The Secret History of the Pink Carnation Read online

  But, if she was being quite, quite honest, what stung most wasn’t the slight to mankind, but the sense of betrayal his words caused. It was utterly ridiculous. She had known the man all of two hours. One couldn’t really claim betrayal after two hours’ acquaintance. Even so, in those two hours, it wasn’t as though he had lied and claimed to have fought for the English and then let slip by accident that he had been with the French.

  He had been witty and interesting and charming. He had argued antiquities with Amy as though she were an equal, and not just a young girl who had never been out of the country and knew only what she had stumbled across in her uncle’s library. Good heavens, he had even told her, in the most sincere of tones, that he was honoured to know her. In short, he had committed the crime of acting as though he liked her and the even greater crime of charming her into liking him. And then to reveal that he had defected to the French…

  Suddenly, the man seated across from her took on all sorts of sinister attributes. The smile that a half an hour ago had seemed genial was now mocking. The gleam in his green eyes that had been good-natured became sinister. Even the dark hues of his clothing went from elegant to dangerous, the sleek pelt of a panther on the prowl. He was probably quite practiced at gulling the unwary into liking and trusting him. Good heavens, for all she knew he might be a French spy! Why else would he have been back in England? The logical part of her brain, the bit that always sounded like Jane, reminded her that he might very well have family back in England he wished to visit. Amy silenced it.

  Across the table, Richard raised an eyebrow at her in silent inquiry. The gesture made Amy want to whack him over the head with The Proceedings of the Royal Egyptological Society.

  Amy struggled for words to voice her revulsion. ‘Scholarship is all very well and good, but after what the French did – while your own country was at war with them! To join the French army!’

  ‘I wasn’t in the French army,’ Richard corrected. ‘I merely travelled with them.’

  Amy rediscovered her voice and her vocabulary. ‘Egypt was a military action first and a scholarly expedition second! You can’t claim not to have known – I’m sure even the savages in the wilds of America knew!’

  ‘Priorities, my dear, priorities.’ Richard realised that he was being provoking, but something about the way Amy was looking at him, as though she had just discovered nine dismembered wives in a cupboard in his bedchamber, brought out the worst in him. The fact that he agreed with everything she was saying annoyed him even more. He brushed an imaginary speck of lint off his sleeve. ‘I chose to concentrate on the second.’

  ‘You chose to ignore the thousands of innocent people slaughtered on the guillotine. You chose to range yourself with a murderous rabble against your own country!’ Amy retorted.

  How many people had he saved from the guillotine since he had first joined Percy and the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel? Fifty? A hundred? One lost count after the first few dozen. Richard was trying to remain calm and urbane, but irritation rose through him like heat radiating from the Egyptian sands.

  ‘What,’ he asked languidly, ‘has the guillotine to do with my researches?’

  It was quite a credible imitation of a vapid London fop, and Amy reacted just as expected. She sputtered.

  Rationally, Richard knew that in her position he, too, would have sputtered, appalled by such selfish callousness. Rationally, he knew that he was behaving in an absolutely appalling fashion. Rationally. Of course, Richard was feeling quite irrationally irate just now and thus enjoying her distress accordingly. The five-year-old in him was of the firm opinion that it served her right. Just what it served her right for, he wasn’t quite sure, but why fret about details?

  ‘That army was led by the same people who cold-bloodedly slaughtered thousands of their compatriots! The ground of the Place da la Guillotine was still red with the blood of the murdered when you went to Egypt. By your very presence, you condoned their villainy!’ Amy’s voice rose and cracked with the intensity of her emotions.

  ‘I quite agree, dear girl. What the French did was reprehensible. Did. Past tense. You’re a bit behind the times. They stopped killing off their aristocrats several years ago now.’

  ‘You might as well say that just because a cannibal eats vegetables for a few years, he’s no longer a cannibal,’ choked Amy. ‘The fact still remains that he once feasted on human flesh and he can’t be allowed to get away with it!’

  The sheer oddity of the analogy left Richard speechless for a moment. He devoted his energy to fighting off a horrible image of Bonaparte, in the gilded dining room of the Tuilleries, polishing off a human leg, while his elegant wife Josephine munched on an arm. Richard winced. ‘Let’s keep cannibals out of this, shall we? I assure you, the French may eat horse but they haven’t descended to human.’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss the eating habits of the French!’

  ‘You brought them up.’

  ‘I did no such – oh, for heaven’s sake, it was a metaphor!’

  ‘So, metaphorically speaking, by going to Egypt I metaphorically feasted with the metaphorical cannibals.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You are on a packet bound for Calais.’

  Amy blinked. ‘If you so desperately want to change the subject, you could find a more subtle way of doing it, you know.’

  ‘I’m not trying to change the subject. I’m simply pointing out that you, O scourge of metaphorical cannibals, are on a boat bound for France.’

  Amy squirmed slightly in her chair, silent with frustrated anger. She had an uncomfortable inkling of where he was going with that statement.

  ‘I say now what was that comment you made about guilt by association?’ Richard continued loftily. ‘Something about condoning their evil with my presence, wasn’t it? That’s all very well and good, but isn’t there an old saw about people in glass houses not lobbing stones at their neighbours?

  ‘And that dress you’re wearing.’ Amy’s hands flew automatically to her bodice. ‘Isn’t that in the French style? The revolutionary style? If associating with the revolutionaries is a hanging crime, what about aping their fashions? Speak to me again of condoning.’

  Amy stood so suddenly her chair toppled over behind her. ‘It’s not at all equivalent! It’s been five years—’

  ‘But a cannibal is still a cannibal, isn’t he, Miss Balcourt?’

  ‘—and England is no longer at war with France…and…’

  Amy couldn’t think of any more logical arguments, but she knew, just knew that she was right and he was absolutely, positively wrong. Blast him and blast his nasty, underhanded, sophistic debating techniques! This had gone on far too long. She should have got up and left the minute he’d told her he had accompanied the French, not stayed to argue like an idealistic fool.

  ‘And?’ Richard looked up from toying idly with the lace on his cuffs.

  Amy fought back tears of pure rage. Oh, to be a man, to be able to just punch someone when she didn’t know what to say! ‘And how dare you judge me when you know nothing of my reasons! Nothing!’

  Sweeping her skirts away as though from something infected, she resumed her post by the porthole, her back to Lord Richard.

  Left alone in splendid solitude at the little table, Richard realised he finally had the quiet he had craved. After all, hadn’t he just wanted to be left in peace to work? Lighting one of the covered lamps, Richard moved to a berth at the far end of the room and took out the latest dispatches from the War Office. He went so far as to prop a page against his knee and stare at the words on the paper. But all he saw was a pair of angry blue eyes.

  Chapter Five

  ‘What right does she have’ – whap – ‘to judge me? She has no idea what she’s talking about.’ Whap! Richard pounded the nearly flat pillow under his head into a more hospitable shape. ‘And why should it bloody well bother me?’ Whap! ‘It shouldn’t bother me. I’m not bothered.’ Richard punched the pillow again. He had no illusi
ons that his pounding would render the pillow comfortable, but punching something made him feel better, and he couldn’t very well punch Amy.

  After his altercation with Amy, Richard had kept punctiliously to his side of the cabin. There might as well have been a line drawn across the scarred wooden floor. When true dark fell, replacing the rainy grey gloom, Miss Gwen had insisted on raising a literal barrier down the centre of the room. ‘I will not have you share a bedchamber with a person of the opposite sex,’ she had declared to the two girls, and gone off to badger the captain for spare sailcloth. The captain had refused to be badgered. Not to be thwarted, Miss Gwen had commandeered Richard’s cloak. Strung up along the centre of the room with Miss Gwen’s, Amy’s, and Jane’s cloaks, it made a rather uneven but passable partition.

  Unfortunately, it did nothing to keep out the image of Amy’s furious face.

  Richard pummelled his pillow again. So the girl had condemned him for hobnobbing with the French. He had thought he was used to that by now. Old Falconstone wasn’t the only one to have taken umbrage at Richard’s activities. Over the past few years, Richard had run the gamut of disapproval, from snide remarks hissed behind his back to outright lectures delivered to his face. Considering the tongue-lashing he had received from the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale in the middle of the Alsworthys’ ballroom, Amy’s protest was mild indeed.

  But he hadn’t spent the night awake, abusing his pillow, after being reproved by the Dowager Duchess.

  ‘You are a prize idiot,’ he mumbled to himself. He should be delighted to have rid himself of the tedious company of a simpering young female. Usually, he had to employ every ounce of his ingenuity to be rid of them. But to be fair, Amy’s company hadn’t been tedious and she hadn’t simpered. She had bounced, giggled, and occasionally squealed, but she hadn’t simpered. And she had read Herodotus in the original. He wondered if she had stumbled across the plays of Sophocles and what she thought of… Richard nipped that line of inquiry in the bud. No matter how many classics the girl had perused, young ladies were a liability that an intrepid spy could not afford. Richard had learnt that lesson well five years ago.

  He pushed the recollection away. Some things did not bear remembering.

  At any rate, the last thing he needed in Paris was an English debutante clinging to him while he tried to ferret out Napoleon’s plan for invasion. Richard had been waiting for this assignment for years. They had all known that Bonaparte would try to invade England sooner or later – it was one of the few countries he hadn’t got around to yet. Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, all had fallen. England had the advantage of a watery moat, but how long could it hold out against Bonaparte’s tactical brilliance?

  It bothered him that she disliked him.

  Richard tried to push aside the uneasy suspicion that it might be guilt keeping him awake. He had, after all, behaved very badly indeed. And it was compounded by the fact that the girl had had the right of it. Maybe a little naïve, a little too self-righteous, but essentially right. Hell, had their positions been reversed, he would have said the same himself. In a more logical, less emotional fashion, of course. In return, he had been not only ungentlemanly, but downright unkind.

  Damn it, he didn’t have time for this! England still needed to be saved, and he couldn’t save England unless he got some sleep. Richard dragged his blanket up around his ears and prepared to settle down for a much-needed rest.

  Unfortunately, the blanket was as thin and flat as the pillow. Even with the emaciated cloth pulled halfway over his head, Richard’s trained ear heard the soft thud of someone swinging her legs out of bed. And then, close on the heels of the previous noise, a series of slow, soft footfalls. It had to be Amy, thought Richard resignedly. Neither the chaperone nor the other girl looked the sort who would wander about after hours. Poking his head out of the nest of blanket (which smelt regretfully like its last occupant, someone who obviously took a very dim view of bathing), Richard heard a thud, and a muffled cry. Ah, he wisely concluded, someone stubbed her toe. The footfalls resumed with a slight limp. Richard’s lips twitched into a grin in the darkness.

  The grin disappeared as the midnight prowler slipped out the door of the cabin and closed it behind herself with a cautious click. Richard sat bolt upright in bed, no longer the least bit amused. Of all the damn fool things to do! Didn’t the little ninny realise that the deck could be teeming with rough men? If she happened across a drunken sailor at this time of night… Richard cursed and threw his own legs over the side of the bed.

  Wait! What was he doing going after her? Richard paused in a half-crouch. She was certainly none of his responsibility. Hadn’t she made it more than clear that she wanted nothing to do with him? And that was all very well and good since he wanted nothing to do with her either, and she could bloody well take care of herself.

  Richard flung himself back upon his bed with enough force to bang his head against the wall. Hard. Maybe it was the bump on his head affecting his judgment – at least, Richard was pretty sure it was the bump on his head – but as he rubbed his aching cranium, Richard began to have disturbing images of Amy alone on deck. Leaning over the railing to stare at a star, slipping, and tumbling into the hungry waters. Or being backed into a corner by a drunken sailor with nobody to hear her scream.

  With one leap, Richard was off the bed and three-quarters of the way to the door.

  Amy couldn’t sleep. With all the portholes closed, the air in the cabin was heavy and dusty and scarred by the rasping of Miss Gwen’s snores. The gentle rocking of the ship should have put Amy to sleep. It had put Jane to sleep. When Amy pulled herself up and peeked over the edge – which she had at least twice in the past fifteen minutes – she could see Jane in the berth above her, the blankets over her lightly rising and falling with her regular breaths. But Amy remained hideously, uncomfortably awake.

  Amy rolled over irritably. ‘I will fall asleep, I will fall asleep,’ she muttered. The noise evoked a new crescendo of snores from Miss Gwen. Amy flopped back onto her back. She tried counting sheep, but all that did was bring back memories of Shropshire. Shropshire, which had seemed so detestable for the last decade or so, took on a far more attractive aspect in retrospect. There was the blue and white room she shared with Jane; the back staircase she had sneaked down so many times; her favourite climbing tree in the orchard…and what on earth did she think she was doing?

  It had all seemed quite, quite simple back in Shropshire. They would stop off at the Fisherman’s Rest inn for a glass of lemonade, and Jane would distract Miss Gwen, while Amy pretended to have to use the facilities. Amy would have a great deal of trouble finding the necessary room, and would have to linger about the common room of the inn, glancing about as if searching for the correct door, and looking vague. In the process, she would be able to drift in the direction of two men having an intent conversation (there were sure to be two men having an intent conversation), and would overhear one whisper to the other in anxious tones something that would clearly mark him as the Purple Gentian (Amy couldn’t think of any such phrase off the top of her head, but she was sure to recognise it once she heard it).

  But that hadn’t happened. And plan A had been such an easy plan! True, Amy had plans B through G in reserve, but they were all much more complicated, and involved a freedom of movement that Amy wasn’t sure she could acquire under Miss Gwen’s watchful eye. For example, plan B, dressing as a stable boy and eavesdropping in the stables of any suspects, involved finding boy’s clothes, finding enough time away from Miss Gwen, and, well, finding suspects. And plan C grew even more intricate… What if Jane were right?

  What if she was dragging them all across the Channel on a fool’s errand?

  The dark pressed in on Amy like a physical force. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand it anymore, not the sweltering blackness of the cabin, not Miss Gwen’s muffled snores, not Jane’s quiet breathing. She needed to be alone. Stumbling off the bed, Amy fumbled in the dark for her shawl. Amy left her s
lippers untouched on the floor; bare feet would make less noise. Feeling her way carefully in the dark, she made her way along the partition with the silent grace of an experienced spy.

  ‘Argh!’ Amy doubled over and clutched her toe. Good heavens, what had Miss Gwen been thinking to leave her portmanteau right there, where anyone could trip over it! Amy scowled and nursed her wounded toe. And why had she felt the need to pack the blasted thing with bricks?

  Aggrieved, Amy limped to the door. It really was quite a challenge to limp stealthily. Amy paused by the doorframe and listened again. All was still. The storm had spent itself several hours ago and the calm water lapped gently at the boat. Lifting her skirts, Amy tiptoed up the stairs to the deck.

  About halfway up the narrow stairway, she paused, arrested by a sudden thought. All of these doubts, these fears, these worries…none of them had appeared until after her run-in with Lord Richard. It was Lord Richard, questioning her motives, calling her a hypocrite, who was clearly to blame for her sleeplessness.

  ‘I can’t believe I let that man make me doubt myself,’ Amy mumbled, as she continued up the stairs. She breathed in the cool night air on a deep breath of relief and satisfaction. ‘Everything will go splendidly. I just know it will.’

  It was such a pity she hadn’t thought of a better retort this afternoon.

  Her eyes accustomed to the darkness, Amy made her way carefully to the edge of the deck and rested her arms on the railing. After the musty air of the cabin, even the bouquet of tar and damp wood that rose from the deck smelt of freedom to Amy. A gentle mist had succeeded the rain. The moon, hidden behind the clouds, threaded the sky with delicate silver strands. Their supernatural glow reminded Amy of the three Fates of Greek myth, spinning peoples’ destinies on their spindles. For a moment, alone on the moonlit deck, she had a fancy that if she looked long and hard enough, she would be able to distinguish her own thread, disentangle it from the rest, and follow its glistening length to her destiny.