady Uppington towards the servants’ quarters, blocking out her last words. That the plan might go awry was not to be thought of. Any more than she could bear to think of what Delaroche might be doing to Richard at this very moment.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Booted feet slapped to a stop outside the door of Richard’s cell. Levering himself on his bound wrists, he wriggled to a standing position from the floor where the guards had thrown him with unnecessary force several hours before. He had informed them that the use of that much force was a waste of their energies, but they had just grunted in response to his kindly professional advice. They had also proved churlish in not giving him opportunity for the escape ploy in which they bent over to untie him, and he bashed them over the head with his bound wrists, then stole their clothes. A pity, that. It had worked so well in 1801. Maybe the word had spread. At any rate, they had avoided that prospect by simply declining to untie him. So Richard had spent the past several hours reclining, still bound, on the straw-scattered floor, his mind turning anxiously elsewhere. Not to Delaroche and the tortures the disturbed little man was arranging for him, but to Amy, lying bound and helpless on the cobblestones outside Delaroche’s lodging.

  A key squeaked in the lock. The door shuddered. “Open it, you fools!” a voice thundered.

  “Um, it’s stuck, sir,” someone quavered.

  A very loud curse from the other side of the door, and then the door shuddered again and popped open. Two sentries tumbled to the floor. Behind them stood . . . Delaroche. He really ought to be a comical figure, Richard thought. Small and skinny, dressed all in black like a cut-rate Oliver Cromwell, strutting forward in boots that could use a polish. Richard hopped forward on his hobbled legs and executed what he hoped was a mocking bow.

  “So,” Delaroche snarled, “we meet at last.”

  “Actually,” Richard responded blandly, “I believe we were first introduced at Mme Bonaparte’s salon, if I remember correctly.”

  “Your powerful friends cannot help you here. You are in my domain now.” Delaroche laughed. Evilly.

  “You should really get that rattle in your throat looked at,” suggested Richard, peering earnestly at Delaroche. “It must be from all this loafing about in drafty dungeons. Terrible for your health, you know.”

  “It is your health you should fear for.” The evil laughter was beginning to grate on Richard’s nerves. Not to mention that his neck hurt from trying to keep an eye on Delaroche as the man paced in circle
s around him, his boots crunching on the straw and debris scattered about the floor.

  Delaroche strode on bandy legs to the door, clapped his hands together, and bellowed, “Prepare the interrogation chamber!”

  “The regular interrogation chamber, sir?” one guard ventured, keeping well on the other side of the stone doorframe.

  “Oh no.” Delaroche unleashed another of his humorless laughs. “Take him to the extra-special interrogation chamber!”

  It didn’t raise Richard’s spirits that the guard himself blanched at the suggestion.

  Down several flights of stairs, nestled in a catacomb of underground cells, Delaroche flung open the door of his extra-special interrogation chamber with housewifely pride.

  “Behold!” Delaroche crowed, as the guards gave Richard a little push towards the center of the room, fleeing back towards the corridor.

  Skidding a bit on the straw that covered the floor, Richard beheld. He and Geoff had heard rumors about the extra-special interrogation chamber—it was the sort of thing that was whispered from agent to agent—and had even speculated on breaking into it, as part of their what-can-we-do-to-annoy-the-Ministry-of-Police campaign. But they had never gotten around to it. And Richard had always, in the back of his mind, assumed that the whole extra-special interrogation chamber was most likely a rumor fabricated to terrify the enemies of the Republic. Sure, maybe Delaroche had a little room somewhere where he quizzed his hapless victims; maybe he even owned a pair of thumbscrews; but a whole torture chamber? The whole idea was just too medieval, too melodramatic, too . . . Delaroche.

  Damn. He should have known better.

  “Friends of yours?” he inquired, waving a hand at the skulls standing on pikes around the walls.

  “No,” Delaroche bit out. “But they’ll soon be friends of yours.”

  Richard didn’t much care for the sound of that. He was also running out of dazzling repartee in the face of what looked like an increasingly bleak situation. Delaroche was more of a madman than even he had realized. While the skulls might be a bit dusty, the extensive collection of torture tools arrayed about the room gleamed sharp and clean. Delaroche must have scoured the dungeons of castles across the breadth of Europe to acquire his toys, which looked like they included not only the full collection of the Marquis de Sade, but a representative sampling of the best the Inquisition had to offer. In his quick sweep of the room—it wouldn’t do to take his eyes off Delaroche for too long—Richard noted no fewer than two iron maidens, thumbscrews in ten different sizes, and a deluxe rack. Delaroche greeted each implement of torture personally—as far as Richard could make out, he hadn’t named them (though Richard wouldn’t have put it past him to do that), but he stopped by each one to touch spikes and grind levers with macabre tenderness.

  Across the room, Delaroche carefully eased a double-headed ax onto a specially designed stand that showed off both blades to their best advantage. “Where shall we begin?” Delaroche mused, crossing his arms across his chest, as he strutted toward Richard. Richard had rather hoped he wouldn’t get to that stage for a while yet. Didn’t he have more instruments of torture to caress first? “Something appropriate, something tasteful. Torture is an art, you know,” Delaroche chided. “A skill that must be practiced with care and finesse. What is it that you use in your English prisons? The rack? Your fists?”

  “Actually,” Richard drawled, “we use a little thing called due process.”

  Delaroche looked momentarily intrigued, then shrugged. “Whatever that is, it is the work of amateurs to use the same instrument for all crimes! Here, we very carefully match the punishment to the crime.”

  “How very refined.”

  “Your compliments will not help you, Selweeck. I could give you a painful poison in that tea you English love so well, nothing that will kill you—no, no!—but something that will make you writhe with pain and beg to confess. Or I could cut off an appendage for every enemy of the state you stole from Mme Guillotine. . . .”

  “Why not start with my head?” Richard suggested.

  While Delaroche vacillated among his toys, Richard once again twisted his wrists to test the slack in his bonds. There wasn’t any. It could have been worse, though. At least they had bound his wrists in front of him, instead of behind. If Delaroche would come close enough, he had the chance of mustering enough force to strike him a blow on the head, something the Assistant Minister of Police was clearly not expecting. Ideally, he’d follow that up with a kick, but his feet were tied tightly enough that in the attempt he would more likely bowl himself over than his adversary.

  “Ah! I have it!” Richard had stopped listening about four suggestions ago, but the glee in Delaroche’s voice yanked his attention away from his escape plans. “Since you are so fond of the company of the fairer sex,” Delaroche sneered, “we shall start with an introduction to the lady in the corner.”

  He gestured towards the iron maiden, and Richard’s eyes involuntarily followed. It was, most certainly, the most deluxe iron maiden imaginable. Like the mummy cases Richard had seen in Egypt, the casing had been painted to resemble a woman. Knowledge of what lay inside suggested a rapacious slant to that red mouth, and a hungry glint to the painted eyes.

  Delaroche grasped the handle cleverly concealed among the lady’s red-and-gold skirts; inch by ominous inch, the gaudy façade of the iron maiden jerked open, revealing its spiky intestines.

  For the first time in a long and successful career, it occurred to Richard that he might actually be facing death, a very painful death, and that there was little more he could do to outwit it.

  Death was, of course, a possibility he had considered in the past. Percy had counseled them all very seriously about it when they joined the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Mortality hadn’t seemed all that pressing at the time, but then, after Tony’s death, Richard had been convinced that his own turn was bound to come at any moment, his life forfeit for Tony’s. Given the suicidal recklessness with which he had rushed into missions for months thereafter, death had seemed a probability, if not an inevitability. But he had survived. Fate was funny like that.

  All those times he’d contemplated his potential demise—in the moments before he’d crawled through a Temple prison window, or plunged into a group of armed French agents—he had consoled himself with the thought that he’d left a legacy of which he could be proud. He had done something heroic with his life. How many men could say the same?

  Blast it all, why wasn’t that enough anymore? Glory, he reminded himself. Think of Ajax, of Achilles. Glory, glory, glory.

  But all he could think about was Amy.

  When he tried to picture Henry V, plunging into the breach at Honfleur, instead he saw Amy, popping out from underneath a desk. Instead of Achilles roaring beneath the walls of Troy, there was Amy, swinging a punch at Georges Marston. Amy, Amy, everywhere—and usually somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, Richard thought, with what might have turned into a grin, if Delaroche hadn’t tested one of the spikes of the iron maiden, and sprung away, holding a handkerchief to his bleeding finger.

  Devil take it, he didn’t want to die. Not that he’d ever really wanted to die, even after Tony, but now . . . how in the blazes was he supposed to tell Amy he loved her if he was dead?

  Delaroche dropped the bloody handkerchief and bore down upon Richard.

  “Selweeck,” he panted triumphantly, “meet your doom!”

  Richard hoped to hell that Miles and Geoff had come up with a rescue plan.

  “I didn’t think there would be so many of them,” whispered Amy.

  The uneven stones of the wall rasped against Amy’s back as she cautiously tilted her head around the corner of the corridor for a second glance. Drat. They were still there. Three sentries in dark blue coats, muskets at their sides, ranged in front of a large wooden door banded with iron. There were five other doors on the corridor, four of them mere grilles, revealing the cells within. When she craned her neck, Amy could see a hint
of movement in one, and something that might have been a bony arm in another. The fifth portal was a smaller version of the guarded door, a heavy oaken affair hinged and studded with iron, with a tiny shuttered window at the height of a man’s head. Amy’s gaze darted back to the largest portal. The window was closed, the thick wood of the door and the massive stone walls muffling any sounds from within. But Amy had no doubts that they were finally within view of Delaroche’s extra-special interrogation chamber. And Richard.

  And three armed sentries.

  And she had thought that just getting into the building had been nerve-racking. There had been that heart-stopping moment when the guard at the front entrance of the Ministry of Police had demanded their passes. He had peered at the seal Geoff had purloined from Delaroche with a care that could denote either suspicion or poor eyesight. Amy and Lady Uppington had avoided looking at one another, lest they betray their fear in a guilty glance. But after an agonizing hour of scrutiny (which in reality had been thirty seconds at the most), the guard had shoved the papers back at Amy, with a grunted “All in order.”

  He had, nonetheless, demanded to see the contents of their pails. “The minister thinks there might be trouble tonight,” he growled by way of explanation, as the water sloshed in Amy’s bucket, and the rag that had been draped over the side slid down into the liquid with a slow plop. Amy had endeavored to look nonchalant, but the unaccustomed bulk of her dagger’s sheath burned against her calf. She tried to stand as a charwoman would stand, perhaps with a bit of a slump from the weight of the bucket.

  Glancing over at Lady Uppington, Amy couldn’t help but be impressed by Jane’s handiwork and the older woman’s acting abilities. There wasn’t a hint of the English marchioness left in the woman beside her. Lady Uppington’s silvering blond tresses had been liberally combed through with ashes, to turn them a rough, dirty gray, and then covered with an equally sooty kerchief, that looked as though it had served as both a cleaning rag and someone’s handkerchief before being pressed into duty as a head covering. Her tattered brown dress hung shapelessly from her form as she slouched forward, unspeakably aged, clutching two voluminous shawls around her shoulders to warm her old bones and make up for the ripped and patched state of her sleeves. Even her face looked different. Jane had accentuated her crow’s-feet with a careful web of lines drawn in charcoal, but it was more than that. Something about the slack hang of the mouth, the tired droop of the eyelids.